No. The folks who believe in the rapture can read the Bible as well as anybody else, and in the last days, Christians will NOT be in control of governments. They will be an oppressed people, with the world against them. (One reason why it's called "rapture".) People like the grandparent who think Christians are a cancer will be doing the oppressing, by the way, in case you want to know what they'll look like.
These folks just believe what they believe, and they're fighting for what they think is right. You know, like a democracy or something. They get enough support to be elected and re-elected. Like a democracy or something. What we need are some more laws that prevent this kind of vicious democracy from working so minority whackjobs can have their way. Like statist fascism or something.
I've never understood the pants-wetting fear that you people have for Santorum. What has he said that indicates he wants to cram all women in a bag and send kids out to blow themselves up for Jesus?
Yet we now have enough tax money to give jobs to 10000 civil servants (assuming each one requires 100000 in salary, office rent, etc). Frankly, I'll happily make Bill Gates subsist at the millionaire level to create 10000 jobs.
You must be kidding. Now that you've got 10,000 civil servants, next those civil servants will each need secretaries, underlings, and copy boys. Government grows. It doesn't know how to do anything else. At some point, you have everybody in the country on the payroll of government, supported by one very overworked McDonald's employee.
The easiest way to increase jobs is to give government jobs to people. But government jobs don't obey market forces. They don't have to. So the government jobs aren't moving the economy forward, just leeching off the rest of us. Even jobs that should move the economy forward--such as pure research--isn't focussed on market forces. It's not even focussed on needs. It's focussed on politics, which if there's anything more ridiculous to base future planning on than the market it's politics. (This is why there is constant increases in AIDS research, when the disease is about as easily prevented as a disease can be.)
This has been answered, repeatedly. Afghanistan was an easy sell--they harbored Bin Laden with the complicity of an oppressive regime. We finished with Afghanistan. Who's next? Saudi Arabia? That's a harder sell. Iraq isn't. Saddam was a punk-ass, everybody knew he was a punk-ass, and we need to de-louse the Middle East. A nice fat democracy in the cradle of civilization would work nicely.
Now, parts of the world--the German and French parts, largely--didn't like the idea of going into Iraq for a lot of reasons, but the main one is because they were getting a fair amount of bling-bling from Iraq. Plus, they'd oppose anything the US did out of spite.
In this post-terrorist, post-9/11 world, playing patty-cake with terrorists is over, and playing patty-cake with dictatorships who have supported terrorism (which Iraq did--never mind listing the other countries who also support terrorism, Iraq belongs on that list as well) is over too.
So, to sum up: we hit Afghanistan to break up the command-and-control of al Queda as much as we can and eliminate the complicit Taliban gov't, replacing it with some fashion of a democracy. That takes care of 9/11, more or less. Now, we're fighting the second stage--terrorism in general. Who do you start with? Iraq is not only a state supporter of terrorism, they have a track record of being shits.
So, Iraq is not about 9/11 directly. It's mostly about generalized terrorism, and making headway in bringing the Middle East out of the 13th century. For all the Left's wild-eyed claims that the US is a terrorist state, terrorism doesn't thrive very well in places where there's a free people electing a representative government with a free press. That's what Iraq is about.
(Not that we can exactly broadcast this. Bush's theme of "freedom" is the best he can do. We need the Saudis to at least not directly oppose us, though part of the plan is certainly to uproot the regime there, though through slow osmosis with Iraq instead of Apache gunships blowing the pointy tops off Saudi palaces.)
(1) Those who don't know what to do because they like to learn new things, and will probably start five different businesses in fifteen years. These folks will succeed no matter the obstacles.
(2) Those who don't know what to do for the rest of their lives because they're utterly rudderless, and generally just follow whatever their friends do. These people will never succeed because they're too busy watching "Fear Factor: Playboy Edition" and playing sports games on their XBox.
The way you phrase this, it sounds like "rich people get better grades because they're rich" in a lefty-hippie-eat-the-rich way. I'd counter that the performance delta you see between high-and-low incomes in SAT scores is more accurately presented in the reverse: higher SATs indicates a greater liklihood of financial success.
In other, simpler, words, if you're smart, you're going to be more successful. No mater how much you wish that there were untapped geniuses in the ghetto, for the most part the people are in the ghetto because they're not all that smart. And more educational funding is not going to make them smart.
There will always be poor people. A lot of those poor people will be poor because they're not smart enough to know not to do poor people things, like rent-to-own furniture and using check-cashing oufits with confiscatory interest rates. Unfortunate? Yes. But it's not the fault of rich people that there are dumb poor people (except for the smart rich person who opened the check-cashing place--those people should be sterilized).
Others have covered it already. But the point should be reitereated--atheism is not a "third way", but atheists like to believe that they are the unbenighted keepers of the Truth, so I'm unsurprised by your statement.
A lot of important science raises serious questions that make people of many religions uncomfortable.
And a lot of religious questions make scientists uncomfortable as well, such as "If natural selection is so great, why are we actively working to protect untenable genes with doctors and opthamologists and boob-jobs?" Science, regardless of the high opinion its practitioners have of themselves, do not have all the answers.
I also take issue with this, though my point is more subtle here.
I take issue with the grandparent's point as well, but for different reasons. I believe that there are, sometimes, very simple, black and white issues. Abortion would be one of them. Is that mass of cells alive, or is it not? If it's alive, we have a responsibility to protect that life. Is it not alive? Then we can do what we want.
Almost every reasonable person would agree that mass of cells is certainly alive. Left unchecked, it will definitely be born just like any other baby, barring unfortunate events that are normally considered "tragedies", such as birth defects or stillbirth. Most people know this, but they want to have the option of killing that life when it becomes inconvenient, embarrassing, or otherwise less-than-ideal. They wrap this desire under the disingenuous label of "choice", and start talking about grey areas.
the thing he said that struck him about the United States was how everyone is so determined to be patrotic here.
The reason he's so amazed is because he doesn't much care for his own country, he can't imagine that there are people who do love their country.
The Anti-Patriotism Patriots always insinuate that American patriotism is half-ignorant jingoism. It never occurs to them that most of America really loves America. What a loony idea! People who think they are more "nuanced" (that's you) tend to think that America is a crappy country because we killed a lot of Indians, or we bombed Japan, or we didn't sign the Kyoto protocols, or whatever, and that patriotism for this crappy country must be some brain-washing caused by flags and country music. It's nothing of the sort. You hate America for your own reasons. A lot of the rest of America loves it. Their patriotism is no less real than your lack of it.
It wasn't the everywhere-stars-and-stripes that brought the U.S. together after 9/11
For most of the country, it was the flag; and prayers, love of our fellow citizens, anger at the attackers, and a dozen other things. We don't gather in groups and hold candles and pray for the victims of Hezbollah, or at least not that often. Why? Because they're Israelis! Who the fuck cares about Israelis? Israel does.
You sound like a secular humanist. Not surprising--I'd say most of Slashdot is inhabited by your ideological brothers. But as a group, you are very much distanced from a lot of Americans, and that realization makes you uncomfortable. So you label the opposition with such things as "unscientific" and "nationalism" in your quest to feel better about yourself. Which, ironically enough, is most certainly is a trait of humanity that is shared by all who are born of woman. Maybe we can all get together and sing Kumbaya on self-absorbtion one day--at least on that we can all agree.
And I kinda thought the internet and the dot-com boom would give nerds an edge in the political process...but I suppose we still actually have to get involved in the political process, which isn't nearly as much fun as hacking machines.
The only think I can discern from the "dot-com boom" is that the nerds are as gawd-awfully ignorant as the rest of the country.
I mean, sure--dumb people gave us Wrestlemania, but smart fuckers gave us the Bomb.
How on earth can you be undecided? I have never understood the "undecideds" that the media makes such a fuss over. Does that mean you have no opinion on the War on Terror? I choose that issue because it's an issue that cuts across every demographic possible, except for dead people, who can't vote anywhere except Chicago. Assuming you have an opinion, then which candidate meets your approval? Do you favor taking an aggressive, pre-emptive stance on terrorism and terrorists? Then G.W. is your man. Do you favor... well, whatever the hell it is that John Kerry stands for? Then vote for him. Simple!
This image of the archetype "undecided", who wanders into a voting booth and making up their mind with their democratic dick in their hand... well, that sounds EXACTLY like a stupid, uninformed voter who is more or less tossing a coin. These are the lame-brained fools and morons you DON'T want voting come November. They aren't "moderates" or "centrists"--they're ignoramuses. They don't know enough about the issues or the candidates to make an informed decision until they can't dither about it anymore.
We don't want these people anywhere near a ballot, ever.
If that is you, sir or madam, you need to stay home. The mechanics don't want you "helping" while they're under the hood, and the informed citizens don't want you invalidating their vote because you're fucking guessing.
(Your snide remark about how you assume most readers know something about the world around them is particularly ironic, coming from somebody who is undecided in what has to be the most polarized election since 1860.)
Here's what I think, and I'm pretty confident that I'm right. You don't like Bush because you've come to believe through pop-culture repetition that he's an idiot chimp; but you can't bear to vote for Kerry, because he's obviously some kind of space-alien in a Lurch costume. So rather than say "I don't know who to vote for because the winds of popularity have not coalesced behind one cadidate with such force that I can feel comfort in joining the bandwagon, so I call myself an 'undecided' instead."
Yeah, he may be the poorest of the bunch, but he still has more money than I will ever see in my life...
... your juvenile, defeatist attitude is why Bush will always have more money than you. Is this how you get laid, too? "I'm never going to pick up chicks, I might as well jack-off!"
Of course, you could be a congenital idiot. In which case, yes, Bush will always have more money than you. The squeegee guy at the full-serve pump will have more money than you. Wait, don't tell me... you smoke dope, too, don't you?
Ooh, cool! If you can ignore an environmental impact because the environment that is impacted is so large and resilient, we can put to rest the bogus science that is "global warming". Do you know how big the fucking Earth is? It's huge. We can pump car exhaust and cow farts until the, ahh, cows come home and not make much of a dent. Because the Earth, she is huge. When you take into account the real benefits of an industrial society--computers that remember for us, cool cars to pick up chicks, microwavable pizza that doesn't taste like a gym sock, and babies that don't die of diarrhea in a God-forsaken hellhole in damned-to-hell Absurdistan--the environmental impact gets lost in the noise.
No, not persecuted. They're called, in equal proportions, baby-killers, gay-bashers, eager-polluters, chickenhawks, war-mongers, racists, and Swiftian-like in their anti-poor attitudes.
Persecution? No, not persecuted. They're not put in cages, like gorillas, or denied ballot access. Baseless name-calling, borderline libel and slander, and various other ad hominem attacks abound, though. I'm not all that offended if some people classify that as "persecution", however--we are quite spoiled in America these days, due no doubt to the extreme unfairness inherent to our religio-capitalistic oppressive culture. When the biggest threats to your free speech involve the possible inability to access goatse.cx from the public library, it's possible that some people might exaggerate the nuances.
So, tell me. Do you think that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are being persecuted? After all, they've gotten close to zero media time on their well-documented charges, and have instead been accused of being Republican apparachniks by everybody from Dan Rather on down. Contrast this to the Bush-AWOL story that had legs for two weeks, which was based on the careful accretion of no facts at all. A serious charge has been made against Kerry--where are the defenders of the truth? They're poking into the Internet postings of the authors of a book and ignoring the charge altogether.
I don't understand. Why did you make up an acronym and then Spell It Out? Are you hoping that IDLITUS is going to become a new Slashdot meme whereby all the dirty foreigners start prefacing their replies to stories that are US-centric with this moniker?
(Now, to be sure, I'm in favor of this if it should take off. It's injecting fresh honesty into life; similar to--indeed exactly like--people coming up to you to share their opinions but opening with, "Now, I'm an ignorant fool and I'm full of shit..." So should it spread like wildfire, I will support this new tradition.)
I have the same problem with IANARP (I Am Not A Random Profession)--IANA is perfectly adequate, if you want to make yourself look like a 'Net-centric asshole, or a pre-teen AOL Instant Messenger addict. Simply tag the profession you want to claim to not be at the end, and you've got sentence that is reasonably parseable. But this bastard Frankenstein you've created? As far as I can tell (AFAICT), you tried and failed to make a lick of damn sense.
Way to go--not only are you a goddamn nerd, you can't count, either. My guess is you've used the brain-pan space that normally handles math to store the secret identities of Bizarro Earth's heros.
Let's do remedial math for Captain Nerd here: I was replying to a poster, which makes your post the grandparent. One, two, three. Got it, Brainiac? Damn, bet you wished you'd used the "Preview" now, don't you?
(See, I remember quite a lot from the 1980s, but it mostly concerns reading, writing and simple math. Gosh, how devestated I am that I haven't memorized the Marvel Comics timeline instead!)
Here's a life-changing clue. I offer it free of charge, no need to thank me, I'm the soul of generosity. Being a sci-fi/comic/anime fanatic does not make you special. It means you have poor prioritization skills, but in our wealthy Western culture you can perhaps be forgiven for that. Do not confuse knowing trivialities with being smart, as I goddamn know that you do. Appropriating "nerd" and "geek" to mean "smart" seems to be a hazing ritual here on Slashdot, required before you can get your membership card and your Perl decoder ring, but it's nothing more than self-delusion. You weren't ostracized in high school because you were smart. You were ostracized because you were tiresome, annoying, and obsessed with fucking comic books. Likely ugly as sin, too, but if homosexuality has taught us nothing else, it has shown that even crater-faces can find a warm place to put it. That's free sexual role modelling so you can take refuge in the weakest of your "points"; I even brought gaydom in, just because I'm nice like that.
I look forward to your post where you cry, "yOu DuNt KnO mE!!!!!!1". In fact, I have a private bet on it.
Jesus, neither you nor the grandparent have ever seen so much as an erect nipple that wasn't first penciled in, have you?
The only more embarrassingly geeky than knowing the pseudo-science rationale for a panoply of "alternate" Earths to account for a superhero per-capita ratio that equals that of "reality" TV fans is to be impressed that somebody knows this irrelevant trival bullshit.
(If you were being sarcastic, you're still a shit because sarcasm is the demesne of the Comic Book Guy, who is also a shit.)
That would be true only if we conquered, say, Canada. When you get rid of a dictator like Saddam who liked to boil babies for fun, it's going to be better by default.
Are you going to argue that Iraq is completely borked? I'd like to see your evidence of this. And, no, "the rest of the world subscribe to this view" is not proof, especially when "the rest of the world" is a completely bogus claim. At best you can say that the "rest of the world" is divided, not counting Germany and France who were major beneficiaries of the corruption in Iraq.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that Iraq is substantially worse off now than it was pre-war. (You may notice that the accusations of "quagmire" started right after the embedded reporters were pulled out.)
Only if you're a dusky heathen bent on killing the Great Satan, captured with a gun in your hand on a battlefield.
Come on... this is Insightful? It's bullshit. You can't point to a line of innocent red-blooded Americans waiting to be interred in Gitmo. You can't show where the Evil American Government raided libraries across the nation to round up every person who checked out Dude, Where's My Country?. All you've got is vague accusations and wildly speculative imaginations that prominently feature black helicopters.
And now, the Other Side to Circuit City, for balance.
I was shopping for a new TV. I found the one I wanted at Circuit City, a 27 inch JVC, and promptly bought it. When the grunt-monkeys brought the box out, I noticed that the box was opened. Later I found that the remote was loose, banging around inside the box, not wrapped in plastic. In other words, I was sold a returned TV as new.
Actually, I didn't care at the time. Maybe it was refurbed, maybe the customer had buyers remorse, blah blah blah. So I took it home. The TV failed later that day. I brought it back to Circuit City, got the manager out of his hole, and explained--calmly--that I was not impressed with this and asked how he was going to make it right. Manager-jackhole says that they don't have any more of that TV in stock, but that they would sell me the floor model at a discount. 10% discount.
Pah! I explained that I had just been sold a USED TV as NEW by his crack sales staff; that I was a single male with a lot of disposable income; that I am the go-to guy for literally dozens of people who want to know what and where to buy stuff. He didn't move off his position.
So, I got my money back and found the same TV at Service Merchandise for $15 cheaper. Fuck Circuit City. Fuck them with a bandsaw.
Slashdot Mirror
These folks just believe what they believe, and they're fighting for what they think is right. You know, like a democracy or something. They get enough support to be elected and re-elected. Like a democracy or something. What we need are some more laws that prevent this kind of vicious democracy from working so minority whackjobs can have their way. Like statist fascism or something.
I've never understood the pants-wetting fear that you people have for Santorum. What has he said that indicates he wants to cram all women in a bag and send kids out to blow themselves up for Jesus?
You must be kidding. Now that you've got 10,000 civil servants, next those civil servants will each need secretaries, underlings, and copy boys. Government grows. It doesn't know how to do anything else. At some point, you have everybody in the country on the payroll of government, supported by one very overworked McDonald's employee.
The easiest way to increase jobs is to give government jobs to people. But government jobs don't obey market forces. They don't have to. So the government jobs aren't moving the economy forward, just leeching off the rest of us. Even jobs that should move the economy forward--such as pure research--isn't focussed on market forces. It's not even focussed on needs. It's focussed on politics, which if there's anything more ridiculous to base future planning on than the market it's politics. (This is why there is constant increases in AIDS research, when the disease is about as easily prevented as a disease can be.)
This has been answered, repeatedly. Afghanistan was an easy sell--they harbored Bin Laden with the complicity of an oppressive regime. We finished with Afghanistan. Who's next? Saudi Arabia? That's a harder sell. Iraq isn't. Saddam was a punk-ass, everybody knew he was a punk-ass, and we need to de-louse the Middle East. A nice fat democracy in the cradle of civilization would work nicely.
Now, parts of the world--the German and French parts, largely--didn't like the idea of going into Iraq for a lot of reasons, but the main one is because they were getting a fair amount of bling-bling from Iraq. Plus, they'd oppose anything the US did out of spite.
In this post-terrorist, post-9/11 world, playing patty-cake with terrorists is over, and playing patty-cake with dictatorships who have supported terrorism (which Iraq did--never mind listing the other countries who also support terrorism, Iraq belongs on that list as well) is over too.
So, to sum up: we hit Afghanistan to break up the command-and-control of al Queda as much as we can and eliminate the complicit Taliban gov't, replacing it with some fashion of a democracy. That takes care of 9/11, more or less. Now, we're fighting the second stage--terrorism in general. Who do you start with? Iraq is not only a state supporter of terrorism, they have a track record of being shits.
So, Iraq is not about 9/11 directly. It's mostly about generalized terrorism, and making headway in bringing the Middle East out of the 13th century. For all the Left's wild-eyed claims that the US is a terrorist state, terrorism doesn't thrive very well in places where there's a free people electing a representative government with a free press. That's what Iraq is about.
(Not that we can exactly broadcast this. Bush's theme of "freedom" is the best he can do. We need the Saudis to at least not directly oppose us, though part of the plan is certainly to uproot the regime there, though through slow osmosis with Iraq instead of Apache gunships blowing the pointy tops off Saudi palaces.)
(1) Those who don't know what to do because they like to learn new things, and will probably start five different businesses in fifteen years. These folks will succeed no matter the obstacles.
(2) Those who don't know what to do for the rest of their lives because they're utterly rudderless, and generally just follow whatever their friends do. These people will never succeed because they're too busy watching "Fear Factor: Playboy Edition" and playing sports games on their XBox.
The way you phrase this, it sounds like "rich people get better grades because they're rich" in a lefty-hippie-eat-the-rich way. I'd counter that the performance delta you see between high-and-low incomes in SAT scores is more accurately presented in the reverse: higher SATs indicates a greater liklihood of financial success.
In other, simpler, words, if you're smart, you're going to be more successful. No mater how much you wish that there were untapped geniuses in the ghetto, for the most part the people are in the ghetto because they're not all that smart. And more educational funding is not going to make them smart.
There will always be poor people. A lot of those poor people will be poor because they're not smart enough to know not to do poor people things, like rent-to-own furniture and using check-cashing oufits with confiscatory interest rates. Unfortunate? Yes. But it's not the fault of rich people that there are dumb poor people (except for the smart rich person who opened the check-cashing place--those people should be sterilized).
against atheism, which is not a religion
Others have covered it already. But the point should be reitereated--atheism is not a "third way", but atheists like to believe that they are the unbenighted keepers of the Truth, so I'm unsurprised by your statement.
A lot of important science raises serious questions that make people of many religions uncomfortable.
And a lot of religious questions make scientists uncomfortable as well, such as "If natural selection is so great, why are we actively working to protect untenable genes with doctors and opthamologists and boob-jobs?" Science, regardless of the high opinion its practitioners have of themselves, do not have all the answers.
But it should still be taught, undistorted.
But it's not being taught, undistorted. If your "science" requires NewSpeak in order to make sense, I question its value.
I also take issue with this, though my point is more subtle here.
I take issue with the grandparent's point as well, but for different reasons. I believe that there are, sometimes, very simple, black and white issues. Abortion would be one of them. Is that mass of cells alive, or is it not? If it's alive, we have a responsibility to protect that life. Is it not alive? Then we can do what we want.
Almost every reasonable person would agree that mass of cells is certainly alive. Left unchecked, it will definitely be born just like any other baby, barring unfortunate events that are normally considered "tragedies", such as birth defects or stillbirth. Most people know this, but they want to have the option of killing that life when it becomes inconvenient, embarrassing, or otherwise less-than-ideal. They wrap this desire under the disingenuous label of "choice", and start talking about grey areas.
the thing he said that struck him about the United States was how everyone is so determined to be patrotic here.
The reason he's so amazed is because he doesn't much care for his own country, he can't imagine that there are people who do love their country.
The Anti-Patriotism Patriots always insinuate that American patriotism is half-ignorant jingoism. It never occurs to them that most of America really loves America. What a loony idea! People who think they are more "nuanced" (that's you) tend to think that America is a crappy country because we killed a lot of Indians, or we bombed Japan, or we didn't sign the Kyoto protocols, or whatever, and that patriotism for this crappy country must be some brain-washing caused by flags and country music. It's nothing of the sort. You hate America for your own reasons. A lot of the rest of America loves it. Their patriotism is no less real than your lack of it.
It wasn't the everywhere-stars-and-stripes that brought the U.S. together after 9/11
For most of the country, it was the flag; and prayers, love of our fellow citizens, anger at the attackers, and a dozen other things. We don't gather in groups and hold candles and pray for the victims of Hezbollah, or at least not that often. Why? Because they're Israelis! Who the fuck cares about Israelis? Israel does.
You sound like a secular humanist. Not surprising--I'd say most of Slashdot is inhabited by your ideological brothers. But as a group, you are very much distanced from a lot of Americans, and that realization makes you uncomfortable. So you label the opposition with such things as "unscientific" and "nationalism" in your quest to feel better about yourself. Which, ironically enough, is most certainly is a trait of humanity that is shared by all who are born of woman. Maybe we can all get together and sing Kumbaya on self-absorbtion one day--at least on that we can all agree.
The only think I can discern from the "dot-com boom" is that the nerds are as gawd-awfully ignorant as the rest of the country.
I mean, sure--dumb people gave us Wrestlemania, but smart fuckers gave us the Bomb.
How on earth can you be undecided? I have never understood the "undecideds" that the media makes such a fuss over. Does that mean you have no opinion on the War on Terror? I choose that issue because it's an issue that cuts across every demographic possible, except for dead people, who can't vote anywhere except Chicago. Assuming you have an opinion, then which candidate meets your approval? Do you favor taking an aggressive, pre-emptive stance on terrorism and terrorists? Then G.W. is your man. Do you favor... well, whatever the hell it is that John Kerry stands for? Then vote for him. Simple!
This image of the archetype "undecided", who wanders into a voting booth and making up their mind with their democratic dick in their hand... well, that sounds EXACTLY like a stupid, uninformed voter who is more or less tossing a coin. These are the lame-brained fools and morons you DON'T want voting come November. They aren't "moderates" or "centrists"--they're ignoramuses. They don't know enough about the issues or the candidates to make an informed decision until they can't dither about it anymore.
We don't want these people anywhere near a ballot, ever.
If that is you, sir or madam, you need to stay home. The mechanics don't want you "helping" while they're under the hood, and the informed citizens don't want you invalidating their vote because you're fucking guessing.
(Your snide remark about how you assume most readers know something about the world around them is particularly ironic, coming from somebody who is undecided in what has to be the most polarized election since 1860.)
Here's what I think, and I'm pretty confident that I'm right. You don't like Bush because you've come to believe through pop-culture repetition that he's an idiot chimp; but you can't bear to vote for Kerry, because he's obviously some kind of space-alien in a Lurch costume. So rather than say "I don't know who to vote for because the winds of popularity have not coalesced behind one cadidate with such force that I can feel comfort in joining the bandwagon, so I call myself an 'undecided' instead."
Well, that, and the fact he's a fat, drunk, ultra-left wingnut shithead. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
Oh, and throw Jerry Doyle in the "smart people in Hollywood" bin. Michael Garibaldi kicks ass.
... your juvenile, defeatist attitude is why Bush will always have more money than you. Is this how you get laid, too? "I'm never going to pick up chicks, I might as well jack-off!"
Of course, you could be a congenital idiot. In which case, yes, Bush will always have more money than you. The squeegee guy at the full-serve pump will have more money than you. Wait, don't tell me... you smoke dope, too, don't you?
About time this was acknowledged!
Persecution? No, not persecuted. They're not put in cages, like gorillas, or denied ballot access. Baseless name-calling, borderline libel and slander, and various other ad hominem attacks abound, though. I'm not all that offended if some people classify that as "persecution", however--we are quite spoiled in America these days, due no doubt to the extreme unfairness inherent to our religio-capitalistic oppressive culture. When the biggest threats to your free speech involve the possible inability to access goatse.cx from the public library, it's possible that some people might exaggerate the nuances.
So, tell me. Do you think that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are being persecuted? After all, they've gotten close to zero media time on their well-documented charges, and have instead been accused of being Republican apparachniks by everybody from Dan Rather on down. Contrast this to the Bush-AWOL story that had legs for two weeks, which was based on the careful accretion of no facts at all. A serious charge has been made against Kerry--where are the defenders of the truth? They're poking into the Internet postings of the authors of a book and ignoring the charge altogether.
(Now, to be sure, I'm in favor of this if it should take off. It's injecting fresh honesty into life; similar to--indeed exactly like--people coming up to you to share their opinions but opening with, "Now, I'm an ignorant fool and I'm full of shit..." So should it spread like wildfire, I will support this new tradition.)
I have the same problem with IANARP (I Am Not A Random Profession)--IANA is perfectly adequate, if you want to make yourself look like a 'Net-centric asshole, or a pre-teen AOL Instant Messenger addict. Simply tag the profession you want to claim to not be at the end, and you've got sentence that is reasonably parseable. But this bastard Frankenstein you've created? As far as I can tell (AFAICT), you tried and failed to make a lick of damn sense.
Way to go--not only are you a goddamn nerd, you can't count, either. My guess is you've used the brain-pan space that normally handles math to store the secret identities of Bizarro Earth's heros.
Let's do remedial math for Captain Nerd here: I was replying to a poster, which makes your post the grandparent. One, two, three. Got it, Brainiac? Damn, bet you wished you'd used the "Preview" now, don't you?
(See, I remember quite a lot from the 1980s, but it mostly concerns reading, writing and simple math. Gosh, how devestated I am that I haven't memorized the Marvel Comics timeline instead!)
Here's a life-changing clue. I offer it free of charge, no need to thank me, I'm the soul of generosity. Being a sci-fi/comic/anime fanatic does not make you special. It means you have poor prioritization skills, but in our wealthy Western culture you can perhaps be forgiven for that. Do not confuse knowing trivialities with being smart, as I goddamn know that you do. Appropriating "nerd" and "geek" to mean "smart" seems to be a hazing ritual here on Slashdot, required before you can get your membership card and your Perl decoder ring, but it's nothing more than self-delusion. You weren't ostracized in high school because you were smart. You were ostracized because you were tiresome, annoying, and obsessed with fucking comic books. Likely ugly as sin, too, but if homosexuality has taught us nothing else, it has shown that even crater-faces can find a warm place to put it. That's free sexual role modelling so you can take refuge in the weakest of your "points"; I even brought gaydom in, just because I'm nice like that.
I look forward to your post where you cry, "yOu DuNt KnO mE!!!!!!1". In fact, I have a private bet on it.
Krull rocked, you ass.
The only more embarrassingly geeky than knowing the pseudo-science rationale for a panoply of "alternate" Earths to account for a superhero per-capita ratio that equals that of "reality" TV fans is to be impressed that somebody knows this irrelevant trival bullshit.
(If you were being sarcastic, you're still a shit because sarcasm is the demesne of the Comic Book Guy, who is also a shit.)
That would be true only if we conquered, say, Canada. When you get rid of a dictator like Saddam who liked to boil babies for fun, it's going to be better by default.
Yah. Man, I'd love to be in a country whose government feared the people so much they took away their firearms.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that Iraq is substantially worse off now than it was pre-war. (You may notice that the accusations of "quagmire" started right after the embedded reporters were pulled out.)
Only if you're a dusky heathen bent on killing the Great Satan, captured with a gun in your hand on a battlefield.
Come on... this is Insightful? It's bullshit. You can't point to a line of innocent red-blooded Americans waiting to be interred in Gitmo. You can't show where the Evil American Government raided libraries across the nation to round up every person who checked out Dude, Where's My Country?. All you've got is vague accusations and wildly speculative imaginations that prominently feature black helicopters.
You're welcome to try. I'd like to see if your email made it past Mail.app's junk-mail filter. I'm guessing no.
I was shopping for a new TV. I found the one I wanted at Circuit City, a 27 inch JVC, and promptly bought it. When the grunt-monkeys brought the box out, I noticed that the box was opened. Later I found that the remote was loose, banging around inside the box, not wrapped in plastic. In other words, I was sold a returned TV as new.
Actually, I didn't care at the time. Maybe it was refurbed, maybe the customer had buyers remorse, blah blah blah. So I took it home. The TV failed later that day. I brought it back to Circuit City, got the manager out of his hole, and explained--calmly--that I was not impressed with this and asked how he was going to make it right. Manager-jackhole says that they don't have any more of that TV in stock, but that they would sell me the floor model at a discount. 10% discount.
Pah! I explained that I had just been sold a USED TV as NEW by his crack sales staff; that I was a single male with a lot of disposable income; that I am the go-to guy for literally dozens of people who want to know what and where to buy stuff. He didn't move off his position.
So, I got my money back and found the same TV at Service Merchandise for $15 cheaper. Fuck Circuit City. Fuck them with a bandsaw.
It's an unattributed Dead Kennedy's quote anyway. No apologies needed.