Has it occurred to you, oh worshipper of Lucas' enormous phallus, that perhaps some of us aren't envious, but rather enormously disappointed in what we see as nothing more than manufactured Hollywood tripe? No, I guess not; to the fanboy everyone who doesn't care for his religion and his gods must be driven by a hatred rooted in jealousy.
Imagine, for a moment, that some folks don't like the movies not for any nefarious reason you dream up in that twisted little mind of yours, but rather because they believe that the movies *suck*. A personal opinion, to be sure, but one just as valid as your own. A rational human being would concur that such opinions exist and are not driven by The Evil Within(TM), but fanboys, by their very nature, have only the lightest grip on rationality.
I watched both movies and was disappointed by the first, and found the second close to revolting. The only upside were the special effects and Natalie Portman's very fine young body (although she seems to have left her acting ability at home, like all the other actors in the movies). If the third movie follows in the same vein I doubt I'll even see it on video.
My opinion doesn't arise from jealousy. It comes from an incredible disappointment. This series of movies doesn't even come close to the story-telling of the first series, which made those movies enjoyable even though the acting wasn't all that much better.
The fact that you can't stand contrary opinions says nothing about us and a great deal about you.
My anger is directed at the folks who can't spell "lose" properly. It's "lose" as in "you lose, dude", and "loose" as in "he's loose, so make him wear a condom".
You can't use deadly force except in direct defense of your life against an armed opponent.
This is bullshit no matter what state of the Union you reside in. The Supreme Court has ruled that using deadly force in defense of life - yourself, your family's your neighbor's - is perfectly acceptable. No state has the ability to challenge this.
All one needs is a reasonable presumption of imminent danger, and this includes finding an intruder in your house at 2:00 in the morning. A 'reasonable presumption' is that the fucker intends to kill you and your family - and that's enough to justify sending him to the morgue.
Although with a Californian jury I wouldn't want to take any chances.
You rather missed the point, although this doesn't surprise me.
What *you* wish to reveal is up to you - that's part and parcel of freedom. However, you don't have any business whatsoever telling me what I *have* to reveal. I can and will hide whatever I please, for whatever reasons I desire, without any need or requirement to explain myself to you.
In the end, unless you can get the government to back you by force of arms, the slogan "information wishes to be free" is exactly what I said it is: the battle cry of perverts and voyeurs.
the fact that this narcissistic blowhard of a guy is now being celebrated by wanna-be's all over slashdot.
Celebrated by mysogynistic geek losers who hate and fear women because they can't get a date with anything other than a RealDoll. Katy Johnson may have been too stupid to avoid a fuckwit like Tucker Max, but most women can spot these sorts of losers pretty quickly, and avoid them like the plague.
Why else do you think there are so many frustrated nerds out there? If most women were as lacking in the ability to judge character as Ms. Johnson, we'd be overrun with little nerdlets by now.
And as for Beavis and Butthead, I show I loved: these two were deliberately written as over-the-top losers of the worst sort. No one could mistake them for anything but losers. That's one of the things that made them so funny. Tucker Max, unfortunately, isn't immediately identifiable as a real-life Beavis, at least to some people.
And we also know that 'Tucker Max' is an arrogant, mysogynistic little boy whose mama shoud've bitch-slapped him more when he was growing up. Scum like this little turd makes me think that forced castration for assholes is the only way to clean up the human gene pool....
I for one want normal people with all their flaws running the country. I don't care about their dark secrets, I want to know what they can do TODAY.
And that you can already do. But you have no business telling the rest of us that we can't investigate the person in question. Well, actually, according to the First Amendment you can blather on about any little thing that comes into your head, but you only sound foolish doing so.
Bush, for instance:
- was AWOL for 2 years - and never served time for it - was/is an alcoholic - was/is a cocaine addict
Are you telling me that none of this is relevant to my ability to make a decision as to whether or not an alcoholic, crack-addict deserter is qualified to sit in the Oval Office? Yeah, right, tell me another.
Oh, and before you go on about 'reformation' and 'forgiveness', the only person qualified to judge whether or not Bush deserves a second chance is *me*. It is, after all, *my* vote.
And, as i said in a different post, she claimed (whether true or not) her objections were specifically because stalkers (and if you were as despised as much as she was you'd have several too) can now find new and better ways onto her property and into her house.
Then perhaps the hypocritical Ms. Streisand should pay more attention to the 2nd Amendment and buy herself a firearm. When the stalkers come calling, she can then *legally* shoot them and perhaps discourage future unwanted intrusions. At the very least she'll end all future intrusions by *that* stalker.
Hey, so the next time I get a good set of pictures of you fucking your dog, your sister, or your 16-year-old babysitter, or recount in great detail how you couldn't stop pissing in your bed until you were 19, then I'm sure you won't have any objection if I publish all of this on the net?
Along with your address and home phone number? So that people can call you up and ridicule you in person?
"Information wants to be free." - the battle cry of the voyeur and pervert.
'Free' software isn't about freedom either. It's about enforcing one's views of morality on others by claiming that any choice that doesn't conform to the standards of the free software folks is a mistaken one.
Freedom includes choice - always. If someone freely chooses to use a proprietary product, then that's the end of the story. You don't have any business berating them for not using the software *you'd* choose - it isn't up to *you* what they do. If that sticks in your craw then too damned bad - that's the price of living in a 'free' country.
the open source crowd argues that open source software must lead to better software through competition (another thinly veiled Darwinism), but there isn't any evidence to back this up.
And the free software people labor under the delusion that enforcing their idea of 'freedom' on others will in some mystical fashion lead to more...freedom.
Yep, that's a good one. Color me impressed.
The only viable use of the world 'free' here is 'free as in choice' - I can use free software, or open source, or closed, proprietary source. It's up to *me*, not some moron with a political axe to grind.
Choice is *always* the best option. If the consumer doesn't make the choice you like, well that's just too fucking bad, ain't it? You can either 'educate' the consumer in the egotistical belief that the consumer would wake up and move to 'free' software if only he were enlightened, or you could assume that the consumer isn't a complete idiot, has made up his own mind as is his right, and just shut the fuck up.
The 'free software' crowd are a bunch of whining idiots who insist that the rest of us write code while living out of dumpsters in order to satisfy their vision of How Things Should Be(TM).
The 'open source' crowd - which I'm a part of, mostly out of paranoia - recognizes that software can be worth paying for even if it's GPL'd. For example, I've purchased copy after copy of SuSe and Redhat distributions, even though there's absolutely no reason I would *have* to do this (and as a programmer, I don't need support, so I have no incentive to purchase in order to get support). Why? In part out of laziness (box, manuals, CDs) and in part because I think the product is worth money.
Being something of an optimist, I think most people in this arena are 'open source' and not 'free software'. Which means that Bram might very well make a bundle. In fact, whether or not he did make a bundle would go a long way to proving or disproving my belief.
if you take 100 computer owners, 90 of them have zero clue and use "what the computer came with" they dont use it because they CANT INSTALL IT.
While this is true of older generations (e.g., the ones whose VCRs are permanently set to '12:00' because they can't figure out how to change the time) this isn't the case with younger generations. Boomers are indeed, for the most part, clueless because the technology came along long after childhood; those who grew up with the technology are more likely to have some idea of what it's all about (they are, after all, the ones their Boomer parents rely on to actually install new software, fix computer problems, and so forth).
Generalizing between the two generations is rather pointless. Once those kids become Certified Consumers(TM) I'm willing to bet that the savviness of the buying public will start to improve.
I recently taught computer courses to middle school students for three years. One of the first things I did at the outset was set up a Linux lab alongside the regular Windows lab.
For the first couple of weeks there were complaints because it wasn't like Windows; after that the complaints abated and then actually reversed (i.e., "do we *have* to use Windows today?"). Kids are remarkably adaptable, and learn quite quickly that there are some pretty cool things you can do with a Linux box that you can't do with a Windows box.
This really brought home to me why MS is so adamant about getting Windows into schools, especially early. If an alternative like Linux is available to all those young, flexible minds those kids might very well grow up Linux users rather than Windows users. Make 'em Windows users while they're young and keep them on Windows boxes until they graduate, and after ossification sets in moving them to a different platform will no doubt be more difficult.
I don't think you really played any role in bidding up these prices.
I'm fairly sure I did on at least two items, including the outrageous $200 manual. Why? Because beyond a certain point the bidding was between myself and one other guy; had I not bid he would've won at a much, much lower price.
As is I artificially raised the price of the item by bidding on it well beyond the point of what the people who *actually* wanted it were willing to spend - except for this one guy.
As for the other items, it seemed an observable behavior (anecdotal evidence here) that 'pushing' the bidding in a visible manner encouraged others to get into the act - long before the time limit was to expire. That is, they saw the price go up and decided to get into the act so as not to be left out. I don't think this behavior is at all rational; in that sense it's much like gambling. Show other people that you think the item isn't worth x, but rather x+y, and they suddenly decide that they too think the item is worth x+y...and +z as well, to top your bid.
Like I said, great fun. Although it's a game you can't really win, only avoid losing.
Then again... EBay prices are inflated because of all those compulsive bidders.
You have to admit thought, this is part of the fun.
A year or so ago I got on ebay for the first time (don't really care for this stuff myself) just to see what the fuss was all about. Registered, did my thing, then watched for a bit.
After seeing people bid like crazy over the silliest shit, I started bidding myself on a few items just to see what would happen. I didn't actually want the items, I just wanted to see how much people would bid on them before they gave up. In this case, the items in question were truly useless: old RuneQuest game manuals.
In the course of my experiment I managed to jack up the price of several game manuals to ridiculous levels, probably the most extreme of which was one that had sat at $15 for ages up to $200 before the time ran out. On that one I was almost worried that I'd actually have to pay for the stupid thing ($200 for an RPG manual???) but in the end one of the fanatics topped my bid and I was spared.
It was quite entertaining. Before I got involved the grand total for all the items was somewhere around $60, and no one seemed incline to pay more; by bidding I managed to increase the overall value to somewhere around $450, no doubt pleasing the owner immensely. A fool and his money....
Note: I would've, of course, paid for the items had I 'lost' the bid by 'winning', even though they were utterly valueless to me. But my fellow humans proved to be as foolish as I thought they were, and it turns out I was never in any danger of having to do so.
As a sport, screwing with the bidding is far, far more rewarding than gambling at Vegas ever could be....
Would you support such a project in a free country? If not, how could you support it here?
It doesn't matter whether I support it or disapprove of it. It isn't my country, therefore *it isn't my decision*. Only the Chinese have any business commenting on the dam.
So in conclusion, this is simply another minority group (again, see Inner Mongolia and Tibet for the other two most publicized examples) that is being horribly treated in China--and no one cares because of business opportunities...
So the Chinese are taking lessons from us Americans re American Indians? Shouldn't we be proud of their 'western' behavior? Might be hope for them after all!
As a native of the Northwest I heartily support the dams and find the 'environmentalists' who insist we tear them all down to be irritating and irrational. What exactly do we replace them with? Coal or gas fired plants? The equivalent number of fossil-fuel burning plants create enormous amounts of pollution and will, in the long run, cause far more damage than the dams will.
Of course, in the Pacific Northwest we have to deal with fanatics like Earth First!, who seem to worship 'the environment' as a religion and whose actions are cleary anti-technogoly, anti-progress, and ultimately anti-human. It seems that people like these will only be happy if everything remotely technical is destroyed, 99% of the human race is wiped out (except for *them*, of course), and everyone adopts their version of 'environmentalism' as the One True Creed.
Even worse, most of these folks aren't even natives of the area, but assholes from some other part of the country who seem to think they have some business telling us how to live. Another bunch of totalitarian control freaks using 'the environment' as an excuse to impose their will on others. How this makes them any different from right-wing religious fundamentalists is beyond my understanding.
And the only way to do that peacefully is to reduce birth rates to below maintenance levels and shrink down to a global population of 1-2 billion again.
Ah, yes. What we need is an Orwellian superstate with the power to 'license' how many children we'll have. Who gets to decide? No doubt the people you personally approve of to make the decisions, eh?
Which do you prefer? Being limited to one child, or billions dying in wars and epidemics?
What I prefer is for assholes to tend to their own house, and stay out of my business. If I choose to have one child or ten, that isn't your concern. Don't like it? Too bad - that's something called 'freedom', and if you want things to be different then offer an incentive that tempts people to keep down the birth rate. In the First World it appears that affluence is a decent way of doing this, without any need for some fascist state to enforce draconian measures.
You can choose the carrot, or nothing - the stick isn't an option, at least not to people who believe in little things like 'liberty' and 'rights'.
What you fail to realize is that the decision to build the dam or not is up to the Chinese *and the Chinese alone*. No foreigner has any business telling them to do otherwise - especially one who seems to think he has some moral imperative that supercedes that of the people *who actually live there and own the land*.
Goddamn, but I am sick and tired of assholes who think they have some right to tell other people - especially people in other countries - how to live. If the Chinese want to build this dam, then more power to 'em. If it collapses due to lousy construction well, perhaps they'll do a better job next time.
Either way, I don't have any right to tell them what to do - and neither do you.
Slashdot Mirror
Whooooo-eeee! Can anyone say 'fanboy'?
Has it occurred to you, oh worshipper of Lucas' enormous phallus, that perhaps some of us aren't envious, but rather enormously disappointed in what we see as nothing more than manufactured Hollywood tripe? No, I guess not; to the fanboy everyone who doesn't care for his religion and his gods must be driven by a hatred rooted in jealousy.
Imagine, for a moment, that some folks don't like the movies not for any nefarious reason you dream up in that twisted little mind of yours, but rather because they believe that the movies *suck*. A personal opinion, to be sure, but one just as valid as your own. A rational human being would concur that such opinions exist and are not driven by The Evil Within(TM), but fanboys, by their very nature, have only the lightest grip on rationality.
I watched both movies and was disappointed by the first, and found the second close to revolting. The only upside were the special effects and Natalie Portman's very fine young body (although she seems to have left her acting ability at home, like all the other actors in the movies). If the third movie follows in the same vein I doubt I'll even see it on video.
My opinion doesn't arise from jealousy. It comes from an incredible disappointment. This series of movies doesn't even come close to the story-telling of the first series, which made those movies enjoyable even though the acting wasn't all that much better.
The fact that you can't stand contrary opinions says nothing about us and a great deal about you.
Max
If they want to pay it, who is anyone else to say they're being ripped off ?
Anyone who lives in a country with free speech. Duhhhh!
Max
I hope you loose your anger as you grow older
My anger is directed at the folks who can't spell "lose" properly. It's "lose" as in "you lose, dude", and "loose" as in "he's loose, so make him wear a condom".
Max
You can't use deadly force except in direct defense of your life against an armed opponent.
This is bullshit no matter what state of the Union you reside in. The Supreme Court has ruled that using deadly force in defense of life - yourself, your family's your neighbor's - is perfectly acceptable. No state has the ability to challenge this.
All one needs is a reasonable presumption of imminent danger, and this includes finding an intruder in your house at 2:00 in the morning. A 'reasonable presumption' is that the fucker intends to kill you and your family - and that's enough to justify sending him to the morgue.
Although with a Californian jury I wouldn't want to take any chances.
Max
Color me stupid, but I fail to see the joke. I know there is one but all I hear is the 'whoosh!' as it passes overhead.
Max
You rather missed the point, although this doesn't surprise me.
What *you* wish to reveal is up to you - that's part and parcel of freedom. However, you don't have any business whatsoever telling me what I *have* to reveal. I can and will hide whatever I please, for whatever reasons I desire, without any need or requirement to explain myself to you.
In the end, unless you can get the government to back you by force of arms, the slogan "information wishes to be free" is exactly what I said it is: the battle cry of perverts and voyeurs.
Max
the fact that this narcissistic blowhard of a guy is now being celebrated by wanna-be's all over slashdot.
Celebrated by mysogynistic geek losers who hate and fear women because they can't get a date with anything other than a RealDoll. Katy Johnson may have been too stupid to avoid a fuckwit like Tucker Max, but most women can spot these sorts of losers pretty quickly, and avoid them like the plague.
Why else do you think there are so many frustrated nerds out there? If most women were as lacking in the ability to judge character as Ms. Johnson, we'd be overrun with little nerdlets by now.
And as for Beavis and Butthead, I show I loved: these two were deliberately written as over-the-top losers of the worst sort. No one could mistake them for anything but losers. That's one of the things that made them so funny. Tucker Max, unfortunately, isn't immediately identifiable as a real-life Beavis, at least to some people.
Max
And we also know that 'Tucker Max' is an arrogant, mysogynistic little boy whose mama shoud've bitch-slapped him more when he was growing up. Scum like this little turd makes me think that forced castration for assholes is the only way to clean up the human gene pool....
Max
I for one want normal people with all their flaws running the country. I don't care about their dark secrets, I want to know what they can do TODAY.
And that you can already do. But you have no business telling the rest of us that we can't investigate the person in question. Well, actually, according to the First Amendment you can blather on about any little thing that comes into your head, but you only sound foolish doing so.
Bush, for instance:
- was AWOL for 2 years - and never served time for it
- was/is an alcoholic
- was/is a cocaine addict
Are you telling me that none of this is relevant to my ability to make a decision as to whether or not an alcoholic, crack-addict deserter is qualified to sit in the Oval Office? Yeah, right, tell me another.
Oh, and before you go on about 'reformation' and 'forgiveness', the only person qualified to judge whether or not Bush deserves a second chance is *me*. It is, after all, *my* vote.
Max
And, as i said in a different post, she claimed (whether true or not) her objections were specifically because stalkers (and if you were as despised as much as she was you'd have several too) can now find new and better ways onto her property and into her house.
Then perhaps the hypocritical Ms. Streisand should pay more attention to the 2nd Amendment and buy herself a firearm. When the stalkers come calling, she can then *legally* shoot them and perhaps discourage future unwanted intrusions. At the very least she'll end all future intrusions by *that* stalker.
Max
Cry me a river; information was meant to be free.
Hey, so the next time I get a good set of pictures of you fucking your dog, your sister, or your 16-year-old babysitter, or recount in great detail how you couldn't stop pissing in your bed until you were 19, then I'm sure you won't have any objection if I publish all of this on the net?
Along with your address and home phone number? So that people can call you up and ridicule you in person?
"Information wants to be free." - the battle cry of the voyeur and pervert.
Max
'Free' software isn't about freedom either. It's about enforcing one's views of morality on others by claiming that any choice that doesn't conform to the standards of the free software folks is a mistaken one.
Freedom includes choice - always. If someone freely chooses to use a proprietary product, then that's the end of the story. You don't have any business berating them for not using the software *you'd* choose - it isn't up to *you* what they do. If that sticks in your craw then too damned bad - that's the price of living in a 'free' country.
Max
the open source crowd argues that open source software must lead to better software through competition (another thinly veiled Darwinism), but there isn't any evidence to back this up.
And the free software people labor under the delusion that enforcing their idea of 'freedom' on others will in some mystical fashion lead to more...freedom.
Yep, that's a good one. Color me impressed.
The only viable use of the world 'free' here is 'free as in choice' - I can use free software, or open source, or closed, proprietary source. It's up to *me*, not some moron with a political axe to grind.
Choice is *always* the best option. If the consumer doesn't make the choice you like, well that's just too fucking bad, ain't it? You can either 'educate' the consumer in the egotistical belief that the consumer would wake up and move to 'free' software if only he were enlightened, or you could assume that the consumer isn't a complete idiot, has made up his own mind as is his right, and just shut the fuck up.
Max
The 'free software' crowd are a bunch of whining idiots who insist that the rest of us write code while living out of dumpsters in order to satisfy their vision of How Things Should Be(TM).
The 'open source' crowd - which I'm a part of, mostly out of paranoia - recognizes that software can be worth paying for even if it's GPL'd. For example, I've purchased copy after copy of SuSe and Redhat distributions, even though there's absolutely no reason I would *have* to do this (and as a programmer, I don't need support, so I have no incentive to purchase in order to get support). Why? In part out of laziness (box, manuals, CDs) and in part because I think the product is worth money.
Being something of an optimist, I think most people in this arena are 'open source' and not 'free software'. Which means that Bram might very well make a bundle. In fact, whether or not he did make a bundle would go a long way to proving or disproving my belief.
Max
if you take 100 computer owners, 90 of them have zero clue and use "what the computer came with" they dont use it because they CANT INSTALL IT.
While this is true of older generations (e.g., the ones whose VCRs are permanently set to '12:00' because they can't figure out how to change the time) this isn't the case with younger generations. Boomers are indeed, for the most part, clueless because the technology came along long after childhood; those who grew up with the technology are more likely to have some idea of what it's all about (they are, after all, the ones their Boomer parents rely on to actually install new software, fix computer problems, and so forth).
Generalizing between the two generations is rather pointless. Once those kids become Certified Consumers(TM) I'm willing to bet that the savviness of the buying public will start to improve.
Max
I recently taught computer courses to middle school students for three years. One of the first things I did at the outset was set up a Linux lab alongside the regular Windows lab.
For the first couple of weeks there were complaints because it wasn't like Windows; after that the complaints abated and then actually reversed (i.e., "do we *have* to use Windows today?"). Kids are remarkably adaptable, and learn quite quickly that there are some pretty cool things you can do with a Linux box that you can't do with a Windows box.
This really brought home to me why MS is so adamant about getting Windows into schools, especially early. If an alternative like Linux is available to all those young, flexible minds those kids might very well grow up Linux users rather than Windows users. Make 'em Windows users while they're young and keep them on Windows boxes until they graduate, and after ossification sets in moving them to a different platform will no doubt be more difficult.
Max
I don't think you really played any role in bidding up these prices.
I'm fairly sure I did on at least two items, including the outrageous $200 manual. Why? Because beyond a certain point the bidding was between myself and one other guy; had I not bid he would've won at a much, much lower price.
As is I artificially raised the price of the item by bidding on it well beyond the point of what the people who *actually* wanted it were willing to spend - except for this one guy.
As for the other items, it seemed an observable behavior (anecdotal evidence here) that 'pushing' the bidding in a visible manner encouraged others to get into the act - long before the time limit was to expire. That is, they saw the price go up and decided to get into the act so as not to be left out. I don't think this behavior is at all rational; in that sense it's much like gambling. Show other people that you think the item isn't worth x, but rather x+y, and they suddenly decide that they too think the item is worth x+y...and +z as well, to top your bid.
Like I said, great fun. Although it's a game you can't really win, only avoid losing.
Max
Then again... EBay prices are inflated because of all those compulsive bidders.
You have to admit thought, this is part of the fun.
A year or so ago I got on ebay for the first time (don't really care for this stuff myself) just to see what the fuss was all about. Registered, did my thing, then watched for a bit.
After seeing people bid like crazy over the silliest shit, I started bidding myself on a few items just to see what would happen. I didn't actually want the items, I just wanted to see how much people would bid on them before they gave up. In this case, the items in question were truly useless: old RuneQuest game manuals.
In the course of my experiment I managed to jack up the price of several game manuals to ridiculous levels, probably the most extreme of which was one that had sat at $15 for ages up to $200 before the time ran out. On that one I was almost worried that I'd actually have to pay for the stupid thing ($200 for an RPG manual???) but in the end one of the fanatics topped my bid and I was spared.
It was quite entertaining. Before I got involved the grand total for all the items was somewhere around $60, and no one seemed incline to pay more; by bidding I managed to increase the overall value to somewhere around $450, no doubt pleasing the owner immensely. A fool and his money....
Note: I would've, of course, paid for the items had I 'lost' the bid by 'winning', even though they were utterly valueless to me. But my fellow humans proved to be as foolish as I thought they were, and it turns out I was never in any danger of having to do so.
As a sport, screwing with the bidding is far, far more rewarding than gambling at Vegas ever could be....
Max
But, if people want to really address why our legal system is in its current state, more than blaming the lawyers will have to take place.
You're quite right. We'll also have to hang them.
Max
Would you support such a project in a free country? If not, how could you support it here?
It doesn't matter whether I support it or disapprove of it. It isn't my country, therefore *it isn't my decision*. Only the Chinese have any business commenting on the dam.
Max
So in conclusion, this is simply another minority group (again, see Inner Mongolia and Tibet for the other two most publicized examples) that is being horribly treated in China--and no one cares because of business opportunities...
So the Chinese are taking lessons from us Americans re American Indians? Shouldn't we be proud of their 'western' behavior? Might be hope for them after all!
Max
As a native of the Northwest I heartily support the dams and find the 'environmentalists' who insist we tear them all down to be irritating and irrational. What exactly do we replace them with? Coal or gas fired plants? The equivalent number of fossil-fuel burning plants create enormous amounts of pollution and will, in the long run, cause far more damage than the dams will.
Of course, in the Pacific Northwest we have to deal with fanatics like Earth First!, who seem to worship 'the environment' as a religion and whose actions are cleary anti-technogoly, anti-progress, and ultimately anti-human. It seems that people like these will only be happy if everything remotely technical is destroyed, 99% of the human race is wiped out (except for *them*, of course), and everyone adopts their version of 'environmentalism' as the One True Creed.
Even worse, most of these folks aren't even natives of the area, but assholes from some other part of the country who seem to think they have some business telling us how to live. Another bunch of totalitarian control freaks using 'the environment' as an excuse to impose their will on others. How this makes them any different from right-wing religious fundamentalists is beyond my understanding.
Max
And the only way to do that peacefully is to reduce birth rates to below maintenance levels and shrink down to a global population of 1-2 billion again.
Ah, yes. What we need is an Orwellian superstate with the power to 'license' how many children we'll have. Who gets to decide? No doubt the people you personally approve of to make the decisions, eh?
Which do you prefer? Being limited to one child, or billions dying in wars and epidemics?
What I prefer is for assholes to tend to their own house, and stay out of my business. If I choose to have one child or ten, that isn't your concern. Don't like it? Too bad - that's something called 'freedom', and if you want things to be different then offer an incentive that tempts people to keep down the birth rate. In the First World it appears that affluence is a decent way of doing this, without any need for some fascist state to enforce draconian measures.
You can choose the carrot, or nothing - the stick isn't an option, at least not to people who believe in little things like 'liberty' and 'rights'.
Max
What you fail to realize is that the decision to build the dam or not is up to the Chinese *and the Chinese alone*. No foreigner has any business telling them to do otherwise - especially one who seems to think he has some moral imperative that supercedes that of the people *who actually live there and own the land*.
Goddamn, but I am sick and tired of assholes who think they have some right to tell other people - especially people in other countries - how to live. If the Chinese want to build this dam, then more power to 'em. If it collapses due to lousy construction well, perhaps they'll do a better job next time.
Either way, I don't have any right to tell them what to do - and neither do you.
Max
Because, as we know, the human race is on the brink of extinction itself and cannot sustain such losses.
If you want to volunteer for suicide to help with the population problem, you have my complete support in your endeavor!
Max