First of all, let me stipulate that I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm justing thinking of a moral choice made in the context of other moral choices. I too disliked Google's accomodation of China, and I deplore China's human rights record.
Okay, so let's say I drop gmail and stop using google. What about all the other products I buy that send money to China? Something like 80% of the goods in Wal-Mart are made in China. All I'm wearing from China at the second is a pair of shoes and maybe the watch (Timex, but doesn't say origin on the back). But I know that many of my clothes are made in Malaysia, the Philippines, India, etc, and I have no idea what labor or environmental practices are behind these products. Let's not even start on my computer, mp3 player, dvd player, LCD TV, and so on. Plus I spend about $230 a month on gasoline, much of which which goes to large oil companies and Wahaabi fundamentalists, neither of which embody moral values I'm happy with.
How do you go about delineating which areas of your shopping life can be seen in a moral context? I know many people who are horrified at even adult prostitution in Thailand, but sweatshop workers working 14-hr days at 13 cents a shirt doesn't cause their moral compass to even tremble. How is that? Why don't I see exposes on the people worked to death in the sugar-cane fields to get the sugar to go into my coffee, or the people killed in Guatemala by thugs financed via the bananas that go into my banana pudding? How do you choose?
Again, I'm not saying that you're wrong, and I'm not even challenging you to defend yourself. My question is largely rhetorical. I consider myself personally complicit in a very wide variety of daily atrocities. If you watch the documentary The Corporation you'll find that it is the corporte entity itself, not just Microsoft or Google (or even Haliburton) that is evil, or at best sociopathic. What's more, the moral problems are so widespread that you'd be hard pressed to live a morally uncompromised life as a modern consumer.
You could, I guess, wander off and live off the land, but I doubt many of us could manage that. The compass in my backpack is made of plastic dependent on the entire petroleum industry and all that it entails. Eyeglasses as well. My jeans, underwear, socks, and shirt could've been made in sweatshops (though I hope they weren't). My shoes--China. This whole "do no evil" thing isn't easy to live up to. I'm certainly an abject failure at it.
I'm skeptical that this oft-heard binary choice really covers the options. If people want to change things for The Better, and then they go into government because that's how you change laws, but then things would be so much easier/more efficient if the government (i.e. them, at this point) had a little more power, and so on. In short order you get a phenomenon that, though ostensibly motivated by vaguely benevolent ideas, is indistinguishable from a naked power grab.
I don't believe even the most draconian Neocon wants power just so he can stomp an orphan in the face--to him he is doing the right thing. Left or right, the totalitarians always have ideals somewhere in there, and though we may disagree with their Vision of how the world should be, they really do want to make it "better". Pol Pot thought that intellectuals had undermined his country, so he fixed their wagon. Rinse, wash, repeat. Evil comes not always from evil, and I don't think the only alternative is stupidity. In my opinion, "good intentions" unrestrained by humility does a lot of the damage.
Plus, none of us are immune to vanity, convenience, self-interest, and so on, and all of these taint our everyday decisions. When your everyday decisions involve such things as habeus corpus and torture for people of a different skin color, of a different religion (which you consider to be foolish at best and devil worship at worst), who speak a different language, and who you're afraid might want to hurt you and yours, then you get, well, evil. It's not out there--it's in us.
The reason is that people are just wrong about what the article means. At first blush, it looked like the company was getting a statewide monopoly. After further reading, it appears that the first impression was wrong. People can be wrong, and we have to credit each other with the ability to assimilate new facts and adjust our opinions accordingly. That generosity will sometimes be found to be unrealistic, and that's fine, but to have a conversation untained with acrimonious, contemptuous comments, we have to at least try.
Airport security has never been rude to me, only bizarrely inconvenient. If I just exited a 12-hr transoceanic flight, why make me take my shoes off again and my laptop out again enroute to my connecting flight? If I lacked Bad Stuff on plane 1, where would I get the Bad Stuff to take on plane 2?
I'm also confident that they could build those shoe-zappy thingies into the floor and save us at least that much trouble. I hate to be gratuitously cynical, but I have to wonder how much of this is just to be seen doing something security-ish.
Well, the question has been asked. And we both know that if the Iraqi parliment tried to vote on it--well, scratch that, they did. Even Maliki says they don't need us. We just ignore them. So let's not act as if the Iraqis are clamoring for us to stay. Most Iraqis want us out. Most Americans want us out. Even most of the US military wants us out. It's just the bitter-enders in the current administration, along with their ideological allies, pretending that the Iraqis want us there and the American public wants us there and the US military wants to be there. Reality has been tested, and is not what the administration says it is.
I'm always perplexed when people blame eugenics on evolution. It's not as if no one had thought to wipe out a particular group of people before Darwin came along. Obviously if you kill all the blind people, there won't be blind people. If you kill the Jews, there won't be Jews.
After Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, people just took what they were doing before and rephrased it as pseudoscience. Now you have Hovind and other creationists saying that the eugenics crowd were motivated by evolutionary theory. The movement had much less to do with evolution than it did Mendelian genetics--does that mean genetics is a fraud? Does the idea of inheritance lead inexorably to Nazi eugenics experiments?
Or can we safely say that people have always been tempted, here and there, to wipe out anyone whose existence they found distasteful, and they'll tack their bigotry onto any pseudo-science they can just to lend their efforts a patina of legitimacy?
It could be that the compassion we show to the old and infirm is just a by-product of the compassion we have for our own kids and even ourselves. In other words, a recognition that this, too, is our lot in time. That compassion, that working together to protect each other, just might improve the survivability of the set of genes that make up the individuals we're talking about. The evolution of compassion and altruism is a very hot topic. I wouldn't dismiss it, or the significance of compassion to our species, so readily.
Oh, my kids both read. From the responses I got, it seemed that I was saying my kids were dumb as a bag of hammers and really should be euthanized. Nothing of the kind. They just aren't curious about computers. Part of my problem is that I'm curious about almost everything (but not smart enough to keep up), but they don't have that.
It has long been theorized that intelligence may be a self-limiting phenomenon. We may be smart enough to destroy ourselves but not smart enough to prevent ourselves from doing so. We're smart enough to develop automobiles and heavy industry, but perhaps not smart enough, collectively, to avoid making our own environment uninhabitable.
But in that evolution is just "genetic change in a population over time," of course there is still human evolution. As long as there is variation and some selection process, there will be evolution, though perhaps not speciation. All this speculation is just us pretending that we have more control over the selection process than we actually do.
Another part of the problem is the misunderstanding that evolution means progress forward, or a bettering of the species, or the development of super powers or some such shite. Evolution doesn't advance any species, only makes some alleles more common than their competitors.
which is why the house if full of books on dozens of subjects and magazines like Harper's and the Atlantic. But I think new parents are just a bit too optimistic, sadly so, that their kid will be different than those around him or her. Some kids are, but the thing about exceptional kids is that they are the exception. I'd love to discuss Godel Escher Bach with my son, but being an intellectual just isn't cool. I even have dark stuff around like Lavey or Baudelaire, but he wants garden-variety books on Wicca.
Admittedly, this optimism extends a bit beyond intellectual pursuits. I know a lot of parents paying for basketball camp hoping that their kid is the next Kobe Bryant. I guess it can't be avoided.
or at least their curiosity is. I have a Macbook and a Ubuntu desktop, and my kids (14, 16) have zero curiosity about either. There is nothing about kids that makes them magically curious about computer gear, programming, or whatever. Yes, they'll play DDR or Prince of Persia on the PS2, and they can write homework assignments with Abiword or OpenOffice, but "file>save as MS Word doc" is about as complex as their usage gets. I'm always bemused by the optimism that kids are going to be hacking perl scripts if they're given the opportunity. Kids are individuals, and those who are curious about computers are just curious about computers. The rest are not.
I even tried to entice my son by talking a bit about encryption, thinking he would make the connection of "aha! I can hide stuff from the old man!" but even that lure failed to get him to open the Missing Manual book. I keep hoping to find an encrypted container indicating that he's learned something, but alas he lacks my secretiveness. Kids today!
Iraq was a "socialist state" with a very good education and public health system. Minority rights, women's rights, and freedom of religion was tolerated, at least in comparison to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Middle Eastern dictatorships with which we are still allied. Saddam was brutal and no doubt corrupt, but he was a bulwark against religious extremism, a counterweight against Saudi Wahaabi fanatics.
Iraq only became a shithole after the UN sanctions, and then a hellhole after our invasion. The USA has historically had no problem with nations that were politically repressive, even brutal (Indonesia, anyone? Saudi Arabia? UAE?) as long as they did business with US companies, allowing us to profit from their brutality. I agree that Saddam was a dictator, but saying they have us to "thank" for "democracy" is a bit cheeky. Can they thank us for arming him, or for cutting off medical supplies? How about selling him components for chemical weapons in the 80s?
As for Iraq being a democracy, stop acting as if they have self-determination. Over 150K troops and mercenaries on your soil, enjoying complete immunity from Iraqi law, with the ability to shoot you at will, isn't what I'd call a democracy. Would you favor letting the Iraqis vote next week on whether US military members and mercenaries should be subject to Iraqi law? Would you consider the referendum binding? If not, they aren't much of a soverign nation, are they?
But weapons are cool! We have to be kept safe, or something. And that $500B (more like $750B now) creates jobs, or something. Big government is o-tay if all big government means is giving tax money to corporations on a no-bid basis, or suspending habeus corpus, or building more prisons or something. Big government is bad, i.e. socialism, if you give one red cent to a poor person, or pay any health-care related expense for anyone who isn't old enough to be an O'Reilley fan.
I'm still a little fuzzy on how building infrastructure in Iraq is okay, but building infrastructure in the USA is socialism. Are we foisting socialism on the Iraqis?
in what they perceive. The book A Bright Shining Lie said a lot about this stuff. The AF would bomb the hell out of the jungle and chalk up x VC kills, and wouldn't believe Vann, who went out there to see the bombing site, when he said there were no weapons in the place they bombed, only dead peasants.
Why are people like this? Dunno. But an AF officer isn't going to make much rank if he isn't convinced 24/7 that airpower is the best answer to whatever problem they have that day. And "collateral damage" (i.e. brown or yellow people who I don't have to care about) just isn't important.
From day one of the Iraq war/occupation/whatever I've said we should let cameram crews walk around the areas we've bombed. You support war? Fine--here are the pictures of the children you killed today. How's that moral clarity working out for you?
Even today, supporters of the war are crowing about how "improved" Iraq is. Fine. My problem is that I mentally transfer the car bombs and dozens of sectarian killings every day, along with the imprisonment without trial, govt-backed death squads, lack of clean water, lack of medicine, etc, to, say, Houston, and wonder how wonderful we'd consider it. We'd be horrified, and there's no way we'd be happy if another country imposed that on us, especially with ~150K troops and mercenaries on our part of the earth but with complete immunity from our laws and even their own damned laws (at least in the case of the mercs). People's insouciance is due simply to the fact that it isn't them.
If the AF blew up the school across from their house and they were picking up body parts from their front lawn, a pro forma apology and a speech by the foreign president that "things are looking up" wouldn't fly. 80% of us would be working for the insurgency. Once you just ask the seemingly obvious question "how would we feel in their place?" the BS you see on Fox and Fox Lite (i.e. the other TV channels) rings a bit hollow.
Cheney in particular made repeated claims on various news programs that a substantive collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Queida. He didn't qualify it with doubt or nuance--he said "We know" again and again, saying that Iraq was helping Al Queida.
Many people thought that Iraq had WMD, as in they had a gut feeling. But you don't go to war based on a seat-of-your-pants gut feeling, unless you're a moron who considers yourself a "gut thinker."
I'm sure Clinton (either or both) and Gore both thought he did, but the fact remains that I was reading articles well before we invaded/liberated Iraq saying that high-level State Dept and CIA officials were saying that there was no evidence that Iraq had an active program.
UN weapons inspectors found nothing, even when they followed up on every lead the US Govt fed to them. Inspectors were looking for weapons, and found none. Blix had access to the disputed sites, and found nothing, even when the US "helped" with their wild-goose-chase hints. Blix was still inspecting when the USA threw the weapons inspectors out so they could start the war.
But sometimes those individuals are part of organizations, and while they are part of them they make decisions (or people in their philosophical camp, with which they identify) and later try to cover up what they did and why they did it.
When you are part of an organization that makes policy and starts wars, editing a public encyclopedia to revise the historical record to a more flattering view of what your organization did and why it did it...that is just suspicious.
Lying to make yourself look better isn't the same thing as J. Random Person making edits on the Wikipedia entry on apples.
Is it policy? No. We aren't going to find a signed, fingerprint-laden order by the VP ordering mass Wiki edits. So no, we have no sinister conspiracy. But neither is it benign.
Men got blown before Clinton, are still getting blown, and some lucky ones will get blown in the future. Even Presidents had affairs--almost half of Americans admit to affairs, which mean more than half probably have them.
The Clinton impeachment fiasco was just politics. I too am sorry that oral sex was discussed so frankly on the news, making it a normal topic of conversation even for kids. But that wasn't Clinton's fault--that was the fault of those who made a huge national scandal out of a private matter between two consenting adults. What's more, their moral outrage was transparently fake. Delay and Gingrich both had affairs while the Monica witch-hunt was afoot, and conservatives still respect those two. So don't blame Clinton--that public spectacle was orchestrated by the Republican party.
Even if I thought a President was as dumb as a bag of hammers, had lied us into an unnecessary war, had gutted habeus corpus and legitimized torture, I still wouldn't want him impeached over a blowjob. No matter how much I detested a sitting President (a hypothetical President, mind you), oral sex with a consenting adult is still a private matter.
Optimism is the problem you find so frustrating. People like to think "oh, people aren't that bad." Anyone who points out the obvious, that people really are that bad, is dismissed as a cynic. I'm amazed, living in a nation where 85%+ call themselves Christian, that I rarely find a person who actually believes in original sin. People are inherently corrupt, and are good by effort and vigilance. I'm an atheist, and even I can see that.
We are capable of good, yes, but no one is immune to the pull of self-interest, convenience, vanity, and so on. The more secrecy your activities are cloaked in, the less accountability you have, the more likely you are to indulge the less pretty side of your nature. To me, all of society is one large Zimbardo prison experiment, with the authority roles intact but without the prison (for most of us).
The CIA isn't "supposedly" torturing people. The CIA is doing things that were torture before we were doing them, or at least before we admitted we were doing them. When you're plainly, admittedly doing something, it doesn't become "supposedly" when the word torture comes up. We're doing it. It has been approved, legalized (thank you Woo!), and implemented--no "supposedly" there. The only uncertainty in this is that introduced by those who want to pretend that what's torture is a murky, uncertain question.
If a pretty white woman were waterboarded by 2 black cops in Atlanta, and died during the "interrogation", and then they packed the body in ice and faked the death certificate to say "heart problems," there would be no question in anyone's mind, least of all of the Attorney General or Vice President, that this constituted torture.
Our uncertainty as to what torture means is a sham--it's only torture because it's brown people who worship Allah and look sort of like towelheads. And everyone damn well knows that.
Old fashioned books are cheaper. If I leave Macbeth on the train I'm out $7, vs several hundred for an ebook reader. I can scribble notes in Macbeth, legible or otherwise.
And let's not forget snob appeal. No one is going to notice me reading Proust on a PDA. Well, no one is going to notice the book, either, and if they did they wouldn't know who he is or how damned smart I must be for reading him (cough cough) but dammit I can hope. Do you want to take that hope away from me?
I've read a few books on a Tungsten (whichever one had the keyboard) and it was cool, but I migrated back to analog via Moleskine notebooks, Lamy fountain pens, and dead-tree books. I miss copy/paste and a search function, but that's it.
I don't think molestation is all that rare (not like struck-by-lightning rare, anyway). It just is vastly more likely to occur in the home or that of a relative than by a stranger. But "stepfathers are the most frequent molesters" doesn't have the stranger-as-threat, outsider-as-enemy utility people like so much.
I was once told by a woman of an ethnic background I'm not going to share with you that she didn't know any women of her ethnic background who hadn't been molested. I'd bet good money that was quite an exaggeration, but the bare fact that she said it, and the matter-of-fact tone she was using, creeped me out. No, I'm not presening anecdotal evidence. It's already well-known that most molestation occurs in the home, and not by marauding gay activists. It was just a weird thing to hear from a friend of my then-wife, who is of the same cultural background.
can anyone give a reason why ALL people convicted of ANYTHING aren't in a database? Since privacy is no longer important when it has to compete with safety on any level, why give it even a token protection? I'm all for protecting children from child molesters, but don't you also have a "right" to know if a convicted car thief lives in the neighborhood? Why can't you look up your new neighbor and find out that he shoplifted a package of underwear 12 years ago? Don't you have a right to sleep soundly at night? Why do we need to know that a child molester lives in the area, but not a convicted murderer? How about drug offenses? Shouldn't we just put all criminal records online? Isn't public safety more important than the "privacy" of criminals?
but you forgot to mention that all of those problems posed by nuclear power are solved by magical elves. The GP clearly considers retorts like that to be reasonable and intelligent responses, so you should respect their precedent. It's always risky to treat a moron, who has already shown contempt for the subject, like a sentient human being.
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What liberal blog did you copy that crap from?
Okay, so let's say I drop gmail and stop using google. What about all the other products I buy that send money to China? Something like 80% of the goods in Wal-Mart are made in China. All I'm wearing from China at the second is a pair of shoes and maybe the watch (Timex, but doesn't say origin on the back). But I know that many of my clothes are made in Malaysia, the Philippines, India, etc, and I have no idea what labor or environmental practices are behind these products. Let's not even start on my computer, mp3 player, dvd player, LCD TV, and so on. Plus I spend about $230 a month on gasoline, much of which which goes to large oil companies and Wahaabi fundamentalists, neither of which embody moral values I'm happy with.
How do you go about delineating which areas of your shopping life can be seen in a moral context? I know many people who are horrified at even adult prostitution in Thailand, but sweatshop workers working 14-hr days at 13 cents a shirt doesn't cause their moral compass to even tremble. How is that? Why don't I see exposes on the people worked to death in the sugar-cane fields to get the sugar to go into my coffee, or the people killed in Guatemala by thugs financed via the bananas that go into my banana pudding? How do you choose?
Again, I'm not saying that you're wrong, and I'm not even challenging you to defend yourself. My question is largely rhetorical. I consider myself personally complicit in a very wide variety of daily atrocities. If you watch the documentary The Corporation you'll find that it is the corporte entity itself, not just Microsoft or Google (or even Haliburton) that is evil, or at best sociopathic. What's more, the moral problems are so widespread that you'd be hard pressed to live a morally uncompromised life as a modern consumer.
You could, I guess, wander off and live off the land, but I doubt many of us could manage that. The compass in my backpack is made of plastic dependent on the entire petroleum industry and all that it entails. Eyeglasses as well. My jeans, underwear, socks, and shirt could've been made in sweatshops (though I hope they weren't). My shoes--China. This whole "do no evil" thing isn't easy to live up to. I'm certainly an abject failure at it.
I don't believe even the most draconian Neocon wants power just so he can stomp an orphan in the face--to him he is doing the right thing. Left or right, the totalitarians always have ideals somewhere in there, and though we may disagree with their Vision of how the world should be, they really do want to make it "better". Pol Pot thought that intellectuals had undermined his country, so he fixed their wagon. Rinse, wash, repeat. Evil comes not always from evil, and I don't think the only alternative is stupidity. In my opinion, "good intentions" unrestrained by humility does a lot of the damage.
Plus, none of us are immune to vanity, convenience, self-interest, and so on, and all of these taint our everyday decisions. When your everyday decisions involve such things as habeus corpus and torture for people of a different skin color, of a different religion (which you consider to be foolish at best and devil worship at worst), who speak a different language, and who you're afraid might want to hurt you and yours, then you get, well, evil. It's not out there--it's in us.
The reason is that people are just wrong about what the article means. At first blush, it looked like the company was getting a statewide monopoly. After further reading, it appears that the first impression was wrong. People can be wrong, and we have to credit each other with the ability to assimilate new facts and adjust our opinions accordingly. That generosity will sometimes be found to be unrealistic, and that's fine, but to have a conversation untained with acrimonious, contemptuous comments, we have to at least try.
I'm also confident that they could build those shoe-zappy thingies into the floor and save us at least that much trouble. I hate to be gratuitously cynical, but I have to wonder how much of this is just to be seen doing something security-ish.
Well, the question has been asked. And we both know that if the Iraqi parliment tried to vote on it--well, scratch that, they did. Even Maliki says they don't need us. We just ignore them. So let's not act as if the Iraqis are clamoring for us to stay. Most Iraqis want us out. Most Americans want us out. Even most of the US military wants us out. It's just the bitter-enders in the current administration, along with their ideological allies, pretending that the Iraqis want us there and the American public wants us there and the US military wants to be there. Reality has been tested, and is not what the administration says it is.
After Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, people just took what they were doing before and rephrased it as pseudoscience. Now you have Hovind and other creationists saying that the eugenics crowd were motivated by evolutionary theory. The movement had much less to do with evolution than it did Mendelian genetics--does that mean genetics is a fraud? Does the idea of inheritance lead inexorably to Nazi eugenics experiments?
Or can we safely say that people have always been tempted, here and there, to wipe out anyone whose existence they found distasteful, and they'll tack their bigotry onto any pseudo-science they can just to lend their efforts a patina of legitimacy?
It could be that the compassion we show to the old and infirm is just a by-product of the compassion we have for our own kids and even ourselves. In other words, a recognition that this, too, is our lot in time. That compassion, that working together to protect each other, just might improve the survivability of the set of genes that make up the individuals we're talking about. The evolution of compassion and altruism is a very hot topic. I wouldn't dismiss it, or the significance of compassion to our species, so readily.
Oh, my kids both read. From the responses I got, it seemed that I was saying my kids were dumb as a bag of hammers and really should be euthanized. Nothing of the kind. They just aren't curious about computers. Part of my problem is that I'm curious about almost everything (but not smart enough to keep up), but they don't have that.
But in that evolution is just "genetic change in a population over time," of course there is still human evolution. As long as there is variation and some selection process, there will be evolution, though perhaps not speciation. All this speculation is just us pretending that we have more control over the selection process than we actually do.
Another part of the problem is the misunderstanding that evolution means progress forward, or a bettering of the species, or the development of super powers or some such shite. Evolution doesn't advance any species, only makes some alleles more common than their competitors.
Admittedly, this optimism extends a bit beyond intellectual pursuits. I know a lot of parents paying for basketball camp hoping that their kid is the next Kobe Bryant. I guess it can't be avoided.
I even tried to entice my son by talking a bit about encryption, thinking he would make the connection of "aha! I can hide stuff from the old man!" but even that lure failed to get him to open the Missing Manual book. I keep hoping to find an encrypted container indicating that he's learned something, but alas he lacks my secretiveness. Kids today!
Iraq only became a shithole after the UN sanctions, and then a hellhole after our invasion. The USA has historically had no problem with nations that were politically repressive, even brutal (Indonesia, anyone? Saudi Arabia? UAE?) as long as they did business with US companies, allowing us to profit from their brutality. I agree that Saddam was a dictator, but saying they have us to "thank" for "democracy" is a bit cheeky. Can they thank us for arming him, or for cutting off medical supplies? How about selling him components for chemical weapons in the 80s?
As for Iraq being a democracy, stop acting as if they have self-determination. Over 150K troops and mercenaries on your soil, enjoying complete immunity from Iraqi law, with the ability to shoot you at will, isn't what I'd call a democracy. Would you favor letting the Iraqis vote next week on whether US military members and mercenaries should be subject to Iraqi law? Would you consider the referendum binding? If not, they aren't much of a soverign nation, are they?
I'm still a little fuzzy on how building infrastructure in Iraq is okay, but building infrastructure in the USA is socialism. Are we foisting socialism on the Iraqis?
Why are people like this? Dunno. But an AF officer isn't going to make much rank if he isn't convinced 24/7 that airpower is the best answer to whatever problem they have that day. And "collateral damage" (i.e. brown or yellow people who I don't have to care about) just isn't important.
From day one of the Iraq war/occupation/whatever I've said we should let cameram crews walk around the areas we've bombed. You support war? Fine--here are the pictures of the children you killed today. How's that moral clarity working out for you?
Even today, supporters of the war are crowing about how "improved" Iraq is. Fine. My problem is that I mentally transfer the car bombs and dozens of sectarian killings every day, along with the imprisonment without trial, govt-backed death squads, lack of clean water, lack of medicine, etc, to, say, Houston, and wonder how wonderful we'd consider it. We'd be horrified, and there's no way we'd be happy if another country imposed that on us, especially with ~150K troops and mercenaries on our part of the earth but with complete immunity from our laws and even their own damned laws (at least in the case of the mercs). People's insouciance is due simply to the fact that it isn't them.
If the AF blew up the school across from their house and they were picking up body parts from their front lawn, a pro forma apology and a speech by the foreign president that "things are looking up" wouldn't fly. 80% of us would be working for the insurgency. Once you just ask the seemingly obvious question "how would we feel in their place?" the BS you see on Fox and Fox Lite (i.e. the other TV channels) rings a bit hollow.
Arm VP Cheney, and let him protect his President. Anyone who isn't a moron can use a modern shotgun safely and effectively.
Many people thought that Iraq had WMD, as in they had a gut feeling. But you don't go to war based on a seat-of-your-pants gut feeling, unless you're a moron who considers yourself a "gut thinker."
I'm sure Clinton (either or both) and Gore both thought he did, but the fact remains that I was reading articles well before we invaded/liberated Iraq saying that high-level State Dept and CIA officials were saying that there was no evidence that Iraq had an active program.
UN weapons inspectors found nothing, even when they followed up on every lead the US Govt fed to them. Inspectors were looking for weapons, and found none. Blix had access to the disputed sites, and found nothing, even when the US "helped" with their wild-goose-chase hints. Blix was still inspecting when the USA threw the weapons inspectors out so they could start the war.
So who is revising history again?
When you are part of an organization that makes policy and starts wars, editing a public encyclopedia to revise the historical record to a more flattering view of what your organization did and why it did it...that is just suspicious.
Lying to make yourself look better isn't the same thing as J. Random Person making edits on the Wikipedia entry on apples.
Is it policy? No. We aren't going to find a signed, fingerprint-laden order by the VP ordering mass Wiki edits. So no, we have no sinister conspiracy. But neither is it benign.
The Clinton impeachment fiasco was just politics. I too am sorry that oral sex was discussed so frankly on the news, making it a normal topic of conversation even for kids. But that wasn't Clinton's fault--that was the fault of those who made a huge national scandal out of a private matter between two consenting adults. What's more, their moral outrage was transparently fake. Delay and Gingrich both had affairs while the Monica witch-hunt was afoot, and conservatives still respect those two. So don't blame Clinton--that public spectacle was orchestrated by the Republican party.
Even if I thought a President was as dumb as a bag of hammers, had lied us into an unnecessary war, had gutted habeus corpus and legitimized torture, I still wouldn't want him impeached over a blowjob. No matter how much I detested a sitting President (a hypothetical President, mind you), oral sex with a consenting adult is still a private matter.
We are capable of good, yes, but no one is immune to the pull of self-interest, convenience, vanity, and so on. The more secrecy your activities are cloaked in, the less accountability you have, the more likely you are to indulge the less pretty side of your nature. To me, all of society is one large Zimbardo prison experiment, with the authority roles intact but without the prison (for most of us).
If a pretty white woman were waterboarded by 2 black cops in Atlanta, and died during the "interrogation", and then they packed the body in ice and faked the death certificate to say "heart problems," there would be no question in anyone's mind, least of all of the Attorney General or Vice President, that this constituted torture.
Our uncertainty as to what torture means is a sham--it's only torture because it's brown people who worship Allah and look sort of like towelheads. And everyone damn well knows that.
And let's not forget snob appeal. No one is going to notice me reading Proust on a PDA. Well, no one is going to notice the book, either, and if they did they wouldn't know who he is or how damned smart I must be for reading him (cough cough) but dammit I can hope. Do you want to take that hope away from me?
I've read a few books on a Tungsten (whichever one had the keyboard) and it was cool, but I migrated back to analog via Moleskine notebooks, Lamy fountain pens, and dead-tree books. I miss copy/paste and a search function, but that's it.
I was once told by a woman of an ethnic background I'm not going to share with you that she didn't know any women of her ethnic background who hadn't been molested. I'd bet good money that was quite an exaggeration, but the bare fact that she said it, and the matter-of-fact tone she was using, creeped me out. No, I'm not presening anecdotal evidence. It's already well-known that most molestation occurs in the home, and not by marauding gay activists. It was just a weird thing to hear from a friend of my then-wife, who is of the same cultural background.
can anyone give a reason why ALL people convicted of ANYTHING aren't in a database? Since privacy is no longer important when it has to compete with safety on any level, why give it even a token protection? I'm all for protecting children from child molesters, but don't you also have a "right" to know if a convicted car thief lives in the neighborhood? Why can't you look up your new neighbor and find out that he shoplifted a package of underwear 12 years ago? Don't you have a right to sleep soundly at night? Why do we need to know that a child molester lives in the area, but not a convicted murderer? How about drug offenses? Shouldn't we just put all criminal records online? Isn't public safety more important than the "privacy" of criminals?
but you forgot to mention that all of those problems posed by nuclear power are solved by magical elves. The GP clearly considers retorts like that to be reasonable and intelligent responses, so you should respect their precedent. It's always risky to treat a moron, who has already shown contempt for the subject, like a sentient human being.