The objective wasn't to kill them. The objective is deterrence. If another country wanted to risk devastation by hosting them, their problem. I doubt it would have taken much effort to see the troublemakers dead after that.
Allies are not so the US can be defended - you can try to convince yourself of that, but it was never true. Allies were to prevent the European powers from Finlandizing towards the Soviets during the Cold War, which is why NATO is pointless now. The US doesn't need allies to defend itself. Nuclear umbrella + navy the size of the next three challengers. The rest is just gravy.
Yes, not invading Afghanistan would have been smarter than doing what we did.
Pulling out now would be smarter than what we are going to do.
In 2001, nuking the country until the mountains melted and the sands glowed for 100 years would have been the correct response to an attack on a few thousand civilians emanating from there. The reason why asymmetric warfare has been so popular for the last 75 years or so is that the pinprick attacks weren't mass attacks (mostly) and weren't targeted at civilians (mostly). Therefore, there was no ambiguity about whether nuclear deterrence would be invoked. No sane person is going to nuke the enemy over 50 people getting killed in an engagement in Vietnam or the Middle East. However, if you don't respond with the deterrent when 2500 or so are killed, and the two biggest buildings in the biggest city in North America are destroyed, along with a fifth or so of the headquarters of your armed forces and a (foiled) attack on the President's residence, no one will believe you will ever use that deterrent. It broke the asymmetry and exposed that the emperor had no clothes.
There was a golden opportunity to make an example and shut down the spate of terrorist attacks cold. No country will tolerate attacks emanating from its soil if they feel that that might be the response. Instead, we have the endless war and the constant flow of body bags into Dover AFB. Until we finally have to use the deterrent in a less appealing place. It will happen - and because Bush was either a pussy or didn't even consider the option, those in the future will have to face the very unpalatable choice of nuking an actually important part of the world, and perhaps absorbing a warhead or ten in return as retaliation.
Oh, and the big screens. I'm sure that is a selling point.
I will point out that the Samsung phones we see here in the US are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the (dumb and smart) phones available in Asia. HTC didn't seem to have much of a leg in the Korean or Japanese markets, as far as I could tell.
The HTC phone I had was fragile and the updating was near-nonexistent. Show me how many PC clone makers from the 1980s are still alive today - Dell, is Gateway still in business? and that's it. The market was going to consolidate and they weren't paying attention to the future.
In addition, no one has demonstrated much of a market in VR equipment yet.
An advertising toolkit with malware embedded in it...yes, you haven't been captured by the system at all. I bought a phone and now it's ok to include advertising toolkits with embedded malware in the applications on it without my knowledge. The vendor of the phone knows this, but won't tell anyone which ones to avoid, to protect their bottom line instead of the users.
Disclosure is always the right move. This is just another data point on the "Google is Evil" path to hell.
Google's bottom line must be pummeled, as a result.
People I trust have flown into certain countries with literal pallets full of cash and were handing it out in bank wrap to local warlords as the price for their forbearance. Like, soldiers - not CIA agents or USAID people.
Regardless if you used a payment card or not, the very act of giving these people money IS corrupt, by any Western standard. But it's how business is transacted there. If you don't pay them, body bags come home unnecessarily. So your definition of 'wasted' money may not be adequate to cover the situation.
As usual, you're ignoring intent, which is the reason the insane aren't held accountable for their actions. That makes the whole presentation invalid on its face.
Unborn life is presumed innocent since it hasn't done anything yet. No harm to anyone else - and this is divorced from any religious beliefs, as I have none except snuff means snuff and we die forever. If you believe in judging people by the sum total of their actions, it makes sense to exempt the unborn from that.
And you wonder why we hate Clintons - most of you probably don't even remember this shit, and this was only the nth of the sleazy Clintons had been up to.
The families would probably be less dysfunctional if forced to stay together because then one of the parents would likely be looking out for the kids. Leaving it to the mother alone, especially in the absent of older generation supports, is a recipe for disaster. Single point of failure.
I disagree about the black/white thing. It mostly only looks that way because more blacks (in proportion to their 13% of the population) come into contact with law enforcement. As for why, see above for a big reason.
There is mistreatment, but the Mad Max mentality of the cities doesn't increase cops' tenderness and love, to put it mildly. You're not going to get kinder, gentler policing out of a shitty situation like city police departments face today. Civilian review boards and harsh punishments aren't going to fix it either, else they would have already. You want nice, go to the suburbs. If you want it in the cities, fix the socioeconomic problem and reconstitute families.
There's also a huge racial bias in the crime statistics, and it isn't all 'racist cops', either. Probably very little of it actually comes down to race.
The USG does its best to keep this information away from people, but the real story here is that you have to stop thinking of people on racial lines and start thinking socioeconomic differences. As soon as you do that, you realize the most important data point about crime in the US. It's all concentrated in the cities. There is virtually no class of crime that isn't concentrated in the urban areas.
So how does the USG cloud this state of affairs? By grouping metropolitan areas together in statistics, so that you can't see the stark differences between crime rates in expensive suburbs or nearby inner cities. I suppose this serves some sort of political purpose, but to me it is murky. Will the proles rebel if they know their cities are full of crime and the whiter than white suburb isn't? I doubt it.
The reason why race figures into it is the overall poor socioeconomic status of particular minorities. Meaning there is much more chance that they will be LIVING in said cities.
A primary reason why crime is concentrated in the cities is NOT the socioeconomic status of the people committing the crimes. Despite how seemingly 'obvious' this is, people who are poor aren't automatically criminals, in fact quite the opposite in most cases. The poor are probably more law-abiding in the overall than their wealthier cousins. No, the actual reason is that the cities have social services, and that attracts people with mental problems. It's the reason why cities have bag ladies and homeless people all around. There's no way they'd go to redneck land - there is no shelter there. No free food. Maybe Medicaid at most.
Then you have the corollary impact of the social services - dysfunctional families that don't stick together because there are perverse economic incentives not to. So you have a population of ready-made juvenile future criminals who don't have adequate parental supervision because of poorly designed benefit programs that were supposed to help, but only hinder.
The cops in this are rather neutral. First, most city forces are heavily mixed-race by this point. This isn't LA in the 1980s anymore. Second, the cops are mostly just trying to get to the pension age and get out. The legal environment for cops in most cities has been toxic for at least 25 years. Careers end instantly. If they wanted to be a badass, they went to work for a suburban force. If they could get a job there.
Blaming the cops seems to be convenient, but it's not true and it solves nothing. I advocate all white cops leaving city forces. When the city forces are 100% minority, then let's hear about how racism is the issue. There are real problems that aren't even being considered and will continue to fester until they are addressed directly.
If you don't want nude shots of you on the internet, don't send out nude shots to people you don't know and can't trust.
Oh wait, everyone today is a fucking moron and believes that they should be protected from self-interested actions by others while pursuing their own self-interested actions with impunity. Forgot about that. So all the attention whores get to send out their pics to get their attention fix, and rest assured that they got destroyed as they wished by the flaming assholes that are paying attention to them.
Everyone is a shitbird, including your parents some of the time. News at 11. So I don't feel even a little sorry for anyone on that site.
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid. This is why most people don't work very hard - they've already grokked this and don't feel it worthwhile to attempt to find the places where they might have to work to get more money. They are comfortable with what they have, apparently.
If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.
I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in anything anymore - not for the last 25 years, at least. But I do have a firm axiom - those who are constraining free expression are always wrong. I was right about the Christian conservatives of my youth and i'm right about the SJWs, too.
The same crew that claims traditional religion is horseshit has created their own called secular humanism. And it will brook no dissent.
The asshole SJWs today differ only in their detailed views from the bible-thumping televangelists of the 70s and 80s. The utter intolerance and willingness to use political force to get their way is identical.
Slashdot Mirror
The objective wasn't to kill them. The objective is deterrence. If another country wanted to risk devastation by hosting them, their problem. I doubt it would have taken much effort to see the troublemakers dead after that.
Allies are not so the US can be defended - you can try to convince yourself of that, but it was never true. Allies were to prevent the European powers from Finlandizing towards the Soviets during the Cold War, which is why NATO is pointless now. The US doesn't need allies to defend itself. Nuclear umbrella + navy the size of the next three challengers. The rest is just gravy.
Complete disagreement.
Preemptively nuking a practically defenseless country happened in 1945. People understood we'd use the things then. They don't now.
Deterrence involves fear. You're being a pussy like Bush was. Pussies get beaten up in the schoolyard.
Yes, not invading Afghanistan would have been smarter than doing what we did.
Pulling out now would be smarter than what we are going to do.
In 2001, nuking the country until the mountains melted and the sands glowed for 100 years would have been the correct response to an attack on a few thousand civilians emanating from there. The reason why asymmetric warfare has been so popular for the last 75 years or so is that the pinprick attacks weren't mass attacks (mostly) and weren't targeted at civilians (mostly). Therefore, there was no ambiguity about whether nuclear deterrence would be invoked. No sane person is going to nuke the enemy over 50 people getting killed in an engagement in Vietnam or the Middle East. However, if you don't respond with the deterrent when 2500 or so are killed, and the two biggest buildings in the biggest city in North America are destroyed, along with a fifth or so of the headquarters of your armed forces and a (foiled) attack on the President's residence, no one will believe you will ever use that deterrent. It broke the asymmetry and exposed that the emperor had no clothes.
There was a golden opportunity to make an example and shut down the spate of terrorist attacks cold. No country will tolerate attacks emanating from its soil if they feel that that might be the response. Instead, we have the endless war and the constant flow of body bags into Dover AFB. Until we finally have to use the deterrent in a less appealing place. It will happen - and because Bush was either a pussy or didn't even consider the option, those in the future will have to face the very unpalatable choice of nuking an actually important part of the world, and perhaps absorbing a warhead or ten in return as retaliation.
see title
Oh, and the big screens. I'm sure that is a selling point.
I will point out that the Samsung phones we see here in the US are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the (dumb and smart) phones available in Asia. HTC didn't seem to have much of a leg in the Korean or Japanese markets, as far as I could tell.
The HTC phone I had was fragile and the updating was near-nonexistent. Show me how many PC clone makers from the 1980s are still alive today - Dell, is Gateway still in business? and that's it. The market was going to consolidate and they weren't paying attention to the future.
In addition, no one has demonstrated much of a market in VR equipment yet.
An advertising toolkit with malware embedded in it...yes, you haven't been captured by the system at all. I bought a phone and now it's ok to include advertising toolkits with embedded malware in the applications on it without my knowledge. The vendor of the phone knows this, but won't tell anyone which ones to avoid, to protect their bottom line instead of the users.
Disclosure is always the right move. This is just another data point on the "Google is Evil" path to hell.
Google's bottom line must be pummeled, as a result.
He was more like a fellow traveler, methinks. They can't possibly have paid him enough money to sell his soul like that, 15 years ago.
People I trust have flown into certain countries with literal pallets full of cash and were handing it out in bank wrap to local warlords as the price for their forbearance. Like, soldiers - not CIA agents or USAID people.
Regardless if you used a payment card or not, the very act of giving these people money IS corrupt, by any Western standard. But it's how business is transacted there. If you don't pay them, body bags come home unnecessarily. So your definition of 'wasted' money may not be adequate to cover the situation.
Their app store is riddled with malware and they won't identify the malware. That really engenders trust and makes me want to use their stuff.
I go for least evil. Consider Google the ninth layer of Hell. Apple is near the second layer and Microsoft is unusable, don't bother. ;-)
And hence, evil. Therefore, I won't be using it.
As usual, you're ignoring intent, which is the reason the insane aren't held accountable for their actions. That makes the whole presentation invalid on its face.
Injecting religion into it is a nonsequitur.
Unborn life is presumed innocent since it hasn't done anything yet. No harm to anyone else - and this is divorced from any religious beliefs, as I have none except snuff means snuff and we die forever. If you believe in judging people by the sum total of their actions, it makes sense to exempt the unborn from that.
Clinton accepted huge donations from Chinese sources during the 1996 campaign and was forced to return most of them post-campaign.
Imagine Trump firing Rosenstein for appointing a special counsel. That's a fair summation of the Clinton administration's response to this.
And you wonder why we hate Clintons - most of you probably don't even remember this shit, and this was only the nth of the sleazy Clintons had been up to.
The families would probably be less dysfunctional if forced to stay together because then one of the parents would likely be looking out for the kids. Leaving it to the mother alone, especially in the absent of older generation supports, is a recipe for disaster. Single point of failure.
I disagree about the black/white thing. It mostly only looks that way because more blacks (in proportion to their 13% of the population) come into contact with law enforcement. As for why, see above for a big reason.
There is mistreatment, but the Mad Max mentality of the cities doesn't increase cops' tenderness and love, to put it mildly. You're not going to get kinder, gentler policing out of a shitty situation like city police departments face today. Civilian review boards and harsh punishments aren't going to fix it either, else they would have already. You want nice, go to the suburbs. If you want it in the cities, fix the socioeconomic problem and reconstitute families.
There's also a huge racial bias in the crime statistics, and it isn't all 'racist cops', either. Probably very little of it actually comes down to race.
The USG does its best to keep this information away from people, but the real story here is that you have to stop thinking of people on racial lines and start thinking socioeconomic differences. As soon as you do that, you realize the most important data point about crime in the US. It's all concentrated in the cities. There is virtually no class of crime that isn't concentrated in the urban areas.
So how does the USG cloud this state of affairs? By grouping metropolitan areas together in statistics, so that you can't see the stark differences between crime rates in expensive suburbs or nearby inner cities. I suppose this serves some sort of political purpose, but to me it is murky. Will the proles rebel if they know their cities are full of crime and the whiter than white suburb isn't? I doubt it.
The reason why race figures into it is the overall poor socioeconomic status of particular minorities. Meaning there is much more chance that they will be LIVING in said cities.
A primary reason why crime is concentrated in the cities is NOT the socioeconomic status of the people committing the crimes. Despite how seemingly 'obvious' this is, people who are poor aren't automatically criminals, in fact quite the opposite in most cases. The poor are probably more law-abiding in the overall than their wealthier cousins. No, the actual reason is that the cities have social services, and that attracts people with mental problems. It's the reason why cities have bag ladies and homeless people all around. There's no way they'd go to redneck land - there is no shelter there. No free food. Maybe Medicaid at most.
Then you have the corollary impact of the social services - dysfunctional families that don't stick together because there are perverse economic incentives not to. So you have a population of ready-made juvenile future criminals who don't have adequate parental supervision because of poorly designed benefit programs that were supposed to help, but only hinder.
The cops in this are rather neutral. First, most city forces are heavily mixed-race by this point. This isn't LA in the 1980s anymore. Second, the cops are mostly just trying to get to the pension age and get out. The legal environment for cops in most cities has been toxic for at least 25 years. Careers end instantly. If they wanted to be a badass, they went to work for a suburban force. If they could get a job there.
Blaming the cops seems to be convenient, but it's not true and it solves nothing. I advocate all white cops leaving city forces. When the city forces are 100% minority, then let's hear about how racism is the issue. There are real problems that aren't even being considered and will continue to fester until they are addressed directly.
No one would even know Discord was being used in such a way unless they opened their mouths like this.
More important than doing the right thing, which is to ignore them.
What's wrong with the world today, in a nutshell.
I skimmed the site. It's mostly selfies.
If you don't want nude shots of you on the internet, don't send out nude shots to people you don't know and can't trust.
Oh wait, everyone today is a fucking moron and believes that they should be protected from self-interested actions by others while pursuing their own self-interested actions with impunity. Forgot about that. So all the attention whores get to send out their pics to get their attention fix, and rest assured that they got destroyed as they wished by the flaming assholes that are paying attention to them.
Everyone is a shitbird, including your parents some of the time. News at 11. So I don't feel even a little sorry for anyone on that site.
You can use modifiers to make much more repellent curses than single word expletives.
I'd run out of comment space before i'd get done with describing the issue, but i'll leave you with two words: Jayson Blair.
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid. This is why most people don't work very hard - they've already grokked this and don't feel it worthwhile to attempt to find the places where they might have to work to get more money. They are comfortable with what they have, apparently.
If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.
I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in anything anymore - not for the last 25 years, at least. But I do have a firm axiom - those who are constraining free expression are always wrong. I was right about the Christian conservatives of my youth and i'm right about the SJWs, too.
The same crew that claims traditional religion is horseshit has created their own called secular humanism. And it will brook no dissent.
The asshole SJWs today differ only in their detailed views from the bible-thumping televangelists of the 70s and 80s. The utter intolerance and willingness to use political force to get their way is identical.