Re:my favourite civil liberty is...
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· Score: 1
The founders of the US identified "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as _inalienable rights_.
No they didn't, not in the literal sense. Like all politicians they said one thing and did another. That statement shouldn't be taken literally. It was never intended to apply to prisoners, foreign citizens - or indeed slaves.
Did it ever occur to you that a lot of civil suits might be alleging failure of responsibility? For example, corporations failing to take responsibility for poisoning people or putting people at risk, including innocent kids. You cannot be expected to avoid products which you do not know are unsafe and only the seller knows is unsafe. Even less can kids and young teens be expected to be totally responsible for their own safety.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Palestine celebrated over this attack.
NO. Some Palestinians celebrated. Not all.
May I remind you that there was cheering in the streets of America when Hiroshima was nuked, and when innocent civilians were killed in Iraq in the Gulf War. Does that make those Americans who cheered (including young kids) animals?
Whatever - it doesn't mean they are evil. It just means they were immature.
And then came the really bad part. If we get some people who really aren't deserving, that's okay, it's that important.
Unfortunately, this is par for the course in US government thinking, whether it be a Democrat or Republican administration. I'm not just talking about terrorist attacks, I'm talking about things like "the threat of a good example", e.g. Allende in Chile. Allende was considered such a threat because he was a democratic socialist, and if he could stand up to America that would be a worrying example to other developing countries. Kissinger preferred Pinochet. No matter that Pinochet was an evil dictator who stifled dissent with torture and a "caravan of death" - Kissinger knew of this, and approved - he told State Department officials to stop bringing up the issue of human rights.
This is all true, and there are many other examples (evil Saddam used to be a US ally, believe it or not) although I expect I'll be modded into oblivion...
Michael Albert just posted this to the ZMag updates list. Well worth reading:
Calamitous Perspective
By Michael Albert
Sending a commentary on a topic other than today?s horrific events has
seemed untenable. Addressing today?s events has also seemed untenable. That
our web and email server has been inaccessible all day, depriving us of
internet communications and of access to update ZNet hasn?t helped. It seems
web traffic was so great that it caused problems in Washington State, around
Seattle, where our servers are located.
A simple chronicle of the day?s events would be superfluous. Known facts are
displayed on every TV station. Reliable deductions are relatively obvious.
After routine take-offs four planes were commandeered by terror teams and
simultaneously flown on dramatically distorted trajectories to demolish
pre-selected targets. The devastation is not yet known, but is certainly
horrific. What can one conclude other than that devastating suicidal
terrorist attacks are eminently doable? Annihilating skyscrapers in the U.S.
or other developed countries is harder than the U.S. bombing cities in
targeted nations, but it is evidently far from impossible.
Good-hearted Americans will mourn these innocent and horrible deaths with
dignity and with respect. Media analysts and politicians, however, will soon
use pictures of the rubble to seek increased police and military spending
and greater state interventionary and surveillance powers. They will intone
that killing civilians is cowardly and warrants swift and merciless
punishment. They will however ignore having themselves supported the recent
assault on Yugoslavia that terrorized that country?s civilian population to
topple its despised government. They will also ignore that the U.S.-led
embargo of Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, again
to destabilize a hated government. Today?s terrorism was horrendously vile.
It arose in a terror-infected world.
People throughout the third world have long had their destiny held hostage
by distant rulers. First world diplomats and entrepreneurs year after year
pursue power and profit imposing nearly unimaginable third world calamity.
Due to our distance from the victims and the endless mass media obfuscation
of their plight, we first world citizens fail to realize that when a million
people starve because a poor country?s energies are commandeered to benefit
multinational capital, it is murder. But, it is murder, and so third world
populations have long endured near total dependence on choices made by
distant authoritative leaders who are callous to their futures.
The same abysmal condition has arrived, to a degree, for populations in
developed countries. Those who died in today?s attacks also suffered a
choice made by far away actors callous to the carnage they imposed. First
world populations may henceforth share not the degrading conditions and
daily poverty of the third world, but some of the fear of being held hostage
by others. To try to overcome this condition, but even more to enlarge their
already grotesquely bloated powers, first world leaders may in coming weeks
challenge decades of gains in civil and legal rights, trying to turn back
freedom's clock.
Can anything curtail the carnage of capital, the carnage of terrorism, and
the carnage of repressive reaction? Our best hope is to win institutional
change that reduces profit-seeking and political subordination, while also
reducing desires to lash out with mindless and inhumane terrorism.
In coming weeks we may suffer a kind of celebration in America, a
celebration of security and of power, a celebration of surreptitious
information retrieval, a celebration of arms growth, and perhaps of
assassination, all described as virtuous goals rather than uncivil
abominations, all touted as if the terror victims will be honored rather
than defiled by our preparing to entomb still more innocent people around
the world. Normal good-hearted Americans will weep for the suffering that
today?s events exacted and hope to create a world in which such hate and
callousness disappears. But I fear that America?s leaders will cynically
bulk up their ammo belts while seeking to make ubiquitous their listening
devices?trying to relegate public freedoms to an incinerator.
In this environment, people of good will must explain as often as necessary
that terrorism is horrific and insane, but so too is capitalist business as
usual. And we must not step back from dissent, but must instead work harder
to oppose all kinds of injustice with massive public demonstrations and
civil disobedience.
Because Iraq's economy is not just teetering on the bridge of collapse, it has already collapsed some time ago. Iraq really really does not want another Gulf War right now!
What utter nonsense. If you do not believe in killing some people for a greater good (this was how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "justified" in the mainstream) you must be a pacifist. The only people who do not believe in a greater good are a subset of the total pacifists, and most people are not total pacifists.
The previous poster said Katz was "not insightful". You then accused him of the verbal equivalent of dragging Katz into the streets and stoning him. Then you accussed the poster of being a "heartless puke".
You need your head examined. The Katz article really wasn't insightful, to anyone with an IQ higher than Dubya's.
All of you who have replied to MxTxL - he was TROLLING. He was obviously being SARCASTIC. He was trying to make a point by taking the hawkish line to its obvious ridiculous conclusions, such as:
We may have to submit to cavity searches before too long.
Come on. This was a throwaway line (as if the DEA analogy didn't peg your bullshit meter already!)
And this:
Is the encryption export ban such a bad thing when stacked against 50,000 people's lives?
Everyone with a clue knows that an encryption export ban is FUCKING 100% USELESS!!
It was actually quite a high quality troll (and it fooled quite a few people) - if you read it with that in mind.:-)
I don't know about that. Katz is just a "columnist" (and I use that word in a very loose sense) paid to produce tripe regularly. Whether he actually believes what he writes is doubtful, and rather besides the point.
I was going to say it's a bit sickening to exploit such a horrific tragedy for petty journalistic gain, but I'm not really sure what Katz's motives are in posting this, so I'll leave it at that.
A club bouncer keeping people out? How does libertarianism justify club bouncers physically removing pushy people?
Is smacking a child force? Is verbally abusing a child force? Is verbally abusing someone to the extent they commit suicide, force?
Is stalking force?
Is drugging someone into a coma and then unlawfully imprisoning them without food or water (hence killing) force? Why? There is in point of fact no physical force involved, but it's still murder.
Is drug-raping someone force? Why, when consensual sex can involve more "force" than drug-rape?
Is graffitti force? Is littering force? Is tearing down a poster force? Is putting up advertising on someone else's property force? Is trespass force? Is shooting at someone to get them off your property force?
Is pollution force? If I force you to breathe noxious fumes and you immediately die from them that's surely murder. But corporations get away with it by being separated in space and time, and being richer.
Is noise pollution force? You can kill someone with sound if it's loud enough. At what point does sound become force? Injury? Deafness? Bleeding ears? Death?
Is goatse.cx force? Is shoving a printout of goatse.cx in someone's face force? What about if it was a child you were showing it to? How horrifying does a picture have to be before it's outrageous to show it to a child?
What about scaring a child to death, or giving an old woman a fatal heart attack by pretending to be a ghost? Is that force?
Is fraud force?
Is education force?
Is libertarianism force? Is saying "Those protestors need to stop whining and get their heads out of their asses" force ? Is saying "You are a know nothing fuckwit" force? Yes. Yes yes yes it is.
Force is much, much more complicated than libertarians will admit. If they admitted it they'd have to renounce libertarianism.
They would only cost money to implement. After a while, fares would more than pay for running costs, except most American cities are run by liberals/socialists so the system always runs in the red.
I love that kind of line. "XYZ is corrupt because they're socialists". I hear that sort of thing all the time. A brilliant example of assertion without evidence. Right up there with "You should obey God because the Bible says so". Bravo!
It is usually considered a socialist (or "European", which seems to mean the same thing these days to Americans, *sigh*) idea to increase gas taxes and car taxes, but it actually is fully compatible with a libertarian view as well, particularly as it means that the market actually can work out the best balance between driving cars and taking mass transit,
I am a socialist, and I can tell you, you are mistaken. The libertarian concept is to let the market work out the best price by itself, without govt intervention. "True" socialists believe that won't work, thus we need both govt intervention (in the short term) and democratic factories, offices, etc. (in the loooooooong term). You are thus on the socialist side of the fence on this particular issue. Sorry.
Hint: Just because you've had it pounded into your brain that socialism is somehow evil, doesn't make it true.
Not necessarily. It takes time to develop a development environment (or similar) to the point where it can be used to "bootstrap" itself - at the beginning, non-stable early versions can't be developed with stable versions since the latter don't exist yet.
No, this was a particularly blatant example of a Microsoft Big Lie. Try opening a.doc file in Notepad sometime. Look like XML to you?
Re:software is incredibly complex...
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But organisms, particularly humans, are far more resilient than any software yet created. Our brains don't usually "crash" completely, no matter what you throw at them. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
No they didn't, not in the literal sense. Like all politicians they said one thing and did another. That statement shouldn't be taken literally. It was never intended to apply to prisoners, foreign citizens - or indeed slaves.
NO. Some Palestinians celebrated. Not all.
May I remind you that there was cheering in the streets of America when Hiroshima was nuked, and when innocent civilians were killed in Iraq in the Gulf War. Does that make those Americans who cheered (including young kids) animals?
Whatever - it doesn't mean they are evil. It just means they were immature.
Why is it that Slashdot seems to be crawling with right-wing crazies these days?
Unfortunately, this is par for the course in US government thinking, whether it be a Democrat or Republican administration. I'm not just talking about terrorist attacks, I'm talking about things like "the threat of a good example", e.g. Allende in Chile. Allende was considered such a threat because he was a democratic socialist, and if he could stand up to America that would be a worrying example to other developing countries. Kissinger preferred Pinochet. No matter that Pinochet was an evil dictator who stifled dissent with torture and a "caravan of death" - Kissinger knew of this, and approved - he told State Department officials to stop bringing up the issue of human rights.
This is all true, and there are many other examples (evil Saddam used to be a US ally, believe it or not) although I expect I'll be modded into oblivion...
Michael Albert just posted this to the ZMag updates list. Well worth reading:
Calamitous Perspective
By Michael Albert
Sending a commentary on a topic other than today?s horrific events has
seemed untenable. Addressing today?s events has also seemed untenable. That
our web and email server has been inaccessible all day, depriving us of
internet communications and of access to update ZNet hasn?t helped. It seems
web traffic was so great that it caused problems in Washington State, around
Seattle, where our servers are located.
A simple chronicle of the day?s events would be superfluous. Known facts are
displayed on every TV station. Reliable deductions are relatively obvious.
After routine take-offs four planes were commandeered by terror teams and
simultaneously flown on dramatically distorted trajectories to demolish
pre-selected targets. The devastation is not yet known, but is certainly
horrific. What can one conclude other than that devastating suicidal
terrorist attacks are eminently doable? Annihilating skyscrapers in the U.S.
or other developed countries is harder than the U.S. bombing cities in
targeted nations, but it is evidently far from impossible.
Good-hearted Americans will mourn these innocent and horrible deaths with
dignity and with respect. Media analysts and politicians, however, will soon
use pictures of the rubble to seek increased police and military spending
and greater state interventionary and surveillance powers. They will intone
that killing civilians is cowardly and warrants swift and merciless
punishment. They will however ignore having themselves supported the recent
assault on Yugoslavia that terrorized that country?s civilian population to
topple its despised government. They will also ignore that the U.S.-led
embargo of Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, again
to destabilize a hated government. Today?s terrorism was horrendously vile.
It arose in a terror-infected world.
People throughout the third world have long had their destiny held hostage
by distant rulers. First world diplomats and entrepreneurs year after year
pursue power and profit imposing nearly unimaginable third world calamity.
Due to our distance from the victims and the endless mass media obfuscation
of their plight, we first world citizens fail to realize that when a million
people starve because a poor country?s energies are commandeered to benefit
multinational capital, it is murder. But, it is murder, and so third world
populations have long endured near total dependence on choices made by
distant authoritative leaders who are callous to their futures.
The same abysmal condition has arrived, to a degree, for populations in
developed countries. Those who died in today?s attacks also suffered a
choice made by far away actors callous to the carnage they imposed. First
world populations may henceforth share not the degrading conditions and
daily poverty of the third world, but some of the fear of being held hostage
by others. To try to overcome this condition, but even more to enlarge their
already grotesquely bloated powers, first world leaders may in coming weeks
challenge decades of gains in civil and legal rights, trying to turn back
freedom's clock.
Can anything curtail the carnage of capital, the carnage of terrorism, and
the carnage of repressive reaction? Our best hope is to win institutional
change that reduces profit-seeking and political subordination, while also
reducing desires to lash out with mindless and inhumane terrorism.
In coming weeks we may suffer a kind of celebration in America, a
celebration of security and of power, a celebration of surreptitious
information retrieval, a celebration of arms growth, and perhaps of
assassination, all described as virtuous goals rather than uncivil
abominations, all touted as if the terror victims will be honored rather
than defiled by our preparing to entomb still more innocent people around
the world. Normal good-hearted Americans will weep for the suffering that
today?s events exacted and hope to create a world in which such hate and
callousness disappears. But I fear that America?s leaders will cynically
bulk up their ammo belts while seeking to make ubiquitous their listening
devices?trying to relegate public freedoms to an incinerator.
In this environment, people of good will must explain as often as necessary
that terrorism is horrific and insane, but so too is capitalist business as
usual. And we must not step back from dissent, but must instead work harder
to oppose all kinds of injustice with massive public demonstrations and
civil disobedience.
In the wake of these attacks, it's even more important to have zero tolerance against racism. Racism is no friend of freedom.
Symbolic center of Western capitalism.
There were civilans there!
Since when has that stopped suicide bombers?
You need your head examined. The Katz article really wasn't insightful, to anyone with an IQ higher than Dubya's.
The parent post is a TROLL!!! Can't you see?
All of you who have replied to MxTxL - he was TROLLING. He was obviously being SARCASTIC. He was trying to make a point by taking the hawkish line to its obvious ridiculous conclusions, such as:
We may have to submit to cavity searches before too long.
Come on. This was a throwaway line (as if the DEA analogy didn't peg your bullshit meter already!)
And this:
Is the encryption export ban such a bad thing when stacked against 50,000 people's lives?
Everyone with a clue knows that an encryption export ban is FUCKING 100% USELESS!!
It was actually quite a high quality troll (and it fooled quite a few people) - if you read it with that in mind. :-)
I don't know about that. Katz is just a "columnist" (and I use that word in a very loose sense) paid to produce tripe regularly. Whether he actually believes what he writes is doubtful, and rather besides the point.
I was going to say it's a bit sickening to exploit such a horrific tragedy for petty journalistic gain, but I'm not really sure what Katz's motives are in posting this, so I'll leave it at that.
First type whereis libfoo to see if you have it. Then go to rpmfind.net and look for it. Failing that (exceedingly unlikely) look on google.
It's not that hard!
What counts as "force"?
A club bouncer keeping people out? How does libertarianism justify club bouncers physically removing pushy people?
Is smacking a child force? Is verbally abusing a child force? Is verbally abusing someone to the extent they commit suicide, force?
Is stalking force?
Is drugging someone into a coma and then unlawfully imprisoning them without food or water (hence killing) force? Why? There is in point of fact no physical force involved, but it's still murder.
Is drug-raping someone force? Why, when consensual sex can involve more "force" than drug-rape?
Is graffitti force? Is littering force? Is tearing down a poster force? Is putting up advertising on someone else's property force? Is trespass force? Is shooting at someone to get them off your property force?
Is pollution force? If I force you to breathe noxious fumes and you immediately die from them that's surely murder. But corporations get away with it by being separated in space and time, and being richer.
Is noise pollution force? You can kill someone with sound if it's loud enough. At what point does sound become force? Injury? Deafness? Bleeding ears? Death?
Is goatse.cx force? Is shoving a printout of goatse.cx in someone's face force? What about if it was a child you were showing it to? How horrifying does a picture have to be before it's outrageous to show it to a child?
What about scaring a child to death, or giving an old woman a fatal heart attack by pretending to be a ghost? Is that force?
Is fraud force?
Is education force?
Is libertarianism force? Is saying "Those protestors need to stop whining and get their heads out of their asses" force ? Is saying "You are a know nothing fuckwit" force? Yes. Yes yes yes it is.
Force is much, much more complicated than libertarians will admit. If they admitted it they'd have to renounce libertarianism.
Political ads probably lower ratings rather than raising them!
Paradox alert!
I love that kind of line. "XYZ is corrupt because they're socialists". I hear that sort of thing all the time. A brilliant example of assertion without evidence. Right up there with "You should obey God because the Bible says so". Bravo!
I am a socialist, and I can tell you, you are mistaken. The libertarian concept is to let the market work out the best price by itself, without govt intervention. "True" socialists believe that won't work, thus we need both govt intervention (in the short term) and democratic factories, offices, etc. (in the loooooooong term). You are thus on the socialist side of the fence on this particular issue. Sorry.
Hint: Just because you've had it pounded into your brain that socialism is somehow evil, doesn't make it true.