I remember the first time I exited a Fry's on my first visit to the US. I thought they were joking. I've never, ever been asked to provide a receipt on exit anywhere else in the world. It seemed like I'd gone to some kind of police state. Except in the actual police states I've been to stuff like that or the excessive immigrations procedures for the US would never have happened.
It's enough to look at relatively recent US history to see that the US government is perfectly happy to make life miserable for people who have not done anything illegal. Or have you forgotten for example about McCarthy, and about the widespread blacklisting over political views that used to go on?
The innocent DO have something to fear: That at some point whichever administration gets into power will have different ideas about whether they are innocent or not.
I find your post very interesting, because while you say you are for capitlism, your post pretty much summarized the Marxist view of capitalism as inevitably taking away individual choice and dehumanising society ("With the capability of almost unlimited travel in the modern age ("boarders haemorrhaging", we now have a system where the government no longer cares about the identity of its "multi-ethnic" citizens, it simply wants them to marry and become productive units (ahem, or 'members of society'). So where capitalism serves the interest of a nation of people, it is slowly eroding at the core and serving the nation in locality - this is directly attributable to the controlling interests of the law. (clue: big business!)", and "The higher up we traverse the pyramid, the more capitalist mechanisms ('assassinations', stock market crashes, share holders, mums) prevent use from being human (caring).")
In fact, Marx several places made the point that the capitalist is not free - he either has to live by the rules of capitalist society, or his business will fail and he'll find himself "lower down the pyramid", to borrow from you, and thus without the economic means to achieve economic freedom. Thus only those who do not depend on work or a business for their money are truly free in the Marxist sense under capitalism (i.e. they are not only free from oppression by the government, but also free from the limits imposed by limited economic means etc.)
Even your "yay capitalism" paragraph comes very close to a key idea of Marxism - that capitalist governments like all before it will take whichever actions needed to protect itself from regime change (whether justified against opponents that don't have public support, or against opponents that DO have public support). That is in fact the core justification in Marixsm for the idea that armed revolution would be a necessity to establish a socialist society.
It is working well for China - their population is on track to peak and start reducing in a few decades. As for India or the rest of the third world, they've never put enough resource into trying.
In addition to contraceptives and education, the third part which is also important is to increase the living standard. Historically, as living standards and health care reach a certain minimum level, birthrates start rapidly dropping all of their own.
In fact, if the rest of the world caught up with the developed countries, we'd be faced with a big problem of how to avoid the population from dropping dramatically - most industrialized countries populations are currently propped up by immigration.
It's not a "swedish case". Its about how a US corporation or its subsidiaries behavior in Sweden might make it liable under US anti-trust laws in the US because the actions in Sweden might be aimed at affecting the competitive landscape in the US to.
It's clearly for US courts to decide if a US corporation affects the US competitive landscape.
If it was settled out of court for $50,000, the SEC really can't have had much proof or much of a hope of winning the case, given he's raised millions... Not that that means they might not have been right, of course.
Where I live, all the houses for miles in each direction are taller than 10 feet, and the only place this thing would be able to navigate would be along the streets, close to the ground. If you tried flying it at the full 10 feet you'd be crashing into phone lines and trees on a regular basis. Try flying it lower, and you're just as stuck in traffic as before.
I'm sure this thing will have an appeal, but you'll note that Moller has indicated he's hoping they might produce 250 a year. They're not exactly aiming at the commuter market. It's pretty clearly aimed to be a curiosity for people who have somewhere to fly them for fun, put on the market mainly to get "something" out there to make money of while they try to get the SkyCar (which is winged) closer to production.
If you have worked in group homes, you have mostly seen people in the late stages of Alzheimers, not the often years of declining faculties that go before that, when memory has still not gone so much that they can't function and work around it, but with the downside that many of them constantly still know exactly what is happening to them.
Alzheimers is associated with a lot of depression and also with a lot of really aggressive behavior for those reasons.
Neither of my grandmothers seemed depressed about it for long after they were diagnosed. But by then they'd started declining so rapidly, and lost so much of their memory, that they were essentially "gone" - their lives were reduced to five minute sliding windows of attention combined with some remnants of their long term memory, and they quickly lost that too.
Those weren't the horrible years for them. They five or so years before that were the bad ones, and we only realized how bad it was once we got the diagnosis and started thinking back to how they'd behaved over those preceding years.
But for both of them they were terrified for weeks or months around the time when their functional level got so low that they needed to be taken into care. My grandfather on my moms side had to struggle for a couple of months to get my grandmother to agree to even see a doctor when they both knew what was happening, and had to struggle for further weeks to get her admitted, as she kept refusing.
A "bit frustrating"? Try years of living in fear of whats happening and shame of not being able to function properly and desperately trying to hide it. It's not how it plays out for all Alzheimers sufferers, but it's a fairly normal way for it to start.
Both my grandmothers went down that route. One of them managed to hide it from her husband until he was meant to go to hospital for a minor operation. Then her world collapsed, because she knew she wouldn't be able to handle things alone while he was away, and she refused to get out of bed, and she never did again - she lived another ten years with rapidly declining mental faculties and rapidly accelerating memory loss, but was certainly aware of it for another year or two.
The other, we realized after she was diagnosed, had been hiding her declining memory for years by excusing any memory problem by claiming she had "just taken pain medication" for some of her other health problems. Others hide it by writing notes to assist them, or learning to talk and ask questions in ways designed to avoid admitting they've forgotten something.
Remember those horrible moments in school, when you'd forgotten something very obvious and got asked about it, and knew or thought everyone else would think you were an idiot if you answered wrongly? Now imagine every conversation you have for several years being like that.
If you survive to old age today, most people die of either cancer or heart disease or get dementia of one form or another that either eventually kills them or leaves them with so little brain function it's an academic point anyway (i.e. Alzheimers, where patients might spend years in almost vegetative states before dying, often as a result of decay because they might have spent years unable to even walk).
I believe it's a reasonably even split between the three, though I might be mistaken, and Alzheimers make up by far the largest number of the dementia cases.
Seriously, if that's an attempt at a joke it's extremely tasteless.
Both my grandmothers have/had Alzheimers. The first couple of years they still recognized us, though their short term memory went within months and got to the point where at any visit you'd have to remind them who you were several times (then they'd still recognize us) and they'd ask the same questions over and over again and promptly forget the conversation.
But then, pretty soon they were unable to recognize anyone. Including their spouses who they'd lived with for decades; including their children.
Beyond that it took a couple of years before they eventually lost the ability to speak, and were sitting around just looking. We've been "lucky" - neither of them got aggressive. Aggression is a common effect of Alzheimers.
My paternal grandmother was in hospital for a couple of years with some level of memory, and then sat like a vegetable in a nursing home for about eight years before she died. She was unable to speak, and recognized noone during all of those eight years.
But the worst part is that when we found out they had Alzheimers, you could see the symptoms going back several years - suddenly lots of strange incidents made sense -, and they must have known something was badly wrong, but tried to hide it. Alzheimers scare the shit out of people and a lot of people getting it try to hide their memory loss as best they can because they're ashamed or scared until it gets so bad they can't function.
Frankly, if I get Alzheimers and there's still not a cure, I hope I realize early enough to kill myself.
Yahoo's Chinese subsidiary is a Chinese company that just so happens to have a single US corporation as it's sole shareholder.
By your argument, Vivendi-Universal's subsidiaries for example should just feel free to ignore US law, since Vivendi is a French company. I'd like to see them try to get that past US courts...
You clearly don't fly much. I've flown about 54k miles so far this year, and I've seen the inflight systems on my flights crash more than 20 times at least. Passengers on the flights I've been on have never reacted apart from groaning about their movies being interrupted. Presumably they all understand that the entertainment system is kept entirely separate and that the flight systems are kept to an entirely different standard.
You know, many (possibly most) US comics sell more copies in Europe than in the US. In fact, some US comics that mainly appear in newspaper syndication in the US have their own magazines in various European countries, particularly in Scandinavia (in Norway Ernie, Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side currently have their own monthly magazines and at least The Far Side and Ernie have been republished in Norwegian hardcover books too), and many sell more copies in single countries in Europe than they do in all of the US. Norway, with 4.5 million people have regularly had Norwegian translations outsell the US originals, with comics like The Phantom and Donald Duck being particularly persistent successes, alongside the "staple" Marvel and DC series.
It's not for nothing that one of the few places in the world where US comic artists tour for conferences and signings is Scandinavia (as a bonus, some US series such as Ernie have more than once features sequences drawn specifically for the Scandinavian audiences).
In many larger European countries you'll find a greater focus on European series (particularly French and Belgian series have a long heritage), but US imports are at the very least available in comic book stores.
There are of course some backwaters in Europe where comics aren't doing very well (unfortunately for me I'm currently living in the UK - one of the worst of them, though even here US imports are available in comic book stores in all major cities; the problem is an almost complete lack of European series here).
Poor excuse. Bloom Country/Outland/Opus have been available in large parts of the world in one form another, ranging from newspaper syndication to the book collections or pages in various comic magazines.
I've never read it in a newspaper, but that hasn't stopped me from reading most of them.
If there are so many of them, how come we're not seeing more violence from these people outside of war zones? How come even most people in these war zones aren't picking up weapons and turning it into far larger scale conflicts?
Considering Christians make up more than a billion, even a tiny fraction of them is too much too. Yet we keep seeing mass murdering butchers like the Lords Resistance Army and assorted terrorists groups using Christianity as an excuse for murder too.
And Christianity as been promoting intolerance for hundreds of years. Listen to a few Christian radio shows in the US for example, and you'll find plenty of examples, including calling for the death of non-christians every now and again.
And if you thought I was apologizing for religion you really failed to understand the entire point of my message. Try reading it again. Try reading the message I replied to again.
The entire point was that Christianity has an equally long history of being used to promote violence, and that trying to make everyone believing in a religion responsible for the acts of someone who claim to share their beliefs but who carry out actions that are contrary to the beliefs held by most of those people is meaningless at best.
The problem with trying to put all those people in a class like that is that they're not card carrying members of an organization requiring them all to state their agreement with some manifesto. They are individuals with widely differing beliefs.
Look at Christians - you have a range from declared pacifists willing to die for their right not to use arms to people who are prepared to bomb other Christians using religion as an excuse, or who will happily call for the destructions of cities full of muslim civilians as retribution for actions carried out by people already dead.
That same diversity exists within Islam - ranging all the way from people who are well integrated in Western societies and would pick western freedoms over their religion any day if they had to choose, to extremists like the Taleban or the Saudi Wahabists, with a huge range in between.
I'm an atheist. I think organized religion is silly at best and more likely harmful. But I don't lump the average person who holds beliefs I find childish or backwards in the same group as the few fanatics of any denomination that carry and have carried out atrocities in the name of their respective religions.
I'm an atheist and I don't agree with your claim. While true, I wouldn't be convinced of benefits to me personally, people do things motivated by desperation or benefits to their family, friends or country or [insert cause here] all the time.
That I don't believe in a god just means I would weigh the possible causes up against the end of my own life, not look for a possible "price".
But look at Palestine, for example. Many of the suicide bombers from Fatah's military groups have not been motivated by religion. While I don't know if any of them would have considered themselves atheist, at the very least many of them were not muslim, and for many the motivation has at least been presented as mainly political (compared with Hamas, whose political goals and religious basis are inherently mixed together).
Religion and political ideologies have much in common - charismatic leaders can turn both into cults where reason is put aside and people become willing to do extreme things.
You are not aware of fundie responses to satire over Christianity because you don't look. It's not that long ago (weeks) that christians rioted outside an arts centre in Sweden which dared show an exhibit (previously shown in a cathedral with the support of the local bishop) of Jesus surrounded by drag artists.
Just as the "muslim" terrorists are doing things in the name of their religion that is inconsistent with what the vast majority of the believers in that religion think. Which was exactly my point - dragging out Muslims as somehow particularly bad has little basis in reality.
Well, Bizarro is one of my most favorite comics, but Opus is higher up the list...
If you've missed Bloom County / Outland / Opus you owe it to yourself to catch up. There's a great collection called "Opus: 25 years of his Sunday best" that'd give you a good introduction, though you'd miss out on the daily strips of the early years (the current incarnation of the series is only Sunday panels)
Seriously.... Opus / Outland is one of THE classics of American comics over the last 25 years, with some of the most biting satire (political and other) you'll find. Personally I'd rate is as the best US comic ever. But then I'm from a country where most people actually read comics (Norway - with 4.5 million people, our comic magazines regularly have larger circulations than most US ones could ever hope for, and even some newspaper strips like Ernie have their own monthly magazines)
Plenty of Christians blow stuff up. Just look at Britain - despite the recent couple of Muslim attacks, by far the most deaths have been caused by catholics and protestants over Northern Ireland, including a large number of bombings outside Northern Ireland such as the bomb aimed at taking out parts of the British cabinet back in '84. People have short memories.
Trying to pretend Christians are somehow better than Muslims when it comes to violence just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
That's no excuse for those Muslims who do pick violence, but they are still tiny minority of Muslims just as it's a tiny minority of Christians that's been responsible for all the murders committed in the name of Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember the first time I exited a Fry's on my first visit to the US. I thought they were joking. I've never, ever been asked to provide a receipt on exit anywhere else in the world. It seemed like I'd gone to some kind of police state. Except in the actual police states I've been to stuff like that or the excessive immigrations procedures for the US would never have happened.
Nothing gives them the right of doing it without permission. Part of the problem is that SWIFT willingly hands over the data.
The innocent DO have something to fear: That at some point whichever administration gets into power will have different ideas about whether they are innocent or not.
In fact, Marx several places made the point that the capitalist is not free - he either has to live by the rules of capitalist society, or his business will fail and he'll find himself "lower down the pyramid", to borrow from you, and thus without the economic means to achieve economic freedom. Thus only those who do not depend on work or a business for their money are truly free in the Marxist sense under capitalism (i.e. they are not only free from oppression by the government, but also free from the limits imposed by limited economic means etc.)
Even your "yay capitalism" paragraph comes very close to a key idea of Marxism - that capitalist governments like all before it will take whichever actions needed to protect itself from regime change (whether justified against opponents that don't have public support, or against opponents that DO have public support). That is in fact the core justification in Marixsm for the idea that armed revolution would be a necessity to establish a socialist society.
In addition to contraceptives and education, the third part which is also important is to increase the living standard. Historically, as living standards and health care reach a certain minimum level, birthrates start rapidly dropping all of their own.
In fact, if the rest of the world caught up with the developed countries, we'd be faced with a big problem of how to avoid the population from dropping dramatically - most industrialized countries populations are currently propped up by immigration.
It's clearly for US courts to decide if a US corporation affects the US competitive landscape.
If it was settled out of court for $50,000, the SEC really can't have had much proof or much of a hope of winning the case, given he's raised millions... Not that that means they might not have been right, of course.
I'm sure this thing will have an appeal, but you'll note that Moller has indicated he's hoping they might produce 250 a year. They're not exactly aiming at the commuter market. It's pretty clearly aimed to be a curiosity for people who have somewhere to fly them for fun, put on the market mainly to get "something" out there to make money of while they try to get the SkyCar (which is winged) closer to production.
The entire reason the "flying saucer" is limited to 10ft is that they are trying to avoid any requirement of a pilots license.
Alzheimers is associated with a lot of depression and also with a lot of really aggressive behavior for those reasons.
Neither of my grandmothers seemed depressed about it for long after they were diagnosed. But by then they'd started declining so rapidly, and lost so much of their memory, that they were essentially "gone" - their lives were reduced to five minute sliding windows of attention combined with some remnants of their long term memory, and they quickly lost that too.
Those weren't the horrible years for them. They five or so years before that were the bad ones, and we only realized how bad it was once we got the diagnosis and started thinking back to how they'd behaved over those preceding years.
But for both of them they were terrified for weeks or months around the time when their functional level got so low that they needed to be taken into care. My grandfather on my moms side had to struggle for a couple of months to get my grandmother to agree to even see a doctor when they both knew what was happening, and had to struggle for further weeks to get her admitted, as she kept refusing.
Both my grandmothers went down that route. One of them managed to hide it from her husband until he was meant to go to hospital for a minor operation. Then her world collapsed, because she knew she wouldn't be able to handle things alone while he was away, and she refused to get out of bed, and she never did again - she lived another ten years with rapidly declining mental faculties and rapidly accelerating memory loss, but was certainly aware of it for another year or two.
The other, we realized after she was diagnosed, had been hiding her declining memory for years by excusing any memory problem by claiming she had "just taken pain medication" for some of her other health problems. Others hide it by writing notes to assist them, or learning to talk and ask questions in ways designed to avoid admitting they've forgotten something.
Remember those horrible moments in school, when you'd forgotten something very obvious and got asked about it, and knew or thought everyone else would think you were an idiot if you answered wrongly? Now imagine every conversation you have for several years being like that.
I believe it's a reasonably even split between the three, though I might be mistaken, and Alzheimers make up by far the largest number of the dementia cases.
Both my grandmothers have/had Alzheimers. The first couple of years they still recognized us, though their short term memory went within months and got to the point where at any visit you'd have to remind them who you were several times (then they'd still recognize us) and they'd ask the same questions over and over again and promptly forget the conversation.
But then, pretty soon they were unable to recognize anyone. Including their spouses who they'd lived with for decades; including their children.
Beyond that it took a couple of years before they eventually lost the ability to speak, and were sitting around just looking. We've been "lucky" - neither of them got aggressive. Aggression is a common effect of Alzheimers.
My paternal grandmother was in hospital for a couple of years with some level of memory, and then sat like a vegetable in a nursing home for about eight years before she died. She was unable to speak, and recognized noone during all of those eight years.
But the worst part is that when we found out they had Alzheimers, you could see the symptoms going back several years - suddenly lots of strange incidents made sense -, and they must have known something was badly wrong, but tried to hide it. Alzheimers scare the shit out of people and a lot of people getting it try to hide their memory loss as best they can because they're ashamed or scared until it gets so bad they can't function.
Frankly, if I get Alzheimers and there's still not a cure, I hope I realize early enough to kill myself.
By your argument, Vivendi-Universal's subsidiaries for example should just feel free to ignore US law, since Vivendi is a French company. I'd like to see them try to get that past US courts...
You clearly don't fly much. I've flown about 54k miles so far this year, and I've seen the inflight systems on my flights crash more than 20 times at least. Passengers on the flights I've been on have never reacted apart from groaning about their movies being interrupted. Presumably they all understand that the entertainment system is kept entirely separate and that the flight systems are kept to an entirely different standard.
It's not for nothing that one of the few places in the world where US comic artists tour for conferences and signings is Scandinavia (as a bonus, some US series such as Ernie have more than once features sequences drawn specifically for the Scandinavian audiences).
In many larger European countries you'll find a greater focus on European series (particularly French and Belgian series have a long heritage), but US imports are at the very least available in comic book stores.
There are of course some backwaters in Europe where comics aren't doing very well (unfortunately for me I'm currently living in the UK - one of the worst of them, though even here US imports are available in comic book stores in all major cities; the problem is an almost complete lack of European series here).
I've never read it in a newspaper, but that hasn't stopped me from reading most of them.
Considering Christians make up more than a billion, even a tiny fraction of them is too much too. Yet we keep seeing mass murdering butchers like the Lords Resistance Army and assorted terrorists groups using Christianity as an excuse for murder too.
And Christianity as been promoting intolerance for hundreds of years. Listen to a few Christian radio shows in the US for example, and you'll find plenty of examples, including calling for the death of non-christians every now and again.
And if you thought I was apologizing for religion you really failed to understand the entire point of my message. Try reading it again. Try reading the message I replied to again.
The entire point was that Christianity has an equally long history of being used to promote violence, and that trying to make everyone believing in a religion responsible for the acts of someone who claim to share their beliefs but who carry out actions that are contrary to the beliefs held by most of those people is meaningless at best.
The problem with trying to put all those people in a class like that is that they're not card carrying members of an organization requiring them all to state their agreement with some manifesto. They are individuals with widely differing beliefs.
Look at Christians - you have a range from declared pacifists willing to die for their right not to use arms to people who are prepared to bomb other Christians using religion as an excuse, or who will happily call for the destructions of cities full of muslim civilians as retribution for actions carried out by people already dead.
That same diversity exists within Islam - ranging all the way from people who are well integrated in Western societies and would pick western freedoms over their religion any day if they had to choose, to extremists like the Taleban or the Saudi Wahabists, with a huge range in between.
I'm an atheist. I think organized religion is silly at best and more likely harmful. But I don't lump the average person who holds beliefs I find childish or backwards in the same group as the few fanatics of any denomination that carry and have carried out atrocities in the name of their respective religions.
That I don't believe in a god just means I would weigh the possible causes up against the end of my own life, not look for a possible "price".
But look at Palestine, for example. Many of the suicide bombers from Fatah's military groups have not been motivated by religion. While I don't know if any of them would have considered themselves atheist, at the very least many of them were not muslim, and for many the motivation has at least been presented as mainly political (compared with Hamas, whose political goals and religious basis are inherently mixed together).
Religion and political ideologies have much in common - charismatic leaders can turn both into cults where reason is put aside and people become willing to do extreme things.
You are not aware of fundie responses to satire over Christianity because you don't look. It's not that long ago (weeks) that christians rioted outside an arts centre in Sweden which dared show an exhibit (previously shown in a cathedral with the support of the local bishop) of Jesus surrounded by drag artists.
Just as the "muslim" terrorists are doing things in the name of their religion that is inconsistent with what the vast majority of the believers in that religion think. Which was exactly my point - dragging out Muslims as somehow particularly bad has little basis in reality.
If you've missed Bloom County / Outland / Opus you owe it to yourself to catch up. There's a great collection called "Opus: 25 years of his Sunday best" that'd give you a good introduction, though you'd miss out on the daily strips of the early years (the current incarnation of the series is only Sunday panels)
Seriously.... Opus / Outland is one of THE classics of American comics over the last 25 years, with some of the most biting satire (political and other) you'll find. Personally I'd rate is as the best US comic ever. But then I'm from a country where most people actually read comics (Norway - with 4.5 million people, our comic magazines regularly have larger circulations than most US ones could ever hope for, and even some newspaper strips like Ernie have their own monthly magazines)
Really? Do you have a list of the papers refusing to run it and documentation to back of those claims? Or is it just hot air?
Trying to pretend Christians are somehow better than Muslims when it comes to violence just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
That's no excuse for those Muslims who do pick violence, but they are still tiny minority of Muslims just as it's a tiny minority of Christians that's been responsible for all the murders committed in the name of Christianity.