How can you justify trading with a Chinese Communist government, still unapologetic about human rights violations (i.e. Tienemen Square), when you won't trade with Fidel Castro's Communist Cuba for the same reason?
We can't justify it. There is no excuse. The embargo should be lifted, preferably yesterday.
Right-wingers like to believe that we are making some sort of grand "moral" stand against Fidel Castro and Communism, but as you have pointed out, the hypocrisy is nearly staggering. The United States is the only country in the world that has decided to make such a stand (with the possible exception of Israel, or have they backed down?)
Don't get me wrong; I would very much like to see a democratic, Castro-free Cuba. But keeping up with the embargo is not the way to encourage such a transition. One of the things that people tend to underplay in the collapse of the Soviet Union was the introduction of the Internet into society (and therefore, the fostering of the free exchange of information.) America is doing nothing to contribute to a change of power in Cuba. If anything, we are helping Fidel Castro by giving him a common "enemy" that he can unite his people behind.
If we Americans really wanted freedom and democracy in Cuba, we would drop the embargo. In addition, it would be a boon to U.S. businesses, but that would only be (in my opinion) a side effect.
The economic policies of the Democratic Leadership Council (the "New Democrats") are virtually identical to those of the Republican party. They are in lockstep with each other on almost every issue (the current big one being permanent normal trade relations with China.) And you believe these people are "socialist utopians?" You must be joking.
First of all, the Lady Hope story (deathbed recantation) is a myth; see the link. I'm curious, though, as to why you would "absolutely *love* to bring this up in a BIO class?" Even if it were true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the theory. I am certain you agree that if Copernicus and Galileo had recanted their theories of heliocentrism on their deathbeds, the Earth would not have magically become the center of the Universe at the time of their death(s).
Scientific theories rise and fall on the basis of how well they explain current observations and predict future ones. In this regard, biological evolution has an excellent track record. They do not rise and fall on the basis of how well-liked they are or who "believes" in them. After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a member of British society wrote "Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin writes is not true.. but if it is, let is hope that it does not become well-known." It occurs to me that this attitude sums up a lot of the anti-science activism we see today; if we cannot get evolution banned from classrooms, then we must spread lies and misinformation about it (the Lady Hope deathbed myth being an easy example.)
at least some basic facts should be checked before posting something like this...
Why?
It's "Rio de Janeiro".
Okay, my bad.
"Sanchez" is a Spanish name
So?
And, aren't you thinking of Bolivia...?
Thinking of Bolivia how? Where?
"Gonzalez" is again Spanish.
So?
You'll find "federal judges" in Brasília, the capital, not in Rio...
Who cares?
Then again, 30% of Americans still think the capital is Buenos Aires
30% of Americans can't differentiate between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
And, Starbucks in Brazil...? Now that is hilarious!
Not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, are you? That was the whole point. (The running Onion joke is about a Starbucks opening a new Starbucks in the bathroom of an existing franchise.) If you're going to point that out, you should have also pointed out some other factual inaccuracies:
No drug dealer in Brazil was ever actually sentenced to a "blue screen of death"
Ed Muth, who works for Microsoft, is not actually Brazil's "Minister of Justice"
George W. Bush did not stop at Berkeley; in fact, there is no evidence he plans to go anywhere near it
There is probably nobody named "Mary Madalyn Murray Coughlin O'Laughlin" who works for the National Council of Churches
There is no Service Pack that administers Brazilian justice available for Windows 2000, so there is no way it can be part of the default installation
Linus Torvalds did not actually say the things that were attributed to him
"The black guy from The Green Mile" contributed nothing
BRAZILIAN DRUG KINGPIN SENTENCED TO BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH Harsh Sentence From Judge Raises Some Eyebrows
RIO DE JANIERO (UPI) - Luis Sanchez, overlord of a drug cartel that stretches from the Cape Horn to the Bering Strait, was sentenced to the blue screen of death this afternoon by a federal judge. Judge Roberto Gonzalez carried out the sentence at a Starbuck's coffee house in downtown Rio after he was spotted by undercover agents. The agents called in Gonzalez and restrained Sanchez until he arrived with his laptop computer, running the Automatic Brazilian Justice Service Pack (ABJSP) of the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. The ABJSP is part of the default installation.
Opponents of the blue screen of death penalty were quick to criticize Gonzalez's actions. "The blue screen of death penalty is never justified," explained Mary Madalyn Murray Coughlin O'Laughlin, a representative of the National Council of Churches. "What sort of message do we send when we carry out a penalty like this? It puts us in the same boat with countries like China, Iran, and Afghanistan. It's brutal, it's barbaric, and it's an idea that is about a thousand years too old."
Famous programmer Linus Torvalds agreed with Coughlin O'Laughlin. "I'm from Finland," explained Torvalds, "and I can tell you that I have never, ever seen a blue screen of death penalty carried out. Ever. It's just something that doesn't happen in a sufficiently evolved society."
Ed Muth, newly-appointed Brazilian Minister of Justice, had a slightly different take.
"We need the blue screen of death penalty," explained Muth. "Studies have shown that it acts as a deterrent, that it gives criminals something to think about, that it stops them from committing violent crimes. Also, we cannot forget about the closure factor. While it might seem barbaric, I've had family members of murder victims come up to me and thank me for blue-screening a criminal. They'll tell me that they're finally able to get a good night's sleep, now that their long nightmare is over."
Texas governor and United States presidential candidate George W. Bush agrees. "The blue screen of death penalty remains a necessary evil," Bush explained during a campaign stopover at Berkeley. "It sends a compassionate, yet conservative message to the criminal population of the world." Over the past thirty years, Bush's home state of Texas has blue-screened more inmates than the rest of the Western world combined.
The big black guy from "The Green Mile" contributed to this report.
This is one area where I think a lot of the open source tools get it right. A good example would be the utilities that are available for burning CDs under Linux (and other operating systems) such as mkisofs and cdrecord. These tools provide the functionality that you need to premaster and record CD-Rs on the command line. Then you've got software such as xcdroast that essentially acts as a graphical front end; when it needs the services of either of the previously-mentioned pieces of software, it simply opens a pipe to them and lets them do the work. The result is that if you prefer working with a command line (as I do), you're good to go. If you prefer working with a GUI, you're still good to go.
In many ways, this type of architecture is an extension of the classic paradigm of Unix tool development: have a lot of tools that accomplish small tasks, and have the ability to chain those tools together to perform more complex operations. Only in today's environment, "chaining together" often involves wrapping a functional GUI around them to make them easier and more intuitive for users to navigate. This type of architecture really does offer the best of both worlds; it gives users the tools they need to perform a task, and it offers them a choice as to how those tools will be used.
And most things do seem to be after Euler. Some Gaussian. A whole wack of Cauchy (a touch of Dirichlet), some Euclidean, a splash of Newton, a touch of Taylor, and a jiggle of Riemann and Leibnitz.
How dare you forget Georg Cantor???:-)
Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
Ye gods! When I first saw this, I originally misread it thusly:
We've got a double-headed review of
Simon and Garfunkel's new book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Century.
Index.pl determines whether I've meta-moderated. If I haven't it asks me if I have. Taco obviously smokes crack.
I don't think it's meant to be interpreted that way. For example, think back to your days as a small child. When your mother said "Shoeboy, have you eaten your vegetables?" you knew damn well that she knew damn well that you hadn't eaten your vegetables. The question, therefore, is simply a more polite and indirect way to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you ought to eat your vegetables.. or in this case, maybe you ought to meta-moderate. (After all, it's infinitely more diplomatic than "Shoeboy! Eat yer fuckin' veggies!")
On the other hand, I am morally certain that CmdrTaco smokes crack, albeit for reasons completely unrelated to meta-moderation.
NOTE: I have censored myself to protect Slashdot's younger viewers from potentially reading bad words like 'ass'.
This reminds me of a stunt the Miami Herald pulled several years ago. One Sunday, they refused to run Berke Breathed's "Bloom County" comic strip because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks." To explain to readers why the comic was missing, a brief letter was put in is place explaining that the paper was not running the comic because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks" (that's right, they printed the phrase verbatim.)
Some time later, after several puzzled letters to the editor had been received, the Herald ran an editorial which again explained that the comic had been pulled because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks." Apparently, it simply did not dawn on them that they had used.. multiple times.. the very phrase that they intended to censor from the "Bloom County" strip.
Anyway, the last line of your post made me think of that. Let's see if a conservative moderator moderates this down simply because it has a subject line reading "Reagan Sucks.":-)
If I own a CD, I can do anything I please with it, short of redistributing the music. This includes ripping the tracks off of the CD, encoding them as MP3s, and storing them on my hard drive. I can also take them, burn them onto a data CD-R, and bring them with me to work. For example, if I've got eight Def Leppard albums, I can rip them, encode the songs as MP3, and make a single data CD that has all eight albums in MP3 form. I can then take that CD to work, fire up X11Amp, and not hear a single song repeated all day. I can also take those MP3s, decode them, and burn them to an audio CD that I can use in my car or home stereo. This lets me re-arrange the order of songs on a CD, or put together a CD of my favorite tunes.
I can do all of this. All of this is legal, provided I own the CDs that are the source material for the MP3s. It is no different than recording a CD onto a cassette tape so that you can listen to it in an old Walkman. You have the right to "fair use" of the material. So I say again, there is nothing illegal about "ripping MP3s." Furthermore, "ripping MP3s" is all done locally, and doesn't use a single bit of a college network's available bandwidth.
The legal issues are about distributing MP3s, not creating them. Don't fall into the trap that the RIAA is trying to cleverly lay out. MP3 is not an "illegal format." It is not illegal to create, own, or use MP3-formatted music files. It is illegal to distribute those files to parties who do not legally own the source CD, which is what real beef with Napster is all about. So try not to confuse the issue here.
No, my guess is that you're a garden-variety right-wing christian
Oh, great.. now I've got to clear my name.:-)
To tell you the truth, I'm a bleeding heart liberal (really, I am) that likes to write fake news stories from time to time. When I saw this story, I was taken by the idea of doing some sort of word-play on the "McCarthy hearings." The result was a pretty half-hearted attempt at humor, IMHO.. it started out okay, but when I tried to reach out and fill in the gaps, there just weren't any berries on the bush.
Besides, I referred to Bush as a "former President" and Reagan as a "former Hollywood actor".. how right-wing can I be, dude?:-) Right now, some ditto-head is plotting my assassination for such a comment!
MCCARTHY HEARINGS CONTINUE IN HOLLAND "We Will Root Out Right-Wing Zealotry," Vows Community Leader
HOLLAND, MI (UPI) - Community leader Jamie McCarthy continued his set of hearings to uncover and uproot a clandestine right-wing conspiracy to outlaw "objectionable" books, movies, and Internet material. "We are pleased with the progress that we've made so far," explained McCarthy, "and we know that given enough time, we'll chase these loonies back down to Bumpkin, Arkansas, where they belong." McCarthy's Holland Un-Internetarian Activities Committee has already exposed several right-wing individuals and organizations and has forced them to flee in shame.
On the stand today was former presidential contender Gary Bauer, a social conservative who dropped out of the race following the New Hampshire Republican primary. McCarthy's line of questioning, as usual, was direct and to the point: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Family Research Council?" asked McCarthy. Bauer, after consulting with his attorney, took a sip of water and hoarsely whispered "Yes, I am."
"Are you a part of the self-righteous group of people that believes it has the right to impose its narrow-minded view of morality on all children and parents?" thundered McCarthy from the front of the room. "Yes, I am," admitted Bauer, to a raucous audience reaction and a flurry of popping flashbulbs that could only be silenced by the steady beat of the chairman's gavel. Bauer later left the hearings, never to be seen in Holland again.
Such has been the pattern established by McCarthy's committee over the past couple of weeks. Right-wingers, bravely turned in by community leaders and readers of the Slashdot Web site, are quickly processed by the committee and banished forever from decent society. "We are proud of the work we are doing," beamed McCarthy. "Each night when I go to bed, I do it knowing that I've accomplished something worthwhile. Ensuring that our children can grow up at a safe distance from the clutches of the religious fundamentalists and ultra-right-wing zealots is definitely worthwhile."
Scheduled to appear before the committee next week are Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, political strategist Ralph Reed, NRA president Charlton Heston, former United States president George Bush, and former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan.
Richard Gephardt contributed to this story.
Re:Hate to say this, but...
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 1
I think that would be a lovely program to write (make arbitrary size and checksum cruft). Maybe I'll call it DeCSS.:)
I wrote the above post, but clicked on the "post anonymously" checkbox instead of the "no score +1 bonus", which was my intention. Apologies for any confusion.
Without God, there is no atrocity that won't seem right to somebody somewhere.
Unfortunately, a good number of the people who commit atrocities not only believe in God, but they believe that He is on their side, and therefore commit said atrocities with what they believe to be the full blessing of God. Now, this is not to say that atrocities have never been committed by people who don't believe in God. But it would be intellectually dishonest to attempt to claim that belief in some sort of deity automatically makes one moral.
Personally, I live by the Golden Rule. I am moral because I feel that others want me to be moral. If large segments of the population behave morally and ethically simply because they are scared of a God that has a metaphysical shotgun wired to their foreheads, so be it. If that's what it takes, so be it. In an ideal society, people would behave morally and ethically out of respect for one another, not out of respect for an ancient character who might "get them" in the afterlife. It saddens me that for so many people, this is apparently not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
.. that the more precisely we try to search, the less accurate the results are?
How can you justify trading with a Chinese Communist government, still unapologetic about human rights violations (i.e. Tienemen Square), when you won't trade with Fidel Castro's Communist Cuba for the same reason?
We can't justify it. There is no excuse. The embargo should be lifted, preferably yesterday.
Right-wingers like to believe that we are making some sort of grand "moral" stand against Fidel Castro and Communism, but as you have pointed out, the hypocrisy is nearly staggering. The United States is the only country in the world that has decided to make such a stand (with the possible exception of Israel, or have they backed down?)
Don't get me wrong; I would very much like to see a democratic, Castro-free Cuba. But keeping up with the embargo is not the way to encourage such a transition. One of the things that people tend to underplay in the collapse of the Soviet Union was the introduction of the Internet into society (and therefore, the fostering of the free exchange of information.) America is doing nothing to contribute to a change of power in Cuba. If anything, we are helping Fidel Castro by giving him a common "enemy" that he can unite his people behind.
If we Americans really wanted freedom and democracy in Cuba, we would drop the embargo. In addition, it would be a boon to U.S. businesses, but that would only be (in my opinion) a side effect.
The economic policies of the Democratic Leadership Council (the "New Democrats") are virtually identical to those of the Republican party. They are in lockstep with each other on almost every issue (the current big one being permanent normal trade relations with China.) And you believe these people are "socialist utopians?" You must be joking.
Thanks a lot. You just fucked up my entire system. I'll be digging through a backup tape for days. :-(
First of all, the Lady Hope story (deathbed recantation) is a myth; see the link. I'm curious, though, as to why you would "absolutely *love* to bring this up in a BIO class?" Even if it were true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the theory. I am certain you agree that if Copernicus and Galileo had recanted their theories of heliocentrism on their deathbeds, the Earth would not have magically become the center of the Universe at the time of their death(s).
.. but if it is, let is hope that it does not become well-known." It occurs to me that this attitude sums up a lot of the anti-science activism we see today; if we cannot get evolution banned from classrooms, then we must spread lies and misinformation about it (the Lady Hope deathbed myth being an easy example.)
Scientific theories rise and fall on the basis of how well they explain current observations and predict future ones. In this regard, biological evolution has an excellent track record. They do not rise and fall on the basis of how well-liked they are or who "believes" in them. After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a member of British society wrote "Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin writes is not true
Anyway, just some things to think about.
Wow! Thanks, Redmond! Word has it that Windows 2000 Service Pack 8 will also have built in invulnerability to the Morris Worm!
*nod*
at least some basic facts should be checked before posting something like this...
Why?
It's "Rio de Janeiro".
Okay, my bad.
"Sanchez" is a Spanish name
So?
And, aren't you thinking of Bolivia...?
Thinking of Bolivia how? Where?
"Gonzalez" is again Spanish.
So?
You'll find "federal judges" in Brasília, the capital, not in Rio...
Who cares?
Then again, 30% of Americans still think the capital is Buenos Aires
30% of Americans can't differentiate between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
And, Starbucks in Brazil...? Now that is hilarious!
Not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, are you? That was the whole point. (The running Onion joke is about a Starbucks opening a new Starbucks in the bathroom of an existing franchise.) If you're going to point that out, you should have also pointed out some other factual inaccuracies:
- No drug dealer in Brazil was ever actually sentenced to a "blue screen of death"
- Ed Muth, who works for Microsoft, is not actually Brazil's "Minister of Justice"
- George W. Bush did not stop at Berkeley; in fact, there is no evidence he plans to go anywhere near it
- There is probably nobody named "Mary Madalyn Murray Coughlin O'Laughlin" who works for the National Council of Churches
- There is no Service Pack that administers Brazilian justice available for Windows 2000, so there is no way it can be part of the default installation
- Linus Torvalds did not actually say the things that were attributed to him
- "The black guy from The Green Mile" contributed nothing
Here's some advice: It's a joke. Lighten up.BRAZILIAN DRUG KINGPIN SENTENCED TO BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH
Harsh Sentence From Judge Raises Some Eyebrows
RIO DE JANIERO (UPI) - Luis Sanchez, overlord of a drug cartel that stretches from the Cape Horn to the Bering Strait, was sentenced to the blue screen of death this afternoon by a federal judge. Judge Roberto Gonzalez carried out the sentence at a Starbuck's coffee house in downtown Rio after he was spotted by undercover agents. The agents called in Gonzalez and restrained Sanchez until he arrived with his laptop computer, running the Automatic Brazilian Justice Service Pack (ABJSP) of the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. The ABJSP is part of the default installation.
Opponents of the blue screen of death penalty were quick to criticize Gonzalez's actions. "The blue screen of death penalty is never justified," explained Mary Madalyn Murray Coughlin O'Laughlin, a representative of the National Council of Churches. "What sort of message do we send when we carry out a penalty like this? It puts us in the same boat with countries like China, Iran, and Afghanistan. It's brutal, it's barbaric, and it's an idea that is about a thousand years too old."
Famous programmer Linus Torvalds agreed with Coughlin O'Laughlin. "I'm from Finland," explained Torvalds, "and I can tell you that I have never, ever seen a blue screen of death penalty carried out. Ever. It's just something that doesn't happen in a sufficiently evolved society."
Ed Muth, newly-appointed Brazilian Minister of Justice, had a slightly different take.
"We need the blue screen of death penalty," explained Muth. "Studies have shown that it acts as a deterrent, that it gives criminals something to think about, that it stops them from committing violent crimes. Also, we cannot forget about the closure factor. While it might seem barbaric, I've had family members of murder victims come up to me and thank me for blue-screening a criminal. They'll tell me that they're finally able to get a good night's sleep, now that their long nightmare is over."
Texas governor and United States presidential candidate George W. Bush agrees. "The blue screen of death penalty remains a necessary evil," Bush explained during a campaign stopover at Berkeley. "It sends a compassionate, yet conservative message to the criminal population of the world." Over the past thirty years, Bush's home state of Texas has blue-screened more inmates than the rest of the Western world combined.
The big black guy from "The Green Mile" contributed to this report.
This is one area where I think a lot of the open source tools get it right. A good example would be the utilities that are available for burning CDs under Linux (and other operating systems) such as mkisofs and cdrecord. These tools provide the functionality that you need to premaster and record CD-Rs on the command line. Then you've got software such as xcdroast that essentially acts as a graphical front end; when it needs the services of either of the previously-mentioned pieces of software, it simply opens a pipe to them and lets them do the work. The result is that if you prefer working with a command line (as I do), you're good to go. If you prefer working with a GUI, you're still good to go.
In many ways, this type of architecture is an extension of the classic paradigm of Unix tool development: have a lot of tools that accomplish small tasks, and have the ability to chain those tools together to perform more complex operations. Only in today's environment, "chaining together" often involves wrapping a functional GUI around them to make them easier and more intuitive for users to navigate. This type of architecture really does offer the best of both worlds; it gives users the tools they need to perform a task, and it offers them a choice as to how those tools will be used.
I thought we killed all those people off with the black helicopters already, for gosh darn sakes!
Actually, we're only at the halfway point. But we're making amazing progress!
IIRC, the Commodore 64 version shrieked "Welcome to PLASMAAAANIA!" when you loaded it up.
Man, talk about being left in the dark. I had no idea something like Evolution was in the works.
:-)
Evolution has been in the works for billions of years. You must have gone to school in Kansas.
And most things do seem to be after Euler. Some Gaussian. A whole wack of Cauchy (a touch of Dirichlet), some Euclidean, a splash of Newton, a touch of Taylor, and a jiggle of Riemann and Leibnitz.
:-)
How dare you forget Georg Cantor???
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Come on, guys (and girls.) I got a good laugh out of this. If you didn't, that's fine, but this is definitely not a "troll." Sheesh.
Index.pl determines whether I've meta-moderated. If I haven't it asks me if I have. Taco obviously smokes crack.
.. or in this case, maybe you ought to meta-moderate. (After all, it's infinitely more diplomatic than "Shoeboy! Eat yer fuckin' veggies!")
I don't think it's meant to be interpreted that way. For example, think back to your days as a small child. When your mother said "Shoeboy, have you eaten your vegetables?" you knew damn well that she knew damn well that you hadn't eaten your vegetables. The question, therefore, is simply a more polite and indirect way to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you ought to eat your vegetables
On the other hand, I am morally certain that CmdrTaco smokes crack, albeit for reasons completely unrelated to meta-moderation.
NOTE: I have censored myself to protect Slashdot's younger viewers from potentially reading bad words like 'ass'.
.. multiple times .. the very phrase that they intended to censor from the "Bloom County" strip.
:-)
This reminds me of a stunt the Miami Herald pulled several years ago. One Sunday, they refused to run Berke Breathed's "Bloom County" comic strip because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks." To explain to readers why the comic was missing, a brief letter was put in is place explaining that the paper was not running the comic because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks" (that's right, they printed the phrase verbatim.)
Some time later, after several puzzled letters to the editor had been received, the Herald ran an editorial which again explained that the comic had been pulled because it contained the phrase "Reagan Sucks." Apparently, it simply did not dawn on them that they had used
Anyway, the last line of your post made me think of that. Let's see if a conservative moderator moderates this down simply because it has a subject line reading "Reagan Sucks."
They can do it. It's all up to them! M'kay?
If I own a CD, I can do anything I please with it, short of redistributing the music. This includes ripping the tracks off of the CD, encoding them as MP3s, and storing them on my hard drive. I can also take them, burn them onto a data CD-R, and bring them with me to work. For example, if I've got eight Def Leppard albums, I can rip them, encode the songs as MP3, and make a single data CD that has all eight albums in MP3 form. I can then take that CD to work, fire up X11Amp, and not hear a single song repeated all day. I can also take those MP3s, decode them, and burn them to an audio CD that I can use in my car or home stereo. This lets me re-arrange the order of songs on a CD, or put together a CD of my favorite tunes.
I can do all of this. All of this is legal, provided I own the CDs that are the source material for the MP3s. It is no different than recording a CD onto a cassette tape so that you can listen to it in an old Walkman. You have the right to "fair use" of the material. So I say again, there is nothing illegal about "ripping MP3s." Furthermore, "ripping MP3s" is all done locally, and doesn't use a single bit of a college network's available bandwidth.
The legal issues are about distributing MP3s, not creating them. Don't fall into the trap that the RIAA is trying to cleverly lay out. MP3 is not an "illegal format." It is not illegal to create, own, or use MP3-formatted music files. It is illegal to distribute those files to parties who do not legally own the source CD, which is what real beef with Napster is all about. So try not to confuse the issue here.
No, my guess is that you're a garden-variety right-wing christian
.. now I've got to clear my name. :-)
.. it started out okay, but when I tried to reach out and fill in the gaps, there just weren't any berries on the bush.
.. how right-wing can I be, dude? :-) Right now, some ditto-head is plotting my assassination for such a comment!
Oh, great
To tell you the truth, I'm a bleeding heart liberal (really, I am) that likes to write fake news stories from time to time. When I saw this story, I was taken by the idea of doing some sort of word-play on the "McCarthy hearings." The result was a pretty half-hearted attempt at humor, IMHO
Besides, I referred to Bush as a "former President" and Reagan as a "former Hollywood actor"
MCCARTHY HEARINGS CONTINUE IN HOLLAND
"We Will Root Out Right-Wing Zealotry," Vows Community Leader
HOLLAND, MI (UPI) - Community leader Jamie McCarthy continued his set of hearings to uncover and uproot a clandestine right-wing conspiracy to outlaw "objectionable" books, movies, and Internet material. "We are pleased with the progress that we've made so far," explained McCarthy, "and we know that given enough time, we'll chase these loonies back down to Bumpkin, Arkansas, where they belong." McCarthy's Holland Un-Internetarian Activities Committee has already exposed several right-wing individuals and organizations and has forced them to flee in shame.
On the stand today was former presidential contender Gary Bauer, a social conservative who dropped out of the race following the New Hampshire Republican primary. McCarthy's line of questioning, as usual, was direct and to the point: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Family Research Council?" asked McCarthy. Bauer, after consulting with his attorney, took a sip of water and hoarsely whispered "Yes, I am."
"Are you a part of the self-righteous group of people that believes it has the right to impose its narrow-minded view of morality on all children and parents?" thundered McCarthy from the front of the room. "Yes, I am," admitted Bauer, to a raucous audience reaction and a flurry of popping flashbulbs that could only be silenced by the steady beat of the chairman's gavel. Bauer later left the hearings, never to be seen in Holland again.
Such has been the pattern established by McCarthy's committee over the past couple of weeks. Right-wingers, bravely turned in by community leaders and readers of the Slashdot Web site, are quickly processed by the committee and banished forever from decent society. "We are proud of the work we are doing," beamed McCarthy. "Each night when I go to bed, I do it knowing that I've accomplished something worthwhile. Ensuring that our children can grow up at a safe distance from the clutches of the religious fundamentalists and ultra-right-wing zealots is definitely worthwhile."
Scheduled to appear before the committee next week are Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, political strategist Ralph Reed, NRA president Charlton Heston, former United States president George Bush, and former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan.
Richard Gephardt contributed to this story.
I think that would be a lovely program to write (make arbitrary size and checksum cruft). Maybe I'll call it DeCSS. :)
:-)
_Deirdre
Actually, that would work out just fine!
"DeCSS" == "Deirdre's Checksum & Size Satisfier"
Now start coding.
I wrote the above post, but clicked on the "post anonymously" checkbox instead of the "no score +1 bonus", which was my intention. Apologies for any confusion.
Without God, there is no atrocity that won't seem right to somebody somewhere.
Unfortunately, a good number of the people who commit atrocities not only believe in God, but they believe that He is on their side, and therefore commit said atrocities with what they believe to be the full blessing of God. Now, this is not to say that atrocities have never been committed by people who don't believe in God. But it would be intellectually dishonest to attempt to claim that belief in some sort of deity automatically makes one moral.
Personally, I live by the Golden Rule. I am moral because I feel that others want me to be moral. If large segments of the population behave morally and ethically simply because they are scared of a God that has a metaphysical shotgun wired to their foreheads, so be it. If that's what it takes, so be it. In an ideal society, people would behave morally and ethically out of respect for one another, not out of respect for an ancient character who might "get them" in the afterlife. It saddens me that for so many people, this is apparently not the case.
Critically examine my words.
:-) Thanks for your thoughts.
Well, they make a hell of a lot of sense to me.