The truth about ourselves is always hardest to see.
Looks like there's a lot of active resistance to it here today/tonight.
And as far as that other discussion goes, don't forget to include the natural end of empire, the desperate mid-life crisis of an aging nation, and after thousands of years of leaving Mesopotamia the ouroboros finally coming back to swallow its tail - in other words, collective awakening and consciousness.
I'm sorry, but if your actions repeatedly lead to the killing of civilians then you are responsible for them. Beyond a certain point, intent becomes irrelevant.
Thank you.
Murder is murder.
The justifications here and elsewhere are like committing second-degree murder but trying to argue that because it wasn't first-degree murder that one is innocent.
(One could also argue it's even worse than first-degree murder: the killings are both murders for hire and committed during a robbery.)
"Moeen Marastial, a member of parliament from Kunduz, said: "Local people are telling me 130 people have been killed despite all the promises of Nato to do fewer bombardments and reduce civilian casualties. There will be a reaction to this. It is a very bad day for international forces in Afghanistan."
"At least 27 civilians died in a Nato air strike in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan cabinet says, revising downwards a prior statement that 33 were killed"
"After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid."
"Deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO troops have more than doubled this year, NATO statistics show, jeopardizing a U.S. campaign to win over the local population by protecting them against insurgent attacks."
"The French military took responsibility on Friday for killing four Afghan children during a missile strike in early April, and NATO said it was investigating allegations of a military convoy gunning down two Afghan women and a girl in southeastern Afghanistan."
"NATO said on Saturday it was investigating whether shots fired by its troops in southern Afghanistan had killed two women and a child traveling in car."
Of course, expending any effort whatsoever to consider the plight of those being killed in Afghanistan and finding out some facts - rather than making a false assumption and then using your error to defend killing innocent people - might have taken you almost as much time as you spent supporting the murders committed by "our guys."
Anyone else wondering why Wired found it so necessary to run this article now, attempting to defend these men and their actions as empathetic and moral?
Rosner saw innocent farmers working their fields along the valley floor; he doesn't want to add them to the rolls of the dead.
...
Are any civilians in harm's way?
...
"Everything is so critical," Chandler says. Any mistake "can cost you a life."
Gee, this couldn't be Pentagon PR after the recent revelations of US slaughtering innocents, could it? No, I'm sure it's simply Wired keeping us up-to-date on interesting technology.
Perhaps Wired will also do a story on the technology the people in Afghanistan use to bury their dead.
Poor Terry Childs. Exactly the kind of personality that would have him be able to design a system resistant to sustained, vicious attack is what landed him in jail.
Childs' only crime was exposing the ignorance and impotence of those who imagine themselves superior.
The comments in the earlier thread reveal this was a case that called out for jury nullification. Sadly, this did not happen.
Law is most fundamentally not about "justice," but about enforcing the rule of the powerful.
Thanks for responding. It appears from your wording you were on the jury. Is that true?
You say
essentially this juror went into deliberations, had already made up his mind, informed the rest of the jurors that he had thought about the matter on his own and made up his mind, and didn't want to hear anything more about it.
And yet you claim
He was not released for "having his own opinion" or being "a lone holdout".
It sounds to me from what you've written here that having his own opinion is exactly why he was removed.
This juror may not have explained his opinion to your (and perhaps other jurors') satisfaction - but unless I'm mistaken jurors are charged to render their verdict, not to satisfy the other jurors.
This person may have indeed had all the social graces of a rock, or it may have been the case they were being coerced by the mob behavior of the rest of the jury. I don't know, I certainly wasn't there. Important points may be in the full details you chose not to give. And we only have your experience of it - we don't have theirs.
It sounds like, if you were in fact on the jury, you were taking your responsibilities very seriously. But from what you've said this jury incident sounds a lot like the entire event in microcosm: someone with no social skills stands up for their principles in the face of public pressure to do the expedient thing, and is punished for it.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond. It was really very helpful and illuminating. Thank you again.
This is what I believe is even more disturbing than the conviction. The point deserves repeating:
"The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours."
So when the government discovers a juror who's convinced of your innocence, they can and will simply replace them.
This turns "12 Angry Men" from a compelling 90-minute drama into a sick 60-second comedy sketch.
"I'm not sure he's guilty..." "Bailiff! Remove that man!" (scuffle ensues, Henry Fonda is subdued and removed) "OK, now do we all agree he's guilty?" (in unison) "He's guilty!"
I think Steve needs to watch that 1984 commercial he helped make -- except HIS FACE needs to be the face of Big Brother.
You're right, the setting of the 1984 commercial is essentially a Steve Jobs keynote in 2010.
That's not coincidence. It was easily predictable, even 25 years ago. It's a result of the way the ego functions, and in particular the feature called projection - which is where we energetically or emotionally attribute to others the characteristics and behaviors we can't see or can't accept about ourselves.
Projection is also not an occasional occurrence - it's the basic functioning of the ego 24x7. And because consciousness is self-similar, it works the same way at the scale of an individual, a corporation (as we see in this case), or a nation.
Knowing this allows us to understand the real truth in what we hear and read: that when we hear a person or a corporation or a nation speaking vehemently about the nature of someone else, they're really telling us about themselves.
It's also probably useful to remember before posting online.;-)
Government increases its own power, without limit, until stopped by some other force. It's inherent in the word "govern" - which means to control. Government was, is, and always will be the control of the many by the few - that's what the word means.
This will change only when we stop accepting that we and our fellow human beings need to be controlled - to be "govern"ed - by some external force, and we each consciously take on our individual responsibility to contribute to society and create a new form of social organization.
The increasing power of government is exactly like the increasing pain of an untreated disease - its purpose is to do whatever is necessary to get the organism to wake up and respond. As long as the organism ignores the symptom, the only chance for healing is for the disease to increase the pain. The symptom is never the problem. Ignoring the symptom is the problem. The symptom is the call to heal.
So from a holistic or systemic view we can see the increase in the power (and abuses) of government is actually humanity's way of trying to call attention to our real illness: the unresponsiveness, and most accurately the unconsciousness, of the rest of the body politic - i.e., each of us.
Our only choice is whether we hear the call and respond.
Ironic that this company once ran an ad based on Orwell's 1984 where Apple decries totalitarian control.
When one understands the nature of projection, which is where we attribute to others the behaviors and characteristics we can't see or can't accept about ourselves, one then starts to be able to see expressions like Apple's famous "1984" commercial as the most revealing indicators of the character of and the most reliable predictors of the future behavior of the speaker.
Projection isn't an occasional occurrence; it's the way the ego functions. It's always operative. Every ego-driven activity - an observation, a statement, an action - one makes is a projection.
It's true in personal relationships (both on the low side and the high side, it's how people fight and how people fall in love) and in group relationships (read any pronouncement from any country about their enemy and one knows exactly what's true about the country making the accusation).
The important tell is the amount of emotional energy in the statement. The amount of emotional energy, the reactivity, associated with an action or observation or statement is a measure of the energy the thing to which the speaker is reacting has within the speaker. So lots of short-term energy (e.g., a quick, visceral emotional response to something) or lots of long-term energy (a thing on which one spends one's time and energy, over and over) both reveal that the thing to which the speaker is reacting is unconscious to them internally - and thus is actually what runs them. The same statement made objectively and dispassionately indicates the speaker has a conscious awareness and acceptance of, and thus control over, that characteristic within them.
And because human consciousness is self-similar, projection works at every scale. It's really quite beautiful.
Some examples:
Corporations: Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil"
Politics: Bush's demonization of Saddam Hussein as a "brutal dictator" who "hates freedom"
Nations: Israel's fear that Iran wants to "wipe their enemies off the map"
Religions: The characteristics people project onto their chosen deity (e.g., Christ's compassion and love)
Personal: What you're thinking about the writer of this comment right now.;-)
Of course, knowing about projection is not only useful in understanding others, it's essential for learning the truth about and becoming responsible for oneself. (The classic mistake made when first learning about projection is to see it only in other people, and not apply it to oneself: "Ha! That idiot has no idea they're projecting!" Oooooops....)
I'd say the nature of projection is one of the most helpful things I've ever learned, easily the equal of any of my technical education.
The sadly amusing thing about the "1984" commercial is how much the setting resembles a Steve Jobs presentation.
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'.
The old Apple which you remember so fondly was the Apple of Woz.
The new Apple is the Apple of Jobs.
Woz was a hacker. Jobs is an authoritarian.
All the rest flows from that.
"We're off to hack the Apple! The wonderful Apple of Woz...."
Then play fair but play to win - ask for data
on
Music While Programming?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It sounds like your boss isn't a programmer, otherwise they wouldn't even be making their assertion. sigh...
So your boss claims when you listen to music you're collectively distracted and you make more mistakes. You should then, since you take anything that can improve the quality of the code seriously, hold this meta-contribution to the corporate codebase to the same standard as anything else - in other words, require it be tested and verified before committing it.
While from your standpoint this is likely to get you what you want, since it's very unlikely that your boss has anything factual to back up their position, it's also the most respectful way of considering your boss' potential contribution. "OK, even though you're not a skilled programmer, we'll still accept and treat your contribution just as if you were. Now here's the level of quality we all expect and demand from everything we put in our product - does what you intend to add actually meet the standards our company requires?"
And this also gives them the possibility of showing you how they're right, and for whatever reason the programming group is distracted and error-prone. Even if music isn't the immediate cause (perhaps more of a late-stage symptom of some other systemic problem), that would still be very helpful to know.
Of course, if you're just a bunch guys sitting around slinging code, you're gonna be SOL in this if you don't have any structure, testing and metrics to your development - and if you don't then your boss might strictly speaking be mistaken but indirectly be life's way of helpfully prompting you to get your act together.:-)
Good luck improving your work environment. Rock out with your awk out!
The response might have been a little different had they not had more money than they could spend.
(Since I've commented in this thread, I can't use mod points to upvote one of your comments about the ACLU's position on the 2nd Amendment, a position which tends to not get much scrutiny. While I don't consider their position hypocritical as much as unfortunate and dangerously naive, I appreciate you bringing it to light.)
Slashdot Mirror
Moderation is not supposed to be used to suppress comments one finds disagreeable.
You must be old here. ;-)
Though the action is uniform: at the nation-state level and the individual level suppressing that with which they disagree.
The truth about ourselves is always hardest to see.
Looks like there's a lot of active resistance to it here today/tonight.
And as far as that other discussion goes, don't forget to include the natural end of empire, the desperate mid-life crisis of an aging nation, and after thousands of years of leaving Mesopotamia the ouroboros finally coming back to swallow its tail - in other words, collective awakening and consciousness.
+4 "insightful". What bullshit.
"insightful" and "underrated". Hard to say which one's worse.
A better rating would be +5 "tragic."
I'm sorry, but if your actions repeatedly lead to the killing of civilians then you are responsible for them. Beyond a certain point, intent becomes irrelevant.
Thank you.
Murder is murder.
The justifications here and elsewhere are like committing second-degree murder but trying to argue that because it wasn't first-degree murder that one is innocent.
(One could also argue it's even worse than first-degree murder: the killings are both murders for hire and committed during a robbery.)
For the cognitively challenged, you could try searching for "NATO Afghan killings" - just to get started.
"Consumed by fireball, the Afghan village devastated by Nato strike on Taliban" - The Guardian, September 4 2009
"Moeen Marastial, a member of parliament from Kunduz, said: "Local people are telling me 130 people have been killed despite all the promises of Nato to do fewer bombardments and reduce civilian casualties. There will be a reaction to this. It is a very bad day for international forces in Afghanistan."
and
"Nato strike kills 27 Afghanistan civilians" - BBC, February 22, 2010
"At least 27 civilians died in a Nato air strike in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan cabinet says, revising downwards a prior statement that 33 were killed"
and
"U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women" - New York Times, April 4, 2010
"After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid."
and
"NATO strikes killing more Afghan civilians" - USA Today, April 16, 2010
"Deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO troops have more than doubled this year, NATO statistics show, jeopardizing a U.S. campaign to win over the local population by protecting them against insurgent attacks."
and
"NATO Investigates 3 Afghan Civilian Deaths" - New York Times, May 1, 2010
"The French military took responsibility on Friday for killing four Afghan children during a missile strike in early April, and NATO said it was investigating allegations of a military convoy gunning down two Afghan women and a girl in southeastern Afghanistan."
and
"NATO checks report of Afghan civilian deaths" - Reuters, May 1, 2010
"NATO said on Saturday it was investigating whether shots fired by its troops in southern Afghanistan had killed two women and a child traveling in car."
Of course, expending any effort whatsoever to consider the plight of those being killed in Afghanistan and finding out some facts - rather than making a false assumption and then using your error to defend killing innocent people - might have taken you almost as much time as you spent supporting the murders committed by "our guys."
Rosner saw innocent farmers working their fields along the valley floor; he doesn't want to add them to the rolls of the dead.
...
Are any civilians in harm's way?
...
"Everything is so critical," Chandler says. Any mistake "can cost you a life."
Gee, this couldn't be Pentagon PR after the recent revelations of US slaughtering innocents, could it? No, I'm sure it's simply Wired keeping us up-to-date on interesting technology.
Perhaps Wired will also do a story on the technology the people in Afghanistan use to bury their dead.
Poor Terry Childs. Exactly the kind of personality that would have him be able to design a system resistant to sustained, vicious attack is what landed him in jail.
Childs' only crime was exposing the ignorance and impotence of those who imagine themselves superior.
The comments in the earlier thread reveal this was a case that called out for jury nullification. Sadly, this did not happen.
Law is most fundamentally not about "justice," but about enforcing the rule of the powerful.
You say
essentially this juror went into deliberations, had already made up his mind, informed the rest of the jurors that he had thought about the matter on his own and made up his mind, and didn't want to hear anything more about it.
And yet you claim
He was not released for "having his own opinion" or being "a lone holdout".
It sounds to me from what you've written here that having his own opinion is exactly why he was removed.
This juror may not have explained his opinion to your (and perhaps other jurors') satisfaction - but unless I'm mistaken jurors are charged to render their verdict, not to satisfy the other jurors.
This person may have indeed had all the social graces of a rock, or it may have been the case they were being coerced by the mob behavior of the rest of the jury. I don't know, I certainly wasn't there. Important points may be in the full details you chose not to give. And we only have your experience of it - we don't have theirs.
It sounds like, if you were in fact on the jury, you were taking your responsibilities very seriously. But from what you've said this jury incident sounds a lot like the entire event in microcosm: someone with no social skills stands up for their principles in the face of public pressure to do the expedient thing, and is punished for it.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond. It was really very helpful and illuminating. Thank you again.
This is what I believe is even more disturbing than the conviction. The point deserves repeating:
"The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours."
So when the government discovers a juror who's convinced of your innocence, they can and will simply replace them.
This turns "12 Angry Men" from a compelling 90-minute drama into a sick 60-second comedy sketch.
"I'm not sure he's guilty..." "Bailiff! Remove that man!" (scuffle ensues, Henry Fonda is subdued and removed) "OK, now do we all agree he's guilty?" (in unison) "He's guilty!"
I think Steve needs to watch that 1984 commercial he helped make -- except HIS FACE needs to be the face of Big Brother.
You're right, the setting of the 1984 commercial is essentially a Steve Jobs keynote in 2010.
;-)
That's not coincidence. It was easily predictable, even 25 years ago. It's a result of the way the ego functions, and in particular the feature called projection - which is where we energetically or emotionally attribute to others the characteristics and behaviors we can't see or can't accept about ourselves.
Projection is also not an occasional occurrence - it's the basic functioning of the ego 24x7. And because consciousness is self-similar, it works the same way at the scale of an individual, a corporation (as we see in this case), or a nation.
Knowing this allows us to understand the real truth in what we hear and read: that when we hear a person or a corporation or a nation speaking vehemently about the nature of someone else, they're really telling us about themselves.
It's also probably useful to remember before posting online.
More likely the Constitution will be found to be anti-ACTA.
Kinda screws years of PR and spin when "Don't Be Evil" turns out to mean "Don't Be Non-White."
"But lots of us here like Will Smith and Beyoncé...Eric even has an Obama bumper sticker!...dawg?"
Government increases its own power, without limit, until stopped by some other force. It's inherent in the word "govern" - which means to control. Government was, is, and always will be the control of the many by the few - that's what the word means.
This will change only when we stop accepting that we and our fellow human beings need to be controlled - to be "govern"ed - by some external force, and we each consciously take on our individual responsibility to contribute to society and create a new form of social organization.
The increasing power of government is exactly like the increasing pain of an untreated disease - its purpose is to do whatever is necessary to get the organism to wake up and respond. As long as the organism ignores the symptom, the only chance for healing is for the disease to increase the pain. The symptom is never the problem. Ignoring the symptom is the problem. The symptom is the call to heal.
So from a holistic or systemic view we can see the increase in the power (and abuses) of government is actually humanity's way of trying to call attention to our real illness: the unresponsiveness, and most accurately the unconsciousness, of the rest of the body politic - i.e., each of us.
Our only choice is whether we hear the call and respond.
It would be funny if Steve's office at Infinite Loop was "Room 101."
:-)
Funny...but not surprising.
Ironic that this company once ran an ad based on Orwell's 1984 where Apple decries totalitarian control.
When one understands the nature of projection, which is where we attribute to others the behaviors and characteristics we can't see or can't accept about ourselves, one then starts to be able to see expressions like Apple's famous "1984" commercial as the most revealing indicators of the character of and the most reliable predictors of the future behavior of the speaker.
;-)
Projection isn't an occasional occurrence; it's the way the ego functions. It's always operative. Every ego-driven activity - an observation, a statement, an action - one makes is a projection.
It's true in personal relationships (both on the low side and the high side, it's how people fight and how people fall in love) and in group relationships (read any pronouncement from any country about their enemy and one knows exactly what's true about the country making the accusation).
The important tell is the amount of emotional energy in the statement. The amount of emotional energy, the reactivity, associated with an action or observation or statement is a measure of the energy the thing to which the speaker is reacting has within the speaker. So lots of short-term energy (e.g., a quick, visceral emotional response to something) or lots of long-term energy (a thing on which one spends one's time and energy, over and over) both reveal that the thing to which the speaker is reacting is unconscious to them internally - and thus is actually what runs them. The same statement made objectively and dispassionately indicates the speaker has a conscious awareness and acceptance of, and thus control over, that characteristic within them.
And because human consciousness is self-similar, projection works at every scale. It's really quite beautiful.
Some examples:
Corporations: Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil"
Politics: Bush's demonization of Saddam Hussein as a "brutal dictator" who "hates freedom"
Nations: Israel's fear that Iran wants to "wipe their enemies off the map"
Religions: The characteristics people project onto their chosen deity (e.g., Christ's compassion and love)
Personal: What you're thinking about the writer of this comment right now.
Of course, knowing about projection is not only useful in understanding others, it's essential for learning the truth about and becoming responsible for oneself. (The classic mistake made when first learning about projection is to see it only in other people, and not apply it to oneself: "Ha! That idiot has no idea they're projecting!" Oooooops....)
I'd say the nature of projection is one of the most helpful things I've ever learned, easily the equal of any of my technical education.
The sadly amusing thing about the "1984" commercial is how much the setting resembles a Steve Jobs presentation.
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'.
Give us until 2009."
The old Apple which you remember so fondly was the Apple of Woz.
The new Apple is the Apple of Jobs.
Woz was a hacker. Jobs is an authoritarian.
All the rest flows from that.
"We're off to hack the Apple! The wonderful Apple of Woz...."
It sounds like your boss isn't a programmer, otherwise they wouldn't even be making their assertion. sigh...
:-)
So your boss claims when you listen to music you're collectively distracted and you make more mistakes. You should then, since you take anything that can improve the quality of the code seriously, hold this meta-contribution to the corporate codebase to the same standard as anything else - in other words, require it be tested and verified before committing it.
While from your standpoint this is likely to get you what you want, since it's very unlikely that your boss has anything factual to back up their position, it's also the most respectful way of considering your boss' potential contribution. "OK, even though you're not a skilled programmer, we'll still accept and treat your contribution just as if you were. Now here's the level of quality we all expect and demand from everything we put in our product - does what you intend to add actually meet the standards our company requires?"
And this also gives them the possibility of showing you how they're right, and for whatever reason the programming group is distracted and error-prone. Even if music isn't the immediate cause (perhaps more of a late-stage symptom of some other systemic problem), that would still be very helpful to know.
Of course, if you're just a bunch guys sitting around slinging code, you're gonna be SOL in this if you don't have any structure, testing and metrics to your development - and if you don't then your boss might strictly speaking be mistaken but indirectly be life's way of helpfully prompting you to get your act together.
Good luck improving your work environment. Rock out with your awk out!
These people would have tried to save the Titanic by pounding the water with a hammer.
"A breach in the hull! Man the hammers!"
That was very cool - like a cross between Queen and Futurama.
Allah your bass are belong to us.
Ahh, now I know what they mean they call those Easter hams "Honey-glazed"...and why they're so expensive!
Yeah, you can tell people that 'til you're hoarse....
Wilbur? Wilbur?
Bet they've got some serious CONTROL structures to keep things from getting too KAOTIC....
"Would you believe a GOTO statement and a couple of flags?"
Ahh, but remember - 911 changed everything.
The response might have been a little different had they not had more money than they could spend.
(Since I've commented in this thread, I can't use mod points to upvote one of your comments about the ACLU's position on the 2nd Amendment, a position which tends to not get much scrutiny. While I don't consider their position hypocritical as much as unfortunate and dangerously naive, I appreciate you bringing it to light.)
One can generally starve children in Africa for free. Why not save the $1500 and spend it on a nice set of headphones?