Shrinking the government to an ineffective size will kill the government.
No, shrinking the government to an ineffective size might kill us. The government can be shrunk without harm to itself.
But you're assuming that shrinking the government would make it less effective instead of more... I think you could trim the entire TSA and Homeland security without impacting our real safety at all.
I think that was the idea behind Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had "declared war" (as much as they could, since they're not a country) on us and future attacks were coming. We tried to secure our country the best we could and attacked and destroyed the center of the organization and the leaders harboring them.
But you didn't attack either the organization or the leaders harboring them, you primarily attacked the people nearby. And the "leaders" "harboring" him didn't have the power to kick him out anyway - look at how well the largest military in the world is doing. We don't even know he was there, it's the same intel than pointed to Saddam having an active WMD program.
We screwed several things up (like not catching Bin Laden),
If that's what you think you've screwed up you've got another thing coming. Go watch 'Collateral Murder'. Now think of the children orphaned in that van when their non-combatant father and friend were brutally slain for trying to take what appeared to be victims of a bombing to the hospital.
Even if you don't give a shit about them personally, and I must assume people like you don't or you couldn't support a war, you need to understand that if anyone had a reason to want you (collectively) dead it's the enemies you're so busy making right now.
but we hurt them enough to prevent any large-scale organized attacks for a while,
Pft. That attack didn't take planning, or a budget. They trained but even our experts admit they didn't need to.
The reason they aren't attacking you is that they've already succeeded. Osama's burning our money faster than we could by shoving it into a furnace, and it's all playing a secondary role of PR for him.
The terrorists no-longer hate us for our freedoms though, that's a plus. Of course that's because we no longer have them...
Whose interpretation? The SCOTUS was being Constitutional when they decided that money is free speech.
And they couldn't be more obviously wrong. Perhaps there should be an amendment protecting your right to give money but it's obviously not speech and not appropriate at the same times.
Giving a police officer who stopped you some kind words isn't bribery, giving him money is. The same with politicians, etc.
Also, pizza places don't take speech.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say corporations can't be people either.
And nowhere does it say chickens can't be citizens.
That is ridiculous though. Obviously, to properly vote for each of my chickens I'd need to incorporate a business behind each and lobby for corporate personhood, that makes much more sense than simply letting a chicken vote!
A purely Libertarian government would be a tyranny.
A purely libertarian government wouldn't be big enough to be a tyranny. If you wanted a tyranny you'd have to form/fund it yourself.
I'm for gun control (not banning, control, before the strawmen begin), and still follow the Constitution since my interpretation doesn't read the individualistic "all persons have the the right to bear arms", only the collective "the people".
I don't think you've thought that through. Who is "the people" such that it isn't the government and yet is different than "all persons"?
The Constitution is a lot like the Bible, true believers can interpret it which ever way makes them look right. And, being true believers, generally the premise their proving is harmful to the people, which is against the spirit of the document, if not the literal translation.
Yeah, harmful to the people. That's what you get when you try to make it justify your pre-existing choices instead of trying to see why it says what it says.
Yeah, try to exercise your right to free speech by giving a traffic cop $20 and you'll be arrested for bribery. (Make it $200 and you might get away with it.)
Not at all, those people would have all the rights that anyone else has - to speak, assemble, donate, etc. They merely would have to withdraw money from this corporation of theirs and give it themselves.
Corporations and other entities all have distinct advantages over mere individuals, they're immortal, unable to be arrested or usefully censured, etc.
Unless by stories, you mean when they put together those clips of other shows to make a point about the mishandling/reporting of the "real news". It's embarrassing how unimportant the "Real News" considers reporting on bad reporting to be.
Also, which shows actually do journalism then? I remember a 60-minutes undercover-footage investigation which seems to qualify, but all the talking heads I see on TV today are doing exactly what you accuse TDS of - taking video shot by someone else and talking over it.
You're drawing arbitrary distinctions between federal and state, as if any of it matters to the people on the ground.
Also, the federal weapons from those wars, like the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War on Afghanistan, are trickling down to the "state" level. You're liable to wake up to your door being kicked down by highly militarized local police.
If he'd have lost the bike that may have been justified because he endangered people using it, but not to be locked up for recording his arrest. If anything, that produces a safer society by auditing law enforcement.
A traffic stop was justified, but not one where an unidentified man bursts from a vehicle brandishing a weapon and screaming.
Depending on where I was when that happened to me my instinct would be to duck and floor it, driving over the carjacker. They should really consider buying those stick-on sirens...
But the people we went to go kill in Afghanistan WERE, if only by association and support, responsible for 9/11.
Ignore that? I'll call you a fucking imbecile if you believe it.
Alrighty then, here's some truth for you. The CIA [...] foster the mujaheddin [...] Russians. [...] cash, weapons, and training. [...] scary religious overtones[...] Osama bin Laden. The Russians left [...] Osama bin Laden did stuff elsewhere, but had the support of the Taliban and had camps in Afghanistan.
Now, as far as I know, that's all mostly true. Some details can be debated, but on the whole it's true.
Yeah, I'll stipulate to all of that, and more. But that's far less than 1/10th of 1% of the people in Afghanistan, and we didn't care about that until we needed an excuse to invade.
Also, the Taliban weren't a government like you think. They were a collection of like-minded warlords. Having their support means little more than moral support. And moral support is something he has more of now than before.
We're going to war and killing tens of thousands of innocents and blaming it on some guy who 1) was uncatchable and 2) their lame-duck "government" for failing to catch the uncatchable guy.
If you're going to call me an imbecile for telling you this stuff, please, just look it up.
No, I'm calling you an imbecile for believing that we're in any way punishing the guilty.
You even admit that we just attacked to be seen doing something:
And we needed to smack someone up alongside the head after 9/11. Actually hunting down a connected and funded terrorist cell is difficult, and destroying the nation that they hide under is a lot easier.
The problem is that Afghanistan isn't a nation, and its people almost assuredly do not support any large government objective.
It's far more differentiated than the USA for instance, and you propose going to war with them because some of their gun-toting militias did crazy things out in the hill.
As I said, that's as crazy as blaming YOU for Timothy McVeigh's attacks. You're in the same country, you speak his language. Why didn't you stop him?
I'm a peace-monger myself.
Pft, a peace-monger willing to justify war with an entire country because of the few actions of some people who may have lived in that country.
This is something else I want to clear up. The afghan populous, "in general", are not the people we went over there to kill. They're civilians stupid. We're not committing genocide.
But the civilians are the ones who die in the greatest numbers. If we aren't committing genocide it's because we had the good sense to invade well-populated countries.
The Taliban is a shifting alliance. Many of our original enemies are allies and vice versa. The guilty, if there were any, are adjusting to the terminology of "legitimate" government and selling themselves as leaders instead of slavers. The actual leaders of the organizations we sought to eliminate are now mostly safely in power in governmental ways and only their mainly draftee armies are dead or punished.
We went there to fuck over the Taliban. If we showed up and the Taliban simply dissolved or whatever, then we wouldn't have had to kill anybody.
But the Taliban weren't really a threat (we knew about them all along) and we're only attacking them, as you say, because Bush/The USA needed to do something after 9/11 so as to not appear impotent.
In fact had they folded you'd have had to go manufacture another enemy. Like Iraq for instance. And at least another half million civilian casualties.
Well no, I'm not fucking crazy. I did everything I could "within reason". That shouldn't need to be appended there, because we're reasonable people, right?
No, there aren't any good reasons. All the closed-controller-for-radio-security thing does is give manufacturers an excuse to close the phone. It provides no real security against tampering. Anything that could be done with open source can still be done by disassembling closed source or simply modifying the hardware.
It's just a band-aid so they can pretend they've done something. If there was a real problem (doubtful, thankfully) the security by obscurity would be pierced instantly.
Usually conversations are how you exchange views and gain understanding.
Anyways, I don't disagree with you that fake reasons exist, or that you have to understand them. I just think you need to identify them as fake reasons and deal with them differently.
Real issues have solutions. If someone's honestly worried for their children you can either help them protect their children or to understand how low the risks are. But if someone's just using it as a panic point they'll insist on perfect safety and other unreasonable standards.
Family-before-the-individual is a real opinion held by many people, but you could make a pro or anti-censorship argument based on it. It becomes a fake reason when always used by the conservative side to argue for increasing restrictions.
I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).
If you're too distraught perhaps you shouldn't go read the local newspaper's editorial/user comments section. Hmmm?
Yes, and they're free to drive all their posters away by building walls. They're so addicted to the dimes they get from editorials and user-talkback sections and yet unwilling to spend any of those dimes maintaining the flow.
Karma-shmarma. The issue of ACs on slashdot is bigger than taking rude pot-shots. I want anonymous posting (stronger than it is) so that people can leak data and whistleblow on/. without fear.
I'm adult enough to wade past a few trolls if it means I can have a grown-up forum where people aren't chastised for hurting someone's feelings.
Don't they hope to make money from the user comments? Didn't they already spend time/money choosing user comments when they came on paper?
If your bitching about a one-time.99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.
It's not the $1, it's the $1 and online credit-card purchase fun at each and every forum.
If it worked at all it'd lead to more isolated groups of users. I'm willing to make a new account to comment on a blog post or article, I'm not willing to give my real name, credit card number, and money, for the privilege.
And anyways, on Slashdot I find great value in the anon posters. Some are jerks, some are whistle-blowers. The value of their words is totally unrelated to the * by their names, or names at all. I'd find it a less useful site if they weren't here.
anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people. (BTW, good job here, it worked on me)
Wow, that's pretty lame. Worst rhetoric? A rise? Maybe he simply thinks people who freak out about trolls and use them as an excuse to censor are assholes.
The economy is in the shitter and it's the fault of those who worked steadily as if nothing was wrong, bought giant houses in a crazily booming market, and pretended the economy was so big it couldn't fail./troll:)
But simply pumping it up by a few more jobs isn't going to change the nature of the monetary and banking systems, or ensure common laws against fraud/etc are actually enforced properly.
If the Goldman Sachs thing was kiddy porn we'd have locked up everyone who even heard of the deal and didn't call police immediately, but instead we dither about finding the truly guilty and instead let everyone off the hook.
Slashdot Mirror
Shrinking the government to an ineffective size will kill the government.
No, shrinking the government to an ineffective size might kill us. The government can be shrunk without harm to itself.
But you're assuming that shrinking the government would make it less effective instead of more... I think you could trim the entire TSA and Homeland security without impacting our real safety at all.
I think that was the idea behind Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had "declared war" (as much as they could, since they're not a country) on us and future attacks were coming. We tried to secure our country the best we could and attacked and destroyed the center of the organization and the leaders harboring them.
But you didn't attack either the organization or the leaders harboring them, you primarily attacked the people nearby. And the "leaders" "harboring" him didn't have the power to kick him out anyway - look at how well the largest military in the world is doing. We don't even know he was there, it's the same intel than pointed to Saddam having an active WMD program.
We screwed several things up (like not catching Bin Laden),
If that's what you think you've screwed up you've got another thing coming. Go watch 'Collateral Murder'. Now think of the children orphaned in that van when their non-combatant father and friend were brutally slain for trying to take what appeared to be victims of a bombing to the hospital.
Even if you don't give a shit about them personally, and I must assume people like you don't or you couldn't support a war, you need to understand that if anyone had a reason to want you (collectively) dead it's the enemies you're so busy making right now.
but we hurt them enough to prevent any large-scale organized attacks for a while,
Pft. That attack didn't take planning, or a budget. They trained but even our experts admit they didn't need to.
The reason they aren't attacking you is that they've already succeeded. Osama's burning our money faster than we could by shoving it into a furnace, and it's all playing a secondary role of PR for him.
The terrorists no-longer hate us for our freedoms though, that's a plus. Of course that's because we no longer have them...
Whose interpretation? The SCOTUS was being Constitutional when they decided that money is free speech.
And they couldn't be more obviously wrong. Perhaps there should be an amendment protecting your right to give money but it's obviously not speech and not appropriate at the same times.
Giving a police officer who stopped you some kind words isn't bribery, giving him money is. The same with politicians, etc.
Also, pizza places don't take speech.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say corporations can't be people either.
And nowhere does it say chickens can't be citizens.
That is ridiculous though. Obviously, to properly vote for each of my chickens I'd need to incorporate a business behind each and lobby for corporate personhood, that makes much more sense than simply letting a chicken vote!
A purely Libertarian government would be a tyranny.
A purely libertarian government wouldn't be big enough to be a tyranny. If you wanted a tyranny you'd have to form/fund it yourself.
I'm for gun control (not banning, control, before the strawmen begin), and still follow the Constitution since my interpretation doesn't read the individualistic "all persons have the the right to bear arms", only the collective "the people".
I don't think you've thought that through. Who is "the people" such that it isn't the government and yet is different than "all persons"?
The Constitution is a lot like the Bible, true believers can interpret it which ever way makes them look right. And, being true believers, generally the premise their proving is harmful to the people, which is against the spirit of the document, if not the literal translation.
Yeah, harmful to the people. That's what you get when you try to make it justify your pre-existing choices instead of trying to see why it says what it says.
Yeah, try to exercise your right to free speech by giving a traffic cop $20 and you'll be arrested for bribery. (Make it $200 and you might get away with it.)
Not at all, those people would have all the rights that anyone else has - to speak, assemble, donate, etc. They merely would have to withdraw money from this corporation of theirs and give it themselves.
Corporations and other entities all have distinct advantages over mere individuals, they're immortal, unable to be arrested or usefully censured, etc.
Right, but I hope you're a vegetarian or you're a huge hypocrite.
Lawn darts hurt less kids than stairs. Take your bans and shove them up your ass.
Unless by stories, you mean when they put together those clips of other shows to make a point about the mishandling/reporting of the "real news". It's embarrassing how unimportant the "Real News" considers reporting on bad reporting to be.
Also, which shows actually do journalism then? I remember a 60-minutes undercover-footage investigation which seems to qualify, but all the talking heads I see on TV today are doing exactly what you accuse TDS of - taking video shot by someone else and talking over it.
Sentences. Use them properly.
Also, quit being an imbecile. Your stupid scare-mongering analogy has so many holes in it you could use it as a novelty door for a submarine.
Robin Hood is just a thief.
No, Robin Hood takes your money to wage a war on your behalf. He's a government.
You're drawing arbitrary distinctions between federal and state, as if any of it matters to the people on the ground.
Also, the federal weapons from those wars, like the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War on Afghanistan, are trickling down to the "state" level. You're liable to wake up to your door being kicked down by highly militarized local police.
If he'd have lost the bike that may have been justified because he endangered people using it, but not to be locked up for recording his arrest. If anything, that produces a safer society by auditing law enforcement.
A traffic stop was justified, but not one where an unidentified man bursts from a vehicle brandishing a weapon and screaming.
Depending on where I was when that happened to me my instinct would be to duck and floor it, driving over the carjacker. They should really consider buying those stick-on sirens...
It's not the US that's the police state in this one particular way.
To them broadcast was defined by the medium and not the intent.
Well yeah, if your medium goes through me, it's a broadcast even if that term has a more specific legal meaning as well.
And that's enough to justify the legality of receiving it - I can. You sent it to me.
You should point out the pedantic terminology where it matters, but you shouldn't think the terminology is the argument.
But the people we went to go kill in Afghanistan WERE, if only by association and support, responsible for 9/11.
Ignore that? I'll call you a fucking imbecile if you believe it.
Alrighty then, here's some truth for you. The CIA [...] foster the mujaheddin [...] Russians. [...] cash, weapons, and training. [...] scary religious overtones[...] Osama bin Laden. The Russians left [...] Osama bin Laden did stuff elsewhere, but had the support of the Taliban and had camps in Afghanistan.
Now, as far as I know, that's all mostly true. Some details can be debated, but on the whole it's true.
Yeah, I'll stipulate to all of that, and more. But that's far less than 1/10th of 1% of the people in Afghanistan, and we didn't care about that until we needed an excuse to invade.
Also, the Taliban weren't a government like you think. They were a collection of like-minded warlords. Having their support means little more than moral support. And moral support is something he has more of now than before.
We're going to war and killing tens of thousands of innocents and blaming it on some guy who 1) was uncatchable and 2) their lame-duck "government" for failing to catch the uncatchable guy.
If you're going to call me an imbecile for telling you this stuff, please, just look it up.
No, I'm calling you an imbecile for believing that we're in any way punishing the guilty.
You even admit that we just attacked to be seen doing something:
And we needed to smack someone up alongside the head after 9/11. Actually hunting down a connected and funded terrorist cell is difficult, and destroying the nation that they hide under is a lot easier.
The problem is that Afghanistan isn't a nation, and its people almost assuredly do not support any large government objective.
It's far more differentiated than the USA for instance, and you propose going to war with them because some of their gun-toting militias did crazy things out in the hill.
As I said, that's as crazy as blaming YOU for Timothy McVeigh's attacks. You're in the same country, you speak his language. Why didn't you stop him?
I'm a peace-monger myself.
Pft, a peace-monger willing to justify war with an entire country because of the few actions of some people who may have lived in that country.
This is something else I want to clear up. The afghan populous, "in general", are not the people we went over there to kill. They're civilians stupid. We're not committing genocide.
But the civilians are the ones who die in the greatest numbers. If we aren't committing genocide it's because we had the good sense to invade well-populated countries.
The Taliban is a shifting alliance. Many of our original enemies are allies and vice versa. The guilty, if there were any, are adjusting to the terminology of "legitimate" government and selling themselves as leaders instead of slavers. The actual leaders of the organizations we sought to eliminate are now mostly safely in power in governmental ways and only their mainly draftee armies are dead or punished.
We went there to fuck over the Taliban. If we showed up and the Taliban simply dissolved or whatever, then we wouldn't have had to kill anybody.
But the Taliban weren't really a threat (we knew about them all along) and we're only attacking them, as you say, because Bush/The USA needed to do something after 9/11 so as to not appear impotent.
In fact had they folded you'd have had to go manufacture another enemy. Like Iraq for instance. And at least another half million civilian casualties.
Well no, I'm not fucking crazy. I did everything I could "within reason". That shouldn't need to be appended there, because we're reasonable people, right?
Yeah, you did
Yeah, not until one person noticed for any reason and pointed it out to everyone.
No, there aren't any good reasons. All the closed-controller-for-radio-security thing does is give manufacturers an excuse to close the phone. It provides no real security against tampering. Anything that could be done with open source can still be done by disassembling closed source or simply modifying the hardware.
It's just a band-aid so they can pretend they've done something. If there was a real problem (doubtful, thankfully) the security by obscurity would be pierced instantly.
Usually conversations are how you exchange views and gain understanding.
Anyways, I don't disagree with you that fake reasons exist, or that you have to understand them. I just think you need to identify them as fake reasons and deal with them differently.
Real issues have solutions. If someone's honestly worried for their children you can either help them protect their children or to understand how low the risks are. But if someone's just using it as a panic point they'll insist on perfect safety and other unreasonable standards.
Family-before-the-individual is a real opinion held by many people, but you could make a pro or anti-censorship argument based on it. It becomes a fake reason when always used by the conservative side to argue for increasing restrictions.
I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).
If you're too distraught perhaps you shouldn't go read the local newspaper's editorial/user comments section. Hmmm?
Yes, and they're free to drive all their posters away by building walls. They're so addicted to the dimes they get from editorials and user-talkback sections and yet unwilling to spend any of those dimes maintaining the flow.
Karma-shmarma. The issue of ACs on slashdot is bigger than taking rude pot-shots. I want anonymous posting (stronger than it is) so that people can leak data and whistleblow on /. without fear.
I'm adult enough to wade past a few trolls if it means I can have a grown-up forum where people aren't chastised for hurting someone's feelings.
Yeah, they only want the troll to pay, and people to pay to refute him. They aren't actually interested in a higher level of discourse.
And that won't cost the paper money?
Don't they hope to make money from the user comments? Didn't they already spend time/money choosing user comments when they came on paper?
If your bitching about a one-time .99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.
It's not the $1, it's the $1 and online credit-card purchase fun at each and every forum.
If it worked at all it'd lead to more isolated groups of users. I'm willing to make a new account to comment on a blog post or article, I'm not willing to give my real name, credit card number, and money, for the privilege.
And anyways, on Slashdot I find great value in the anon posters. Some are jerks, some are whistle-blowers. The value of their words is totally unrelated to the * by their names, or names at all. I'd find it a less useful site if they weren't here.
anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people. (BTW, good job here, it worked on me)
Wow, that's pretty lame. Worst rhetoric? A rise? Maybe he simply thinks people who freak out about trolls and use them as an excuse to censor are assholes.
The economy is in the shitter and it's the fault of those who worked steadily as if nothing was wrong, bought giant houses in a crazily booming market, and pretended the economy was so big it couldn't fail. /troll :)
But simply pumping it up by a few more jobs isn't going to change the nature of the monetary and banking systems, or ensure common laws against fraud/etc are actually enforced properly.
If the Goldman Sachs thing was kiddy porn we'd have locked up everyone who even heard of the deal and didn't call police immediately, but instead we dither about finding the truly guilty and instead let everyone off the hook.