The issue with many desalination plants is not the disposal of salts/minerals but keeping the system clean from all those salts/minerals. The issue being that salts/minerals have a tenancy to build up inside the pipes causing the system to need lots of maintenance.
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow! They'd have enough salt to last forever!
Putting aside your politics for the moment -- let's just say that I disagree with you -- this is about a well-designed and enduring piece of technology. I can admire the technical excellence of a something without liking what it was used for, or who used it. I can, for example, still appreciate the robustness and shallow learning curve of the AK-47 without being a Marxist -- and by the way, that weapon has almost certainly killed more people over those 60 years than the B-52 has. The ideal nerd should be able to look at a high-tech device and have some part of his mind thinking "whoa, that's freakin' cool!" right up to the moment that it kills him.
In the September 1965 National Geographic feature article on the USAF, they write about the B-52's capabilities, but give a warning, saying (quoting as best I can): "Weapon systems have a useful service life of about a decade, and the B-52 is almost that old now. How long will it be until we need to replacement for it?"
Mind you, in 1965 that outlook did make more sense than it does in hindsight. The USAF/USAAF's primary long-range bomber had gone from the B-29 to the B-36 to the B-47 to the B-52 within the the space of twenty years, and the B-70 hadn't been cancelled yet. The same thing applies to fighters, going from one new deployed design per year on average, then, down to one every 10-12 years now. I presume part of that is due to increased computing capability allowing more tinkering and experimentation without having to actually build something, but that can't be all of it. Anyone care to speculate?
Creating rumors, spreading rumors, and listening to rumors are treason, Citizen. Please report such rumors to Your Friend the Computer immediately! Thank you for your cooperation.
No sir. The leader of our military (assuming you're an American) is a civilian. The military leaders who became president from Washington to Eisenhower took off the uniform when they became president and never put it back on. If you're going to try to argue that there were no fascist overtones in a sitting president donning an unearned uniform, being flown in a fighter jet to the deck of an aircraft carrier
Except that that's not a uniform, that's a flight suit. It's there for functional reasons (safety, primarily -- it's fire-resistant), and when you fly on a military aircraft, you wear one, whether you're a civilian or a member of the military, as you can see here. (Actually, the flight suit in the linked photo is closer to a uniform than the one Bush wore, because it has squadron and service patches on it, and Bush's did not). You put one on because of where you are, not who you are, the same way you'd be required to wear scrubs when visiting an operating room, and nobody would think you were trying to pass yourself off as a surgeon.
Now, you could take issue with the expense of the landing, as opposed to going out there by helicopter, but I doubt the cost difference was a noticeable fraction of, say, getting all the Secret Service people in place for the President (whichever one) to throw out the first baseball pitch of the season.
The rest of your comments here are just question-begging on your part. A commander mingling with his troops to congratulate them isn't "fascist", no matter how much florid prose you pile on.
I'm not a professional at this political tater-tate like you, there are guys who slice Goldberg's baloney much more effectively. You know who they are (and they're not at The Nation as you know very well).
The Doughboy has been pushing how "Liberals are the real Hitlers" for years before he finally decided to show those fancy-pants intellectuals how to write a REAL book. You know that. He continues in this vein even today, It's one of his favorite themes, besides his all-time favorite, how "blacks are stoopid". You don't believe me? See his March 28 NRO whine entitled (I swear to God this is true) "Me and Black America"
I hadn't read until you pointed it out to me. After reading it, I'll be extremely charitable and just say that your accuracy is lacking. It's a response to the response to a previous article of his, in which he talks about perceived vs. actual risks to young black men like Trayvon Martin, i.e. that when one of them is killed, it's most likely to have been at the hands of another young black man. Liberals responded by saying that Goldberg doesn't know anything about black America. Goldberg's response to that, in the article you mention, is that "First, I never claimed to have intimate knowledge of black America. If anything, I’m dubious of the idea (or desirability) of a monolithic 'black America.' Second, nothing in my column requires an intimate personal knowledge of black America. All I did was make the case, based on the sort of empirical data the self-proclaimed 'reality-based community' relies upon, that violent, never mind homicidal, white racism is hardly the chief threat to African-Americans." Nowhere in either article does he say anything even vaguely denigrating blacks, either in matters of intelligence or otherwise. In fact, his recognition that black people are individuals like everyone else (not "monolithic"), each with brains and opinions of their own that don't necessarily mirror those of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, is the exact opposite of calling them stupid.
So, to sum up, you claimed Goldberg's book about progressives and fascists consists merely of trivial coincidences like vegetarianism, when actually he discusses the philosophical foundations of both movements, the policies they had in common during their heyday when their icons were establishing themselves, the mutual admiration between their major figures, and how modern liberal ideas trace back to that era. You claimed that an article he wrote called blacks unintelligent, when actually it does nothing of the kind, and arguably does the opposite. Anything else?
Before I even get to specifics, I'll point out that Goldberg's book focuses largely on the ideological foundations of progressivism and fascism, hence it dealing a lot with the period starting with the Progressive Era up through the New Deal. Your claims that those eras are irrelevant are down silly. These are where the progressive ideas were formed, and where a lot of the movement's heroes made their names.
The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.
That's nothing like the current calls for Republicans to ignore the fact that a big government moderate is running as their party's nominee, and vote for Romney is absolutely critical if you're "on the team". In other words, ignore you own personal beliefs, because it's more important that "we" win.
A core philosophical tenet is nothing compared to voting for a candidate you disagree with significantly but agree with more than the alternative?
Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.
And of course, not like trivial things like the right-wing corporatization of politics and privatization of the military and law enforcement, as well as militarization of the police. When I see the American Left (as named in Goldberg's subtitle), the first thing that comes to mind is "Eugenics". In fact, hasn't Eugenics been a platform of the Democratic Party for the past 60 years? Sadly, No.
Whether or not you like those things, what have they got to do with the truth or falsehood of Goldberg's assertion of similarity between progressive and fascist policies? Not to mention that fascists are hardly keen on privatization, certainly not of the military. They want society at large to resemble and be run like the military, not the other way around. As to eugenics, its importance is not whether it is advocated by liberals now, but the fact that it fitted so nicely into progressive ideology during its heyday can give some insight into their general underpinnings. Of course, when it comes to government control of the economy, that's something progressives/liberals definitely haven't discarded.
A tendency of both fascists and progressives to imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism.
Holy Fucking Shit. Are you getting this? This far Right chickenhawk is accusing the Left of militarizing everything! You see what I mean about brass balls?
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I said "imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism." You expect the military to look and feel like, well, the military. Fascists want all of society to be that way. Progressives up through the New Deal openly espoused a toned-down version of that -- things like the National Recovery Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps (which was essentially run like the army), and the general idea of top-down planning. Progressives loved the centralized power put into place during WW1 and wanted to keep it going afterwards: "we planned in war, we can plan during peace." They weren't talking about planning as mere thought experiments, they meant orders that had to be obeyed. Likewise subordinating individual goals to the big group goal, the government stirring up public sentiment against the enemy (abstract in some cases, specific groups in others), the demand that people sacrifice in order to win the struggle, etc.
Right, it's "progressives" that want to turn everything into "the moral equivalent of war".
You do know that you're quoting William James (a major influence o
Is this the same John Derbyshire that wrote Prime Obsession? I really liked that book (it's about the Riemann Hypothesis). It would be a shame if the author turns out to be a moron.
You're assuming that "racist" is a subclass of "moron" rather than a subclass of "asshole."
Today, the intellectual leader of the National Review Online is the well-known Doughy Pantload, Jonah Goldberg. Raised like a veal in a whorehouse by the famous harpy Lucienne Golberg, Jonah Goldberg is best known for his weighty tome, "Liberal Fascism", which puts forth the case that liberals are like Hitler because National Socialism has the word "socialism" in it and Hitler was a vegetarian and all liberals are vegetarians so it's not the corporate Right that are fascists, it's really the liberals, neener neener neener.
Thank you for giving us The Nation magazine's strawman caricature of Goldberg's thesis. What he actually writes about are things like:
The socialist roots of Mussolini's (and other fascists') beliefs, in particular the similarities and differences between fascism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism), and the ease (noted by both sides) with which people adapted themselves when they moved from one group to the other.
The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.
The "totalitarian" nature of the belief systems in the original sense of the word, meaning that it is all-encompassing; compare Mussolini's "everything within the State, nothing outside the State" to the more modern liberal "the personal is the political."
Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.
A tendency of both fascists and progressives to imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism. Not as prevalent today, and conservatives aren't innocent (cf. the War on Drugs), but it was much more widespread among progressives during the first half of the 20th century. Do a search for "Blue Eagle" sometime, for example.
You can disagree with Goldberg all you like, of course, but your characterization of his book is extremely dishonest.
It's the Hobbit pub. It comes in half pints, you insensitive clod!
"Do you think they'll make jokes about our height?"
"Of course not! If we behave like tall people, we'll be treated tall people!"
"What'll it be, gents?"
"We'd like a half pint of ale, a plate of short ribs with small fries, and a short order of shrimp!"
"That's tellin' 'im, Mr. Frodo!"
(From The Ring and I, musical parody of the Bakshi version of Lord of the Rings, in Mad Magazine ~1978).
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods.
"Quite simple to pull off really. All I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers, then on 9/11 we pretended like four planes were being hijacked when really we just rerouted them to Pennsylvania then flew two military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives then shot down all the witnesses of Flight 93 with an F-15 after blowing up the Pentagon with a cruise missile. It was only the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan, ever, ever."
"The Naming of Servers is a serious matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a server has three different names..."
... those being DNS entry, IP, and the one which "the server itself knows, and never will confess."
Cigarette ads on radio and television are illegal in the US. That's a direct precedent.
... and one which should be overturned yesterday, as it's a crystal-clear violation of the First Amendment. To rephrase what I said previously, the fact that government has gotten away with something already is no excuse for letting them do more of it.
If "it makes someone feel bad" is sufficient reason to infringe on peoples' freedoms, then what's next? Enact a law requiring high school athletes and cheerleaders to date the campus nerds?
I think you've got some problems with your analogy there (but it's great rhetoric, hey?). The situation we're considering is one where some advertising is shown to promote behaviours that are a public health problem.
With the exception of communicable disease or similar physical hazards -- things that can harm someone by contact or proximity -- there is no such thing as "public health." You're talking about something that people mentally react to, not a person spreading their typhoid germs around. Furthermore, "shown to promote behaviours" is just a fancier way of saying "make someone feel bad."
So going with your analogy, try putting an ad that promotes beating up nerds on TV. Or one that shows nerds cutting themselves because they're social outcasts.
If someone actually wants to do that, sure. That's their right. I stand with Voltaire on this issue. And I say that as a glasses-wearing program-writing member of the high-school wargamers (read: AD&D) club who was occasionally on the receiving end of unkind treatment by campus jocks and other nitwits.
Freedom of speech is limited in all kinds of ways.
You are, unfortunately, correct. That's no excuse for imposing more limits, however.
False advertising for example. Or making health claims. Controls on what you can and can't do in ads aren't new.
Laws against false advertising are really just taking laws against fraud and moving them to a prior step in the process. If I sell you quartz crystals by convincing you that they cure cancer, that's fraud, and is rightfully illegal. Airing commercials that say "buy our quartz crystals, they cure cancer" is pretty clearly an extension of the sales process. If I just say "quartz crystals cure cancer", without trying to sell you any, there's nothing the government should be able to do about it, false though my statement would be. It's up to listeners to decide whether or not to believe me. This goes triple in the skinny models issue, first because the statement is only an implicit one ("skinny people are more attractive than fat people"), and second because the statement is entirely subjective.
If "it makes someone feel bad" is sufficient reason to infringe on peoples' freedoms, then what's next? Enact a law requiring high school athletes and cheerleaders to date the campus nerds?
Brian: Yeah, about your pamphlet, I'm not seeing anything about German history between 1939 and 1945. There's just a big gap...
German tour guide: Everyone was on vacation! On your left is Munich's first city hall, erected in 15...
Brian: What are you talking about? Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and...
Tour guide: We were invited! Punch was served! Check with Poland!
Brian: You can't just ignore those years. Thomas Mann fled to American because of Nazism's stranglehold on Germany.
Tour guide: No, no, he left to manage a Dairy Queen.
Brian: A Dairy Queen? That's preposterous.
Tour guide: I will hear no more insinuations about the German people! Nothing bad happened! Sie werden sich hinsetzen! Sie werden ruhig sein! Sie werden nicht beleidigen Deutschland!
... our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it.
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I disagree with the underlying assumption that data belongs to you by virtue of being about you. Take it down to the simplest level: Adam sees Bob crossing the street. "Bob crossed the street" is the data, an observation that belongs to Adam (the observer) not Bob (the observed), by virtue of now residing in Adam's brain, which belongs to him, not to Bob. Everything else is just communication, storage, analysis, and technological assistance. It comes back to this fundamental point once you remove the obfuscating details, and Bob doesn't acquire the right to perform a partial lobotomy on Adam just because he doesn't like what or how much Adam knows about him, or whom Adam might tell, or what decisions Adam might make based on what he knows.
This assumes, of course, that Adam didn't violate Bob's rights in order to make these observations -- he didn't trespass by breaking into Bob's house, for instance.
Knowing what Cato/Heritage consider to be the ideal situation (or their "agenda" as you put it) is precisely why such a ranking is useful. I could just as easily have looked a study by a Marxist think tank ranking countries according to how closely they matched their ideal of pure communism. I would probably get something pretty
close to the other list, just in the opposite order -- as I pointed out with my example regarding guns policy from the perspective of the pro- or anti-gun-control groups.
Both of the surveys look at a lot of different factors. Cato breaks it down into five overall areas, each subdivided further. "Size of Government", would be where socialized medicine would go, and for that, they do indeed rank the US as more capitalist than the UK (54th place vs. 72nd place). The UK outranks the US on "Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights" (12th vs. 26th) and "Freedom to Trade Internationally" (15th vs. 44th). The US outranks the UK on "Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business" (20th vs. 27th), and very slightly on "Access to Sound Money" (11th vs. 12th). And in light of a reply to my original post, I'll reiterate: it doesn't matter whether you like Cato or agree with them on (say) the desirability of a minimum wage (a sub-sub item of "Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business"). All you need to know is that their position is that there shouldn't be a minimum wage, and they're looking at how close each country comes to that.
In the Cato Institute's "Economic Freedom of the World", the US is ranked 10th out of 141, higher ranking being rightward. Same result on the Heritage Foundation's equivalent report
And we should trust well known organs of conservative/libertarian propaganda because.....?
For the same reason we would trust a Planned Parenthood study ranking countries by their abortion policies, regardless of how we felt about abortion: because the group in question is ranking the countries based on how much the group agrees with them. Whether we agree with the group is irrelevant. If I want to know roughly where different Congresscritters stand on gun policy, it doesn't matter whether I look at a study by the National Rifle Association, or at one by Handgun Control International, even though those organizations' views on what constitutes good gun policy are diametrically opposed.
Does this really require explaining? I would have done so in the original post, if it didn't strike me as obvious.
Name a single Democrat who is as far on the insane left scale as Santorum is on the insane right scale. You can't.
Would you care to name a few opinions/posititions, the holding of which you think would qualify someone as "insane left"?
Democrats are, in fact, farther to the right on most issues than most people who are called "leftists" anywhere else in the world.
On economic issues, close, but not 100%. In the Cato Institute's "Economic Freedom of the World", the US is ranked 10th out of 141, higher ranking being rightward. Same result on the Heritage Foundation's equivalent report, out of 179, though the reports disagree slightly about which countries are further right, and which order. They agree we're leftward (less capitalist) than Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, and Mauritius. Cato says the UK is more capitalist than us, while Heritage says that Ireland is.
By number of victims, Stalin was by far the scummier one.
You'll get no argument from me on that -- I wear one of these. But it would have been tangential to the main point. Which, now that I think about it, is a silly expression, because you can't have a tangent to a point, a tangent is to a curve. But nevermind.
You know what they say about hindsight, but maybe the right course of action for the USA in WW2 would have been to act opportunistic: stay out, let nazis and reds fight to the end, and only then swiftly move in to crush the weakened victor, whoever it is.
The basic idea has merit on a coldly-logical basis, though I wouldn't like the deaths and suffering it would cause to innocent Russians -- or even innocent Germans, for that matter. Problem is, the USSR was in it second-to-last, and Japan would have brought the US in regardless. If it had been purely Third Reich vs. USSR from the start, I agree that sitting it out would have been best.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue with many desalination plants is not the disposal of salts/minerals but keeping the system clean from all those salts/minerals. The issue being that salts/minerals have a tenancy to build up inside the pipes causing the system to need lots of maintenance.
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow! They'd have enough salt to last forever!
Putting aside your politics for the moment -- let's just say that I disagree with you -- this is about a well-designed and enduring piece of technology. I can admire the technical excellence of a something without liking what it was used for, or who used it. I can, for example, still appreciate the robustness and shallow learning curve of the AK-47 without being a Marxist -- and by the way, that weapon has almost certainly killed more people over those 60 years than the B-52 has. The ideal nerd should be able to look at a high-tech device and have some part of his mind thinking "whoa, that's freakin' cool!" right up to the moment that it kills him.
In the September 1965 National Geographic feature article on the USAF, they write about the B-52's capabilities, but give a warning, saying (quoting as best I can): "Weapon systems have a useful service life of about a decade, and the B-52 is almost that old now. How long will it be until we need to replacement for it?"
Mind you, in 1965 that outlook did make more sense than it does in hindsight. The USAF/USAAF's primary long-range bomber had gone from the B-29 to the B-36 to the B-47 to the B-52 within the the space of twenty years, and the B-70 hadn't been cancelled yet. The same thing applies to fighters, going from one new deployed design per year on average, then, down to one every 10-12 years now. I presume part of that is due to increased computing capability allowing more tinkering and experimentation without having to actually build something, but that can't be all of it. Anyone care to speculate?
Creating rumors, spreading rumors, and listening to rumors are treason, Citizen. Please report such rumors to Your Friend the Computer immediately! Thank you for your cooperation.
Stay Alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!
Apparently I messed up the link in the parent article. Here it is.
No sir. The leader of our military (assuming you're an American) is a civilian. The military leaders who became president from Washington to Eisenhower took off the uniform when they became president and never put it back on. If you're going to try to argue that there were no fascist overtones in a sitting president donning an unearned uniform, being flown in a fighter jet to the deck of an aircraft carrier
Except that that's not a uniform, that's a flight suit. It's there for functional reasons (safety, primarily -- it's fire-resistant), and when you fly on a military aircraft, you wear one, whether you're a civilian or a member of the military, as you can see here. (Actually, the flight suit in the linked photo is closer to a uniform than the one Bush wore, because it has squadron and service patches on it, and Bush's did not). You put one on because of where you are, not who you are, the same way you'd be required to wear scrubs when visiting an operating room, and nobody would think you were trying to pass yourself off as a surgeon.
Now, you could take issue with the expense of the landing, as opposed to going out there by helicopter, but I doubt the cost difference was a noticeable fraction of, say, getting all the Secret Service people in place for the President (whichever one) to throw out the first baseball pitch of the season.
The rest of your comments here are just question-begging on your part. A commander mingling with his troops to congratulate them isn't "fascist", no matter how much florid prose you pile on.
I'm not a professional at this political tater-tate like you, there are guys who slice Goldberg's baloney much more effectively. You know who they are (and they're not at The Nation as you know very well).
The Doughboy has been pushing how "Liberals are the real Hitlers" for years before he finally decided to show those fancy-pants intellectuals how to write a REAL book. You know that. He continues in this vein even today, It's one of his favorite themes, besides his all-time favorite, how "blacks are stoopid". You don't believe me? See his March 28 NRO whine entitled (I swear to God this is true) "Me and Black America"
I hadn't read until you pointed it out to me. After reading it, I'll be extremely charitable and just say that your accuracy is lacking. It's a response to the response to a previous article of his, in which he talks about perceived vs. actual risks to young black men like Trayvon Martin, i.e. that when one of them is killed, it's most likely to have been at the hands of another young black man. Liberals responded by saying that Goldberg doesn't know anything about black America. Goldberg's response to that, in the article you mention, is that "First, I never claimed to have intimate knowledge of black America. If anything, I’m dubious of the idea (or desirability) of a monolithic 'black America.' Second, nothing in my column requires an intimate personal knowledge of black America. All I did was make the case, based on the sort of empirical data the self-proclaimed 'reality-based community' relies upon, that violent, never mind homicidal, white racism is hardly the chief threat to African-Americans." Nowhere in either article does he say anything even vaguely denigrating blacks, either in matters of intelligence or otherwise. In fact, his recognition that black people are individuals like everyone else (not "monolithic"), each with brains and opinions of their own that don't necessarily mirror those of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, is the exact opposite of calling them stupid.
So, to sum up, you claimed Goldberg's book about progressives and fascists consists merely of trivial coincidences like vegetarianism, when actually he discusses the philosophical foundations of both movements, the policies they had in common during their heyday when their icons were establishing themselves, the mutual admiration between their major figures, and how modern liberal ideas trace back to that era. You claimed that an article he wrote called blacks unintelligent, when actually it does nothing of the kind, and arguably does the opposite. Anything else?
The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.
That's nothing like the current calls for Republicans to ignore the fact that a big government moderate is running as their party's nominee, and vote for Romney is absolutely critical if you're "on the team". In other words, ignore you own personal beliefs, because it's more important that "we" win.
A core philosophical tenet is nothing compared to voting for a candidate you disagree with significantly but agree with more than the alternative?
Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.
And of course, not like trivial things like the right-wing corporatization of politics and privatization of the military and law enforcement, as well as militarization of the police. When I see the American Left (as named in Goldberg's subtitle), the first thing that comes to mind is "Eugenics". In fact, hasn't Eugenics been a platform of the Democratic Party for the past 60 years? Sadly, No.
Whether or not you like those things, what have they got to do with the truth or falsehood of Goldberg's assertion of similarity between progressive and fascist policies? Not to mention that fascists are hardly keen on privatization, certainly not of the military. They want society at large to resemble and be run like the military, not the other way around. As to eugenics, its importance is not whether it is advocated by liberals now, but the fact that it fitted so nicely into progressive ideology during its heyday can give some insight into their general underpinnings. Of course, when it comes to government control of the economy, that's something progressives/liberals definitely haven't discarded.
A tendency of both fascists and progressives to imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism.
Holy Fucking Shit. Are you getting this? This far Right chickenhawk is accusing the Left of militarizing everything! You see what I mean about brass balls?
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I said "imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism." You expect the military to look and feel like, well, the military. Fascists want all of society to be that way. Progressives up through the New Deal openly espoused a toned-down version of that -- things like the National Recovery Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps (which was essentially run like the army), and the general idea of top-down planning. Progressives loved the centralized power put into place during WW1 and wanted to keep it going afterwards: "we planned in war, we can plan during peace." They weren't talking about planning as mere thought experiments, they meant orders that had to be obeyed. Likewise subordinating individual goals to the big group goal, the government stirring up public sentiment against the enemy (abstract in some cases, specific groups in others), the demand that people sacrifice in order to win the struggle, etc.
Right, it's "progressives" that want to turn everything into "the moral equivalent of war".
You do know that you're quoting William James (a major influence o
Is this the same John Derbyshire that wrote Prime Obsession? I really liked that book (it's about the Riemann Hypothesis). It would be a shame if the author turns out to be a moron.
You're assuming that "racist" is a subclass of "moron" rather than a subclass of "asshole."
Today, the intellectual leader of the National Review Online is the well-known Doughy Pantload, Jonah Goldberg. Raised like a veal in a whorehouse by the famous harpy Lucienne Golberg, Jonah Goldberg is best known for his weighty tome, "Liberal Fascism", which puts forth the case that liberals are like Hitler because National Socialism has the word "socialism" in it and Hitler was a vegetarian and all liberals are vegetarians so it's not the corporate Right that are fascists, it's really the liberals, neener neener neener.
Thank you for giving us The Nation magazine's strawman caricature of Goldberg's thesis. What he actually writes about are things like:
You can disagree with Goldberg all you like, of course, but your characterization of his book is extremely dishonest.
It's the Hobbit pub. It comes in half pints, you insensitive clod!
"Do you think they'll make jokes about our height?"
"Of course not! If we behave like tall people, we'll be treated tall people!"
"What'll it be, gents?"
"We'd like a half pint of ale, a plate of short ribs with small fries, and a short order of shrimp!"
"That's tellin' 'im, Mr. Frodo!"
(From The Ring and I, musical parody of the Bakshi version of Lord of the Rings, in Mad Magazine ~1978).
Not if his name is Bilbo. I know people that have been named after characters in the book.
Now that would be an amusing copyright lawsuit to watch.
There are three pubs here in Vegas called "Bilbo's", I wonder if the owner should be worried.
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods.
"Quite simple to pull off really. All I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers, then on 9/11 we pretended like four planes were being hijacked when really we just rerouted them to Pennsylvania then flew two military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives then shot down all the witnesses of Flight 93 with an F-15 after blowing up the Pentagon with a cruise missile. It was only the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan, ever, ever."
"The Naming of Servers is a serious matter,
... those being DNS entry, IP, and the one which "the server itself knows, and never will confess."
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a server has three different names..."
Cigarette ads on radio and television are illegal in the US. That's a direct precedent.
... and one which should be overturned yesterday, as it's a crystal-clear violation of the First Amendment. To rephrase what I said previously, the fact that government has gotten away with something already is no excuse for letting them do more of it.
If "it makes someone feel bad" is sufficient reason to infringe on peoples' freedoms, then what's next? Enact a law requiring high school athletes and cheerleaders to date the campus nerds?
I think you've got some problems with your analogy there (but it's great rhetoric, hey?). The situation we're considering is one where some advertising is shown to promote behaviours that are a public health problem.
With the exception of communicable disease or similar physical hazards -- things that can harm someone by contact or proximity -- there is no such thing as "public health." You're talking about something that people mentally react to, not a person spreading their typhoid germs around. Furthermore, "shown to promote behaviours" is just a fancier way of saying "make someone feel bad."
So going with your analogy, try putting an ad that promotes beating up nerds on TV. Or one that shows nerds cutting themselves because they're social outcasts.
If someone actually wants to do that, sure. That's their right. I stand with Voltaire on this issue. And I say that as a glasses-wearing program-writing member of the high-school wargamers (read: AD&D) club who was occasionally on the receiving end of unkind treatment by campus jocks and other nitwits.
Freedom of speech is limited in all kinds of ways.
You are, unfortunately, correct. That's no excuse for imposing more limits, however.
False advertising for example. Or making health claims. Controls on what you can and can't do in ads aren't new.
Laws against false advertising are really just taking laws against fraud and moving them to a prior step in the process. If I sell you quartz crystals by convincing you that they cure cancer, that's fraud, and is rightfully illegal. Airing commercials that say "buy our quartz crystals, they cure cancer" is pretty clearly an extension of the sales process. If I just say "quartz crystals cure cancer", without trying to sell you any, there's nothing the government should be able to do about it, false though my statement would be. It's up to listeners to decide whether or not to believe me. This goes triple in the skinny models issue, first because the statement is only an implicit one ("skinny people are more attractive than fat people"), and second because the statement is entirely subjective.
If "it makes someone feel bad" is sufficient reason to infringe on peoples' freedoms, then what's next? Enact a law requiring high school athletes and cheerleaders to date the campus nerds?
I'm surprised nobody has made the "Irish Spring SOPA" joke yet. Time to clean house!
Well, until someone does, we can make do with this.
Sorry that you misunderstood my post. You "will hear no more insinuations about the German people!" from me. :)
Brian: Yeah, about your pamphlet, I'm not seeing anything about German history between 1939 and 1945. There's just a big gap...
German tour guide: Everyone was on vacation! On your left is Munich's first city hall, erected in 15...
Brian: What are you talking about? Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and...
Tour guide: We were invited! Punch was served! Check with Poland!
Brian: You can't just ignore those years. Thomas Mann fled to American because of Nazism's stranglehold on Germany.
Tour guide: No, no, he left to manage a Dairy Queen.
Brian: A Dairy Queen? That's preposterous.
Tour guide: I will hear no more insinuations about the German people! Nothing bad happened! Sie werden sich hinsetzen! Sie werden ruhig sein! Sie werden nicht beleidigen Deutschland!
... our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it.
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I disagree with the underlying assumption that data belongs to you by virtue of being about you. Take it down to the simplest level: Adam sees Bob crossing the street. "Bob crossed the street" is the data, an observation that belongs to Adam (the observer) not Bob (the observed), by virtue of now residing in Adam's brain, which belongs to him, not to Bob. Everything else is just communication, storage, analysis, and technological assistance. It comes back to this fundamental point once you remove the obfuscating details, and Bob doesn't acquire the right to perform a partial lobotomy on Adam just because he doesn't like what or how much Adam knows about him, or whom Adam might tell, or what decisions Adam might make based on what he knows.
This assumes, of course, that Adam didn't violate Bob's rights in order to make these observations -- he didn't trespass by breaking into Bob's house, for instance.
Knowing what Cato/Heritage consider to be the ideal situation (or their "agenda" as you put it) is precisely why such a ranking is useful. I could just as easily have looked a study by a Marxist think tank ranking countries according to how closely they matched their ideal of pure communism. I would probably get something pretty close to the other list, just in the opposite order -- as I pointed out with my example regarding guns policy from the perspective of the pro- or anti-gun-control groups.
"Cato says the UK is more capitalist than us"
because after all they have socialized medicine.
Both of the surveys look at a lot of different factors. Cato breaks it down into five overall areas, each subdivided further. "Size of Government", would be where socialized medicine would go, and for that, they do indeed rank the US as more capitalist than the UK (54th place vs. 72nd place). The UK outranks the US on "Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights" (12th vs. 26th) and "Freedom to Trade Internationally" (15th vs. 44th). The US outranks the UK on "Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business" (20th vs. 27th), and very slightly on "Access to Sound Money" (11th vs. 12th). And in light of a reply to my original post, I'll reiterate: it doesn't matter whether you like Cato or agree with them on (say) the desirability of a minimum wage (a sub-sub item of "Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business"). All you need to know is that their position is that there shouldn't be a minimum wage, and they're looking at how close each country comes to that.
And we should trust well known organs of conservative/libertarian propaganda because.....?
For the same reason we would trust a Planned Parenthood study ranking countries by their abortion policies, regardless of how we felt about abortion: because the group in question is ranking the countries based on how much the group agrees with them. Whether we agree with the group is irrelevant. If I want to know roughly where different Congresscritters stand on gun policy, it doesn't matter whether I look at a study by the National Rifle Association, or at one by Handgun Control International, even though those organizations' views on what constitutes good gun policy are diametrically opposed.
Does this really require explaining? I would have done so in the original post, if it didn't strike me as obvious.
Name a single Democrat who is as far on the insane left scale as Santorum is on the insane right scale. You can't.
Would you care to name a few opinions/posititions, the holding of which you think would qualify someone as "insane left"?
Democrats are, in fact, farther to the right on most issues than most people who are called "leftists" anywhere else in the world.
On economic issues, close, but not 100%. In the Cato Institute's "Economic Freedom of the World", the US is ranked 10th out of 141, higher ranking being rightward. Same result on the Heritage Foundation's equivalent report, out of 179, though the reports disagree slightly about which countries are further right, and which order. They agree we're leftward (less capitalist) than Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, and Mauritius. Cato says the UK is more capitalist than us, while Heritage says that Ireland is.
By number of victims, Stalin was by far the scummier one.
You'll get no argument from me on that -- I wear one of these. But it would have been tangential to the main point. Which, now that I think about it, is a silly expression, because you can't have a tangent to a point, a tangent is to a curve. But nevermind.
You know what they say about hindsight, but maybe the right course of action for the USA in WW2 would have been to act opportunistic: stay out, let nazis and reds fight to the end, and only then swiftly move in to crush the weakened victor, whoever it is.
The basic idea has merit on a coldly-logical basis, though I wouldn't like the deaths and suffering it would cause to innocent Russians -- or even innocent Germans, for that matter. Problem is, the USSR was in it second-to-last, and Japan would have brought the US in regardless. If it had been purely Third Reich vs. USSR from the start, I agree that sitting it out would have been best.