"Take control"? The border guards have fucking guns. More to the point, they beat and imprisoned the guy. Even further, they can press charges against him. What did he do? Asked a question? HOW DARE HE!
I think the previous poster must be implying that police officers have a low self-esteem and self-control problems, since most people of moderate intellect are not threatened by simple questions.
If you find yourself threatened by questions about what you're doing on the job, please seek therapy.
With our dollar high and our relatively strong economy in face of global recession, I can see why the border guards are trying to keep us from spending our hard earned money visiting you down there.
[sarcasm off]
When the fingerprinting and other unnecessary "security" measures that attempt to treat me as a potential criminal rather than a visitor cropped up, I discussed it with my wife and we decided to avoid any future travel to the United States until reason again prevailed. In the mean time, Europe is very pretty, and welcoming.
I've had the same experience many times. However, on at least one occasion, I've had an officer try to publicly humiliate me in front of my family and threaten me with non-existent laws in front of them. "You know if I could.... then I would" types of comments are harassment, and it happens. I was nothing but respectful, and even had witnesses, but some police officers believe themselves to be judge, jury and executioner.
I believe many people forget the police's role in the judicial system, and too many police officers lament the rest of the system instead of realizing their role in it.
Defend yourself in court, not on the scene. Allowing people to "defend" themselves against the police because they think they are in the right is not one compatible with the rule of law. Should the police just give up if the guy insists (very strenuously I'm sure) that he has done nothing wrong?
You know what will deteriorate the rule of law faster than people fighting back? People believing the police don't have their best interests at heart. Once a significant portion of the population ceases to believe the police are in fact on their side, to protect and to serve, the rule of law is lost.
If you want order, you must first enforce it on the law enforcement themselves. I might add that a non-homeless person with a good lawyer would most likely have the charges dropped for resisting since it would be argued as self-defence if attacked without provocation. There would also likely be an expensive lawsuit brought against the jurisdiction in question.
No, these things are done to people who have no means of defending themselves on purpose. No police officer starts randomly beating Enron executives, even though they deserve it a lot more than a homeless guy.
I often wonder if foresight wouldn't have lead to constitutional amendments preventing the restrictions since imposed, as I'm quite sure the right to bear arms explicitly disavows any future police state.
Its too bad really, when I look at America now and count off all the things they used to mock the Soviet Union for, all the freedoms those poor "commies" didn't have that Americans no longer have either. I specifically recall many political discourses and writers commenting on how evil it was for their governments to encourage snitching on your neighbours and how the KGB would make you disappear without access to representation.
Welcome to the era of the FBI snitch 800 numbers, and the ability to throw people in jail without access to a lawyer for security reasons, without an open hearing, with no public record. Sounds like something America fought against to me.
You don't understand any of what you just said, nor the parent's post it would seem.
The parent was commenting on selective enforcement. When's the last time you saw a well-known drug-addled WHITE rock star in jail for serious time for possession? Exactly.
I've heard police officers ask me "well what would you do if you saw a young asian driving a sports car? Its obviously stolen." Obviously? White kids don't steal cars? Asian kids don't have rich parents?
There is selective enforcement and are discriminatory policies in effect all around you, but you may not be paying attention.
Except when your crappy government starts tramping all over trade tariffs despite being ruled in non-compliance by international courts and holds their wealth over our heads as a way of influencing policy...
America does indeed buy influence in the form of highly unfair trade arrangements, or ignoring the stipulations of less unfair ones.
I said nothing of the sort and this will in fact be my last reply because you fail to comprehend the difference between arguing a specific point and arguing with the perceived position you impose on another. I have nothing against a good argument, but this is bordering on ridiculous as you continue to throw counter-arguments at me about things I've never said.
I've made almost none of the claims you think I need to prove, and if you bothered to read any of the arguments I've made back, you'd see that very clearly.
Thanks for the link, I've studied under-grad logic before, and I did not commit the fallacy in question as only someone making claims could have done so, and I made none. I only requested that you justify your own position, which you can't, and therefore are the one making invalid arguments.
I play Burnout Paradise all the time and purposely wreck the car just to watch the fantastic roll overs. I've never felt the need or desire to do the same thing in real life.
While its normal in children, there are names for the brain defects in adults who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
What I find more interesting is when one real life race car driver beat all the best GT5 players at a mini tournament playing the game. He knew how to drive well, and that translated properly to the game.
Watch Tanner Faust explain how to drift in the game based on his real-world driving experience on Youtube if you like.
You haven't actually done your research obviously. Several drivers have in fact used the Gran Turismo for car control. There's an interesting interview with one driver who said he's used Gran Turismo to practice certain tricky corners before getting to a track because wrecking the car in the game is a lot more forgiving than doing it in real life.
Gran Turismo has the graphics mapped down to the location of the markings on the asphalt and the positions of the trees from the real tracks. The tracks aren't flat either, they have bumps and unevenness from the mapping of the real asphalt. While the game doesn't map a few interesting bits like tire wear over time or vehicle weight changes from fuel usage, it is in fact very very accurate.
In fact, most people I know who enjoy Gran Turismo, including myself, have a hard time explaining why to our gamer friends who insist "its not fun" because its too realistic.
Yawn. I can visit the antarctic and china in HD, watch plane crashes and learn about huge construction disasters, go to the bottom of the ocean and see space. I don't have the funds to do any of the things in real life that I experience while TV.
When the local anchorperson starts coming to the front door to give me the news, I'll do that in your "real life" too.
It would in fact be interesting to directly correlate the quality of the printed word in local papers on a chart of average education level achieved for the region.
Personally I glean a lot of random news from Google News because I use it as a homepage, but most of my heavy reporting comes from the CBC, who do some fantastic journalistic work.
Nobody said anything about removing bias. What I said was preventing utter fabrication of facts.
There's a huge difference.
"The house at 555 Spruce Lane burned down yesterday." Did it? "The police chief likes little boys." Does he?
Printing facts in print and reporting facts from the news desk ought to be held to a standard of some form. The media used to simply regulate themselves, but they don't seem to be doing that anymore, do they?
I love your rose coloured glasses where those younger stations with better business models don't get bought up by the older money of the established stations and turned into member stations like everyone else.
It happened with print, it happened in TV and it will happen over and over again. No amount of deregulation is going to help, if anything, it would encourage it.
That said, I stand by that the potential regulation that Fox News fought and won in court was NOT good. It would not have improved the chances that news wouldn't be spun a certain way. It would only have served to guarantee that it would always be spun the way federal regulators want.
Your logic reminds me of a few really horrible conspiracy theory websites. Simple restrictions on printing falsehoods (or at least requiring retractions when proven false) would not give the government any more influence than they have already.
By the same token, having no restrictions on the press allows them to be as in bed with government officials as they like and simply print the press releases given by the state with no critical thought at all, already, right now. You have no guarantee this isn't happening at all.
In fact, restricting any press agency from printing fabrications as news would prevent a lot of the government press release spin that does get printed, as it contains no verifiable facts whatsoever.
Opinion pieces are of course exempt from my reasoning.
PS the press can already be sued for libel by parties involved in fabrications, but fabrications not negatively affecting others should IMHO be restricted in the same way.
I think you missed my point entirely. You can give it a funny name if you want in your head, and tell stories about it to your children to make it sacred, but the Bill of Rights is just another legal document that was laid out by government officials. It happens to restrict the behaviour of those citizens who work for the government in what they can or cannot do in their official functions.
More to what you quoted though, the amendments to the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress themselves, therefore it is itself a government document.
If you so distrust government inherently, you must also ignore the Bill of Rights which were declared by a government body.
Neither of you replied to precisely the point I made -- you can't trust anything you read or hear in the media right now because there is no standard of truth to which they are legally bound.
I mentioned only Fox News because they're the ones who fought for the right to lie to the public, not because I think there's any difference between them and the rest. In fact my argument implied the opposite -- that I think all media can and will lie to us at any time for ratings.
You can find the reporting on the case from whichever outlet you prefer by Googling something like "fox news truth first amendment florida court case" which worked for me, although several of the headlines seem to read things like "Fox News gets okay to misinform public".
I love how you put words in my mouth, by the way, without asking what kind of regulation I'd insinuated at all because you believe that government people are inherently more crooked than private sector people.
I believe strongly that Fox News should have lost this case, that knowingly publishing falsehoods and claiming them to be true ought to be illegal for any media outlet, and I believe most of the American public expects this to be the case already when it clearly is not.
PS the First Amendment is government intervention. Jeez.
I'm quite certain that if you already made the expose public on Wikipedia that you're not blackmailing at all.
If I call you a useless git on Slashdot, its not blackmail. If I ask you for $100 and threaten to call you names on Slashdot if you don't, that's blackmail.
To my reading, there's no point where the supposed blackmailer is trying to get anything out of this businesswoman. It looks like a straight-up case of shaming to me, which isn't illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the previous poster must be implying that police officers have a low self-esteem and self-control problems, since most people of moderate intellect are not threatened by simple questions.
If you find yourself threatened by questions about what you're doing on the job, please seek therapy.
I'm sorry but under very few circumstances is pushing a guy through a piece of glass "doing nothing wrong."
I'll give you that if he's got bombs strapped to his waist, or has some other weapon that will cause more damage than you're about to cause him.
Police do not have an implicit right to injure people unnecessarily in the course of their duty.
With our dollar high and our relatively strong economy in face of global recession, I can see why the border guards are trying to keep us from spending our hard earned money visiting you down there.
[sarcasm off]
When the fingerprinting and other unnecessary "security" measures that attempt to treat me as a potential criminal rather than a visitor cropped up, I discussed it with my wife and we decided to avoid any future travel to the United States until reason again prevailed. In the mean time, Europe is very pretty, and welcoming.
- Canadian
I've had the same experience many times. However, on at least one occasion, I've had an officer try to publicly humiliate me in front of my family and threaten me with non-existent laws in front of them. "You know if I could .... then I would" types of comments are harassment, and it happens. I was nothing but respectful, and even had witnesses, but some police officers believe themselves to be judge, jury and executioner.
I believe many people forget the police's role in the judicial system, and too many police officers lament the rest of the system instead of realizing their role in it.
You know what will deteriorate the rule of law faster than people fighting back? People believing the police don't have their best interests at heart. Once a significant portion of the population ceases to believe the police are in fact on their side, to protect and to serve, the rule of law is lost.
If you want order, you must first enforce it on the law enforcement themselves. I might add that a non-homeless person with a good lawyer would most likely have the charges dropped for resisting since it would be argued as self-defence if attacked without provocation. There would also likely be an expensive lawsuit brought against the jurisdiction in question.
No, these things are done to people who have no means of defending themselves on purpose. No police officer starts randomly beating Enron executives, even though they deserve it a lot more than a homeless guy.
I often wonder if foresight wouldn't have lead to constitutional amendments preventing the restrictions since imposed, as I'm quite sure the right to bear arms explicitly disavows any future police state.
Its too bad really, when I look at America now and count off all the things they used to mock the Soviet Union for, all the freedoms those poor "commies" didn't have that Americans no longer have either. I specifically recall many political discourses and writers commenting on how evil it was for their governments to encourage snitching on your neighbours and how the KGB would make you disappear without access to representation.
Welcome to the era of the FBI snitch 800 numbers, and the ability to throw people in jail without access to a lawyer for security reasons, without an open hearing, with no public record. Sounds like something America fought against to me.
You don't understand any of what you just said, nor the parent's post it would seem.
The parent was commenting on selective enforcement. When's the last time you saw a well-known drug-addled WHITE rock star in jail for serious time for possession? Exactly.
I've heard police officers ask me "well what would you do if you saw a young asian driving a sports car? Its obviously stolen." Obviously? White kids don't steal cars? Asian kids don't have rich parents?
There is selective enforcement and are discriminatory policies in effect all around you, but you may not be paying attention.
Except when your crappy government starts tramping all over trade tariffs despite being ruled in non-compliance by international courts and holds their wealth over our heads as a way of influencing policy ...
America does indeed buy influence in the form of highly unfair trade arrangements, or ignoring the stipulations of less unfair ones.
I live in Canada where very few places have good OTA service, even for the government-sponsored channels.
I also only pay $23/mo for my satellite TV service, so I don't feel too bad about it at all, and it includes full HD programming.
I said nothing of the sort and this will in fact be my last reply because you fail to comprehend the difference between arguing a specific point and arguing with the perceived position you impose on another. I have nothing against a good argument, but this is bordering on ridiculous as you continue to throw counter-arguments at me about things I've never said.
I've made almost none of the claims you think I need to prove, and if you bothered to read any of the arguments I've made back, you'd see that very clearly.
Thanks for the link, I've studied under-grad logic before, and I did not commit the fallacy in question as only someone making claims could have done so, and I made none. I only requested that you justify your own position, which you can't, and therefore are the one making invalid arguments.
I play Burnout Paradise all the time and purposely wreck the car just to watch the fantastic roll overs. I've never felt the need or desire to do the same thing in real life.
While its normal in children, there are names for the brain defects in adults who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
What I find more interesting is when one real life race car driver beat all the best GT5 players at a mini tournament playing the game. He knew how to drive well, and that translated properly to the game.
Watch Tanner Faust explain how to drift in the game based on his real-world driving experience on Youtube if you like.
You haven't actually done your research obviously. Several drivers have in fact used the Gran Turismo for car control. There's an interesting interview with one driver who said he's used Gran Turismo to practice certain tricky corners before getting to a track because wrecking the car in the game is a lot more forgiving than doing it in real life.
Gran Turismo has the graphics mapped down to the location of the markings on the asphalt and the positions of the trees from the real tracks. The tracks aren't flat either, they have bumps and unevenness from the mapping of the real asphalt. While the game doesn't map a few interesting bits like tire wear over time or vehicle weight changes from fuel usage, it is in fact very very accurate.
In fact, most people I know who enjoy Gran Turismo, including myself, have a hard time explaining why to our gamer friends who insist "its not fun" because its too realistic.
You haven't played GT have you? Its not a game as much as its a simulator.
Airline pilots learn how to fly real planes in "video games" too for that matter.
Yawn. I can visit the antarctic and china in HD, watch plane crashes and learn about huge construction disasters, go to the bottom of the ocean and see space. I don't have the funds to do any of the things in real life that I experience while TV.
When the local anchorperson starts coming to the front door to give me the news, I'll do that in your "real life" too.
Get off your soap box.
A whole other debate entirely, yes, but I agree.
It would in fact be interesting to directly correlate the quality of the printed word in local papers on a chart of average education level achieved for the region.
Personally I glean a lot of random news from Google News because I use it as a homepage, but most of my heavy reporting comes from the CBC, who do some fantastic journalistic work.
Nobody said anything about removing bias. What I said was preventing utter fabrication of facts.
There's a huge difference.
"The house at 555 Spruce Lane burned down yesterday." Did it? "The police chief likes little boys." Does he?
Printing facts in print and reporting facts from the news desk ought to be held to a standard of some form. The media used to simply regulate themselves, but they don't seem to be doing that anymore, do they?
"For lack of evidence otherwise" has never been a good justification for claiming a belief system to be fact.
The sooner you realize this, the sooner you'll have a leg up on the people you disagree with. Until then, you just have a different belief system.
I love your rose coloured glasses where those younger stations with better business models don't get bought up by the older money of the established stations and turned into member stations like everyone else.
It happened with print, it happened in TV and it will happen over and over again. No amount of deregulation is going to help, if anything, it would encourage it.
Your logic reminds me of a few really horrible conspiracy theory websites. Simple restrictions on printing falsehoods (or at least requiring retractions when proven false) would not give the government any more influence than they have already.
By the same token, having no restrictions on the press allows them to be as in bed with government officials as they like and simply print the press releases given by the state with no critical thought at all, already, right now. You have no guarantee this isn't happening at all.
In fact, restricting any press agency from printing fabrications as news would prevent a lot of the government press release spin that does get printed, as it contains no verifiable facts whatsoever.
Opinion pieces are of course exempt from my reasoning.
PS the press can already be sued for libel by parties involved in fabrications, but fabrications not negatively affecting others should IMHO be restricted in the same way.
You can see here what I was thinking of. Also covered on cnet.
I think you missed my point entirely. You can give it a funny name if you want in your head, and tell stories about it to your children to make it sacred, but the Bill of Rights is just another legal document that was laid out by government officials. It happens to restrict the behaviour of those citizens who work for the government in what they can or cannot do in their official functions.
More to what you quoted though, the amendments to the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress themselves, therefore it is itself a government document.
If you so distrust government inherently, you must also ignore the Bill of Rights which were declared by a government body.
Neither of you replied to precisely the point I made -- you can't trust anything you read or hear in the media right now because there is no standard of truth to which they are legally bound.
I mentioned only Fox News because they're the ones who fought for the right to lie to the public, not because I think there's any difference between them and the rest. In fact my argument implied the opposite -- that I think all media can and will lie to us at any time for ratings.
You can find the reporting on the case from whichever outlet you prefer by Googling something like "fox news truth first amendment florida court case" which worked for me, although several of the headlines seem to read things like "Fox News gets okay to misinform public".
I love how you put words in my mouth, by the way, without asking what kind of regulation I'd insinuated at all because you believe that government people are inherently more crooked than private sector people.
I believe strongly that Fox News should have lost this case, that knowingly publishing falsehoods and claiming them to be true ought to be illegal for any media outlet, and I believe most of the American public expects this to be the case already when it clearly is not.
PS the First Amendment is government intervention. Jeez.
I'm quite certain that if you already made the expose public on Wikipedia that you're not blackmailing at all.
If I call you a useless git on Slashdot, its not blackmail. If I ask you for $100 and threaten to call you names on Slashdot if you don't, that's blackmail.
To my reading, there's no point where the supposed blackmailer is trying to get anything out of this businesswoman. It looks like a straight-up case of shaming to me, which isn't illegal.
Unfortunately, that's where most of the security cameras seem to be in the UK, in public space.