Yeah, right. The 400+ members of Congress wouldn't agree to that, and would very noisily oppose it. And there likely would be an armed insurrection if it didn't look like the other branches of government would do anything about it. And as others have pointed out, good luck getting the military (i.e., the guys on the ground with boots and rifles, not the ones with fancy hats and medals) to actually go along with this.
Are you trolling, or do you really believe the gibberish you write? This is the second trollish comment from you in 20 minutes.
The point isn't that it's goign to happen with bush. The point is it's goign to happen if enough of you consider it to be such a ludicrous possibility. It happened to a Germany, Happened to italy etc.. A recession/depression and something like a major terrorist event and you exactly the conditions that would allow it to happen. Is pointing out a scenario trollish? America is nto seperate fromt he rest of humanity. It maintains the same foilables as the rest of the world and with the right pre-conditions bad shit can happen. In the past 8 years your personal freedoms have been diminshed and there hasn't been a very big repsonse. If you slide it in slow enough would they notice?
A group of gun nuts? If you're referring to Waco and Ruby Ridge, you're being pretty stupid.
There's a lot of gun nuts in Iraq and they seem to be winning against our professional military force. A military can't win against an armed populace that completely opposes them.
Comparing an entire population that opposes a military force to a small group of extremists is just stupid.
Sure you can. How do you think most middle eastern powers stay in power. Most of the populations there are armed and oppose the rulers but through bribery, violence, and supurior firepower they have kept the lid on the seathing armed underclass for some time. Remember Saddam had few friends in the religious majority in iraq. Iraq mostly hated him.
The fact that you can't say anything about someone being a muslim due to the low incidence of radicals isn't relevant to them possibly having most per capita than the christians?
Islam has a diproportianate number of radicals.
Compared to what? I've never seen this backed up in any meaningful way.
Islam may not wash their hands of it by saying "well it's less then 10% of us"
It's not 10% - that's 100m people. In a group the size of Islam, 100k people are.01% and still numerous enough to stir shit up.
And what's this got to do with pedo priests?
In both instances the rebuttal is meaningless. you seem to misread comments fairly intentially.
The statement was X muslim terrorist 10%. not = 10%. and you will agree exstremists who commit a violent act is surely less then 10%. But the correlation between "violent radical" and "muslim" is high then say "Violent radical" and "wiccan" or even per capita "violent radical" and "christian". So you must address why islam has such a high incidence of intersection with "violent radical". The arguement about catholic clerigyman is just a reducto absurdium. Your arguement is silly. Catholocism has issues that encourage deviants to join the clerigy and Islam has issue that encourage the poor and disgruntled to be violent radicals.
In western countries with representative democracies, we still have the faint hope that we can vote our way to a better government. As bad as Bush is, unless he decides to unilaterally declare himself dictator, or call off elections and declare himself President until he decides to step down, he's going to be out in 18 months.
Picture this;
"My fellow americans. In light of the pressing terrorists threat I cannot in good conciounce convene a election. I have recived an agreement from the various legislative and judicial branches (that I had either appointed, bribed, or blackmailed) to to approve a temporary emergency term exstension of 8 additional years. I assure you elections will be as soon as we deal with this terrorist threat. I know it is a hard job but I must shoulder on for our childrens sake. Why wont' you think of the children. The generals of the various armed forces (close cousins) will ensure order is kept in the oncoming exstended term."
Lastly, there's the citizens. Many of us are armed, unlike in many other countries. The military may be powerful, but it's nowhere near as large as the citizenry. And Iraq is showing us every day exactly how effective guerrilla insurgents with improvised explosives and small arms can be against the world's most powerful military force. Besides, it's not likely most of the military would voluntarily go against their own countrymen.,/i>
A group of gun nuts vs a professional military/police force.. hmm I remember vaguely of this happening a few times int he US and the gun nuts didn't fare too well.
If the people that I know in the military are any indication, then the day a President unilaterally declares himself king/emperor/dictator for life is the day that some missiles are "accidentally" launched at said dictator. There are a lot of military folks who take that "uphold the Constitution" part of their duty very very seriously.
The trick is to cut those military folk in on it and convince them el presidente is just safe gaurding the constitution in a dangerous uncertain world.
People who truly believe their religion wish only to *share* their religion. Take it or leave it. The act of *sharing* your beliefs if done by a zealot drives people away. The act of *sharing* your beliefs done by a true believer can be a moving event in a non believers life.
The minority ethnic Chinese population operates large parts of Malaysia's economy. Naturally, this means it is difficult for ethnic Malays to move up in the economy as it stands. However, thanks to democracy, the political power lies in the hands of the Malays... who gladly elect populists.
These populists write affirmative action laws to control hiring and to limit government contracts with non-Malay companies. It's vaguely reminiscent of South Africa's populist ethnopolitics, but with the bizarre addition of a law outlawing the criticism of their affirmative action amendment.
If this was a game of SimCountry, you'd just have to move the "Prosperity" slider a few notches down to turn the country into another Uganda...
Indeed, Malaysia is bad for this... indonesia is worse (for economy and racism). The government in malaysia has been trying to bring their economy down to the level of indonesia for a long time.
Just because the inverse of a statement (most muslims are terrorists) is false doesn't make the original statement (most terrorists are muslim) either false or irrelevant.
Sure it does - youcan tell if someone is muslim without much trouble. Similarly, you can tell if someone is a woman more easily than whether they have breast cancer.
How did your response address his arguement? Islam has a diproportianate number of radicals. It paints a bad picture of Islam. Islam may not wash their hands of it by saying "well it's less then 10% of us". Catholocism has an issue with repressed homosexuals and pedophilles entering the clerigy. A claims that not all priests or all catholics are pedophiles/repressed gay men does not fix the issue. The underlying reason the clergy has issues is guilt forces these men to atone. The ultimate way to do that is the clergy. But biology overides faith and they become monsters. Similiarly Islam paints a romantic and inconsistant picture of violence. This provides a lower mental barrier to convert a normal person to a killer.
While we obviously can't line up all the terrorists and count them, I'd bet there is a goodly amount of non-muslim terrorists in Africa. But nobody cares about them, so nobody counts them.
To paraphrase Hotel Rwanda: "They're not even niggers. They're africans."
Much of africa is also muslim so a subset of your group adds to his group.
The major players are israeli jews and palestinian muslims; the jews have been screwing with the palestinians for rather a long time and have gone so far as to build a wall and make all the palestinians stand in line to cross it (making them 2nd class citizens in their own country). In a very real sense, the (specific) jews did do it.
You forgot to mention it's not a one way street. The two groups have been screwing with each other for some time. Don't forget that the Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, and various other groups screw with the palastinains too. When the native Muslims has more power then the native jews (they existed) or immigrant jews they were seriously screwing the jews. Once the jews got the upper hand the situation reversed. Palastines neighbros have been screwing them and killing them as well. Palastines friends ar ea unstable lot who make big promises and rarely fufill them.
I do believe a large portion of palastines government budget come nto from taxes, or from their lovely arab enighbors but from international (read western) AID.
I think the wall is a good idea just not on palastinain land. it should straddle the exact border and make detour around border towns. Good walls make good neighbors.
I will take issue with that statement. My only true pet peeve in this game is that same-faction griefing is completely ignored by Blizzard. If you are Alliance and a Horde steals a kill or a resource node, you can either settle it with PvP or just go your own way, and I am perfectly okay with that. It is balanced and it is more than fair; you are, after all, enemies. However, if you are Alliance and another Alliance follows you around, kill-stealing, trying to take nodes from you, ninja-skinning you, there is absolutely NO recourse available to you. Sure, you can ask the guy to stop it, and he'll keep on doing it cause he's in it for the fun of annoying you. You can/ignore him (for non WoW players, that stops him from messaging you) but that isn't a solution at all when his harassment of you is physical and not verbal. You can try reporting him to a GM, but they will kindly tell you that what the guy is doing is not considered griefing because apparently same-faction griefing doesn't exist in their eyes. Basically, some guy can decide he hates your guts or wants to bug you for fun and he can get away with it scot-free. You can't settle it PvP, you can't get assistance from the GMs and you can't make him stop without logging out until he goes away. How in the world this isn't griefing of the worst kind I'll never know. Yet, you so much as call him a "bastard" and he can report you for swearing, which will get you a warning or a ban if it's happened before. This gross imbalance has twice made me almost quit the game for good. Thankfully such assholes are very few and far between.
Wait, ore nodes I can understand. You clear the monsters, they take the ore. But most of the good stuff are in instances so if you teamed with a jerk you can always leave. How can you steal kills? if you hit something you tag it and only you get XP for it. At most their helping you level. If you heavily damage a monster it doesn't untag till it heals fully so were exactly are they griefing you?
Stealing skinning? you have a lock on the corpse for X seconds after you killed it. He can't skin it unless you've ignored the corpse right? If a person harasses by following you and picking up trash you ignore how exactly is that griefing? I haven't played for a while but I haven't heard them removing those anti-griefing measures.
Second Life has been snuffed out of existence. They were not accepting log-ins throughout the late afternoon and currently are only allowing employees to log-in. Anybody want to estimate how many Linden$ are being lost because of this?;^) http://secondlife.com/status/
1/30 of a monthly subscription? Since people pay monthly a outage of one day will cost either 0 or what ever linden wishes to refund. a 1 day credit would be reasonable?
For Solo play the Wii is ridiculously bad so far (Zelda being the exception). Bored in an hour and I move back to my PS2/Ps3/DS. But ina group setting it's fun. Most of it's uptake is from "new" gamers. The mainstream non gamers picking it up. Of the hardcore most have a 360 or Ps3 and a Wii. As we don't want to be left otu and the wii is economically reasonable to be a 2nd system. While many who have just a wii either can't afford the 360/Ps3 or aren't gamers and have no interest in them.
Blue ray movies have come down. Some older titles hit the 19.95 sweet spot here in canada for occasional sales. Most are still 29.95 cnd and up.
As for software emulation. It's actually pretty good. 70% - 80% with few show stopping glitches. the 360 does 30% and of those 30% there are still significant glitches.
A lot of country locations also have a density that would make all prospects of ADSL/Cable unprofitable or prohibitively expensive. I am lead to beleive most ADSL machines have a range of about 4km. In some places there is maybe 15 or 16 families in that area. Not even close enough to pay for the machine within the machines lifetime.
Eric McCormack (Will from Will and Grace) is straight. You were saying?
And the US is a paragon of acceptance and liberal attitudes. In fact your president rode in on a platform partially about gay marriage. I didn't read it but it must have been progressive and positive.
I haven't noticed this. It's about as warm as my launch PS2. Perhaps my idea of hot is skewed. The wii gets awfully hot too. I believe noticably hotter then my Ps2 or Ps3.
Gay "black face". I'd say thats pretty repressed. Make a characature of a gay person done by a straight person. I'm sure it'd be pretty offensive if we did that here or subsituted gay with spanish or chinese.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right. The 400+ members of Congress wouldn't agree to that, and would very noisily oppose it. And there likely would be an armed insurrection if it didn't look like the other branches of government would do anything about it. And as others have pointed out, good luck getting the military (i.e., the guys on the ground with boots and rifles, not the ones with fancy hats and medals) to actually go along with this.
Are you trolling, or do you really believe the gibberish you write? This is the second trollish comment from you in 20 minutes.
The point isn't that it's goign to happen with bush. The point is it's goign to happen if enough of you consider it to be such a ludicrous possibility. It happened to a Germany, Happened to italy etc.. A recession/depression and something like a major terrorist event and you exactly the conditions that would allow it to happen. Is pointing out a scenario trollish? America is nto seperate fromt he rest of humanity. It maintains the same foilables as the rest of the world and with the right pre-conditions bad shit can happen. In the past 8 years your personal freedoms have been diminshed and there hasn't been a very big repsonse. If you slide it in slow enough would they notice?
A group of gun nuts? If you're referring to Waco and Ruby Ridge, you're being pretty stupid.
There's a lot of gun nuts in Iraq and they seem to be winning against our professional military force. A military can't win against an armed populace that completely opposes them.
Comparing an entire population that opposes a military force to a small group of extremists is just stupid.
Sure you can. How do you think most middle eastern powers stay in power. Most of the populations there are armed and oppose the rulers but through bribery, violence, and supurior firepower they have kept the lid on the seathing armed underclass for some time. Remember Saddam had few friends in the religious majority in iraq. Iraq mostly hated him.
I,>How did your response address his arguement?
.01% and still numerous enough to stir shit up.
The fact that you can't say anything about someone being a muslim due to the low incidence of radicals isn't relevant to them possibly having most per capita than the christians?
Islam has a diproportianate number of radicals.
Compared to what? I've never seen this backed up in any meaningful way.
Islam may not wash their hands of it by saying "well it's less then 10% of us"
It's not 10% - that's 100m people. In a group the size of Islam, 100k people are
And what's this got to do with pedo priests?
In both instances the rebuttal is meaningless. you seem to misread comments fairly intentially.
The statement was X muslim terrorist 10%. not = 10%. and you will agree exstremists who commit a violent act is surely less then 10%. But the correlation between "violent radical" and "muslim" is high then say "Violent radical" and "wiccan" or even per capita "violent radical" and "christian". So you must address why islam has such a high incidence of intersection with "violent radical". The arguement about catholic clerigyman is just a reducto absurdium. Your arguement is silly. Catholocism has issues that encourage deviants to join the clerigy and Islam has issue that encourage the poor and disgruntled to be violent radicals.
In western countries with representative democracies, we still have the faint hope that we can vote our way to a better government. As bad as Bush is, unless he decides to unilaterally declare himself dictator, or call off elections and declare himself President until he decides to step down, he's going to be out in 18 months.
Picture this;
"My fellow americans. In light of the pressing terrorists threat I cannot in good conciounce convene a election. I have recived an agreement from the various legislative and judicial branches (that I had either appointed, bribed, or blackmailed) to to approve a temporary emergency term exstension of 8 additional years. I assure you elections will be as soon as we deal with this terrorist threat. I know it is a hard job but I must shoulder on for our childrens sake. Why wont' you think of the children. The generals of the various armed forces (close cousins) will ensure order is kept in the oncoming exstended term."
Lastly, there's the citizens. Many of us are armed, unlike in many other countries. The military may be powerful, but it's nowhere near as large as the citizenry. And Iraq is showing us every day exactly how effective guerrilla insurgents with improvised explosives and small arms can be against the world's most powerful military force. Besides, it's not likely most of the military would voluntarily go against their own countrymen.,/i>
A group of gun nuts vs a professional military/police force.. hmm I remember vaguely of this happening a few times int he US and the gun nuts didn't fare too well.
If the people that I know in the military are any indication, then the day a President unilaterally declares himself king/emperor/dictator for life is the day that some missiles are "accidentally" launched at said dictator. There are a lot of military folks who take that "uphold the Constitution" part of their duty very very seriously.
The trick is to cut those military folk in on it and convince them el presidente is just safe gaurding the constitution in a dangerous uncertain world.
Stop fucking the middle east.
IT'll stop whent he oil runs out and then they can resume fucking each other without our imposing hand.
Only fanatics want to *force* it on people.
People who truly believe their religion wish only to *share* their religion. Take it or leave it. The act of *sharing* your beliefs if done by a zealot drives people away. The act of *sharing* your beliefs done by a true believer can be a moving event in a non believers life.
The line is carbon nanotubule thin.
The minority ethnic Chinese population operates large parts of Malaysia's economy. Naturally, this means it is difficult for ethnic Malays to move up in the economy as it stands. However, thanks to democracy, the political power lies in the hands of the Malays... who gladly elect populists.
These populists write affirmative action laws to control hiring and to limit government contracts with non-Malay companies. It's vaguely reminiscent of South Africa's populist ethnopolitics, but with the bizarre addition of a law outlawing the criticism of their affirmative action amendment.
If this was a game of SimCountry, you'd just have to move the "Prosperity" slider a few notches down to turn the country into another Uganda...
Indeed, Malaysia is bad for this... indonesia is worse (for economy and racism). The government in malaysia has been trying to bring their economy down to the level of indonesia for a long time.
Just because the inverse of a statement (most muslims are terrorists) is false doesn't make the original statement (most terrorists are muslim) either false or irrelevant.
Sure it does - youcan tell if someone is muslim without much trouble. Similarly, you can tell if someone is a woman more easily than whether they have breast cancer.
How did your response address his arguement? Islam has a diproportianate number of radicals. It paints a bad picture of Islam. Islam may not wash their hands of it by saying "well it's less then 10% of us". Catholocism has an issue with repressed homosexuals and pedophilles entering the clerigy. A claims that not all priests or all catholics are pedophiles/repressed gay men does not fix the issue. The underlying reason the clergy has issues is guilt forces these men to atone. The ultimate way to do that is the clergy. But biology overides faith and they become monsters. Similiarly Islam paints a romantic and inconsistant picture of violence. This provides a lower mental barrier to convert a normal person to a killer.
I don't know.
While we obviously can't line up all the terrorists and count them, I'd bet there is a goodly amount of non-muslim terrorists in Africa. But nobody cares about them, so nobody counts them.
To paraphrase Hotel Rwanda: "They're not even niggers. They're africans."
Much of africa is also muslim so a subset of your group adds to his group.
The major players are israeli jews and palestinian muslims; the jews have been screwing with the palestinians for rather a long time and have gone so far as to build a wall and make all the palestinians stand in line to cross it (making them 2nd class citizens in their own country). In a very real sense, the (specific) jews did do it.
You forgot to mention it's not a one way street. The two groups have been screwing with each other for some time. Don't forget that the Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, and various other groups screw with the palastinains too. When the native Muslims has more power then the native jews (they existed) or immigrant jews they were seriously screwing the jews. Once the jews got the upper hand the situation reversed. Palastines neighbros have been screwing them and killing them as well. Palastines friends ar ea unstable lot who make big promises and rarely fufill them.
I do believe a large portion of palastines government budget come nto from taxes, or from their lovely arab enighbors but from international (read western) AID.
I think the wall is a good idea just not on palastinain land. it should straddle the exact border and make detour around border towns. Good walls make good neighbors.
If you ask your child to follow a rule, and they don't, does punishing them mean you don't love them?
If you stone them to death or behead them, the likely hood of you actually loving them is slim.
Can't Linden Labs just print more Linden$, and offer Linden$ as a condolence?
How does inflation work in Second Life anyways?
Same way it works everywhere else. The more there is is the less it's worth all else being equal.
I will take issue with that statement. My only true pet peeve in this game is that same-faction griefing is completely ignored by Blizzard. If you are Alliance and a Horde steals a kill or a resource node, you can either settle it with PvP or just go your own way, and I am perfectly okay with that. It is balanced and it is more than fair; you are, after all, enemies. However, if you are Alliance and another Alliance follows you around, kill-stealing, trying to take nodes from you, ninja-skinning you, there is absolutely NO recourse available to you. Sure, you can ask the guy to stop it, and he'll keep on doing it cause he's in it for the fun of annoying you. You can /ignore him (for non WoW players, that stops him from messaging you) but that isn't a solution at all when his harassment of you is physical and not verbal. You can try reporting him to a GM, but they will kindly tell you that what the guy is doing is not considered griefing because apparently same-faction griefing doesn't exist in their eyes. Basically, some guy can decide he hates your guts or wants to bug you for fun and he can get away with it scot-free. You can't settle it PvP, you can't get assistance from the GMs and you can't make him stop without logging out until he goes away. How in the world this isn't griefing of the worst kind I'll never know. Yet, you so much as call him a "bastard" and he can report you for swearing, which will get you a warning or a ban if it's happened before. This gross imbalance has twice made me almost quit the game for good. Thankfully such assholes are very few and far between.
Wait, ore nodes I can understand. You clear the monsters, they take the ore. But most of the good stuff are in instances so if you teamed with a jerk you can always leave. How can you steal kills? if you hit something you tag it and only you get XP for it. At most their helping you level. If you heavily damage a monster it doesn't untag till it heals fully so were exactly are they griefing you?
Stealing skinning? you have a lock on the corpse for X seconds after you killed it. He can't skin it unless you've ignored the corpse right? If a person harasses by following you and picking up trash you ignore how exactly is that griefing? I haven't played for a while but I haven't heard them removing those anti-griefing measures.
Second Life has been snuffed out of existence. They were not accepting log-ins throughout the late afternoon and currently are only allowing employees to log-in. ;^)
Anybody want to estimate how many Linden$ are being lost because of this?
http://secondlife.com/status/
1/30 of a monthly subscription? Since people pay monthly a outage of one day will cost either 0 or what ever linden wishes to refund. a 1 day credit would be reasonable?
Gamefaqs/Gamespot is also down. I wonder if it's related.
Remember that unlike Soviet Russia or a dictatorship, in the US, "political officers" are elected directly or appointed by someone elected
A political apointee is elected? wellt hats news to me, when did they redefine the word apointee.
For Solo play the Wii is ridiculously bad so far (Zelda being the exception). Bored in an hour and I move back to my PS2/Ps3/DS. But ina group setting it's fun. Most of it's uptake is from "new" gamers. The mainstream non gamers picking it up. Of the hardcore most have a 360 or Ps3 and a Wii. As we don't want to be left otu and the wii is economically reasonable to be a 2nd system. While many who have just a wii either can't afford the 360/Ps3 or aren't gamers and have no interest in them.
I bought 3. One for me, one for my GF, then a replacement for me when I gave my old one to my brother.
Blue ray movies have come down. Some older titles hit the 19.95 sweet spot here in canada for occasional sales. Most are still 29.95 cnd and up.
As for software emulation. It's actually pretty good. 70% - 80% with few show stopping glitches. the 360 does 30% and of those 30% there are still significant glitches.
A lot of country locations also have a density that would make all prospects of ADSL/Cable unprofitable or prohibitively expensive. I am lead to beleive most ADSL machines have a range of about 4km. In some places there is maybe 15 or 16 families in that area. Not even close enough to pay for the machine within the machines lifetime.
Eric McCormack (Will from Will and Grace) is straight. You were saying?
And the US is a paragon of acceptance and liberal attitudes. In fact your president rode in on a platform partially about gay marriage. I didn't read it but it must have been progressive and positive.
I haven't noticed this. It's about as warm as my launch PS2. Perhaps my idea of hot is skewed. The wii gets awfully hot too. I believe noticably hotter then my Ps2 or Ps3.
You think Hard Gay is "repressed"?
Gay "black face". I'd say thats pretty repressed. Make a characature of a gay person done by a straight person. I'm sure it'd be pretty offensive if we did that here or subsituted gay with spanish or chinese.