There is no objective truth, or at least there is no objective truth when the facts and logic aren't on your side. But that being said, I think there are more nihilists than you think. People aren't generally as good as we give them credit for. I'm amazed at how many people flame me when I say something as simple as "torture is wrong." Seems easy enough--pretty much a foundational moral statemement. But no--in practice it's controversial, polarizing, and yes, nihilism eventually surfaces, in practice if not in name.
Just yesterday I was making this point, and I get an avalance of crap about Clinton and Whitewater and shady deals, all put forward in response to my objections to torture and the gutting of habeus corpus. People view these debates as a tennis match in which all volleys are of equivalent import--I say torture, you say Whitewater, so we're even and the issue of whether torture is wrong is never really discussed. It's just political point-scoring, and you can't find a person to actually discuss whether or not torture is morally okay, excepting those who already think it's wrong.
Is this nihilism? Maybe not in the strict philosophical sense, but I think people don't really care about torture and Abu Ghraib and civilians being kept forever without trial--their own personal ethics don't come to bear, because it isn't happening to them. Yes, if their own mother were kidnapped off the street, flown to Syria to be tortured, was kept for 5-6 years at a secret prison with no access to lawyers, the Red Cross, or any visitors, and photos surfaced of her being sodomized with broomsticks by laughing US troops, then yes, morality might suddenly, as if by magic, become part of the conversation. Then, it would be wrong, an abomination, and it might reflect a teensy-weensy bit on the administration that either explicitly developed or negligently allowed these policies.
But right now it's just brown people, poor brown people who speak a different language, and their stories, if told, are irrelevant in the context of thousands of hours of talking heads on Fox News. Ergo, they don't really matter. At least, they don't matter to the extent they would matter if cops in, say, Seattle or Dallas did the these things to a pretty blonde white woman and the investigating officer was explicitly forbidden from investigating up the chain of command to see how far up the approval of the interrogation policies went.
I agree that the Dems are milking the impasse--they get to continue to use the war to beat the Repubs over the head right until the election. But I also think the conservatives would LOVE for the Dems to defund the war, because Bush still wouldn't pull out, and they would get to lay every single death at the door of the Democratic party. Dems would have to sell the defunding of the war to the people, and with the media consistently selling the line that pulling out of Iraq is "soft on terrorism," it would be a hard sell. It would be difficult to sell the idea that yanking funding was an effort to end an open-ended and pointless occupation, and not the abandonment of the troops that the Repubs would sell it as. How do you proceed when ~60% of the US population wants out, wants Congress to do more, but that same population loves throwing money at the military?
Where, precisely? What evidence do you have? Or is an accusation alone enough for you?
Numerous articles in the Atlantic, Harper's, New Yorker, as well as reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. Yes, those are enough for me. Or were you thinking it's all just a liberal plot to make Bush look bad? No, there are interviews, photos, testimony, etc. No one has repudiated torture (though they do keep redefining it), the Attorney General says the Geneva Conventions (which outlaw torture) are "quaint and outdated," and the Vice President says it's a "no-brainer" that we should waterboard people--and we used to prosecute people for war crimes when they used waterboarding. So from this I should infer that it isn't going on? How?
As far as "rogue prison abuse," Taguba was explicitly forbidden from investigating up the chain of command to see how far up the sanction of torture went. That was in a New Yorker article that you didn't read. The info is out there--you just have to stop relying on TV news to inform you.
don't fucking pretend that your pet congresscritters had nothing to do with it. There is no lesser of the two evils.
I pretend nothing. I didn't say they "had nothing to do with it." They are trying to vote to end it, and the Repubs are preventing even voting on the issue.
If two groups agree to war, they are equally culpable for starting the war. Check. But if ~60% of the population wants to end the war, thinks it was a mistake, and one of the groups says "well, we tried what we tried, but it's time to bring the troops home, so let's vote" and the other groups says "whoa! no voting on this subject!" then there very much is the lesser of two evils. The two are not the same, because the subject is not who authorized force several YEARS ago, but who is preventing even a vote of whether or not we should scale back American military involvement now.
The American public wants the troops out. Congress's low approval rating is largely due to them not trying hard enough to get the troops out. The population has finally begun to realize that the civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis isn't really the mission of the US military. About time. Our involvement over there is making terrorism worse, and preventing the Iraqis from taking possession of their own problems.
These matter. To me. To you, perhaps the Star report was of equivalent moral weight. My sense of proportion tells me that Clinton does not have to have been completely free of corruption, completely free of tarnish, for torture and the gutting of habeus corpus to be important to me. What's more, Clinton's corruption, if extant, deals with his own profit and loss, not with the entire system of due process for an entire nation--mine, as the case would have it.
Whitewater didn't set a precedent by which the President can revoke your right to a trial by your peers, the right to have evidence presented against you, and by which you can be whisked to Syria or wherever to be tortured to death. Are we communicating yet? "The Republicans sanction torture" can't be rebutted with "but Clinton had some crooked land deals, by all appearances!"
This isn't a tennis match where any return volley is of equivalent weight, so point-per-point we're tied. We're not tied. I'm worried about habeus corpus, torture, and the rule of law, while you're worried about a laundry list of petty things that, though I wish Clinton hadn't done them (assuming he did all of them, which is iffy) but none of which really are on the scale of what worries me about the Repubs.
And I don't know what your definition of torture is, but I do know that terrorizing parents with threats to subpeona young children and calling up their schools to find out when they can nab them without the parents being there, or de-facto telling parents of college kids, "pay us $3000 or we'll have your kid expelled from college," fits my definition of mental torture.
Well, I think the Taguba report related items a bit more draconian. People have been beaten, burned, raped, sodomized with lightsticks and other objects, waterboarded, attacked with dogs, etc. Your "definition" of torture might be clarified a bit if you were chained in a cell while someone was beaten to death in front of you.
And no, I'm not "humming along" while anyone throws out constitutional protections. You just need to realize that people really are being tortured in facilities operated by the US Government, right now, as I type this. People are being held indefinitely, without trial, without due process. If you think these things, which are already happening, are as morally compelling as a bill that may or not be presented, and may or not be passed, sometime in the future, in an overzealous and heavy-handed attempt to fight filesharing, your moral compass may need a bit of calibration.
The distinction between the past and the present is that the present is happening now. I didn't say the Democrats had the moral high ground--they're a political party, not a convention of saints. But one political party is comprised of members today who support torture and voted to gut habeus corpus--which party was it? Wait, wait... I can look this up. This is part of fact-base reality. Do you know the answer?
I can't vote against the people who interned the Japanese Americans, or pushed for MK-Ultra. I can vote against the ones who are supporting torture, imprisonment without trial, and warrantless surveillance now.
You might as well say I should vote Republican because of Abe Lincoln. Torture matters. Habeus corpus matters. What the hell is wrong with you? You're muddying the waters, not adding perspective. There is a difference.
By continually bemoaning that the Dems are "just as bad" as the Republicans, we can muddy the waters enough that some people may, just may, forget what party gutted habeus corpus, thinks torture is OK, continues to block votes on Iraq, ran up the biggest defecit in national history, and so on. Psshaw! Going after filesharing is just as bad as Abu Ghraib!
If you can't bring your party up to where people could vote for them with a clean conscience, you can at least bring the other party down and pretend that they're at the same level. Responses, if any, will be along the lines of "yeah, because Democrats are such angels, perfect in every way, and they always do what the people want" which is not what I said. I have long said that Dems and Repubs are about the same when it comes to pork spending, subservience to lobbyists, and general corruption (including legal but unethical stuff), but Repubs are essentially The Torture Party as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to impress me much to beat out The Torture Party.
If the Dems just run as the "We Think Habeus Corpus is Important" party, that's good enough for me, even with the usual complement of pork spending and knee-jerk overreaction that we always expect from congress. I wish Dems were better, but this equivocation where going after filesharers proves that the Dems are just as bad as the Republicans is a bit ridiculous. If torture, habeus corpus, and warrantless surveillance aren't part of the discussion about which party is better, at least right now, then we aren't really having a discussion.
I lived through the last 3 months of a 4-month school term using Knoppix on a 933MHz laptop with 256megs of RAM. I hosed my Win2K install and didn't have the time or inclination to fix it. Knoppix allowed me to surf the net, at least well enough to use WebTycho (UMUC student) to complete my four classes, to include writing papers in OpenOffice, reading Powerpoint presentations, looking at PDFs, writing a few C++ programs, and so on. The experience actually sold me on Linux as a permanent OS.
People with more robust needs would obviously need a more robust computer. But you can do a lot with modest hardware. Complex/large documents can be accomplished with LaTeX, though Abiword would probably suffice for the gui-inclined. Firefox works fine even from a LiveCD. But I'm aware that some people need certain software packages that would require more computing power.
I've always disliked that colleges force students to use a certain software package. Programming classes should not require a certain IDE--when taking my C++ course I used text editors and the command line. For a web design course the prof mandated a particular FTP program, but the command line worked well enough for me. I'm aware that there are some courses that do dictate that software title X must be used, so no solution is good for everyone.
Software installation is, to me, the only significant difference, and the only real dealbreaker between systems. I'm partial to apt-get, but not all Debian-based distros work the same way. I wanted to install VM Player and Truecrypt on DSL, to no avail. I'm neither a serious enthusiast nor relentlessly dedicated, so I'm not saying it can't be done, only that the instructions that worked for Debian and Ubuntu didn't work for DSL.
I wanted to think of DSL as Ubuntu with a very small footprint, but that isn't accurate by a long shot. There can be a huge difference even between distros within a common family. And for those of us who can't do more than sudo./configure or similar, those differences are often too much to overcome. I'm not complaining--I do love Linux, and prefer it to Windows and OS X, but there are limitations faced by us mere mortals.
They don't have to be stupid. They can mandate that the backdoors remain open, and claim immunity for themselves and the compliant companies under the aegis of national security. If it worked for warrantless wiretapping and torture, surely it would work for this. It should work for pretty much any type of surveillance or other government activity. Once those two words are allowed to trump all other concerns, and are allowed to even stifle debate about the programs, then the game is effectively over.
The dark fiber is dark, and the unused cycles are unused, not because there aren't enough good reasons to use them, but because there aren't enough economically profitable reasons to use them. Folding@home may cure disease, but if doesn't make a buck...scratch that, if it doesn't maximize revenue as part of a dynamic global strategy to leverage something or other, then they can't be bothered. Making a buck isn't enough anymore.
Dana Scully was hot initially, but over time she got older
Guys like you are why women hide their intelligence and cultivate the whole ditzy airhead thing. Guys like me like cerebral women, even those who age with time (you know, like everything in the goddamned universe) and we hate guys like you because women think they're talking to you when really they're talking to me, and they are cautious about seeming too intelligent. You haven't quite ruined my life, but you make it much harder to find interesting women. The problem of course is that your kind outnumbers my kind by about 100:1, so women have to play the odds and can't make the transition back to being a sentient human being by the time they run into me. But you still suck. Sorry.
Age aside, I lost my fascination with Sculley when they made her vulnerable and emotional. The ice-maiden thing was quite the draw, but when I saw her crying and needy...hell, I can find that anywhere. Cerebral and aloof? Sign me up.
If MS Office is incompatible with prior versions of itself, or corrupts its own documents and eats your thesis, or fails to open files from other vendors, then people shrug their shoulders and move on. It's software, and people who expect perfection just like to bitch.
If OpenOffice isn't completely compatible with every version of MS Word/Excel, ever corrupts a file, or fails to render the formatting exactly as it was on another platform, then this is proof positive that OpenOffice isn't ready for serious users. It's great for fanboys or those who just hate Microsoft, but for normal people who need to "get work done," it isn't up to the task.
You have to use different logic to ensure that you justify the decision you have already made on other grounds. I thought everyone knew that.
I don't use OpenOffice because it's free. I have several similarly priced versions of MS Office I purchased at the Kazaa store. I use OpenOffice because of the PDF Export feature, the fact that it's available on Linux, and it serves my needs. It continues to serve my needs even if businesses decide not to use it. And even if it doesn't, I have Abiword and LaTeX. It isn't that I dislike MS Office, but that I dislike painting myself into a corner by depending on that one software package. I'm no visionary hippie, but I don't like spending time and money to gradually eliminate my own options.
Well, OpenOffice was free, so the difficult-to-quantify costs were probably along the lines of "our people wouldn't stop bitching that we were too cheap to buy them a real office suite." I'm not going to argue that OpenOffice has all the capabilities of MS Office, but I think the "it's free, so it must not be as capable" motivates a lot of people.
What percentage of users actually need/use the features that separate MS Office from OpenOffice? I'd bet it's smaller than the percentage of users who bitch about OpenOffice not being as capable. People like to bitch, they don't like change, and they usually think their employers are trying to foist inferior tools on them...in this context, OpenOffice's price actually works against acceptance.
What if it isn't for sport really, but just amusement? I mean, sometimes you find some really cute baby deer, and it just looks up at you with those big soft eyes, and bashing it in the head can really make your day. There are other things you can kill, true, but cute animals are much more cathartic. I've been looking for a baby seal, but there aren't any in my neck of the woods.
Right now I'll vote for a party that will restore habeus corpus, believes in the rule of law, will make torture illegal again, close the secret torture prisons (or open them to red Cross/humanitarian inspection) and will rein in defense contractors, particularly Blackwater and the other mercenaries, who as of right now are not under any law at all. Do I believe that the Democrats are the panacea to all of America's ills? No, not at all.
But if you believe, as I do, that the last few years have been the darkest period of American history since, say, the internment of the Japanese Americans, then you would think that we need to go in the other direction, even if the other party isn't all you would like it to be. This talk of "The Democrats are just as bad!" would be true if we just looked at pork-barrel spending or other random corruption. I agree completely, if we keep the debate to that scope.
But the debate isn't limited to that scope--Bush and the Neocons have institutionalized torture and secret prisons, undermined due process and the rule of law, watered down basic human rights such as habeus corpus, on top of the normal array of corruptioin and favoritism. I'm not even getting to the political censorship of basic science, the damage to public health done by abstinence-only education, the damage to the environment done by industry employees turned "public servant," and so on. For me, torture, habeus corpus, and those secret prisons are just about enough to make me completely reject the Republican party for quite a long time.
If that party repudiated torture, said that it was wrong, said that the secret prisons were wrong, said that people do have habeus corpus rights even when the President doesn't want them to, and so on, explicitly, then I'd consider them again. If they backed investigation and prosecution of those who approved torture, all the way up to Rumsfeld and the VP, and if necessary, to the White House, then I'd be impressed, be convinced that they had integrity and morality, and I'd consider voting for one of them, though the candidates all look a bit loopy from where I'm standing. But until then, I have to assume that the President's values, that the Attorney General's values, are Republican values. No thanks.
Blowjob+fibbing+whitewater is far less important than justifying and institutionalizing torture, by a very wide margin. If you lack the moral proportion and sense to see that justifying torture is worse than what Clinton stands accused of, then there is something wrong with you.
People who talk about fibbed-about blowjobs while ignoring torture and suspension of habeus corpus just crack me up. As if you could still have moral authority after showing that you consider that blowjob to be more of a moral concern than Abu Ghraib. You can continue to make noise, but you have no credibility when it comes to morality.
...started by Eisenhower. And no, I'm not positing that Democrats don't start or perpetuate BS wars. You just chose a poor example. Johnson would've been better.
Actually that was a tangent, not part of my central argument. The point of the tangent was that Christianity per se (as in believing in Christ, accepting that he died for your sins, etc) is not under attack. His point, as I understood it, was that Christianity is being discriminated against, whereas my counterpoint was that it is not Christianity, but fundamentalism that is under attack. So after rethinking, it was more of a counterargument than a tangent, but it still isn't a strawman.
When fundamentalists are criticized, the defense is "you hate Christians! You're a bigot!" rather than recognizing that Christianity at large is allowing the subset of loonies to co-opt what the word "Christian" means. I know who I do and don't have scorn for, and I don't have scorn for people just because they believe in Christ.
And I agreed with him about some schools going too far. I was just giving some context as to how I think this came about. If you're complaining about racial profiling against Middle Eastern men in the USA, pointing out the 9/11 attackers doesn't justify it, but it does help explain how it came about. That I understand how we ruled part of our history off-limits for school discussion does not mean that I approve of that exclusion.
What was the strawman argument? My point was that Christians have a prominent, comfortable, well-accepted role in American society, and that the rhetoric of being a persecuted group is just vain hyperbole. No one has to hide the fact that they're a Christian to get a job, or a car loan, or anything else.
I hear complaints of persecution against Christians all the time--I saw a clip of Benny Hinn just a few days ago as he stood in a huge stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, shaking his fist mightily at the camera and bellowing "We are not ashamed of Christ!" as if he and his audience were making a brave stand against the secular powers of evil.
Was this a secret meeting? Were the authorities about to crash in the doors and cart off the believers? Oh wait--this was televised, well-publicized, and well-attended. Hinn is a millionaire. So... what's the strawman argument? I didn't say Christians are bad, only that I frequently hear laments of persecution for being Christian, which I find silly. What is the strawman argument in that?
But we agree on the usefulness of the seige mindset. It's a great tool to build group coherence and loyalty. Us vs. them, all the way. They hate us, and want to wipe us out. Pretty soon they'll start rounding us up and putting us in camps. How brave we are to stand up to them! Not everyone has this much integrity! It has the dual function of scaring the wits out of everyone and assuaging their vanity at their own courage and inherent goodness. No wonder people use it.
If he does, and Haliburton gets contracts from the US government, then those shares go up in value, increasing Cheney's wealth.
If Cheney owns no shares, then point that out, I'll concede that you're right, and we'll quit now. If he does own shares, and you're using a technically true statement(Cheney "doesn't get paid by Haliburton" vs "Cheney stands to make no money from Haliburton contracts") to deliberately mislead. That would mean that you lack the integrity to have an honest debate.
So this isn't complicated. If Cheney owns shares, then he stands to profit, and you're deliberately muddying the waters--i.e. lying. If he doesn't own shares, then he doesn't stand to profit, and there is no conflict of interest. I don't mind being wrong--if he doesn't own shares, then he doesn't own shares. But if he does, then there is a conflict of interest, and no claim of liberal bias can muddy the waters enough to obscure that obvious fact.
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Just yesterday I was making this point, and I get an avalance of crap about Clinton and Whitewater and shady deals, all put forward in response to my objections to torture and the gutting of habeus corpus. People view these debates as a tennis match in which all volleys are of equivalent import--I say torture, you say Whitewater, so we're even and the issue of whether torture is wrong is never really discussed. It's just political point-scoring, and you can't find a person to actually discuss whether or not torture is morally okay, excepting those who already think it's wrong.
Is this nihilism? Maybe not in the strict philosophical sense, but I think people don't really care about torture and Abu Ghraib and civilians being kept forever without trial--their own personal ethics don't come to bear, because it isn't happening to them. Yes, if their own mother were kidnapped off the street, flown to Syria to be tortured, was kept for 5-6 years at a secret prison with no access to lawyers, the Red Cross, or any visitors, and photos surfaced of her being sodomized with broomsticks by laughing US troops, then yes, morality might suddenly, as if by magic, become part of the conversation. Then, it would be wrong, an abomination, and it might reflect a teensy-weensy bit on the administration that either explicitly developed or negligently allowed these policies.
But right now it's just brown people, poor brown people who speak a different language, and their stories, if told, are irrelevant in the context of thousands of hours of talking heads on Fox News. Ergo, they don't really matter. At least, they don't matter to the extent they would matter if cops in, say, Seattle or Dallas did the these things to a pretty blonde white woman and the investigating officer was explicitly forbidden from investigating up the chain of command to see how far up the approval of the interrogation policies went.
I agree that the Dems are milking the impasse--they get to continue to use the war to beat the Repubs over the head right until the election. But I also think the conservatives would LOVE for the Dems to defund the war, because Bush still wouldn't pull out, and they would get to lay every single death at the door of the Democratic party. Dems would have to sell the defunding of the war to the people, and with the media consistently selling the line that pulling out of Iraq is "soft on terrorism," it would be a hard sell. It would be difficult to sell the idea that yanking funding was an effort to end an open-ended and pointless occupation, and not the abandonment of the troops that the Repubs would sell it as. How do you proceed when ~60% of the US population wants out, wants Congress to do more, but that same population loves throwing money at the military?
As far as "rogue prison abuse," Taguba was explicitly forbidden from investigating up the chain of command to see how far up the sanction of torture went. That was in a New Yorker article that you didn't read. The info is out there--you just have to stop relying on TV news to inform you.
If two groups agree to war, they are equally culpable for starting the war. Check. But if ~60% of the population wants to end the war, thinks it was a mistake, and one of the groups says "well, we tried what we tried, but it's time to bring the troops home, so let's vote" and the other groups says "whoa! no voting on this subject!" then there very much is the lesser of two evils. The two are not the same, because the subject is not who authorized force several YEARS ago, but who is preventing even a vote of whether or not we should scale back American military involvement now.
The American public wants the troops out. Congress's low approval rating is largely due to them not trying hard enough to get the troops out. The population has finally begun to realize that the civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis isn't really the mission of the US military. About time. Our involvement over there is making terrorism worse, and preventing the Iraqis from taking possession of their own problems.
- Torture
- Habeus Corpus
These matter. To me. To you, perhaps the Star report was of equivalent moral weight. My sense of proportion tells me that Clinton does not have to have been completely free of corruption, completely free of tarnish, for torture and the gutting of habeus corpus to be important to me. What's more, Clinton's corruption, if extant, deals with his own profit and loss, not with the entire system of due process for an entire nation--mine, as the case would have it.Whitewater didn't set a precedent by which the President can revoke your right to a trial by your peers, the right to have evidence presented against you, and by which you can be whisked to Syria or wherever to be tortured to death. Are we communicating yet? "The Republicans sanction torture" can't be rebutted with "but Clinton had some crooked land deals, by all appearances!"
This isn't a tennis match where any return volley is of equivalent weight, so point-per-point we're tied. We're not tied. I'm worried about habeus corpus, torture, and the rule of law, while you're worried about a laundry list of petty things that, though I wish Clinton hadn't done them (assuming he did all of them, which is iffy) but none of which really are on the scale of what worries me about the Repubs.
And no, I'm not "humming along" while anyone throws out constitutional protections. You just need to realize that people really are being tortured in facilities operated by the US Government, right now, as I type this. People are being held indefinitely, without trial, without due process. If you think these things, which are already happening, are as morally compelling as a bill that may or not be presented, and may or not be passed, sometime in the future, in an overzealous and heavy-handed attempt to fight filesharing, your moral compass may need a bit of calibration.
I can't vote against the people who interned the Japanese Americans, or pushed for MK-Ultra. I can vote against the ones who are supporting torture, imprisonment without trial, and warrantless surveillance now.
You might as well say I should vote Republican because of Abe Lincoln. Torture matters. Habeus corpus matters. What the hell is wrong with you? You're muddying the waters, not adding perspective. There is a difference.
If you can't bring your party up to where people could vote for them with a clean conscience, you can at least bring the other party down and pretend that they're at the same level. Responses, if any, will be along the lines of "yeah, because Democrats are such angels, perfect in every way, and they always do what the people want" which is not what I said. I have long said that Dems and Repubs are about the same when it comes to pork spending, subservience to lobbyists, and general corruption (including legal but unethical stuff), but Repubs are essentially The Torture Party as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to impress me much to beat out The Torture Party.
If the Dems just run as the "We Think Habeus Corpus is Important" party, that's good enough for me, even with the usual complement of pork spending and knee-jerk overreaction that we always expect from congress. I wish Dems were better, but this equivocation where going after filesharers proves that the Dems are just as bad as the Republicans is a bit ridiculous. If torture, habeus corpus, and warrantless surveillance aren't part of the discussion about which party is better, at least right now, then we aren't really having a discussion.
People with more robust needs would obviously need a more robust computer. But you can do a lot with modest hardware. Complex/large documents can be accomplished with LaTeX, though Abiword would probably suffice for the gui-inclined. Firefox works fine even from a LiveCD. But I'm aware that some people need certain software packages that would require more computing power.
I've always disliked that colleges force students to use a certain software package. Programming classes should not require a certain IDE--when taking my C++ course I used text editors and the command line. For a web design course the prof mandated a particular FTP program, but the command line worked well enough for me. I'm aware that there are some courses that do dictate that software title X must be used, so no solution is good for everyone.
I wanted to think of DSL as Ubuntu with a very small footprint, but that isn't accurate by a long shot. There can be a huge difference even between distros within a common family. And for those of us who can't do more than sudo ./configure or similar, those differences are often too much to overcome. I'm not complaining--I do love Linux, and prefer it to Windows and OS X, but there are limitations faced by us mere mortals.
They don't have to be stupid. They can mandate that the backdoors remain open, and claim immunity for themselves and the compliant companies under the aegis of national security. If it worked for warrantless wiretapping and torture, surely it would work for this. It should work for pretty much any type of surveillance or other government activity. Once those two words are allowed to trump all other concerns, and are allowed to even stifle debate about the programs, then the game is effectively over.
The dark fiber is dark, and the unused cycles are unused, not because there aren't enough good reasons to use them, but because there aren't enough economically profitable reasons to use them. Folding@home may cure disease, but if doesn't make a buck...scratch that, if it doesn't maximize revenue as part of a dynamic global strategy to leverage something or other, then they can't be bothered. Making a buck isn't enough anymore.
I believe it was a Zoolander allusion.
Age aside, I lost my fascination with Sculley when they made her vulnerable and emotional. The ice-maiden thing was quite the draw, but when I saw her crying and needy...hell, I can find that anywhere. Cerebral and aloof? Sign me up.
If OpenOffice isn't completely compatible with every version of MS Word/Excel, ever corrupts a file, or fails to render the formatting exactly as it was on another platform, then this is proof positive that OpenOffice isn't ready for serious users. It's great for fanboys or those who just hate Microsoft, but for normal people who need to "get work done," it isn't up to the task.
You have to use different logic to ensure that you justify the decision you have already made on other grounds. I thought everyone knew that.
I don't use OpenOffice because it's free. I have several similarly priced versions of MS Office I purchased at the Kazaa store. I use OpenOffice because of the PDF Export feature, the fact that it's available on Linux, and it serves my needs. It continues to serve my needs even if businesses decide not to use it. And even if it doesn't, I have Abiword and LaTeX. It isn't that I dislike MS Office, but that I dislike painting myself into a corner by depending on that one software package. I'm no visionary hippie, but I don't like spending time and money to gradually eliminate my own options.
What percentage of users actually need/use the features that separate MS Office from OpenOffice? I'd bet it's smaller than the percentage of users who bitch about OpenOffice not being as capable. People like to bitch, they don't like change, and they usually think their employers are trying to foist inferior tools on them...in this context, OpenOffice's price actually works against acceptance.
What if it isn't for sport really, but just amusement? I mean, sometimes you find some really cute baby deer, and it just looks up at you with those big soft eyes, and bashing it in the head can really make your day. There are other things you can kill, true, but cute animals are much more cathartic. I've been looking for a baby seal, but there aren't any in my neck of the woods.
But if you believe, as I do, that the last few years have been the darkest period of American history since, say, the internment of the Japanese Americans, then you would think that we need to go in the other direction, even if the other party isn't all you would like it to be. This talk of "The Democrats are just as bad!" would be true if we just looked at pork-barrel spending or other random corruption. I agree completely, if we keep the debate to that scope.
But the debate isn't limited to that scope--Bush and the Neocons have institutionalized torture and secret prisons, undermined due process and the rule of law, watered down basic human rights such as habeus corpus, on top of the normal array of corruptioin and favoritism. I'm not even getting to the political censorship of basic science, the damage to public health done by abstinence-only education, the damage to the environment done by industry employees turned "public servant," and so on. For me, torture, habeus corpus, and those secret prisons are just about enough to make me completely reject the Republican party for quite a long time.
If that party repudiated torture, said that it was wrong, said that the secret prisons were wrong, said that people do have habeus corpus rights even when the President doesn't want them to, and so on, explicitly, then I'd consider them again. If they backed investigation and prosecution of those who approved torture, all the way up to Rumsfeld and the VP, and if necessary, to the White House, then I'd be impressed, be convinced that they had integrity and morality, and I'd consider voting for one of them, though the candidates all look a bit loopy from where I'm standing. But until then, I have to assume that the President's values, that the Attorney General's values, are Republican values. No thanks.
People who talk about fibbed-about blowjobs while ignoring torture and suspension of habeus corpus just crack me up. As if you could still have moral authority after showing that you consider that blowjob to be more of a moral concern than Abu Ghraib. You can continue to make noise, but you have no credibility when it comes to morality.
When fundamentalists are criticized, the defense is "you hate Christians! You're a bigot!" rather than recognizing that Christianity at large is allowing the subset of loonies to co-opt what the word "Christian" means. I know who I do and don't have scorn for, and I don't have scorn for people just because they believe in Christ.
And I agreed with him about some schools going too far. I was just giving some context as to how I think this came about. If you're complaining about racial profiling against Middle Eastern men in the USA, pointing out the 9/11 attackers doesn't justify it, but it does help explain how it came about. That I understand how we ruled part of our history off-limits for school discussion does not mean that I approve of that exclusion.
I hear complaints of persecution against Christians all the time--I saw a clip of Benny Hinn just a few days ago as he stood in a huge stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, shaking his fist mightily at the camera and bellowing "We are not ashamed of Christ!" as if he and his audience were making a brave stand against the secular powers of evil.
Was this a secret meeting? Were the authorities about to crash in the doors and cart off the believers? Oh wait--this was televised, well-publicized, and well-attended. Hinn is a millionaire. So... what's the strawman argument? I didn't say Christians are bad, only that I frequently hear laments of persecution for being Christian, which I find silly. What is the strawman argument in that?
But we agree on the usefulness of the seige mindset. It's a great tool to build group coherence and loyalty. Us vs. them, all the way. They hate us, and want to wipe us out. Pretty soon they'll start rounding us up and putting us in camps. How brave we are to stand up to them! Not everyone has this much integrity! It has the dual function of scaring the wits out of everyone and assuaging their vanity at their own courage and inherent goodness. No wonder people use it.
If he does, and Haliburton gets contracts from the US government, then those shares go up in value, increasing Cheney's wealth.
If Cheney owns no shares, then point that out, I'll concede that you're right, and we'll quit now. If he does own shares, and you're using a technically true statement(Cheney "doesn't get paid by Haliburton" vs "Cheney stands to make no money from Haliburton contracts") to deliberately mislead. That would mean that you lack the integrity to have an honest debate.
So this isn't complicated. If Cheney owns shares, then he stands to profit, and you're deliberately muddying the waters--i.e. lying. If he doesn't own shares, then he doesn't stand to profit, and there is no conflict of interest. I don't mind being wrong--if he doesn't own shares, then he doesn't own shares. But if he does, then there is a conflict of interest, and no claim of liberal bias can muddy the waters enough to obscure that obvious fact.