But the guy for fraud, sure, but the "investors" were idiots.
I wouldn't call them idiots for investing, but they can't complain when they lose all of their unregulated currency to a Ponzi scheme.
Just to be clear: if this had been done in a regulated currency, the investors still get *no* protection, whatsoever. Just ask Bernie Madoff's investors.
He may be called many things, but do you really think it's appropriate for a civilian to call a member of the military a coward just becuase they don't like something that person did which has nothing at all to do with cowardice?
I'm a civilian who happens to be a veteran. And like others, I have to vote for civilian government that has a duty to maintain the UCMJ which defines, among other things, cowardice. I forget which article, but it's in there.
We are the government, and we have a duty to govern. Ergo we have a responsibility to form and develop opinions, usually through debate and other civic processes, about all matters including military. We can't simply ignore large portions of that responsibility when we don't have direct experience in those fields.
In particular, if I am prior service and you have wrong views on military affairs, I can only set you straight if you speak your mind and I am presented with an incorrect opinion and the opportunity to correct it.
Finally, there are plenty of forms of cowardice besides running away, moral and intellectual being two very prevalent ones.
Second, while your convenient strawman may be a worthless excuse for a human being...
Hard as it may be to believe, that entire post wasn't directed at you.
(I'm coming at this from a developer's perspective, so a sysadmin perspective may be different.)
To be sure, Linux isn't the only Unix, and you can do this to an extent on Windows. (Much more if you install Python or Ruby on Windows.)
But Linux tends to have the state of the art in Unix tools, from the various scripting languages to the various development tools and languages. And because they're so good, it does encourage this idea that things should fit into a larger system, that you're not making "apps" or huge "enterprise" systems that are big fugly stovepipes. Instead, these are tools that do specific jobs, and someone else can make another tool that complements it, and so forth.
The contrast, I think, is with the IDE mentality where all the messy details are hidden from you. It's fine to use an IDE but if you're using it because you can't figure out how make or a linker works, you're a very junior developer. You're still using training wheels.
And it gives you a clear path to get rid of the training wheels. You don't have to ditch the IDE entirely. Instead, if you're using Eclipse, figure out how to write your own build script. Learn how to use your source control management without the IDE. Learn how to use grep and find instead of the tools in the IDE. These are all things you can do one at a time, so it's manageable and achievable. Pick up a shell (or even stick with a language like python) and start scripting some annoying tasks.
And that's how I'd really try to sell yourself: not necessarily as being a Linux guy, but being someone who understands how things work and is more versatile.
I'd say since he was a serving member of the military in a war zone he has more balls and most likely more integrity than you are putting on show.
Don't mean to put the guy down, but Manning never went outside the wire. He signed up to sit in a room full of computers and compile reports. (Yes, I did go outside the wire, and was combat arms.)
Manning was an adult, had taken the oath and is responsible for his actions, and yes, they're going to throw the book at him. They should: that intel has disrupted our peaceful diplomatic efforts, it included names and addresses of people in dangerous situations, etc. I don't care what terrible secrets of the government were uncovered, none of that was worth the life of even one poor son of a bitch in some hellhole who was feeding us intel so he could feed his family.
But, at the same time, he was a young dude who was going through a difficult time, and he was callously manipulated by Assange's people. That organization is designed to find a sucker they can manipulate to fall on his sword while they keep far enough back to be legally untouchable. And they don't care if the leaks harm innocent people.
And why don't they care? Because you, the fans, don't care, you'll never hold them to account. You're so fucking self-righteous that you worship this creep Assange and make excuses for his sexually assaulting those women. You don't care about the brown guy in Shitcanistan who gets tortured to death because of the leaks. You don't care if our peaceful efforts at diplomacy are derailed. You just want to be part of a big circle jerk around your stupid conspiracy theories. You really are worthless excuses for human beings.
It seems that quantum computing has consistently been viewed as harder than it really is, judging by the ever-decreasing timescales between breakthroughs. Judging from the history of cryptography, and the military value of being able to break RSA, it's not unreasonable to expect that the NSA may have been trying to build such a chip for some time and could potentially have succeeded.
Well, of course, they got it from the aliens at area 51 decades ago. They've just been spoonfeeding us the tech, bit by bit.
I'm not saying you can't do serious work this way, since the Army has used Preventative Maintenance Monthly as one of their most successful ways of disseminating general technical knowledge.
But I think it's going to have similar problems as TV journalism, which, except for C-SPAN, is generally awful.
mod'd informative?? really? what was informative about this guy, trolling, and yet telling others not to troll?
what information did he bring to the table? seriously. why mod him informative?
we get that you are a shill and you are taking the party line against julian. but if you have nothing to offer other than your hate, please take it elsewhere. maybe fox news has a forum more to your liking?
There's a party line against Assange? On/.?
The informative mod was probably because someone agreed with my point that all this drama is making Assange a sympathetic figure, and the governments would be better served if they leaved him alone.
What's sad is that you didn't catch that. I feel entirely justified in my remarks about Assange's sycophant fans.
(By the way, the past tense of "mod", whether it means modify or moderate, is "modded".)
Julian Assange is a lowlife piece of garbage who uses and destroys other people for his own ends. His sycophant fans are as legion as stupidity itself.
So the guy is the biggest fucking attention whore on the Intertubes and I don't see why these officials can't comprehend one simple maxim:
Don't. Feed. The. Fucking. Troll.
It's not like this is a new concept, it goes back since small children have done stupid shit for attention, and parents waited for the tantrum to end.
It is that easy. Just let him fucking rot in obscurity.
Except they didn't get boycotted, did they? They had lines around the block.
Depressing, but true.
Of course, the lines around the block were after two mayors decided to abuse their power and deny Chick-fil-A a business license. But I guess anything that gets in the way of liberals' thug tactics is depressing to a hypocrite like you.
You seem to be blissfully ignorant of what you're talking about.
I'm knowingly ignorant, it's the guy who thinks "I'll run this data through some algorithm and turn meaningless garbage into fake numbers!" who is *blissfully* ignorant.
Rather, it's a philosophy
Good choice of words, because it's definitely not a science and definitely not a methodology.
Now, a suitably-equipped TV can send an event upstream for not just every show, but every minute watched, every commercial seen, every volume adjustment, and possibly even a guess of how many people are in the room.
And while some systems like that may exist, in my experience the Big Data is whatever garbage they can lay their hands on, no clear idea of what it means, and an analyst can flip through it and find one ludicrously false example after another. I've done this with a SME and we had another fork of our project whose system was buggered straight to hell and they didn't check a damned thing. Why ruin the party?
And the claim is that having lots and lots of erroneous data will somehow make it all better. Bullshit. If you point a million cameras up at the sky and you misinterpreted the hue, you're still going to get a report that the sky is green.
But, hey, you'll come up with numbers, and no one will be able to contradict you, and you'll get paid, so it's all good, right? If that's how you feel, you're a fucking liar.
Why does anyone want to be good at anything? Some people are good at computers but how do they discover they are good if they weren't hacking around? See? A hacker is just an amateur computer enthusiast.
That's where hacking starts, where does it go?
Right now, if you're a talented amateur, you work towards becoming a professional. So you start out a hacker and become not a hacker.
To restate my question: Why would anyone want to remain a hacker?
"Big Data" is another way to put data into a cylinder or a fluffy cloud and avoid the messy task of actually thinking about it.
But the truth is, in data-mining operation, the bigger the metadata the more ways you can mine it, and the more surprisingly the result you get out of it
If I want a surprise, I can leave the toilet seat up before I go #2. What we're aiming for in data processing is extracting something meaningful.
There were a lot of great hackers coming up with stuff 20 or 30 years ago, but it seems like it's fallen to shit. And it's not just because of Hollywood, it just didn't survive the transition from an exclusive club to the huge amorphous "community" it is now.
Every time I hear about hackers, I find it's a journalist talking about felons, or some smart kid who learned how to program his microwave, or some guys who are marginally skilled in computers and seriously in need of therapy. Or just yet another fucking poser.
And they're worse in numbers, like these security conferences. These conferences are basically all about security theater, so you're starting off with a bunch of losers to begin with. Add in all the hacker wannabes, and the fact that freaks go there to grope women doesn't seem particularly surprising.
The real communities are professional organizations that are full of people who actually make things, and, frankly, it's pretty stupid to constantly worship hackers who don't make anything.
Christian Dominionism is, for example, right wing... Market fundamentalism is another purist ideology
Market fundamentalism is a pejorative, not an ideology. Free market economics is a set of observations about how the world works. This is very much like how Marx invented the popular notion of Capitalism as a fictional counter to his Socialism.
Essentially, what we've got is the modern left who argue that the state should be the all-provider, that's where Obama's remarks that "you didn't build that" came from, both he and Elizabeth Warren are echoing George Lakoff's views. And leftists genuinely believe this stuff and assume that's just how the world works: a powerful entity has to provide everything, organize society, etc. To the left, the notion that order can spontaneously arise within a market is some kind of insane belief like a jumbo jet can assemble itself from parts, which is why free market economics is derided as "market fundamentalism."
So when the right talks about cutting taxes and individualism, the left assumes that the right's real aim is to have a competing all-provider take the place of the state. This could be corporations or religion, and leftists have long accused the right of "corporatism" and "christian dominionism". That's why you see the steelworker whose wife died from cancer on an ad blaming Romney (who is the proxy for Bain Capital): to prove that corporations are a lousy alternative to the state as an all-provider.
Other forms of right-wing ideology rely on concepts like divine mandate, birthright of the nobility, or a sense of national destiny.... Even Christianity, which is today usually thought of as mostly reactionary, was at its start a radical break from Roman society
National destiny? Woodrow Wilson. Divine mandate? Teddy Roosevelt. Birthright of the nobility? The left's endless fascination with the Kennedy clan comes to mind. Maybe you're referring to earlier versions of these, but while there may have been analogs of left and right going back to Ug and Oog the cavemen, even going back as far as the Enlightenment it's getting to be a stretch. There's no continuity of thought between early Christians and the modern left.
But Christians were extremely active in the abolitionist movement, which is hard to place because you had a massive realignment of left and right due to slavery and the Civil War. And Christians were very active Progressives, especially in the suffrage movement and temperance movements. I don't see a compelling case that religion itself is left or right wing, really.
Left-wing ideologies, in contrast, work on increasing social equality or fairness, decreasing disparities in wealth and power.
That's the marketing pitch for the past 10 years, but progressive thought goes back 120 years, easily. It was a FDR's Supreme Court that declared, "three generations of imbeciles are enough!" in Buck v Bell. And it's contemporary liberals who still can't understand why Sarah Palin would bring a child with Down's Syndrome to term. In practice, the stuff about equality or fairness is bunk, it's about organizing everyone to march towards a unified utopian vision.
Classical liberalism sought to unseat the prerogatives of the king/queen
The modern left and right both began from Enlightenment thought and split in two revolutions: the French Revolution and the American Revolution. The French Revolution, where the nobility were just the first to be guillotined in a reign of terror, was the start of the modern left. The American Revolution, where the British soldiers accused of massacring civilians were acquitted after a fair trial, was the start of the modern right.
Because, you know, there are like only two ways to code: Liberal and Conservative.
There are only two directions on a single axis, the existence of which doesn't rule out other axes.
And his axis is really just "risk-taking" vs. "risk-averse", which has nothing to do with the political notions of left and right.
But even the idea of a political spectrum is a fantasy. First, there's no center; moderatism is an agenda driven ideology that seeks to suppress certain speech through demands for civility, and to play both sides off each other and then demand concessions in return for a swing vote.
And a spectrum suggests symmetry, but there is none. There are dozens of leftist ideologies, but really only two or three distinct right-wing ideologies. Leftist thinking has the notion of radicalisms and syncretism wherein you take ideologies apart and put them together in virtually any way imaginable; no matter how far out to the left someone is, there's always someone accusing him of being a fascist. Conservative thought is anti-utopian; it doesn't try to solve all problems but prefers to respect the capacity of existing institutions, and that narrow scope is why you see a huge number of people having pretty similar arguments and independently reaching the same conclusions. (And, strangely, they also accuse all the other conservatives of being "establishment RINOs" even though they are almost in complete agreement.)
His point being that whether it was a French, British, or Dutch colony, it was already being shit on and exploited. Typical European colonists.
Sort of, it was more that much of 20th century history involved the US cleaning up after the messes left behind when European colonial powers walked away from their colonies. Now, did the US screw up a lot? Sure. Were we locked in a struggle with the USSR and use smaller countries as proxies? Sure.
But no one just decided, "hey, fuck, let's bomb some brown people and steal their oil!"
And, it's worth noting that it wasn't until after we withdrew from Vietnam, after Saigon fell, and after and the "peace" was established that the reeducation camps were set up. That, in turn, is when the boat people started coming.
Someone who believes in science is generally skeptical of all such claims,...
OT... I'm not a fan of the phrase "believe in science." I accept various scientific theories because in some cases I've put in effort to satisfy myself that they explain the world I live in, and in other cases I don't have the explanation, but the existence of products or technologies that need such an explanation is good circumstantial evidence. Or, at the very least, I can accept that a thriving scientific community is an imperfect but effective mechanism to devise an explanation.
So my acceptance of science is both partial and conditional, a far cry from belief.
But according to Scientology, there's millions of Scientologists around the world who appreciate the works of L. Ron Hubbard!
But as religious prophecy, not as science fiction. What's amazing to me is that there is even a splinter group that still keeps the faith but rejects the management.
This is either a PR stunt or the US is trying to befriend Vietnam, possibly because that would make invading Iran easier, or maybe to build yet another military base.
Yes, that's what we need to invade Iran: a base that's on the other side of India and Pakistan.
If you don't think gun-loving liberals exist, I invite you to visit Austin. There's lots of us here.
I like Austin, I've been there a couple of times. But you can't hold a candle to Vermont, absolutely anyone can carry concealed, no permit required.
But, reading comprehension: I said that if anarchists start killing lawyers or cops, they'd go after unarmed people first, and the fact remains that most liberals deliberately disarm themselves.
You'll wind up slaughtering a lot of limp wristed liberal lawyers, and be shot dead by the well-armed conservative lawyers
Because conservatives are the only ones who know how to use guns?
That's almost exclusively my experience. The enlisted ranks in the military are heavily conservative, and they all have at least basic proficiency. All your hunters, farmers, etc., are largely conservative, and they tend to be armed.
But more importantly, liberals are the only ones who deliberately disarm themselves and their law-abiding neighbors, for example, in "gun-free zones". Virtually every major inner city region is run by liberals, has strict gun control, and vastly higher murder rates.
This is a pretty typical anarchist sentiment, but I thought about it, and it works for me. You'll wind up slaughtering a lot of limp wristed liberal lawyers, and be shot dead by the well-armed conservative lawyers (have fun storming the legal offices of the NRA!) and the country will be far better off.
Slashdot Mirror
But the guy for fraud, sure, but the "investors" were idiots.
I wouldn't call them idiots for investing, but they can't complain when they lose all of their unregulated currency to a Ponzi scheme.
Just to be clear: if this had been done in a regulated currency, the investors still get *no* protection, whatsoever. Just ask Bernie Madoff's investors.
He may be called many things, but do you really think it's appropriate for a civilian to call a member of the military a coward just becuase they don't like something that person did which has nothing at all to do with cowardice?
I'm a civilian who happens to be a veteran. And like others, I have to vote for civilian government that has a duty to maintain the UCMJ which defines, among other things, cowardice. I forget which article, but it's in there.
We are the government, and we have a duty to govern. Ergo we have a responsibility to form and develop opinions, usually through debate and other civic processes, about all matters including military. We can't simply ignore large portions of that responsibility when we don't have direct experience in those fields.
In particular, if I am prior service and you have wrong views on military affairs, I can only set you straight if you speak your mind and I am presented with an incorrect opinion and the opportunity to correct it.
Finally, there are plenty of forms of cowardice besides running away, moral and intellectual being two very prevalent ones.
Second, while your convenient strawman may be a worthless excuse for a human being...
Hard as it may be to believe, that entire post wasn't directed at you.
(I'm coming at this from a developer's perspective, so a sysadmin perspective may be different.)
To be sure, Linux isn't the only Unix, and you can do this to an extent on Windows. (Much more if you install Python or Ruby on Windows.)
But Linux tends to have the state of the art in Unix tools, from the various scripting languages to the various development tools and languages. And because they're so good, it does encourage this idea that things should fit into a larger system, that you're not making "apps" or huge "enterprise" systems that are big fugly stovepipes. Instead, these are tools that do specific jobs, and someone else can make another tool that complements it, and so forth.
The contrast, I think, is with the IDE mentality where all the messy details are hidden from you. It's fine to use an IDE but if you're using it because you can't figure out how make or a linker works, you're a very junior developer. You're still using training wheels.
And it gives you a clear path to get rid of the training wheels. You don't have to ditch the IDE entirely. Instead, if you're using Eclipse, figure out how to write your own build script. Learn how to use your source control management without the IDE. Learn how to use grep and find instead of the tools in the IDE. These are all things you can do one at a time, so it's manageable and achievable. Pick up a shell (or even stick with a language like python) and start scripting some annoying tasks.
And that's how I'd really try to sell yourself: not necessarily as being a Linux guy, but being someone who understands how things work and is more versatile.
I'd say since he was a serving member of the military in a war zone he has more balls and most likely more integrity than you are putting on show.
Don't mean to put the guy down, but Manning never went outside the wire. He signed up to sit in a room full of computers and compile reports. (Yes, I did go outside the wire, and was combat arms.)
Manning was an adult, had taken the oath and is responsible for his actions, and yes, they're going to throw the book at him. They should: that intel has disrupted our peaceful diplomatic efforts, it included names and addresses of people in dangerous situations, etc. I don't care what terrible secrets of the government were uncovered, none of that was worth the life of even one poor son of a bitch in some hellhole who was feeding us intel so he could feed his family.
But, at the same time, he was a young dude who was going through a difficult time, and he was callously manipulated by Assange's people. That organization is designed to find a sucker they can manipulate to fall on his sword while they keep far enough back to be legally untouchable. And they don't care if the leaks harm innocent people.
And why don't they care? Because you, the fans, don't care, you'll never hold them to account. You're so fucking self-righteous that you worship this creep Assange and make excuses for his sexually assaulting those women. You don't care about the brown guy in Shitcanistan who gets tortured to death because of the leaks. You don't care if our peaceful efforts at diplomacy are derailed. You just want to be part of a big circle jerk around your stupid conspiracy theories. You really are worthless excuses for human beings.
It seems that quantum computing has consistently been viewed as harder than it really is, judging by the ever-decreasing timescales between breakthroughs. Judging from the history of cryptography, and the military value of being able to break RSA, it's not unreasonable to expect that the NSA may have been trying to build such a chip for some time and could potentially have succeeded.
Well, of course, they got it from the aliens at area 51 decades ago. They've just been spoonfeeding us the tech, bit by bit.
I'm not saying you can't do serious work this way, since the Army has used Preventative Maintenance Monthly as one of their most successful ways of disseminating general technical knowledge.
But I think it's going to have similar problems as TV journalism, which, except for C-SPAN, is generally awful.
mod'd informative?? really? what was informative about this guy, trolling, and yet telling others not to troll?
what information did he bring to the table? seriously. why mod him informative?
we get that you are a shill and you are taking the party line against julian. but if you have nothing to offer other than your hate, please take it elsewhere. maybe fox news has a forum more to your liking?
There's a party line against Assange? On /.?
The informative mod was probably because someone agreed with my point that all this drama is making Assange a sympathetic figure, and the governments would be better served if they leaved him alone.
What's sad is that you didn't catch that. I feel entirely justified in my remarks about Assange's sycophant fans.
(By the way, the past tense of "mod", whether it means modify or moderate, is "modded".)
Is this really so complicated?
Julian Assange is a lowlife piece of garbage who uses and destroys other people for his own ends. His sycophant fans are as legion as stupidity itself.
So the guy is the biggest fucking attention whore on the Intertubes and I don't see why these officials can't comprehend one simple maxim:
Don't. Feed. The. Fucking. Troll.
It's not like this is a new concept, it goes back since small children have done stupid shit for attention, and parents waited for the tantrum to end.
It is that easy. Just let him fucking rot in obscurity.
Except they didn't get boycotted, did they? They had lines around the block.
Depressing, but true.
Of course, the lines around the block were after two mayors decided to abuse their power and deny Chick-fil-A a business license. But I guess anything that gets in the way of liberals' thug tactics is depressing to a hypocrite like you.
You seem to be blissfully ignorant of what you're talking about.
I'm knowingly ignorant, it's the guy who thinks "I'll run this data through some algorithm and turn meaningless garbage into fake numbers!" who is *blissfully* ignorant.
Rather, it's a philosophy
Good choice of words, because it's definitely not a science and definitely not a methodology.
Now, a suitably-equipped TV can send an event upstream for not just every show, but every minute watched, every commercial seen, every volume adjustment, and possibly even a guess of how many people are in the room.
And while some systems like that may exist, in my experience the Big Data is whatever garbage they can lay their hands on, no clear idea of what it means, and an analyst can flip through it and find one ludicrously false example after another. I've done this with a SME and we had another fork of our project whose system was buggered straight to hell and they didn't check a damned thing. Why ruin the party?
And the claim is that having lots and lots of erroneous data will somehow make it all better. Bullshit. If you point a million cameras up at the sky and you misinterpreted the hue, you're still going to get a report that the sky is green.
But, hey, you'll come up with numbers, and no one will be able to contradict you, and you'll get paid, so it's all good, right? If that's how you feel, you're a fucking liar.
Why does anyone want to be good at anything? Some people are good at computers but how do they discover they are good if they weren't hacking around? See? A hacker is just an amateur computer enthusiast.
That's where hacking starts, where does it go?
Right now, if you're a talented amateur, you work towards becoming a professional. So you start out a hacker and become not a hacker.
To restate my question: Why would anyone want to remain a hacker?
"Big Data" is another way to put data into a cylinder or a fluffy cloud and avoid the messy task of actually thinking about it.
But the truth is, in data-mining operation, the bigger the metadata the more ways you can mine it, and the more surprisingly the result you get out of it
If I want a surprise, I can leave the toilet seat up before I go #2. What we're aiming for in data processing is extracting something meaningful.
The NYT's Steve Lohr reports that his has been the crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, term and marketing tool.
"Big Data" is another way to put data into a cylinder or a fluffy cloud and avoid the messy task of actually thinking about it.
We don't need structure, we don't need logic, we'll just throw a metric crap-ton of data at it and hope something works!
There were a lot of great hackers coming up with stuff 20 or 30 years ago, but it seems like it's fallen to shit. And it's not just because of Hollywood, it just didn't survive the transition from an exclusive club to the huge amorphous "community" it is now.
Every time I hear about hackers, I find it's a journalist talking about felons, or some smart kid who learned how to program his microwave, or some guys who are marginally skilled in computers and seriously in need of therapy. Or just yet another fucking poser.
And they're worse in numbers, like these security conferences. These conferences are basically all about security theater, so you're starting off with a bunch of losers to begin with. Add in all the hacker wannabes, and the fact that freaks go there to grope women doesn't seem particularly surprising.
The real communities are professional organizations that are full of people who actually make things, and, frankly, it's pretty stupid to constantly worship hackers who don't make anything.
Christian Dominionism is, for example, right wing... Market fundamentalism is another purist ideology
Market fundamentalism is a pejorative, not an ideology. Free market economics is a set of observations about how the world works. This is very much like how Marx invented the popular notion of Capitalism as a fictional counter to his Socialism.
Essentially, what we've got is the modern left who argue that the state should be the all-provider, that's where Obama's remarks that "you didn't build that" came from, both he and Elizabeth Warren are echoing George Lakoff's views. And leftists genuinely believe this stuff and assume that's just how the world works: a powerful entity has to provide everything, organize society, etc. To the left, the notion that order can spontaneously arise within a market is some kind of insane belief like a jumbo jet can assemble itself from parts, which is why free market economics is derided as "market fundamentalism."
So when the right talks about cutting taxes and individualism, the left assumes that the right's real aim is to have a competing all-provider take the place of the state. This could be corporations or religion, and leftists have long accused the right of "corporatism" and "christian dominionism". That's why you see the steelworker whose wife died from cancer on an ad blaming Romney (who is the proxy for Bain Capital): to prove that corporations are a lousy alternative to the state as an all-provider.
Other forms of right-wing ideology rely on concepts like divine mandate, birthright of the nobility, or a sense of national destiny. ... Even Christianity, which is today usually thought of as mostly reactionary, was at its start a radical break from Roman society
National destiny? Woodrow Wilson. Divine mandate? Teddy Roosevelt. Birthright of the nobility? The left's endless fascination with the Kennedy clan comes to mind. Maybe you're referring to earlier versions of these, but while there may have been analogs of left and right going back to Ug and Oog the cavemen, even going back as far as the Enlightenment it's getting to be a stretch. There's no continuity of thought between early Christians and the modern left.
But Christians were extremely active in the abolitionist movement, which is hard to place because you had a massive realignment of left and right due to slavery and the Civil War. And Christians were very active Progressives, especially in the suffrage movement and temperance movements. I don't see a compelling case that religion itself is left or right wing, really.
Left-wing ideologies, in contrast, work on increasing social equality or fairness, decreasing disparities in wealth and power.
That's the marketing pitch for the past 10 years, but progressive thought goes back 120 years, easily. It was a FDR's Supreme Court that declared, "three generations of imbeciles are enough!" in Buck v Bell. And it's contemporary liberals who still can't understand why Sarah Palin would bring a child with Down's Syndrome to term. In practice, the stuff about equality or fairness is bunk, it's about organizing everyone to march towards a unified utopian vision.
Classical liberalism sought to unseat the prerogatives of the king/queen
The modern left and right both began from Enlightenment thought and split in two revolutions: the French Revolution and the American Revolution. The French Revolution, where the nobility were just the first to be guillotined in a reign of terror, was the start of the modern left. The American Revolution, where the British soldiers accused of massacring civilians were acquitted after a fair trial, was the start of the modern right.
Because, you know, there are like only two ways to code: Liberal and Conservative.
There are only two directions on a single axis, the existence of which doesn't rule out other axes.
And his axis is really just "risk-taking" vs. "risk-averse", which has nothing to do with the political notions of left and right.
But even the idea of a political spectrum is a fantasy. First, there's no center; moderatism is an agenda driven ideology that seeks to suppress certain speech through demands for civility, and to play both sides off each other and then demand concessions in return for a swing vote.
And a spectrum suggests symmetry, but there is none. There are dozens of leftist ideologies, but really only two or three distinct right-wing ideologies. Leftist thinking has the notion of radicalisms and syncretism wherein you take ideologies apart and put them together in virtually any way imaginable; no matter how far out to the left someone is, there's always someone accusing him of being a fascist. Conservative thought is anti-utopian; it doesn't try to solve all problems but prefers to respect the capacity of existing institutions, and that narrow scope is why you see a huge number of people having pretty similar arguments and independently reaching the same conclusions. (And, strangely, they also accuse all the other conservatives of being "establishment RINOs" even though they are almost in complete agreement.)
His point being that whether it was a French, British, or Dutch colony, it was already being shit on and exploited. Typical European colonists.
Sort of, it was more that much of 20th century history involved the US cleaning up after the messes left behind when European colonial powers walked away from their colonies. Now, did the US screw up a lot? Sure. Were we locked in a struggle with the USSR and use smaller countries as proxies? Sure.
But no one just decided, "hey, fuck, let's bomb some brown people and steal their oil!"
And, it's worth noting that it wasn't until after we withdrew from Vietnam, after Saigon fell, and after and the "peace" was established that the reeducation camps were set up. That, in turn, is when the boat people started coming.
Someone who believes in science is generally skeptical of all such claims, ...
OT... I'm not a fan of the phrase "believe in science." I accept various scientific theories because in some cases I've put in effort to satisfy myself that they explain the world I live in, and in other cases I don't have the explanation, but the existence of products or technologies that need such an explanation is good circumstantial evidence. Or, at the very least, I can accept that a thriving scientific community is an imperfect but effective mechanism to devise an explanation.
So my acceptance of science is both partial and conditional, a far cry from belief.
But according to Scientology, there's millions of Scientologists around the world who appreciate the works of L. Ron Hubbard!
But as religious prophecy, not as science fiction. What's amazing to me is that there is even a splinter group that still keeps the faith but rejects the management.
This is either a PR stunt or the US is trying to befriend Vietnam, possibly because that would make invading Iran easier, or maybe to build yet another military base.
Yes, that's what we need to invade Iran: a base that's on the other side of India and Pakistan.
Ya, you shit the world, kill millions of humans, ruin their countries and let them deal with it....
Typical American.
You do realize Vietnam was a French colony, right?
If you don't think gun-loving liberals exist, I invite you to visit Austin. There's lots of us here.
I like Austin, I've been there a couple of times. But you can't hold a candle to Vermont, absolutely anyone can carry concealed, no permit required.
But, reading comprehension: I said that if anarchists start killing lawyers or cops, they'd go after unarmed people first, and the fact remains that most liberals deliberately disarm themselves.
You'll wind up slaughtering a lot of limp wristed liberal lawyers, and be shot dead by the well-armed conservative lawyers
Because conservatives are the only ones who know how to use guns?
That's almost exclusively my experience. The enlisted ranks in the military are heavily conservative, and they all have at least basic proficiency. All your hunters, farmers, etc., are largely conservative, and they tend to be armed.
But more importantly, liberals are the only ones who deliberately disarm themselves and their law-abiding neighbors, for example, in "gun-free zones". Virtually every major inner city region is run by liberals, has strict gun control, and vastly higher murder rates.
Siri: Is this the comic you're looking for? http://xkcd.com/416/
No, Siri, I was looking for the funny one, with good art.
Sure. Throw in the cops, too.
This is a pretty typical anarchist sentiment, but I thought about it, and it works for me. You'll wind up slaughtering a lot of limp wristed liberal lawyers, and be shot dead by the well-armed conservative lawyers (have fun storming the legal offices of the NRA!) and the country will be far better off.
So, have at it!