There *is* no good reason to have done what they did. This "blame the victim" attitude is pretty horrible in my opinion.
You - and all too many others - confuse motive with blame.
Saying that Bin Laden was motivated by the stupidity and brutality of American foreign policy, or that a child molester was motivated by abuse they suffered as a child, is not justifying those actions or blaming the victim. It is seeking to understand how these actions happened so that we can prevent them from happening again in the future, by preventing the conditions that breed terrorists or child molesters.
FWIW I haven't heard anybody actually blaming terrorists for 9/11 in some time. Just blaming the U.S.
I haven't heard anyone make a big deal out of predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that dropped objects fall to the ground. Obvious facts are often left unstated.
But if it makes you happy: 9/11 was a bad thing. Killing innocent people was not a justified action. Regardless of motive, the final blame lies with those who carried out and planned these attacks.
Yes, it does now, but that can change very quickly. Consider the relative prominence of the US in 1935 versus 1945. Over just a few years World War Two reorganized the world and put America in superpower position; the "War on Terror", or whatever historians will eventually label these days, has the potential to change things just as radically.
We don't care why they hate us, we were the ones asking "when can we kill them".
"Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle." -- Sun Tzu
If you only ask "when can we kill them", you're going to create a whole bunch more of "them". Which means a whole bunch more of dead "us".
I've always wondered why the Jews didn't figure out prior to WWII why the Germans hated them?
Actually, if the world had paid attention to who among the Germans was spreading racial hatred, and to its origins and the reasons for its successful spread, yes, it's possible that action could have been taken earlier - perhaps even before war became necessary - and many lives spared.
No, this is the result of a peer-reviewed scientific study by the
Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, published in The Lancet.
Mostly I have in mind the ones forming the European Union. It's a very interesting form of post-nationalist cooperation taking shape over there. (Of course, considering that we're still dealing with the problems many of these nations left the world after their colonial conflicts climaxed in WWI, a certain dose of salt is still in order.)
Whatever you have to say about our human rights record, you MUST admit that we're better than Libya, for crying out loud.
Certainly. But that debacle is the price we (not just the U.S. but the industrialized West in general) pay for putting our attention on the Middle East (oil! oil!) and ignoring the multiple catastrophe of Africa. (The votes of African nations that put Libya into that position are believed to be a quid pro quo for Libyan financing of the African Union.)
Evidence: they pass all kinds of resolutions about how Israel needs to be nice, but ignore the atrocities committed by the palestinians.
Considering that Israel owes its existance to a U.N. declaration but doesn't feel bound to other declarations, that is Israel killing more people than Palestinian terrorists/resistance fighters/choose your term by a factor of about 2.5, and that Israel is a nation with an effective government that can take action while the Palestinian Authority has no de facto authority to stop terrorists/resistance fighters, that's not unreasonable.
What could the U.N. do, sanction the Palestinian Authority? If you don't have a nation, you probably don't feel too bound by the opinions of the United Nations.
Because it was a crime. A violation of international law and of the basic premise of national sovreignty. At best, international vigilantism; at worst the outright mugging of a nation to control its oil reserves.
Oh, and those 100,000 dead innocents might have something to do with it.
Yes, Saddam bad. That doesn't mean killing a bunch of people and letting a whole nation descend into chaos (from which it may well emerge into a fundamentalist theocracy) to put him in jail is a smart or moral course of action.
If my neighbor was beating his wife, I'd want to stop him, but it would not be good to burn down his house and kill his whole family to do so.
I'm getting really sick of these arrogant Europeans thinking their oppinion in our election even matters.
And it's people like you who were asking "why do they hate us" after 9/11...
Anyway, if we keep this national attitude up, in a few more years the rest of the world certainly won't give a damn about the U.S. elections. Because they won't give a damn about the U.S. - we won't matter in world affairs anymore. The "American Century" is over, and we can either be a player, maybe even "first among equals", in the new century, or we can be a second-rate laughing stock as nations that value cooperation and intelligent behavior lead the way.
A non-American's opinion in the 2004 presidential election is pretty much as irrelevant as it gets.
A nice rhetorical trick, except that what the parent was talking about was not not qualified by "in the 2004 presidential election".
We have to live on a planet filled with billions of people who are not American citizens. It would be smart for a president to take some consideration for their thoughts, and hiding your website from foreign eyes (and from the eyes of U.S. citizens overseas) is yet another illustration that W's thoughts (such as they are) stop at the national border.
Tht sort of thinking is not just rude, but stupid and dangerous. As Neal Stephenson recently put it here on/. "The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you." That applies to nations as well as individuals.
non-US citizens do not and should not have any say whatsoever in the outcome of US elections?
And the U.S. should have no say whatsoever in the governing of other nations. Like, say, invading a foreign nation that's not not threatening us to install a government more to our liking.
US political campaign sites have no actual reason to serve anyone other than voters?
You do realize that there are U.S. citizens living abroad?
explain to me how it's right for the Guardian to encourage its UK readers, i.e., not US citizens, to start a letter writing and email campaign to Ohioans encouraging them to vote for John Kerry
What, people in other countries don't have a right to hold and express an opinion? It's no different than Amnesty International volunteers writing to foreign officials to urge action on human rights.
It's certainly more ethical than the U.S. government's historical method of influencing foreign governments through covert operations, assassinations, and outright invasion.
It's good that you are the one who gets to decide what's needed in cars and what isn't. I was wondering who was in charge of that, thanks!
If you only want to drive your car on your own property, hey, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
But if you want the priviledge of driving on the public roads, yes, we the people through democratic representation will tell you that some things are needed in your car (brakes, speedometer, licence plate) and some things aren't (darkened windows, TVs visible from the driver's seat).
I had a GPS in my car, and only used the navigation features when I had a trip to an unfamiliar place. Using it around town is kinda pointless.
You'd be surprised. I once dated a brilliant woman, PhD candidate in Egyptology, speaks six languages, is now a Fulbright scholar. We dated for about seven months, and she would still get lost on the way to my house. Some people really need this feature.
(She can't do math, either. She can explain the historical development of the Babylonian sexagesimal number system, but I once spent twenty minutes trying without success to explain how to compute a 20% tip by doubling and shifting the decimal point. Her dad is a retired engineer, a former VP at Lucent/Bell Labs, but to her any mathematical formula makes as little sense as hieroglyphics make to me.)
I'm not sure if Poker is a fad right now or something that may last.
Poker has been around for a long time, and will certainly last; it's current popularity is probably a fad.
My father used to be a programmer/analyst (recently moved into being a realtor - anybody looking to buy or sell a house in the Baltimore area?), and likes to gamble a bit. For most of my childhood we had a royal flush he was once dealt in a game of 7-card stud, framed and hanging on the dining room wall. Mostly does blackjack at the casinos now.
My brother and I used to while away car trips playing hands of 5-card draw in the backseat, but I've only really played a few times in my adult life.
Remember, all water is recycled. (Ok, not counting the occasional few grams of ice from space.) The only question is the process.
Right now, around here it's usually my toilet - sewage treatment - Back River - ocean - evaporation - rain - Prettyboy Reservoir - water treatment - 100% recycled water at my kitchen sink. This just compresses a few steps, taking some of the load off of our spaceship's main recycling system.
With only one significant digit - as given in the article - 2 meters converts to 6 feet. (It didn't say "2.0 meters", right?)
And at three significant digits, it's closer to 1.83 meters than 1.82. (There are 2.54 cm/inch by defintion, so the conversion is precisely, 1.8288 m.)
<curmudgeon>Don't they teach you kids these days about significant digits and rounding? Why, back in my day...</curmudgeon>
The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia,/with all the duties which that entails/.
A common misconception.
First, Ammendment II does not say 'by a militia'. It says that because an militia (armed citizens) are important, the RKBA is to be protected: " A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." ("Well regulated" is a term that means "effective in the use of arms.)
Second, according to U.S. federal law, and also the laws of many states, every able-bodied male of a certain age range is in the militia.
Thrid, it's important to note that the Founders were generally opposed to having a standing army. They wanted us all to have guns, but only put an army together on a temporary basis when needed to protect the country. (As opposed to, say, having a bunch of guys standing around ready to go invade some other country.) Somewhat similar to the situation in Switzerland.
The 2nd amendment doesn't specify "certain" or "specific" weapons for protection. It protects **all** weapons.
Actually, it says "arms". IIRC, at the time there was a clear distinction in usage between "arms" and "artillery"; arms basically being rifles and other weapons carried by one man, artillery being cannon, etcetera. So the Second Amendment does have some limit (though as you point out, military assault rifles certainly do fall within its protection as arms for a modern militia.)
The key phrase here is "Congress shall make no law..."
That phrase does not appear in Amendment II: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Just don't go to the brewers art late on a sunday night; my sis got to watch a firefight (Something I missed in my 5 years as a Baltimoron).
Yow! For the record, I've lived in the Baltimore area all my life, except for my years at College Park, and have only ever seen gunfire at licenced ranges. But I'd risk a firefight for the Brewer's Art's new Proletary Ale...
(Now, I've certainly heard gunshots off in the distance, when sitting on the back porch of a friends house near Leakin Park. People generally don't get killed in the park, but it is a popular body dump and unlicenced gun range.)
Simply because Nader is a liar. There's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?
That was exactly the presentation that Gore and the Democrats gave during the 2000 campaign, when his response to most of Bush's statements in the debates was "I agree". That's not Nader's fault.
Until 2001 our "two party" system was the center of the right, versus the right of the center. No question, though, that in the post-9/11 world the neo-cons have taken over the administration, and they are dangerous freedom-hating fuckers who need to be thrown out of the White House - preferably from a great height and into a tank of water filled with great white sharks, electric eels, piranha, alligators, and a lion.
Solar is a perfect example of this. Lots of people added solar to their houses in the '80s and now they, and anybody that knows them, wouldn't touch solar with a 10 foot pole (not to mention the fact that 20 years later it's still not quite ready).
WTF are you talking about? Photovoltaic is ready for many applications, and people are using it right now to live off the grid, or to run their meters backward. If Regan hadn't kowtowed to fossil fuel companies and gutted renewables research as soon as he got into office, photovoltaic would be ready for even more applications.
Nuclear technology is mature and ready to solve our current energy problems *today* with practically no additional development.
Fission can't be said to be ready until waste disposal and nuclear proliferation are solved issues; even then it's only good for a few hundred years. Better to put the resources into developing renewables.
The quantity of fuel used is so vastly lower than the amount of coal and oil burned in fossil fuel plants that the cost of mining really isn't that much, even given the relative scarcity of the element itself.
Electric heating is as efficient as gas heating; in both cases, you're turning virtually all of the available energy into heat.
Not if you consider the small percentage of the heat energy at the power plant being converted to electricity. Yes, in you electric heater, almost all the power is converted into heat (some comes out as those cheery red photons we all love), but a heck of a lot of power gets wasted before it gets to your electric heater. I meant this "big picture" efficiency.
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You - and all too many others - confuse motive with blame.
Saying that Bin Laden was motivated by the stupidity and brutality of American foreign policy, or that a child molester was motivated by abuse they suffered as a child, is not justifying those actions or blaming the victim. It is seeking to understand how these actions happened so that we can prevent them from happening again in the future, by preventing the conditions that breed terrorists or child molesters.
I haven't heard anyone make a big deal out of predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that dropped objects fall to the ground. Obvious facts are often left unstated.
But if it makes you happy: 9/11 was a bad thing. Killing innocent people was not a justified action. Regardless of motive, the final blame lies with those who carried out and planned these attacks.
Yes, it does now, but that can change very quickly. Consider the relative prominence of the US in 1935 versus 1945. Over just a few years World War Two reorganized the world and put America in superpower position; the "War on Terror", or whatever historians will eventually label these days, has the potential to change things just as radically.
"Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle." -- Sun Tzu
If you only ask "when can we kill them", you're going to create a whole bunch more of "them". Which means a whole bunch more of dead "us".
Actually, if the world had paid attention to who among the Germans was spreading racial hatred, and to its origins and the reasons for its successful spread, yes, it's possible that action could have been taken earlier - perhaps even before war became necessary - and many lives spared.
Except that the no-fly zones had no legal authorization. Which is why even the Bush administration didn't use them as a justification for the invasion.
No, this is the result of a peer-reviewed scientific study by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, published in The Lancet.
Mostly I have in mind the ones forming the European Union. It's a very interesting form of post-nationalist cooperation taking shape over there. (Of course, considering that we're still dealing with the problems many of these nations left the world after their colonial conflicts climaxed in WWI, a certain dose of salt is still in order.)
Certainly. But that debacle is the price we (not just the U.S. but the industrialized West in general) pay for putting our attention on the Middle East (oil! oil!) and ignoring the multiple catastrophe of Africa. (The votes of African nations that put Libya into that position are believed to be a quid pro quo for Libyan financing of the African Union.)
Considering that Israel owes its existance to a U.N. declaration but doesn't feel bound to other declarations, that is Israel killing more people than Palestinian terrorists/resistance fighters/choose your term by a factor of about 2.5, and that Israel is a nation with an effective government that can take action while the Palestinian Authority has no de facto authority to stop terrorists/resistance fighters, that's not unreasonable.
What could the U.N. do, sanction the Palestinian Authority? If you don't have a nation, you probably don't feel too bound by the opinions of the United Nations.
Because it was a crime. A violation of international law and of the basic premise of national sovreignty. At best, international vigilantism; at worst the outright mugging of a nation to control its oil reserves.
Oh, and those 100,000 dead innocents might have something to do with it.
Yes, Saddam bad. That doesn't mean killing a bunch of people and letting a whole nation descend into chaos (from which it may well emerge into a fundamentalist theocracy) to put him in jail is a smart or moral course of action.
If my neighbor was beating his wife, I'd want to stop him, but it would not be good to burn down his house and kill his whole family to do so.
And it's people like you who were asking "why do they hate us" after 9/11...
Anyway, if we keep this national attitude up, in a few more years the rest of the world certainly won't give a damn about the U.S. elections. Because they won't give a damn about the U.S. - we won't matter in world affairs anymore. The "American Century" is over, and we can either be a player, maybe even "first among equals", in the new century, or we can be a second-rate laughing stock as nations that value cooperation and intelligent behavior lead the way.
And with a 30 minute reaction cycle followed by a 150 minute dormant period, in a manner that I would guess is almost useless for power generation.
A nice rhetorical trick, except that what the parent was talking about was not not qualified by "in the 2004 presidential election".
We have to live on a planet filled with billions of people who are not American citizens. It would be smart for a president to take some consideration for their thoughts, and hiding your website from foreign eyes (and from the eyes of U.S. citizens overseas) is yet another illustration that W's thoughts (such as they are) stop at the national border.
Tht sort of thinking is not just rude, but stupid and dangerous. As Neal Stephenson recently put it here on /. "The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you." That applies to nations as well as individuals.
And the U.S. should have no say whatsoever in the governing of other nations. Like, say, invading a foreign nation that's not not threatening us to install a government more to our liking.
You do realize that there are U.S. citizens living abroad?
What, people in other countries don't have a right to hold and express an opinion? It's no different than Amnesty International volunteers writing to foreign officials to urge action on human rights.
It's certainly more ethical than the U.S. government's historical method of influencing foreign governments through covert operations, assassinations, and outright invasion.
If you only want to drive your car on your own property, hey, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
But if you want the priviledge of driving on the public roads, yes, we the people through democratic representation will tell you that some things are needed in your car (brakes, speedometer, licence plate) and some things aren't (darkened windows, TVs visible from the driver's seat).
You'd be surprised. I once dated a brilliant woman, PhD candidate in Egyptology, speaks six languages, is now a Fulbright scholar. We dated for about seven months, and she would still get lost on the way to my house. Some people really need this feature.
(She can't do math, either. She can explain the historical development of the Babylonian sexagesimal number system, but I once spent twenty minutes trying without success to explain how to compute a 20% tip by doubling and shifting the decimal point. Her dad is a retired engineer, a former VP at Lucent/Bell Labs, but to her any mathematical formula makes as little sense as hieroglyphics make to me.)
Poker has been around for a long time, and will certainly last; it's current popularity is probably a fad.
My father used to be a programmer/analyst (recently moved into being a realtor - anybody looking to buy or sell a house in the Baltimore area?), and likes to gamble a bit. For most of my childhood we had a royal flush he was once dealt in a game of 7-card stud, framed and hanging on the dining room wall. Mostly does blackjack at the casinos now.
My brother and I used to while away car trips playing hands of 5-card draw in the backseat, but I've only really played a few times in my adult life.
Remember, all water is recycled. (Ok, not counting the occasional few grams of ice from space.) The only question is the process.
Right now, around here it's usually my toilet - sewage treatment - Back River - ocean - evaporation - rain - Prettyboy Reservoir - water treatment - 100% recycled water at my kitchen sink. This just compresses a few steps, taking some of the load off of our spaceship's main recycling system.
With only one significant digit - as given in the article - 2 meters converts to 6 feet. (It didn't say "2.0 meters", right?)
And at three significant digits, it's closer to 1.83 meters than 1.82. (There are 2.54 cm/inch by defintion, so the conversion is precisely, 1.8288 m.)
<curmudgeon>Don't they teach you kids these days about significant digits and rounding? Why, back in my day...</curmudgeon>
A common misconception.
First, Ammendment II does not say 'by a militia'. It says that because an militia (armed citizens) are important, the RKBA is to be protected: " A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." ("Well regulated" is a term that means "effective in the use of arms.)
Second, according to U.S. federal law, and also the laws of many states, every able-bodied male of a certain age range is in the militia.
Thrid, it's important to note that the Founders were generally opposed to having a standing army. They wanted us all to have guns, but only put an army together on a temporary basis when needed to protect the country. (As opposed to, say, having a bunch of guys standing around ready to go invade some other country.) Somewhat similar to the situation in Switzerland.
Actually, it says "arms". IIRC, at the time there was a clear distinction in usage between "arms" and "artillery"; arms basically being rifles and other weapons carried by one man, artillery being cannon, etcetera. So the Second Amendment does have some limit (though as you point out, military assault rifles certainly do fall within its protection as arms for a modern militia.)
That phrase does not appear in Amendment II: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Yow! For the record, I've lived in the Baltimore area all my life, except for my years at College Park, and have only ever seen gunfire at licenced ranges. But I'd risk a firefight for the Brewer's Art's new Proletary Ale...
(Now, I've certainly heard gunshots off in the distance, when sitting on the back porch of a friends house near Leakin Park. People generally don't get killed in the park, but it is a popular body dump and unlicenced gun range.)
Is your election commisioner an expert in computer security?
Do you machine have a voter-verifiable paper trail? If not, they're nowhere near as secure as they can be made - no where near sedure enough, in fact.
And there were much more severe problems in Fairfax County than taking an extra day to count the votes.
That was exactly the presentation that Gore and the Democrats gave during the 2000 campaign, when his response to most of Bush's statements in the debates was "I agree". That's not Nader's fault.
Until 2001 our "two party" system was the center of the right, versus the right of the center. No question, though, that in the post-9/11 world the neo-cons have taken over the administration, and they are dangerous freedom-hating fuckers who need to be thrown out of the White House - preferably from a great height and into a tank of water filled with great white sharks, electric eels, piranha, alligators, and a lion.
Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, in 1955. It's become something of a cliche since then.
WTF are you talking about? Photovoltaic is ready for many applications, and people are using it right now to live off the grid, or to run their meters backward. If Regan hadn't kowtowed to fossil fuel companies and gutted renewables research as soon as he got into office, photovoltaic would be ready for even more applications.
Fission can't be said to be ready until waste disposal and nuclear proliferation are solved issues; even then it's only good for a few hundred years. Better to put the resources into developing renewables.
Actually tailings are really really nasty; there are lots of problems with water contamination.
Not if you consider the small percentage of the heat energy at the power plant being converted to electricity. Yes, in you electric heater, almost all the power is converted into heat (some comes out as those cheery red photons we all love), but a heck of a lot of power gets wasted before it gets to your electric heater. I meant this "big picture" efficiency.