It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.
Brainwashing?
Was there ever a communist country that wasn't totalitarian?
Neither non-communist countries are automatically paradises of civil rights nor communist countries are inevitably police-states. Things are a lot more complex than that.
Do you have an example of a communist country (note that I said "communist" and not "socialist") that wasn't a police-state?
I mean, even if I could think of such an example, it would still be the the exception that proves the rule... but honestly, I can't think of a single one.
Here, let me correct that for you:
"Although some Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Polish leaders have demonstrated the ultimate outcome of communism for many people..." All on the Russian model, and mostly with Russian assistance. Don't make me start linking to wikipedia now. Do you have any other examples of openly communist countries? If I remember correctly, every country that described itself as "communist", as opposed to just "socialist", was influenced by the "Russian model", and was an oppressive, and usually, dirt-poor dictatorship.
For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well. As do numerous small communes throughout the world, most notably the Israeli kibbutzim.
The Israeli Kibbutzim worked... for a while. But now they are either failing miserably, existing mostly because of government support, getting privatized, or both.
From a social point of view, many people who grew up in the Kibbutz describe the experience as a horrible trauma, calling themselves "Kibbutz survivors". Apparently, if you didn't "fit in", the whole tiny society turned against you (think highschool x 100).
One of the things that pissed me off about Google buying YouTube is Google Video didn't used to use any obfuscation. And they ended up re-encoding a bunch of videos that were already working just fine.
Didn't they always use Flash? The "old" Google Video player certainly uses it now, and I don't remember it changing a lot since its launch. If they didn't, what did they use? WMP? Quicktime? Some kind of a Java Player? And if they did use Flash, doesn't it undermine your argument?
Where "behaves much better" means "hangs more often"?
In my experience, across several different computers and browsers, the exact opposite is true. Quicktime would constantly hang ("Why isn't my browser responding? Oh, it was a Quicktime video...") and crash, and was generally annoying and slow. Windows Media Player wouldn't even work on Firefox most of the time (all of the time?), and when/where it did, it was just as bad as Quicktime. In fact, just about every plugin aside from Flash - PDF, Java applets, whatever, suck. I really think that the speed (esp. loading speed) and (relative) stability of the Flash plugin is the one of its main selling points.
View Source, search for ".mov" or ".wmv" is "hard"?
With WMP, the source usually leads to an asx/asf file streamed over MMS. It's possible to capture, but not any easier than capturing flash videos (which aren't that hard to capture either, judging by the sheer volume of FLV capture tools). I don't know what streaming/obfuscation capabilities Quicktime offers, mostly because I've rarely encountered it in commercial sites.
Anyway, I agree that obfuscation is an important feature of the Flash video player, but since it already existed in WMP, it couldn't have been the main reason to use Flash.
Most flash isn't in flash-based sites, it's little panels in regular sites. Little panels that often have simple graphics and not even any animations, doing things that are trivial in CSS, but that require you to actually interact with them to find out what they're all about. For all these things obfuscation is far more important than ease of generating fancy transitions.
I don't know... do you have any common examples? I can only think of a few ways Flash is being used on the web:
Ads. Those usually have some annoying animation (even text popping out from somewhere). Much easier to do in Flash than in CSS/DHTML. In fact, the actual animation requires only a couple of minutes to do, and no programming whatsoever.
Annoying mouseover transitions and other stupid animations. As above, animation is really much easier to do in Flash, especially for non-programmers.
Embedded video. Impossible to do without some kind of plugin, and Flash behaves much better than Quicktime or embedded Windows Media Player. Btw, both Quicktime and Windows Media try to make downloading streaming media hard, so I don't think that moving to Flash-based players is because of obfuscation.
Pure flash sites. More common than you might think. Especially image (as in corporate image) sites for movies, bands, and the like. Also, in my experience, ~50% of graphic design/illustration/architecture portfolios and corporate sites are pure flash.
All of those are because Flash is great for simple animations, and because the Flash plugin is fast and well behaved (unlike Quicktime or Windows Media Player). The only example I can think of that actually uses Flash for obfuscation is how flickr uses it to prevent downloading images, but that's about it.
I really think the main reason people use flash is because it moderately increases the difficulty of reverse-engineering an interface. Chopping up a.swf package can be done, even without a few hundred bucks worth of Adobe software, but it's more work than running "curl -o filename url" a few times. It's obfuscation, pure and simple.
I doubt it. It's possible to obfuscate HTML/Javascript to some extent, and yet, no one bothers to. The closest thing to obfuscation you get on the web is Javascript minimization, and that's for bandwidth reasons, not obfuscation. In fact, most modern web pages try to be clean and readable. Some commercial web sites I've looked at, even had comments.
If average Flash sites looked just like average HTML sites, I would've thought you had a point. But they don't. They're image based, have complex layouts, and annoying animation/video everywhere. It's simply much easier to make these sites in Flash. It can literally take 2-3 lines of code (and even no code).
Of course, I agree with the GP that all of these "features" are annoying and that Flash-based sites suck. But I really don't think the reason is obfuscation.
However, my tax dollars are going to support a regime that is racist, militarist and un-democratic, which has an expansionist foreign policy
That's a bit too harsh. I mean, OK, I agree that the USA is militarist and expansionist, and that your election system is somewhat anti-democratic (and there was this Bush-Gore election debacle...), but I think you've made great strides with the racism thing.
Fuck Israel.
Oh wait. You meant Israel? A country that's nothing more than a speck on the world's map is "expansionist"? The only country in the Middle East where Arabs(!) can vote and express their opinions freely is "undemocratic and racist"? And you accuse that tiny country, surrounded by dictatorships that want to destroy it of "militarism"?
... which commits the type of war crimes...
Uh-huh. The Israeli-Palestinian is a very small, and a very peaceful regional conflict. The Iraq war killed several times more people than the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948. The Iraq war is just an example, of course. More or less every regional conflict in history (think Yugoslavia, or Rwanda) was much bloodier and more barbaric.
... that they accused Germany of on an almost daily basis
"They accused Germany of", as opposed to what really happened, I guess.
Israel has already decided how to proceed with this, though. They'll be a democracy in much the same way South Africa was a democracy.
I wonder, where did you hear that bullshit? In any case, I advise you to stay clear of that source of (mis)information, because that statement is both pointlessly inflammatory and completely false.
The first mistake is the claim that Israel "decided" on any solution, as if Israeli society, or Israeli politics are monolithic. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are 4-5 major parties and a myriad for minor ones in Israel. These include anything from the Ultra-orthodox moderate right wing, to the secular socialists and the anti-Zionist religious Arab parties. There's a heated debate on the subject, and there's no consensus in sight.
The second mistake is thinking that stripping Israeli Arabs of their citizenship (or, conversely, annexing the Palestinian territories and not giving the Palestinians citizenship) is a dominant notion in Israeli politics. It's not. It's not even espoused by the whole far-right-wing. The dominant solution to the "demographic problem" posed by the Palestinians, one that's supported by more or less all of the Israeli politicians, is the two state solution. As for the Israeli Arabs, it's not considered a pressing issue, since they're a much smaller minority, but the idea I've heard is simply annexing de-facto Arab cities to the newly formed Palestinian state, a far cry from being "like South Africa".
You've got to be a total deluded moron to claim that the Israelis don't have a birthright to Israel. Why? It is the simple truth. Hmm... but claiming that something as intangible and debatable as a nation's birthright can be a "simple truth" is pretty moronic, so the GP is still right
but if there's a legal question raised about what you "meant", then the formal definition wins out and it's YOUR FAULT if you meant something else.
Are you sure about that? Can you give any examples of that actually happening?
Where I live (Israel), we have an official version of our language, but it doesn't turn Hebrew into some unambiguous, unchanging, formal language. There's still Hebrew slang, and people mostly use "incorrect" Hebrew, just like English-speakers. When it comes to legal matters AFAIK, it's all about intent, and reasonable expectations. If you use language that's uncommon, be it some bizarre local slang, or antiquated, but technically correct language, you obviously cannot expect people to understand you, and the courts don't claim otherwise.
The main purpose of having a "correct" form of Hebrew is to preserve Hebrew as a unique language, by promoting native Hebrew grammar and vocabulary (as opposed to taking grammatical forms and words from other languages, such as English). As far as I understand, that's the main purpose of "correct" forms in general.
English doesn't have any real rivals, so it doesn't need an official form. But wait until most of the technical terms, business names and slang are in Chinese, and see how quickly an Academy of The English Language is formed.
I hope you're right. I love the "2d look" and I don't want to see it go away because it's cheaper to use 3d. Unfortunately, there are nearly photo-realistic 3d animations, and no 3d animation that look like classic (hand-drawn) animation. That tells us that the problem is far from being trivial.
You're wrong, because Jews aren't just the followers of a certain religion, or people with particular genetic ancestry - they're a nation, a group of people defined by many things (including their ancestry and religion, but also their language, their customs, their art, etc.). For various theological and historical reasons, you can't convert to Christianity/Islam and remain part of the Jewish nation, just as you can't convert to Judaism while retaining your old nationality. So, basically, the Arabs who are descended from Jews are not different from any other Arabs in that regard, because they abandoned their Jewish culture. It's not a racial/genetic or even religious question - it's a cultural one.
Israel is the only logical place for the Jews to exercise their right of self-determination. There's no doubt that they were there in the past. There's no doubt that it is the only place that they consider to be their ancestral homeland.
Iman Al Hams? First of all that is not a unique case of an Israeli soldier being tried for killing Palestinians, but it is a unique case of a group of soldiers trying to frame their commanding officer (as the inquiry revealed).
But, of course, we still have a dead girl, so how did that happen?
The girl was a long way off any populated area. The compound is surrounded by a fence and has many clear warnings. She simply couldn't have been there by accident.
The girl had a backpack. News reports claimed that it was filled with books, thus establishing the image of the innocent schoolgirl killed by the trigger-happy psychopath. However, that backpack was never opened. It was immediately buried by the IDF sappers. Considering that the girl was not there by accident, and the terrorist organizations' history with teenage suicide bombers, there's simply no reason to assume that she wasn't on a suicide bombing mission.
It was dark, and the soldier (Liutenant R) was far away. He only saw a figure trying to infiltrate the compound with a suspicious object on its back. When he shot the girl, he simply had no way of knowing that it was a 13-year-old girl. It may seem paranoid, but you have to remember that this is a remote and clearly clearly marked military compound, in a very hostile area. If you're defending it, then you're simply not going to ask any questions before shooting.
As for the Palestinians... well, no one could claim that the children they killed in their attacks posed any danger to them. The children weren't even "in the wrong place at the wrong time". It's pretty clear that the children were the target, being Israelis, and thus, free game. And while Liutenant R was put on trial for his actions, the Palestinians who intentionally, and might I add, proudly kill civilians, are praised as heroes and are recognized as such by every Palestinian organization.
More like, the government confiscates a tiny part of your backyard to build a house for persecuted immigrants (since it's where their ancestral home is). You decide that no immigrant should get even the tiniest piece of your precious land, so you and your neighbors form a lynch mob and try to destroy that tiny house. Unfortunately, the immigrants fight back, and they win, taking another tiny portion of your land. Then you keep trying to destroy them, and keep failing.
By every definition, you're a vicious neighbor.
(btw, excellent troll. "You complain. He shoots your children in retaliation"! If only the Palestinians would stop with their suicide complaining... I laughed, I cried, etc.)
Anyway, the fact that ancient Israel/Judea existed is well proven by archeology and external (i.e. non-Jewish) sources. There's simply no debate about this fact (unless you're a conspiracy theory nut).
There's obviously no debate as to the historical Arab presence in the area either (it's not really clear from your post which nation you're referring to).
This is not meant to invoke Godwin's law. Shamir was a top leader during WWII of a group which was fighting for Israeli independance against the UK. This group (ELHI, aka the Stern Gang) was a terrorist organization which openly idolized the Nazis, celebrated Nazi field victories praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis (on the basis that this way at least they were effectively self-governing), and even in 1942 attempted to form a military alliance with Hitler. Funny-- celebrate Nazi victories, try to enter into an alliance with Hitler,..., get elected PM of Israel. Yes, the world has gone mad.
No, the world hasn't gone mad. It's just that you listen to crazy propaganda.
LEHI (and not "ELHI") didn't "openly idolize the Nazis" and certainly never "praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis". They did try to make contact with the Nazis in the beginning of the war, proposing to support them in exchange for letting the German Jews immigrate to Palestine. They believed that the Nazis only want to expel the Jews from Europe, and since the British are stopping Jews from coming to Palestine (the White Book laws), siding with the Nazis against the British would help them found the Jewish state.
In any case, once the news of the holocaust reached Palestine, no Jewish organization would support the Nazis (of course, it didn't prevent the Arabs from openly supporting them... but I'll stay on topic).
Sharon was convicted of an Israeli military tribunal of being in part responsible for the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebannon in the 1980's.
Wrong again. There wasn't any "Israeli military tribunal" after the first Lebanon War. The Kahan commission was a civilian inquiry commission. And it never convicted (or accused, since it cannot "convict" anyone) Ariel Sharon of "war crimes". It only decided that he should be fired because, as the minister of defense, he should've foreseen the massacre.
Others can point flaws to modern English translations such as the the Leviticus's part about homosexuality that there was no word for homosexual in ancient Greek. The literal translation meant "soft" or "feminine" which in ancient times more or less meant "weak willed".
There is no word for homosexuality in ancient Hebrew either, and it's not mentioned in Leviticus. It mentions "men lying with other men as they would lie with a woman", and it's pretty accurately translated.
In any case, the fact Hebrew doesn't have vowels doesn't mean that every Hebrew word has an infinite amount of meanings, depending on the context. In the case of Genesis 1, the word used is "yom" (YVM), and it clearly means "day". Messing with the vowels gives you absolutely nothing ("yavem", "yuvam", etc. are meaningless words).
You talk about universal healthcare as if it's some far-fetched theoretical idea. There are many countries (like in, say, Europe) that have UH and are doing just fine. On the other hand, the American health system is the most expensive and inefficient system in the Western world.
Btw, "give people something for free and they abuse it"? Like, how? Drinking rat poison and breaking your arms just for the thrill of free hospitalization? Aside from people with (the very rare) Münchhausen syndrome, I don't see how this is an issue.
Your example only proves the GP's point. Fellatio should be legal, and if more people will get arrested, it will create public pressure to remove these moronic laws.
"It's illegal but the law shouldn't be enforced" is a stupid patch for bad laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Brainwashing?
Was there ever a communist country that wasn't totalitarian?
Do you have an example of a communist country (note that I said "communist" and not "socialist") that wasn't a police-state?
I mean, even if I could think of such an example, it would still be the the exception that proves the rule... but honestly, I can't think of a single one.
The Israeli Kibbutzim worked... for a while. But now they are either failing miserably, existing mostly because of government support, getting privatized, or both.
From a social point of view, many people who grew up in the Kibbutz describe the experience as a horrible trauma, calling themselves "Kibbutz survivors". Apparently, if you didn't "fit in", the whole tiny society turned against you (think highschool x 100).
Didn't they always use Flash? The "old" Google Video player certainly uses it now, and I don't remember it changing a lot since its launch. If they didn't, what did they use? WMP? Quicktime? Some kind of a Java Player? And if they did use Flash, doesn't it undermine your argument?
Where "behaves much better" means "hangs more often"?In my experience, across several different computers and browsers, the exact opposite is true. Quicktime would constantly hang ("Why isn't my browser responding? Oh, it was a Quicktime video...") and crash, and was generally annoying and slow. Windows Media Player wouldn't even work on Firefox most of the time (all of the time?), and when/where it did, it was just as bad as Quicktime. In fact, just about every plugin aside from Flash - PDF, Java applets, whatever, suck. I really think that the speed (esp. loading speed) and (relative) stability of the Flash plugin is the one of its main selling points.
View Source, search for ".mov" or ".wmv" is "hard"?With WMP, the source usually leads to an asx/asf file streamed over MMS. It's possible to capture, but not any easier than capturing flash videos (which aren't that hard to capture either, judging by the sheer volume of FLV capture tools). I don't know what streaming/obfuscation capabilities Quicktime offers, mostly because I've rarely encountered it in commercial sites.
Anyway, I agree that obfuscation is an important feature of the Flash video player, but since it already existed in WMP, it couldn't have been the main reason to use Flash.
I don't know... do you have any common examples? I can only think of a few ways Flash is being used on the web:
All of those are because Flash is great for simple animations, and because the Flash plugin is fast and well behaved (unlike Quicktime or Windows Media Player). The only example I can think of that actually uses Flash for obfuscation is how flickr uses it to prevent downloading images, but that's about it.
I doubt it. It's possible to obfuscate HTML/Javascript to some extent, and yet, no one bothers to. The closest thing to obfuscation you get on the web is Javascript minimization, and that's for bandwidth reasons, not obfuscation. In fact, most modern web pages try to be clean and readable. Some commercial web sites I've looked at, even had comments.
If average Flash sites looked just like average HTML sites, I would've thought you had a point. But they don't. They're image based, have complex layouts, and annoying animation/video everywhere. It's simply much easier to make these sites in Flash. It can literally take 2-3 lines of code (and even no code).
Of course, I agree with the GP that all of these "features" are annoying and that Flash-based sites suck. But I really don't think the reason is obfuscation.
That's a bit too harsh. I mean, OK, I agree that the USA is militarist and expansionist, and that your election system is somewhat anti-democratic (and there was this Bush-Gore election debacle...), but I think you've made great strides with the racism thing.
Oh wait. You meant Israel? A country that's nothing more than a speck on the world's map is "expansionist"? The only country in the Middle East where Arabs(!) can vote and express their opinions freely is "undemocratic and racist"? And you accuse that tiny country, surrounded by dictatorships that want to destroy it of "militarism"?
Uh-huh. The Israeli-Palestinian is a very small, and a very peaceful regional conflict. The Iraq war killed several times more people than the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948. The Iraq war is just an example, of course. More or less every regional conflict in history (think Yugoslavia, or Rwanda) was much bloodier and more barbaric.
"They accused Germany of", as opposed to what really happened, I guess.
Classy.
I wonder, where did you hear that bullshit? In any case, I advise you to stay clear of that source of (mis)information, because that statement is both pointlessly inflammatory and completely false.
The first mistake is the claim that Israel "decided" on any solution, as if Israeli society, or Israeli politics are monolithic. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are 4-5 major parties and a myriad for minor ones in Israel. These include anything from the Ultra-orthodox moderate right wing, to the secular socialists and the anti-Zionist religious Arab parties. There's a heated debate on the subject, and there's no consensus in sight.
The second mistake is thinking that stripping Israeli Arabs of their citizenship (or, conversely, annexing the Palestinian territories and not giving the Palestinians citizenship) is a dominant notion in Israeli politics. It's not. It's not even espoused by the whole far-right-wing. The dominant solution to the "demographic problem" posed by the Palestinians, one that's supported by more or less all of the Israeli politicians, is the two state solution. As for the Israeli Arabs, it's not considered a pressing issue, since they're a much smaller minority, but the idea I've heard is simply annexing de-facto Arab cities to the newly formed Palestinian state, a far cry from being "like South Africa".
Where I live (Israel), we have an official version of our language, but it doesn't turn Hebrew into some unambiguous, unchanging, formal language. There's still Hebrew slang, and people mostly use "incorrect" Hebrew, just like English-speakers. When it comes to legal matters AFAIK, it's all about intent, and reasonable expectations. If you use language that's uncommon, be it some bizarre local slang, or antiquated, but technically correct language, you obviously cannot expect people to understand you, and the courts don't claim otherwise.
The main purpose of having a "correct" form of Hebrew is to preserve Hebrew as a unique language, by promoting native Hebrew grammar and vocabulary (as opposed to taking grammatical forms and words from other languages, such as English). As far as I understand, that's the main purpose of "correct" forms in general.
English doesn't have any real rivals, so it doesn't need an official form. But wait until most of the technical terms, business names and slang are in Chinese, and see how quickly an Academy of The English Language is formed.
I hope you're right. I love the "2d look" and I don't want to see it go away because it's cheaper to use 3d. Unfortunately, there are nearly photo-realistic 3d animations, and no 3d animation that look like classic (hand-drawn) animation. That tells us that the problem is far from being trivial.
Israel is the only logical place for the Jews to exercise their right of self-determination. There's no doubt that they were there in the past. There's no doubt that it is the only place that they consider to be their ancestral homeland.
But, of course, we still have a dead girl, so how did that happen?
As for the Palestinians... well, no one could claim that the children they killed in their attacks posed any danger to them. The children weren't even "in the wrong place at the wrong time". It's pretty clear that the children were the target, being Israelis, and thus, free game. And while Liutenant R was put on trial for his actions, the Palestinians who intentionally, and might I add, proudly kill civilians, are praised as heroes and are recognized as such by every Palestinian organization.
By every definition, you're a vicious neighbor.
(btw, excellent troll. "You complain. He shoots your children in retaliation"! If only the Palestinians would stop with their suicide complaining... I laughed, I cried, etc.)
Anyway, the fact that ancient Israel/Judea existed is well proven by archeology and external (i.e. non-Jewish) sources. There's simply no debate about this fact (unless you're a conspiracy theory nut).
There's obviously no debate as to the historical Arab presence in the area either (it's not really clear from your post which nation you're referring to).
No, the world hasn't gone mad. It's just that you listen to crazy propaganda.
LEHI (and not "ELHI") didn't "openly idolize the Nazis" and certainly never "praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis". They did try to make contact with the Nazis in the beginning of the war, proposing to support them in exchange for letting the German Jews immigrate to Palestine. They believed that the Nazis only want to expel the Jews from Europe, and since the British are stopping Jews from coming to Palestine (the White Book laws), siding with the Nazis against the British would help them found the Jewish state.
In any case, once the news of the holocaust reached Palestine, no Jewish organization would support the Nazis (of course, it didn't prevent the Arabs from openly supporting them... but I'll stay on topic).
Wrong again. There wasn't any "Israeli military tribunal" after the first Lebanon War. The Kahan commission was a civilian inquiry commission. And it never convicted (or accused, since it cannot "convict" anyone) Ariel Sharon of "war crimes". It only decided that he should be fired because, as the minister of defense, he should've foreseen the massacre.
Especially considering (as I've pointed out in another comment) that the sun was only created on the fourth day.
I've never heard anyone claim that Erev and Boker mean anything but "Evening" and "Morning".
That would be a problem, considering that the sun was created only on the fourth day.
There is no word for homosexuality in ancient Hebrew either, and it's not mentioned in Leviticus. It mentions "men lying with other men as they would lie with a woman", and it's pretty accurately translated.
In any case, the fact Hebrew doesn't have vowels doesn't mean that every Hebrew word has an infinite amount of meanings, depending on the context. In the case of Genesis 1, the word used is "yom" (YVM), and it clearly means "day". Messing with the vowels gives you absolutely nothing ("yavem", "yuvam", etc. are meaningless words).
Disclaimer: I'm a native Hebrew speaker.
Btw, "give people something for free and they abuse it"? Like, how? Drinking rat poison and breaking your arms just for the thrill of free hospitalization? Aside from people with (the very rare) Münchhausen syndrome, I don't see how this is an issue.
That's why my previous comment was against selective enforcement, which Zero__Kalvin seems to support.
"It's illegal but the law shouldn't be enforced" is a stupid patch for bad laws.