(For the tin-foil crowd, no, I don't think elections will be made illegal or term limits extended in the next four years. Sorry.)
Do you have some objective evidence to support that, or is it just a strongly held belief? Plus, if you read the article, the fear isn't so much that the Republicans will control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency- we've had that for four years already, and while they HAVE abused the power somewhat, the Judiciary is still keeping them in check. But with three more judges set to retire in the next 4 years- Republicans could concieveably have a lock on all three branches of government. Does your supposition hold up under those circumstances?
A question- if we're tending right as you say, then how can the House and Senate fail to stay in Republican Hands? In fact, how can the Democrats hope to survive the next 4 years at all? What would stop Bush from calling for a third continenetal congress to reconsider the Constitution itself once the neocons have a lock on all three branches of Government?
As you say, we're a divided nation- and nations in division have a tendency to go totalitarian in this world.
I think they were edited out because this is Politics, not Ask Slashdot (and yes, I promise to pick my topics more carefully in the future).
Will this lead to a Stalin-like hard right rule in the United States, and the warned curtailing of rights that a single, right-wing party is feared to be? Or will it be neoconservative utopia, ushering in an era of low taxes, small government, trickle down economics, and an end to labor law disputes?
How do you propose to nuke terrorists living in London, New York, Hamburg?
I propose deportation of all noncitizens back to where they came from, and an utter closing of the borders.
What do you propose we do about the non-terrorists living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East?
If we leave them alive after an attack of that magnitude, they won't be non-terrorists for very long- these are a people who still are racists against Mongols for what Ghengis Kahn did to them.
What do you propose we do about global economic interdependence?
It's a bad idea that needs to be ended, utterly. There should be no communication between countries at all.
Where shall we get our oil after your Final Solution?
Out of waste vegitation, it's a simple enough chemical process. Didn't you see the article on slashdot a couple of weeks ago?
By the way, in case you didn't notice, terrorists are not a "race." "Genocide" means destroying a race. What race do you wish to destroy?
More of a culture- the tribes of the middle eastern desert who have that strange idea that Justice will only come when Mecca is ruled by a dictatorship and has control over the whole world.
Muslims? (A religion, not a race, that spans many races, including whitey).
Not all Muslims believe that.
Arabs? (What about all the terrorists in non-Arab Muslim nations like Indonesia or Iran?)
Same solution as before- if they're of the Islamic Death Cult, they need to be killed, along with their families, friends, etc.
Finally, what the fuck are you talking about "historically proven to reduce terrorism." Which historical genocide has proven that?
Augustus Titus, Roman General and Governor of the province of Judah, came up with the solution originally. He responded to Jewish terrorism by killing 500 Jews for every centurion killed. Eventually he razed Jerusalem, sowed the fields with salt, took all the people as slaves, and left. It was 1948 before Zionism raised it's ugly head again. I'd say that's a pretty complete solution, wouldn't you?
You've backed off of native America and Japan; perhaps you support the German genocide of Jews? Or the Armenian genocide?
Nah, I go much further back in history than that, those are just some minor examples of incomplete solutions to largely non-existant problems (though the Turkish genocide of the Armenians comes close- you haven't heard of an Armenian attack in Turkey since, have you?).
(Why the hell am I arguing with you?)
Because you don't actually understand that to me, genocide is the worse of the two solutions- far better would it be for us to destroy our economy than our morality. We can reinvent our economy- we can't reinvent our morality. In addition, genocide would probably ruin us economically as well, we only had a small opportunity to use genocide as an option and Bush wasted the 72 hours after 9-11-2001 trying to pin it all on Saddam.
Now see that's not true. People will take peace as a last resort and be happy with it, as long as they believe that suffering isn't worth it and the end is inevitable anyway. Look at consolidations of power pre Age of Enlightenment (which, coincidently, arabs and particularly islamists still are).
For Islamic Death Cultists- Death is always preferable to peace. They still have yet to forgive the Mongols for running over their territory.
With out the Mongols there would be no Russia. Without the Germans there would be no Germany (that was nowhere near the cohesive country it is today circa our civil war). There would be no United States without tyranny from England. Japan is what it is because of the efforts of many tyrants and the invention of Gunboat Diplomacy. The threat of total annhiliation is probably needed to provide the impetus for the Islamic reformation, a few centuries late BTW. The death of enough of them to make credible the end of their beliefs and culture might be the only thing that can save them. Because they might push us like Hannibal pushed the Romans. And then, there's no peace but a final rest.
Hmm, now THAT is an interesting theory- but such a death better be enough to totally destroy the Death Cultists. You can leave the moderates in the United States alone.
That said, watch "Terror's Children", and the Thomas Friedman specials. The funny thing is the Islamist, they'd vote for Bush. They think that he's the safer canadate for them when it comes to wielding American military might. Now that's ironic!
But it's true- just think what an actual genius could do with the American Military. As opposed to a C-student frat boy whose sense of strategy is so bad that he couldn't even avoid getting caught for cocaine possession by the Texas Rangers.
Hmm, I'll have to look at it again. That could be a problem (not a large problem, but a problem). Stallman would be such a hippie as to prevent that, wouldn't he?
Hmm, you are right (after looking at it). One would have to be a *very* good manager of the code and prevent unauthorized changes from coming in, in that case, to prevent hackers from messing with the debates and voting.
:-) Actually, no I'm not- I've held this opinion for quite some time that our democracy needs a bit of computerization and supercharging. Slashdot is just the first near-solution I've seen (though there have been others proposed, from taking budgeting out of the hands of Congress and putting it into the hands of the taxpayers, to direct-participation democracy where the President is everybody's slave).
I don't LIKE either of the two options, I only point out that they are the only two methods that are historically proven to reduce terrorism. All other potential solutions only make the problem worse.
Besides, we left a couple of million Natives still alive, and killed less than 1/100th the population of Japan. For a terrorist situation the genocide has to be so close to complete that the only survivors are taken as slaves or something and prevented from reforming their country within the next millenia or so. Some of our nuclear weapons would be VERY good for that- the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't (you can visit ground zero in Nagasaki today without dying, for instance. They've put a very nice park there.) With terrorism, if you leave even ONE person alive and free to preach, you will have created a new terrorist problem. Terrorists breed like rats- and like rats, if you're even going to ATTEMPT extermination you've got to get them all.
This strategy certainly has worked wonders for North Korea.
Not quite complete for North Korea though- somehow they got France to sell them a nuclear reactor, and it all went downhill from there. MAYBE if the border had been a complete shut out from both sides, it would have worked. This may still be the answer for the world to protect itself from North Korea though- set up automatic batteries of Patriot Missiles surrounding the nation tied to radar stations that automatically fire at anything with a bigger radar signature than a baseball (even the Stealth Interceptors have the radar signal of a basketball). And cut them off even more, by broadcasting wide band jamming signals across their borders. If there was ever a man who needed a country-wide insane asylum, it's Kim Jung Ill.
Very good- there's the hole in the plan. However- there's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modfying an open source project and creating a new closed source project forked off of it. My key would be to have two programmers- one for the House and one for the Senate- who would be responsible for keeping the system running at maximum efficiency and implementing rule changes as necessary.
BTW, since I don't have the capability of entering a bug report from work, another bug that really gets to me is what happens after a delete in the inbox- instead of going to my/inbox it goes to messages.pl. This is to do the delete and show the new list. But that means that if you are deleting messages one by one and using the back button, the system breaks every time you hit a journal entry.
Re:Of course the candidates are in favor!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
If, for whatever reason, the gubment went sour and there came a time for armed revolt
I know quite a few people who, after living through the last four years of being attacked economically by our own government, economically by our own corporations, and physically by foreign invaders from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and India; feel that it is LONG PAST time for armed revolt and the only reason that it hasn't happened is because the government is allowed to own tanks and rocket launchers and the best we can do is a puny little assault rifle.
Where to me, armed surrender is equally as acceptable as genocide. Under genocide, we will lose our moral superiority as a nation, guaranteed, but nobody will ever fsck with us again. Under armed surrender (what one wag called my plan for "Fortress America"), we basically ignore that the rest of the world exists for a while- and kill anybody who tries to tell us different. That would cost us our economic superiority- but maybe, just maybe, when we come out a thousand years from now, the rest of the world will have caught up to us in standard of living.
And I'm saying that with slashcode, you could put a name up for nomination, allow 24 hours for debate, then post a poll on the topic to get the vote, without any fillibuster possible at all (because the server, not a human being, is controling the process, just as the server prevented me from posting this message within 2 minutes of the last one). We've got a great device here that could supercharge our democracy, is what I'm pointing out.
I'm just saying what it has done for me- I've had enough RTFA responses that I now read ALL the source materials before posting. In addition, the bills debated by Congress don't have a lot of source material, and could be put into the original slashdot article. You do at least read the words posted on slashdot before responding, right?
I agree that unions have had a positive effect overall on labor in the past. But, unfortunately they have not changed with the times. Globalization is a reality, even though ugly at times. The unions are not doing themselves, their members, and the companies they work for, any good by artificially restricting efficiency. The 21st century is going to be marked by those companies that are the most nimble, the most efficient, and the lowest cost.
Sounds like we need to kill the globalists then- they're worse terrorists than al Qaida. But once again, what's your solution to prventing the parasites (investors) and predators (C-level executives) from stealing the productivity of the working class? You're long on problems, but very short on solutions, it seems. Agreed- standard union tactics reduce efficiency- so what's the solution for the 21st century, as you put it?
And yet with the opposite point of view, you have companies like Sun bribing the courts to let them terminate older employees so that they can bring in younger ones from India, which is also inefficient because you have to train all the new workers.
So what is YOUR solution to the predatory class taking advantage of workers?
Not entirely true- that's just the FUD that the management would like you to believe, to keep you from forming a union and striking (a strike ALWAYS hurts the employer FAR more than the employees- because your paycheck is only a small fraction of your true worth to the company unless you are a C-level executive. That's why they can afford to pay the C-level guys MILLIONS more than they pay you, it's just a giant ponzi scheme).
According to the courts, the Federal Labor Laws do not exist in this situation. Sun won their case, as did IBM and Intel. It's already been decided. Old Americans are no longer a protected class of employee, and haven't been since 2002.
Good luck being able to forsee something happening halfway across the world.
You are the master of your destiny, unfortunately the master in a ship is perhaps the people with the most serious responsbilites.
The last 4 years have taught me that we are all in a single ship- and that we've elected a total incompetant for a captain who is trying to steer us towards any iceberg available.
Ah, but with a truly efficient government, the repeal of such laws could come as quickly as the original pass. At least with slashcode you could hardcode the vote to not come before at least a certain number of people posted in the debate session, making it more likely that more people actually READ THE BILL before VOTING ON IT. You can't do that with verbal debates that end on a vote.
About bloody time. There are only two possible endings to the war on terror- genocide and surrender- and if we go with the first nuclear weapons will be necessary eventually.
You can't say "nu-clee-ar"
That really scares me
Sometimes a brain comes
In quite handy
But it's not going to help you
Because I won three Purple Hearts
This Land Will Surely Vote for Me!
of Congress. Now if we could just install slashcode servers for the House and Senate, with automatic e-mailing of poll results to the President, then we could REALLY get some work done!
Slashdot Mirror
(For the tin-foil crowd, no, I don't think elections will be made illegal or term limits extended in the next four years. Sorry.)
Do you have some objective evidence to support that, or is it just a strongly held belief? Plus, if you read the article, the fear isn't so much that the Republicans will control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency- we've had that for four years already, and while they HAVE abused the power somewhat, the Judiciary is still keeping them in check. But with three more judges set to retire in the next 4 years- Republicans could concieveably have a lock on all three branches of government. Does your supposition hold up under those circumstances?
A question- if we're tending right as you say, then how can the House and Senate fail to stay in Republican Hands? In fact, how can the Democrats hope to survive the next 4 years at all? What would stop Bush from calling for a third continenetal congress to reconsider the Constitution itself once the neocons have a lock on all three branches of Government?
As you say, we're a divided nation- and nations in division have a tendency to go totalitarian in this world.
At least the Assault Weapons Ban sunsets. Do you think Bush's next two appointees to SCOTUS will?
I think they were edited out because this is Politics, not Ask Slashdot (and yes, I promise to pick my topics more carefully in the future).
Will this lead to a Stalin-like hard right rule in the United States, and the warned curtailing of rights that a single, right-wing party is feared to be? Or will it be neoconservative utopia, ushering in an era of low taxes, small government, trickle down economics, and an end to labor law disputes?
How do you propose to nuke terrorists living in London, New York, Hamburg?
I propose deportation of all noncitizens back to where they came from, and an utter closing of the borders.
What do you propose we do about the non-terrorists living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East?
If we leave them alive after an attack of that magnitude, they won't be non-terrorists for very long- these are a people who still are racists against Mongols for what Ghengis Kahn did to them.
What do you propose we do about global economic interdependence?
It's a bad idea that needs to be ended, utterly. There should be no communication between countries at all.
Where shall we get our oil after your Final Solution?
Out of waste vegitation, it's a simple enough chemical process. Didn't you see the article on slashdot a couple of weeks ago?
By the way, in case you didn't notice, terrorists are not a "race." "Genocide" means destroying a race. What race do you wish to destroy?
More of a culture- the tribes of the middle eastern desert who have that strange idea that Justice will only come when Mecca is ruled by a dictatorship and has control over the whole world.
Muslims? (A religion, not a race, that spans many races, including whitey).
Not all Muslims believe that.
Arabs? (What about all the terrorists in non-Arab Muslim nations like Indonesia or Iran?)
Same solution as before- if they're of the Islamic Death Cult, they need to be killed, along with their families, friends, etc.
Finally, what the fuck are you talking about "historically proven to reduce terrorism." Which historical genocide has proven that?
Augustus Titus, Roman General and Governor of the province of Judah, came up with the solution originally. He responded to Jewish terrorism by killing 500 Jews for every centurion killed. Eventually he razed Jerusalem, sowed the fields with salt, took all the people as slaves, and left. It was 1948 before Zionism raised it's ugly head again. I'd say that's a pretty complete solution, wouldn't you?
You've backed off of native America and Japan; perhaps you support the German genocide of Jews? Or the Armenian genocide?
Nah, I go much further back in history than that, those are just some minor examples of incomplete solutions to largely non-existant problems (though the Turkish genocide of the Armenians comes close- you haven't heard of an Armenian attack in Turkey since, have you?).
(Why the hell am I arguing with you?)
Because you don't actually understand that to me, genocide is the worse of the two solutions- far better would it be for us to destroy our economy than our morality. We can reinvent our economy- we can't reinvent our morality. In addition, genocide would probably ruin us economically as well, we only had a small opportunity to use genocide as an option and Bush wasted the 72 hours after 9-11-2001 trying to pin it all on Saddam.
Now see that's not true. People will take peace as a last resort and be happy with it, as long as they believe that suffering isn't worth it and the end is inevitable anyway. Look at consolidations of power pre Age of Enlightenment (which, coincidently, arabs and particularly islamists still are).
For Islamic Death Cultists- Death is always preferable to peace. They still have yet to forgive the Mongols for running over their territory.
With out the Mongols there would be no Russia. Without the Germans there would be no Germany (that was nowhere near the cohesive country it is today circa our civil war). There would be no United States without tyranny from England. Japan is what it is because of the efforts of many tyrants and the invention of Gunboat Diplomacy. The threat of total annhiliation is probably needed to provide the impetus for the Islamic reformation, a few centuries late BTW. The death of enough of them to make credible the end of their beliefs and culture might be the only thing that can save them. Because they might push us like Hannibal pushed the Romans. And then, there's no peace but a final rest.
Hmm, now THAT is an interesting theory- but such a death better be enough to totally destroy the Death Cultists. You can leave the moderates in the United States alone.
That said, watch "Terror's Children", and the Thomas Friedman specials. The funny thing is the Islamist, they'd vote for Bush. They think that he's the safer canadate for them when it comes to wielding American military might. Now that's ironic!
But it's true- just think what an actual genius could do with the American Military. As opposed to a C-student frat boy whose sense of strategy is so bad that he couldn't even avoid getting caught for cocaine possession by the Texas Rangers.
Hmm, I'll have to look at it again. That could be a problem (not a large problem, but a problem). Stallman would be such a hippie as to prevent that, wouldn't he?
Hmm, you are right (after looking at it). One would have to be a *very* good manager of the code and prevent unauthorized changes from coming in, in that case, to prevent hackers from messing with the debates and voting.
:-) Actually, no I'm not- I've held this opinion for quite some time that our democracy needs a bit of computerization and supercharging. Slashdot is just the first near-solution I've seen (though there have been others proposed, from taking budgeting out of the hands of Congress and putting it into the hands of the taxpayers, to direct-participation democracy where the President is everybody's slave).
I don't LIKE either of the two options, I only point out that they are the only two methods that are historically proven to reduce terrorism. All other potential solutions only make the problem worse.
Besides, we left a couple of million Natives still alive, and killed less than 1/100th the population of Japan. For a terrorist situation the genocide has to be so close to complete that the only survivors are taken as slaves or something and prevented from reforming their country within the next millenia or so. Some of our nuclear weapons would be VERY good for that- the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't (you can visit ground zero in Nagasaki today without dying, for instance. They've put a very nice park there.) With terrorism, if you leave even ONE person alive and free to preach, you will have created a new terrorist problem. Terrorists breed like rats- and like rats, if you're even going to ATTEMPT extermination you've got to get them all.
No worse than current- and you can program things to happen in a more orderly fashion...perfection.
This strategy certainly has worked wonders for North Korea.
Not quite complete for North Korea though- somehow they got France to sell them a nuclear reactor, and it all went downhill from there. MAYBE if the border had been a complete shut out from both sides, it would have worked. This may still be the answer for the world to protect itself from North Korea though- set up automatic batteries of Patriot Missiles surrounding the nation tied to radar stations that automatically fire at anything with a bigger radar signature than a baseball (even the Stealth Interceptors have the radar signal of a basketball). And cut them off even more, by broadcasting wide band jamming signals across their borders. If there was ever a man who needed a country-wide insane asylum, it's Kim Jung Ill.
Very good- there's the hole in the plan. However- there's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modfying an open source project and creating a new closed source project forked off of it. My key would be to have two programmers- one for the House and one for the Senate- who would be responsible for keeping the system running at maximum efficiency and implementing rule changes as necessary.
BTW, since I don't have the capability of entering a bug report from work, another bug that really gets to me is what happens after a delete in the inbox- instead of going to my/inbox it goes to messages.pl. This is to do the delete and show the new list. But that means that if you are deleting messages one by one and using the back button, the system breaks every time you hit a journal entry.
If, for whatever reason, the gubment went sour and there came a time for armed revolt
I know quite a few people who, after living through the last four years of being attacked economically by our own government, economically by our own corporations, and physically by foreign invaders from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and India; feel that it is LONG PAST time for armed revolt and the only reason that it hasn't happened is because the government is allowed to own tanks and rocket launchers and the best we can do is a puny little assault rifle.
Where to me, armed surrender is equally as acceptable as genocide. Under genocide, we will lose our moral superiority as a nation, guaranteed, but nobody will ever fsck with us again. Under armed surrender (what one wag called my plan for "Fortress America"), we basically ignore that the rest of the world exists for a while- and kill anybody who tries to tell us different. That would cost us our economic superiority- but maybe, just maybe, when we come out a thousand years from now, the rest of the world will have caught up to us in standard of living.
And I'm saying that with slashcode, you could put a name up for nomination, allow 24 hours for debate, then post a poll on the topic to get the vote, without any fillibuster possible at all (because the server, not a human being, is controling the process, just as the server prevented me from posting this message within 2 minutes of the last one). We've got a great device here that could supercharge our democracy, is what I'm pointing out.
I'm just saying what it has done for me- I've had enough RTFA responses that I now read ALL the source materials before posting. In addition, the bills debated by Congress don't have a lot of source material, and could be put into the original slashdot article. You do at least read the words posted on slashdot before responding, right?
I agree that unions have had a positive effect overall on labor in the past. But, unfortunately they have not changed with the times. Globalization is a reality, even though ugly at times. The unions are not doing themselves, their members, and the companies they work for, any good by artificially restricting efficiency. The 21st century is going to be marked by those companies that are the most nimble, the most efficient, and the lowest cost.
Sounds like we need to kill the globalists then- they're worse terrorists than al Qaida. But once again, what's your solution to prventing the parasites (investors) and predators (C-level executives) from stealing the productivity of the working class? You're long on problems, but very short on solutions, it seems. Agreed- standard union tactics reduce efficiency- so what's the solution for the 21st century, as you put it?
And yet with the opposite point of view, you have companies like Sun bribing the courts to let them terminate older employees so that they can bring in younger ones from India, which is also inefficient because you have to train all the new workers.
So what is YOUR solution to the predatory class taking advantage of workers?
Not entirely true- that's just the FUD that the management would like you to believe, to keep you from forming a union and striking (a strike ALWAYS hurts the employer FAR more than the employees- because your paycheck is only a small fraction of your true worth to the company unless you are a C-level executive. That's why they can afford to pay the C-level guys MILLIONS more than they pay you, it's just a giant ponzi scheme).
According to the courts, the Federal Labor Laws do not exist in this situation. Sun won their case, as did IBM and Intel. It's already been decided. Old Americans are no longer a protected class of employee, and haven't been since 2002.
I will do something else before that happens.
Good luck being able to forsee something happening halfway across the world.
You are the master of your destiny, unfortunately the master in a ship is perhaps the people with the most serious responsbilites.
The last 4 years have taught me that we are all in a single ship- and that we've elected a total incompetant for a captain who is trying to steer us towards any iceberg available.
Ah, but with a truly efficient government, the repeal of such laws could come as quickly as the original pass. At least with slashcode you could hardcode the vote to not come before at least a certain number of people posted in the debate session, making it more likely that more people actually READ THE BILL before VOTING ON IT. You can't do that with verbal debates that end on a vote.
About bloody time. There are only two possible endings to the war on terror- genocide and surrender- and if we go with the first nuclear weapons will be necessary eventually.
You can't say "nu-clee-ar"
That really scares me
Sometimes a brain comes
In quite handy
But it's not going to help you
Because I won three Purple Hearts
This Land Will Surely Vote for Me!
of Congress. Now if we could just install slashcode servers for the House and Senate, with automatic e-mailing of poll results to the President, then we could REALLY get some work done!