Your worldview is seriously compromising your ability to think properly. I am not a Trump supporter. Between you and I, the only person exercising vivid fantasies about the situation is you.
In fact, I am on your side, though you don't know it and probably couldn't disengage yourself from the political paradigm you are addicted to long enough to make a rational decision one way or another. From your post you obviously see the political spectrum in the indoctrinated form of a two party system. You will defend your chosen party, even sacrificing reason, logic, and your own integrity to do so. You see the threat of "the other party" as so immense that you will do anything, and even worse feel justified in doing anything, to make sure they don't get power. You will also shamelessly proselytize and engage in apologetic arguments for your chosen brand of politics. Loyalty to the party is your currency, with which you buy self worth. You wager your precious time and exchange authentic self expression for politically constructed self expression. You become a programmed robot for a group of people who use you like a tool and care nothing for your existence, much less your support as long as there are enough useful idiots to vote for them when the time comes.
I challenge you to make a small tweak to your observation of American politics that will ultimately free you from giving your support to a structure that is not concerned with your best interests and not worthy of your unconditional support. You can even keep your two party paradigm. Just realize that there are two parties in the US, namely the elected, and the electorate. I dare you to reclaim your self determination. Quit being a fool for a power system that is designed to put you at the throats of your fellow American brothers and sisters. Look what it has gained us, the American people, just in this election. We have the two most polarizing and flawed candidates ever presented to the electorate. Don't blame the opposition. Blame yourself for participating in the system in such a way that you will accept a candidate like Hillary, overlook all of her flaws, keep your mouth shut, and even defend her against all comers with mudslinging attacks against imaginary opponents. Even if her campaign is paying you handsomely to troll and AstroTurf on her behalf, you deserve better than that. The same goes for Trump supporters. Trump's only advantage is that he hasn't had as much time "in the system" to rack up a litany of questionable acts, though he is catching up quickly with his propensity to piss people off when he opens his mouth.
Partisan politics make this country almost unlivable. There are innumerable party cheerleaders falling for carefully crafted wedge issues hook, line, and sinker. They buy into the party mindset and in doing so learn to hate Americans at the direction of their party leaders. Can't you see that the Machiavellian machinations of our political parties are focus-group-honed to appeal to your baser instincts? They exploit class, race, what they call wealth, sexuality, and thought to divide, and ultimately to conquer the electorate? Isn't it obvious by now that blind, devoted partisanship results in the elected dictating to their supporters in the electorate which Americans need to be watched closely, distrusted, and thwarted? The system is set up to find and exploit people who can't or won't cop to being used, who instead double down and tunnel farther into the party conditioning when challenged. Yes, that's what I said. You are being used to exploit yourself and the rest of America by a very small sect of people who do not have your or America's best interests at heart. And you love it. And it is what is killing America.
Drop the pom-poms, bro. It's obvious you can't see past them.
The mass daily shootings in the US are perpetrated by people who cannot be mentioned in connection with those terms. Please be very careful with your thoughts and words. Only mention mass shootings perpetrated by media approved individuals. Any attempt to cite facts that violate the narrative will result in your condemnation as a racist, a bigot, and a fool.
Tomorrow someone will kill someone and take their family hostage as slaves. Before, during, and after these vile crimes the perpetrator will proclaim, both in print and in voice, that they are committing murder and enslaving children in the name of the all powerful stealth_finger. Other people will read and hear about this and they will know that stealth_finger is a bad person, full of violence and hate, reprehensible in spirit and action, a man who brings death and destruction...someone who is the source and inspiration of murder and mayhem for all mankind.
But, stealth_finger has a long and established post history on/. in which he proclaims the sanctity of human life, love for mankind, freedom for all mankind, and strictly forbids wanton violence done in his name. Doesn't that count for something, you might ask? Doesn't it matter that he, stealth_finger, did not condone, participate, or even know about these actions? Isn't this the height of complete idiocy to attribute the criminal injustices committed by one person to another who had nothing to do with them?
The result? A gaggle of incredibly stupid morons would still blame you, stealth_finger, for the actions of someone else even though they are completely opposite of what you stand for and you had no knowledge they would be done in your name.
I am not sure if Powell was enriching himself or not. What the tone from both Hillary and Colin seems to indicate is the people in the state department, and specifically in the position of secretary of state, are quite concerned with keeping records and details of what they are actually doing while "serving" in office a secret from the American people.
There are innumerable lessons we can learn from our government's handling of what goes on behind closed doors. From the Pentagon Papers/Viet Nam and our government conspiring to start a war, to Snowden/warrant-less mass surveillance that contravened both Congress and the Constitution, and a thousand other things in between, the track record for secret actions by our government is abysmal. Transparency seems to be the only way to ensure that the people who are entrusted with a responsibility to uphold the law aren't blatantly breaking it in service of power grabs that undermine the very fabric of what America is and stands for.
And, as with any abuse of power, it will continue until we, the People, decide it needs to stop.
Way too funny! I just deconstructed your completely fraudulent method of argumentation and accusation, and what do you do? You double down and do it again, this time with gusto! Sure you turned it on its head by grouping yourself with "respectable human beings/people" instead of associating me with someone you think is deserving of ridicule, but its the same thing, bro.
Based on what you have written I am convinced that you need some serious mental health attention. "If you don't like the company you keep..." is a prime example. I made zero reference to the company I keep and my feelings about them. You invented that from your own bias, hatred and awkwardly misplaced self righteousness. It looks like you are so hungry to have someone to hate that you have no problem adding content from your own poisoned internal dialogue to what people actually say. That is a dangerous place to come from. To others it is indistinguishable from insanity.
Colin's attributed remarks are Irrelevant, as Hillary had already set up her server. Convenient, expedient politically, and whitewash for the ignorant self-misinformed cheerleaders. The rest of us know the reason for the server to exist, and it wasn't because Colin told her to do it. When data was destroyed without any arms length oversight and the one who destroyed the data claims that attorney client privilege covers the criteria for the destroyed data, you can rest assured the original intent for setting up the server was accomplished.
Any other conclusion defies logic, reason, facts, reality, Occam, and actions.
If you think I am a Trump supporter or a racist you obviously didn't read my post history, but that's not really a concern.
That you would use those terms with such abandon is telling. It is really indicative of the level of intelligence involved in the mud-slinging meta attacks that the younger generation tries to pass off as intellectual discourse (not to be left out, there are some older generation people that have learned to do this. Its even more pathetic when they do it as they should have learned better by now.) Namely, just call someone a racist and associate them with a public figure that is held in contempt by the majority of people in the particular forum you are speaking in and you don't even have to have a cogent argument. Which is for the best I guess, because I have a hard time believing that someone who resorts to this kind of behavior can get past their own stunted emotional responses to rationally consider their own opinions, much less those of someone else.
I implore you, learn to focus on the issues at hand instead of carrying around the equivalent of a sharpened stick to poke people with. You might learn that what you accuse people of, and are convinced they are a party to, is so far from the truth that you would be utterly embarrassed that you had made that accusation when you learn the facts.
We haven't changed our bodies or minds out for anything newer since then, so the fundamentals would still apply. When you have a shiny metallic ass to bite we can talk about progress in this area. Until then, the basic principles of "delicate meat sacks with opinions" will always apply. Progress will be measured in terms of who forgets this first and, as a result, dies at the hands of another less "progressive" person.
Well that and the fact that Arizona grew tired of the constant stream of illegal immigrants robbing, raping and killing their constituents. In an obviously misguided attempt to try to enforce immigration laws that our faithful supreme federal government would not they passed their own laws that would allow their local police departments to help control immigration.
The Federal Government sued them and won the right to go on not enforcing federal immigration laws which are currently on the books, thereby rendering Arizona helpless to defend its own borders. If that makes any damn sense at all...
I don't think it presumes a lack of free will. I think it presumes that a very small percentage of young people, in certain situations and with certain preconditioning, will tend toward activities that result in pregnancy. People can control themselves. Those young women that became pregnant, they controlled themselves in such a way that they became pregnant. Was that decision made easier by the stimulus they experienced? Well, it looks like in about 2-4% of them, the answer is yes.
One thing you need to remember is that you, and I, and everyone alive on this planet for that matter, comes from ancestors who all did one thing right, without fail, 100% of the time, each and every generation, going all the way back to the very first humans ever on this planet. That singular thing that every single one of your ancestors have in common? They procreated successfully and created offspring that procreated successfully.
Think about that for a moment and let's compare. What if every ancestor of a certain person from the beginning of human history was a murderer. How surprised would you be when that person committed a murder? Murder is, admittedly, a more complex behavior than sex so it is easy to argue that sex would be even more likely.
Also, it's not like there aren't tons of papers, experiments, and conjecture on the psycho-sexual motivations of humans. I have read that just about every human behavior has been related to or attributed to sexual drives by psychologist, psychiatrists, philosophers, and pundits. Everything from the drive to work and earn money and upwardly mobile social movement to speech patterns, vocabulary choice, and clothing. So it's not about whether or not people have free will, its about how people choose to use that free will, and how the world occurs to them when they make choices. Its about how people choose to have sex, when they will choose to have sex, and even why they choose to have sex.
I also seemed to notice a slippery slope in your writing that was coupled with a pejorative view of sex. If that is the case I fear we may have difficulty discussing this subject without knowing each other better. When discussing topics like sex there can be heavy filters and unspoken assumptions that lead to misunderstandings between people that are not aware of each others presuppositions. My goal in replying is not to say you are wrong, not is it to argue, but merely to say that any discussion of free will and sex needs to include the possibility that people will choose freely to have sex, and that those free choices are influenced by antecedents, stimuli, and experiences. It is true that acknowledging that people can control themselves is a good first step toward controlling that behavior. It is also just as important to realize what you are dealing with when considering human sexual activity. To deny that there are incredibly powerful underlying components to the human makeup that can be manipulated to increase the likelihood of procreation is shortsighted and leads to useless therapies like teaching abstinence, non-communication on sexual matters between children and parents, and ultimately sending children out into the world drastically under prepared and unsupported.
As humans we are, at our basest nature, violent sexual beings that don't always make choices that fit with the predominant behavior patterns we display to the world on a daily basis. Forgetting this leads to all sorts of problems. Like assuming that people will, with he proper training and teaching, decide to not rape an unconscious woman when she presents herself as such. I would love to live in a world where everyone could be taught proper self control and willpower, and would use those skills without fail. However, this is not the world we live in, and this is not who humans are. Drop a fully sedated and unconscious supermodel in front of 10000 young intoxicated men and regardless of how well you train them, some of them will rape her. Its not surprising, really. Remember those ancestors that I mentioned earlier, the ones that have been batting 1000 on the procreation front? Many of them were rapists, too.
Sounds plausible doesn't it? Show the young lady exactly what it is like to have a child, but without them having one. That should scare them into not wanting children, right?
However, when I read about this I thought "Aren't they risking priming and further activating all of the reproductive programming that women (and men) are subject to at that age?" I mean really, haven't we noticed yet that reproduction is a dirty trick that our biology plays on us? The drive to procreate is definitely not rational, in light of population pressure, economic well being, and lost opportunities swallowed up in the time it takes to raise young. But in spite of this it persists at a rate that is greater than necessary to sustain the species. What does that tell you? It tells me that reproductive motivations have root access to the wetware OS and are using that access to control the system subtly and pervasively.
Personally, I am surprised it isn't more effective at driving up pregnancy rates than it is.
So what you are saying is that I was correct initially when I stated I always thought it was going to be right-wing reactionaries, but somehow when I misinterpreted his statement and expanded my viewpoint to include both right and left wing reactionaries and generally anyone who places ideology above the sanctity of human life, all of a sudden I don't get it...
See you said: "It's going to be the right-wingers who kill you for threatening the environment."
I said: "Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars."
See, pretty similar. Also notice that I don't discount that idea, only add to it the possibility of another source of social breakdown. Yet somehow you declare I don't get it. Whatevs, man.
Personally, with all the "denier" talk, its the politically active environmentalists with language constriction as part of their policies that I really worry about. They sound like religious people, and we all know how dangerous and destabilizing they are.
Populace means the people living in an area. You added the connotation of "the rich" and erroneously so. Unless you define "wealth enough to own a firearm" as "the rich."
I saw his statement as the government/army, not the electorate. Your interpretation makes more sense as I read it, though it is hard to push that through the stereotype filter of typical parlance on this site. I mean really, did he just say "when all the hillbillies in flyover states start caring about the environment..."? Seems implausible to me.
As for an armed populace, I would prefer that all men are armed. The tyranny of government is the enemy. That criminals fear those they would prey on is also desirable. That an armed society is a polite society is a pleasant side effect.
Not to be a smart ass, but a "population reduction war" is, by virtue of the words placed in that order, a war fought to reduce population. It is, I posit, a logical conjecture about a hypothetical future war. It's not too difficult to foresee something like this. Combine the prime problem of exponentially growing population pressure with the exacerbating factors of dwindling resources, kin selection, religious friction, ideological conflicts between neighbors, and energy-dense technology proliferation and you have the perfect ingredients for a return to our species roots as genocidal monsters.
A war fought for territory, or for honor, religion, or for ideology would be completely different than a "population reduction war." A "population reduction war" would be a war fought specifically to reduce the population on the Earth. Whether this ultimate goal is know or hidden from the participants is irrelevant. In a population reduction war killing the enemy's armed forces is not done to force compliance, depose the government leaders, or to gain territory. Killing the enemy would not be a means to an end in a war like this. Killing the enemy is the end. And, as such, the means would be different than in other wars. Combatants would not be the main targets, they would be tactical obstacles between you and the strategic goals of large populations of civilians.
Well then that's all we need! We have provided our decedents with more knowledge in this generation than all of our cumulative generations previous to this one. Conserving any resources is irrelevant!
Thanks for proving my point, again lol!
Seriously though, Leary and Wilson call inherited knowledge you are referring to the "time-binding semantic circuit" of human consciousness. It is an inalienable trait of being a human. Making a societal decision for conservation of resources for future generations is totally different than the automatic accumulation of human knowledge as a by product of language using monkeys playing with tools. It is even father afield from the results of reproductive pressures expressed in future generations that you refer to.
There really is no way to compare them. Its like comparing geology and satellites. Their Venn diagrams aren't even on the same plane.
Goes well with the old adage, "necessity is the mother of invention." Force our future generations into devising increasingly ingenious ways of staying ahead of the extinction curve. No one handed our distant Paleolithic ancestors a leg up, same goes for every generation since. This attitude served us well up to this point, in that we aren't dead yet..
Also goes along well with the "intelligence implies belligerence" adage, though as a cause of the intelligence. A harsher environment will lead to greater intelligence, which will, in turn, reinforce the behavior of molding our environment to our wishes. (Intentional digression) at a certain point I think that deliberate adaptation of our environment will reach a place of diminishing returns. Somewhere along that asymptotic curve it will become more cost and energy effective to deliberately modify the human element of the survival equation.
Not supporting his position per se. Just exploring the taste of that mind filter out loud here. What would I use as rationalization and ancillary support if I were to adopt that thought as valid. As always, even the most ludicrous shit can be justified through human "reasoning" and "logic."
Another argument is that sooner or later the men with guns are going to realize that the environment has to be protected. And then they will find that you muck up the numbers, and will have to be removed from the equation in order to make them come out correctly. Buh-bye!
Yikes! That's a wake up call right there. Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars. Just goes to show that any authoritarian agents with power-centric ideologies they value above the sanctity of human life are dangerous as fuck.
This. Soooo much this. And, if you squint hard enough most of the pejorative monikers for one candidate can be interchanged with at least one or two others.
Makes me want a shorter election cycle for president with a corresponding shorter term. Flush the system quicker, limit the damage, burn through the current chaff and get some damn wheat. Only problem is the people we elect to the "feeder" offices (like governor, etc) are just as tainted and tarnished as the crop of whackjobs we fielded this time. And if Trump is indicative in the slightest of our private sector offerings for the position of POTUS our American experiment is well and truly over.
The worst part is that there are so many die-hard fans of these imbeciles. Watching large swaths of the electorate fawn over these incredibly flawed humans has somehow further degraded my already rock bottom apprehension of the American public. It seems the worse the candidate the more the people voting for them have to overcompensate with fervor and gusto for their candidate du jour. Its sickening to observe.
I hate being resigned and cynical, its so gauche. Seems the only other options are to revel in the embarrassing spectacle that is the American political system, or actively contribute to its downfall. With the latter I used to think that armed uprising was the only way to bring down this country. Now it looks like pulling a voting lever will do the job quite thoroughly. You don't even have to worry about messing it up, any one will do.
Agreed on all fronts, with the exception of it being a "deal" to turn off international call access.
Most cell companies will turn off/on international calling access at the customer's request. In fact, I recall one of my associates had to have their international service turned on by T-mobile when we traveled to Mexico for a business trip. This was subsequent to the experience I related in the previous post. Boy did I have a nice rant about that. Kind of lost my shit in the hotel bar for a few.
I surmise that turning off international calling is a simple customer service request, provided you already have existing service. My guess is that in all the hurry to take my money they dropped the ball. Or, maybe the service was initially turned off but was reinstated when I switched phones, renewed my plan, etc.
Lastly, I will relate a quote from a friend of mine which describes the nature and culture of cell phone carriers. He worked in Canada for a major cell company at the time:
I knew it was time for me to look for a new job when I told a customer "I don't see what your son's leukemia has to do with you not paying your cell phone bill."
It was years ago when I signed up for T-mobile. They described my plan and said it included, among other things, international calling. I told them specifically "I don't need, nor will I ever use international calling. Remove that and I will sign up for your service." They said "no problem!" and I got their phone service.
Fast forward 4 years and my phone was stolen. I was having a great time that weekend at the downtown high-rise apartment of an amazingly generous and affluent acquaintance with quite a few other friends and acquaintances. Being preoccupied I did not notice the phone was missing for 2 days. Once I returned home and realized it was well and truly gone I contacted T-mobile. The conversation went like this.
Me: "Hi my phone was stolen."
T-mobile: "I see. Looks like you ran up over $900 in calls to Guatemala and Honduras over the weekend."
Me: "How can that be? I told you when I signed up for service that I would only sign up if you disabled international calling."
T-mobile: "Hmmm. Let me check. Oh, I see it here in the notes. Let me get you with a supervisor that can help you with that."
T-mobile supervisor: "Hello, since you have been a good customer we are graciously offering to discount your international calls you made by $50 if you pay in full over the phone right now."
Me: "Your associate just confirmed that I requested international calling turned off on my phone as a condition of purchasing your service, how are there international calls made on my phone and how am I responsible for that?"
T-mobile supervisor: "Your records do not show that. I can accept your credit card."
me: "...."
On subsequent calls with them they called my wife a liar. They called me a liar. They accused me of giving the phone to someone else to use, charging that person cash, and then attempting to refute the charges. They were rude, intentionally offensive, and intentionally provocative. In retrospect, I realize they did everything they could to keep me off balance and upset.
I was young and stupid and didn't contact a lawyer, go to small claims court, etc. I just didn't pay them anything, ever and considered strongly the use of fire to extract recompense for my time and frustration. Were this to happen to me today I would have someone's ass, it would be posted on the Consumerist instantly, there would be recorded conversations of them doing this, and they would be looking at a lawsuit.
TL;DR: My recommendation, no matter what they offer you, don't ever enter into a contract with T-mobile and never use them for anything more than a place to store rancid feces.
My grandfather was a racist by some metrics: he used the "N" word on occasion, he had a country accent, he told the occasional off color joke about race or foreigners, he was from the deep South. And, of course, he was white, the most damning of traits to some.
He also told all of his grandchildren that if our government forced intermarrying between races our country would be drastically better off in three generations. He encouraged us to take matters into our own hands on this front.
Sometimes I envision a day when the people of the US have through reproduction thoroughly eradicated the gross physical traits that humans identify as race. I like to imagine what our world would look like without race as a dividing factor. When no one is claiming harm to their ancestors, when no one is feeling guilty about what their ancestors did, because they all share the same ancestors. What would that open up as a possibility?
Call him a racist if you want, but grandpa was a conscientious and intelligent old racist.
Slashdot Mirror
Your worldview is seriously compromising your ability to think properly. I am not a Trump supporter. Between you and I, the only person exercising vivid fantasies about the situation is you.
In fact, I am on your side, though you don't know it and probably couldn't disengage yourself from the political paradigm you are addicted to long enough to make a rational decision one way or another. From your post you obviously see the political spectrum in the indoctrinated form of a two party system. You will defend your chosen party, even sacrificing reason, logic, and your own integrity to do so. You see the threat of "the other party" as so immense that you will do anything, and even worse feel justified in doing anything, to make sure they don't get power. You will also shamelessly proselytize and engage in apologetic arguments for your chosen brand of politics. Loyalty to the party is your currency, with which you buy self worth. You wager your precious time and exchange authentic self expression for politically constructed self expression. You become a programmed robot for a group of people who use you like a tool and care nothing for your existence, much less your support as long as there are enough useful idiots to vote for them when the time comes.
I challenge you to make a small tweak to your observation of American politics that will ultimately free you from giving your support to a structure that is not concerned with your best interests and not worthy of your unconditional support. You can even keep your two party paradigm. Just realize that there are two parties in the US, namely the elected, and the electorate. I dare you to reclaim your self determination. Quit being a fool for a power system that is designed to put you at the throats of your fellow American brothers and sisters. Look what it has gained us, the American people, just in this election. We have the two most polarizing and flawed candidates ever presented to the electorate. Don't blame the opposition. Blame yourself for participating in the system in such a way that you will accept a candidate like Hillary, overlook all of her flaws, keep your mouth shut, and even defend her against all comers with mudslinging attacks against imaginary opponents. Even if her campaign is paying you handsomely to troll and AstroTurf on her behalf, you deserve better than that. The same goes for Trump supporters. Trump's only advantage is that he hasn't had as much time "in the system" to rack up a litany of questionable acts, though he is catching up quickly with his propensity to piss people off when he opens his mouth.
Partisan politics make this country almost unlivable. There are innumerable party cheerleaders falling for carefully crafted wedge issues hook, line, and sinker. They buy into the party mindset and in doing so learn to hate Americans at the direction of their party leaders. Can't you see that the Machiavellian machinations of our political parties are focus-group-honed to appeal to your baser instincts? They exploit class, race, what they call wealth, sexuality, and thought to divide, and ultimately to conquer the electorate? Isn't it obvious by now that blind, devoted partisanship results in the elected dictating to their supporters in the electorate which Americans need to be watched closely, distrusted, and thwarted? The system is set up to find and exploit people who can't or won't cop to being used, who instead double down and tunnel farther into the party conditioning when challenged. Yes, that's what I said. You are being used to exploit yourself and the rest of America by a very small sect of people who do not have your or America's best interests at heart. And you love it. And it is what is killing America.
Drop the pom-poms, bro. It's obvious you can't see past them.
The mass daily shootings in the US are perpetrated by people who cannot be mentioned in connection with those terms. Please be very careful with your thoughts and words. Only mention mass shootings perpetrated by media approved individuals. Any attempt to cite facts that violate the narrative will result in your condemnation as a racist, a bigot, and a fool.
If you did that, I would say you would be the first to do so.
Consider this line of conjecture:
Tomorrow someone will kill someone and take their family hostage as slaves. Before, during, and after these vile crimes the perpetrator will proclaim, both in print and in voice, that they are committing murder and enslaving children in the name of the all powerful stealth_finger. Other people will read and hear about this and they will know that stealth_finger is a bad person, full of violence and hate, reprehensible in spirit and action, a man who brings death and destruction...someone who is the source and inspiration of murder and mayhem for all mankind.
But, stealth_finger has a long and established post history on /. in which he proclaims the sanctity of human life, love for mankind, freedom for all mankind, and strictly forbids wanton violence done in his name. Doesn't that count for something, you might ask? Doesn't it matter that he, stealth_finger, did not condone, participate, or even know about these actions? Isn't this the height of complete idiocy to attribute the criminal injustices committed by one person to another who had nothing to do with them?
The result? A gaggle of incredibly stupid morons would still blame you, stealth_finger, for the actions of someone else even though they are completely opposite of what you stand for and you had no knowledge they would be done in your name.
I am not sure if Powell was enriching himself or not. What the tone from both Hillary and Colin seems to indicate is the people in the state department, and specifically in the position of secretary of state, are quite concerned with keeping records and details of what they are actually doing while "serving" in office a secret from the American people.
There are innumerable lessons we can learn from our government's handling of what goes on behind closed doors. From the Pentagon Papers/Viet Nam and our government conspiring to start a war, to Snowden/warrant-less mass surveillance that contravened both Congress and the Constitution, and a thousand other things in between, the track record for secret actions by our government is abysmal. Transparency seems to be the only way to ensure that the people who are entrusted with a responsibility to uphold the law aren't blatantly breaking it in service of power grabs that undermine the very fabric of what America is and stands for.
And, as with any abuse of power, it will continue until we, the People, decide it needs to stop.
Way too funny! I just deconstructed your completely fraudulent method of argumentation and accusation, and what do you do? You double down and do it again, this time with gusto! Sure you turned it on its head by grouping yourself with "respectable human beings/people" instead of associating me with someone you think is deserving of ridicule, but its the same thing, bro.
Based on what you have written I am convinced that you need some serious mental health attention. "If you don't like the company you keep..." is a prime example. I made zero reference to the company I keep and my feelings about them. You invented that from your own bias, hatred and awkwardly misplaced self righteousness. It looks like you are so hungry to have someone to hate that you have no problem adding content from your own poisoned internal dialogue to what people actually say. That is a dangerous place to come from. To others it is indistinguishable from insanity.
Colin's attributed remarks are Irrelevant, as Hillary had already set up her server. Convenient, expedient politically, and whitewash for the ignorant self-misinformed cheerleaders. The rest of us know the reason for the server to exist, and it wasn't because Colin told her to do it. When data was destroyed without any arms length oversight and the one who destroyed the data claims that attorney client privilege covers the criteria for the destroyed data, you can rest assured the original intent for setting up the server was accomplished.
Any other conclusion defies logic, reason, facts, reality, Occam, and actions.
If you think I am a Trump supporter or a racist you obviously didn't read my post history, but that's not really a concern.
That you would use those terms with such abandon is telling. It is really indicative of the level of intelligence involved in the mud-slinging meta attacks that the younger generation tries to pass off as intellectual discourse (not to be left out, there are some older generation people that have learned to do this. Its even more pathetic when they do it as they should have learned better by now.) Namely, just call someone a racist and associate them with a public figure that is held in contempt by the majority of people in the particular forum you are speaking in and you don't even have to have a cogent argument. Which is for the best I guess, because I have a hard time believing that someone who resorts to this kind of behavior can get past their own stunted emotional responses to rationally consider their own opinions, much less those of someone else.
I implore you, learn to focus on the issues at hand instead of carrying around the equivalent of a sharpened stick to poke people with. You might learn that what you accuse people of, and are convinced they are a party to, is so far from the truth that you would be utterly embarrassed that you had made that accusation when you learn the facts.
You seem intelligent and reasonable. Would you do what the drone operators in the article are accused of doing?
We haven't changed our bodies or minds out for anything newer since then, so the fundamentals would still apply. When you have a shiny metallic ass to bite we can talk about progress in this area. Until then, the basic principles of "delicate meat sacks with opinions" will always apply. Progress will be measured in terms of who forgets this first and, as a result, dies at the hands of another less "progressive" person.
Self and other defense, judicial punishment, war. These are the justifiable reasons for homicide in the Bible.
Well that and the fact that Arizona grew tired of the constant stream of illegal immigrants robbing, raping and killing their constituents. In an obviously misguided attempt to try to enforce immigration laws that our faithful supreme federal government would not they passed their own laws that would allow their local police departments to help control immigration.
The Federal Government sued them and won the right to go on not enforcing federal immigration laws which are currently on the books, thereby rendering Arizona helpless to defend its own borders. If that makes any damn sense at all...
I don't think it presumes a lack of free will. I think it presumes that a very small percentage of young people, in certain situations and with certain preconditioning, will tend toward activities that result in pregnancy. People can control themselves. Those young women that became pregnant, they controlled themselves in such a way that they became pregnant. Was that decision made easier by the stimulus they experienced? Well, it looks like in about 2-4% of them, the answer is yes.
One thing you need to remember is that you, and I, and everyone alive on this planet for that matter, comes from ancestors who all did one thing right, without fail, 100% of the time, each and every generation, going all the way back to the very first humans ever on this planet. That singular thing that every single one of your ancestors have in common? They procreated successfully and created offspring that procreated successfully.
Think about that for a moment and let's compare. What if every ancestor of a certain person from the beginning of human history was a murderer. How surprised would you be when that person committed a murder? Murder is, admittedly, a more complex behavior than sex so it is easy to argue that sex would be even more likely.
Also, it's not like there aren't tons of papers, experiments, and conjecture on the psycho-sexual motivations of humans. I have read that just about every human behavior has been related to or attributed to sexual drives by psychologist, psychiatrists, philosophers, and pundits. Everything from the drive to work and earn money and upwardly mobile social movement to speech patterns, vocabulary choice, and clothing. So it's not about whether or not people have free will, its about how people choose to use that free will, and how the world occurs to them when they make choices. Its about how people choose to have sex, when they will choose to have sex, and even why they choose to have sex.
I also seemed to notice a slippery slope in your writing that was coupled with a pejorative view of sex. If that is the case I fear we may have difficulty discussing this subject without knowing each other better. When discussing topics like sex there can be heavy filters and unspoken assumptions that lead to misunderstandings between people that are not aware of each others presuppositions. My goal in replying is not to say you are wrong, not is it to argue, but merely to say that any discussion of free will and sex needs to include the possibility that people will choose freely to have sex, and that those free choices are influenced by antecedents, stimuli, and experiences. It is true that acknowledging that people can control themselves is a good first step toward controlling that behavior. It is also just as important to realize what you are dealing with when considering human sexual activity. To deny that there are incredibly powerful underlying components to the human makeup that can be manipulated to increase the likelihood of procreation is shortsighted and leads to useless therapies like teaching abstinence, non-communication on sexual matters between children and parents, and ultimately sending children out into the world drastically under prepared and unsupported.
As humans we are, at our basest nature, violent sexual beings that don't always make choices that fit with the predominant behavior patterns we display to the world on a daily basis. Forgetting this leads to all sorts of problems. Like assuming that people will, with he proper training and teaching, decide to not rape an unconscious woman when she presents herself as such. I would love to live in a world where everyone could be taught proper self control and willpower, and would use those skills without fail. However, this is not the world we live in, and this is not who humans are. Drop a fully sedated and unconscious supermodel in front of 10000 young intoxicated men and regardless of how well you train them, some of them will rape her. Its not surprising, really. Remember those ancestors that I mentioned earlier, the ones that have been batting 1000 on the procreation front? Many of them were rapists, too.
Sounds plausible doesn't it? Show the young lady exactly what it is like to have a child, but without them having one. That should scare them into not wanting children, right?
However, when I read about this I thought "Aren't they risking priming and further activating all of the reproductive programming that women (and men) are subject to at that age?" I mean really, haven't we noticed yet that reproduction is a dirty trick that our biology plays on us? The drive to procreate is definitely not rational, in light of population pressure, economic well being, and lost opportunities swallowed up in the time it takes to raise young. But in spite of this it persists at a rate that is greater than necessary to sustain the species. What does that tell you? It tells me that reproductive motivations have root access to the wetware OS and are using that access to control the system subtly and pervasively.
Personally, I am surprised it isn't more effective at driving up pregnancy rates than it is.
So what you are saying is that I was correct initially when I stated I always thought it was going to be right-wing reactionaries, but somehow when I misinterpreted his statement and expanded my viewpoint to include both right and left wing reactionaries and generally anyone who places ideology above the sanctity of human life, all of a sudden I don't get it...
See you said: "It's going to be the right-wingers who kill you for threatening the environment."
I said: "Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars."
See, pretty similar. Also notice that I don't discount that idea, only add to it the possibility of another source of social breakdown. Yet somehow you declare I don't get it. Whatevs, man.
Personally, with all the "denier" talk, its the politically active environmentalists with language constriction as part of their policies that I really worry about. They sound like religious people, and we all know how dangerous and destabilizing they are.
Populace means the people living in an area. You added the connotation of "the rich" and erroneously so. Unless you define "wealth enough to own a firearm" as "the rich."
I saw his statement as the government/army, not the electorate. Your interpretation makes more sense as I read it, though it is hard to push that through the stereotype filter of typical parlance on this site. I mean really, did he just say "when all the hillbillies in flyover states start caring about the environment..."? Seems implausible to me.
As for an armed populace, I would prefer that all men are armed. The tyranny of government is the enemy. That criminals fear those they would prey on is also desirable. That an armed society is a polite society is a pleasant side effect.
Not to be a smart ass, but a "population reduction war" is, by virtue of the words placed in that order, a war fought to reduce population. It is, I posit, a logical conjecture about a hypothetical future war. It's not too difficult to foresee something like this. Combine the prime problem of exponentially growing population pressure with the exacerbating factors of dwindling resources, kin selection, religious friction, ideological conflicts between neighbors, and energy-dense technology proliferation and you have the perfect ingredients for a return to our species roots as genocidal monsters.
A war fought for territory, or for honor, religion, or for ideology would be completely different than a "population reduction war." A "population reduction war" would be a war fought specifically to reduce the population on the Earth. Whether this ultimate goal is know or hidden from the participants is irrelevant. In a population reduction war killing the enemy's armed forces is not done to force compliance, depose the government leaders, or to gain territory. Killing the enemy would not be a means to an end in a war like this. Killing the enemy is the end. And, as such, the means would be different than in other wars. Combatants would not be the main targets, they would be tactical obstacles between you and the strategic goals of large populations of civilians.
Well then that's all we need! We have provided our decedents with more knowledge in this generation than all of our cumulative generations previous to this one. Conserving any resources is irrelevant!
Thanks for proving my point, again lol!
Seriously though, Leary and Wilson call inherited knowledge you are referring to the "time-binding semantic circuit" of human consciousness. It is an inalienable trait of being a human. Making a societal decision for conservation of resources for future generations is totally different than the automatic accumulation of human knowledge as a by product of language using monkeys playing with tools. It is even father afield from the results of reproductive pressures expressed in future generations that you refer to.
There really is no way to compare them. Its like comparing geology and satellites. Their Venn diagrams aren't even on the same plane.
Goes well with the old adage, "necessity is the mother of invention." Force our future generations into devising increasingly ingenious ways of staying ahead of the extinction curve. No one handed our distant Paleolithic ancestors a leg up, same goes for every generation since. This attitude served us well up to this point, in that we aren't dead yet..
Also goes along well with the "intelligence implies belligerence" adage, though as a cause of the intelligence. A harsher environment will lead to greater intelligence, which will, in turn, reinforce the behavior of molding our environment to our wishes. (Intentional digression) at a certain point I think that deliberate adaptation of our environment will reach a place of diminishing returns. Somewhere along that asymptotic curve it will become more cost and energy effective to deliberately modify the human element of the survival equation.
Not supporting his position per se. Just exploring the taste of that mind filter out loud here. What would I use as rationalization and ancillary support if I were to adopt that thought as valid. As always, even the most ludicrous shit can be justified through human "reasoning" and "logic."
Another argument is that sooner or later the men with guns are going to realize that the environment has to be protected. And then they will find that you muck up the numbers, and will have to be removed from the equation in order to make them come out correctly. Buh-bye!
Yikes! That's a wake up call right there. Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars. Just goes to show that any authoritarian agents with power-centric ideologies they value above the sanctity of human life are dangerous as fuck.
And yet another reason for an armed populace.
This. Soooo much this. And, if you squint hard enough most of the pejorative monikers for one candidate can be interchanged with at least one or two others.
Makes me want a shorter election cycle for president with a corresponding shorter term. Flush the system quicker, limit the damage, burn through the current chaff and get some damn wheat. Only problem is the people we elect to the "feeder" offices (like governor, etc) are just as tainted and tarnished as the crop of whackjobs we fielded this time. And if Trump is indicative in the slightest of our private sector offerings for the position of POTUS our American experiment is well and truly over.
The worst part is that there are so many die-hard fans of these imbeciles. Watching large swaths of the electorate fawn over these incredibly flawed humans has somehow further degraded my already rock bottom apprehension of the American public. It seems the worse the candidate the more the people voting for them have to overcompensate with fervor and gusto for their candidate du jour. Its sickening to observe.
I hate being resigned and cynical, its so gauche. Seems the only other options are to revel in the embarrassing spectacle that is the American political system, or actively contribute to its downfall. With the latter I used to think that armed uprising was the only way to bring down this country. Now it looks like pulling a voting lever will do the job quite thoroughly. You don't even have to worry about messing it up, any one will do.
Dammit that's the combination to my luggage!
Agreed on all fronts, with the exception of it being a "deal" to turn off international call access.
Most cell companies will turn off/on international calling access at the customer's request. In fact, I recall one of my associates had to have their international service turned on by T-mobile when we traveled to Mexico for a business trip. This was subsequent to the experience I related in the previous post. Boy did I have a nice rant about that. Kind of lost my shit in the hotel bar for a few.
I surmise that turning off international calling is a simple customer service request, provided you already have existing service. My guess is that in all the hurry to take my money they dropped the ball. Or, maybe the service was initially turned off but was reinstated when I switched phones, renewed my plan, etc.
Lastly, I will relate a quote from a friend of mine which describes the nature and culture of cell phone carriers. He worked in Canada for a major cell company at the time:
I knew it was time for me to look for a new job when I told a customer "I don't see what your son's leukemia has to do with you not paying your cell phone bill."
It was years ago when I signed up for T-mobile. They described my plan and said it included, among other things, international calling. I told them specifically "I don't need, nor will I ever use international calling. Remove that and I will sign up for your service." They said "no problem!" and I got their phone service.
Fast forward 4 years and my phone was stolen. I was having a great time that weekend at the downtown high-rise apartment of an amazingly generous and affluent acquaintance with quite a few other friends and acquaintances. Being preoccupied I did not notice the phone was missing for 2 days. Once I returned home and realized it was well and truly gone I contacted T-mobile. The conversation went like this.
Me: "Hi my phone was stolen."
T-mobile: "I see. Looks like you ran up over $900 in calls to Guatemala and Honduras over the weekend."
Me: "How can that be? I told you when I signed up for service that I would only sign up if you disabled international calling."
T-mobile: "Hmmm. Let me check. Oh, I see it here in the notes. Let me get you with a supervisor that can help you with that."
T-mobile supervisor: "Hello, since you have been a good customer we are graciously offering to discount your international calls you made by $50 if you pay in full over the phone right now."
Me: "Your associate just confirmed that I requested international calling turned off on my phone as a condition of purchasing your service, how are there international calls made on my phone and how am I responsible for that?"
T-mobile supervisor: "Your records do not show that. I can accept your credit card."
me: "...."
On subsequent calls with them they called my wife a liar. They called me a liar. They accused me of giving the phone to someone else to use, charging that person cash, and then attempting to refute the charges. They were rude, intentionally offensive, and intentionally provocative. In retrospect, I realize they did everything they could to keep me off balance and upset.
I was young and stupid and didn't contact a lawyer, go to small claims court, etc. I just didn't pay them anything, ever and considered strongly the use of fire to extract recompense for my time and frustration. Were this to happen to me today I would have someone's ass, it would be posted on the Consumerist instantly, there would be recorded conversations of them doing this, and they would be looking at a lawsuit.
TL;DR: My recommendation, no matter what they offer you, don't ever enter into a contract with T-mobile and never use them for anything more than a place to store rancid feces.
My grandfather was a racist by some metrics: he used the "N" word on occasion, he had a country accent, he told the occasional off color joke about race or foreigners, he was from the deep South. And, of course, he was white, the most damning of traits to some.
He also told all of his grandchildren that if our government forced intermarrying between races our country would be drastically better off in three generations. He encouraged us to take matters into our own hands on this front.
Sometimes I envision a day when the people of the US have through reproduction thoroughly eradicated the gross physical traits that humans identify as race. I like to imagine what our world would look like without race as a dividing factor. When no one is claiming harm to their ancestors, when no one is feeling guilty about what their ancestors did, because they all share the same ancestors. What would that open up as a possibility?
Call him a racist if you want, but grandpa was a conscientious and intelligent old racist.