Yeah, blame it on the "mindless drones" instead of all the corporate lackeys working hard to deceive said mindless drones.
In this case, what if one of these drones hears a rumor that Bush Sr. really didn't think we should invade Iraq? Maybe he sees one of those old pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam? Someone tells him Time Magazine published a piece that confirms this evil rumor. He goes to Time's website, sees that the article doesn't exist, and realizes that once again, the liberal media are fomenting vicious propaganda against Our Beloved Leader.
Maybe there's some perfectly innocent reason why Time pulled the article from the website. If so, I'd like to hear that reason.
Suggesting that some people have too much and others have too little is essentially communism.
No, it's reality. Communism is suggesting that because some have too much and some have too little, the state should steal from the former and give to the latter.
The thing that you need to grasp is that those who have too little can get their hands on guns or other weapons and make their displeasure evident, in the form of killing those who have too much. Therefore, it is in the self-interest of those who have too much to figure out how to help everyone get enough. It's called self-preservation, not philanthropy. A starving man with a gun is a scary thing.
Isn't the solution to this problem to take away the gatekeeper powers of doctors, so that patients could independently obtain medications?
I can already hear the howls of outrage. But consider. You can work on your own car, even though incompetent mechanics can fix cars in ways that can end up killing you and your family. But you aren't allowed to work on your own body, using whatever tools you can afford.
Doctors have become priests in the temple of medicine, and their prerogatives have become sacred and inviolate.
If you really think Bush is doing "a great job" you should read Molly Ivins' new book, Bushwhacked.
As Ivins says, if you'd read her previous book, Shrub, she wouldn't have had to write another book about the guy. In other words, if everyone in America knew what a terrible job Bush did as governor of Texas, we'd have been a lot warier about electing him President.
It's one thing to hear on CNN "Two soldiers died today in Fallujah."
It's a completely different thing to see the crying families when their loved ones return in a box. Haven't you wondered why there have been so few interviews with surviving family members, in the national media?
This transparent attempt to spin the consequences of the war is only one of the many reasons I've lost all respect for the Bush administration, but it's one of the most cowardly and contemptible things they have done.
I'm pretty sure that when your child is killed, the last thing you're going to worry about is whether or not the rest of America gets to see your child's casket being unloaded from the cargo plane. If it were my dead child, I'd damn sure want the rest of my fellow Americans to see what Bush's nifty little war had cost me.
Hey, if hippie-wannabes piss you off more then rigged elections, may I suggest you move immediately to someplace more in accord with your philosophy? Red China, maybe? Hardly any hippie-wannabes and plenty of rigged elections.
It's a win-win deal. You'll be happier, and the rest of us, who worry more about who's going to lead us than who has a politically incorrect haircut, will be happier without you.
Unlimited freedom without repsonsibility is equivalent to anarchy.
Since none of us possess "unlimited freedom," or ever will, this is a completely irrelevant observation.
I leave the hardest issue for the reader, how do we encourage those who threaten our freedoms with their irresponsible behaviours to behave responsibly?
"Irresponsible behaviors" do not threaten freedom. "Irresponsible behaviors" is nanny-state code for "That guy over there is doing something with his freedom that annoys me, so make him stop." It's folks who value freedom so little that they would give it away to avoid annoyance who are the real threat to freedom. Just as those who are eager to give away our freedom in exchange for the illusion of safety are more of a threat to our freedom than any terrorist could ever be.
The cure for these problems is learning to take care of your own business. Spam, for example, is only a problem for those who refuse to deal with it themselves. End-user filters are infinitely preferable to tight government regulation of the net.
It just happens to be the case that right now you see many more killings by Palestinian terrorists than by Israeli terrorists. This is probably because Israel is in political control of the region right now.
I think this is only true if you consider the killings of Palestinians by the Israeli military to be non-terrorist in nature. This distinction may not make a lot of difference to the dead Palestinians, who have died in much larger numbers than Israelis have.
Here's what I worry about. If the Shrub wins re-election (he's surely got another pointless war up his sleeve) then Brother Jeb wants his turn on the throne. Can America-as-we-know-it survive 16 years of Bushness?
...HOWEVER the second they start to organize a possible attack (like its members do) then its not free speech anymore.
In America, the authorities are supposed to prove such allegations before punishing the perpetrators. This is admittedly inefficient, since it's pretty much impossible to do this "the second they start," but our system of law has worked pretty well for 200 years. Folks who don't like it ought to consider moving to a country where the state gets rid of dissidents before they can cause any trouble, like the Peoples Republic.
Myself, I don't find that sort of efficiency admirable.
A couple weeks back, Terry Gross interviewed Coscarelli on Fresh Air. Lotta stuff about Bubba Hotep, and a lot of fascinating stuff about the technical aspects of making Phantasm on a very low budget. There's a segment on the sound effects of the skull driller. I'm not advocating any illegal copyright infringement, but that sound effect would make an excellent component of an answering machine message.
As they were engaged in clandestine acts of espionage and sabotage, they were not covered under the Geneva convention, and were not Prisoners of War, so it was perfectly legal to try and execute them.
The detainees at Guantanamo are not being tried. The problem is that these people are in a legal limbo. If they committed crimes, try them and punish them. But we have no way of knowing what these people are even accused of doing.
To believe that our government would not detain innocent people is to be naive to the point of absurdity.
The point here is that locking people up indefinitely, with no right to face their accusers and defend themselves, is unAmerican, and should be deeply offensive to every real American. We should all resent the erosion of America's reputation as the world's greatest bastion of liberty and justice. If we lose that, we've lost something a whole lot more important than anything the terrorists can take from us.
Actually, Evil will triumph over Good, because Good only makes its songs available to folks with broadband connections. Those of us still in the dial-up Stone Age can't play the sample songs.
Dude, I'm a conservative liberal gun-toting hippie who thinks that systematic crimes against humanity are a Bad Thing. Where did you get these strange ideas about Amnesty International? Amnesty International supports your views re segregation. Amnesty International certainly does not support the status quo if that status quo involves the systematic and egregious brutalization of people.
You seem to know absolutely nothing about the organization. Maybe you think it's criticized certain sacred cows who inhabit your pasture, but you're probably wrong about that. I think you must have AI confused with some other organization. But if you check out the organization, you'll find that it is against all manner of barbaric practices, not just the ones you happen to think are okay. You really have to stop getting all your news from Fox.
If you can't bring yourself to do anything else, at least read their front page. On it you'll find criticism of many governments.
Look at the page! They complain about Israel, Russia, Congo, Liberia, Serbia, Brazil, Vietnam, and many others. They even criticize Canada, for heaven's sake. And it has absolutely nothing to do with some nefarious plan to "segregrate the world by sex and religion." Where the hell did that come from? Check out the site. They want Mexico to do something about all the women who've been murdered in Juarez in late years. They're concerned about 100 pro-democracy organizers in Myanmar who've disappeared recently, many of them into unmarked graves, no doubt. They want the prisons in Afghanistan to be rebuilt-- the prisons are in such bad shape that violent prisoners can't be kept in custody, which is contributing to the current Afghan lawlessness. Some of those bandits are perfectly willing to kill U.S. soldiers. You're really against this? Really? You and all the Young Republicans who've weighed in on this issue are speaking from embarassing ignorance.
Unless you find the torture and murder of political prisoners to be acceptable, then you ought to get behind Amnesty International, at least to the extent of not spouting nonsense about them in a public forum.
You know, what I really think this all reflects is the appalling inflexibility of both the liberal and conservative mind. Conservatives dislike AI because it attracts so many liberals. And some liberals dislike AI because it takes a principled stand against brutal reprisals, even against folks liberals think deserve brutalization, such as certain deposed fascist dictators and their storm troopers.
You would think, if there were any rationality in the world, that all decent people could agree that torture was generally a Bad Thing, and making an effort to stop it a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, blame it on the "mindless drones" instead of all the corporate lackeys working hard to deceive said mindless drones.
In this case, what if one of these drones hears a rumor that Bush Sr. really didn't think we should invade Iraq? Maybe he sees one of those old pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam? Someone tells him Time Magazine published a piece that confirms this evil rumor. He goes to Time's website, sees that the article doesn't exist, and realizes that once again, the liberal media are fomenting vicious propaganda against Our Beloved Leader.
Maybe there's some perfectly innocent reason why Time pulled the article from the website. If so, I'd like to hear that reason.
I wonder what we could do on the moon with 87 billion dollars.
Wait, we're going to spend that on democracy for the Iraqis.
You wouldn't really need to store power, once you had a grid that reached around the moon. No doubt this would be a long term goal.
No, it's reality. Communism is suggesting that because some have too much and some have too little, the state should steal from the former and give to the latter.
The thing that you need to grasp is that those who have too little can get their hands on guns or other weapons and make their displeasure evident, in the form of killing those who have too much. Therefore, it is in the self-interest of those who have too much to figure out how to help everyone get enough. It's called self-preservation, not philanthropy. A starving man with a gun is a scary thing.
Isn't the solution to this problem to take away the gatekeeper powers of doctors, so that patients could independently obtain medications?
I can already hear the howls of outrage. But consider. You can work on your own car, even though incompetent mechanics can fix cars in ways that can end up killing you and your family. But you aren't allowed to work on your own body, using whatever tools you can afford.
Doctors have become priests in the temple of medicine, and their prerogatives have become sacred and inviolate.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Yeah, you're right. I hate it when people call my sister a moron just because she's a crack whore.
Give me a break. Anyone who watches Fox News for anything but scary giggles is a moron. Happy Halloween!
If you really think Bush is doing "a great job" you should read Molly Ivins' new book, Bushwhacked.
As Ivins says, if you'd read her previous book, Shrub, she wouldn't have had to write another book about the guy. In other words, if everyone in America knew what a terrible job Bush did as governor of Texas, we'd have been a lot warier about electing him President.
My father's a priest, and I find your advocacy of his disembowellment loathsome in the extreme.
I thought priests were supposed to be celibate.
You don't know much about PR, do you?
It's one thing to hear on CNN "Two soldiers died today in Fallujah."
It's a completely different thing to see the crying families when their loved ones return in a box. Haven't you wondered why there have been so few interviews with surviving family members, in the national media?
This transparent attempt to spin the consequences of the war is only one of the many reasons I've lost all respect for the Bush administration, but it's one of the most cowardly and contemptible things they have done.
I'm pretty sure that when your child is killed, the last thing you're going to worry about is whether or not the rest of America gets to see your child's casket being unloaded from the cargo plane. If it were my dead child, I'd damn sure want the rest of my fellow Americans to see what Bush's nifty little war had cost me.
Read Molly Ivins book, _Bushwhacked_.
Warning: If you're a Bush fan, be prepared for horror and disbelief.
Hey, if hippie-wannabes piss you off more then rigged elections, may I suggest you move immediately to someplace more in accord with your philosophy? Red China, maybe? Hardly any hippie-wannabes and plenty of rigged elections.
It's a win-win deal. You'll be happier, and the rest of us, who worry more about who's going to lead us than who has a politically incorrect haircut, will be happier without you.
And yours is a fantastic example of a completely non-responsive post. You fail to offer even the pretense of a counter-argument.
I congratulate you!
Since none of us possess "unlimited freedom," or ever will, this is a completely irrelevant observation.
I leave the hardest issue for the reader, how do we encourage those who threaten our freedoms with their irresponsible behaviours to behave responsibly?
"Irresponsible behaviors" do not threaten freedom. "Irresponsible behaviors" is nanny-state code for "That guy over there is doing something with his freedom that annoys me, so make him stop." It's folks who value freedom so little that they would give it away to avoid annoyance who are the real threat to freedom. Just as those who are eager to give away our freedom in exchange for the illusion of safety are more of a threat to our freedom than any terrorist could ever be.
The cure for these problems is learning to take care of your own business. Spam, for example, is only a problem for those who refuse to deal with it themselves. End-user filters are infinitely preferable to tight government regulation of the net.
I'd heard that allegation. I hadn't heard that Kach had been convicted, in any court, of conspiracy in that case. Is this your claim?
I think this is only true if you consider the killings of Palestinians by the Israeli military to be non-terrorist in nature. This distinction may not make a lot of difference to the dead Palestinians, who have died in much larger numbers than Israelis have.
Aren't we all?
Here's what I worry about. If the Shrub wins re-election (he's surely got another pointless war up his sleeve) then Brother Jeb wants his turn on the throne. Can America-as-we-know-it survive 16 years of Bushness?
"Time is the only true purgatory."
Samuel Butler
In America, the authorities are supposed to prove such allegations before punishing the perpetrators. This is admittedly inefficient, since it's pretty much impossible to do this "the second they start," but our system of law has worked pretty well for 200 years. Folks who don't like it ought to consider moving to a country where the state gets rid of dissidents before they can cause any trouble, like the Peoples Republic.
Myself, I don't find that sort of efficiency admirable.
A couple weeks back, Terry Gross interviewed Coscarelli on Fresh Air. Lotta stuff about Bubba Hotep, and a lot of fascinating stuff about the technical aspects of making Phantasm on a very low budget. There's a segment on the sound effects of the skull driller. I'm not advocating any illegal copyright infringement, but that sound effect would make an excellent component of an answering machine message.
The detainees at Guantanamo are not being tried. The problem is that these people are in a legal limbo. If they committed crimes, try them and punish them. But we have no way of knowing what these people are even accused of doing.
To believe that our government would not detain innocent people is to be naive to the point of absurdity.
The point here is that locking people up indefinitely, with no right to face their accusers and defend themselves, is unAmerican, and should be deeply offensive to every real American. We should all resent the erosion of America's reputation as the world's greatest bastion of liberty and justice. If we lose that, we've lost something a whole lot more important than anything the terrorists can take from us.
What the hell are "ass titties?"
You must be one of those business types who think that if they're losing money on each sale, they can always make it up in volume.
Actually, Evil will triumph over Good, because Good only makes its songs available to folks with broadband connections. Those of us still in the dial-up Stone Age can't play the sample songs.
Dude, I'm a conservative liberal gun-toting hippie who thinks that systematic crimes against humanity are a Bad Thing. Where did you get these strange ideas about Amnesty International? Amnesty International supports your views re segregation. Amnesty International certainly does not support the status quo if that status quo involves the systematic and egregious brutalization of people.
You seem to know absolutely nothing about the organization. Maybe you think it's criticized certain sacred cows who inhabit your pasture, but you're probably wrong about that. I think you must have AI confused with some other organization. But if you check out the organization, you'll find that it is against all manner of barbaric practices, not just the ones you happen to think are okay. You really have to stop getting all your news from Fox.
If you can't bring yourself to do anything else, at least read their front page. On it you'll find criticism of many governments.
Look at the page! They complain about Israel, Russia, Congo, Liberia, Serbia, Brazil, Vietnam, and many others. They even criticize Canada, for heaven's sake. And it has absolutely nothing to do with some nefarious plan to "segregrate the world by sex and religion." Where the hell did that come from? Check out the site. They want Mexico to do something about all the women who've been murdered in Juarez in late years. They're concerned about 100 pro-democracy organizers in Myanmar who've disappeared recently, many of them into unmarked graves, no doubt. They want the prisons in Afghanistan to be rebuilt-- the prisons are in such bad shape that violent prisoners can't be kept in custody, which is contributing to the current Afghan lawlessness. Some of those bandits are perfectly willing to kill U.S. soldiers. You're really against this? Really? You and all the Young Republicans who've weighed in on this issue are speaking from embarassing ignorance.
Unless you find the torture and murder of political prisoners to be acceptable, then you ought to get behind Amnesty International, at least to the extent of not spouting nonsense about them in a public forum.
You know, what I really think this all reflects is the appalling inflexibility of both the liberal and conservative mind. Conservatives dislike AI because it attracts so many liberals. And some liberals dislike AI because it takes a principled stand against brutal reprisals, even against folks liberals think deserve brutalization, such as certain deposed fascist dictators and their storm troopers.
You would think, if there were any rationality in the world, that all decent people could agree that torture was generally a Bad Thing, and making an effort to stop it a Good Thing.
But apparently not.
So tell me this. What kind of a nutbar bases his opinion of an entire international organization on the basis of one unpleasant individual's actions?
Where's the logic? The murderer whose execution you were celebrating was male. Does that mean that all men are murdering animals? Why not?
You might want to entertain the notion that judging a large group of people by the actions of one is pretty much the definition of brainless bigotry.
No wonder the world is so screwed up.