Your analogy there is badly flawed. If the biologists all got together and voted that mammals were cold-blooded, it would mean one of two things: that the concept we now call "warm-blooded" is now called "cold-blooded", in which case we'd also need a new term for "cold-blooded"; or that they had voted on whether specific animals (mammals) exhibit an observable property (ie, cold-bloodedness), in which case you've completely missed the point, because that's not what's happening here. There is a difference between voting on labeling and classification, and voting on observable properties. The former can and must be done; the latter is not science.
I hate to break it to you, but all classification is ultimately arbitrary. A planet is whatever we say a planet is-- you're not going to find the word "planet" stamped on any celestial bodies. So if the IAU gets together and defines the word "planet" around a set of observable properties, and Pluto doesn't exhibit the necessary properties to fit the definition, then as a point of fact Pluto is not a planet.
You wouldn't want a teacher to tell kids that trees are animals, just because she really likes trees, would you? We have a definition of the word "animal", and trees simply do not fit it. Teachers should teach the fact that trees are not animals. Likewise, Pluto and "planet".
You mention intelligent design, which is ironic. A tiny handful of astronomers, not even a quorum at a conference, took a vote. A vote. Now suddenly parents like you are demanding that this be taught as fact. You are demanding that the government teach your specific belief system to all children.
Um, it is fact, guy. What we have here is a question of definition, of classification. When the authoritative body writes the definition, it is fact that the definition has been written and that some things will meet it and others will not. This is fact in the same way that a foot is comprised of twelve inches, "down" is toward the ground, mammals are warm-blooded, people born in the United States are Americans, etc.
Nobody's arguing over the properties or history of Pluto. Hell, nobody's arguing over Pluto at all (directly)-- the argument is over the definition of a planet. When the dust settles and the definition is written, Pluto either will or will not be a planet, as a matter of fact. People are demanding that kids be taught the definition of a planet, and which known bodies fit that definition. What's the problem?
I can write a good spec. But if I take the time to do so, there's no particular reason I should hand that spec to you for implementation rather than to a cheap offshore team. Coding to spec is their specialty, and they're not bad at it.
I don't want or need programmer monkeys. Junior developers we can train into senior developers, sure. There are a lot of very good reasons to go that route, and it's healthy and economical to have some junior devs on staff. But spending the big money on whizbang coders who need everything spelled out for them is a double waste.
My interview is designed to find people who can and will think about a problem and its solution, and who have the knowledge and experience to get the details right. Those are the best developers, and they're relatively rare. You can bet that when I find and hire them they're highly valued and treated as such.
Finally, an interview is a meeting of equals, and I approach it as such. The goal is to figure out together whether you and I want to enter into the employer-employee relationship, not for me alone to decide whether you're "good enough" for my team. If my expectations and your expectations differ, that's fine, we can shake hands and go our separate ways and the best of luck to you. Like you said, there are plenty of other employers. If you at any point display contempt for my expectations, though, you're just some prima donna asshat with a superiority complex-- don't let the door hit you on the ass, jack.
Because I don't have the time in my day to cross every 't' and dot every 'i' for you. You are a valuable developer if I can throw the problem and maybe the broad strokes of the solution to you, and trust you to fill in the details in both in a way that makes sense, and trust you to communicate with me when (and only when) you really need information or decisions that only I can give you.
If I have to write a massive spec for everything I want you to do, I might as well replace you with some cheap team in India. They're great at giving you exactly what you ask for.
When I get people who are contemptuous in an interview, for any reason, the interview is over. I'm looking to see whether I can work with you, not whether you're the perfect little programmer monkey. The world is awash with programmer monkeys, and with assholes.
The first rule of Fight Club is seriously, will you people shut the hell up about Fight Club already? Jesus, you're almost as bad as the Ben Franklin and 1984 people. You're practically Trekkies.
First of all, the "jihadis" to whom you're referring are just people buying large numbers of cell phones for resale.
Second, even if some wackjobs are calling their buddies in Waziristan to chat about blowing stuff up, I'd rather the government miss those calls than listen in on mine.
Third, you know what works? FISA warrants. Even your buddy Bill O'Reilly knows it, and he's every bit the wingnut you are.
AAC isn't proprietary. Well, not to Apple anyway. It's MPEG standard audio, and lots of devices support it without anybody licensing anything from Apple. Furthermore, it was explicitly intended by the MPEG group to be an improved successor to MP3, so MP3 is "legacy" in that context.
Any lock-in that Apple obtains is from the FairPlay DRM employed by the iTunes Music Store, which is not (by default) present in any files you rip yourself using iTunes-- doesn't really have anything to do with AAC.
WMA, on the other hand, is all Microsoft. Their lock-in comes from licensing control as well as DRM.
I'm not any kind of a trekkie, but I've seen enough of the Star Trek to get most of the references. Not one of those damn things was funny, and I checked all three pages. (I am bored. I am not, now, any less bored.)
I know it's a slow day, but if the best you can do is to dredge up an unfunny crapfest from some internet backwater, maybe you guys should just take the day off instead.
Yes, I'm asserting that Gore's movie is not propaganda.
When you base your argument on facts, and you present the facts that support your argument, and you provide the sources for those facts, and you do it under your own name, you're not just propagandizing.
When you take baseless jabs at the other side, without bothering to argue the facts or the other side's reasoning, well, then you are just propagandizing.
It takes either shameless disingenuousness or ethical bankruptcy to claim that Gore's methods and DCI's are the same. Whichever afflicts you, I hope you get over it. I just wanted to make sure that your post didn't go unrefuted, so I'm done here.
Your point was that there is some sort of equivalence between Gore's actions and DCI's actions. I understood that, and now you've reiterated it. Guess what? You're still wrong: There is no such equivalence.
Gore's "one-sided view of the 'facts', presented as truth" was an argument. That's how you make an honest argument: You draw a conclusion from facts, you present the facts that support your conclusion along with your sources for them, and you do it under your own name and with your own motivations on the table.
Flinging snarky personal insults while pretending to be someone else is not argument, and it's not honest.
Gore's movie had his name all over it. He's been completely open about his motivations and his support, and sourced the claims his movie made. If it's one-sided, it's because the subject matter is factual and he's not lying.
These people pretend to be someone else while they snipe at Gore and his movie. They don't debate or argue his claims, they don't find fault with his methods or supporters-- it's pure assassination, and they do it from hiding.
If you're sure you want to draw a lesson here, please do. I suspect you're too busy cheerleading to do so.
The program only applies to communications where one party is located outside of the
United States.
That's the whole damn controversy, here-- domestic surveillance without FISA warrants. Nobody except wingnut wackjobs are arguing that this has not occurred. The administration itself has taken the tack of inventing fatuous legal "justifications" involving the AUMF (which anyone with half a brain can see were conclusively kicked to the curb by the Supreme Court in Hamdan).
Furthermore, by all accounts this surveillance is performed by 'tapping' everything in sight and sorting it out later, so it's even worse than the DOJ admits it is.
If you don't understand what's going on, maybe you should refrain from assuming a position.
That's what backslash is now. It used to be a post of follow-ups to earlier stories, with new information or with resolutions to open questions from the original discussion.
Now it's just a summary of the original discussion, which is a complete waste of everyone's time. Those of us who cared enough to read the comments probably already did, and if not, those comments are all still there.
(For the inevitable jackass: I have removed Backslash in my prefs, but since I don't subscribe it still shows up in my feed.)
First, let me say that I agree with your subject: This article is crass.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Kashmir and Pakistan. India has recently been subject to more terrorist attacks than most places-- a couple a year for the past five or six years, I think. There were bombings in Mumbai a few years ago, so it's not like this is new either.
NASA is made for outsourcing. That's partly the point of NASA. It's as much about driving the strategic American aerospace industry as it is about conducting research and space flight missions for their own sake.
(d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
...
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
...
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes.
Right. I forgot about the international anti-gun media conspiracy, which suppresses the fact that South American airlines let passengers carry handguns, as well as the fact that an attempted hijacking of an Iberian Airlines flight was foiled by armed passengers. Such being the case, it is a shame that nobody else who shares your view that the populace should be armed, but perhaps has more time and resources-- the NRA, for instance-- has been able to independently publish these facts on the free and open internet. Given that these facts support that position so well, I mean.
Somehow in all of this you've missed the fact that I have not once argued against your position on civilian armament. I've only said, repeatedly, that the two anecdotes you used to support your own argument do not seem to be true.
If and when you find that story in a newspaper, or any other reputable source, I would very much like to see it. That's how I got into this thread with you to begin with, after all. (I'm sure the NRA would like to see it, too.)
Well, this is completely out of the scope of the previous conversation-- which was much more to do with emotional reaction to oppression and the appropriate degree of sensitivity to that emotion-- but what the hell.
First, an apology: I was maybe a little bit sloppy in my phrasing. This "apology for slavery" crap is a straw man, often thrown out by people making the exact argument you just did, and it was the use of this straw man that intended to reference. Yes, you will find people who call for an apology. I am not going to argue the point, because the idea itself is the concoction of politicians trying to score in-group points, and the prevailing arguments on both sides of the idea are consequently and necessarily worthless bullshit.
Japanese killing Americans, and Germans killing Russians, is not at all the same thing as whites subjugating blacks in various ways for several hundred years in North America. Those instances were clashes of nations and nationalities-- they were fights between separate, enemy societies. In the United States, there was one society with two tiers, and one group was deliberately, systematically put and kept on the lower tier for generations.
One of the things that people such as yourself do not seem to "get" is that preferential treatment-- by which I assume you mean affirmative action programs and the like, because you usually do-- is an attempt to accelerate the integration of an oppressed subculture into the mainstream, not suck up to the disadvantaged out of misplaced guilt. In a situation where you have an ethnically distinct population at a social and economic disadvantage, it is a bad scene for the society as a whole, especially when that disadvantage was deliberately manufactured by the mainstream and both groups know it. It's absolutely useless to tell people to "get over it" when they are still feeling the effects of institutionalized oppression that-- again-- ended only forty years ago (not with the abolition of slavery on which you seem to be fixated).
When I say that it will take a few generations for the emotional memory of oppression to fade, I say that because only distance from the oppression can lessen that emotion-- there's nothing we as a society can do to change that. When I say that it will take longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were committed, I do not mean to imply that the descendents of one group personally and individually owe anything to the descendents of the other-- rather, that real integration can only happen if the disadvantaged group is provided a handicap in order to catch up to the rest of the game, and that for the sake of the cohesion and advancement of the society as a whole it is critical that such integration occur.
It's a bummer that those of us in the advantaged group might have to give up a tiny bit of that advantage in order for this all to happen, but it's not like we have to trade places with the disadvantaged group or anything. Nobody's asking you, for instance, to be poor. All this whining about how unfair it is strikes me as incredibly crass and deeply ironic, not to mention an incredibly short-sighted and self-absorbed way to formulate social policy.
I called bullshit because you stated some pretty weird crap that I'd never heard of as fact, and when I made a good faith effort to try to verify it myself (hey, both of your stories would be interesting if true), I came up with nothing.
So far, you've just made some asinine (and wrong) assumptions about me, waved off the Iberian Airlines story, and backed off of your South American airline claim (ie, from "they let you carry handguns on planes" to "there are no LAWS [etc.]"). Local laws or no, the airlines I found do not "let you carry handguns on planes".
You haven't shown any source for your foiled Iberia Airlines hijacking, nor have you shown any South American airline that allows you to carry a handgun. This isn't complicated. Either support your crap with some references, or let the call stand.
Go page through the South American airlines listed here and let me know which of them allows you to travel with any kind of firearm at all. I didn't find one, and I checked a handful.
Also, I could find no mention anywhere of an Iberian Airlines hijacking that was thwarted by armed passengers. Iberia Airlines does not allow you to carry ammunition or sharp sticks, let alone firearms. Nor was I able to find mention of any hijacker being killed by passengers other than air marshals, ever-- on Iberian Airlines or otherwise.
I find this interesting, because if either of your stories-- guns allowed on planes in South America; armed passengers foiling a hijacking-- had even a hint of truth there should be thousands of gun advocates beating those drums all over the web.
But nobody says anything about the picture where the black is dominating the white. Why is that not racist? Or is racism only when the black is the one being dominated? That sounds pretty unfair to me.
I don't think either image is racist, per se. One image (white dominating black) is controversial for two reasons that simply do not apply to the other image (black dominating white): It depicts a black woman subjugated to a white woman with no other context, and there is no fight occurring. It is an image of dominance and more to the point possession, and because that posession is of a black woman by a white woman, it evokes the racial inequity that existed and in a very real way still exists here. In the other image, the black woman is winning a fight-- she is not gripping the white woman's face, and even if she were it would not echo the historical/social context with the same clarity.
I don't see what's unfair about it. Both images do present a racial conflict, but one of them is simply more evocative because of the reality from which we view it. It's not like black people "win" anything by this.
People in the United States, particularly in certain parts of the United States, have to think about racism even if they are not themselves racists. A lot of people act as though racism is a thing of the distant past, simply because slavery was outlawed so long ago. But parts of this country still had institutionalized racism not forty years ago. People who experienced that are still alive, and their children certainly know all about it, and they still feel the effects economically, socially, and emotionally. And of course, there's still a marginal but not insignificant number of racists floating around, poking at wounds that haven't had time to heal yet; and there are people who exploit and exacerbate that emotion in order to gain and hold power within their community.
Some people will tell you that everyone needs to just get over it, that whites need not apologize for the actions of their ancestors or walk on eggshells to avoid giving offense. Those people don't get it. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. It's going to take a few generations for the emotional aspects of the memory to fade, and probably longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were done. In the meantime, a certain degree of sensitivity can only help.
So when some of us look at an advertisement that depicts a white person subjugating a black person, it's not so much a question of the ad itself being racist. In the context of its intent, it is clearly not. In the greater context of the time and society from which some of us observe that ad, its connotations are abrasive. Does this mean the ad in question is inappropriate? Not necessarily. It didn't run in the United States. Maybe in the Netherlands the social context is different, and those abrasive connotations are simply not there. I certainly hope that is the case. Regardless, your accusation of racism on (for instance) my part is misplaced.
Buffett disagrees with you, and his position makes a lot of sense.
Maybe you should read the intervew, where he talks about this:
And someone who was compounding money at a high rate, I thought, was the better party to be taking care of the philanthropy that was to be done 20 years out, while the people compounding at a lower rate should logically take care of the current philanthropy.
But that theory also happened to fit what you wanted to do, right?
(He laughs, hard.) And how! No question about that. I was having fun - and still am having fun - doing what I do. And for a while I also thought in terms of control of Berkshire.
I had bought effective control of Berkshire in the early 1970s, using $15 million I got when I disbanded Buffett Partnership. And I had very little money - considerably less than $1 million - outside of Berkshire. My salary was $50,000 a year.
So if I had engaged in significant philanthropy back then, I would have had to give away shares of Berkshire. I hadn't bought those to immediately give them away.
global warming could be happening, we just don't know for sure yet
global warming isn't caused by humans
global warming is cyclical-- it'll cool down any minute now
global warming can't be stopped anyway, might as well relax
hell, global warming could be fun!
How about you all get together and settle on one line of bullshit? I suggest "cyclical". Those of you who aren't up to at least "not caused by humans" are just straggling, and personally I think anybody who's already on "could be fun" has gotten a little bit ahead of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but all classification is ultimately arbitrary. A planet is whatever we say a planet is-- you're not going to find the word "planet" stamped on any celestial bodies. So if the IAU gets together and defines the word "planet" around a set of observable properties, and Pluto doesn't exhibit the necessary properties to fit the definition, then as a point of fact Pluto is not a planet.
You wouldn't want a teacher to tell kids that trees are animals, just because she really likes trees, would you? We have a definition of the word "animal", and trees simply do not fit it. Teachers should teach the fact that trees are not animals. Likewise, Pluto and "planet".
Um, it is fact, guy. What we have here is a question of definition, of classification. When the authoritative body writes the definition, it is fact that the definition has been written and that some things will meet it and others will not. This is fact in the same way that a foot is comprised of twelve inches, "down" is toward the ground, mammals are warm-blooded, people born in the United States are Americans, etc.
Nobody's arguing over the properties or history of Pluto. Hell, nobody's arguing over Pluto at all (directly)-- the argument is over the definition of a planet. When the dust settles and the definition is written, Pluto either will or will not be a planet, as a matter of fact. People are demanding that kids be taught the definition of a planet, and which known bodies fit that definition. What's the problem?
I can write a good spec. But if I take the time to do so, there's no particular reason I should hand that spec to you for implementation rather than to a cheap offshore team. Coding to spec is their specialty, and they're not bad at it.
I don't want or need programmer monkeys. Junior developers we can train into senior developers, sure. There are a lot of very good reasons to go that route, and it's healthy and economical to have some junior devs on staff. But spending the big money on whizbang coders who need everything spelled out for them is a double waste.
My interview is designed to find people who can and will think about a problem and its solution, and who have the knowledge and experience to get the details right. Those are the best developers, and they're relatively rare. You can bet that when I find and hire them they're highly valued and treated as such.
Finally, an interview is a meeting of equals, and I approach it as such. The goal is to figure out together whether you and I want to enter into the employer-employee relationship, not for me alone to decide whether you're "good enough" for my team. If my expectations and your expectations differ, that's fine, we can shake hands and go our separate ways and the best of luck to you. Like you said, there are plenty of other employers. If you at any point display contempt for my expectations, though, you're just some prima donna asshat with a superiority complex-- don't let the door hit you on the ass, jack.
Because I don't have the time in my day to cross every 't' and dot every 'i' for you. You are a valuable developer if I can throw the problem and maybe the broad strokes of the solution to you, and trust you to fill in the details in both in a way that makes sense, and trust you to communicate with me when (and only when) you really need information or decisions that only I can give you.
If I have to write a massive spec for everything I want you to do, I might as well replace you with some cheap team in India. They're great at giving you exactly what you ask for.
When I get people who are contemptuous in an interview, for any reason, the interview is over. I'm looking to see whether I can work with you, not whether you're the perfect little programmer monkey. The world is awash with programmer monkeys, and with assholes.
The first rule of Fight Club is seriously, will you people shut the hell up about Fight Club already? Jesus, you're almost as bad as the Ben Franklin and 1984 people. You're practically Trekkies.
First of all, the "jihadis" to whom you're referring are just people buying large numbers of cell phones for resale.
Second, even if some wackjobs are calling their buddies in Waziristan to chat about blowing stuff up, I'd rather the government miss those calls than listen in on mine.
Third, you know what works? FISA warrants. Even your buddy Bill O'Reilly knows it, and he's every bit the wingnut you are.
Any lock-in that Apple obtains is from the FairPlay DRM employed by the iTunes Music Store, which is not (by default) present in any files you rip yourself using iTunes-- doesn't really have anything to do with AAC.
WMA, on the other hand, is all Microsoft. Their lock-in comes from licensing control as well as DRM.
I know it's a slow day, but if the best you can do is to dredge up an unfunny crapfest from some internet backwater, maybe you guys should just take the day off instead.
When you base your argument on facts, and you present the facts that support your argument, and you provide the sources for those facts, and you do it under your own name, you're not just propagandizing.
When you take baseless jabs at the other side, without bothering to argue the facts or the other side's reasoning, well, then you are just propagandizing.
It takes either shameless disingenuousness or ethical bankruptcy to claim that Gore's methods and DCI's are the same. Whichever afflicts you, I hope you get over it. I just wanted to make sure that your post didn't go unrefuted, so I'm done here.
Gore's "one-sided view of the 'facts', presented as truth" was an argument. That's how you make an honest argument: You draw a conclusion from facts, you present the facts that support your conclusion along with your sources for them, and you do it under your own name and with your own motivations on the table.
Flinging snarky personal insults while pretending to be someone else is not argument, and it's not honest.
These people pretend to be someone else while they snipe at Gore and his movie. They don't debate or argue his claims, they don't find fault with his methods or supporters-- it's pure assassination, and they do it from hiding.
If you're sure you want to draw a lesson here, please do. I suspect you're too busy cheerleading to do so.
Not even the DOJ disputes that the program engaged in domestic surveillance.
I quote, you jackass:
That's the whole damn controversy, here-- domestic surveillance without FISA warrants. Nobody except wingnut wackjobs are arguing that this has not occurred. The administration itself has taken the tack of inventing fatuous legal "justifications" involving the AUMF (which anyone with half a brain can see were conclusively kicked to the curb by the Supreme Court in Hamdan).
Furthermore, by all accounts this surveillance is performed by 'tapping' everything in sight and sorting it out later, so it's even worse than the DOJ admits it is.
If you don't understand what's going on, maybe you should refrain from assuming a position.
Oh yeah, you're right. I take it back then: Backslash was never worth a damn.
Now it's just a summary of the original discussion, which is a complete waste of everyone's time. Those of us who cared enough to read the comments probably already did, and if not, those comments are all still there.
(For the inevitable jackass: I have removed Backslash in my prefs, but since I don't subscribe it still shows up in my feed.)
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Kashmir and Pakistan. India has recently been subject to more terrorist attacks than most places-- a couple a year for the past five or six years, I think. There were bombings in Mumbai a few years ago, so it's not like this is new either.
Jesus. We want to wipe out the crabs, not the Russians and Norwegians.
From the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established NASA:
Somehow in all of this you've missed the fact that I have not once argued against your position on civilian armament. I've only said, repeatedly, that the two anecdotes you used to support your own argument do not seem to be true.
If and when you find that story in a newspaper, or any other reputable source, I would very much like to see it. That's how I got into this thread with you to begin with, after all. (I'm sure the NRA would like to see it, too.)
First, an apology: I was maybe a little bit sloppy in my phrasing. This "apology for slavery" crap is a straw man, often thrown out by people making the exact argument you just did, and it was the use of this straw man that intended to reference. Yes, you will find people who call for an apology. I am not going to argue the point, because the idea itself is the concoction of politicians trying to score in-group points, and the prevailing arguments on both sides of the idea are consequently and necessarily worthless bullshit.
Japanese killing Americans, and Germans killing Russians, is not at all the same thing as whites subjugating blacks in various ways for several hundred years in North America. Those instances were clashes of nations and nationalities-- they were fights between separate, enemy societies. In the United States, there was one society with two tiers, and one group was deliberately, systematically put and kept on the lower tier for generations.
One of the things that people such as yourself do not seem to "get" is that preferential treatment-- by which I assume you mean affirmative action programs and the like, because you usually do-- is an attempt to accelerate the integration of an oppressed subculture into the mainstream, not suck up to the disadvantaged out of misplaced guilt. In a situation where you have an ethnically distinct population at a social and economic disadvantage, it is a bad scene for the society as a whole, especially when that disadvantage was deliberately manufactured by the mainstream and both groups know it. It's absolutely useless to tell people to "get over it" when they are still feeling the effects of institutionalized oppression that-- again-- ended only forty years ago (not with the abolition of slavery on which you seem to be fixated).
When I say that it will take a few generations for the emotional memory of oppression to fade, I say that because only distance from the oppression can lessen that emotion-- there's nothing we as a society can do to change that. When I say that it will take longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were committed, I do not mean to imply that the descendents of one group personally and individually owe anything to the descendents of the other-- rather, that real integration can only happen if the disadvantaged group is provided a handicap in order to catch up to the rest of the game, and that for the sake of the cohesion and advancement of the society as a whole it is critical that such integration occur.
It's a bummer that those of us in the advantaged group might have to give up a tiny bit of that advantage in order for this all to happen, but it's not like we have to trade places with the disadvantaged group or anything. Nobody's asking you, for instance, to be poor. All this whining about how unfair it is strikes me as incredibly crass and deeply ironic, not to mention an incredibly short-sighted and self-absorbed way to formulate social policy.
So far, you've just made some asinine (and wrong) assumptions about me, waved off the Iberian Airlines story, and backed off of your South American airline claim (ie, from "they let you carry handguns on planes" to "there are no LAWS [etc.]"). Local laws or no, the airlines I found do not "let you carry handguns on planes".
You haven't shown any source for your foiled Iberia Airlines hijacking, nor have you shown any South American airline that allows you to carry a handgun. This isn't complicated. Either support your crap with some references, or let the call stand.
Go page through the South American airlines listed here and let me know which of them allows you to travel with any kind of firearm at all. I didn't find one, and I checked a handful.
Also, I could find no mention anywhere of an Iberian Airlines hijacking that was thwarted by armed passengers. Iberia Airlines does not allow you to carry ammunition or sharp sticks, let alone firearms. Nor was I able to find mention of any hijacker being killed by passengers other than air marshals, ever-- on Iberian Airlines or otherwise.
I find this interesting, because if either of your stories-- guns allowed on planes in South America; armed passengers foiling a hijacking-- had even a hint of truth there should be thousands of gun advocates beating those drums all over the web.
I don't think either image is racist, per se. One image (white dominating black) is controversial for two reasons that simply do not apply to the other image (black dominating white): It depicts a black woman subjugated to a white woman with no other context, and there is no fight occurring. It is an image of dominance and more to the point possession, and because that posession is of a black woman by a white woman, it evokes the racial inequity that existed and in a very real way still exists here. In the other image, the black woman is winning a fight-- she is not gripping the white woman's face, and even if she were it would not echo the historical/social context with the same clarity.
I don't see what's unfair about it. Both images do present a racial conflict, but one of them is simply more evocative because of the reality from which we view it. It's not like black people "win" anything by this.
People in the United States, particularly in certain parts of the United States, have to think about racism even if they are not themselves racists. A lot of people act as though racism is a thing of the distant past, simply because slavery was outlawed so long ago. But parts of this country still had institutionalized racism not forty years ago. People who experienced that are still alive, and their children certainly know all about it, and they still feel the effects economically, socially, and emotionally. And of course, there's still a marginal but not insignificant number of racists floating around, poking at wounds that haven't had time to heal yet; and there are people who exploit and exacerbate that emotion in order to gain and hold power within their community.
Some people will tell you that everyone needs to just get over it, that whites need not apologize for the actions of their ancestors or walk on eggshells to avoid giving offense. Those people don't get it. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. It's going to take a few generations for the emotional aspects of the memory to fade, and probably longer to right the social and economic wrongs that were done. In the meantime, a certain degree of sensitivity can only help.
So when some of us look at an advertisement that depicts a white person subjugating a black person, it's not so much a question of the ad itself being racist. In the context of its intent, it is clearly not. In the greater context of the time and society from which some of us observe that ad, its connotations are abrasive. Does this mean the ad in question is inappropriate? Not necessarily. It didn't run in the United States. Maybe in the Netherlands the social context is different, and those abrasive connotations are simply not there. I certainly hope that is the case. Regardless, your accusation of racism on (for instance) my part is misplaced.
Maybe you should read the intervew, where he talks about this:
- global warming isn't happening
- global warming could be happening, we just don't know for sure yet
- global warming isn't caused by humans
- global warming is cyclical-- it'll cool down any minute now
- global warming can't be stopped anyway, might as well relax
- hell, global warming could be fun!
How about you all get together and settle on one line of bullshit? I suggest "cyclical". Those of you who aren't up to at least "not caused by humans" are just straggling, and personally I think anybody who's already on "could be fun" has gotten a little bit ahead of the game.