I'm a United States citizen. While I am horrified about what's been going on currently in the US, it doesn't really suprise me, given our history as the self-appointed Savior of Europe after WWII, defender against communism, the Vietnam war, etc.
With our two-party political system, both parties have to pander to their base, which, to simplify a lot, is socialists for the Democrats and facists for the Republicans. Now that the republicans are in ascendancy, I'm not surprised that corporate power is going unchecked, and those who don't believe in government are unable to govern competently. After 9/11 burst our bubble that oceans would protect us from what's going on in the rest of the world, and the fact that we're waging a 'war on terror' that will never end, I'm not surprised that people would become fanatical and fall in line behind a militaristic administration.
However, what the hell is going on in Great Britain that gives political cover for this radical infringement into the rights and privacy of the people? Didn't the U.K. defeat Facism that threatened to overrun the country? Hasn't the UK been fighting terrorism from Ireland relatively sanely for decades? Doesn't the parliamentary system give *some* power to other policital groups which are somewhat left-leaning?
"It's clearly obvious to many that a movie star is not worth $20 million per movie these days. They can easily be replaced by high-quality, CG actors and actresses. Thus their real value has declined significantly."
Clearly obvious to geeks, maybe.
The reason that Joe Public goes to see a movie is not for the plot, nor for the special effects, but for the star power. People will see Pirates of the Caribean for Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp, not because it's about pirates.
Even if we replace actual actors with CGI clones, or purely CGI characters develop, it will cost $20 million to license their image, because star power is what draws people to the movies in the first place. The movie industry is one of the freest markets, and I think it's a tough case to make that the money stars make is somehow distorted.
Since the link only provides download mirrors and torrent links, here's some background about the project from Wikipedia:
"Elephants Dream is a computer-generated movie made using open sourceapplications that premiered on March 24, 2006. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the way the script was developed.
The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm time for the movie.
The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.
During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1], were added into Blender especially for the project.
The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [2], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.
The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.
"
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
The question is not whether you or I would expect it to be private. We're geeks. The question is whether an average person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Just because something is *possible*, doesn't mean it's *legal*. If your door is unlocked, and I walk into your house and wander around, I am still trespassing, even though you didn't lock your door. This is the same excuse that crackers use to justify their illegal activity -- "They didn't apply patches/had weak security/use default passwords, so it's okay that I entered their network". Wrong. It's illegal trespassing.
Same goes for internet traffic. It's up to the court to decide whether a person has a reasonable expectation for privacy in their electronic communications. It doesn't matter if it's *possible*, it just matters if it's *legal*. Sure, it's possible for me to peer into my neighbors' window with binoculars, but it's not *legal*. It's possible for me to sniff my neighbor's traffic, but that doesn't mean that it's legal.
And here in the good ol' USA, we are a nation of laws, and the government has to follow the law just like everybody else.
Don't worry, we aren't quite so alone. For more than four decades, Amnesty International has been doing an outstanding job of researching, tracking down, and keeping tabs on dissapeared persons, death squads, and evil dictators. I was involved in the 90s when there was a lot of work to do with murder, torture and dissapearances in South America. At the time it seemed far away, stuff that was par for the course in third world countries, and something that I couldn't do anything about.
Unfortunately the chickens have come home to roost. John Negroponte, who likely organized death squads in South America and most recently in Iraq, is now the National Intelligence Director. This guy really knows how to shut down dissent.
When you and I have been locked up or dissapeared for believing in the United States that we learned about in school, hopefully, somewhere in the world, some Amnesty International activist will be writing letters, raising awareness, and asking tough questions to their government and ours.
"Folks, the Big Thing everyone is missing here is that any clown with a packet sniffer can see just about anything."
That's not true. You can only see what's going on on your local network. OTOH, this government program is reviewing practically all internet traffic. Do you see the difference there? I can probably sniff what my neighbor is reading on my cable link, but I won't be able to sniff what Joe Nobody is doing clear on the other side of the country (unless I hack into routers/machines on his network --but that involves hacking, not just sniffing.) .
The government is now tracking all of us, without a warrant or probably cause. We all now have a file, albeit small and digital, a file nonetheless.
I'm having a hard time digesting your Middle-Earth == Great Britain thesis, however.
Tolkein waqs writing in a time where people still thought that ethnicity, culture, and personality was somehow genetic -- that a Frenchman was a different race than a Dutchman, Irishman, or Englishman. It seems silly nowadays because, at least in the US, we lump them all together as 'white' or 'European'. But back in those days people really thought they were like different races. That's why I say that the different races of Middle Earth are the different nationalities of Europe. Back then, people thought of them as racially different, rather than culturally or ethnically different. More to the point, elves are a stereotype of Scandinavians -- tall, fair, blond, blue-eyed, dwarves are a stereotype of Germans -- hard working, barrell-chested, industrious, interested in machinery.
As far as orcs being hooligans... who was raising an army of hooligans? Isn't the concern about hooligans vandalism and soccer riots? But the orc threat was that Saruman was organizing them into an army to threaten the various nations of Middle Earth. I think it makes more sense that orcs represent Asian or Africans -- the orcs, trolls, etc. have various degrees of dark skin, they ride elephants, etc. And what European countries were doing was using the wealth from New World colonies to finance their wars against other European nations. When I think of hooligan, I think of petty street crime, not well-organized soldiers from far off lands.
I don't think it addresses the situation at all that you can play the other side. The racism here is that humans are white Europeans, and that other animalistic races are various non-European. It's basically saying that non-Europeans are animals.
I never agreed with the 'evil' thesis of the article. But I think it's hard to argue that the horde is not the embodiment of the noble savage. And they are animals to boot.
I wasn't going to reply to this b/c you posted as AC, but it looks like you replied to another response, so here goes:
YOU MISSED THE POINT OF MY THREAD ENTIRELY. If you had bothered to comprehend the first paragraph, you'd know that I had said that *everyone* *everywhere* thinks that thier people are decent, civilized people, and that the *other* groups are savages. I never said that Native Americans are great, those evil Europeans destroyed Utopia. Quite the opposite -- I basically agreed with everything you said, minus the attitude (and what are you so upset about, anyway? Do you have a worthless degree? Or were you dumped by a women's studies major?)
I'm well aware of Monteczuma sacrficing hundreds of thousands of captured villagers to dedicated a new temple. My argument was that everywhere, everyone is the same, and as soon as one group gets some kind of leverage or power over the other, then the slaughter commences.
White Man's Burden is simply the name for European's justification and slaughter of Africans, Asians, and Americans. If African's were colonizing and slaughtering Europe, we would call it Black Man's Burden. Nowhere did I ever say Native == good, Whites == bad. In fact, I said the opposite.
Thanks for the correction. It actually helps support my point.
The Navajo's own name for themselves is "Dine", which, according to wikipedia, means "people". And other people's name for the Dine is "Navajo" which means savage. Again, the pattern of "We are people, they are savages/animals".
FWIW, Jared Diamond doesn't really get into the ideas behind White Man's Burden, Noble Savage and all that, even at a debunking level. He just does a superb job of providing an alternative explanation.
I think it's a part of human nature to think of 'those guys over there' as bloodthirsty, uncivilized animals. My bachelor's is in anthropology, and in my reading, time and time again, all over the world, any ethnic group, society, or culture refers to itself as 'the people' -- that's literally what names like 'Navajo', 'Hopi', etc. mean. The implication is that anyone who is not in your group is not exactly human. It doesn't matter whether you are a large kingdom or a small group of hunter gatherers. Those guys over there are bloodthirsty savages with long penises, one step up from animals, who are just salivating to come over here, kill us, and rape our women.
This kind of racism is by no means limited to white Europeans conquering other groups. When the first White Australian prospectors encountered native New Guineas, the New Guineans thought that these whites were going to rape and seduce their women with penises so long they had to wrap them around their waists! What a reversal of stereotypes -- blacks afraid of over-sexualized white guys with long penises.
It should come as no surprise that these motifs are repeated in fantasy and science fiction. I'll admit that I'm not widely read, but you rarely find some truly creative and outlandish descriptions of extra-terrestrials. Mostly they are some kind of 'Noble Savage' humanoid with bumps on their head, or a mask, etc. Non-intelligent life forms are some re-capitulation of Earthly life forms, be it plants, insects, reptiles, etc.
For instance, in Star Wars, you have Chewbacca, who is some kind of Bigfoot Woodsman who growls to communicate, wears no cloths, and has a crossbow for God's sake. A crossbow. Same deal with Ewoks -- cute pygmies, naked, furry, with wooden spears and magic.
Same deal with warcraft. The Humans are all white guys, with medieval clothing, architecture, and religion. They build churches and practice alchemy and magic. They speak with various British Isles accents. The 'Others' set up tents like Mongolian raiders, have shamans, which is the name for a non-European witch, live in tribes, have cheifs, etc. Orcs are basically Big Scary Black Men in green skin -- muscular, wide notrils, thick lips. Taurens have Totems like North Pacific Native Americans. The Orc Hero Blademaster is obviously a samurai -- people might doubt that orcs are stereotyped blacks, but no one can seriously argue that the Blademaster is not a Japanese guy in green skin. He even has a Japanese accent! "I Hear-O and Obey!" Trolls are voo-doo practicing Jamacans, etc.
This is the basic fantasy paradigm that we inherited from JRR Tolkein and the racist perspective of the world he lived in. It's called the White Man's Burden -- it was Europe's job to bring civilization and culture to those poor, dark-skinned people inhabiting the rest of the world. This was the justification for the resource explotation of Asia, Africa, and the Americas that fueled the wars and industrialization of Europe, finally culminating in WWI and WWII. The Hobbits were the British, "A nation of shopkeepers" as Churchill put it. The warring factions of humans, elves, and dwarves were the various European nations that couldn't stop their infighting to face a common threat. The Orc armies that Saruman raised represent the vast resources marshalled from the colonies to finance the new European war machines.
Your honorary anthropology degree in a nutshell. For more detail, check out _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.
The BBC, one of the world's most reputable news service, is reporting that the hijackers identities' are suspect.This is blatantly stolen from another post:
Did you really think you were going to find any information that disagreed with the official story on a.mil or.gov website? If so, you need to have your critical thinking skills checked.
"That's the problem with 'line-by-line' debunkings. In order to prove the thesis that the entire Loose Change video is 100% nonsense without any glimmer of truth at all, the author of the debunking needs to refute each and every single little comment made in the entire thing. This innevitably involves the same leaps of logic, unreferenced sources, and implication through sarcasm/incredulity that you can legitimately fault the original source for."
I don't follow. In order to show that someone is making things up, you have to make things up yourself? That doesn't make sense. I see no reason why you couldn't do a line-by-line debunking that is rigorous, backed by facts where necessary, or at least points out "this is unreferenced", "this is taken out of context", "There is an implied conclusion here", or "the evidence doesn't support this conclusion".
So what you're telling me is that a terrorism investigator is going to walk into a hangar and make sense of plane parts strewn about randomly? He's going to look at the cockpit windshield at one side of the hangar, and then walk all the way to the other side to look at the instrumentation of the same plane?
No, you at least have to have the parts of the same plane lying next to each other, with the parts lying where they would be if the planes were intact.
It would be like asking a fraud investigator to sift through papers out of order, lying in a pile on the floor, instead of in neat little manilla folders.
What would we gain? We would know more about terrorist techniques than we know now. Maybe the terrorists somehow smuggled fuel or explosives into the planes to make their impact more destructive. The only evidence that we have for exactly what went on during the hijacking is the remains of the planes themselves. Why would you want to ignore this very important information when you're waging a war on terror?
When there is a crime, there needs to be a complete investigation of the physical evidence. That's standard procedure for all crime scene investigations. You don't just march in, declare what happened, and throw all the evidence in the trash. If, however, you do decide to violate these age-old procedures, it makes you look extremely suspicious.
"...why would they invest that kind of time and resources?"
Look, they have to clean up the sites. They are going to encounter plane parts in the debris. How much extra time and effort is it to gather all the plane debris into a hangar? Very little.
I'm not sure where I fall with the stress/temperature curves -- the Loose Change video references several steel buildings that burned for days without falling. That doesn't meant that it couldn't have fallen due to fire, but it's far from clear-cut.
What I really want to know is,
where are the planes reconstructed from the debris? Here is an image of a section of fuselage in the WTC descrution. Where is the fuselage now? Where are all the parts they pulled from the pentagon? By contrast, here is an image of the reconstruction of flight 800. Why don't we have such reconstructions of the 9/11 planes?
I agree, Loose Change is poorly referenced, full of retorical question and implied conclusions. However, the supposed 'debunking' pdf reader is simply a piece of trash. It lends credibility to Loose Change if the only 'debunking' of it is trollish nonsense. It makes it seem like there are no logical arguments refuting the conspiracy, only name calling and trash-talking. You can say "My opponent has no arguments; he can only make potty talk"
"It's fairly sensible to accept more sloppy language in something disputing an extraordinary claim than in something making the claim in the first place."
Think about what you have written above. The 'conspiracy' video claims to be debunking the 'extraordinary' official story. As a skeptical, open-minded outsider, who has not already taken a position, how do I know which side I should treat less critically? Your asking me to give the benefit of the doubt to one side, which is not fair.
If you are going to claim you are debunking a story, I am going to treat you more critically as anyone else. I have no reason go go softer on one 'debunking' side than the other.
A false flag operation is one of the oldest tricks in the books -- look at military history. 'Extraorniary claims' involving supernatural powers, such as levitiation and eternal life, break the known laws of physics. An 'extraordinary claim' of a false flag operation does not break the laws of physics. So I argue that someone who is being totally open-minded would naturally have a false-flag operation on the list of possiblities in a suprise military attack. In the US, we have had the Boston Tea Party, where they dressed as Native Americans, the Gulf of Tonkin attacks, and the "Operation Northwoods" plan. So, claiming a false flag attacks does not ask us to believe anything that hasn't happened many times over in the history of the world.
This 'debunking guide' has language just as smarmy and referenceless statements just like conspiracy videos. That degrades its credibility, in my eyes. I was keen on seeing a decent debunking of the loose change video, but this guide is simply a troll. If you want to be taken seriously, speak seriously. Here are a few select quotes:
"You must be thinking of the old Pentagon, which was made of balsa wood and marshmallows" (p. 31)
"KARL! Thank God we've got an expert in the house!" (p. 33)
"And they're all accounted for. You can check yourself if you don't believe me." (p. 41)
"They work for the 'Boss'. (Springsteen?)" (p. 42)
This sloppy scarcastic language is found throughout the guide. Why should I take it seriously?
"I want a system that can learn a language the way a human does without any preconceived ideas about how a language should sound or look like. "
As someone who is studying computational linguistics, I am sure you are aware that there are some who argue (Chomsky, Pinker) that the human mind has built-in preconceptions about language, and that language ability is more development than learning?
Can I assume you would argue that language is primarily learned?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a United States citizen. While I am horrified about what's been going on currently in the US, it doesn't really suprise me, given our history as the self-appointed Savior of Europe after WWII, defender against communism, the Vietnam war, etc.
With our two-party political system, both parties have to pander to their base, which, to simplify a lot, is socialists for the Democrats and facists for the Republicans. Now that the republicans are in ascendancy, I'm not surprised that corporate power is going unchecked, and those who don't believe in government are unable to govern competently. After 9/11 burst our bubble that oceans would protect us from what's going on in the rest of the world, and the fact that we're waging a 'war on terror' that will never end, I'm not surprised that people would become fanatical and fall in line behind a militaristic administration.
However, what the hell is going on in Great Britain that gives political cover for this radical infringement into the rights and privacy of the people? Didn't the U.K. defeat Facism that threatened to overrun the country? Hasn't the UK been fighting terrorism from Ireland relatively sanely for decades? Doesn't the parliamentary system give *some* power to other policital groups which are somewhat left-leaning?
ARGH!
"It's clearly obvious to many that a movie star is not worth $20 million per movie these days. They can easily be replaced by high-quality, CG actors and actresses. Thus their real value has declined significantly."
Clearly obvious to geeks, maybe.
The reason that Joe Public goes to see a movie is not for the plot, nor for the special effects, but for the star power. People will see Pirates of the Caribean for Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp, not because it's about pirates.
Even if we replace actual actors with CGI clones, or purely CGI characters develop, it will cost $20 million to license their image, because star power is what draws people to the movies in the first place. The movie industry is one of the freest markets, and I think it's a tough case to make that the money stars make is somehow distorted.
"Elephants Dream is a computer-generated movie made using open source applications that premiered on March 24, 2006. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the way the script was developed.
The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm time for the movie.
The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.
During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1], were added into Blender especially for the project.
The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [2], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.
The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.
"Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.
The question is not whether you or I would expect it to be private. We're geeks. The question is whether an average person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Just because something is *possible*, doesn't mean it's *legal*. If your door is unlocked, and I walk into your house and wander around, I am still trespassing, even though you didn't lock your door. This is the same excuse that crackers use to justify their illegal activity -- "They didn't apply patches/had weak security/use default passwords, so it's okay that I entered their network". Wrong. It's illegal trespassing.
Same goes for internet traffic. It's up to the court to decide whether a person has a reasonable expectation for privacy in their electronic communications. It doesn't matter if it's *possible*, it just matters if it's *legal*. Sure, it's possible for me to peer into my neighbors' window with binoculars, but it's not *legal*. It's possible for me to sniff my neighbor's traffic, but that doesn't mean that it's legal.
And here in the good ol' USA, we are a nation of laws, and the government has to follow the law just like everybody else.
Don't worry, we aren't quite so alone. For more than four decades, Amnesty International has been doing an outstanding job of researching, tracking down, and keeping tabs on dissapeared persons, death squads, and evil dictators. I was involved in the 90s when there was a lot of work to do with murder, torture and dissapearances in South America. At the time it seemed far away, stuff that was par for the course in third world countries, and something that I couldn't do anything about.
Unfortunately the chickens have come home to roost. John Negroponte, who likely organized death squads in South America and most recently in Iraq, is now the National Intelligence Director. This guy really knows how to shut down dissent.
When you and I have been locked up or dissapeared for believing in the United States that we learned about in school, hopefully, somewhere in the world, some Amnesty International activist will be writing letters, raising awareness, and asking tough questions to their government and ours.
"Folks, the Big Thing everyone is missing here is that any clown with a packet sniffer can see just about anything."
That's not true. You can only see what's going on on your local network. OTOH, this government program is reviewing practically all internet traffic. Do you see the difference there? I can probably sniff what my neighbor is reading on my cable link, but I won't be able to sniff what Joe Nobody is doing clear on the other side of the country (unless I hack into routers/machines on his network --but that involves hacking, not just sniffing.) .
The government is now tracking all of us, without a warrant or probably cause. We all now have a file, albeit small and digital, a file nonetheless.
Thanks for the correction on the Napoleon quote.
I'm having a hard time digesting your Middle-Earth == Great Britain thesis, however.
Tolkein waqs writing in a time where people still thought that ethnicity, culture, and personality was somehow genetic -- that a Frenchman was a different race than a Dutchman, Irishman, or Englishman. It seems silly nowadays because, at least in the US, we lump them all together as 'white' or 'European'. But back in those days people really thought they were like different races. That's why I say that the different races of Middle Earth are the different nationalities of Europe. Back then, people thought of them as racially different, rather than culturally or ethnically different. More to the point, elves are a stereotype of Scandinavians -- tall, fair, blond, blue-eyed, dwarves are a stereotype of Germans -- hard working, barrell-chested, industrious, interested in machinery.
As far as orcs being hooligans... who was raising an army of hooligans? Isn't the concern about hooligans vandalism and soccer riots? But the orc threat was that Saruman was organizing them into an army to threaten the various nations of Middle Earth. I think it makes more sense that orcs represent Asian or Africans -- the orcs, trolls, etc. have various degrees of dark skin, they ride elephants, etc. And what European countries were doing was using the wealth from New World colonies to finance their wars against other European nations. When I think of hooligan, I think of petty street crime, not well-organized soldiers from far off lands.
I don't think it addresses the situation at all that you can play the other side. The racism here is that humans are white Europeans, and that other animalistic races are various non-European. It's basically saying that non-Europeans are animals.
I never agreed with the 'evil' thesis of the article. But I think it's hard to argue that the horde is not the embodiment of the noble savage. And they are animals to boot.
I wasn't going to reply to this b/c you posted as AC, but it looks like you replied to another response, so here goes:
YOU MISSED THE POINT OF MY THREAD ENTIRELY. If you had bothered to comprehend the first paragraph, you'd know that I had said that *everyone* *everywhere* thinks that thier people are decent, civilized people, and that the *other* groups are savages. I never said that Native Americans are great, those evil Europeans destroyed Utopia. Quite the opposite -- I basically agreed with everything you said, minus the attitude (and what are you so upset about, anyway? Do you have a worthless degree? Or were you dumped by a women's studies major?)
I'm well aware of Monteczuma sacrficing hundreds of thousands of captured villagers to dedicated a new temple. My argument was that everywhere, everyone is the same, and as soon as one group gets some kind of leverage or power over the other, then the slaughter commences.
White Man's Burden is simply the name for European's justification and slaughter of Africans, Asians, and Americans. If African's were colonizing and slaughtering Europe, we would call it Black Man's Burden. Nowhere did I ever say Native == good, Whites == bad. In fact, I said the opposite.
Thanks for the correction. It actually helps support my point.
The Navajo's own name for themselves is "Dine", which, according to wikipedia, means "people". And other people's name for the Dine is "Navajo" which means savage. Again, the pattern of "We are people, they are savages/animals".
FWIW, Jared Diamond doesn't really get into the ideas behind White Man's Burden, Noble Savage and all that, even at a debunking level. He just does a superb job of providing an alternative explanation.
I think it's a part of human nature to think of 'those guys over there' as bloodthirsty, uncivilized animals. My bachelor's is in anthropology, and in my reading, time and time again, all over the world, any ethnic group, society, or culture refers to itself as 'the people' -- that's literally what names like 'Navajo', 'Hopi', etc. mean. The implication is that anyone who is not in your group is not exactly human. It doesn't matter whether you are a large kingdom or a small group of hunter gatherers. Those guys over there are bloodthirsty savages with long penises, one step up from animals, who are just salivating to come over here, kill us, and rape our women.
This kind of racism is by no means limited to white Europeans conquering other groups. When the first White Australian prospectors encountered native New Guineas, the New Guineans thought that these whites were going to rape and seduce their women with penises so long they had to wrap them around their waists! What a reversal of stereotypes -- blacks afraid of over-sexualized white guys with long penises.
It should come as no surprise that these motifs are repeated in fantasy and science fiction. I'll admit that I'm not widely read, but you rarely find some truly creative and outlandish descriptions of extra-terrestrials. Mostly they are some kind of 'Noble Savage' humanoid with bumps on their head, or a mask, etc. Non-intelligent life forms are some re-capitulation of Earthly life forms, be it plants, insects, reptiles, etc.
For instance, in Star Wars, you have Chewbacca, who is some kind of Bigfoot Woodsman who growls to communicate, wears no cloths, and has a crossbow for God's sake. A crossbow. Same deal with Ewoks -- cute pygmies, naked, furry, with wooden spears and magic.
Same deal with warcraft. The Humans are all white guys, with medieval clothing, architecture, and religion. They build churches and practice alchemy and magic. They speak with various British Isles accents. The 'Others' set up tents like Mongolian raiders, have shamans, which is the name for a non-European witch, live in tribes, have cheifs, etc. Orcs are basically Big Scary Black Men in green skin -- muscular, wide notrils, thick lips. Taurens have Totems like North Pacific Native Americans. The Orc Hero Blademaster is obviously a samurai -- people might doubt that orcs are stereotyped blacks, but no one can seriously argue that the Blademaster is not a Japanese guy in green skin. He even has a Japanese accent! "I Hear-O and Obey!" Trolls are voo-doo practicing Jamacans, etc.
This is the basic fantasy paradigm that we inherited from JRR Tolkein and the racist perspective of the world he lived in. It's called the White Man's Burden -- it was Europe's job to bring civilization and culture to those poor, dark-skinned people inhabiting the rest of the world. This was the justification for the resource explotation of Asia, Africa, and the Americas that fueled the wars and industrialization of Europe, finally culminating in WWI and WWII. The Hobbits were the British, "A nation of shopkeepers" as Churchill put it. The warring factions of humans, elves, and dwarves were the various European nations that couldn't stop their infighting to face a common threat. The Orc armies that Saruman raised represent the vast resources marshalled from the colonies to finance the new European war machines.
Your honorary anthropology degree in a nutshell. For more detail, check out _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.
The BBC, one of the world's most reputable news service, is reporting that the hijackers identities' are suspect.This is blatantly stolen from another post:
1 51.stm [bbc.co.uk]
6 69.stm [bbc.co.uk]
. stm [bbc.co.uk]
.mil or .gov website? If so, you need to have your critical thinking skills checked.
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559
BBC News | MIDDLE EAST | Hijack 'suspect' alive in Morocco
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558
BBC News | AMERICAS | FBI probes hijackers' identities
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1553754
Did you really think you were going to find any information that disagreed with the official story on a
"That's the problem with 'line-by-line' debunkings. In order to prove the thesis that the entire Loose Change video is 100% nonsense without any glimmer of truth at all, the author of the debunking needs to refute each and every single little comment made in the entire thing. This innevitably involves the same leaps of logic, unreferenced sources, and implication through sarcasm/incredulity that you can legitimately fault the original source for."
I don't follow. In order to show that someone is making things up, you have to make things up yourself? That doesn't make sense. I see no reason why you couldn't do a line-by-line debunking that is rigorous, backed by facts where necessary, or at least points out "this is unreferenced", "this is taken out of context", "There is an implied conclusion here", or "the evidence doesn't support this conclusion".
I already defined reconstruction, as far as I was concerned, when I wrote:
" you at least have to have the parts of the same plane lying next to each other, with the parts lying where they would be if the planes were intact."
In turn, you replied:
"That is not a 'reconstruction'".
I gave my definition, and you rejected it. Now, please give us your definition of reconstruction.
Please define reconstruction.
So what you're telling me is that a terrorism investigator is going to walk into a hangar and make sense of plane parts strewn about randomly? He's going to look at the cockpit windshield at one side of the hangar, and then walk all the way to the other side to look at the instrumentation of the same plane?
No, you at least have to have the parts of the same plane lying next to each other, with the parts lying where they would be if the planes were intact.
It would be like asking a fraud investigator to sift through papers out of order, lying in a pile on the floor, instead of in neat little manilla folders.
What would we gain? We would know more about terrorist techniques than we know now. Maybe the terrorists somehow smuggled fuel or explosives into the planes to make their impact more destructive. The only evidence that we have for exactly what went on during the hijacking is the remains of the planes themselves. Why would you want to ignore this very important information when you're waging a war on terror?
When there is a crime, there needs to be a complete investigation of the physical evidence. That's standard procedure for all crime scene investigations. You don't just march in, declare what happened, and throw all the evidence in the trash. If, however, you do decide to violate these age-old procedures, it makes you look extremely suspicious.
"...why would they invest that kind of time and resources?"
Look, they have to clean up the sites. They are going to encounter plane parts in the debris. How much extra time and effort is it to gather all the plane debris into a hangar? Very little.
I'm not sure where I fall with the stress/temperature curves -- the Loose Change video references several steel buildings that burned for days without falling. That doesn't meant that it couldn't have fallen due to fire, but it's far from clear-cut.
What I really want to know is, where are the planes reconstructed from the debris? Here is an image of a section of fuselage in the WTC descrution. Where is the fuselage now? Where are all the parts they pulled from the pentagon? By contrast, here is an image of the reconstruction of flight 800. Why don't we have such reconstructions of the 9/11 planes?
Jim, I think we are arguing cross points.
I agree, Loose Change is poorly referenced, full of retorical question and implied conclusions. However, the supposed 'debunking' pdf reader is simply a piece of trash. It lends credibility to Loose Change if the only 'debunking' of it is trollish nonsense. It makes it seem like there are no logical arguments refuting the conspiracy, only name calling and trash-talking. You can say "My opponent has no arguments; he can only make potty talk"
"It's fairly sensible to accept more sloppy language in something disputing an extraordinary claim than in something making the claim in the first place."
Think about what you have written above. The 'conspiracy' video claims to be debunking the 'extraordinary' official story. As a skeptical, open-minded outsider, who has not already taken a position, how do I know which side I should treat less critically? Your asking me to give the benefit of the doubt to one side, which is not fair.
If you are going to claim you are debunking a story, I am going to treat you more critically as anyone else. I have no reason go go softer on one 'debunking' side than the other. A false flag operation is one of the oldest tricks in the books -- look at military history. 'Extraorniary claims' involving supernatural powers, such as levitiation and eternal life, break the known laws of physics. An 'extraordinary claim' of a false flag operation does not break the laws of physics. So I argue that someone who is being totally open-minded would naturally have a false-flag operation on the list of possiblities in a suprise military attack. In the US, we have had the Boston Tea Party, where they dressed as Native Americans, the Gulf of Tonkin attacks, and the "Operation Northwoods" plan. So, claiming a false flag attacks does not ask us to believe anything that hasn't happened many times over in the history of the world.
This 'debunking guide' has language just as smarmy and referenceless statements just like conspiracy videos. That degrades its credibility, in my eyes. I was keen on seeing a decent debunking of the loose change video, but this guide is simply a troll. If you want to be taken seriously, speak seriously. Here are a few select quotes:
"You must be thinking of the old Pentagon, which was made of balsa wood and marshmallows" (p. 31)
"KARL! Thank God we've got an expert in the house!" (p. 33)
"And they're all accounted for. You can check yourself if you don't believe me." (p. 41)
"They work for the 'Boss'. (Springsteen?)" (p. 42)
This sloppy scarcastic language is found throughout the guide. Why should I take it seriously?
Dictionary.com says that a conspiracy is "An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act."
Do you believe that the planes flew into the towers and the pentagon by accident? If not, you believe in a conspiracy.
"I want a system that can learn a language the way a human does without any preconceived ideas about how a language should sound or look like. "
As someone who is studying computational linguistics, I am sure you are aware that there are some who argue (Chomsky, Pinker) that the human mind has built-in preconceptions about language, and that language ability is more development than learning?
Can I assume you would argue that language is primarily learned?