You may think you've shown me, but you haven't. You continually drew absurd conclusions from unrelated premises, while I was trying to demonstrate that my premises weren't absurd or unrelated. Rather than argue that my premises are absurd or that they are, in fact, unrelated, you just keep demonstrating the same thing.
So, let's say I'm as slow as you seem to think I am. Please explain why my premises are no good and not related to each other in a way that justifies my conclusion about suspicion.
Okay. Is there an economy of scale to building more smaller and simpler rockets instead of larger rockets? Overall, is it more economical to launch 10 packages of 100kg, or one of 100kg? The Russians seem to have figured out how to do it with the Progress Supply Vehicle.
Someone who knows more about orbital mechanics and the economics of launches, please correct me here:
The main issue with getting into space is the high cost in energy (and thus money) of getting out of the Earth's gravity well. The heavier the load, the more fuel is required; more fuel increases the weight, which requires more fuel still... eventually you hit a kind of maximum whereby you can't add enough energy in the form of fuel to overcome the weight of the total package.
Wouldn't it then be economically feasible to launch many small packages that get assembled at the ISS? A swarm deployment to orbit, of sorts?
I laid out my claims and said they justify suspicion, but not a conclusion. You snarked your way through without ever actually trying to argue anything.
One little detail I just found supporting #2: During the Church Committee hearings, the director of the FBI, Clarence Kelly, admitted that Terry Normal was on the FBI payroll.
No they're not. Believing in general that human stupidity explains more than co-ordinated malice doesn't contradict the specific case of an organization with a demonstrated history of malicious actions. I believe people in general aren't child molesters; that doesn't prevent me from being suspicious when a guy who's been in jail for child molesting is once again caught with his pants down around a little girl.
The rest is full of unproven assertions.
There's a spectrum of certainty that depends on evidence. For evidence of shots fired before the guardsmen fired, we have an audio recording that captured the shots prior to the guardsmen's, witnesses to his shooting, and witnesses to a LEO saying that four shots had been fired from the gun. That's decent evidence of #1.
For #2, we have Norman's admission that he regularly took photos that he sold to the FBI and local police.
For #3, we have voluminous documentation of COINTELPRO, including the FBI's admission that the program existed. We also have the final report of the 1976 Church Committee, a U.S. Congressional investigation into abuses by the American intelligence community, that concluded
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.
For #4, we have various denials that Norman fired the gun at all, including the official police report that he didn't, and denials that he was in any way connected to the police or the FBI.
So, does that justify thinking the FBI planned to have the guardsmen shoot the students by triggering them with an agent provocateur with handgun? No, even if you uncritically accept all four premises. But you can't be aware of the various conspiracies that have been real, like Watergate and COINTELPRO, and not be a little suspicious at how things worked out. And being suspicious doesn't put you in the "I want to believe!" camp. Refusing to be suspicious, though, does make you credulous to an absurd degree.
If you'd led with that instead of mockery, we might have had an interesting discussion.
I don't know that there was a conspiracy on the part of the FBI to instigate the Kent State shootings, but it's suspicious that 1) there were shots just prior to the guardsmen shooting, 2) those shots came from an FBI informant, 3) the FBI and other U.S. government agencies actually do have a documented history of not just monitoring "subversive" groups but instigating incidents from within them, and 4) the shots were covered up at the time.
I subscribe to the maxim "never attribute to malice that which can more easily explained by stupidity", and that's likely what the shots fired by the informant were. But that doesn't mean I'm willing give the FBI the benefit of the doubt after all they did under Hoover.
Awesome. We've exposed the limits of argument by sarcasm.
Now, care to address the fact that there are real, acknowledged, well-documented conspiracies by the U.S. government to harm its own citizens, and that the existence of loony conspiracy theories like JFK's assassination and 9/11 truthers don't change that fact?
So in your mind the FBI and the U.S. government have never done anything wrong that could possibly have harmed its own citizens. No Tuskegee experiment where they deliberately left syphilis untreated to monitor its progress over decades. No recording Martin Luther King with his mistress so they could play the tapes for his wife and derail the civil rights movement. No MKULTRA, no Project SHAD, no human radiation experiments (in co-operation with McGill University's medical department, Mr. I'm-not-American).
That must be a nice world, full of unicorns and chocolate rivers.
Read up on COINTELPRO. Read up on Fred Hampton, given barbituates by an FBI informant so he'd be asleep at the time of the police raid they'd planned, and then shot to death in his bed by the police. None of this controversial; it's all accepted history.
This isn't "JFK shot by CIA/KGB/FBI/Unions/Mafia/Cubans". This isn't moon landing or 9/11 truther conspiracies. This is all well-documented malfeasance by the FBI.
No psychic signal is necessary. All you need is the "freelance" photographer's boss to say "get in a scuffle and fire some shots where the guardsmen can here you. Or you get another "freelancer" to pick a fight with a guy who has a gun. [I put "freelance" in scare quotes because the photographer's gig was to go to protests and photograph the people there, to sell to the police and FBI.]
When you throw a match on a pool of gasoline, you don't need to send a psychic signal to get the gas to ignite.
choose among 100 fonts, a dozen font sizes, select margins and columns, define pagination, etc is all wasted effort. Picking words to boldface or italicize wastes time and distracts from getting words on the page.
If that's what's keeping you from writing, then the problem isn't the available featureset, it's the writer's discipline. If he wasn't procrastinating by playing with all the bells and whistles in Word, he'd be petting the cat and getting another cup of coffee.
If you start Word and just start typing and accept all the very reasonable default settings, there's no reason you need to adjust anything in order to write. There are even manuscript templates freely available that provide defaults already set to the industry norm for manuscript submission.
I don't think he's saying that the students had it coming. He's saying that, in a direct conflict between you and the machinery of the state, there are two outcomes: You fleeing, and you dead. Don't make the mistake of believing that, because you're peaceful, they won't shoot. As this story demonstrates, they'll do whatever they have to, to create a provocation that lets them shoot you.
Windows 7 isn't a failure, but it's another iteration of one of their successful products from the 90s, which is Windows. Office 2010 is also a success. That's still coasting on core products that are over a decade old. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they're made repeated attempts to open other markets and simply failed. Xbox might be a success if they can make up in profit the billion dollars they lost on the original.
Two large, lumbering companies with zero agility that have coasted for a decade on their successful products from the 90s and failed with everything since, decide to become one larger company that's less agile, less creative, and even less likely to do something game changing or even newly profitable.
Yeah, that's some scary competition. What did Bill Gates say so many years ago? Something like "We didn't want to become IBM"? Well, IBM, in a corporate sense, has become far more dynamic than MS is today. Don't see a merger with Adobe changing that.
You're right, it is insanity, but the firefighters aren't the ones to blame here. They were put into a position of choosing to do what they're supposed to do, but at a cost driving the municipality deeper into debt, and setting an example for all the other Gene Crannicks of the county that you don't, in fact, have to pay, which means less funding for them to do their job. The city is 30k in the hole servicing the Gene Crannicks of the county because they can't collect afterwards from them.
As someone else put it, everyone acted rationally from their perspective; it's the whole situation that's irrational. The villain here is the opt-in system of protection. You don't have an opt-in system if the firefighters just do their job regardless, you have a system where there are suckers who pay and non-suckers who don't. Enforcing the opt-in nature of the system gets you a ton of shit from people like yourself who are understandably horrified at the image of a bunch of firemen watching a house burn down. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
So why do I blame Crannick? Because he and the other county residents have repeatedly shot down plans by the county to institute blanket coverage and help support the FD that services them. They choose not to have blanket coverage. They choose an opt-in system. And then they choose not to pay, counting on moral approbation to force the firemen's hoses out. They're playing the municipality and the fire department for suckers, and I don't blame the fire department one bit for refusing to play that game.
That works when you have a large population, and most of the paying ones don't realize that they're being overcharged to cover the freeloaders and the truly needy who can't pay. South Fulton has a population of around 10k; the rest of the county around them add a couple thousand more. The nominal actual fee they were charging was $500, and failing to collect in the majority of cases. As that goes up to cover freeloaders, the collection rate goes down. The rate curves on this just don't work.
As for collection agencies, you can't enter a contract with someone who's house is on fire--it's the definition of duress. Short version is that the municipality is fucked if the county resident decides not to write a check.
They would have allowed the pets to die in New York or in South Fulton or if Crannick had paid the $75. Firemen don't rush into burning buildings to save cats, only people.
The FD is municipal; the residents are county. The FD has no legal means to compel payment from someone who says "I'll pay anything". And in the past, they've collected from those people in less than 50% of the cases. The FD is 30k in the hole servicing the non-subscribers who can't find their wallet after their house was saved.
Besides, there was a couple hours between the shed catching fire and the house. All Crannick had to do to save his pets was, you know, open the fucking door.
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You may think you've shown me, but you haven't. You continually drew absurd conclusions from unrelated premises, while I was trying to demonstrate that my premises weren't absurd or unrelated. Rather than argue that my premises are absurd or that they are, in fact, unrelated, you just keep demonstrating the same thing.
So, let's say I'm as slow as you seem to think I am. Please explain why my premises are no good and not related to each other in a way that justifies my conclusion about suspicion.
Okay. Is there an economy of scale to building more smaller and simpler rockets instead of larger rockets? Overall, is it more economical to launch 10 packages of 100kg, or one of 100kg? The Russians seem to have figured out how to do it with the Progress Supply Vehicle.
Someone who knows more about orbital mechanics and the economics of launches, please correct me here:
The main issue with getting into space is the high cost in energy (and thus money) of getting out of the Earth's gravity well. The heavier the load, the more fuel is required; more fuel increases the weight, which requires more fuel still... eventually you hit a kind of maximum whereby you can't add enough energy in the form of fuel to overcome the weight of the total package.
Wouldn't it then be economically feasible to launch many small packages that get assembled at the ISS? A swarm deployment to orbit, of sorts?
I laid out my claims and said they justify suspicion, but not a conclusion. You snarked your way through without ever actually trying to argue anything.
"Blowing them off"? Reread our whole exchange, and you tell me who blew off who.
Why do I get the feeling that you'd be defending Nixon all the way through the Watergate Scandal, even after he resigned?
One little detail I just found supporting #2: During the Church Committee hearings, the director of the FBI, Clarence Kelly, admitted that Terry Normal was on the FBI payroll.
Your last two sentences are contradictory.
No they're not. Believing in general that human stupidity explains more than co-ordinated malice doesn't contradict the specific case of an organization with a demonstrated history of malicious actions. I believe people in general aren't child molesters; that doesn't prevent me from being suspicious when a guy who's been in jail for child molesting is once again caught with his pants down around a little girl.
The rest is full of unproven assertions.
There's a spectrum of certainty that depends on evidence. For evidence of shots fired before the guardsmen fired, we have an audio recording that captured the shots prior to the guardsmen's, witnesses to his shooting, and witnesses to a LEO saying that four shots had been fired from the gun. That's decent evidence of #1.
For #2, we have Norman's admission that he regularly took photos that he sold to the FBI and local police.
For #3, we have voluminous documentation of COINTELPRO, including the FBI's admission that the program existed. We also have the final report of the 1976 Church Committee, a U.S. Congressional investigation into abuses by the American intelligence community, that concluded
For #4, we have various denials that Norman fired the gun at all, including the official police report that he didn't, and denials that he was in any way connected to the police or the FBI.
So, does that justify thinking the FBI planned to have the guardsmen shoot the students by triggering them with an agent provocateur with handgun? No, even if you uncritically accept all four premises. But you can't be aware of the various conspiracies that have been real, like Watergate and COINTELPRO, and not be a little suspicious at how things worked out. And being suspicious doesn't put you in the "I want to believe!" camp. Refusing to be suspicious, though, does make you credulous to an absurd degree.
If you'd led with that instead of mockery, we might have had an interesting discussion.
I don't know that there was a conspiracy on the part of the FBI to instigate the Kent State shootings, but it's suspicious that 1) there were shots just prior to the guardsmen shooting, 2) those shots came from an FBI informant, 3) the FBI and other U.S. government agencies actually do have a documented history of not just monitoring "subversive" groups but instigating incidents from within them, and 4) the shots were covered up at the time.
I subscribe to the maxim "never attribute to malice that which can more easily explained by stupidity", and that's likely what the shots fired by the informant were. But that doesn't mean I'm willing give the FBI the benefit of the doubt after all they did under Hoover.
Sure, I'll accept that there are lizards on Earth. Got anything besides deflecting the question with snark?
Awesome. We've exposed the limits of argument by sarcasm.
Now, care to address the fact that there are real, acknowledged, well-documented conspiracies by the U.S. government to harm its own citizens, and that the existence of loony conspiracy theories like JFK's assassination and 9/11 truthers don't change that fact?
So in your mind the FBI and the U.S. government have never done anything wrong that could possibly have harmed its own citizens. No Tuskegee experiment where they deliberately left syphilis untreated to monitor its progress over decades. No recording Martin Luther King with his mistress so they could play the tapes for his wife and derail the civil rights movement. No MKULTRA, no Project SHAD, no human radiation experiments (in co-operation with McGill University's medical department, Mr. I'm-not-American).
That must be a nice world, full of unicorns and chocolate rivers.
Do you think that's a good rebuttal?
Read up on COINTELPRO. Read up on Fred Hampton, given barbituates by an FBI informant so he'd be asleep at the time of the police raid they'd planned, and then shot to death in his bed by the police. None of this controversial; it's all accepted history.
This isn't "JFK shot by CIA/KGB/FBI/Unions/Mafia/Cubans". This isn't moon landing or 9/11 truther conspiracies. This is all well-documented malfeasance by the FBI.
No psychic signal is necessary. All you need is the "freelance" photographer's boss to say "get in a scuffle and fire some shots where the guardsmen can here you. Or you get another "freelancer" to pick a fight with a guy who has a gun. [I put "freelance" in scare quotes because the photographer's gig was to go to protests and photograph the people there, to sell to the police and FBI.]
When you throw a match on a pool of gasoline, you don't need to send a psychic signal to get the gas to ignite.
If that's what's keeping you from writing, then the problem isn't the available featureset, it's the writer's discipline. If he wasn't procrastinating by playing with all the bells and whistles in Word, he'd be petting the cat and getting another cup of coffee.
If you start Word and just start typing and accept all the very reasonable default settings, there's no reason you need to adjust anything in order to write. There are even manuscript templates freely available that provide defaults already set to the industry norm for manuscript submission.
I don't think he's saying that the students had it coming. He's saying that, in a direct conflict between you and the machinery of the state, there are two outcomes: You fleeing, and you dead. Don't make the mistake of believing that, because you're peaceful, they won't shoot. As this story demonstrates, they'll do whatever they have to, to create a provocation that lets them shoot you.
Windows 7 isn't a failure, but it's another iteration of one of their successful products from the 90s, which is Windows. Office 2010 is also a success. That's still coasting on core products that are over a decade old. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they're made repeated attempts to open other markets and simply failed. Xbox might be a success if they can make up in profit the billion dollars they lost on the original.
Call me when profit on the Xbox 360 covers the billion dollar losses on the original Xbox.
Two large, lumbering companies with zero agility that have coasted for a decade on their successful products from the 90s and failed with everything since, decide to become one larger company that's less agile, less creative, and even less likely to do something game changing or even newly profitable.
Yeah, that's some scary competition. What did Bill Gates say so many years ago? Something like "We didn't want to become IBM"? Well, IBM, in a corporate sense, has become far more dynamic than MS is today. Don't see a merger with Adobe changing that.
I laughed my guts at out at Burn After Reading. Watching a smiling Brad Pitt get shot in the face was reason enough to pay the $11.25.
"I guess we learned not to do it again... though I'll be fucked if I know what we did."
Is it unjust to force the fire department to fight the fire for a non-subscriber?
You're right, it is insanity, but the firefighters aren't the ones to blame here. They were put into a position of choosing to do what they're supposed to do, but at a cost driving the municipality deeper into debt, and setting an example for all the other Gene Crannicks of the county that you don't, in fact, have to pay, which means less funding for them to do their job. The city is 30k in the hole servicing the Gene Crannicks of the county because they can't collect afterwards from them.
As someone else put it, everyone acted rationally from their perspective; it's the whole situation that's irrational. The villain here is the opt-in system of protection. You don't have an opt-in system if the firefighters just do their job regardless, you have a system where there are suckers who pay and non-suckers who don't. Enforcing the opt-in nature of the system gets you a ton of shit from people like yourself who are understandably horrified at the image of a bunch of firemen watching a house burn down. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
So why do I blame Crannick? Because he and the other county residents have repeatedly shot down plans by the county to institute blanket coverage and help support the FD that services them. They choose not to have blanket coverage. They choose an opt-in system. And then they choose not to pay, counting on moral approbation to force the firemen's hoses out. They're playing the municipality and the fire department for suckers, and I don't blame the fire department one bit for refusing to play that game.
That works when you have a large population, and most of the paying ones don't realize that they're being overcharged to cover the freeloaders and the truly needy who can't pay. South Fulton has a population of around 10k; the rest of the county around them add a couple thousand more. The nominal actual fee they were charging was $500, and failing to collect in the majority of cases. As that goes up to cover freeloaders, the collection rate goes down. The rate curves on this just don't work.
As for collection agencies, you can't enter a contract with someone who's house is on fire--it's the definition of duress. Short version is that the municipality is fucked if the county resident decides not to write a check.
They would have allowed the pets to die in New York or in South Fulton or if Crannick had paid the $75. Firemen don't rush into burning buildings to save cats, only people.
The FD is municipal; the residents are county. The FD has no legal means to compel payment from someone who says "I'll pay anything". And in the past, they've collected from those people in less than 50% of the cases. The FD is 30k in the hole servicing the non-subscribers who can't find their wallet after their house was saved.
Besides, there was a couple hours between the shed catching fire and the house. All Crannick had to do to save his pets was, you know, open the fucking door.