That you find "assault weapons" more dangerous than other guns shows that you know very little about guns in a general sense.
Then educate me.
There's no real need to continue this discussion - the facts and history are out there, and the common sense is, too.If you add them up to a different conclusion, that's your prerogative, and a lot of that comes from me growing up in a part of the USA where most of our freedoms sitll mean something.
Would you care to share your conclusions and point to the studies? As an Australian maybe I am just not as well aware of the facts and the history. I'd say that if you believe something you have to be willing to argue it.
Personally I think that people living in the US have grown up with certain things and equate them with freedom. That doesn't mean necessarily that losing them means losing your freedom. I hold other freedoms are more valuable and beneficial to society.
Why aren't you out there fighting for freedom of speech and association? I would think both are more important freedoms, and both are under assualt in the US at the moment. Why aren't you fighting to stop people being arrested and jailed without trial?
Why is owning weapons such an important freedom? Is it so you can overthrow the government if/when it goes bad? I can't imagine that you'd last long against trained and well equipped troops.
I also cannot see how assualt weapons are needed for self defense, unless there is a complete breakdown of society. I'd say at that point you have other problems.
I stand firmly with Ben Franklin on this: those who would sacrifice liberty for security don't deserve either one.
I'd agree with him, but note that by submitting to a driving test you are sacrificing liberty for security. Sometimes things are regulated to provide security.
I'm aware that there is a distinction WRT to assault weapons. As far as I am concerned an assault weapon is any military grade weapon. That means high powered, large magazine, semi-automatic. In fact pick any two of those and you'd fit my definition of a gun that a civilian has no need to own.
In Australia, it is next to impossible to legally own a gun, in the general sense.
In whose general sense. I just pointed out that you can own a gun in what I would consider a general sense.
Specific kinds of guns are okay if you have a good reason to own one. I much prefer to be trusted as a law-abiding citizen.
I don't trust you. No offensive, but I don't trust the general public.
Innocent until proven guilty.
I don't see you being able to own an ICBM. I see regulation of owning and driving cars. I don't see a problem with government regulation.
Can you explain to me why you would need an assault rifle? I'm talking about a gun that is specifically designed to kill people? Are you expecting a mass attack from your neighbors? As I don't see a need, but I do see a risk, I see no problem stopping you from owning one.
It is offical; Netcraft confirms it: the web is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered web community when IDC confirmed that web market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the web has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The web is collapsing in complete disarray.
It isn't hard to get a gun license, it is just about filling in the appropriate paperwork. If you are part of a club or a farmer there aren't any issues.
Likewise owning a gun isn't a problem. There are limitations. Guns are only available if they are used for target shooting or are working guns (farmers, hunting). So I think you'd find it hard to get a pump action shotgun and obviously assualt weapons are out of the picture entirely. Handguns are fine (target shooting).
That said, there are strong requirements for storing guns. Concealed guns are illegal. Guns must be stored in a locked cabinet and the ammunition stored separately. For handguns the cabinet you store them in must weigh more than 250Kg (might be 400Kg, not sure exactly). Hence if you own a handgun it is often more convenient to leave it at the range.
The aim is that guns are not available as a weapon for use against people. The biggest problem we have is poor security on weapons in the Security industry, but that is being clamped down on now.
As for how safe we are, I'd be very interested in comparing crime rates in Australia to the US. And to look at whether the oppresive government has in fact helped the crime rates to drop.
What is a reverse firewall? I take it you mean a firewall that filters packets going in *both* directions. That is called a firewall, it is just that some firewalls filter diferent stuff.
You could equally keep running the old version (in the case if $closed_source_app) if you wanted.
Besides I think you want to pick a better target. SQL Server has consistently been backwards compatably. If that ain't enough SQL Server 2000 also includes a backwards copatability mode.
This does not ensure that future behaviour is going to be the same, but it does suggest it is pretty likely.
It is going to be a little hard to reply to all this. Particularly when there is so much to comment on. I'm going to number all the bold bits and your replies, ie the first bold bit means 1.
1. I certainly believe in the concept of good and evil. How can I be a Christian and not believe in good and evil? Love for someone, from a Christian perspective can look somewhat different from what you may imagine. You can love someone as you put them in jail. You can love someone as you respond to an unprovoked attack, like Pearl Harbour. Remember that God is Love, and yet God also judges people. As Christians we are called to serve, and sometimes serving means stopping someone from doing evil.
You might not realise this, but a strong biblical concept is that someone who sins damages themselves as well whatever other damage they do. A murderer harms themselves by murdering and restraining that is a good thing.
2. And what happens when you pre-emptively strike in the real world and kill the guy? You get stuck in jail. That is because you have committed a pre-emptive murder, which is just as wrong as what you thought this guy might do. I fail to see how this illustrates your point about the invasion of Iraq.
Are there not other options? Getting the neighbors to keep an eye open? Possibly even talking rather to the guy than confronting him might be a good idea.
3) As a matter of fact the intelligence said that they couldn't confirm that he didn't have WMD. Australian intel was based largely on US intel. The US intel agencies were under pressure to produce results (Cheney visited the CIA an unprecedented 5 times in the lead up). Also you might not be aware that an Australian intel officer (Andrew Wilkie) quit because he was convinced that the intel they had was wrong. I think you might want to go back and look at the UN reports from the time. Hans Blix is the name you want to look for.
I can explain why Saddam defied the world. It was a matter of pride. As far as I can tell, Saddam wanted to look to the Arab world as if defying the world. In retrospect it appears that he destroyed the WMD largely because the weapons inspections were working.
There was a fair bit of intel on this. The man in charge of the WMD program defected to Jordan in about 96 (I can't recall the name). He said that the weapons had been destroyed. More details are a little hard to get because he accepted Saddam's invitation to return to Iraq and was murdered.
WRT to the shipped to Syria claim, I can't imagine that you can ship the weapons without people noticing. Where are your satelites? That was a CYA comment from Rumsfeld.
As for Sadam's support of terrorism, I'm not sure how aware you are of what is going on in the Middle East. Currently Israel, supported to the tune of $4 billion/year, is killing Palestinian civilans at quite a respectable rate. To pick a couple of incidents: 1. Tank fires 2 shells into a crowd of peace protestors, killing ~40. No weapons on any of the dead, no weapons anywhere. 2. Then there is Rachel Cory, the American peace activist who was run down by an American Bulldozer (in cold blood). 3. Bombing of an apartment block to kill a Hamas leader, also killing some 20 people.
From one perspective the US is supporting state sponsored terrorism. The Palestinians don't have a much in the way of an army or any way of fighting back, other than suicide bombers. Kill those who are killing your children, mothers, sisters, brothers.
I do not agree with the Palestinian approach, but I see greater provocation on the side of Israel. The body count of Palestinian civilians is far higher than Israeli civilians.
This fits into Iraq as Palestine is seen as a rallying ground for the arab and musilm world. Saddam was rallying to that cause in a pretty small way. Compare the US to Saddam's support.
WRT to no fly zones, are you really surprised at this? Wouldn't you if you were him? IIRC you fired back.
Oh and I forgot to say, I'm not a pacifist. I support an appropriate war. Gulf War I was relatively appropriate, although it is possible that it could have been resolved differently or may have been averted beforehand if the US had kept a tighter leash on Saddam in the first place.
I wouldn't agree with your mother on abortion, we'd probably agree on a lot else. WRT to abortion, I'm not sure how best to approach it though. Even though I don't agree with it that doesn't mean automatically supporting legislation to ban it. I haven't yet worked out exactly how to approach this issue.
WRT the war on Iraq. I oppose the Bush doctrine of Pre-Emptive strike. I oppose the Bush doctrine that says we are stronger than the rest of the world and will act to bring down any nation that threatens that.
This comes from my reactions to a local crisis. In Australia an election was fought 3 years ago on border protection (illegal immigrants). I initially supported the government of the time (conservative), however I struggled to reconcile how as Christian a person is to act selflessly, and yet my was acting in a selfish manner. After much thought on the issue I decided that a country should be treated like a person, and that loving your neighbour is just as much a directive for a country as it is for a person.
Now back to Iraq. The doctrine of pre-emptive strike (under which Iraq was invaded) is contrary to Christian principles. It also flies in the face of diplomatic conventions of the last hundred years or so. It is a dangerous doctrine for America also as it means that Korea can invade if it feels threatened by America (as it no doubt does). In the end it assumes that America is stronger than the rest of the world.
The war on Iraq was waged for dishonest reasons. WMD & terrorism were given as the major reasons, and both of these were false. The fact is that your government (and mine) wanted to invade Iraq and looked for reasons to do so. As Wolfiwitz (however it is spelt) said, WMD was the administrative reason.
Invading Iraq was also very dumb. 1. 3 major ethnic groups, with constant strife since the establishment of Iraq. 2. Iraq was a moderate secular state in a region of radical Islamic states. The US would have been better to cultivate Iraq as a bulkward against those states, as it did before Gulf War I. Instead Iraq has become a rallying point for radical groups. The US invasion is radicalising a moderate nation. Remember that Osama was at one point considering attacking Iraq because it was too secular. 3. As Saddam had eliminted all real oposition there was no govt. to take over. Hence this means an occupying army, and everyone hates an occupying army. 4. Getting involved in the region is a pretty poor idea from the start. Muslims and Arabs stick together. An attack on Iraq is seen as an attack on the whole muslim/arab world. Gulf War I was not a problem (or rather less of a problem) because there was a wide coalition that included an awful lot of arab nations.
Some other problems with the Bush government: 1. They have stripped away oversight (judicial and otherwise) in a lot of cases (eg Patriot act). They prefer to operate in the dark. This makes abuse inevitable. Abu Ghraib is the resoponsibility of the White house for this reason, even if there were no direct orders. 2. What kind of government can go from September 11 where the French president says "we are all Americans", to the current situation? That doesn't just go for France, the rest of the world has been transformed in a similar way. American foreign policy has been arrogant, insensitive and mis-guided.
This might just be the most astounding post I've ever read, considering who it's from.;-)
That is quite a compliment. Just to totally blow your mind, I am an active, bible believing, evangelical Christian. The reasons I do not support the war in Iraq or the Bush Government all stem from my beliefs as a Christian.
What Michael Moore does is pick and choose facts and event to fit a certain plot. Like a draw the dots puzzle where you ignore 95% of the dots.
I haven't seen FH 9/11 so I can't really comment. I have seen Bowling for Columbine. It annoyed me for two reasons: 1. He did not present a reasoned case. He kind of wanders all over the place and doesn't tie up the loose ends. 2. It is rather over the top emotional, Australians are a little more reserved.
For those reasons I wasn't planning to see FH 9/11. Certainly not paying to see it. On the other hand did enjoy Bowling for Columbine, and I do agree with some of his conclusions, it just annoyed me that he didn't support them properly.
I had a histor teacher who read out some pretty crazy stuff about serial killers when we were studying Wiemar Germany. He kept things interesting by throwing in unusual facts (like schools at the time promoting nude gymnastics).
But then I am not a USian and I didn't go to a state school either.
You cannot use... Da Vinci Code for primary source material
I'll second that. From a facts perspective the Da Vinci code is a steaming pile of crap. I've just finished reading it.
I love reading history. I generally concentrate on modern history, but I have patches of knowledge outside the last couple of centuries. The Da Vinci code crossed into a couple of those areas. To pick out a few points: 1. The stuff about the Templars was flat wrong in a lot of areas. What was known as the Trial of the Templars (where leaders were burnt at the stake), had nothing to do with beliefs and had everything to do with money. At the time the French king had the pope held as an effective hostage in France. He was having money troubles and saw the Templars as an easy target. They had plenty of money (they were bankers) and were disliked to some extent by the people of the time.
To the leaders were arrested, tortured into confessing and burnt at the stake. Read about it here. Yes I've read the book.
2. The stuff about Constantine and the council of Nicae was also flat wrong. There is no evidence of pressure by Constantine to mould te bible into a certain shape. Constantine was largely uninterested in the process. The council is well documented in a number of sources.
There are other areas of history I know to be flat wrong, but haven't read enough in the area speak with authority.
What Dan Brown does is pick and choose facts and event to fit a certain plot. Like a draw the dots puzzle where you ignore 95% of the dots.
The other complication is that people and even viewpoints aren't always easily pigeon-holed. Someone who is on average left of center might agree in some areas with someone who is right of center.
However I wouldn't dismiss left and right as classifications. They don't provide a perfect model, but it is none the less a useful model. Similar to supply and demand being a useful model even though it is inaccurate.
Left and Right is an inaccurate generalisation, but it does provide some useful insights. Just so long as everyone realises that it is not totally accurate.
And Noam Chomsky is your hometown boy. What exactly is your point?
Go watch the BBC like a good socialist.
I don't watch the BBC. In fact I don't tend to watch any TV, news on TV is maximum impact, minimum fact. But I will go back reading the guardian online.
Left and right are relative positions. Relative generally to where you stand. People tend to want to think of themselves as in the center, not either left or right.
From my position, in Australia, your two major political are far to the right of all of the major parties in Australia (Liberal, Labor, Greens and Democrats). All of your news sources are far to the right most mainstream Australian news sources. For example I won't watch CNN because I consider that they are a little too far right for my liking.
From what I have seen, the rest of the world is at least a little leftish when compared to America.
Just to put this discussion into an international perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
That you find "assault weapons" more dangerous than other guns shows that you know very little about guns in a general sense.
Then educate me.
There's no real need to continue this discussion - the facts and history are out there, and the common sense is, too.If you add them up to a different conclusion, that's your prerogative, and a lot of that comes from me growing up in a part of the USA where most of our freedoms sitll mean something.
Would you care to share your conclusions and point to the studies? As an Australian maybe I am just not as well aware of the facts and the history. I'd say that if you believe something you have to be willing to argue it.
Personally I think that people living in the US have grown up with certain things and equate them with freedom. That doesn't mean necessarily that losing them means losing your freedom. I hold other freedoms are more valuable and beneficial to society.
Why aren't you out there fighting for freedom of speech and association? I would think both are more important freedoms, and both are under assualt in the US at the moment. Why aren't you fighting to stop people being arrested and jailed without trial?
Why is owning weapons such an important freedom? Is it so you can overthrow the government if/when it goes bad? I can't imagine that you'd last long against trained and well equipped troops.
I also cannot see how assualt weapons are needed for self defense, unless there is a complete breakdown of society. I'd say at that point you have other problems.
I stand firmly with Ben Franklin on this: those who would sacrifice liberty for security don't deserve either one.
I'd agree with him, but note that by submitting to a driving test you are sacrificing liberty for security. Sometimes things are regulated to provide security.
I'm aware that there is a distinction WRT to assault weapons. As far as I am concerned an assault weapon is any military grade weapon. That means high powered, large magazine, semi-automatic. In fact pick any two of those and you'd fit my definition of a gun that a civilian has no need to own.
In Australia, it is next to impossible to legally own a gun, in the general sense.
In whose general sense. I just pointed out that you can own a gun in what I would consider a general sense.
Specific kinds of guns are okay if you have a good reason to own one. I much prefer to be trusted as a law-abiding citizen.
I don't trust you. No offensive, but I don't trust the general public.
Innocent until proven guilty.
I don't see you being able to own an ICBM. I see regulation of owning and driving cars. I don't see a problem with government regulation.
Can you explain to me why you would need an assault rifle? I'm talking about a gun that is specifically designed to kill people? Are you expecting a mass attack from your neighbors? As I don't see a need, but I do see a risk, I see no problem stopping you from owning one.
Their family can.
It is offical; Netcraft confirms it: the web is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered web community when IDC confirmed that web market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the web has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The web is collapsing in complete disarray.
Fact: the web is dying.
I tried that but I found the trolls tended to spontanously combust.
I can comment briefly on Aus gun laws.
It isn't hard to get a gun license, it is just about filling in the appropriate paperwork. If you are part of a club or a farmer there aren't any issues.
Likewise owning a gun isn't a problem. There are limitations. Guns are only available if they are used for target shooting or are working guns (farmers, hunting). So I think you'd find it hard to get a pump action shotgun and obviously assualt weapons are out of the picture entirely. Handguns are fine (target shooting).
That said, there are strong requirements for storing guns. Concealed guns are illegal. Guns must be stored in a locked cabinet and the ammunition stored separately. For handguns the cabinet you store them in must weigh more than 250Kg (might be 400Kg, not sure exactly). Hence if you own a handgun it is often more convenient to leave it at the range.
The aim is that guns are not available as a weapon for use against people. The biggest problem we have is poor security on weapons in the Security industry, but that is being clamped down on now.
As for how safe we are, I'd be very interested in comparing crime rates in Australia to the US. And to look at whether the oppresive government has in fact helped the crime rates to drop.
Precisely. If a leader was insane, how is he able to maintain control of his country? He can't.
What is a reverse firewall? I take it you mean a firewall that filters packets going in *both* directions. That is called a firewall, it is just that some firewalls filter diferent stuff.
I'm going to wait til I can get one second hand. It's bound to come down in price to something more like $1000.
I favour semaphore.
You could equally keep running the old version (in the case if $closed_source_app) if you wanted.
Besides I think you want to pick a better target. SQL Server has consistently been backwards compatably. If that ain't enough SQL Server 2000 also includes a backwards copatability mode.
This does not ensure that future behaviour is going to be the same, but it does suggest it is pretty likely.
Mail me on my email address which is my name (david) at my domain (uberconcept.com).
You have created a generalisation that it not useful. This does not mean that all generalisations are not useful.
You can say that people on the Left generally favour:
1. Centralised control
2. Higher taxes
3. State benefits (unemployment, medicare, education)
While people on the right favour
1. Deregulation
2. Lower taxes
3. Smaller government
This is a useful generalisation. Like saying women are less strong than men, and men are taller than women.
It is going to be a little hard to reply to all this. Particularly when there is so much to comment on. I'm going to number all the bold bits and your replies, ie the first bold bit means 1.
1. I certainly believe in the concept of good and evil. How can I be a Christian and not believe in good and evil? Love for someone, from a Christian perspective can look somewhat different from what you may imagine. You can love someone as you put them in jail. You can love someone as you respond to an unprovoked attack, like Pearl Harbour. Remember that God is Love, and yet God also judges people. As Christians we are called to serve, and sometimes serving means stopping someone from doing evil.
You might not realise this, but a strong biblical concept is that someone who sins damages themselves as well whatever other damage they do. A murderer harms themselves by murdering and restraining that is a good thing.
2. And what happens when you pre-emptively strike in the real world and kill the guy? You get stuck in jail. That is because you have committed a pre-emptive murder, which is just as wrong as what you thought this guy might do. I fail to see how this illustrates your point about the invasion of Iraq.
Are there not other options? Getting the neighbors to keep an eye open? Possibly even talking rather to the guy than confronting him might be a good idea.
3) As a matter of fact the intelligence said that they couldn't confirm that he didn't have WMD. Australian intel was based largely on US intel. The US intel agencies were under pressure to produce results (Cheney visited the CIA an unprecedented 5 times in the lead up). Also you might not be aware that an Australian intel officer (Andrew Wilkie) quit because he was convinced that the intel they had was wrong. I think you might want to go back and look at the UN reports from the time. Hans Blix is the name you want to look for.
I can explain why Saddam defied the world. It was a matter of pride. As far as I can tell, Saddam wanted to look to the Arab world as if defying the world. In retrospect it appears that he destroyed the WMD largely because the weapons inspections were working.
There was a fair bit of intel on this. The man in charge of the WMD program defected to Jordan in about 96 (I can't recall the name). He said that the weapons had been destroyed. More details are a little hard to get because he accepted Saddam's invitation to return to Iraq and was murdered.
WRT to the shipped to Syria claim, I can't imagine that you can ship the weapons without people noticing. Where are your satelites? That was a CYA comment from Rumsfeld.
As for Sadam's support of terrorism, I'm not sure how aware you are of what is going on in the Middle East. Currently Israel, supported to the tune of $4 billion/year, is killing Palestinian civilans at quite a respectable rate. To pick a couple of incidents:
1. Tank fires 2 shells into a crowd of peace protestors, killing ~40. No weapons on any of the dead, no weapons anywhere.
2. Then there is Rachel Cory, the American peace activist who was run down by an American Bulldozer (in cold blood).
3. Bombing of an apartment block to kill a Hamas leader, also killing some 20 people.
From one perspective the US is supporting state sponsored terrorism. The Palestinians don't have a much in the way of an army or any way of fighting back, other than suicide bombers. Kill those who are killing your children, mothers, sisters, brothers.
I do not agree with the Palestinian approach, but I see greater provocation on the side of Israel. The body count of Palestinian civilians is far higher than Israeli civilians.
This fits into Iraq as Palestine is seen as a rallying ground for the arab and musilm world. Saddam was rallying to that cause in a pretty small way. Compare the US to Saddam's support.
WRT to no fly zones, are you really surprised at this? Wouldn't you if you were him? IIRC you fired back.
WRT to the Al Quaeda connections, of co
Oh and I forgot to say, I'm not a pacifist. I support an appropriate war. Gulf War I was relatively appropriate, although it is possible that it could have been resolved differently or may have been averted beforehand if the US had kept a tighter leash on Saddam in the first place.
I wouldn't agree with your mother on abortion, we'd probably agree on a lot else. WRT to abortion, I'm not sure how best to approach it though. Even though I don't agree with it that doesn't mean automatically supporting legislation to ban it. I haven't yet worked out exactly how to approach this issue.
WRT the war on Iraq. I oppose the Bush doctrine of Pre-Emptive strike. I oppose the Bush doctrine that says we are stronger than the rest of the world and will act to bring down any nation that threatens that.
This comes from my reactions to a local crisis. In Australia an election was fought 3 years ago on border protection (illegal immigrants). I initially supported the government of the time (conservative), however I struggled to reconcile how as Christian a person is to act selflessly, and yet my was acting in a selfish manner. After much thought on the issue I decided that a country should be treated like a person, and that loving your neighbour is just as much a directive for a country as it is for a person.
Now back to Iraq. The doctrine of pre-emptive strike (under which Iraq was invaded) is contrary to Christian principles. It also flies in the face of diplomatic conventions of the last hundred years or so. It is a dangerous doctrine for America also as it means that Korea can invade if it feels threatened by America (as it no doubt does). In the end it assumes that America is stronger than the rest of the world.
The war on Iraq was waged for dishonest reasons. WMD & terrorism were given as the major reasons, and both of these were false. The fact is that your government (and mine) wanted to invade Iraq and looked for reasons to do so. As Wolfiwitz (however it is spelt) said, WMD was the administrative reason.
Invading Iraq was also very dumb.
1. 3 major ethnic groups, with constant strife since the establishment of Iraq.
2. Iraq was a moderate secular state in a region of radical Islamic states. The US would have been better to cultivate Iraq as a bulkward against those states, as it did before Gulf War I. Instead Iraq has become a rallying point for radical groups. The US invasion is radicalising a moderate nation. Remember that Osama was at one point considering attacking Iraq because it was too secular.
3. As Saddam had eliminted all real oposition there was no govt. to take over. Hence this means an occupying army, and everyone hates an occupying army.
4. Getting involved in the region is a pretty poor idea from the start. Muslims and Arabs stick together. An attack on Iraq is seen as an attack on the whole muslim/arab world. Gulf War I was not a problem (or rather less of a problem) because there was a wide coalition that included an awful lot of arab nations.
Some other problems with the Bush government:
1. They have stripped away oversight (judicial and otherwise) in a lot of cases (eg Patriot act). They prefer to operate in the dark. This makes abuse inevitable. Abu Ghraib is the resoponsibility of the White house for this reason, even if there were no direct orders.
2. What kind of government can go from September 11 where the French president says "we are all Americans", to the current situation? That doesn't just go for France, the rest of the world has been transformed in a similar way. American foreign policy has been arrogant, insensitive and mis-guided.
This might just be the most astounding post I've ever read, considering who it's from. ;-)
That is quite a compliment. Just to totally blow your mind, I am an active, bible believing, evangelical Christian. The reasons I do not support the war in Iraq or the Bush Government all stem from my beliefs as a Christian.
What Michael Moore does is pick and choose facts and event to fit a certain plot. Like a draw the dots puzzle where you ignore 95% of the dots.
I haven't seen FH 9/11 so I can't really comment. I have seen Bowling for Columbine. It annoyed me for two reasons:
1. He did not present a reasoned case. He kind of wanders all over the place and doesn't tie up the loose ends.
2. It is rather over the top emotional, Australians are a little more reserved.
For those reasons I wasn't planning to see FH 9/11. Certainly not paying to see it. On the other hand did enjoy Bowling for Columbine, and I do agree with some of his conclusions, it just annoyed me that he didn't support them properly.
I had a histor teacher who read out some pretty crazy stuff about serial killers when we were studying Wiemar Germany. He kept things interesting by throwing in unusual facts (like schools at the time promoting nude gymnastics).
But then I am not a USian and I didn't go to a state school either.
Wow, we meet again.
... Da Vinci Code for primary source material
You cannot use
I'll second that. From a facts perspective the Da Vinci code is a steaming pile of crap. I've just finished reading it.
I love reading history. I generally concentrate on modern history, but I have patches of knowledge outside the last couple of centuries. The Da Vinci code crossed into a couple of those areas. To pick out a few points:
1. The stuff about the Templars was flat wrong in a lot of areas. What was known as the Trial of the Templars (where leaders were burnt at the stake), had nothing to do with beliefs and had everything to do with money. At the time the French king had the pope held as an effective hostage in France. He was having money troubles and saw the Templars as an easy target. They had plenty of money (they were bankers) and were disliked to some extent by the people of the time.
To the leaders were arrested, tortured into confessing and burnt at the stake. Read about it here. Yes I've read the book.
2. The stuff about Constantine and the council of Nicae was also flat wrong. There is no evidence of pressure by Constantine to mould te bible into a certain shape. Constantine was largely uninterested in the process. The council is well documented in a number of sources.
There are other areas of history I know to be flat wrong, but haven't read enough in the area speak with authority.
What Dan Brown does is pick and choose facts and event to fit a certain plot. Like a draw the dots puzzle where you ignore 95% of the dots.
The other complication is that people and even viewpoints aren't always easily pigeon-holed. Someone who is on average left of center might agree in some areas with someone who is right of center.
However I wouldn't dismiss left and right as classifications. They don't provide a perfect model, but it is none the less a useful model. Similar to supply and demand being a useful model even though it is inaccurate.
Left and Right is an inaccurate generalisation, but it does provide some useful insights. Just so long as everyone realises that it is not totally accurate.
My father went to MIT.
I'm not sure what to make of this as I am not a USian. Is MIT a known left leaning institution? Or are we swapping parent stories?
And Noam Chomsky is your hometown boy. What exactly is your point?
Go watch the BBC like a good socialist.
I don't watch the BBC. In fact I don't tend to watch any TV, news on TV is maximum impact, minimum fact. But I will go back reading the guardian online.
OK troll boy:
a credible source.
This guy was commanding a boat alongside Kerry during the incident for which Kerry was awarded his Silver Star.
Left and right are relative positions. Relative generally to where you stand. People tend to want to think of themselves as in the center, not either left or right.
From my position, in Australia, your two major political are far to the right of all of the major parties in Australia (Liberal, Labor, Greens and Democrats). All of your news sources are far to the right most mainstream Australian news sources. For example I won't watch CNN because I consider that they are a little too far right for my liking.
From what I have seen, the rest of the world is at least a little leftish when compared to America.
Just to put this discussion into an international perspective.
Install the preferences bar extension. There is a chaeckbox for killing flash, along with a whole stack of other stuff.