If you read the posts that precede my post, you will see that I'm not parroting or over-simplifying. Their views are overly simplistic.
You have not said anything that contradicts the main point of what I said. So I suggest you go back and reread what I wrote. You are reading something into the post that I did not put there. This "misinterpretation" on your part "proves" my point that people just don't put in the time and effort necessary to understand what is being said.
A couple of clarifications might help. We apparently have different interpretations of subjective and, presumably, objective. When you say, "'Interpretation is very subjective' is proven by your misinterpreting", I'm not sure whether you mean by subjective that two people can have different interpretations or that the possibiliy of error make something subjective. In either case you are wrong. Two people can have different interpretations because they have different grounds upon which they make an interpretation. So there is nothing essentially subjective about it, other than the fact that it is done by a "subject". As to the possibility of error, an interpretation can be correct but false, that is it follows all appropriate formal rules and is objectively correct but ends up being wrong. It happens all the time. The possibility of error is not essential to subjectivity or objectivity.
My analogy between art and a person was meant to indicate the ethical responsiblity we have to an artist at least to attempt to understand what he is trying to convey. Of course, it may be that he or she is not trying to convey anything. It was not meant to indicate that we don't misunderstand each other in conversations.
One point where we do disagree is on the possibility or impossibility of arriving at an author's intention. I don't have the time or inclination to argue my point. It would need to be a monograph. We'll have to agree to disagree.
You seem to think I'm harkening back to a "scientific" approach to literary interpretation that began back in the nineteenth with philology and continued into the early twentieth century as "linguistics". The over-riding belief was that a certain method could be followed that would produce an objective result. Anything considered objective was also considered true, a rather bad interpretation of objective, but there you have it. This is not what I'm advocating.
I am advocating a scientific/evidence based approach, but one that is defined by falsifiability, rather than formal rules that could be applied to a text to produce the author's intention which would then be assumed to be the only proper interpretation.
You know the "hilarious" thing about your response is that you do to my post exactly what you accuse me of doing to the other people's posts, that is grossly simplifying and caricaturing my position. You'd be surprised how often that happens. It's an obnoxious tendency that most people are not even aware that they do. You might want to keep an eye open for it in the future when you try to "flame" someone else.
I was tempted not to even bother responding, but your misinterpretations of subjectivity and consequently objectivity are so common that I felt I needed to say something about it even if nobody else besides you reads it. You should read some philosophy, especially something written after, say, 1930.
I've just read a lot of replies to this message saying "interpretation is very subjective" and "it doesn't matter what the author intended". Bullshit. Think of the work of art as a "person" trying to communicate. Now, would you say that in a conversation with a person that your interpretation is very subjective or that it doesn't matter what the author was trying to say? Only if you're a solipsist.
Art is more ambiguous than a conversation, mostly because we don't have the cues and context that we would need to disambiguate it, but that doesn't mean that the meaning can be whatever the viewer wants it to be. We can usually discern the author's intention, with a lot of hard work. Do we know for sure? Of course not. Is the author's intention or meaning the best interpretation of the work? Not necessarily. Maybe or maybe not. But it makes sense to try to figure it out. It's only courteous.
In any case an interpretation has to be based on the work. It can't be just any old thing that pops into your head. There are better and worse interpretations, too. People who utter meaningless pseudo-intellectual statements like "it is totally subjective" or "the author's intention doesn't matter" usually do not want to do the hardwork to actually understand the art and that's fine, but don't trivialize the hard work of artists and those who put the hard work into trying to understand art.
I should say that this is the norm. There are exceptions that play off of this norm. Works that are so ambiguous and so slapdash that they are utterly ambiguous and they were trivial for the artist to create, but the power of these works comes from the fact that they are playing against a millenia old tradition.
People who trivialize interpretation by turning it into solipsism are just as bad as those "yes-sayers" that agree to every interpretation someone else proposes.
it would be a mediocre McMagic movie, as a representation of Earthsea it is a travesty. This is exactly what sucks about Hollywood. At least they tried to do it right with Dune. This movie just plain sucks. The only good that can come of it is that more people will read Earthsea and learn what a good story really is. I can't believe sci-fi thinks that their viewers have not read Earthsea. We should send them letters that indicate otherwise.
Where is the critical interpretation? Pro's and con's?
FTC is not able to judge false advertisin for tech
on
Truth in Advertising?
·
· Score: 1
The FTC would have to understand technology to bring a claim of false advertising. I tend to doubt that anyone there does. The only way tech companies will change is if individuals' bring law suits. "To establish a violation under the Lanham Act, consumers and competitors must prove the following: (1) the advertiser made false statements of fact about its product; (2) the false advertisements actually deceived or had the capacity to deceive a substantial segment of the target population; (3) the deception was material; (4) the falsely advertised product was sold in interstate commerce; and (5) the party bringing the lawsuit (known as the "plaintiff") was injured as a result of the deception."
The whole tone of the piece is dismissive from the beginning. He's clearly defending entrenched interests. That said, he has some points. Good editing would reveal internal inconsistencies. A well written article would also make one aware of contraversial points, etc. Clearly these are editorial values that Britannica adds. Is this value worth a thousand dollars? Not for me.
It should be clear though that Britannica's only value is editorial. There are very few subject matter experts at Britannica. They hire subject matter experts from outside of the company to write the entries. Those people they hire are those regarded by their peers as experts. None of this guarantees any kind of accuracy. In fact, it can result in highly "subjective" responses.
At the end of the article he smugly mentions that some of the entries in the Wikipedia are of the same quality as a paper that would get a "C" in high school. That may be true, but any high school student who uses an encyclopedia, let's say Britannica, as his only source should also get a "C" or worse.
Encyclopedia's can be a good place to begin researching, but multiple primary sources or first order evidence are essential for good research. So, from that perspective the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica seem to be on even ground. If this is is the case, then we must ask whether this additional effort on the part of Britannica is of any value to anyone other than a grammar school student.
I don't think anyone doubts that Britannica will be more more correct than the Wikipedia (note: that doesn't necessarily mean more true), but the question is whether that this correctness is of any value. On the other hand, Wikipedia may need to adopt a more restricted method of submission or emendation in order to keep people properly motivated. It also doesn't help that the person advocating for EB is condescending, dismissive, and smug. I suppose he can afford to be as it won't be him who is put out of a job by the Wikipedia.
Now this is depressing. Most of the responses I have seen so far have said: "So what? That's the way it is. Get used to it. If you don't like it, leave." Not only have most people not been bothered they give the impression that this person should stop looking for special treatment and just shut up and be grateful to have a job. No wonder EA can get away with this crap. Do you really have such low expactations? Are you really so pessimistic about our ability to change the practices of big business? If so, then the corporations have won. If everyone is resigned to letting big government and big business do whatever we want, then we might as well give up the hope of being individuals.
Ok, so, you called me clueless because I was referring to soldiers and you knew I was referring to soldiers? All you had to do was say, "No, I was referring to everyone. And these are the totals for everyone:". Of course civilians count but I thought you were referring to soldiers because you said "dead bodies of brave French, British, Canadian, Polish, Russian, etc soldiers". Anyhow, I'm not sure how giving me the stats for the total dead is supposed to make me "re-think everything [I] "know"" when I was referring to something entirely different. Of course civilian deaths matter. Members of my grandmother's family in Poland were killed, as I'm sure many other people's family members were as well. I am sorry you can't recognize the difference between reasoned argument and being clueless, but that's common with bigots.
The number of casualties I was referring to was the casualties for soldiers. The numbers you are showing are for everyone, which would be obvious if you bothered to check, but I'm sure you were just happy to assume I had no clue what I was talking about. Yes, it is a huge blackmark and not one of our finer moments.
Well, if you can put your prejudices and cynicism on hold for a second and reread what I wrote, you will see that I already acknowledged that one of the reasons for the buildup was to make money as well as ensure the security of America against communist expansion. The other reason was that the European governments were happy to let the Americans pay the bill for protecting the OECD while they took the money that would be spent on defense and spent it on social programs. There is a lot of value in these social programs, not the least of which is stability, but there was a price to Europe and the American people for Europeans not taking responsibility for their own defense. Europe woke up one day, looked out the window, and realized that the United States was now more powerful than all European countries combined and there was no longer a balance of power. Many poor Americans meanwhile were denied basic social programs in order to line the pockets of what became the middle class/upper class and for European governments to provide social programs for their people. The social drawinist rationalizations for not having social programs came a long time after the buildup began, long after it was already a fact.
"The only reason the States had to prop up Europe after WWII is because they sat back and PROFITEERED off the dead bodies of brave French, British, Canadian, Polish, Russian, etc soldiers and only entered the war when attacked, suffered almost zero infastructure losses and a small fraction of deaths.. no wonder they emerged ahead of everyone else."
Can you save the melodrama, please? There were legitimate political reasons that the United States couldn't get involved until it was attacked. FDR wanted to get involved as soon as possible, but had to nudge the electorate into accepting the inevitable. Until then the United States provided valuable supplies to England. England would have fallen as quickly as France without them. Many American merchant marines died during these supply missions. To reduce their sacrifice to "profiteering" is insulting and petty. Incidentally, the United States suffered it's fair share of casualties, more than any European country except maybe Hungry. Russia suffered 8,000,000 and China ~2,000,000.
"Military spending (2003): 1 United States $ 370,700,000,000 2 China $ 60,000,000,000 3 France $ 45,238,100,000 4 United Kingdom$ 42,836,500,000 5 Japan $ 42,488,100,000 6 Germany $ 35,063,000,000"
Yes, now, they are spending money, but NATO still relies heavily on the United States for logistics as well as other types of combat support and Japan does not have a Navy comparable to China's. France and Germany are aware of the situation as are the British, but it will take time to develop a European defense program and there is significant opposition to military spending because social programs will have be cut. However all of this is too late as the United States can pretty much do whatever it wants militarily, except, apparently, put down an insurgency, and the "military industrial complex" is firmly entrenched in America and the dominance of big business is only getting worse.
I am not the one who needs to separate propaganda from history. I can see that history is complicated and that simple-minded interpretations of events (e.g. Americans were "profiteers" during WWII) are almost always wrong or only part of the story. You seem to have bought into one of the most common and erroneous sterotypes about Americans: we are stupid, ignorant, arrogant, and only interested in money. While there are a fair share of Americans like that, at least 48% of them are not.
"The idea that we're "sacrificing" for the sake of Europe is curious, but disingenuous."
No, it is not disingenious, but strategic. It wasn't altruism. We initially tooks care of the security of the OECD in order to avoid going to war again. These social darwinistic rationalizations came after the whole process of military buildup got started as a reaction against communism. The wealth generated by the military buildup conveniently gave these people the freedom to repudiate "handouts" and to pat themselves on the back for "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" when, in fact, government spending on the military buildup made it possible for them to do so. Sure, they actualized the possibility, so to speak, by working hard but the government made the possibility possible. In any event, we stopped "sacrificing" for Europe once the Cold War ended for sure and in all honesty it should have stopped during Lyndon Johnson's era but Americans (i.e. big businesses) wanted to continue to exploit Americans (i.e. the middle class through taxes and the poor through lack of social programs) for profit.
I know the attitude sucks but your point about the social programs in other OECD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD) countries just encourages this kind of attitude. Do you know why you have these nice social programs? Because we have subsidized the military budgets of all of the other members of the OECD for the last sixty years.
Many ignorant people in the OECD have criticized the United States for having such a huge military budget while having no social programs. Well guess what? That is another sacrifice that America has made for the past sixty years for Europe. We had to invest all of that money in to our military after WWII in order to deter Stalin because Europe was too poor to defend itself.
Eventually, when Europeans could afford to defend themselves, they let Americans continue to defend Europe so they could spend the money on social programs. So we became the most powerful country in the world. We prospered economically from the military industrial complex and all of the industries that it spawned. Many people got rich from this process and eventually these people decided that we don't need social programs. These people are now called Republicans.
There is no doubt that helping Europe and Japan after the war was the right thing, but when Europe took advantage and America (i.e. those who were in power due to the benefits that accrued from the military industrial complex) let them take advantage America's fate was sealed forty years ago. The American people missed out on the benefits of social programs, corporations took over politics, we became the most powerful country in the world, and the modern Republican party was born.
All of these things were affected by our relationship with Europe. Americans let it happen and deserve most of the blame, or praise depending on how you see it, but Europeans also share some responsibility for the state of things. Sure, we could have raised taxes, but our taxes were already relatively high until Ronald Reagan and since Ronald Reagan we have been running a deficit (that will necessitate a tax increase in the future) in order to afford a $500 billion/year military budget. The only thing that can stop this unsustainable and self-destructive trend is for Europe to develop an army that can address all of its securty needs and doesn't require the United States. There is movement in this direction but not enough.
Eisenhower saw it clearly (http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/ indust.html) and he would be horrified by George Bush, which is why his son supported Kerry. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. This trend has 60 years of momentum behind it.
So do yourself a favor. Learn some history, get some perspective, and don't be so hasty to reach for those Leftish cliches and prejudices to condemn an attitude and a situation that you, yes, you, helped create. Don't worry though. You aren't alone. Most Americans have no idea why we are in the position that we are in. The Democratic "strategists" seem to think this last election was lost due to a tactical error and most don't get the fact that a new strategy is needed. They need to use conservative (and I don't mean religious conservative) means to attain liberal goals, but that's a whole 'nother post.
While I agree that for the most part Europeans are fairly ignorant of the fact that the American defense budget over the past forty years basically made it possible for them to fund their precious social programs, we can't just invade countries and in general do whatever we want. We live in a world with other people in it. We are required to be civil. America has reached the limit of its power in Iraq. Iraq is a big fucking mess that we cannot resolve ourselves and we certainly bit off more than we could chew for no good reason.
I don't think Republicans understand Democrats and vice versa. Almost every Democrat I know, conservative and liberal, absolutely loathes and hates George Bush. There is a lot of hate flowing and I'm interested to see where it ends up.
If you are not in a swing state, you still need to vote. Whoever wins the electoral college wins the presidency, but the popular vote determines the authority the President can wield.
No, really! I mean he certainly had some interesting things to say back in the day, but now it just seems like it's all unsubstantiated fabrication. He's like Negroponte from the MIT media labs. You know, the authorative voice on technology that hasn't produced a single thing that matters. They are both like zombies their personas living on after their tenuous claims have died and been buried.
Yes, but there is a group of us who make more money than your average American and are in the sweet spot demographically that will not watch any of this crap. They are not able to sell advertising for us because they have no product to offer us. If they did, then they could get lucrative ads from Jaguar, Volvo, etc. They can still keep their crap news-tainment for everyone else, but I want some real news. It's not an either/or proposition.
Bush didn't even answer most of the questions. Kerry was somewhat on topic, but typically non-comittal, trying to play both ends to the middle. Nader actually stayed on topic most of the time and had some interesting answers. Nader also was the only one that talked to us like we were peers, not little children.
These folks had an opprtunity to write a response that could have been insightful and informative. They were not on the spot and could have ensured that they said exactly what they wanted to say, but instead we get talking points. Really, how hard is it to answer a simple question?
Bush's answer or lack of it to the mistake question speaks volumes about his character. Somebody else mentioned that we crucify people when they admit mistakes, or more accurately the press crucifies them for public enjoyment and to warn the public against taking risks and making mistakes, but its more than that. You can tell by listening to him and watching his body language. He is contemptuous and arrogant.
Is this the character of a leader? This is not a partisan bash. It is a fact. Anyone who can't see the difference between stubborn, prideful arrogance and strength of character is clearly blinded by partisan beliefs or ignorant. I'm a conservative and I can see that.
The one thing he has got going for him though is the ability to make his weaknesses into strengths:
"Tough on Terror!" : 9/11 happend on his watch and he failed to capture Osama bin Laden before getting us involved in an elective war that made the world more dangerous and caused the world to no longer respect us.
"Huge tax cut!": That mostly benefited the people that least needed it. Even worse, it has created the biggest fiscal deficit in history. So much for fiscal conservatism. And the government has grown larger during this administration than it has been ever.
"Passed the Patriot Act!": So much for civil liberties and freedom. I though conservatives valued freedom? And while we are on the topic of freedom: what about the fact that he wants the government to tell us who we can marry, have sex with, and what to do in general with our own bodies? Freedom?
Conservatives should be outraged, except for maybe bible-thumbing, fundamentalist, born-again Christians. However most Christians should see that Bush is apparently guilty of the worst sin, pride. Of course only god knows, but anyone who votes for Bush because he supports some of the goals that some Christians do is making a truly Faustian bargain.
My point about representation of states' opinions rather than individuals' opinions is directly related to the issue of stability, political stability within the federal government. You arrogantly assumed that you knew what I meant by stability before I had a chance to define it as is my perogative due to the fact that it is my thesis that the electoral college is more stable.
Your simplified equations were exactly the problem. They skew the problem too much in your favor and are not reprenstative of the actual facts, but clearly you are incapable of understanding fine distinctions and prefer to stick with your simplistic notions.
However for the record I was wrong when I wrote that the person would need to win by one vote in every state. The number of total possibilites would be based on the lowest sum of the populations in terms of voters for the states that have enough combined electoral votes to secure the presidency squared which indeed has a higher probability than someone winning the presidency by one vote in a direct vote situation. My argument was with your simplification and your understanding of stability, not your conclusion.
Funny, I thought one of the signs of intelligence is the ability to have a civilized discussion in the pursuit of truth. Obviously you are not interested in finding the truth, but rather in getting people to accept that you are right, and when people refuse to acknowledge your supposedly self-evident truth you become hostile because you feel threatened and attempt to bully them into accepting you conclusions by insulting them. Clearly you misunderstood me, but instead of asking for clarification you saw fit to insult me. All for the purpose of aggrandizing your own pathetic ego, but this is Slashdot so what else should I expect?
Perhaps one day you will grow up and realize how ridiculous your arrogance and disdain make you look to others that are actually intelligent. You may even gain some humility and feel badly for how you have behaved, but until you do so do not bother replying to my post. This "conversation" is over.
You are confusing the outcome of state voting with the outcome of national voting. Someone beling elected under direct vote would win the election if he or she received one vote more than the other person, where as under the electoral college the person would need to win by one vote in every state till the sum of required electoral votes in order to win the election were attained. The purpose of the electoral college is to make the election representative of the states' majority opinions, not the opinions of individuals.
It is far less likely to come down to one vote with the electoral college. That is why it is more stable which was my original point. Anyhow, I'm not really in favor of either of them, but I have a feeling that exchanging one for the other simply would be to exchange one set of inequalities for another.
Unfairness might be considered good if it increases representativeness in a representative government, I suppose.
I am glad someone has finally made at least an implicit comparison between Afghanistan and Iraq because Afghanistan is the counter-example for all of Bush's terrorist rhetoric. Nobody, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal, argues that we should not have attacked Afghanistan, but half of the country objects to the invasion of Iraq. Why? The reasons for objecting to the war cannot be exclusively ideological because people with all sorts of ideologies supported the war in Afghanistan but oppose it in Iraq. At least some of the objections must be for specific, practical reasons, and not for any ideological reasons.
1) We have not captured the instigator of the 9/11 attacks and the most imminent threat to national security, Osama bin Laden. The resources necessary to do so have been directed to Iraq. Does anyone doubt that if we had 100,000 troops in southeastern Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden would still be free?
2) We are not done in Afghanistan. Afghanistan may yet end up in civil war and a haven for terrorists because in our rush to go to war with Iraq we do not have adequate resources on the ground to keep the peace and enforce the rule of law.
3) The war with Iraq was an elective war (See Jeffrey Record's paper for the Army War College). Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat. This is not a matter of hindsight. It was the general consensus of the rest of the world and even within the US government. Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere. We could have waited until after a democratic and peaceful Afghanistan emerged before we confronted Saddam.
4) Saddam Hussein didn't have any WMDs to give to anyone, nor would he have ever developed any WMDs had we continued the process of containment and inspections. Again, this is not hindsight, it was the general consensus of the rest of the world, and there was no need to go against this consensus with out specific and credible evidence. Clearly something had to be done in the long-term about Saddam, but now was not the time.
I don't object to war in general and clearly the war in Afghanistan is an example of a just war, but the war with Iraq was an elective war that distracted us from finishing the job in Afghanistan. Because we did not finish the war in Afghanistan the terrorist organization that attacked America is still free and they along with their allies are free to continue planning attacks on Americans. Americans are less safe in America, abroad, and in Iraq because we didn't take the time to do things right.
What was the rush to invade Iraq? There was no specific and credible evidence that Saddam had WMDs or the intention of giving them to anyone else even if he did have them. The only possible answer is that 9/11 provided a unique opportunity for the president to execute a war on Iraq. Why did he want to go to war with Iraq? There are many possible reasons but national security and WMDs, the only reasons that could have justified the war, had nothing to with it despite what our prevaricating president may have said.
Bush's foreign policy has been a disaster. He didn't protect us from 9/11. He didn't catch the people responsible for committing the atrocious acts of 9/11. He did get us involved in an elective war that was not in the interest of national security and distracted us from catching the people responsible for 9/11. He then proceeded to screw up this elective war, failed to win the peace, and opened up a new front in the war on terror without securing the old one. Not to mention that he has diminished the respect that the rest of the world has for our country by dishonoring it, by putting power above principle; notice how Bush's justifications for his actions will change as the previous justification is proven false; he does not care why things are done as long as he gets his way. Yet, this horribly flawed foreign policy will get this immoral and misguided man re-elected as president of the United States because of spin, propaganda, and money, pure and simple. Unbelievable.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the posts that precede my post, you will see that I'm not parroting or over-simplifying. Their views are overly simplistic.
You have not said anything that contradicts the main point of what I said. So I suggest you go back and reread what I wrote. You are reading something into the post that I did not put there. This "misinterpretation" on your part "proves" my point that people just don't put in the time and effort necessary to understand what is being said.
A couple of clarifications might help. We apparently have different interpretations of subjective and, presumably, objective. When you say, "'Interpretation is very subjective' is proven by your misinterpreting", I'm not sure whether you mean by subjective that two people can have different interpretations or that the possibiliy of error make something subjective. In either case you are wrong. Two people can have different interpretations because they have different grounds upon which they make an interpretation. So there is nothing essentially subjective about it, other than the fact that it is done by a "subject". As to the possibility of error, an interpretation can be correct but false, that is it follows all appropriate formal rules and is objectively correct but ends up being wrong. It happens all the time. The possibility of error is not essential to subjectivity or objectivity.
My analogy between art and a person was meant to indicate the ethical responsiblity we have to an artist at least to attempt to understand what he is trying to convey. Of course, it may be that he or she is not trying to convey anything. It was not meant to indicate that we don't misunderstand each other in conversations.
One point where we do disagree is on the possibility or impossibility of arriving at an author's intention. I don't have the time or inclination to argue my point. It would need to be a monograph. We'll have to agree to disagree.
You seem to think I'm harkening back to a "scientific" approach to literary interpretation that began back in the nineteenth with philology and continued into the early twentieth century as "linguistics". The over-riding belief was that a certain method could be followed that would produce an objective result. Anything considered objective was also considered true, a rather bad interpretation of objective, but there you have it. This is not what I'm advocating.
I am advocating a scientific/evidence based approach, but one that is defined by falsifiability, rather than formal rules that could be applied to a text to produce the author's intention which would then be assumed to be the only proper interpretation.
You know the "hilarious" thing about your response is that you do to my post exactly what you accuse me of doing to the other people's posts, that is grossly simplifying and caricaturing my position. You'd be surprised how often that happens. It's an obnoxious tendency that most people are not even aware that they do. You might want to keep an eye open for it in the future when you try to "flame" someone else.
I was tempted not to even bother responding, but your misinterpretations of subjectivity and consequently objectivity are so common that I felt I needed to say something about it even if nobody else besides you reads it. You should read some philosophy, especially something written after, say, 1930.
I've just read a lot of replies to this message saying "interpretation is very subjective" and "it doesn't matter what the author intended". Bullshit. Think of the work of art as a "person" trying to communicate. Now, would you say that in a conversation with a person that your interpretation is very subjective or that it doesn't matter what the author was trying to say? Only if you're a solipsist.
Art is more ambiguous than a conversation, mostly because we don't have the cues and context that we would need to disambiguate it, but that doesn't mean that the meaning can be whatever the viewer wants it to be. We can usually discern the author's intention, with a lot of hard work. Do we know for sure? Of course not. Is the author's intention or meaning the best interpretation of the work? Not necessarily. Maybe or maybe not. But it makes sense to try to figure it out. It's only courteous.
In any case an interpretation has to be based on the work. It can't be just any old thing that pops into your head. There are better and worse interpretations, too. People who utter meaningless pseudo-intellectual statements like "it is totally subjective" or "the author's intention doesn't matter" usually do not want to do the hardwork to actually understand the art and that's fine, but don't trivialize the hard work of artists and those who put the hard work into trying to understand art.
I should say that this is the norm. There are exceptions that play off of this norm. Works that are so ambiguous and so slapdash that they are utterly ambiguous and they were trivial for the artist to create, but the power of these works comes from the fact that they are playing against a millenia old tradition.
People who trivialize interpretation by turning it into solipsism are just as bad as those "yes-sayers" that agree to every interpretation someone else proposes.
it would be a mediocre McMagic movie, as a representation of Earthsea it is a travesty. This is exactly what sucks about Hollywood. At least they tried to do it right with Dune. This movie just plain sucks. The only good that can come of it is that more people will read Earthsea and learn what a good story really is. I can't believe sci-fi thinks that their viewers have not read Earthsea. We should send them letters that indicate otherwise.
Where is the critical interpretation? Pro's and con's?
The FTC would have to understand technology to bring a claim of false advertising. I tend to doubt that anyone there does. The only way tech companies will change is if individuals' bring law suits. "To establish a violation under the Lanham Act, consumers and competitors must prove the following: (1) the advertiser made false statements of fact about its product; (2) the false advertisements actually deceived or had the capacity to deceive a substantial segment of the target population; (3) the deception was material; (4) the falsely advertised product was sold in interstate commerce; and (5) the party bringing the lawsuit (known as the "plaintiff") was injured as a result of the deception."
http://www.poznaklaw.com/articles/falsead.htm
I agree, but how do you know that the source code that you have is the one installed on the machine?
The whole tone of the piece is dismissive from the beginning. He's clearly defending entrenched interests. That said, he has some points. Good editing would reveal internal inconsistencies. A well written article would also make one aware of contraversial points, etc. Clearly these are editorial values that Britannica adds. Is this value worth a thousand dollars? Not for me.
It should be clear though that Britannica's only value is editorial. There are very few subject matter experts at Britannica. They hire subject matter experts from outside of the company to write the entries. Those people they hire are those regarded by their peers as experts. None of this guarantees any kind of accuracy. In fact, it can result in highly "subjective" responses.
At the end of the article he smugly mentions that some of the entries in the Wikipedia are of the same quality as a paper that would get a "C" in high school. That may be true, but any high school student who uses an encyclopedia, let's say Britannica, as his only source should also get a "C" or worse.
Encyclopedia's can be a good place to begin researching, but multiple primary sources or first order evidence are essential for good research. So, from that perspective the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica seem to be on even ground. If this is is the case, then we must ask whether this additional effort on the part of Britannica is of any value to anyone other than a grammar school student.
I don't think anyone doubts that Britannica will be more more correct than the Wikipedia (note: that doesn't necessarily mean more true), but the question is whether that this correctness is of any value. On the other hand, Wikipedia may need to adopt a more restricted method of submission or emendation in order to keep people properly motivated. It also doesn't help that the person advocating for EB is condescending, dismissive, and smug. I suppose he can afford to be as it won't be him who is put out of a job by the Wikipedia.
Don't: Sell your soul to a publisher that will suck the life out of you.
Wow, I remember when EA used to be cool, about fifteen years ago.
Do: Try digital distribution. What do you have to lose?
Now this is depressing. Most of the responses I have seen so far have said: "So what? That's the way it is. Get used to it. If you don't like it, leave." Not only have most people not been bothered they give the impression that this person should stop looking for special treatment and just shut up and be grateful to have a job. No wonder EA can get away with this crap. Do you really have such low expactations? Are you really so pessimistic about our ability to change the practices of big business? If so, then the corporations have won. If everyone is resigned to letting big government and big business do whatever we want, then we might as well give up the hope of being individuals.
Ok, so, you called me clueless because I was referring to soldiers and you knew I was referring to soldiers? All you had to do was say, "No, I was referring to everyone. And these are the totals for everyone:". Of course civilians count but I thought you were referring to soldiers because you said "dead bodies of brave French, British, Canadian, Polish, Russian, etc soldiers". Anyhow, I'm not sure how giving me the stats for the total dead is supposed to make me "re-think everything [I] "know"" when I was referring to something entirely different. Of course civilian deaths matter. Members of my grandmother's family in Poland were killed, as I'm sure many other people's family members were as well. I am sorry you can't recognize the difference between reasoned argument and being clueless, but that's common with bigots.
The number of casualties I was referring to was the casualties for soldiers. The numbers you are showing are for everyone, which would be obvious if you bothered to check, but I'm sure you were just happy to assume I had no clue what I was talking about. Yes, it is a huge blackmark and not one of our finer moments.
Well, if you can put your prejudices and cynicism on hold for a second and reread what I wrote, you will see that I already acknowledged that one of the reasons for the buildup was to make money as well as ensure the security of America against communist expansion. The other reason was that the European governments were happy to let the Americans pay the bill for protecting the OECD while they took the money that would be spent on defense and spent it on social programs. There is a lot of value in these social programs, not the least of which is stability, but there was a price to Europe and the American people for Europeans not taking responsibility for their own defense. Europe woke up one day, looked out the window, and realized that the United States was now more powerful than all European countries combined and there was no longer a balance of power. Many poor Americans meanwhile were denied basic social programs in order to line the pockets of what became the middle class/upper class and for European governments to provide social programs for their people. The social drawinist rationalizations for not having social programs came a long time after the buildup began, long after it was already a fact.
"The only reason the States had to prop up Europe after WWII is because they sat back and PROFITEERED off the dead bodies of brave French, British, Canadian, Polish, Russian, etc soldiers and only entered the war when attacked, suffered almost zero infastructure losses and a small fraction of deaths.. no wonder they emerged ahead of everyone else."
Can you save the melodrama, please? There were legitimate political reasons that the United States couldn't get involved until it was attacked. FDR wanted to get involved as soon as possible, but had to nudge the electorate into accepting the inevitable. Until then the United States provided valuable supplies to England. England would have fallen as quickly as France without them. Many American merchant marines died during these supply missions. To reduce their sacrifice to "profiteering" is insulting and petty. Incidentally, the United States suffered it's fair share of casualties, more than any European country except maybe Hungry. Russia suffered 8,000,000 and China ~2,000,000.
"Military spending (2003):
1 United States $ 370,700,000,000
2 China $ 60,000,000,000
3 France $ 45,238,100,000
4 United Kingdom$ 42,836,500,000
5 Japan $ 42,488,100,000
6 Germany $ 35,063,000,000"
Yes, now, they are spending money, but NATO still relies heavily on the United States for logistics as well as other types of combat support and Japan does not have a Navy comparable to China's. France and Germany are aware of the situation as are the British, but it will take time to develop a European defense program and there is significant opposition to military spending because social programs will have be cut. However all of this is too late as the United States can pretty much do whatever it wants militarily, except, apparently, put down an insurgency, and the "military industrial complex" is firmly entrenched in America and the dominance of big business is only getting worse.
I am not the one who needs to separate propaganda from history. I can see that history is complicated and that simple-minded interpretations of events (e.g. Americans were "profiteers" during WWII) are almost always wrong or only part of the story. You seem to have bought into one of the most common and erroneous sterotypes about Americans: we are stupid, ignorant, arrogant, and only interested in money. While there are a fair share of Americans like that, at least 48% of them are not.
"The idea that we're "sacrificing" for the sake of Europe is curious, but disingenuous."
No, it is not disingenious, but strategic. It wasn't altruism. We initially tooks care of the security of the OECD in order to avoid going to war again. These social darwinistic rationalizations came after the whole process of military buildup got started as a reaction against communism. The wealth generated by the military buildup conveniently gave these people the freedom to repudiate "handouts" and to pat themselves on the back for "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" when, in fact, government spending on the military buildup made it possible for them to do so. Sure, they actualized the possibility, so to speak, by working hard but the government made the possibility possible. In any event, we stopped "sacrificing" for Europe once the Cold War ended for sure and in all honesty it should have stopped during Lyndon Johnson's era but Americans (i.e. big businesses) wanted to continue to exploit Americans (i.e. the middle class through taxes and the poor through lack of social programs) for profit.
I know the attitude sucks but your point about the social programs in other OECD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD) countries just encourages this kind of attitude. Do you know why you have these nice social programs? Because we have subsidized the military budgets of all of the other members of the OECD for the last sixty years.
/ indust.html) and he would be horrified by George Bush, which is why his son supported Kerry. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. This trend has 60 years of momentum behind it.
Many ignorant people in the OECD have criticized the United States for having such a huge military budget while having no social programs. Well guess what? That is another sacrifice that America has made for the past sixty years for Europe. We had to invest all of that money in to our military after WWII in order to deter Stalin because Europe was too poor to defend itself.
Eventually, when Europeans could afford to defend themselves, they let Americans continue to defend Europe so they could spend the money on social programs. So we became the most powerful country in the world. We prospered economically from the military industrial complex and all of the industries that it spawned. Many people got rich from this process and eventually these people decided that we don't need social programs. These people are now called Republicans.
There is no doubt that helping Europe and Japan after the war was the right thing, but when Europe took advantage and America (i.e. those who were in power due to the benefits that accrued from the military industrial complex) let them take advantage America's fate was sealed forty years ago. The American people missed out on the benefits of social programs, corporations took over politics, we became the most powerful country in the world, and the modern Republican party was born.
All of these things were affected by our relationship with Europe. Americans let it happen and deserve most of the blame, or praise depending on how you see it, but Europeans also share some responsibility for the state of things. Sure, we could have raised taxes, but our taxes were already relatively high until Ronald Reagan and since Ronald Reagan we have been running a deficit (that will necessitate a tax increase in the future) in order to afford a $500 billion/year military budget. The only thing that can stop this unsustainable and self-destructive trend is for Europe to develop an army that can address all of its securty needs and doesn't require the United States. There is movement in this direction but not enough.
Eisenhower saw it clearly (http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents
So do yourself a favor. Learn some history, get some perspective, and don't be so hasty to reach for those Leftish cliches and prejudices to condemn an attitude and a situation that you, yes, you, helped create. Don't worry though. You aren't alone. Most Americans have no idea why we are in the position that we are in. The Democratic "strategists" seem to think this last election was lost due to a tactical error and most don't get the fact that a new strategy is needed. They need to use conservative (and I don't mean religious conservative) means to attain liberal goals, but that's a whole 'nother post.
While I agree that for the most part Europeans are fairly ignorant of the fact that the American defense budget over the past forty years basically made it possible for them to fund their precious social programs, we can't just invade countries and in general do whatever we want. We live in a world with other people in it. We are required to be civil. America has reached the limit of its power in Iraq. Iraq is a big fucking mess that we cannot resolve ourselves and we certainly bit off more than we could chew for no good reason.
I don't think Republicans understand Democrats and vice versa. Almost every Democrat I know, conservative and liberal, absolutely loathes and hates George Bush. There is a lot of hate flowing and I'm interested to see where it ends up.
If you are not in a swing state, you still need to vote. Whoever wins the electoral college wins the presidency, but the popular vote determines the authority the President can wield.
No, really! I mean he certainly had some interesting things to say back in the day, but now it just seems like it's all unsubstantiated fabrication. He's like Negroponte from the MIT media labs. You know, the authorative voice on technology that hasn't produced a single thing that matters. They are both like zombies their personas living on after their tenuous claims have died and been buried.
Yes, but there is a group of us who make more money than your average American and are in the sweet spot demographically that will not watch any of this crap. They are not able to sell advertising for us because they have no product to offer us. If they did, then they could get lucrative ads from Jaguar, Volvo, etc. They can still keep their crap news-tainment for everyone else, but I want some real news. It's not an either/or proposition.
NY Times has an article about Bush's faith-based, anti-factual presidency.
S H. html?oref=login&oref=login&oref=login
7 82 .htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BU
Soul sucking reg. required.
Knight-ridder has an article about Bush doing absolutely no planning for post-war Iraq:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9927
Both of these are left leaning, but they are based on facts. Perhaps selectively, but I trust them more than I do either candidate.
Bush didn't even answer most of the questions. Kerry was somewhat on topic, but typically non-comittal, trying to play both ends to the middle. Nader actually stayed on topic most of the time and had some interesting answers. Nader also was the only one that talked to us like we were peers, not little children.
These folks had an opprtunity to write a response that could have been insightful and informative. They were not on the spot and could have ensured that they said exactly what they wanted to say, but instead we get talking points. Really, how hard is it to answer a simple question?
Bush's answer or lack of it to the mistake question speaks volumes about his character. Somebody else mentioned that we crucify people when they admit mistakes, or more accurately the press crucifies them for public enjoyment and to warn the public against taking risks and making mistakes, but its more than that. You can tell by listening to him and watching his body language. He is contemptuous and arrogant.
Is this the character of a leader? This is not a partisan bash. It is a fact. Anyone who can't see the difference between stubborn, prideful arrogance and strength of character is clearly blinded by partisan beliefs or ignorant. I'm a conservative and I can see that.
The one thing he has got going for him though is the ability to make his weaknesses into strengths:
"Tough on Terror!" : 9/11 happend on his watch and he failed to capture Osama bin Laden before getting us involved in an elective war that made the world more dangerous and caused the world to no longer respect us.
"Huge tax cut!": That mostly benefited the people that least needed it. Even worse, it has created the biggest fiscal deficit in history. So much for fiscal conservatism. And the government has grown larger during this administration than it has been ever.
"Passed the Patriot Act!": So much for civil liberties and freedom. I though conservatives valued freedom? And while we are on the topic of freedom: what about the fact that he wants the government to tell us who we can marry, have sex with, and what to do in general with our own bodies? Freedom?
Conservatives should be outraged, except for maybe bible-thumbing, fundamentalist, born-again Christians. However most Christians should see that Bush is apparently guilty of the worst sin, pride. Of course only god knows, but anyone who votes for Bush because he supports some of the goals that some Christians do is making a truly Faustian bargain.
My point about representation of states' opinions rather than individuals' opinions is directly related to the issue of stability, political stability within the federal government. You arrogantly assumed that you knew what I meant by stability before I had a chance to define it as is my perogative due to the fact that it is my thesis that the electoral college is more stable.
Your simplified equations were exactly the problem. They skew the problem too much in your favor and are not reprenstative of the actual facts, but clearly you are incapable of understanding fine distinctions and prefer to stick with your simplistic notions.
However for the record I was wrong when I wrote that the person would need to win by one vote in every state. The number of total possibilites would be based on the lowest sum of the populations in terms of voters for the states that have enough combined electoral votes to secure the presidency squared which indeed has a higher probability than someone winning the presidency by one vote in a direct vote situation. My argument was with your simplification and your understanding of stability, not your conclusion.
Funny, I thought one of the signs of intelligence is the ability to have a civilized discussion in the pursuit of truth. Obviously you are not interested in finding the truth, but rather in getting people to accept that you are right, and
when people refuse to acknowledge your supposedly self-evident truth you become hostile because you feel threatened and attempt to bully them into accepting you conclusions by insulting them. Clearly you misunderstood me, but instead of asking for clarification you saw fit to insult me. All for the purpose of aggrandizing your own pathetic ego, but this is Slashdot so what else should I expect?
Perhaps one day you will grow up and realize how ridiculous your arrogance and disdain make you look to others that are actually intelligent. You may even gain some humility and feel badly for how you have behaved, but until you do so do not bother replying to my post. This "conversation" is over.
You are confusing the outcome of state voting with the outcome of national voting. Someone beling elected under direct vote would win the election if he or she received one vote more than the other person, where as under the electoral college the person would need to win by one vote in every state till the sum of required electoral votes in order to win the election were attained. The purpose of the electoral college is to make the election representative of the states' majority opinions, not the opinions of individuals.
It is far less likely to come down to one vote with the electoral college. That is why it is more stable which was my original point. Anyhow, I'm not really in favor of either of them, but I have a feeling that exchanging one for the other simply would be to exchange one set of inequalities for another.
Unfairness might be considered good if it increases representativeness in a representative government, I suppose.
I am glad someone has finally made at least an implicit comparison between Afghanistan and Iraq because Afghanistan is the counter-example for all of Bush's terrorist rhetoric. Nobody, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal, argues that we should not have attacked Afghanistan, but half of the country objects to the invasion of Iraq. Why? The reasons for objecting to the war cannot be exclusively ideological because people with all sorts of ideologies supported the war in Afghanistan but oppose it in Iraq. At least some of the objections must be for specific, practical reasons, and not for any ideological reasons.
1) We have not captured the instigator of the 9/11 attacks and the most imminent threat to national security, Osama bin Laden. The resources necessary to do so have been directed to Iraq. Does anyone doubt that if we had 100,000 troops in southeastern Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden would still be free?
2) We are not done in Afghanistan. Afghanistan may yet end up in civil war and a haven for terrorists because in our rush to go to war with Iraq we do not have adequate resources on the ground to keep the peace and enforce the rule of law.
3) The war with Iraq was an elective war (See Jeffrey Record's paper for the Army War College). Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat. This is not a matter of hindsight. It was the general consensus of the rest of the world and even within the US government. Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere. We could have waited until after a democratic and peaceful Afghanistan emerged before we confronted Saddam.
4) Saddam Hussein didn't have any WMDs to give to anyone, nor would he have ever developed any WMDs had we continued the process of containment and inspections. Again, this is not hindsight, it was the general consensus of the rest of the world, and there was no need to go against this consensus with out specific and credible evidence. Clearly something had to be done in the long-term about Saddam, but now was not the time.
I don't object to war in general and clearly the war in Afghanistan is an example of a just war, but the war with Iraq was an elective war that distracted us from finishing the job in Afghanistan. Because we did not finish the war in Afghanistan the terrorist organization that attacked America is still free and they along with their allies are free to continue planning attacks on Americans. Americans are less safe in America, abroad, and in Iraq because we didn't take the time to do things right.
What was the rush to invade Iraq? There was no specific and credible evidence that Saddam had WMDs or the intention of giving them to anyone else even if he did have them. The only possible answer is that 9/11 provided a unique opportunity for the president to execute a war on Iraq. Why did he want to go to war with Iraq? There are many possible reasons but national security and WMDs, the only reasons that could have justified the war, had nothing to with it despite what our prevaricating president may have said.
Bush's foreign policy has been a disaster. He didn't protect us from 9/11. He didn't catch the people responsible for committing the atrocious acts of 9/11. He did get us involved in an elective war that was not in the interest of national security and distracted us from catching the people responsible for 9/11. He then proceeded to screw up this elective war, failed to win the peace, and opened up a new front in the war on terror without securing the old one. Not to mention that he has diminished the respect that the rest of the world has for our country by dishonoring it, by putting power above principle; notice how Bush's justifications for his actions will change as the previous justification is proven false; he does not care why things are done as long as he gets his way. Yet, this horribly flawed foreign policy will get this immoral and misguided man re-elected as president of the United States because of spin, propaganda, and money, pure and simple. Unbelievable.