I think the main point is that this was only a game, and I understood it was only a game.
That's great for you; are you 10? If not, I think you are missing the point. If you are a 10-year-old then chastise whomever gave/sold you the game, then, for me, slap your parents for letting you play it.
If GTA was just about crashing motorbikes we wouldn't be talking about this every other week. Neither Motocross on the C64 or Excitebike, despite all the motorbike crashes, involved depictions of chainsaw rampages, drug trafficing, or beating cops to death with the dildo in their shower.
When my kids are 10 I'm going to keep them far away from depictions of bloody tire-tracks and dildo beatings. Your parents probably feel/felt the same way.
"You are right, to a degree. Most parents simply do not care what their kids see and hear in a video game. But this is not only due to laziness -- it is due also to ignorance. Many adults over 30 still consider video games to be "kid's entertainment." The idea that adult-oriented or even pornographic material could exist in a video game format is simply unfathomable to them."(emphasis added)
:-D You might have to revise this number up -- to let's say many people over 40. Here's why: Everyone in the less than 40 range had the Atari home console revoltion in addition to the video game arcades of the late seventies and early 80s. I'd say "many adults" in this age range (over 25, under 40, as siblings on this thread point out) grew up playing video cames. We're starting families of our own. Some of my friends have games-aged kids now.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the age discrepency. Back on topic though, I think the study points out something pretty important, regardless of the age of the parents, and that is the 'my kid can handle it' syndrome. These are the same jack-ass parents who take their kids to rated-R movies (there were kids in the house when I went to see Sin City) and such (or took their 7 year olds to see SW:ROTS (Lucas gave that movie an ironic set of initials, huh?)). I'm not trying to undermine your point about parents needing to be discerning; I'm saying that parents are so biased that it's hard to be discerning about this topic. Nobody likes absolutes... (generally I don't) but I wish there wasn't a stigma to the NC-17 rating, and that parents treated "M for mature" (i.e., age appropriate for 17+) as the same -- no kids under 17, not as just a recommendation that's irrelevant for their perfect little mature-for-their-age angels. I'm not saying there should be laws, legislating choice sucks.
Anecdote: I have a cousin who was 10 around the time after GTA:Vice City came out. He was talking about how cool it looked how he wanted it for Christmas, and I was like, "Yeah I bought it just when it came out. I love it. It's fucking awesome!" Then I remembered he was 10 and apologized for swearing in front of him and then warned my uncle that really there was no way he should consider buying him GTA:VC (I'm not insinuating he would; it takes a villiage, and all that). My point there is that sometimes it's easy to forget how old your kids/cousins are; they grow up pretty quickly and seem more like little adults than 'children' at times. I may love car-jacking, trafficing coke and sniping cops as much as the next guy, but I can't see how that's age appropriate. Parents wake up; The system would work if you just let it.
You said: "Without IP laws, there would be no creation to begin with."
This is a lie. Why did you say it?
I'll excerpt what I said to another poster: The creative commons existed for thousands of years before the Statue of Anne came about in 1710. Your bickering with Modquark seems to incessantly ignore this historical fact. Our founding fathers, having known of the relatively contemporary statute above, wrote that Congress shall have the power to grant temporary monopolies to authors to promote the sciences and arts. This small concession against otherwise protected property rights was granted to induce inventors and publishers to invent more and publish more than they would with lifetime copyrights (as in Britain)....The only reason we have copyright in this country is to encourage science and art to flourish.
I ask because this whole thread you've only seemed petulant.
I guess the other option is that you are willfully ignorant, inexperienced, or naive.
The creative commons existed for thousands of years before the Statue of Anne came about in 1710. Your bickering with Modquark seems to incessantly ignore this historical fact. Our founding fathers, having known of the relatively contemporary statute above, wrote that Congress shall have the power to grant temporary monopolies to authors to promote the sciences and arts. This small concession against otherwise protected property rights was granted to induce inventors and publishers to invent more and publish more than they would with lifetime copyrights (as in Britain). There it is -- the only reason we have copyright in this country is to encourage science and art to flourish.
I don't think the extreme extensions to the term of these artificial monopolies have helped the arts to flourish. I would argue that granting protection of 'life+70' (the current term, up from our first term of 14 years in the 1800s) only inspires creators to create once, or inspires large holding companies to collect and hold many, many of these one-time creations. The Big Five (the companies that own the companies that form the MPAA and RIAA: Sony, TW, GE, Disney, News Corp.) have a universal and homogenizing effect that harms the arts; if you will agree that the majority of art and science is evolutionary and not entirely revolutionary and divinely unique.
Huh, all of that without even touching on how copyrights affect real natural rights and property rights. Anyway, if the Founders knew that the sharing of an idea left both parties illuminated and neither diminished, why do you keep insisting that that's not the case? Why do you insist the sharing of ideas is stealing of potential sales? Where do you get the idea there is a right to be paid for ideas?
These three questions are irrelevant to the current U.S. code regarding copyrights (which, loosely, prevent the reproduction and distribution of works in a non-transitory medium).
PETA runs a Humane Society shelter. The Humane Society euthanizes animals that are sick or un-adoptable (i.e., infirm, dangerous, failed temperament testing, etc.). Of course, it's not as catchy if a website is named The Humane Society Kills Animals dot com. The Humane Society believes its mission is ethical. Full disclosure: my wife works for the Humane Society.
Hi, we've talked before about this topic. Let's revisit some stuff that's developed since then.
You said further up this thread: We knew we couldn't tackle "Al Qaeda" directly; we wanted to go after a defined government entity that COULD be changed. What's really interesting to me is that you also admit that the insurgency in Iraq isn't the regular Iraqi people (for the most part, anyway) fighting the US occupiers, but are indeed the fanatical extremists that we hope to defeat in the end. You seem to think that simply because the insurgency exists and can feed itself and its power structure and recruitment off of the actions and techniques of the opposing forces (i.e., the US's action in Iraq) that the strategy is doomed to failure.
[...]
There is absolutely no question they'll use this to their advantage, to rally others to their cause, indeed, to attempt to radicalize peoples in the mideast simultaneously against the US and to the cause of Panislamism.
But that the very mechanism by which they do this is itself riddled with falsehoods. They will claim the US wants to rape their women, torture their sons, overtake their countries, exterminate their religion, steal their land, and end their way of life.
Ok. I know that's a lot of bold stuff to address, but I didn't want to take it out of context. I think the most fundamental disagreement you and Demachina are having here (and maybe me too) is this: The insurgents in Iraq (who will be fighting us for decades, make no mistake) are NOT NOT NOT Panislamists. They are merely Arabists. And as "Patriots" it is not difficult to see why they are streaming in from other Arab countries to fight. We do overtake their countries --Palestine, Iraq-- we do 'steal' their land, --Palestine, Iraq-- and we are --through overt military support of Israel-- working to "end their [Arabs', Palestinians'] way of life"; every time we support the Likudniks, or indirectly support the settler's movement. I've been arguing with my buddies through email about this for the weeks since that recent report came out about the geo-political make-up and backgrounds of the foreign fighters in Iraq. The Middle-East is not going to run out of Arabs anytime soon, and as such, the percentage of patriots willing to fight invaders isn't some negligible amount that we can just consume/slay. HOWEVER, this is very distinct from the support structure for what you call Panislamists (and what I normally just call radical Islamists, you know bin Laden-style 'death to the infidel', return to the caliphate, a pox on your decadent life-style extremists). The 'panislamists' have no future (well no real future), their numbers are very small, and I agree with you, they will not win. Sadly, for the foreseeable future there will always be just enough to kill us in explosive, scary, and disruptive ways.
So to sum up this section: Arabists will fight us (or our proxies) in Iraq for decades but eventually the generations that see us as invaders, stealers, and Israel-supporters will all die of old age (presuming that the Palestinians get their own country [back] some time in that span). It's pretty easy to see why: Would the French resistance have stopped killing Germans occupiers? If America was occupied by Germany would you accept it as 'a necessary step to achieve a stabilizing Nazi hegemony in the region', or would you fight them in the streets? (Apologies to Godwin and all, I'm not trying to equate the U.S. actions in Iraq with the spreading fascism of the 40s; merely trying to crystalize a patriot's duty.)
"Panislamists" will fight 'us' (the West) for the foreseeable future. Their numbers are minute. They have no grassroots support. They have no political support (see elections in the Muslim areas of Southeast Asia). This tiny, tiny minority of people must be dealt with as we've always dealt with organized crime (and in my estimation this means not destroying Anti-islmaist states in the region, but whatever, we can agree to disagree). People
Do you make anywhere near the minimum wage? Probably not considering you explicitly mention you are salaried. Many families in America are not salaried and do make somewhere near the minimum wage. Further, what's the sq. footage of your house and your mortgage? A two bedroom flat will house a family of four until the kids are too old to be in the same room (by [retarded] law boys and girls can't share a bedroom past a certain age, I think it's five-years when social services will start harassing you), sadly most folks on minimum wage cant afford a mortgage, so they rent a place like this at around $500 a month. Does $500 a month sound like nothing to you? That's close to what you make on minimum wage. One income pays the rent, the other income pays for the food, clothing, and medicine. Now you see why some people need two incomes. Yay! Congrats on the anecdotal dismissal of a real problem, though.
Re:Education Sucks in the US? That's news to me!
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Improving Education?
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GGP: The divorce rate, breast feeding, college money saving, busy parents, and television are post hoc fallacies. We don't have good public schools because there is no value. They are "free". Americans will value education when they have to pay for it themselves without the government holding the pursestrings.
What both of these prove is that it's not "schools suck because of culture" (if that really is your argument). Like it has been said elsewhere, schools suck because culture doesn't value intellect and education.
(Maybe you could argue that culture sucks because schools suck because generally Americans don't value intellect. You could also argue with the GGP that charging tuition for primary education may not induce Americans to value education. E.g., China, and by extension Japan, have years of Confucian meritocracy to thank for their value of intellect, yet they both have public education systems; Our culture of intellect, Greek, early Roman, and by extension the European Renaissance, have somehow been divorced from America, perhaps by puritanism? It's ironic, because it seems to me that by virtue public education reflects a core belief in the value of intellect. I guess to most Americans, especially privatizers, that seems anachronistic. Anyway, getting off this tangent...:)
In each success story, even in your foreign country examples, the groups involved value education. Arguing against the symptoms is fallacious. You can be a single parent and value education. You can not be terribly involved with their school-work and still value education and instill that value in your child. A child that has been taught the value of education by a good-for-nothing-else parent is still better off than one that hasn't. What it seems a majority of voting Americans don't value is education; Our policies reflect a culture that doesn't.
As you and others have pointed out - children and parents who value education, despite the unfriendly environment, can and do succeed.
What's weird is... I've become so jaded to Slashdot that I can't tell if this is a troll or not -- quoth the anonymous parent:
To me, video games (generally) are more involving than books. I love to read a good book now and then, but I don't think I've EVER read the same book twice. Books have almost zero replay value, whereas games like GTA have quite a bit. And books are not interactive. You just sit there and read it. GTA has missions, but you are free to do other things out of order. On the other hand, books probably promote imagination alot better than video games. Why not do both?
These restraints aren't DRM. They are security. And security for good measure I might add. I don't want the story spoiled for me before I read it myself. Scholastic's fortunes rest on that same truth -- that if the secrets (at the very least) revealed in the new book are published before their time they will be financially damaged.
They may even be damaged --in terms of short term sales-- by loud mouths making and distributing copies to the press (or, God forbid, the Intarwebs).
I don't see anything wrong with keeping the djinni in the bottle until their ready.
I'd like to mention Vagrant Story, an older Squaresoft game, that has a great combination of both game length and replay value. The way the game and story is setup you can complete the main action and story of the game pretty quickly (esp with practice) but it offers a huge variety of replay goodies. If you can get past the low poly-count and low-res textures (i.e. you haven't been jaded by the current generation of actiony-RPGs) I enthusiastically recommend it, even today (oh, it's for the PS1 of course). I've been secretly wishing that Square-Enix would revive this story/universe with a prequel or sequel, as the characters and mythos were all very interesting to me. I'm wondering if the Ivalice of the new FF will share some of the old-Europe/Gothic flavor that is all over VS.
FF-X2, to a lesser extent, offers a little bit of this "shorter story for more replay" trade-off. Previous FFs avoided replayability for a kind of 'infinite playability' with the crazy difficult "Weapons" that require maxed out characters and other features that required ages of game-play to reach (growing Materia, collecting Monsters, in-game card games, filling the skill web, etc).
I snarkily said: "If sacrifice is so important why aren't we pushing for the draft, and why haven't you re-upped?"
To which you replied: "By that logic, you could argue that in order for me to express an opinion in favor of military action, I'd have to be in the military for my entire life."
Haha, not exactly. When one is both in favor of a war-of-choice and demands human sacrifice it would only seem fair to put one's body where one's policy is. I mostly made that remark due to frustration with the "chicken hawks". To me it seems like combat vets (or at least career soldiers) are better prepared to make decisions about war.
Anyhow. I was going to talk about the vets in my family and where they stand on the war and it's ROI regarding American hegemony in the mid-east, but it really doesn't matter (so I deleted it all). Regardless of the personal reasons, in my estimation extending U.S. hegemony throughout the region is the same sort of vain crap that hasn't been working for ages. It has the same smell as "making the world safe for democracy". That lead to a generation of wasted Cold-War effort -- my inner geek hates wasted effort. Now it looks like the same thing, only this time we'll have a 30 to 40 year Warm-War with a more insidious (and possibly falsified) threat of nuclear annihilation. There won't be any duck and cover warning, there will just be unannounced abject panic. Plus, we won't get any of the great space-race perks, we'll only get more advanced surveillance and terrorist-sniffing data-mining.
What perks do you see coming out of the Terror-War?
Sorry for rambling and thanks again for taking the time to reply before. Pardon any mistakes, and especially pardon my uninformed/mixed-up Iraqi casualty numbers from before.
I generally respect your opinions. However, using human calculus is a really slippery slope.
You say: First, all the naysayers who, disgustingly, in my opinion, invoke the US war dead in favor of their arguments also apparently don't care about Iraqis at all. Because if the US leaves, a SHITLOAD more Iraqis will die than ever would have, regardless of whether or not the US ever set foot in Iraq in 2003. That is an absolute given. So if they're out to "preserve life", that's certainly not the way to do it.
Do you have any credible or concrete information to show that more or less Iraqis would have died if we'd never invaded? Where does the post withdrawal "shitload" figure come from? The death rate in Iraq right now is near 100,000 (one hundred thousand) per year. If we had left Iraq alone, and "evil" Saddam remained in power, can you really argue more Iraqis would have died? Would more troops have died if we pressed the hunt for OBL instead of diverting to Iraq?
Further, you go on to chide us all for not willing to make sacrifices. I love making sacrifices as much as the next guy, and I'm glad to hear you served in the military, if not the infantry, but honestly what is the true cost of this (as you say elsewhere) pre-emptive war?
It's not just the 1700 soldiers who signed up to die. And it's not the 200,000 Iraqis who were under the wrong shell at the wrong time. The real sacrifice is the "generational" investment (the one that is shielded from our eyes by no-contest appropriations and deficit spending). And what's more, it's a crying shame that we aren't all sacrificing under war rationing and turning in our extra cash for war bonds. Maybe if this generation could sacrifice like my grandfather's and my uncle's -- if we learned that war-time was a time to do without -- then we wouldn't be as trivial and trite (even flippant?) as you seem to be about choosing war.
If sacrifice is so important why aren't we pushing for the draft, and why haven't you re-upped?
Why are there still war-supporters at home and not in Iraq securing the objective (whatever that may be)?
So yeah, nothing personal. This though is hillarious to me: Things like "we'd like to begin a multi-decade comprehensive strategy of political change in the middle east to kill off Panislamic radicalism, forcibly when necessary, for our own safety and security, and that of the Western economies, in addition to enabling free markets and free exchange of information and ideas among the peoples of the mideast for long term mutual benefit, and we're going to start by militarily overtaking and occupying a quasi-secular, centrally located nation-state to begin creating a catalyst for change and modernization in the region" [...] In other words don't debate the real issue at all, don't address the choices with the citizenry -- just lie to everyone and then argue long after the fact that it was in their own best interest. This is why it's so fucked up that you don't need congress to declare war anymore. Nice one. As a progressive, or at least a Kerry supporter, you have to acknowledge the irony of what you just said... I.e., it was OK for Bush to lie us into war for the very long term outcome. Wow.
Well here's one consolation for you... We have such a high incarceration rate in America that the fraction of nutters on the loose is actually a little smaller than you fear.:-D
I think the next GTA should have a difficulty setting where you can't 'bribe' the cops. So each time you get caught for a crime you do some simulated time for a minute or so and are released with the appropriate amount of years/months subtracted from the characters life-span. Your goal would be to complete the game before you died of virtual-old-age.
First, yes they are longer lived than Americans. Second, the birth rate has been much lower than in the U.S. Additionally, immigratin is slower to Japan so there are fewer foreigners upsetting the averages.
Language is based on sound (or, in the case of sign language, visual form). There is no parsing other than phonetic parsing
So the vital problem is that the construction "should of" doesn't sound like "shoulda" or "should've" or "should have". The phrase is still simply wrong even by your own understanding. This ignores the fact that your caveat for sign language also applies to the visual forms of written language -- hence "should of" even looks wrong.
Regarding word order, any insight on why we still use accusative forms of some words in English? I have to agree that all of the verb-first constructions were bizarre.:-D I know nothing of Finnish, so that was very enlightening.
Finally: I said, "At this point though of is still a preposition and have is still a verb." To which you replied, "Says who? A lot of people disagree with you. You may not hold the majority opinion in fifty years."
I now ask: To whom is of not a preposition? I acknowledge that the verbing of nouns is generally accepted and can go the other way, and hence the nouning of the verb have leads us to phases like "the haves and the have-nots".
I agree with you and semantically there is no doubt.
That said, there is a very common [mis?]conception, in this day and age, to describe a predominately Christian nation as "a Christian nation." If there wasn't the xenophobes wouldn't be telling the Muslims to get out of 'their' country and the (so-called) conservatives wouldn't be demanding [Christian] prayer in schools. This is why I defended the previous poster's position.:)
Full Metal has some very mature themes. I hope your kids are either too young to understand ethnic cleansing or old enough that the graphic murder of children won't damage them.
You see that on the first line? "WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, " Showers sweet? Doesn't he mean "Sweet showers?" Why, he's putting the adjective *after* the noun! That's not English? But, yes it is; the rules have changed.
C'mon, to be fair you have to admit that English has no word order rules... just like Latin, it merely has customs (and yet you insinuate that you are a linguist?!). If English relied on word order (c.f., Asian languages) they would have had to subtitle Yoda.:-D
English has rules. The phrase Should of violates those rules. Rules change. At this point though of is still a preposition and have is still a verb.
It's interesting that earlier in this thread that Ebonics is held up as a defense. Ebonics solves this lame argument by accepting the concatenation of prepositions into parts of speech like 'shoulda'. If people would just write out their pidgin English phonetically we wouldn't have to worry about it. One could tell right away that they were writing in dialect and thus one could throw out all grammatical parsing and just use phonetic parsing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main point is that this was only a game, and I understood it was only a game.
That's great for you; are you 10? If not, I think you are missing the point. If you are a 10-year-old then chastise whomever gave/sold you the game, then, for me, slap your parents for letting you play it.
If GTA was just about crashing motorbikes we wouldn't be talking about this every other week. Neither Motocross on the C64 or Excitebike, despite all the motorbike crashes, involved depictions of chainsaw rampages, drug trafficing, or beating cops to death with the dildo in their shower.
When my kids are 10 I'm going to keep them far away from depictions of bloody tire-tracks and dildo beatings. Your parents probably feel/felt the same way.
:-D You might have to revise this number up -- to let's say many people over 40. Here's why: Everyone in the less than 40 range had the Atari home console revoltion in addition to the video game arcades of the late seventies and early 80s. I'd say "many adults" in this age range (over 25, under 40, as siblings on this thread point out) grew up playing video cames. We're starting families of our own. Some of my friends have games-aged kids now.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the age discrepency. Back on topic though, I think the study points out something pretty important, regardless of the age of the parents, and that is the 'my kid can handle it' syndrome. These are the same jack-ass parents who take their kids to rated-R movies (there were kids in the house when I went to see Sin City) and such (or took their 7 year olds to see SW:ROTS (Lucas gave that movie an ironic set of initials, huh?)). I'm not trying to undermine your point about parents needing to be discerning; I'm saying that parents are so biased that it's hard to be discerning about this topic. Nobody likes absolutes... (generally I don't) but I wish there wasn't a stigma to the NC-17 rating, and that parents treated "M for mature" (i.e., age appropriate for 17+) as the same -- no kids under 17, not as just a recommendation that's irrelevant for their perfect little mature-for-their-age angels. I'm not saying there should be laws, legislating choice sucks.
Anecdote: I have a cousin who was 10 around the time after GTA:Vice City came out. He was talking about how cool it looked how he wanted it for Christmas, and I was like, "Yeah I bought it just when it came out. I love it. It's fucking awesome!" Then I remembered he was 10 and apologized for swearing in front of him and then warned my uncle that really there was no way he should consider buying him GTA:VC (I'm not insinuating he would; it takes a villiage, and all that). My point there is that sometimes it's easy to forget how old your kids/cousins are; they grow up pretty quickly and seem more like little adults than 'children' at times. I may love car-jacking, trafficing coke and sniping cops as much as the next guy, but I can't see how that's age appropriate. Parents wake up; The system would work if you just let it.
You said: "Without IP laws, there would be no creation to begin with."
...The only reason we have copyright in this country is to encourage science and art to flourish.
This is a lie. Why did you say it?
I'll excerpt what I said to another poster:
The creative commons existed for thousands of years before the Statue of Anne came about in 1710. Your bickering with Modquark seems to incessantly ignore this historical fact. Our founding fathers, having known of the relatively contemporary statute above, wrote that Congress shall have the power to grant temporary monopolies to authors to promote the sciences and arts. This small concession against otherwise protected property rights was granted to induce inventors and publishers to invent more and publish more than they would with lifetime copyrights (as in Britain).
How old are you?
I ask because this whole thread you've only seemed petulant.
I guess the other option is that you are willfully ignorant, inexperienced, or naive.
The creative commons existed for thousands of years before the Statue of Anne came about in 1710. Your bickering with Modquark seems to incessantly ignore this historical fact. Our founding fathers, having known of the relatively contemporary statute above, wrote that Congress shall have the power to grant temporary monopolies to authors to promote the sciences and arts. This small concession against otherwise protected property rights was granted to induce inventors and publishers to invent more and publish more than they would with lifetime copyrights (as in Britain). There it is -- the only reason we have copyright in this country is to encourage science and art to flourish.
I don't think the extreme extensions to the term of these artificial monopolies have helped the arts to flourish. I would argue that granting protection of 'life+70' (the current term, up from our first term of 14 years in the 1800s) only inspires creators to create once, or inspires large holding companies to collect and hold many, many of these one-time creations. The Big Five (the companies that own the companies that form the MPAA and RIAA: Sony, TW, GE, Disney, News Corp.) have a universal and homogenizing effect that harms the arts; if you will agree that the majority of art and science is evolutionary and not entirely revolutionary and divinely unique.
Huh, all of that without even touching on how copyrights affect real natural rights and property rights. Anyway, if the Founders knew that the sharing of an idea left both parties illuminated and neither diminished, why do you keep insisting that that's not the case? Why do you insist the sharing of ideas is stealing of potential sales? Where do you get the idea there is a right to be paid for ideas?
These three questions are irrelevant to the current U.S. code regarding copyrights (which, loosely, prevent the reproduction and distribution of works in a non-transitory medium).
PETA runs a Humane Society shelter. The Humane Society euthanizes animals that are sick or un-adoptable (i.e., infirm, dangerous, failed temperament testing, etc.). Of course, it's not as catchy if a website is named The Humane Society Kills Animals dot com. The Humane Society believes its mission is ethical. Full disclosure: my wife works for the Humane Society.
0 22005/111781
For more on the douche --er, lobbyist-- that runs petakillsanimals.com, see http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2005/072005/07
Hi, we've talked before about this topic. Let's revisit some stuff that's developed since then.
You said further up this thread:
We knew we couldn't tackle "Al Qaeda" directly; we wanted to go after a defined government entity that COULD be changed. What's really interesting to me is that you also admit that the insurgency in Iraq isn't the regular Iraqi people (for the most part, anyway) fighting the US occupiers, but are indeed the fanatical extremists that we hope to defeat in the end. You seem to think that simply because the insurgency exists and can feed itself and its power structure and recruitment off of the actions and techniques of the opposing forces (i.e., the US's action in Iraq) that the strategy is doomed to failure.
[...]
There is absolutely no question they'll use this to their advantage, to rally others to their cause, indeed, to attempt to radicalize peoples in the mideast simultaneously against the US and to the cause of Panislamism.
But that the very mechanism by which they do this is itself riddled with falsehoods. They will claim the US wants to rape their women, torture their sons, overtake their countries, exterminate their religion, steal their land, and end their way of life.
Ok. I know that's a lot of bold stuff to address, but I didn't want to take it out of context. I think the most fundamental disagreement you and Demachina are having here (and maybe me too) is this: The insurgents in Iraq (who will be fighting us for decades, make no mistake) are NOT NOT NOT Panislamists. They are merely Arabists. And as "Patriots" it is not difficult to see why they are streaming in from other Arab countries to fight. We do overtake their countries --Palestine, Iraq-- we do 'steal' their land, --Palestine, Iraq-- and we are --through overt military support of Israel-- working to "end their [Arabs', Palestinians'] way of life"; every time we support the Likudniks, or indirectly support the settler's movement. I've been arguing with my buddies through email about this for the weeks since that recent report came out about the geo-political make-up and backgrounds of the foreign fighters in Iraq. The Middle-East is not going to run out of Arabs anytime soon, and as such, the percentage of patriots willing to fight invaders isn't some negligible amount that we can just consume/slay. HOWEVER, this is very distinct from the support structure for what you call Panislamists (and what I normally just call radical Islamists, you know bin Laden-style 'death to the infidel', return to the caliphate, a pox on your decadent life-style extremists). The 'panislamists' have no future (well no real future), their numbers are very small, and I agree with you, they will not win. Sadly, for the foreseeable future there will always be just enough to kill us in explosive, scary, and disruptive ways.
So to sum up this section: Arabists will fight us (or our proxies) in Iraq for decades but eventually the generations that see us as invaders, stealers, and Israel-supporters will all die of old age (presuming that the Palestinians get their own country [back] some time in that span). It's pretty easy to see why: Would the French resistance have stopped killing Germans occupiers? If America was occupied by Germany would you accept it as 'a necessary step to achieve a stabilizing Nazi hegemony in the region', or would you fight them in the streets? (Apologies to Godwin and all, I'm not trying to equate the U.S. actions in Iraq with the spreading fascism of the 40s; merely trying to crystalize a patriot's duty.)
"Panislamists" will fight 'us' (the West) for the foreseeable future. Their numbers are minute. They have no grassroots support. They have no political support (see elections in the Muslim areas of Southeast Asia). This tiny, tiny minority of people must be dealt with as we've always dealt with organized crime (and in my estimation this means not destroying Anti-islmaist states in the region, but whatever, we can agree to disagree). People
You're in a wheelchair?
I must be three-feet into the grave.
I recently came across another anti-living-wage poster: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153727&cid =12897608, but back on topic...
Do you make anywhere near the minimum wage? Probably not considering you explicitly mention you are salaried. Many families in America are not salaried and do make somewhere near the minimum wage. Further, what's the sq. footage of your house and your mortgage? A two bedroom flat will house a family of four until the kids are too old to be in the same room (by [retarded] law boys and girls can't share a bedroom past a certain age, I think it's five-years when social services will start harassing you), sadly most folks on minimum wage cant afford a mortgage, so they rent a place like this at around $500 a month. Does $500 a month sound like nothing to you? That's close to what you make on minimum wage. One income pays the rent, the other income pays for the food, clothing, and medicine. Now you see why some people need two incomes. Yay! Congrats on the anecdotal dismissal of a real problem, though.
GGP: The divorce rate, breast feeding, college money saving, busy parents, and television are post hoc fallacies. We don't have good public schools because there is no value. They are "free". Americans will value education when they have to pay for it themselves without the government holding the pursestrings.
d =13046623
:)
And also: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155413&ci
What both of these prove is that it's not "schools suck because of culture" (if that really is your argument). Like it has been said elsewhere, schools suck because culture doesn't value intellect and education.
(Maybe you could argue that culture sucks because schools suck because generally Americans don't value intellect. You could also argue with the GGP that charging tuition for primary education may not induce Americans to value education. E.g., China, and by extension Japan, have years of Confucian meritocracy to thank for their value of intellect, yet they both have public education systems; Our culture of intellect, Greek, early Roman, and by extension the European Renaissance, have somehow been divorced from America, perhaps by puritanism? It's ironic, because it seems to me that by virtue public education reflects a core belief in the value of intellect. I guess to most Americans, especially privatizers, that seems anachronistic. Anyway, getting off this tangent...
In each success story, even in your foreign country examples, the groups involved value education. Arguing against the symptoms is fallacious. You can be a single parent and value education. You can not be terribly involved with their school-work and still value education and instill that value in your child. A child that has been taught the value of education by a good-for-nothing-else parent is still better off than one that hasn't. What it seems a majority of voting Americans don't value is education; Our policies reflect a culture that doesn't.
As you and others have pointed out - children and parents who value education, despite the unfriendly environment, can and do succeed.
The reason you think it's not working (not keeping kids from getting fat?) is because for the most part it IS gone.
In many primary schools, kids have P.E. once a week. In most (all?) high schools P.E. is an elective.
So, the good news, for you anyway, is that P.E. has been practically eliminated. Given that, do you have any better suggestions?
Sheesh. In my red haze of rage at the retarded submission text I made a stupid typo.
:-D
Anyone tempted to reply just to correct my "their/ they're" faux pas need not bother.
These restraints aren't DRM. They are security. And security for good measure I might add. I don't want the story spoiled for me before I read it myself. Scholastic's fortunes rest on that same truth -- that if the secrets (at the very least) revealed in the new book are published before their time they will be financially damaged.
They may even be damaged --in terms of short term sales-- by loud mouths making and distributing copies to the press (or, God forbid, the Intarwebs).
I don't see anything wrong with keeping the djinni in the bottle until their ready.
I'd like to mention Vagrant Story, an older Squaresoft game, that has a great combination of both game length and replay value. The way the game and story is setup you can complete the main action and story of the game pretty quickly (esp with practice) but it offers a huge variety of replay goodies. If you can get past the low poly-count and low-res textures (i.e. you haven't been jaded by the current generation of actiony-RPGs) I enthusiastically recommend it, even today (oh, it's for the PS1 of course). I've been secretly wishing that Square-Enix would revive this story/universe with a prequel or sequel, as the characters and mythos were all very interesting to me. I'm wondering if the Ivalice of the new FF will share some of the old-Europe/Gothic flavor that is all over VS.
FF-X2, to a lesser extent, offers a little bit of this "shorter story for more replay" trade-off. Previous FFs avoided replayability for a kind of 'infinite playability' with the crazy difficult "Weapons" that require maxed out characters and other features that required ages of game-play to reach (growing Materia, collecting Monsters, in-game card games, filling the skill web, etc).
Thanks for the well reasoned response.
I snarkily said: "If sacrifice is so important why aren't we pushing for the draft, and why haven't you re-upped?"
To which you replied: "By that logic, you could argue that in order for me to express an opinion in favor of military action, I'd have to be in the military for my entire life."
Haha, not exactly. When one is both in favor of a war-of-choice and demands human sacrifice it would only seem fair to put one's body where one's policy is. I mostly made that remark due to frustration with the "chicken hawks". To me it seems like combat vets (or at least career soldiers) are better prepared to make decisions about war.
Anyhow. I was going to talk about the vets in my family and where they stand on the war and it's ROI regarding American hegemony in the mid-east, but it really doesn't matter (so I deleted it all). Regardless of the personal reasons, in my estimation extending U.S. hegemony throughout the region is the same sort of vain crap that hasn't been working for ages. It has the same smell as "making the world safe for democracy". That lead to a generation of wasted Cold-War effort -- my inner geek hates wasted effort. Now it looks like the same thing, only this time we'll have a 30 to 40 year Warm-War with a more insidious (and possibly falsified) threat of nuclear annihilation. There won't be any duck and cover warning, there will just be unannounced abject panic. Plus, we won't get any of the great space-race perks, we'll only get more advanced surveillance and terrorist-sniffing data-mining.
What perks do you see coming out of the Terror-War?
Sorry for rambling and thanks again for taking the time to reply before. Pardon any mistakes, and especially pardon my uninformed/mixed-up Iraqi casualty numbers from before.
Hey Dave,
I generally respect your opinions. However, using human calculus is a really slippery slope.
You say: First, all the naysayers who, disgustingly, in my opinion, invoke the US war dead in favor of their arguments also apparently don't care about Iraqis at all. Because if the US leaves, a SHITLOAD more Iraqis will die than ever would have, regardless of whether or not the US ever set foot in Iraq in 2003. That is an absolute given. So if they're out to "preserve life", that's certainly not the way to do it.
Do you have any credible or concrete information to show that more or less Iraqis would have died if we'd never invaded? Where does the post withdrawal "shitload" figure come from? The death rate in Iraq right now is near 100,000 (one hundred thousand) per year. If we had left Iraq alone, and "evil" Saddam remained in power, can you really argue more Iraqis would have died? Would more troops have died if we pressed the hunt for OBL instead of diverting to Iraq?
Further, you go on to chide us all for not willing to make sacrifices. I love making sacrifices as much as the next guy, and I'm glad to hear you served in the military, if not the infantry, but honestly what is the true cost of this (as you say elsewhere) pre-emptive war?
It's not just the 1700 soldiers who signed up to die. And it's not the 200,000 Iraqis who were under the wrong shell at the wrong time. The real sacrifice is the "generational" investment (the one that is shielded from our eyes by no-contest appropriations and deficit spending). And what's more, it's a crying shame that we aren't all sacrificing under war rationing and turning in our extra cash for war bonds. Maybe if this generation could sacrifice like my grandfather's and my uncle's -- if we learned that war-time was a time to do without -- then we wouldn't be as trivial and trite (even flippant?) as you seem to be about choosing war.
If sacrifice is so important why aren't we pushing for the draft, and why haven't you re-upped?
Why are there still war-supporters at home and not in Iraq securing the objective (whatever that may be)?
So yeah, nothing personal. This though is hillarious to me:
Things like "we'd like to begin a multi-decade comprehensive strategy of political change in the middle east to kill off Panislamic radicalism, forcibly when necessary, for our own safety and security, and that of the Western economies, in addition to enabling free markets and free exchange of information and ideas among the peoples of the mideast for long term mutual benefit, and we're going to start by militarily overtaking and occupying a quasi-secular, centrally located nation-state to begin creating a catalyst for change and modernization in the region" [...] In other words don't debate the real issue at all, don't address the choices with the citizenry -- just lie to everyone and then argue long after the fact that it was in their own best interest. This is why it's so fucked up that you don't need congress to declare war anymore. Nice one. As a progressive, or at least a Kerry supporter, you have to acknowledge the irony of what you just said... I.e., it was OK for Bush to lie us into war for the very long term outcome. Wow.
I cannot believe there's no torrent yet. Whoever finishes the 'huge' version first -- link a torrent here... Please?
Well here's one consolation for you ... We have such a high incarceration rate in America that the fraction of nutters on the loose is actually a little smaller than you fear. :-D
I think the next GTA should have a difficulty setting where you can't 'bribe' the cops. So each time you get caught for a crime you do some simulated time for a minute or so and are released with the appropriate amount of years/months subtracted from the characters life-span. Your goal would be to complete the game before you died of virtual-old-age.
(darn it -- I got too itchy with the 'stumbit' button!)
Continuing with corrections:
[...] immigration is slower in Japan so there are fewer foreigners upsetting the averages.
Anyhow. There was some pretty interesting info about this on PBS the other day.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/
First, yes they are longer lived than Americans. Second, the birth rate has been much lower than in the U.S. Additionally, immigratin is slower to Japan so there are fewer foreigners upsetting the averages.
Language is based on sound (or, in the case of sign language, visual form). There is no parsing other than phonetic parsing
:-D I know nothing of Finnish, so that was very enlightening.
So the vital problem is that the construction "should of" doesn't sound like "shoulda" or "should've" or "should have". The phrase is still simply wrong even by your own understanding. This ignores the fact that your caveat for sign language also applies to the visual forms of written language -- hence "should of" even looks wrong.
Regarding word order, any insight on why we still use accusative forms of some words in English? I have to agree that all of the verb-first constructions were bizarre.
Finally:
I said, "At this point though of is still a preposition and have is still a verb." To which you replied, "Says who? A lot of people disagree with you. You may not hold the majority opinion in fifty years."
I now ask: To whom is of not a preposition? I acknowledge that the verbing of nouns is generally accepted and can go the other way, and hence the nouning of the verb have leads us to phases like "the haves and the have-nots".
I agree with you and semantically there is no doubt.
:)
That said, there is a very common [mis?]conception, in this day and age, to describe a predominately Christian nation as "a Christian nation." If there wasn't the xenophobes wouldn't be telling the Muslims to get out of 'their' country and the (so-called) conservatives wouldn't be demanding [Christian] prayer in schools. This is why I defended the previous poster's position.
Full Metal has some very mature themes. I hope your kids are either too young to understand ethnic cleansing or old enough that the graphic murder of children won't damage them.
Oh, and to nitpick myself, before anyone else does...
not c.f., I should have written compare.
You see that on the first line? "WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, " Showers sweet? Doesn't he mean "Sweet showers?" Why, he's putting the adjective *after* the noun! That's not English? But, yes it is; the rules have changed.
... just like Latin, it merely has customs (and yet you insinuate that you are a linguist?!). If English relied on word order (c.f., Asian languages) they would have had to subtitle Yoda. :-D
C'mon, to be fair you have to admit that English has no word order rules
English has rules. The phrase Should of violates those rules. Rules change. At this point though of is still a preposition and have is still a verb.
It's interesting that earlier in this thread that Ebonics is held up as a defense. Ebonics solves this lame argument by accepting the concatenation of prepositions into parts of speech like 'shoulda'. If people would just write out their pidgin English phonetically we wouldn't have to worry about it. One could tell right away that they were writing in dialect and thus one could throw out all grammatical parsing and just use phonetic parsing.