and the ports system is designed to build software as root, one of the many reasons I avoid it.
So I am assuming you also avoid _installing_ as root, since otherwise you are still vulnerable to malicious install scripts.
Which makes me wonder... is there some logical way to install every piece of software with its own user name? Is that what the Solaris "wheel" group is about?
Hmm.. Let me take a shot at this. Add a user with the same name as the program. Add this user to the "programs" group.
" And if you're a sociologist doing online research of, for example, the impact of evolving internet connectivity in middle-eastern countries, you might want some encryption as well, to avoid that visit from your friendly local FBI agents. "
or else you'll make them even more suspicious and they will closely monitor all of your telephone calls, financial transactions, email correspondence and web traffic for the next few years....
Beliskner quoted from somewhere: "If everyone at school including the teachers hated me and sidelined me, if they made way for the jocks, bullied me, gave no homework to jocks, treated stupid jocks like they were Gods, and this happened every school day then maybe I'd get damn sick of it and also think about doing what happened in Columbine High school"
... enough to reply to this story in any meaningful way.
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 1
"Upon an interest rate rise, the effect is twofold - the repayments rise beyond the affordability of the majority of mortgageholders because it upsets the calculations they did at the low interest rate."
So what if IE 5.2 is out for the Macintoshes? C'mon guys - you're cool enough not to be using Microsoft Windows in the first place, so why not leave Internet Explorer behind where it belongs (on a niche proprietary operating system that caters to people who like to spend money when they don't have to)?
Re:I think it's harder for single people
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 1
The majority of people that immigrate to Canada then immigrate to the US, many Canadians are too stupid to notice this.
heh.. most Canadians are probably too easy-going to care. Except the ones at the border.. if you get past them it's because of their stupidity, and every other person in Canada is probably cheering you on anyway.
(Unless you're Arab, or a programmer, in which case why not just stay in Canada, where at least CSIS and other law enforcement does its job and keeps people safe, instead of "stopping all but one" in order to have a great excuse to go to war, restrict civil rights, and augment military presence in strategic portions of the Middle East)
btw.. i saw your epilogue under copy a floppy, and noticed that the article count at -1 was 666... how ominous - maybe your ideas of mass-extermination of specific portions of the human race will come to pass? Even better, maybe they will get moderated as 5 - informative.
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 1
Banks only offer fixed rate mortgages when the interest rate > 8%. Otherwise the Banks know they're gonna lose money when he interest rate inevitably rises.
Last time I checked, the banks didn't actually have to have all of the money they lend you. They can collect interest on several times the amount of money they actually have. Furthermore, the banks can use other people's money (which otherwise would sit unused in savings accounts) as a basis to lend still more money. Under a system like ours, the banks can actually fabricate that $300,000 you need for a house out of "thin air", and you will still have to pay the entire amount (plus interest compounded annually) back to them. For the banks, paper (or even better, electronic!) money is a wonderful thing.
Methinks they can still make some money at less than 8%...;-) As far as I can tell, the interest rate is basically a way for the governments to control how much people borrow from the banks, thereby controlling inflation (since lending is the primary way that banks create money) and economic growth (since people need access to money in order to do anything these days).
first of all, wow your post was long. clearly you have some kind of emotional attachment to seeing Islam brought down. some of the stuff you said was true, and some of it was false. for instance, what you said about almuhajiroun.com being worse than the kkk. i honestly went and looked at both sites, and i don't know what you're talking about.
for what it's worth the kkk mission is: "to build a nationwide grass roots movement of White Christian men, women, and children who support a return of White Christians to government." (the link is here) thus this organisation, which you claim to prefer, openly supports racism, and the desire to bring a certain race of people with a certain belief system into power, and presumeably remove anyone else who doesn't fit that description. but that was exactly what you seemed to dislike about islam, plus now you want to add racism.
so you have already contradicted yourself, which is a risk when you write messages that are too long.
some of your statements are true but misleading. for instance "their rhetoric is worse than Hitler's speeches" is true, but not because it's evil or calls for genocide (the way YOUR rhetoric does).. it is often spoken with heavy accents using arabic words which are totally incomprehensible to english speakers. it is absolutely horrible to listen to, unless you happen to know arabic . but people on slashdot are pretty much used to that, since we advocate using linux, whose command-line interfaces can be just as bewildering, but we say that the extra learning makes the experience so much richer and more productive. same thing - you gotta learn arabic to understand some of those words they use.
i also got the impression that you don't really think of multiculturalism in the same way as i do... my take on multiculturalism was that you actually have several cultures which are able to co-exist peacefully in tandem. that was the ideal which the ottoman empire aspired towards. you, on the other hand, seem to ascribe to the "melting pot" idea of multiculturalism, where what is really meant is that people are only welcome so long as they ascribe to the dominant culture (which, again, is one of the things you claim to dislike about islam). that's why you cheered the restaurant owner who insisted that his paying guest must eat pork if she wants to stay in the country - as if the only food in the UK is pork. or your earlier comments that you don't mind muslims as long as they would eat pork and drink beer like people from your favorite religions do.
as for that train thing, it is certainly possible. did you know that india and pakistan have been at war since forever? they absolutely can't stand each other. but that is completely unrelated to the following fact, which i will re-iterate since your rambling did not make it any less true: the terrorists are already dead. they died with their victims. you cannot hold an entire population accountable for the actions of a few crazy people. that would be an injustice, and an affront against the liberties of every innocent person who values freedom. nor is is possible to quench "terrorism" which was born of oppression by using more violence and oppression.
so it seems to me that your post is a mixed bag of true stuff, false stuff, misleading stuff, and an all-encompassing hypocracy which is so very apparent to anyone who reads your message and takes the time to understand it (all 10000 lines of it), that i almost didn't reply. but here you go, just in case you yourself did not notice that your post was not as brilliant as you self-congratulatorily thought.
So, when will we see 2.4.19? I thought that 2.4.19 was supposed to have been a shorter bake than 2.4.18, wasn't it?
Also, I'm curious.. is there a "safe" way to play with the development kernels, if you don't have the time to debug filesystems or recover from disasters? are the file-system bugs as bad as they sound, or do they only affect non-ext2/ext3 file systems? does anyone have any "tricks" that they'd like to share? are the 2.5 kernels going to support using GCC 3.1 for greater speed?
Good job, but I am still left with the impression that you are getting all your information from Google, and not really talking to people to see what they think in person. As someone who left Islam, I know from experience that I am not dead. That, despite the fact that I announced my departure to lots of people, including several Imams (heck, I even pointed to that same tradition of killing people who leave Islam to save them the effort of remembering it themselves).
Just like newspapers, various sources of Sharia (tradition) are granted varying levels of trust. And just like any quote you see in a newspaper, you have to remember that nothing is ever said without a context. Out of context, it probably won't make sense, and it probably would be misleading.
Perhaps you are not aware that there is a whole other side to America (or Canada) that is not such a shining beacon of equality. Do you know how many innocent afghani citizens were killed while "radicals" were purged? I'll bet you can give me exact figures for the number of Americans who were killed. Do you keep track of the human rights abuses that occur in the name of corporate America? Do you know about the history that created the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and other examples of "Islam" gone wrong?
And it would be pretty naive (given recent history) to believe that non-Americans in America are treated as equal to Americans. Do you know about all the arrests made with secret evidence? Do you really believe that black people receive the same justice as white people in America? Or that Women are really treated with the dignity they deserve in America? Institutionally and culturally, it just isn't there yet.
Just leave Google alone and actually go talk to people, and maybe you will learn that Google doesn't have all the answers. Live a little, and you might discover that even you are not capable of being perfect, even though everyone tries (Americans, Canadians, and Muslims included).
heh. interesting.. i'll just go tell my muslim friends and they'll go decapitate everyone they know who won't pay that exorbitant tax you mention. or do you think that perhaps your sources are flawed? just a thought.
hi ac, i'm sorry, since you seem to have written quite a lot and got yourself quite worked up about this, and my answer is simple..
the terrorists are dead. there is no black and white, and it is extremely difficult to determine if a person is "radical Islamist".
people are not robots, genders, races, or "sleepers". they are people, and they change over time. the mothers of people who committed terrorist acts thought their children were good natured. the children grew up, stuff happened, and they changed. they still looked the same, and had the same accents, and probably even dressed the same. like that christian guy who was responsible for some horrible terrorist act in the USA a while back. does he fit the "profile" of a terrorist?
this whole profile thing is a slippery slope anyway. what does a radical islamist look like? list the things this person does: he or she probably prays, probably says things like "insh'Allah" or "alHamdullilah" or "bismillah" or speaks arabic, if we are to follow your line of thought. that description probably fits most muslims who are not radical islamists as well!
but islam is not a race, it is an idea, so really the task would be to wipe the idea of islam off of the planet. Being someone who reads slashdot, you probably understand as well as the rest of us how fsking difficult *that* would be. paradoxically, we know, the harder you try to censor a book, the more people will obtain it and read it.
and your (hypothetical) beautiful daughter might decide that she believes in Islam and start wearing modest clothing and a headscarf. would that make her a terrorist? no. would she be flagged as one? probably, in your world.
or perhaps you are talking about killing only arabs. let's call a spade a spade, and suppose that you are in favour of genocide, Hitler style. "kill all arabs, they were no good anyway," perhaps you would say. if that describes you, then i really don't have anything in common with you, and i really hope that you don't come into power.
vkg wrote a bunch of insightful stuff, including: So unless one can find a form of Islam which is open enough to modernity to cope with a multivalent, diverse society and culture - to cope with other systems of belief like science and the remains of the other world religions - and not just to cope with them but to join with them in a spirit of brotherhood, I think that Islam is eventually going to be destroyed as a political and social force.
I think, but do not know for sure, that there are people who understand Islam well enough to revive it from the present dark ages. If I find such people, I would cautiously support them, but so far I have only found a few people who see Islam the way I see it, in a way which emphasizes the reasons rather than the rules, and who I would esteem to be capable of effectively building the infrastructure to bring success to Muslims.
In my opinion (as I mentioned in an earlier post) the problem is that Muslims require a capable leader who actually understands Islam and doesn't just "talk the talk and walk the walk". The Catholic church was not ready to solve the problems of statehood, and neither are the present "leaders" (puppets) of Islam.
It does not seem entirely appropriate however, at this stage in my life, for me to offhandedly dismiss the linking of church and state. The USA has done very well by separating church and state, but Islamic countries have also done well in the past using the model of "the church is the state" (eg. the Ottoman Empire).
I am not talking about the Taliban here, since AFAIK none of them had really undergone any kind of formal schooling about the reasons and context surrounding various aspects of Islam, and therefore had only superficial knowledge of the "rules", and perhaps not very much insight into the reasons, or the methods.
What I am talking about is a non-discriminating society based on a truly fair economic model, which by its very nature does not allow monopolies to form, but encourages and enables individuals to participate in a capitalist economy in a way that is fair to all parties concerned, and provides mechanisms to help the fiscally disadvantaged along the way. And which also completely does away with the need for positive rate interest, taxes, and paper (fiat) money.
That last sentence is a pretty good explanation for why there are powerful people who want Islam to fail miserably. Then people can say of Islam, as they now say of Socialism: "It was tried, and it just doesn't work."
vkg said: Islam, to my eye, seems to be in a similar decline, but still has massive power in government: the result is a religion in decline has turned into a culture in decline which is turning into many millions of people with little hope.
A people which aspires to practice Islam properly will always desire Islamic government and Islamic jurisprudence. For Muslims, and perhaps for others as well, this is a viable path to economic freedom in this world. Islam has well developed economic theories which do not require positive interest rate loans for consumption smoothing, and which do not allow individuals to leverage capital in the way that they can with majority stakeholder ownership in the stockmarkets of today's Western countries. It (correctly, in my opinion) denounces paper money as undermining the concept of ownership. Clearly defined ownership is a very central concept in Islamic economic theory. It is actually quite interesting, and if you want to read from someone who knows what he's talking about (such people seem to be quite rare, both within and without Islam), try googling for Umar Ibrahim Vadillo. (Someone mentioned him earlier in the comments for this article, and he is behind initiatives such as the Islamic Gold Dinar, since he is trying to re-establish fair trade based on stable currency.)
thales states: Your anti-american agenda has caused you to lose sight of the fact that nations as varried as India, The Philipines, Nigeria, and Russia among others, are also undergoing Terrorist attacks from Islamic radicals.
Actually, I don't really care that much. America, to me, is only as good as its constitution, which I admire greatly. However, I notice that Americans are adhering less and less to the principles which made America such a great country, to the spirit of the constitution. For example, I am talking about the way that America abandoned the gold standard in favour of legal tender currency. That decision was not consistent with the constitution which I admire, and has been a source of injustice both within America and in other countries. As another example, look at the way in which America is handling the issue of Copyrights. Once again, a good idea in its original intent, is gradually being turned against its purpose. Are Americans asleep? I am not against America, but I wish for America to be true to itself and just in its actions, and shine as a beacon of hope for others to aspire towards, rather than militarily enforcing its systems on other countries that aren't ready for them yet.
ac said: "Then I guess our only recourse to stop them is kill them before they kill us."
Won't work. I'm not even talking about reasoning here. It's just human nature... heck it's just nature. What happens when you back any animal into a corner? It fights back ferociously. It has nowhere to run, nothing to lose that it hasn't already lost. If you think about it, there's no choice but to fight. It's the same with the people that the USA is turning into terrorists. The actual people who committed the acts are already dead. The others are being forced to fight even though they might not want to.
vkg said: Nothing wrong with the religion, but somebody left a bunch of idiots in charge.
gotta agree with you there.. but it's more like this: nobody's in charge. there's no accountability, and nobody really knows anything. The Islam of today is a very confused and bewildered shadow of what it once was, and that's why so many Muslim children do silly things like run into enemy fire when there's no chance that they could inflict any damage. They have lost hope for this world, and just want to move as quickly as possible to the next. That is partly because of the current state of affairs in the world re: foreign policy, and I doubt it will get better with the latest "purgings." It is also partly because of protectionist policies that were implemented as a coping strategy against the Western media. Sortof like the protectionist policies that Bush seems to like playing with today.
BTWR exclaimed: So copying a friend's King's Quest 5 floppy is going go give you eternal damnation, but suicide bombings against civilians in Israel and New York City get you 41 virgins and eternal paradise?
Not that you probably care, since you're probably more interested in spreading disinformation, but anyway:
Slashdot Mirror
and the ports system is designed to build software as root, one of the many reasons I avoid it.
/usr/bin /usr/lib /usr/sbin
/usr/bin /usr/lib /usr/sbin
So I am assuming you also avoid _installing_ as root, since otherwise you are still vulnerable to malicious install scripts.
Which makes me wonder... is there some logical way to install every piece of software with its own user name? Is that what the Solaris "wheel" group is about?
Hmm.. Let me take a shot at this. Add a user with the same name as the program. Add this user to the "programs" group.
chmod 7751
chmod 7751
chmod 7751
chgrp programs
chgrp programs
chgrp programs
Install as the new user. Remove the shell for the new user. Right?
WWW.ULTRAEDIT.COM
" And if you're a sociologist doing online research of, for example, the impact of evolving internet connectivity in middle-eastern countries, you might want some encryption as well, to avoid that visit from your friendly local FBI agents. "
or else you'll make them even more suspicious and they will closely monitor all of your telephone calls, financial transactions, email correspondence and web traffic for the next few years....
Beliskner quoted from somewhere: "If everyone at school including the teachers hated me and sidelined me, if they made way for the jocks, bullied me, gave no homework to jocks, treated stupid jocks like they were Gods, and this happened every school day then maybe I'd get damn sick of it and also think about doing what happened in Columbine High school"
did you make that one up, or is that for real?
... enough to reply to this story in any meaningful way.
"Upon an interest rate rise, the effect is twofold - the repayments rise beyond the affordability of the majority of mortgageholders because it upsets the calculations they did at the low interest rate."
;-P
hey, you mentioned this before... bitter?
"Now of course if they make you buy it in the beginning with Windoze then we have some reason to complain."
;-)
Which, of course, they DO. Heck, IBM can't even sell their thinkpads with OS/2 without vindictiveness from Microsoft..
Maybe if they teamed up with Walmart they would have a chance...
So what if IE 5.2 is out for the Macintoshes? C'mon guys - you're cool enough not to be using Microsoft Windows in the first place, so why not leave Internet Explorer behind where it belongs (on a niche proprietary operating system that caters to people who like to spend money when they don't have to)?
The majority of people that immigrate to Canada then immigrate to the US, many Canadians are too stupid to notice this.
heh.. most Canadians are probably too easy-going to care. Except the ones at the border.. if you get past them it's because of their stupidity, and every other person in Canada is probably cheering you on anyway.
(Unless you're Arab, or a programmer, in which case why not just stay in Canada, where at least CSIS and other law enforcement does its job and keeps people safe, instead of "stopping all but one" in order to have a great excuse to go to war, restrict civil rights, and augment military presence in strategic portions of the Middle East)
btw.. i saw your epilogue under copy a floppy, and noticed that the article count at -1 was 666... how ominous - maybe your ideas of mass-extermination of specific portions of the human race will come to pass? Even better, maybe they will get moderated as 5 - informative.
Banks only offer fixed rate mortgages when the interest rate > 8%. Otherwise the Banks know they're gonna lose money when he interest rate inevitably rises.
... ;-) As far as I can tell, the interest rate is basically a way for the governments to control how much people borrow from the banks, thereby controlling inflation (since lending is the primary way that banks create money) and economic growth (since people need access to money in order to do anything these days).
Last time I checked, the banks didn't actually have to have all of the money they lend you. They can collect interest on several times the amount of money they actually have. Furthermore, the banks can use other people's money (which otherwise would sit unused in savings accounts) as a basis to lend still more money. Under a system like ours, the banks can actually fabricate that $300,000 you need for a house out of "thin air", and you will still have to pay the entire amount (plus interest compounded annually) back to them. For the banks, paper (or even better, electronic!) money is a wonderful thing.
Methinks they can still make some money at less than 8%
Cheers,
Beliskner records in his log of overgeneralizations: All religions speak of an entity called God
except, apparently, the religions which talk about several gods, whose first language is not English, and/or which do not require any diety at all.
cool, but check your root email ASAP cheers.
first of all, wow your post was long. clearly you have some kind of emotional attachment to seeing Islam brought down. some of the stuff you said was true, and some of it was false. for instance, what you said about almuhajiroun.com being worse than the kkk. i honestly went and looked at both sites, and i don't know what you're talking about.
for what it's worth the kkk mission is: "to build a nationwide grass roots movement of White Christian men, women, and children who support a return of White Christians to government." (the link is here) thus this organisation, which you claim to prefer, openly supports racism, and the desire to bring a certain race of people with a certain belief system into power, and presumeably remove anyone else who doesn't fit that description. but that was exactly what you seemed to dislike about islam, plus now you want to add racism.
so you have already contradicted yourself, which is a risk when you write messages that are too long.
some of your statements are true but misleading. for instance "their rhetoric is worse than Hitler's speeches" is true, but not because it's evil or calls for genocide (the way YOUR rhetoric does).. it is often spoken with heavy accents using arabic words which are totally incomprehensible to english speakers. it is absolutely horrible to listen to, unless you happen to know arabic . but people on slashdot are pretty much used to that, since we advocate using linux, whose command-line interfaces can be just as bewildering, but we say that the extra learning makes the experience so much richer and more productive. same thing - you gotta learn arabic to understand some of those words they use.
i also got the impression that you don't really think of multiculturalism in the same way as i do... my take on multiculturalism was that you actually have several cultures which are able to co-exist peacefully in tandem. that was the ideal which the ottoman empire aspired towards. you, on the other hand, seem to ascribe to the "melting pot" idea of multiculturalism, where what is really meant is that people are only welcome so long as they ascribe to the dominant culture (which, again, is one of the things you claim to dislike about islam). that's why you cheered the restaurant owner who insisted that his paying guest must eat pork if she wants to stay in the country - as if the only food in the UK is pork. or your earlier comments that you don't mind muslims as long as they would eat pork and drink beer like people from your favorite religions do.
as for that train thing, it is certainly possible. did you know that india and pakistan have been at war since forever? they absolutely can't stand each other. but that is completely unrelated to the following fact, which i will re-iterate since your rambling did not make it any less true: the terrorists are already dead. they died with their victims. you cannot hold an entire population accountable for the actions of a few crazy people. that would be an injustice, and an affront against the liberties of every innocent person who values freedom. nor is is possible to quench "terrorism" which was born of oppression by using more violence and oppression.
so it seems to me that your post is a mixed bag of true stuff, false stuff, misleading stuff, and an all-encompassing hypocracy which is so very apparent to anyone who reads your message and takes the time to understand it (all 10000 lines of it), that i almost didn't reply. but here you go, just in case you yourself did not notice that your post was not as brilliant as you self-congratulatorily thought.
So, when will we see 2.4.19? I thought that 2.4.19 was supposed to have been a shorter bake than 2.4.18, wasn't it?
Also, I'm curious.. is there a "safe" way to play with the development kernels, if you don't have the time to debug filesystems or recover from disasters? are the file-system bugs as bad as they sound, or do they only affect non-ext2/ext3 file systems? does anyone have any "tricks" that they'd like to share? are the 2.5 kernels going to support using GCC 3.1 for greater speed?
Good job, but I am still left with the impression that you are getting all your information from Google, and not really talking to people to see what they think in person. As someone who left Islam, I know from experience that I am not dead. That, despite the fact that I announced my departure to lots of people, including several Imams (heck, I even pointed to that same tradition of killing people who leave Islam to save them the effort of remembering it themselves).
Just like newspapers, various sources of Sharia (tradition) are granted varying levels of trust. And just like any quote you see in a newspaper, you have to remember that nothing is ever said without a context. Out of context, it probably won't make sense, and it probably would be misleading.
Perhaps you are not aware that there is a whole other side to America (or Canada) that is not such a shining beacon of equality. Do you know how many innocent afghani citizens were killed while "radicals" were purged? I'll bet you can give me exact figures for the number of Americans who were killed. Do you keep track of the human rights abuses that occur in the name of corporate America? Do you know about the history that created the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and other examples of "Islam" gone wrong?
And it would be pretty naive (given recent history) to believe that non-Americans in America are treated as equal to Americans. Do you know about all the arrests made with secret evidence? Do you really believe that black people receive the same justice as white people in America? Or that Women are really treated with the dignity they deserve in America? Institutionally and culturally, it just isn't there yet.
Just leave Google alone and actually go talk to people, and maybe you will learn that Google doesn't have all the answers. Live a little, and you might discover that even you are not capable of being perfect, even though everyone tries (Americans, Canadians, and Muslims included).
Beliskner said: Does anybody have a comprehensive list of what's wrong with US Foreign Policy
google found this link. cheers.
heh. interesting.. i'll just go tell my muslim friends and they'll go decapitate everyone they know who won't pay that exorbitant tax you mention. or do you think that perhaps your sources are flawed? just a thought.
hi ac, i'm sorry, since you seem to have written quite a lot and got yourself quite worked up about this, and my answer is simple..
the terrorists are dead. there is no black and white, and it is extremely difficult to determine if a person is "radical Islamist".
people are not robots, genders, races, or "sleepers". they are people, and they change over time. the mothers of people who committed terrorist acts thought their children were good natured. the children grew up, stuff happened, and they changed. they still looked the same, and had the same accents, and probably even dressed the same. like that christian guy who was responsible for some horrible terrorist act in the USA a while back. does he fit the "profile" of a terrorist?
this whole profile thing is a slippery slope anyway. what does a radical islamist look like? list the things this person does: he or she probably prays, probably says things like "insh'Allah" or "alHamdullilah" or "bismillah" or speaks arabic, if we are to follow your line of thought. that description probably fits most muslims who are not radical islamists as well!
but islam is not a race, it is an idea, so really the task would be to wipe the idea of islam off of the planet. Being someone who reads slashdot, you probably understand as well as the rest of us how fsking difficult *that* would be. paradoxically, we know, the harder you try to censor a book, the more people will obtain it and read it.
and your (hypothetical) beautiful daughter might decide that she believes in Islam and start wearing modest clothing and a headscarf. would that make her a terrorist? no. would she be flagged as one? probably, in your world.
or perhaps you are talking about killing only arabs. let's call a spade a spade, and suppose that you are in favour of genocide, Hitler style. "kill all arabs, they were no good anyway," perhaps you would say. if that describes you, then i really don't have anything in common with you, and i really hope that you don't come into power.
vkg wrote a bunch of insightful stuff, including: So unless one can find a form of Islam which is open enough to modernity to cope with a multivalent, diverse society and culture - to cope with other systems of belief like science and the remains of the other world religions - and not just to cope with them but to join with them in a spirit of brotherhood, I think that Islam is eventually going to be destroyed as a political and social force.
I think, but do not know for sure, that there are people who understand Islam well enough to revive it from the present dark ages. If I find such people, I would cautiously support them, but so far I have only found a few people who see Islam the way I see it, in a way which emphasizes the reasons rather than the rules, and who I would esteem to be capable of effectively building the infrastructure to bring success to Muslims.
In my opinion (as I mentioned in an earlier post) the problem is that Muslims require a capable leader who actually understands Islam and doesn't just "talk the talk and walk the walk". The Catholic church was not ready to solve the problems of statehood, and neither are the present "leaders" (puppets) of Islam.
It does not seem entirely appropriate however, at this stage in my life, for me to offhandedly dismiss the linking of church and state. The USA has done very well by separating church and state, but Islamic countries have also done well in the past using the model of "the church is the state" (eg. the Ottoman Empire).
I am not talking about the Taliban here, since AFAIK none of them had really undergone any kind of formal schooling about the reasons and context surrounding various aspects of Islam, and therefore had only superficial knowledge of the "rules", and perhaps not very much insight into the reasons, or the methods.
What I am talking about is a non-discriminating society based on a truly fair economic model, which by its very nature does not allow monopolies to form, but encourages and enables individuals to participate in a capitalist economy in a way that is fair to all parties concerned, and provides mechanisms to help the fiscally disadvantaged along the way. And which also completely does away with the need for positive rate interest, taxes, and paper (fiat) money.
That last sentence is a pretty good explanation for why there are powerful people who want Islam to fail miserably. Then people can say of Islam, as they now say of Socialism: "It was tried, and it just doesn't work."
vkg said: Islam, to my eye, seems to be in a similar decline, but still has massive power in government: the result is a religion in decline has turned into a culture in decline which is turning into many millions of people with little hope.
A people which aspires to practice Islam properly will always desire Islamic government and Islamic jurisprudence. For Muslims, and perhaps for others as well, this is a viable path to economic freedom in this world. Islam has well developed economic theories which do not require positive interest rate loans for consumption smoothing, and which do not allow individuals to leverage capital in the way that they can with majority stakeholder ownership in the stockmarkets of today's Western countries. It (correctly, in my opinion) denounces paper money as undermining the concept of ownership. Clearly defined ownership is a very central concept in Islamic economic theory. It is actually quite interesting, and if you want to read from someone who knows what he's talking about (such people seem to be quite rare, both within and without Islam), try googling for Umar Ibrahim Vadillo. (Someone mentioned him earlier in the comments for this article, and he is behind initiatives such as the Islamic Gold Dinar, since he is trying to re-establish fair trade based on stable currency.)
thales states: Your anti-american agenda has caused you to lose sight of the fact that nations as varried as India, The Philipines, Nigeria, and Russia among others, are also undergoing Terrorist attacks from Islamic radicals.
Actually, I don't really care that much. America, to me, is only as good as its constitution, which I admire greatly. However, I notice that Americans are adhering less and less to the principles which made America such a great country, to the spirit of the constitution. For example, I am talking about the way that America abandoned the gold standard in favour of legal tender currency. That decision was not consistent with the constitution which I admire, and has been a source of injustice both within America and in other countries. As another example, look at the way in which America is handling the issue of Copyrights. Once again, a good idea in its original intent, is gradually being turned against its purpose. Are Americans asleep? I am not against America, but I wish for America to be true to itself and just in its actions, and shine as a beacon of hope for others to aspire towards, rather than militarily enforcing its systems on other countries that aren't ready for them yet.
ac said: "Then I guess our only recourse to stop them is kill them before they kill us."
Won't work. I'm not even talking about reasoning here. It's just human nature... heck it's just nature. What happens when you back any animal into a corner? It fights back ferociously. It has nowhere to run, nothing to lose that it hasn't already lost. If you think about it, there's no choice but to fight. It's the same with the people that the USA is turning into terrorists. The actual people who committed the acts are already dead. The others are being forced to fight even though they might not want to.
vkg said: Nothing wrong with the religion, but somebody left a bunch of idiots in charge.
gotta agree with you there.. but it's more like this: nobody's in charge. there's no accountability, and nobody really knows anything. The Islam of today is a very confused and bewildered shadow of what it once was, and that's why so many Muslim children do silly things like run into enemy fire when there's no chance that they could inflict any damage. They have lost hope for this world, and just want to move as quickly as possible to the next. That is partly because of the current state of affairs in the world re: foreign policy, and I doubt it will get better with the latest "purgings." It is also partly because of protectionist policies that were implemented as a coping strategy against the Western media. Sortof like the protectionist policies that Bush seems to like playing with today.
nice try ac, i'm not interested today
BTWR exclaimed: So copying a friend's King's Quest 5 floppy is going go give you eternal damnation, but suicide bombings against civilians in Israel and New York City get you 41 virgins and eternal paradise?
Not that you probably care, since you're probably more interested in spreading disinformation, but anyway:
Suicide bombings against civilians is a sure path to Hell.