I already know that there's going to be people arguing back and forth that a) Hiroshima was a tragedy that never should have happened, or b) Hiroshima was necessary because it ended the war/punished the Japanese/etc.
Well, you know what? I don't care about either of those perspectives. Maybe it was necessary, maybe it wasn't, it's history now, and let's treat it as such. But there's one thing about the bomb that nobody in the US seems to realize:
Any country, *any* country, that uses nuclear weapons against another country had better let it weigh on their soul for as long as that country exists. The discussion should be constant, and permanent, and without end. The empathy of the pain that the Japanese people went through should be part and parcel of every conversation about World War II. People should go to sleep every night knowing exactly how serious of a decision that was.
And that's the problem: For every other country whose government's have committed mass murder, whether justifiable or not, there is a sense of history, of ownership of the bad as well as the good, there is a conceivability that they are as much responsible for the past as they are for the present and future.
In the US, we don't have that sense. It's all abstract and textbook, it's all justifications and wartime terminoligy. It's all disconnected and abstracted to the point of science fiction.
So argue all you want about whether it was right, or wrong, or good, or bad, or justifiable, or unjustifiable. To me, I can understand both sides of that debate.
What I can't understand is how most Americans seem to care much about what it means that we sent two Japenese cities into a nuclear hell. Using the bomb was a horrible act, whether or not it was justifiable, and the real tragedy is that the Japanese people were forced to understand that, while we read the headlines, added some notes to the next year's schoolbooks, and then continued on with our lives.
V for Vendetta is not just about dictatorship, but the way that democracies become dictatorships, and how "leaders" can not only take away people's freedoms, but convince them to beg for their freedoms to be taken away.
China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia all have serious problems (and Iraq too, of course), but V for Vendetta was not written about those countries.
V for Vendetta was written for people who live in liberal democracies, so they could understand what happens when things go really bad.
Orwell wrote 1984 because he was afraid of the Left. Big Brother, Uncle Joe. IngSoc, English Socialism. The Party.
Have you read any Orwell? He was a libertarian Marxist who fought in the POUM in the Spanish Civil War.
Take, for instance, these excerpts from Homage to Catalonia:
- I have no particular love for the idealised 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
- It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle . . . There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
- Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
And more importantly, from "Why I Write":
- The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it.
Don't you dare try and claim Orwell for the right. He's a Godless anti-state commie, thank you very much.
I've been working on an open source myspace style website called Appleseed for a while now. Screenshots are available on the website. I'm planning on releasing the code soon.
I've always been really annoyed with myspace. The coding errors, the bombardment of ads, that creepy "Tom" guy. But a lot of my friends were on it, so I made an account.
I'm hoping that a distributed project like Appleseed would do a bit to take the carpet out from under the rug of things like MySpace and Friendster, which are as much about community as Wal-Mart is.
I'm not very close to being done with Appleseed. I'm running low on time, and I'm hoping that releasing the code will encourage others to help out. I think I've gotten a decent foundation completed, and once I have the code cleaned up and at a point that I'm not embarrassed by it, I'll let it loose on the world.
Seriously, if I were the employee who screwed this up, I'd sleep with a pistol underneath my pillow. Everybody knows the big boss man isn't too forgiving of fuck ups like this.
Oh, wait... Harry Potter books? I thought we were talking about an international shipment of premium grade heroin.
Who the fuck cares about some Harry Potter books coming out a little early?
Maybe the original poster was being a little dramatic... But maybe not. The devastating effect that globalization has had in pushing the peasantry off of their land and into factories has been pretty easily observed. The ability for corporations to take a decent job in Detroit, lay off thousands, and magically transform that job into an early 20th century sweatshop has also been well documented.
The flaw in the original posters rhetoric is that the first world won't be pushed into factories. We'll be pushed into low wage service jobs, instead. Personally, I think reality's even more dystopian than the original poster intended his rhetoric to be.
Re:At least Jim Anchower is still there
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1
and neither will there be peace in the Middle East (unless the whole place is levelled).
Funny, because my parents told me people said the same thing about Europe during World War II: "There will never be peace in Europe, these people have been fueding for a thousand years."
There are no absolutes. Making a statement like that is like saying that the US Empire will exist in 50 years. It most probably will not.
Are parents that emotionally detached from their kids? I mean, couldn't you just ask your kids what they ate for lunch?
Yeah, kids make mistakes, but they're still human. If your body wants protein, you're gonna crave a steak. If your body needs calcium, you'll crave some orange juice or vegetables. I don't think we really have to worry too much about kids buying six dollars worth of snickers bars every day.
In fact, the only situation where I could see this being used is for anorexic teenagers, to make sure that they're actually purchasing food. Which sounds great, in theory, but considering the fact that anorexia is usually linked to domineering parents, a history of sexual abuse, and an inescapable urge to be in control of something, then monitoring an anorexic's every food purchase is not a good way to help them regain control of their life.
This is just ridiculous. They're your kids. They're not supposed to be convenient, they're supposed to be huge pains in the ass who are hard as hell to raise right. You can't just slap a tracking device on them and monitor and measure everything they do so you can fit them into a spreadsheet report.
If you can't ask your kids what they had for lunch and get an honest answer, you have a much bigger problem than the lack of an online monitoring service.
Incidentally, same election shows Dubya carrying the township by ~3.5K votes out of 39K cast. They've certainly got their conservatives there, but it's a bit more balanced than you apparently think.
It's Illinois, the right votes Democrat just as often as they vote Republican. I mean, you have heard of conservative Democrats, right? Hell, the strongman of Chicago, Daley, is not exactly what I would call a 'liberal.'
Alan Keyes got whalloped everywhere because he's not from Illinois, and Obama is a better politician. But voting records aren't the final authority on the culture of a community.
And yes, I did leave ten years ago to a nearby city. If you want to call me a liar for pointing out what I went through as a kid in "the best city in America to raise children", then whatever. Suffice to say, way too many people are familiar with Linden Oaks than should be.
Naperville has problems on a scale that no other community I've lived in has had. For instance, heroin use has gone through the roof in the past few years. Already two people I've known have died from overdoses, three have been through rehab, and one was clinically dead. None of them are what you would call stereotypical drug users. Domestic violence was a huge problem, until all of a sudden you just stopped hearing about it. Nothing changed, just nobody reported it anymore.
Naperville has the money and the blinders to pretend that they don't exist, but you know as well as I do, that the place has some fucked up shit going on underneath the surface.
And the police are working on figuring out a way to not have to go through those proper channels, by way of the legal definition of "The Public." That's what the battle is.
Initially, I was against this development, but after reading TFA, I actually feel al lot better aboout it, for a few reasons:
A little bit of googling results in the fact that, while the library may be protecting the patrons, if it were up to the police, they would have no such ability.
When someone spotted Blaszak's inappropriate library activities, they called the police. Unfortunately, by the time the Naperville PD arrived, Blaszak had left the library. Library officials refused to disclose the patron who had logged in, citing the Illinois Library Records Confidentiality Act, which prohibits libraries from releasing borrowing records, records of reference questions asked, and records of the use of librarys computers for Internet access to the public without a court order. The police don't think they qualify as "the public"; the library thinks they do. Either way, the NPD got a court order, identified Blaszak and the two teens, and discovered that Blaszak had done "the same thing" on May 5. The library and the police are still going back and forth about the meaning of the confidentiality act.
And in any battle between the librarians and the police, I would unfortunately put my money on the police.
Oh, Naperville. How I hate you so. For those who have never been there, let me give you an idea of what this place is like.
Rich. Conservative. And fucked up beyond belief. Alan Keyes made his home there when he was campaigning in Illinois. It boasts the most expensive highschool in the midwest, and even the shitty highschool on the other side of town has an olympic size swimming pool and a greenhouse.
It's sprawled out so far, that even with all the money the city has, it's getting to the point where it can't afford to plow the whole city when it snows.
So does this surprise me? No, not really. My parents moved out of that town when it was getting gentrified away from a quaint, middle class suburb and into a massive, upper-middle class traffic-fest. It's got a whole lot of libertarians now, for whom 'liberty' really only has anything to do with taxes. Concerning anything else (reproductive rights, personal privacy, etc), they would make small towns in Alabama seem damn near progressive in comparison.
It was never that great of a city to begin with, but right before we left (around 1995 or so), it had turned into what I would imagine a nice, quiet suburb in Nazi Germany was like. You know, everything's fine if you just don't pay too much attention to the smoke rising up in the horizon. I remember kids in my sophmore year social studies class arguing for fascism as a preferred political system. And the teacher didn't trick them, they actually brought up the idea, and were pretty enthusiastic about it.
High school was a frenzy of girls getting raped, drug overdoses, rampant (almost encouraged) racism and classism, severe and rampant anorexia and bullemia, bullying on a scale of Columbine, and just overall one of the worst social atmospheres you could ever subject a kid to.
If anybody ever made a movie about life in this town, it would have to be shot like a horror film.
So, I can't say I'm surprised about this. Naperville's got the money, the right-wing leanings, and the idiocy to do something just like this.
Doesn't he have a union or something? I mean, this is Spain, I didn't think things like this could happen there without some kind of repurcussions for the entity doing the firing.
Do you know what I want to see? I want to see that killer app that everyone wants to use require Firefox or another decently CSS-standard following browser.
Imagine if GMail, even just in it's beta phase, had said 'Sorry, Internet Explorer does not support the features necessary to use this website. Download Firefox for free here.' Imagine what that could have done to pressure microsoft to start supporting the standards.
I really think all it's gonna take is somebody with the right application that everybody wants to use, and the moxie to give ol' Internet Explorer the finger.
Whenever unions are brought up on Slashdot, they're usually in the context of low wages or long hours.
But here's another prime example of where some kind of union could prevent this kind of invasion of privacy (and waste of money). But without any kind of organization that can negotiate on the behalf of the employees, most workers just have to take it.
Now before the Libertarians get their briefs in a bunch, no, a corporation has no legal responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of it's employees. Yes, employees are free to find another job. But sometimes those excuses just aren't good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Japanese war crimes also included rape, pillage, murder, cannibalism and forcing female civilians to become sex slaves, known as "comfort women".
If you think that these acts are specific to the Japanese under Hirohito, then you're hopelessly naive about the nature of war.
The expression "War is Hell" didn't come out of nowhere, and it sure as anything is not the name of an upcoming X-Box game.
I already know that there's going to be people arguing back and forth that a) Hiroshima was a tragedy that never should have happened, or b) Hiroshima was necessary because it ended the war/punished the Japanese/etc.
Well, you know what? I don't care about either of those perspectives. Maybe it was necessary, maybe it wasn't, it's history now, and let's treat it as such. But there's one thing about the bomb that nobody in the US seems to realize:
Any country, *any* country, that uses nuclear weapons against another country had better let it weigh on their soul for as long as that country exists. The discussion should be constant, and permanent, and without end. The empathy of the pain that the Japanese people went through should be part and parcel of every conversation about World War II. People should go to sleep every night knowing exactly how serious of a decision that was.
And that's the problem: For every other country whose government's have committed mass murder, whether justifiable or not, there is a sense of history, of ownership of the bad as well as the good, there is a conceivability that they are as much responsible for the past as they are for the present and future.
In the US, we don't have that sense. It's all abstract and textbook, it's all justifications and wartime terminoligy. It's all disconnected and abstracted to the point of science fiction.
So argue all you want about whether it was right, or wrong, or good, or bad, or justifiable, or unjustifiable. To me, I can understand both sides of that debate.
What I can't understand is how most Americans seem to care much about what it means that we sent two Japenese cities into a nuclear hell. Using the bomb was a horrible act, whether or not it was justifiable, and the real tragedy is that the Japanese people were forced to understand that, while we read the headlines, added some notes to the next year's schoolbooks, and then continued on with our lives.
V for Vendetta is not just about dictatorship, but the way that democracies become dictatorships, and how "leaders" can not only take away people's freedoms, but convince them to beg for their freedoms to be taken away.
China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia all have serious problems (and Iraq too, of course), but V for Vendetta was not written about those countries.
V for Vendetta was written for people who live in liberal democracies, so they could understand what happens when things go really bad.
Orwell wrote 1984 because he was afraid of the Left. Big Brother, Uncle Joe. IngSoc, English Socialism. The Party.
Have you read any Orwell? He was a libertarian Marxist who fought in the POUM in the Spanish Civil War.
Take, for instance, these excerpts from Homage to Catalonia:
- I have no particular love for the idealised 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
- It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle . . . There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
- Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
And more importantly, from "Why I Write":
- The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it.
Don't you dare try and claim Orwell for the right. He's a Godless anti-state commie, thank you very much.
I've been working on an open source myspace style website called Appleseed for a while now. Screenshots are available on the website. I'm planning on releasing the code soon.
I've always been really annoyed with myspace. The coding errors, the bombardment of ads, that creepy "Tom" guy. But a lot of my friends were on it, so I made an account.
I'm hoping that a distributed project like Appleseed would do a bit to take the carpet out from under the rug of things like MySpace and Friendster, which are as much about community as Wal-Mart is.
I'm not very close to being done with Appleseed. I'm running low on time, and I'm hoping that releasing the code will encourage others to help out. I think I've gotten a decent foundation completed, and once I have the code cleaned up and at a point that I'm not embarrassed by it, I'll let it loose on the world.
Seriously, if I were the employee who screwed this up, I'd sleep with a pistol underneath my pillow. Everybody knows the big boss man isn't too forgiving of fuck ups like this.
Oh, wait... Harry Potter books? I thought we were talking about an international shipment of premium grade heroin.
Who the fuck cares about some Harry Potter books coming out a little early?
Maybe the original poster was being a little dramatic... But maybe not. The devastating effect that globalization has had in pushing the peasantry off of their land and into factories has been pretty easily observed. The ability for corporations to take a decent job in Detroit, lay off thousands, and magically transform that job into an early 20th century sweatshop has also been well documented.
The flaw in the original posters rhetoric is that the first world won't be pushed into factories. We'll be pushed into low wage service jobs, instead. Personally, I think reality's even more dystopian than the original poster intended his rhetoric to be.
and neither will there be peace in the Middle East (unless the whole place is levelled).
Funny, because my parents told me people said the same thing about Europe during World War II: "There will never be peace in Europe, these people have been fueding for a thousand years."
There are no absolutes. Making a statement like that is like saying that the US Empire will exist in 50 years. It most probably will not.
By then, Intel is gonna have, like, a million BILLION cores, with super powers like laser eyes and an invisibility shield!
[/absurdity]
Let the macho dick-waving contests begin.
After the last star wars movie, my friends and I spent twenty minutes outside of the theater arguing whether Naboo was an apartheid state.
The only conclusion we came to is that we're total geeks, and we needed to stop before anybody noticed.
Are parents that emotionally detached from their kids? I mean, couldn't you just ask your kids what they ate for lunch?
Yeah, kids make mistakes, but they're still human. If your body wants protein, you're gonna crave a steak. If your body needs calcium, you'll crave some orange juice or vegetables. I don't think we really have to worry too much about kids buying six dollars worth of snickers bars every day.
In fact, the only situation where I could see this being used is for anorexic teenagers, to make sure that they're actually purchasing food. Which sounds great, in theory, but considering the fact that anorexia is usually linked to domineering parents, a history of sexual abuse, and an inescapable urge to be in control of something, then monitoring an anorexic's every food purchase is not a good way to help them regain control of their life.
This is just ridiculous. They're your kids. They're not supposed to be convenient, they're supposed to be huge pains in the ass who are hard as hell to raise right. You can't just slap a tracking device on them and monitor and measure everything they do so you can fit them into a spreadsheet report.
If you can't ask your kids what they had for lunch and get an honest answer, you have a much bigger problem than the lack of an online monitoring service.
Nothing gets a napervillian riled up more than the idea that maybe their pleastantville suburb isn't as perfect as they would like to think.
Sorry to point it out but maybe it's just that you hang out with the heroin crowd.
Yeah, right, just keep the blinders on. You'll fit in just fine if you keep doing that.
Incidentally, same election shows Dubya carrying the township by ~3.5K votes out of 39K cast. They've certainly got their conservatives there, but it's a bit more balanced than you apparently think.
It's Illinois, the right votes Democrat just as often as they vote Republican. I mean, you have heard of conservative Democrats, right? Hell, the strongman of Chicago, Daley, is not exactly what I would call a 'liberal.'
Alan Keyes got whalloped everywhere because he's not from Illinois, and Obama is a better politician. But voting records aren't the final authority on the culture of a community.
And yes, I did leave ten years ago to a nearby city. If you want to call me a liar for pointing out what I went through as a kid in "the best city in America to raise children", then whatever. Suffice to say, way too many people are familiar with Linden Oaks than should be.
Naperville has problems on a scale that no other community I've lived in has had. For instance, heroin use has gone through the roof in the past few years. Already two people I've known have died from overdoses, three have been through rehab, and one was clinically dead. None of them are what you would call stereotypical drug users. Domestic violence was a huge problem, until all of a sudden you just stopped hearing about it. Nothing changed, just nobody reported it anymore.
Naperville has the money and the blinders to pretend that they don't exist, but you know as well as I do, that the place has some fucked up shit going on underneath the surface.
And the police are working on figuring out a way to not have to go through those proper channels, by way of the legal definition of "The Public." That's what the battle is.
Initially, I was against this development, but after reading TFA, I actually feel al lot better aboout it, for a few reasons:
A little bit of googling results in the fact that, while the library may be protecting the patrons, if it were up to the police, they would have no such ability.
When someone spotted Blaszak's inappropriate library activities, they called the police. Unfortunately, by the time the Naperville PD arrived, Blaszak had left the library. Library officials refused to disclose the patron who had logged in, citing the Illinois Library Records Confidentiality Act, which prohibits libraries from releasing borrowing records, records of reference questions asked, and records of the use of librarys computers for Internet access to the public without a court order. The police don't think they qualify as "the public"; the library thinks they do. Either way, the NPD got a court order, identified Blaszak and the two teens, and discovered that Blaszak had done "the same thing" on May 5. The library and the police are still going back and forth about the meaning of the confidentiality act.
And in any battle between the librarians and the police, I would unfortunately put my money on the police.
Oh, Naperville. How I hate you so. For those who have never been there, let me give you an idea of what this place is like.
Rich. Conservative. And fucked up beyond belief. Alan Keyes made his home there when he was campaigning in Illinois. It boasts the most expensive highschool in the midwest, and even the shitty highschool on the other side of town has an olympic size swimming pool and a greenhouse.
It's sprawled out so far, that even with all the money the city has, it's getting to the point where it can't afford to plow the whole city when it snows.
So does this surprise me? No, not really. My parents moved out of that town when it was getting gentrified away from a quaint, middle class suburb and into a massive, upper-middle class traffic-fest. It's got a whole lot of libertarians now, for whom 'liberty' really only has anything to do with taxes. Concerning anything else (reproductive rights, personal privacy, etc), they would make small towns in Alabama seem damn near progressive in comparison.
It was never that great of a city to begin with, but right before we left (around 1995 or so), it had turned into what I would imagine a nice, quiet suburb in Nazi Germany was like. You know, everything's fine if you just don't pay too much attention to the smoke rising up in the horizon. I remember kids in my sophmore year social studies class arguing for fascism as a preferred political system. And the teacher didn't trick them, they actually brought up the idea, and were pretty enthusiastic about it.
High school was a frenzy of girls getting raped, drug overdoses, rampant (almost encouraged) racism and classism, severe and rampant anorexia and bullemia, bullying on a scale of Columbine, and just overall one of the worst social atmospheres you could ever subject a kid to.
If anybody ever made a movie about life in this town, it would have to be shot like a horror film.
So, I can't say I'm surprised about this. Naperville's got the money, the right-wing leanings, and the idiocy to do something just like this.
Doesn't he have a union or something? I mean, this is Spain, I didn't think things like this could happen there without some kind of repurcussions for the entity doing the firing.
And in other news, nobody cared.
Watto was a total Sicilian stereotype.
Do you know what I want to see? I want to see that killer app that everyone wants to use require Firefox or another decently CSS-standard following browser.
Imagine if GMail, even just in it's beta phase, had said 'Sorry, Internet Explorer does not support the features necessary to use this website. Download Firefox for free here.' Imagine what that could have done to pressure microsoft to start supporting the standards.
I really think all it's gonna take is somebody with the right application that everybody wants to use, and the moxie to give ol' Internet Explorer the finger.
If I'm not mistaken, using a credit card gives you a paper reciept.
Whenever unions are brought up on Slashdot, they're usually in the context of low wages or long hours.
But here's another prime example of where some kind of union could prevent this kind of invasion of privacy (and waste of money). But without any kind of organization that can negotiate on the behalf of the employees, most workers just have to take it.
Now before the Libertarians get their briefs in a bunch, no, a corporation has no legal responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of it's employees. Yes, employees are free to find another job. But sometimes those excuses just aren't good enough.
The video was funny, the song was really good.
I really like anti-war messages that aren't packaged in your typical angry punk song.
And for further amusement: America (Fuck Yeah!) We Stand As One
Maybe. Or maybe Linux is the ownership of the means of production and distribution being put into the hands of the producers themselves.