While most Muslims are not terrorists, a recent poll found that 57% of all Muslims in the Middle East would provide support and comfort to the terrorists among them. 68% supported bin Laden as a "man who can get things done as a strong leader". Only 26% approved of their policies of killing and suicide bombing. Interpolate those numbera as you like.
While most Christians are not terrorists, it's a good bet that most would provide support and comfort to American military personnel that have killed Iraqi civilians (remember that the current war in Iraq has killed over twice as many Iraqi civilians as 9/11 killed American civilians). Most of them support Bush as a "man who can get things done as a strong leader". A far smaller number support torturing prisoners and indiscriminate killing of Muslims.
If you really want to have your eyes opened to very moderate Islamic doctrine, do a google on the word kuffar/kuffir. A good portion of Islamic religion believes that all non-believers in Islam are in the same category, and are in need of being converted, killed, or have their rights ignored.
Well, I can't speak for the killed, but when it comes to nonbelievers needing to be converted, that's certainly standard practice for a number of Christian faiths. Some of them are quite active -- I've had Jehovah's Witnesses at my door a number of times.
Hitler declared war on the US after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yes, but declaring war on the United States was very different from ever invading it.
At that point in time, the United States had been feeding masses of war assistance to Germany's enemies for some time, and Hitler wanted free rein to sink US supply shipments.
That certainly does not mean that a German invasion of the United States was planned or even feasible.
The arguments presented on Freerepulic must have made quite an impression if the best you can come up with is a spelling flame.
Well...how can I put this?
The spelling errors were really a symptom that I was trying to use to explain what was going on than the actual problem with the site.
Basically, I wanted a place where people clearly and logically argued their point of view. I have a smaller number of conservative views than liberal views, but I still do take some conservative stances. I tend to oppose most drug legalization -- well, though I'm definitely wavering on marijuana now that I'm better aware of some of the politics and issues behind the legalization issues. I am a strong proponent of gun rights (though I have no interest in owning a gun myself). I feel that affirmative action and equal opportunity employment are bad ideas. I dislike Social Security. I don't think that we should destroy our entire nuclear arsenal. I'll even support racial profiling in some situations.
However, I can also sit down and support my dislike for these ideas in a straightforward, logical manner. I've considered all these views. When I'm really debating ideas, I'm not just throwing out emotional bluster.
The posts that I saw on freerepublic were frequently just people insulting others, working themselves up into an emotional frenzy, or overindulgence in hero worship. There was a very, *very* over-negative view towards people with liberal viewpoints, almost frightened.
I'd consider kuro5hin to be a fairly liberal forum, even though it's not solely dedicated to politics. Kuro5hin has its own share of the problems above, but it is not a dominating viewpoint, and there are insightful and educated people that make reasoned, convincing arguments. I didn't find that on the conservative sites I ran across. The most elaborate and knowledgeable conservative justifications I've found were often related to Christian dogma (where someone pointed out how the Bible supported doing a particular action or another). That's *not* what I'm looking for -- I want reasoned, justified conservative viewpoints supported by pragmatic viewpoints. I am quite sure that such people exist, as I know a few conservatives in real life that are quite capable of effectively debating their viewpoints.
I concede that using a "delta" measurement between Republican and non-Republican contributions may be a more accurate metric -- however, nobody appears to have produced such a summary, making this currently the most accurate list of Bush-supporting companies that I have available.
I googled a bit, and it seems that Germany tried to convince Mexico to invade at one point, but it wasn't all that practical -- kind of like convincing Japan to attack the US. It just wasn't all that feasible a long-term strategy.
Muslim moderates *ARE* obligated to take a stand against extremism. It is *NOT* acceptable to stand quietly while such unacceptable acts are commited. Just as I am obligated to take a stand against the actions of US soldiers (and to take a stand against US policy), Muslims are obligated to take a stand against murder.
I've seen *numerous* statements made by Islamic groups condemning September 11th. I believe even the Taliban condemned September 11th (though that didn't mean that they were willing to turn over bin Laden).
Just what exactly are you expecting? I mean, it's not as if Joe Smith, a Christian architect, can stop Christian extremists from killing abortion clinic workers any more than a random Islamic accountant working in Manhattan can stop a bunch of Islamic extremists from attacking targets that *they* hate.
They're about 600 years, developmentally, behind you guys.
They're right now in the "temper tantrum" stage. The Christians embarked on the Crusades at this point in their development.
Ah, you mean they invaded Middle Eastern nations with little justification, a good deal of religious and emotional influence, and a lot of money and politics involved?
Sounds absolutely barbaric.
I'm quite glad that all that is hundreds of years behind us.
But, don't let him show up at my any of my favorite bars around Ft. Bragg. Anyone who supports "religious edicts justifying suicide bombings" and invites people to "financially support the militant Palestinian organization Hamas" wouldn't last too long there.
What about the people who support Bush's invasion of Iraq? More than twice as many Iraqi civilians were killed in the invasion as US citizens were killed on September 11th.
And, well, that's not even Afghanistan. A lot of Afghani citizens died, yes...but at least there was the argument that Afghanistan had a government that wouldn't extradite a member of a group that funded people that were responsibile for killing a bunch of Americans.
In Iraq, there was no such excuse. We invaded and killed people, without cause or reason. Why are we not twice as culpable to the people of Iraq as al Quaeda is to the people of the United States?
Seriously. I got a bit curious a while back. I know that Republicans are strong among religious conservatives and major industry, and Democrats among skilled professionals and academics (the sort of people who are most commonly on the Internet). Possibly as a result, there are a fair number of liberal forums out there.
So, just out of curiosity, I decided to track down a couple of conservative forums. I was curious as to some conservative viewpoints on a couple things.
And I couldn't *find* any. Liberal forums are all over the place, but conservative forums are *damned* hard to find. Finally, I ran across freerepublic.com and took a look. Freerepublic was the *only* active conservative forum that I ran across, and it seemed to be quite small, incredibly amateurish, with rampant misspellings and grammatical errors, and boasted an absolute horde of *dumb* users. If people made the kind of logic errors they do on freerepublic on kuro5hin, they'd get immediately called out.
Despite the propaganda, only a tiny percentage of accidents are fully or even partially caused by speeding and the vast majority happen well within the speed limit.
I read here "Speed was a factor in 30 percent (12,477) of all traffic fatalities in 1998, second only to alcohol (39 percent) as a cause of fatal crashes."
You are correct -- intoxication is a factor in 39% of fatal crashes. High speed is a factor in "only" 30% of fatal accidents. Think of all those people, all of whom thought that they could handle the speed that they were travelling at...
Also, I'm not sure what in your links are intended to support your point. The only tidbit I could find in the first was that the fatality percentage in crashes on the Autobahn relative to fatalities in crashes on US Interstates is lower. If you read the rest of the page, you'll notice that the Autobahn is hardly representative of all the miles of the much larger US highway system. Read the Design section. It also isn't exactly a straightforward comparison due to the fact that a typical American car crash is going to involve heavier vehicles -- and even longer stopping distances.
I'm not at all sure what I'm supposed to read in the second link.
In addition, I have, as of right now, zero wrecks.
Of course, if you *did* kill yourself on a bridge at 85, there's also a good chance that you wouldn't be around saying "Speed *can* be fatal -- why I crashed going 85 and killed myself!"
I certainly do read about fatal car accidents where excessive speed is the major contributing factor, so it certainly *does* happen.
I also feel that people have a pretty strong tendency to misjudge their driving capabilities (nothing is more annoying than people that insist that they're definitely sober enough to drive when they definitely aren't).
Keep in mind two other facts: it only takes a single mistake to be fatal *and* that you may not be the person to pay the price for a bad call on your part -- if a pedestrian gets nailed by a speeding car (and I don't care how great a driver you are, a car going 85 has a *far* greater stopping distance than one at 35), you might go to jail or get fined, but they'll be, well, dead.
Traditionally, XFree86's backing store implementation has been so bad that using backing store actually slows things down if you're using a local machine.
Not sure whether the situation has improved -- I don't really want to deal with the increased memory requirements of backing store.
Those who are arrogant enough to believe that most Windows developers are jumped up VB programmers will write code that runs like shit on the Windows platform.
Most Windows developers *are* jumped up VB programmers.
Of course, most *IX developers are jumped up perl programmers.
It's not a reflection on Windows; it's just the way software development works.
I was once a *die hard* rxvt user. It's incredibly fast, uses less memory than anything else out there, has a good Motif-ish scrollbar (I'm not a tremendous fan of the xterm-style scrollbar).
But then Red Hat moved to Unicode, and rxvt doesn't do Unicode (which makes man pages and the like look messed up).
I use Fedora Core 2, the "latest and greatest" from Red Hat.
I also use sawfish, xterms, xemacs, and firefox as my main applications.
There's no real reason to use KDE or GNOME at *all*. (I guess technically sawfish is considered a GNOME project now, but it's not the full desktop environment.) Even if you have the latest and greatest hardware, GNOME/KDE provide a lower degree of functionality than more traditional *IX environments.
If this is RFID, it's eaasily jammable, as the RFID signal is quite weak.
As a matter of fact, I can't understand how these people are planning to read these things from 160 feet away. Maybe a directional antenna?
On the upside, perhaps these will soon be set up in an automated fashion at measured intervals in the United States. It will become impossible to speed over stretches of highway covered by these. Auto accidents still kill a tremendous number of people annually -- a lot more than "terrorists", whom we in the US have given up a lot more freedoms to combat (and spent more money on) than simply automated license plate reading.
Also on the upside, if readers are properly placed all over, it's easy to accurately identify speeders. People complain bitterly about inaccurate rader guns -- scanning plates 10mi apart won't penalize people that briefly exceed the speed limit (as rader guns might do), and will nab people that aren't driving safely.
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You know, #3 seems to be frequently exercised. :-)
While most Muslims are not terrorists, a recent poll found that 57% of all Muslims in the Middle East would provide support and comfort to the terrorists among them. 68% supported bin Laden as a "man who can get things done as a strong leader". Only 26% approved of their policies of killing and suicide bombing. Interpolate those numbera as you like.
While most Christians are not terrorists, it's a good bet that most would provide support and comfort to American military personnel that have killed Iraqi civilians (remember that the current war in Iraq has killed over twice as many Iraqi civilians as 9/11 killed American civilians). Most of them support Bush as a "man who can get things done as a strong leader". A far smaller number support torturing prisoners and indiscriminate killing of Muslims.
If you really want to have your eyes opened to very moderate Islamic doctrine, do a google on the word kuffar/kuffir. A good portion of Islamic religion believes that all non-believers in Islam are in the same category, and are in need of being converted, killed, or have their rights ignored.
Well, I can't speak for the killed, but when it comes to nonbelievers needing to be converted, that's certainly standard practice for a number of Christian faiths. Some of them are quite active -- I've had Jehovah's Witnesses at my door a number of times.
Hitler declared war on the US after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yes, but declaring war on the United States was very different from ever invading it.
At that point in time, the United States had been feeding masses of war assistance to Germany's enemies for some time, and Hitler wanted free rein to sink US supply shipments.
That certainly does not mean that a German invasion of the United States was planned or even feasible.
You likely need to have tax-funded academics to solve the public-good problem of funding research that does not provide short-term payoffs.
The arguments presented on Freerepulic must have made quite an impression if the best you can come up with is a spelling flame.
Well...how can I put this?
The spelling errors were really a symptom that I was trying to use to explain what was going on than the actual problem with the site.
Basically, I wanted a place where people clearly and logically argued their point of view. I have a smaller number of conservative views than liberal views, but I still do take some conservative stances. I tend to oppose most drug legalization -- well, though I'm definitely wavering on marijuana now that I'm better aware of some of the politics and issues behind the legalization issues. I am a strong proponent of gun rights (though I have no interest in owning a gun myself). I feel that affirmative action and equal opportunity employment are bad ideas. I dislike Social Security. I don't think that we should destroy our entire nuclear arsenal. I'll even support racial profiling in some situations.
However, I can also sit down and support my dislike for these ideas in a straightforward, logical manner. I've considered all these views. When I'm really debating ideas, I'm not just throwing out emotional bluster.
The posts that I saw on freerepublic were frequently just people insulting others, working themselves up into an emotional frenzy, or overindulgence in hero worship. There was a very, *very* over-negative view towards people with liberal viewpoints, almost frightened.
I'd consider kuro5hin to be a fairly liberal forum, even though it's not solely dedicated to politics. Kuro5hin has its own share of the problems above, but it is not a dominating viewpoint, and there are insightful and educated people that make reasoned, convincing arguments. I didn't find that on the conservative sites I ran across. The most elaborate and knowledgeable conservative justifications I've found were often related to Christian dogma (where someone pointed out how the Bible supported doing a particular action or another). That's *not* what I'm looking for -- I want reasoned, justified conservative viewpoints supported by pragmatic viewpoints. I am quite sure that such people exist, as I know a few conservatives in real life that are quite capable of effectively debating their viewpoints.
I found plenty of conservative websites; there weren't many active conservative forums.
A few people here have provided good links, and I thank them.
I concede that using a "delta" measurement between Republican and non-Republican contributions may be a more accurate metric -- however, nobody appears to have produced such a summary, making this currently the most accurate list of Bush-supporting companies that I have available.
The link appears to be registration-only. :-(
I googled a bit, and it seems that Germany tried to convince Mexico to invade at one point, but it wasn't all that practical -- kind of like convincing Japan to attack the US. It just wasn't all that feasible a long-term strategy.
You know, every now and then someone comes along and upsets my world view and makes me re-jiggle things until everything fits together again.
It's not very comfortable, but I suppose it's quite healthy to do so.
Thank you.
Muslim moderates *ARE* obligated to take a stand against extremism. It is *NOT* acceptable to stand quietly while such unacceptable acts are commited. Just as I am obligated to take a stand against the actions of US soldiers (and to take a stand against US policy), Muslims are obligated to take a stand against murder.
I've seen *numerous* statements made by Islamic groups condemning September 11th. I believe even the Taliban condemned September 11th (though that didn't mean that they were willing to turn over bin Laden).
Just what exactly are you expecting? I mean, it's not as if Joe Smith, a Christian architect, can stop Christian extremists from killing abortion clinic workers any more than a random Islamic accountant working in Manhattan can stop a bunch of Islamic extremists from attacking targets that *they* hate.
They're about 600 years, developmentally, behind you guys.
They're right now in the "temper tantrum" stage. The Christians embarked on the Crusades at this point in their development.
Ah, you mean they invaded Middle Eastern nations with little justification, a good deal of religious and emotional influence, and a lot of money and politics involved?
Sounds absolutely barbaric.
I'm quite glad that all that is hundreds of years behind us.
How, exactly, was the United States ever in danger from German invasion?
Hell, how do you even propose that Germany would have the troops required to occupy such a country, forgetting all the logistical issues involved?
But, don't let him show up at my any of my favorite bars around Ft. Bragg. Anyone who supports "religious edicts justifying suicide bombings" and invites people to "financially support the militant Palestinian organization Hamas" wouldn't last too long there.
What about the people who support Bush's invasion of Iraq? More than twice as many Iraqi civilians were killed in the invasion as US citizens were killed on September 11th.
And, well, that's not even Afghanistan. A lot of Afghani citizens died, yes...but at least there was the argument that Afghanistan had a government that wouldn't extradite a member of a group that funded people that were responsibile for killing a bunch of Americans.
In Iraq, there was no such excuse. We invaded and killed people, without cause or reason. Why are we not twice as culpable to the people of Iraq as al Quaeda is to the people of the United States?
Seriously. I got a bit curious a while back. I know that Republicans are strong among religious conservatives and major industry, and Democrats among skilled professionals and academics (the sort of people who are most commonly on the Internet). Possibly as a result, there are a fair number of liberal forums out there.
So, just out of curiosity, I decided to track down a couple of conservative forums. I was curious as to some conservative viewpoints on a couple things.
And I couldn't *find* any. Liberal forums are all over the place, but conservative forums are *damned* hard to find. Finally, I ran across freerepublic.com and took a look. Freerepublic was the *only* active conservative forum that I ran across, and it seemed to be quite small, incredibly amateurish, with rampant misspellings and grammatical errors, and boasted an absolute horde of *dumb* users. If people made the kind of logic errors they do on freerepublic on kuro5hin, they'd get immediately called out.
IIRC, US history isn't heavily taught until high school -- I believe I had mostly state history up until that point.
That was probably the poster's point.
I actually went to school with the guy and he didn't seem so bad. Just goes to show what assumptions will get ya.
What was wrong with said assumptions?
Despite the propaganda, only a tiny percentage of accidents are fully or even partially caused by speeding and the vast majority happen well within the speed limit.
Are you sure?
I read here "Speed was a factor in 30 percent (12,477) of all traffic fatalities in 1998, second only to alcohol (39 percent) as a cause of fatal crashes."
Google it.
I will.
You are correct -- intoxication is a factor in 39% of fatal crashes. High speed is a factor in "only" 30% of fatal accidents. Think of all those people, all of whom thought that they could handle the speed that they were travelling at...
Also, I'm not sure what in your links are intended to support your point. The only tidbit I could find in the first was that the fatality percentage in crashes on the Autobahn relative to fatalities in crashes on US Interstates is lower. If you read the rest of the page, you'll notice that the Autobahn is hardly representative of all the miles of the much larger US highway system. Read the Design section. It also isn't exactly a straightforward comparison due to the fact that a typical American car crash is going to involve heavier vehicles -- and even longer stopping distances.
I'm not at all sure what I'm supposed to read in the second link.
In addition, I have, as of right now, zero wrecks.
Of course, if you *did* kill yourself on a bridge at 85, there's also a good chance that you wouldn't be around saying "Speed *can* be fatal -- why I crashed going 85 and killed myself!"
I certainly do read about fatal car accidents where excessive speed is the major contributing factor, so it certainly *does* happen.
I also feel that people have a pretty strong tendency to misjudge their driving capabilities (nothing is more annoying than people that insist that they're definitely sober enough to drive when they definitely aren't).
Keep in mind two other facts: it only takes a single mistake to be fatal *and* that you may not be the person to pay the price for a bad call on your part -- if a pedestrian gets nailed by a speeding car (and I don't care how great a driver you are, a car going 85 has a *far* greater stopping distance than one at 35), you might go to jail or get fined, but they'll be, well, dead.
Traditionally, XFree86's backing store implementation has been so bad that using backing store actually slows things down if you're using a local machine.
Not sure whether the situation has improved -- I don't really want to deal with the increased memory requirements of backing store.
Those who are arrogant enough to believe that most Windows developers are jumped up VB programmers will write code that runs like shit on the Windows platform.
Most Windows developers *are* jumped up VB programmers.
Of course, most *IX developers are jumped up perl programmers.
It's not a reflection on Windows; it's just the way software development works.
I was once a *die hard* rxvt user. It's incredibly fast, uses less memory than anything else out there, has a good Motif-ish scrollbar (I'm not a tremendous fan of the xterm-style scrollbar).
But then Red Hat moved to Unicode, and rxvt doesn't do Unicode (which makes man pages and the like look messed up).
RIP, rxvt.
Why do that?
I use Fedora Core 2, the "latest and greatest" from Red Hat.
I also use sawfish, xterms, xemacs, and firefox as my main applications.
There's no real reason to use KDE or GNOME at *all*. (I guess technically sawfish is considered a GNOME project now, but it's not the full desktop environment.) Even if you have the latest and greatest hardware, GNOME/KDE provide a lower degree of functionality than more traditional *IX environments.
If this is RFID, it's eaasily jammable, as the RFID signal is quite weak.
As a matter of fact, I can't understand how these people are planning to read these things from 160 feet away. Maybe a directional antenna?
On the upside, perhaps these will soon be set up in an automated fashion at measured intervals in the United States. It will become impossible to speed over stretches of highway covered by these. Auto accidents still kill a tremendous number of people annually -- a lot more than "terrorists", whom we in the US have given up a lot more freedoms to combat (and spent more money on) than simply automated license plate reading.
Also on the upside, if readers are properly placed all over, it's easy to accurately identify speeders. People complain bitterly about inaccurate rader guns -- scanning plates 10mi apart won't penalize people that briefly exceed the speed limit (as rader guns might do), and will nab people that aren't driving safely.