Well, everyone needs water, but there's not much demand for beer because it's forbidden under Sharia (Islamic law). The only people who drink it are expats, and only then in the (relative) privacy of their own homes, bars in international hotels, and so on.
"Arab World" != "Saudi Arabia". It stretches from Morocco to Iraq. And, believe it or not, the majority of the Arab world does not have Islamic law. A lot of it is actually based on French law.
Besides, many Arabs are Christians, and have about as much problem with drinking as Italians do.
And, as another poster mentioned, Muslim:No Beer::Catholic:No Premarital Sex.
There's a much more worrisome flipside; people will abandon Adobe if Apple say so;
That doesn't sound worrisome, it sounds like a best-case scenario. If Apple cooks up something its users can replace Photoshop with, or (absolute best-case) invests in the GIMP to get it up to 100%, everyone wins. Well, everyone except Adobe. But Adobe isn't exactly my favorite company... They're just about no. 2 after MS, in fact.
...Add to this any separately installed support libraries, rc.d init scripts, and you can have a much more difficult time 'uninstalling' than under windows, where the uninstaller takes care of all that (theoretically anyways).
sudo apt-get remove packagename
Please, compare apples and apples. If you're building Windows apps from source, there's probably no uninstaller there either...
Actually, accodring to our dear ol' Founding Fathers, there's quite a difference....
*sigh*... I give up.
Just because someone arbitrarily defines the terms to mean two different things, doesn't mean that they have those different meanings always, in every context. And theoreticians (philosophers, political scientists) have a tendency to define terms in such a way as to make their own arguments work. Those particular definitions are not infinitely generalizable, however.
In short, I'll take the word of the OED over the Federalist Papers, thank you.
BTW, there is certainly a difference between direct-participatory and representative democracy, no one here argued that there isn't. The difference does not necessarily map onto republic::democracy, however. The UK has a representative democracy, but is a kingdom, not a republic. Libya is a republic, but makes little or no pretense at repuresentative government.
They are calling into question whether America is still operating under it's original founding principles.
Yes, well, I think that most of the people who think the U.S. has betrayed its founding principles have a rather ahistorical and rosy-lensed idea of what those founding principles were. Or rather, they radically oversimplify.
If we understand the founding principles to be that the bourgoises and the gentry should have the freedom to rule themselves and the masses without interference from any tyrant, foreign or domestic, then little has changed;)
The issue isn't really democratic vs. republican at all, really. It's a difference in perceptions about how a just society should function. (People tend loosely to use ``democratic'' to mean ``the way things should be,'' and I agree that that is sloppy usage.) Some believe that society should primarily function to maintain people's property (and various civil liberties). Their focus is on limiting the state's taking of their property or limitations of their ``rights.'' Others believe that society should function primarily to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong. You might recognize traditional bourgeois liberalism and traditional working-class social democracy in those, BTW, although much is terribly oversimplified. Anyway, when people think the U.S. is taking the wrong approach to a just society, they tend to say it's not being ``democratic.''
Sheesh, I just realized all this is on a Microsoft topic... So as to avoid going any further off-topic, if anyone wants to continue this let's do it in my journal.
A republic is a nation ruled by law, a democracy is a nation ruled by people.
(That's interesting. I can imagine quite a few Tories being quite upset by being told the UK is a republic...)
OK, I won't talk about the origins of the words. I'll stick to English. Would you accept that the Oxford English Dictionary is a reputable source for English?
Republic, as defined by the OED:
A state in which the supreme power rests in the people and their elected representatives or officers, as opposed to one governed by a king or similar ruler; a commonwealth. Now also applied loosely to any state which claims this designation.
Democracy, as defined by the OED:
Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
Let's see: Both mean rule by the people and/or their elected officers, not by a king.
Democracy sucks.
That why America is a Democratic Republic.
Why do Americans get so hung up on this? I don't get it.
Republic == ``res publica'', Latin for (roughly) the populus (people) is in charge
Democracy == ``dimokratia'', Greek for (roughly) the dimos (people) is in charge
In modern Greek, the word for republic is ``dimokratia'' (as in ``Elliniki Dimokratia'' -- Greek Republic).
You can play semantic games all you want, but the terms have no inherent difference in meaning. If you want to split hairs, you need to provide definitions. FWIW, the difference betwen the Roman and Athenian models (hence, I assume, the hair-splitting) is pretty small. The Romans said the senators were representatives of the people, but they were the heads of the most powerful families. The Greeks said that all citizens participated directly, but restricted citizenship to the heads of the most powerful families. 6 == half dozen.
I'm sorry, but your examples really don't prove your point. Arab nationalists seek a pan-Arabic secular republic -- this is something which has never existed before. They believe that a nation exists, and they want to create a state which has as its citizens the members of this nation. The UAR was a (failed) attempt in that direction. It corresponded to no previous state.
There never was a Basque state of `Navrone'... I assume you mean Navarre, which was a Hispanic kingdom (much like Aragon, Castille, Leon, and eventually Portugal). While Navarre was located roughly where Basque populations were located, it was not a Basque state; to try to identify mediaeval polities with modern national states is in general a futile exercise, as they were usually sub- or transnational. I won't disagree that some Basque nationalists may use Navarre as part of their national myth, much as Skopje-Macedonian nationlists (quite inanely) use Alexander the Great as part of theirs; that doesn't mean it corresponds to any historical reality. And at any rate, no one is trying to resurrect a mediaeval kingdom for the Basques; they want a modern republic.
Finally, anyone who wants to resurrect the Caliphate is not a nationalist of any kind; OBL is not even remotely a nationalist. His movement is specifically based on a supranational ideology, and is intended to bring in Muslims from the Philippines to Morocco. Don't assume that ``bad guy wants power'' == ``nationalist''.
I understand the desire to try to make some distinction between ``patriotism'' (which you may want to feel OK with) and ``nationalism'' (which may give you the willies), but don't distort history to do it.
Iraq attacked Kuwait. US came in to stop invasion under UN charter. Iraq attacked US soldiers.
Another way of looking at it would be:
The UK detached a province from Iraq and set it up as a puppet state. Several decades later, Iraq decided to use force to reunify the Iraqi nation under one state. (The U.S., when asked, said it had no objections.) Then the U.S. unleashed (with U.N. sanction) an invasion of what Iraq considered to be its own territory. (An analogy: Imagine FRG (W. Germany) in the 1980s going into GDR (E. Germany) to reunify Germany, and the Soviets leading a U.N. drive to kick the FRG army back out, while bombing everything from Hamburg to Munich.)
Now, I'm not going to claim for a minute that I buy (or bought in 1990-91) the Iraqi justification for the occupation of Kuwait, but remember that there is usually another side to things.
He (Iraqi Army) attacked American soldiers that were there under UN charter.
Huh? Sorry, I thought it was the U.S. that attacked Iraq, not the other way around. (I'm not making any argument amount the morality of the U.S. attacking Iraq in 1991, just trying to keep the actual sequence of events straight.) Shooting back when you're being attacked doesn't count.
Nationalism is love of a government. Patriotism is love of a country.
This is quite wrong, I have to say. In literal terms, nationalism refers to a natio, which is a people, not a state or geographical entity. Patriotism refers to a patria, which is more generally understood as a land.
More important is the history. The most infamous cases of nationalism are probably Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Both Italian and German nationalisms were born in the absence of national states, indeed as response to the absence of such states. Remember, Italy and Germany were not unified until 1860-71. Before then, there certainly were nationalists -- they were fighting to establish a state which coincided with the nation (i.e., a people, or Volk) as they understood it.
In practical terms, the difference is more likely to be the opposite of what you claim. Patriotism, as Americans generally understand it, demands absolute loyalty to the state -- ``my country, right or wrong.'' Nationalism demands loyalty to the nation, which may or may not map onto any political entity. (E.g., Basque nationalists, Pan-Arabic nationalism, etc.)
Two grad student TA's complaining that they need to grade a stack of midterms by themselves because the other TA has bravely walked out on grading to protest the war.;-)
As I sit here looking at my pile of midterms to grade, I am tempted...
Lets say you have a wife. If someone pulls a gun and aims it at her head, do you wait till he pulls the trigger until you do something?
Sorry, but that's a flawed analogy. Try this: You have a wife. Someone (who you think is a pretty sick f*ck) says ``y'know, I was thinking about picking up that new Glock; it looks pretty cool.'' So you kill him, because he might at some point in the future actually buy that gun, and might if he buys it, think about pointing it at your wife.
Well regaurdless at least we have some big old Oceans between us and anyone we really could care about.
Yeah, too bad about that ``powered flight'' thing those folks in North Carolina developed a few years back.
Re:How about Hebrew, the language it was written i
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
scripsit TheOneEyedMan:
But in Hebrew there is a different word for "kill."
Thanks for posting. As I said, I don't read Hebrew so that wasn't an option open to me. It would appear then that the confusion may come from the Vulgate; KJV is, AFAIK, based on the Vulgate and not the Hebrew text, so it would perpetuate any error in the Vulgate.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
scripsit Twirlip of the Mists:
If I bomb a city for the sole purpose of inflicting terror, through which I hope to achieve my political goals, that's terrorism. And it is unacceptable.
I really do encourage you to read up on the firebombing raids. When I first did, I was sickened. I am an American citizen, and I was raised on the idea that Americans didn't do that sort of thing. We were misled.
Re:Why care about being hated?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
scripsit Dr. Transparent:
The scripture reads, "Thou shalt not murder." as opposed to "Thou shalt not kill."
Well, I don't read Hebrew, so I thought I'd check the Vulgate. Exodus 20:13 reads (in its entirety) ``non occides.'' That means ``do not strike down'' or ``do not slay'' -- the verb occidere has nothing whatsoever to do with legality. It just means don't kill people. Sorry.
Brazil is no more a multinational state than is the U.S. -- it's an immigrant-descended society (including involuntary immigrants, i.e. slaves) with a tiny smattering of indigenous peoples.
Mexico?
That would be the same Mexico that has an Indian insurgency still going on?
The last thing Slashdot needs is a war vs. anti-war flamewar. We've already got BSD vs. Linux, Perl vs. Python vs. Ruby vs. Java vs. Everything Else, KDE vs. Gnome, etc... So I think we're good.
Strange, in a way I feel the opposite. It's really hard to see how I could get worked up about my choice of text editor when people are dying at my government's hands...
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
scripsit Twirlip of the Mists:
The deliberate targeting of civilians. This has never been an acceptable tactic, either for armies or for guerilla freedom fighters.
I recommend you brush up on your WWII history. Read up on the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, for example. Or on the actions of the Allied ``resistance'' movements.
War is evil. People engaged in war do evil things. Don't pretend that white, English-speaking people don't do them too.
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit Highwayman:
Woah, Godzilla's of Cthulu? I must've missed that part...
scripsit sql*kitten:
"Arab World" != "Saudi Arabia". It stretches from Morocco to Iraq. And, believe it or not, the majority of the Arab world does not have Islamic law. A lot of it is actually based on French law.
Besides, many Arabs are Christians, and have about as much problem with drinking as Italians do.
And, as another poster mentioned, Muslim:No Beer::Catholic:No Premarital Sex.
scripsit hype7:
That doesn't sound worrisome, it sounds like a best-case scenario. If Apple cooks up something its users can replace Photoshop with, or (absolute best-case) invests in the GIMP to get it up to 100%, everyone wins. Well, everyone except Adobe. But Adobe isn't exactly my favorite company... They're just about no. 2 after MS, in fact.
Remember Sklyarov.
scripsit pod:
sudo apt-get remove packagename
Please, compare apples and apples. If you're building Windows apps from source, there's probably no uninstaller there either...
scripsit walt-sjc:
Never used one, but IIRC the IIgs boxes at my school had color displays.
scripsit schnarff:
*sigh* ... I give up.
Just because someone arbitrarily defines the terms to mean two different things, doesn't mean that they have those different meanings always, in every context. And theoreticians (philosophers, political scientists) have a tendency to define terms in such a way as to make their own arguments work. Those particular definitions are not infinitely generalizable, however.
In short, I'll take the word of the OED over the Federalist Papers, thank you.
BTW, there is certainly a difference between direct-participatory and representative democracy, no one here argued that there isn't. The difference does not necessarily map onto republic::democracy, however. The UK has a representative democracy, but is a kingdom, not a republic. Libya is a republic, but makes little or no pretense at repuresentative government.
scripsit cmacb:
Yes, well, I think that most of the people who think the U.S. has betrayed its founding principles have a rather ahistorical and rosy-lensed idea of what those founding principles were. Or rather, they radically oversimplify.
If we understand the founding principles to be that the bourgoises and the gentry should have the freedom to rule themselves and the masses without interference from any tyrant, foreign or domestic, then little has changed ;)
The issue isn't really democratic vs. republican at all, really. It's a difference in perceptions about how a just society should function. (People tend loosely to use ``democratic'' to mean ``the way things should be,'' and I agree that that is sloppy usage.) Some believe that society should primarily function to maintain people's property (and various civil liberties). Their focus is on limiting the state's taking of their property or limitations of their ``rights.'' Others believe that society should function primarily to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong. You might recognize traditional bourgeois liberalism and traditional working-class social democracy in those, BTW, although much is terribly oversimplified. Anyway, when people think the U.S. is taking the wrong approach to a just society, they tend to say it's not being ``democratic.''
Sheesh, I just realized all this is on a Microsoft topic... So as to avoid going any further off-topic, if anyone wants to continue this let's do it in my journal.
scripsit ChristTrekker:
(That's interesting. I can imagine quite a few Tories being quite upset by being told the UK is a republic...)
OK, I won't talk about the origins of the words. I'll stick to English. Would you accept that the Oxford English Dictionary is a reputable source for English?
Republic, as defined by the OED:
Democracy, as defined by the OED:
Let's see: Both mean rule by the people and/or their elected officers, not by a king.
scripsit SensitiveMale:
Why do Americans get so hung up on this? I don't get it.
Republic == ``res publica'', Latin for (roughly) the populus (people) is in charge
Democracy == ``dimokratia'', Greek for (roughly) the dimos (people) is in charge
In modern Greek, the word for republic is ``dimokratia'' (as in ``Elliniki Dimokratia'' -- Greek Republic).
You can play semantic games all you want, but the terms have no inherent difference in meaning. If you want to split hairs, you need to provide definitions. FWIW, the difference betwen the Roman and Athenian models (hence, I assume, the hair-splitting) is pretty small. The Romans said the senators were representatives of the people, but they were the heads of the most powerful families. The Greeks said that all citizens participated directly, but restricted citizenship to the heads of the most powerful families. 6 == half dozen.
I'm sorry, but your examples really don't prove your point. Arab nationalists seek a pan-Arabic secular republic -- this is something which has never existed before. They believe that a nation exists, and they want to create a state which has as its citizens the members of this nation. The UAR was a (failed) attempt in that direction. It corresponded to no previous state.
There never was a Basque state of `Navrone'... I assume you mean Navarre, which was a Hispanic kingdom (much like Aragon, Castille, Leon, and eventually Portugal). While Navarre was located roughly where Basque populations were located, it was not a Basque state; to try to identify mediaeval polities with modern national states is in general a futile exercise, as they were usually sub- or transnational. I won't disagree that some Basque nationalists may use Navarre as part of their national myth, much as Skopje-Macedonian nationlists (quite inanely) use Alexander the Great as part of theirs; that doesn't mean it corresponds to any historical reality. And at any rate, no one is trying to resurrect a mediaeval kingdom for the Basques; they want a modern republic.
Finally, anyone who wants to resurrect the Caliphate is not a nationalist of any kind; OBL is not even remotely a nationalist. His movement is specifically based on a supranational ideology, and is intended to bring in Muslims from the Philippines to Morocco. Don't assume that ``bad guy wants power'' == ``nationalist''.
I understand the desire to try to make some distinction between ``patriotism'' (which you may want to feel OK with) and ``nationalism'' (which may give you the willies), but don't distort history to do it.
scripsit mydn:
How 'bout ``those folks from Ohio in North Carolina''? :P
scripsit Xerithane:
Another way of looking at it would be:
The UK detached a province from Iraq and set it up as a puppet state. Several decades later, Iraq decided to use force to reunify the Iraqi nation under one state. (The U.S., when asked, said it had no objections.) Then the U.S. unleashed (with U.N. sanction) an invasion of what Iraq considered to be its own territory. (An analogy: Imagine FRG (W. Germany) in the 1980s going into GDR (E. Germany) to reunify Germany, and the Soviets leading a U.N. drive to kick the FRG army back out, while bombing everything from Hamburg to Munich.)
Now, I'm not going to claim for a minute that I buy (or bought in 1990-91) the Iraqi justification for the occupation of Kuwait, but remember that there is usually another side to things.
scripsit Xerithane:
Huh? Sorry, I thought it was the U.S. that attacked Iraq, not the other way around. (I'm not making any argument amount the morality of the U.S. attacking Iraq in 1991, just trying to keep the actual sequence of events straight.) Shooting back when you're being attacked doesn't count.
scripsit Xerithane:
He did? When? Who is your wife an analog for? Kuwait/Saudi? If so, you should get a divorce because your worst enemies know she swallows.
scripsit Dukeofshadows:
This is quite wrong, I have to say. In literal terms, nationalism refers to a natio, which is a people, not a state or geographical entity. Patriotism refers to a patria, which is more generally understood as a land.
More important is the history. The most infamous cases of nationalism are probably Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Both Italian and German nationalisms were born in the absence of national states, indeed as response to the absence of such states. Remember, Italy and Germany were not unified until 1860-71. Before then, there certainly were nationalists -- they were fighting to establish a state which coincided with the nation (i.e., a people, or Volk) as they understood it.
In practical terms, the difference is more likely to be the opposite of what you claim. Patriotism, as Americans generally understand it, demands absolute loyalty to the state -- ``my country, right or wrong.'' Nationalism demands loyalty to the nation, which may or may not map onto any political entity. (E.g., Basque nationalists, Pan-Arabic nationalism, etc.)
scripsit update():
As I sit here looking at my pile of midterms to grade, I am tempted...
Nah, I'll just protest by failing them all.
</joke>
scripsit Xerithane:
Sorry, but that's a flawed analogy. Try this: You have a wife. Someone (who you think is a pretty sick f*ck) says ``y'know, I was thinking about picking up that new Glock; it looks pretty cool.'' So you kill him, because he might at some point in the future actually buy that gun, and might if he buys it, think about pointing it at your wife.
scripsit Flamesplash:
Yeah, too bad about that ``powered flight'' thing those folks in North Carolina developed a few years back.
scripsit TheOneEyedMan:
Thanks for posting. As I said, I don't read Hebrew so that wasn't an option open to me. It would appear then that the confusion may come from the Vulgate; KJV is, AFAIK, based on the Vulgate and not the Hebrew text, so it would perpetuate any error in the Vulgate.
scripsit Twirlip of the Mists:
I really do encourage you to read up on the firebombing raids. When I first did, I was sickened. I am an American citizen, and I was raised on the idea that Americans didn't do that sort of thing. We were misled.
scripsit Dr. Transparent:
Well, I don't read Hebrew, so I thought I'd check the Vulgate. Exodus 20:13 reads (in its entirety) ``non occides.'' That means ``do not strike down'' or ``do not slay'' -- the verb occidere has nothing whatsoever to do with legality. It just means don't kill people. Sorry.
scripsit stefanlasiewski:
Brazil is no more a multinational state than is the U.S. -- it's an immigrant-descended society (including involuntary immigrants, i.e. slaves) with a tiny smattering of indigenous peoples.
That would be the same Mexico that has an Indian insurgency still going on?
scripsit bahwi:
Strange, in a way I feel the opposite. It's really hard to see how I could get worked up about my choice of text editor when people are dying at my government's hands...
scripsit Twirlip of the Mists:
I recommend you brush up on your WWII history. Read up on the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, for example. Or on the actions of the Allied ``resistance'' movements.
War is evil. People engaged in war do evil things. Don't pretend that white, English-speaking people don't do them too.
scripsit Gojira Shipi-Taro:
As much as I would like to be optimistic, I have to ask: Can you give some examples, other than CH?