Walmart nevers seems to be as successfull in Canada as it is in the US. I've always wondered why that was. Maybe Canadians are just more easily pissed-off by creepy flourescent lighting, annoying greeters, and being treated like seven-year-olds. Maybe we just prefer stores whose employees don't bear the grim visage of death upon their countenances.
So you'd be okay with security cameras in public bathrooms? After all, you have nothing to hide, and terrorists have to use bathrooms sometimes. What better way to track them than by catching them on camera when they "check-in" every few hours?
The system could build up dynamic biometric profiles of people based on the way they stand, how they move, how many times they shake it out afterwards, whether they hum or not, the kinds of trace chemicals in their urine, etc.
Hey, and think of all the drug dealers that you could catch! This idea is sounding better and better....
Or maybe you should just notice that domestic terrorism is less dangerous, on average, than... say... bees. Bees kill a few Americans every year. Domestic terrorism has only managed a handful of incidents in all of US history. Maybe you should develop some perspective and think abuot what the real threat is: terrorists that just want the US to stop interfering with the affairs of their home country, or a government that is fully ready to take every single freedom that you possess in order to create an illusion of safety. One affects every single American and will have effects that last for lifetimes, the other has never affected more than a few thousand people and is an extremely rare occurrence. Decide quickly, because the point-of-no-return is coming.
Because Americans are too fucking stupid to vote for politicians that actually respect the constitution?
Seriously -- everytime someone says that it's a two-party system, democracy dies a little bit. If Americans had even a fraction of the guts of the folks that founded the colonies, you'd all vote for third parties and independents ON PRINCIPLE -- just to avoid having some enormous shadowy organization wielding power over them.
And it's getting worse. I wish there was a way that I could be present everytime someone starts on some anti-authoritarian rant and them proudly declares that they are a republican. I would PAY to be present, just so that I could give them the caning they deserve for being so goddam retarded. I think the videos of "Jesus Camp" showing kids smashing mugs labelled "government" and then praying to portraits of George Bush says it best: somehow these schizoid maniacs are sufficiently steeped in their doublethink that they don't realize that Dubya is heading up the largest government in American history, and running a more authoritarian government than ever before. Democrats of course are no better, given that they've rubber-stamped essentially everything that Bush has done. And many of Bush's more heinous policies are simply continuations of Clinton's. Funny how that works. And what do Democrats plan for the future? There's no talk of canning the PATRIOT act or the DMCA. No talk of scrapping medicare (how many people actually get helped by this program anyway? I'm all for social programs... but technically, to qualify as a "social" program, at least some portion of society should benefit.) Their big idea? Raise minimum wage (something that should be a state-level issue) and dither about what to do in Iraq. Real useful.
Americans are a depressing people... they have a fascinating history, but the present reality is enough to completely destroy one's faith in democracy.
Well, the president is the leader of the nation. And you should always follow your leader -- that's what a good patriot does. So if the president sees laws as extraneous when they conflict with getting what he wants, so should you.
It gets even worse when you note that the "leaders" are all complete jackasses. I mean seriously, what kind of nation would the US be if people actually followed the example of guys like Clinton (lie about everything and cheat on your wife!), Dubya (stupidity is cool! war rocks! muslims all need to die!), Nixon (deny everything! never take responsibility! it's only illegal if you get caught!), Carter (giving deadly weapons to violent savages is a great idea! let terrorists get away with anything they want! being a nice guy makes incompetence okay!)
Most of these things get worse under every president. Yet another to stop voting for BOTH big parties. Also a reason to slap the stupid off the face of anyone that suggests that voting for either the Democrats or Republicans is anything other than a vote for tyranny.
A war between Canada and the US would be so colossally shitty that it's hard to fathom.
First off, no matter how quickly it ended, the cost in lost trade during that time would exceed any possible benefits that the war brings by a thousandfold. And if the losing side engaged in any kind of scorched-earth policy (destroying their mines, refineries, oil fields, hydro-dams, etc), the lost trade would easily cripple the economy of the winner for years. If they mananged to take even a fraction of the enemy's infrastructure with them, their economy would lie in shambles for decades. We depend on trade with each other THAT much.
You mention these hunters... think how easy it would be for citizens of either side to infiltrate each others' cities. Guns are not hard to get in either country. Any big city in Canada or the US has an ample supply of black market firearms. American currency is easy to get in Canada, and no one will bat an eye if you spend American currency in canada (I'm not sure about the converse case). A dozen well-placed snipers could pretty much shut-down a medium size city for days, if not more. No politician would be safe. And if some resisters got really serious? It would not be hard at all to start going around murdering the families of anyone who fights in the enemy's armed forces. Talk about demoralizing the troops fast.
Think what a major city's police force could do. The special tactical units are highly trained, and to operate in urban environments under conditions not at all unlike guerilla combat. They've got body armor, powerful weaponry, light explosives, tear gas, smoke grenades, vehicles optimized for getting around in a city quickly. They have a command-and-control structure already in place. They have informants and contacts everywhere. They know their city better than anyone outside of the local taxi company (and who says that the taxi drivers haven't been recuited by the insurgency as well?) Urban cops are bad-asses in every sense of the word, and I'd imagine that they would form the core of any urban insurgency if a major US city were occupied.
Of couse, America is essentially unassailable. Canada would need to attack with thousands, possibly tens of thousands of tanks and support vehicles, even assuming that the US military and national guards were nowhere to be found. Just dealing with the little militias that would pop-up all over the place would such an enormous task that you would NEED heavy armor and lots of it. 300 million people, and spread out over one of more sizable land-masses on the planet. It's a logistical nightmare even for the American government, let along a government that's trying to occupy that territory and deal with an insurgency. Add to it the fact that America has all the local industries necessary to run a brisk trade in home-made bombs, rockets, machine guns, cannons, and probably even things as surprising as armoured combat vehicles and aircraft... This all makes for a nation that would be so challenging to occupy that even collecting the world's entire GDP would not be enough of a benefit to justify the cost. And we haven't even gotten into how the attacker would deal with the actual US military.
And that's for Canada (or Mexico, I suppose). For anyone else? No hope in HELL. An amphibious assault of the North America is probably the most expensive way a nation could ever devise to get their military destroyed quickly and completely. A handful of east and west coast militias armed with nothing more than shotguns could probably do the job, albeit at great cost. Throw in some modern equipment and support?
You have to understand that most guys that are into CS are treated like lepers, especially by women. 99.9% of all women in western society genuinely see geeks as inferior forms of life. So when a girl waltzes into a CS class and expects to suddenly be treated as something other than the enemy, a lot of very bitter and resentful feelings come to the surface.
Add to it the fact that even THOSE girls would never touch a CS guy, and are probably into the same guys that kicked the shit out of us as teenagers, and CS girls are lucky that they don't get lynched when they walk in the door.
I'm not saying that it's fair, or right, but that's how it is. It's like going to Iran with an American flag stitchd to your backpack, wearing a crucifix, and humming the American anthem as you walk around. It's not fair or right that you'll get stabbed to death in an alley by someone whose family was killed by American-made chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, but that's just how it is. Guilt-by-association is a very fundamental aspect of Human psychology, and there's absolutely no getting around it.
The article is about how women dress relating to their monthly cycle of fertility, not their lifetime fertility. You would be just as stupid if you were to conclude, from a study showing that people go to parties most often when it's dark out (at night), that they most go to parties most often in winter (when it's dark out). Correlation is NOT causation. It's not the fact that they are fertile that makes women dress up (or vice versa). It's most likely response to the same chemical triggers that induce ovulation. The fact that there are fewer eggs remaining to ovulate with and that the uterus has degraded somewhat doesn't mean that the signal isn't still being sent.
After menopause may be a different story of course, but a great deal about female psychology changes at that point. That's no doubt why post-menopausal women weren't included in the study.
"50% of the time they were 60% correct". So... being correct on a true-or-false question is now something that comes in fractions? Half of the time, the person would make a guess whose truth-value was a bizarre superposition of being correct and incorrect?
Seriously, this is the most bizarre, meaningless, and basically stuid post I've read in a long-time, at least since the last time I conversed with an anarchist.
I'm not so sure about that. Every decade that goes by without a major war-related die-off, a society becomes more hateful and aggressive. Americans haven't had a good slaughter since world war 2, and even that one was pretty skimpy. The entire Vietnam war killed fewer people than car accidents in the continental US do in a single year. And look at them now. By contrast, look at the incredible reluctance to get involved in WW2 -- WW1 took all the fight out of the US. And look at how long it took after the civil war before Americans regained their taste for conquest.
The longer a nation goes without having to see the results of war up-close, the less they fear and oppose war. Conservatives start to fill peoples' heads with ideas about the glory of war and the honour of the soldier. Soon, people are comfortable with the idea of going to war again, and need very little to convince them that a war would be a wonderful idea. And so war recurs, again and again.
Uh... handouts? No. Most countries are complaining about, you know, little things... like the US firing rockets into their sovereign territory, the US violating trade deals that the US originally pushed for (spoiled bitches can't handle it when another country embraces capitalism and bests the US at it), the US describing their democratically elected leaders as despots while allowing massive amounts of electoral fraud in American elections, the use of the CIA to assassinate democratically elected leaders and replace reasons. Those nations are all supported by the US for purely selfish reasons. The handful that remain are supported because there is basically NOTHING the people there can do to better themselves right now. Americans just aren't sufficiently sociopathic to consistently refrain from aiding people that are in dire peril. A positive attitude and an independent spirit wont make droughts go away or reverse the effects of earthquakes. No amount of Ayn Randian thinking will protect you from malaria or the dozens of other parasites that keep people in equatorial zones too sick to accomplish anything of merit.
I've gotten the impression that Russia is focusing more on a commercial space program. The ESA is probably the biggest competitor to NASA right now, in terms of how likely they are to do something big and impressive. Not that NASA can't trump them, but it would require the American government to reduce the extent to which it engages in cronyism, earmarking, and all of the other things that make accomplishing anything of merit next-to-impossible. The ESA is comparitively lean and efficient and has so many nations' scientific and technical resources to draw upon that it can provide serious competition to the vastly better-funded NASA. But if the US Congress were to give NASA a free hand to manage themselves reasonably and to budget sanely, well... the other space programs would probably be lining up just for a chance to participate in NASA's ventures.
And yet they vote for a government run by "The Decider", which spies on people and tries to tell people how to live their lives. See homosexuality, abortion, or religion for examples of just how much modern Americans LOVE to have their government tell people how to live their lives. Alright, to be fair, it's just a few million rednecks in the middle of the country that like to have their personal lives micromanaged by the feds. But it's still an amazingly high number given that in most western nations, basically EVERYONE rejects the idea that the government should have a say in how you fuck or which fairy tales you believe or what non-sentient parasites you have expunged from your body.
I totally agree. I had to measure half a litre yesterday, and all I could think about was how much easier it is to measure half a cup or half a gallon. For some reason, fractions of imperial units are just... happier, than fractions of SI units. I mean, half a foot. It sounds great! Half a metre. Only a jackass would want half a metre. Fractions are imperial, and American, and they are the way of Jesus, and no Frenchy atheist is going to use them with metric units so long as I have my gun, a porch to sit on with my gun, and 7/9ths of a pint of moonshine. I'll be cold and dead in the ground before I accept that talking about 3/4 of a litre isn't a sign of apocalypse.
You know, this really misses the whole problem with the Imperial system -- it was not that the units had weird conversions, because no one has ever actually given the slightest worry to that. It's that if you ask "what is a pound?", there's no concrete answer.
The pound was a hideously imprecise unit. So was the yard. That's why there are so many different versions of the foot, of the yard, of the ounce, of the gallon, of the ton. Every national government, every local government, every industrial association, every club, and every scientific society had it's own standards for the units. And they didn't match up very well. This made industry, commerce, science, and technology extremely annoying. People would beat children to death just to relieve the stress of dealing with the thousands of incompatible standards that comprised the imperial system.
The point of the SI system was to establish really solid, singular standards for the units, and avoid the proliferation of ambiguous units and standards. The kilogram, the metre, the second, they were all defined in just one way. There were just one set of primary standards. You could ensure that your own standard matched the primaries, and be as precise as your time, money, and technology allowed. You knew that your standard would match other people's. That's a powerful tool if you deal in very precise measurements. A VERY powerful tool.
Ironically, SI's success has reinvigorated the Imperial system -- all of those units have retroactively been given rock-solid definitions, based on SI units. There's no longer any uncertainty about how long an inch is: it's EXACTLY 0.0254 metres, which in turn is precisely defined by the speed of light in a vacuum and the timing oscillations of the cesium atom in atomic clocks. The inch is now every bit as exact as any other SI unit (except the kilogram, which has lagged behind the ultra-exact definitions of the rest of SI system). Imperial is ultimately a dying system, but SI has definitely given Imperial enough scientific vigor to last for a little while yet.
Hey, thanks. But really, the mod system tends to be a bit deranged at the best of times. I've had absolutely trollish posts get insightful mods and extremely well-thought out posts get flamebait mods. Just the nature of public debate I suppose.
It's not about Americans, it's about America. Most of the time when I meet Americans, I can't even tell that they're not local (to be fair, I only meet Americans sufficiently lacking in xenophobic insanity that they're willing to travel to Canada). Americans aren't the problem. It's America itself. The political and economic system that is designed to foster shittiness and evil at every turn. That glorifies selfishness, greed, and (paradoxically) blind obedience, while condemning virtuous behaviour, reason, and critical political thought. America is not at all unlike Iran in some ways. I've NEVER met an Iranian that wasn't an absolutely wonderful person -- kind, polite, generous to a fault, accepting and tolerant, and possessing only the best aspects of spirituality. Iran, on the other hand... well, you know. Stupid, paranoid, irrational, belligerent, hateful, and possessing of only the very worst aspects of religion.
That is so ridiculously fucking stupid that it's unbelievable.
Do you really think that when a politician is ahead in the polls, his/her campaign staff sit around saying "now that we're ahead, let's just stop. I think we've done enough." Of course not. They keep doing what they're paid to do -- acquire the biggest lead possible. And information about your opponents' strategies provides a proven advantage in elections. If you can beat your opponent to the punch on every issue, on every topic, they come off looking like incompetent boobs and you look cool and in control. Is it any wonder that Nixon supporters would want to have the Democrat's campaign plans?
Show me one election in which the party that was ahead suddenly stopped campaigning, and maybe you will no longer qualify as a humongous retard or a braindead partisan dipshit. But of course, that doesn't happen. Ever. It's just not how politics works.
Right, so when exactly will you NOT think that an impeachment was just partisan discord? What would a president need to do, exactly? Open secret torture camps? Ignore CIA reports that Al Qaeda is planning to attack America? Lie repeatedly about a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda in order to start an unwinnable war, ignore the generals so that any slim hope of victory could be dispensed with, open not-so-secret torture camps in occupied territory, lie about the torture camps, continue ignoring the generals and the CIA, tell more lies in order to maintain support for the war while mismanaging it at every turn, and then have the gall to DENY that he's been babbling like a monkey with Tourette's about "staying the course" for the last two years? (Since when do you have to "stay the course" for two years AFTER "mission accomplished"?)
I guess maybe none of that matters, right? The worst president in all of American history, but any attempt to fire him is just partisan discord. What are you waiting for -- does he need to rape a few babies and curb-stomp senior citizens before you'll acknowledge that he's got to go?
You know, where I come from, if someone is bad at their job, they generally get fired. Bush ain't union, he's got no contract guaranteeing him two verbal warnings and a written warning before he can be fired. If I were to lie to my employer, I'd be looking for a new job as soon as it was discovered. Bush has lied to his employers, but continues to snatch his six figure salary out of their pockets every year. He's let his employers down, he's failed to do his job, he's taken way more sick days than is reasonable. He's done everything required to warrant disciplinary action at ANY job on the planet. Any job other than being the president of the US, apparently.
It's sad and a bit pathetic that you hold your president to a lower standard than you would your doctor, a contractor who's brought in to rebuild the balcony on your house, a sleazy defence lower, or even an ex-con working at Burger King.
I don't really see what Jews have to do with this. They lie completely outside the scope of the analogy, in much the same way that corn subsidies, laser printer manufacturing techniques, or the study of the symbiotic bacterial relationships in coral reefs do. That is, they're only being brought up because you are very uncomfortable with the idea that Americans are losing their free speech. Unless you're trying to make the (completely inane and retarded) claim that critics of the Nazi party were NOT put into concentration camps, along with Jews and Roma and whatnot. But of couse, we know that critics of the Nazi party and members of competing political groups were all put into concentration camps as well. The fact that America has yet to begin massacring people on the same scale as the Nazis doesn't make American free speech any less tenuous. Although give them time -- the secret prisons are already in place and the people have been convinced that they have a fictitious enemy. The pieces are certainly in place.
And yet you totally ignored the point: killing is banned in our society, much like free speech is banned in despotic regimes. And in exactly the same way that killing still goes on in our society (and frequently goes unpunished), free speech goes on in despotic regimes. Only a naive sap would claim that because some people criticize the government, that we MUST still be living in a wonderful liberal free society, rather than one that is spiralling into fascism.
I might have been listening until the part about South America -- the CIA is responsible for most South American dictatorships. Many South Americans like the idea of socialism and communism, but when they try to set up those economic systems within a democratic framework, the CIA comes along and brings a capitalist despot into power. That's YOUR fault, YOUR stupidity, not theirs. Sorry, try again.
How about "here in Canada, things are comparitively peachy"? None of our recent governments were appointed by judges. Gerrymandering and other trickery is minimized by having an impartial, non-partisan election group that can be independently overseen by anyone and everyone (who is honestly stupid enough to let the current administration decide who gets to vote and how?!). We've had significant campaign finance reform to reduce the effect of lobbying. It's not too shabby at all.
Bashing America is not only ludicrously easy, but it's completely appropriate -- this is a nation that bills itself as "the home of the free", the greatest nation on Earth, the land of opportunity. Big words for a nation that locks up reporters and runs prison camps where people don't get trials and are tortured into giving false confessions. Where a majority of the population is still pissed off that executing the mentally retarded was banned, but are pleased that executing children is still fair game. Where the government will happily block the purchase of a sports franchise if the buyer's politics are too dissimilar from their own. Where any criminal record, no matter how petty the offense and how long ago it was, bars people from getting anything but the most unpleasant demeaning jobs and eliminates the possibility of attending a college or university without some vast source of independtly acquired wealth. I could go on and on...
Suffice to say, America invites criticism by braying to the entire world about how wonderful and free it is. Can you really blame people for taking the bait and engaging in some critical analysis of those claims?
More significantly, look at all the people in Nazi Germany, Theocratic Iran, or Communist China that DO speak out. Many of them don't even get called on it. Some do. That's what the lack of free speech is all about -- having to take significant risks to speak your mind.
My whole point was that the existence of people that criticize the government doesn't even remotely indicate that you are still living in a free society, because even the most brutal dictatorial societies in all of history had people doing precisely the same thing. A free society is one where those people don't have to worry that they'll be imprisoned by the police, have their careers destroyed by government intervention, or murdered by some national "security" organization.
Note: you knew exactly what I meant, and deliberately misinterpreted it because the idea of facing up to what is going on the US right now scares the shit out of you. Sorry, but that's reality. Deal with it.
Isn't that the same constitution that doesn't allow for women to vote, and which for decades was widely believed to permit slavery? And which forbids the federal government from doing anything not explicitly mentioned in it?
Sorry, the US constitution hasn't been a meaningful force in US politics since... well, ever. It's a joke. Lincoln destroyed an last vestiges of meaning that it may have possessed. Dubya treats it like a used sanitary napkin; something too unpleasant to mention in polite conversation.
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Walmart nevers seems to be as successfull in Canada as it is in the US. I've always wondered why that was. Maybe Canadians are just more easily pissed-off by creepy flourescent lighting, annoying greeters, and being treated like seven-year-olds. Maybe we just prefer stores whose employees don't bear the grim visage of death upon their countenances.
So you'd be okay with security cameras in public bathrooms? After all, you have nothing to hide, and terrorists have to use bathrooms sometimes. What better way to track them than by catching them on camera when they "check-in" every few hours?
...
... say ... bees. Bees kill a few Americans every year. Domestic terrorism has only managed a handful of incidents in all of US history. Maybe you should develop some perspective and think abuot what the real threat is: terrorists that just want the US to stop interfering with the affairs of their home country, or a government that is fully ready to take every single freedom that you possess in order to create an illusion of safety. One affects every single American and will have effects that last for lifetimes, the other has never affected more than a few thousand people and is an extremely rare occurrence. Decide quickly, because the point-of-no-return is coming.
The system could build up dynamic biometric profiles of people based on the way they stand, how they move, how many times they shake it out afterwards, whether they hum or not, the kinds of trace chemicals in their urine, etc.
Hey, and think of all the drug dealers that you could catch! This idea is sounding better and better.
Or maybe you should just notice that domestic terrorism is less dangerous, on average, than
Seriously -- everytime someone says that it's a two-party system, democracy dies a little bit. If Americans had even a fraction of the guts of the folks that founded the colonies, you'd all vote for third parties and independents ON PRINCIPLE -- just to avoid having some enormous shadowy organization wielding power over them.
And it's getting worse. I wish there was a way that I could be present everytime someone starts on some anti-authoritarian rant and them proudly declares that they are a republican. I would PAY to be present, just so that I could give them the caning they deserve for being so goddam retarded. I think the videos of "Jesus Camp" showing kids smashing mugs labelled "government" and then praying to portraits of George Bush says it best: somehow these schizoid maniacs are sufficiently steeped in their doublethink that they don't realize that Dubya is heading up the largest government in American history, and running a more authoritarian government than ever before. Democrats of course are no better, given that they've rubber-stamped essentially everything that Bush has done. And many of Bush's more heinous policies are simply continuations of Clinton's. Funny how that works. And what do Democrats plan for the future? There's no talk of canning the PATRIOT act or the DMCA. No talk of scrapping medicare (how many people actually get helped by this program anyway? I'm all for social programs ... but technically, to qualify as a "social" program, at least some portion of society should benefit.) Their big idea? Raise minimum wage (something that should be a state-level issue) and dither about what to do in Iraq. Real useful.
Americans are a depressing people... they have a fascinating history, but the present reality is enough to completely destroy one's faith in democracy.
Well, the president is the leader of the nation. And you should always follow your leader -- that's what a good patriot does. So if the president sees laws as extraneous when they conflict with getting what he wants, so should you.
It gets even worse when you note that the "leaders" are all complete jackasses. I mean seriously, what kind of nation would the US be if people actually followed the example of guys like Clinton (lie about everything and cheat on your wife!), Dubya (stupidity is cool! war rocks! muslims all need to die!), Nixon (deny everything! never take responsibility! it's only illegal if you get caught!), Carter (giving deadly weapons to violent savages is a great idea! let terrorists get away with anything they want! being a nice guy makes incompetence okay!)
Most of these things get worse under every president. Yet another to stop voting for BOTH big parties. Also a reason to slap the stupid off the face of anyone that suggests that voting for either the Democrats or Republicans is anything other than a vote for tyranny.
First off, no matter how quickly it ended, the cost in lost trade during that time would exceed any possible benefits that the war brings by a thousandfold. And if the losing side engaged in any kind of scorched-earth policy (destroying their mines, refineries, oil fields, hydro-dams, etc), the lost trade would easily cripple the economy of the winner for years. If they mananged to take even a fraction of the enemy's infrastructure with them, their economy would lie in shambles for decades. We depend on trade with each other THAT much.
You mention these hunters ... think how easy it would be for citizens of either side to infiltrate each others' cities. Guns are not hard to get in either country. Any big city in Canada or the US has an ample supply of black market firearms. American currency is easy to get in Canada, and no one will bat an eye if you spend American currency in canada (I'm not sure about the converse case). A dozen well-placed snipers could pretty much shut-down a medium size city for days, if not more. No politician would be safe. And if some resisters got really serious? It would not be hard at all to start going around murdering the families of anyone who fights in the enemy's armed forces. Talk about demoralizing the troops fast.
Think what a major city's police force could do. The special tactical units are highly trained, and to operate in urban environments under conditions not at all unlike guerilla combat. They've got body armor, powerful weaponry, light explosives, tear gas, smoke grenades, vehicles optimized for getting around in a city quickly. They have a command-and-control structure already in place. They have informants and contacts everywhere. They know their city better than anyone outside of the local taxi company (and who says that the taxi drivers haven't been recuited by the insurgency as well?) Urban cops are bad-asses in every sense of the word, and I'd imagine that they would form the core of any urban insurgency if a major US city were occupied.
Of couse, America is essentially unassailable. Canada would need to attack with thousands, possibly tens of thousands of tanks and support vehicles, even assuming that the US military and national guards were nowhere to be found. Just dealing with the little militias that would pop-up all over the place would such an enormous task that you would NEED heavy armor and lots of it. 300 million people, and spread out over one of more sizable land-masses on the planet. It's a logistical nightmare even for the American government, let along a government that's trying to occupy that territory and deal with an insurgency. Add to it the fact that America has all the local industries necessary to run a brisk trade in home-made bombs, rockets, machine guns, cannons, and probably even things as surprising as armoured combat vehicles and aircraft ... This all makes for a nation that would be so challenging to occupy that even collecting the world's entire GDP would not be enough of a benefit to justify the cost. And we haven't even gotten into how the attacker would deal with the actual US military.
And that's for Canada (or Mexico, I suppose). For anyone else? No hope in HELL. An amphibious assault of the North America is probably the most expensive way a nation could ever devise to get their military destroyed quickly and completely. A handful of east and west coast militias armed with nothing more than shotguns could probably do the job, albeit at great cost. Throw in some modern equipment and support?
Add to it the fact that even THOSE girls would never touch a CS guy, and are probably into the same guys that kicked the shit out of us as teenagers, and CS girls are lucky that they don't get lynched when they walk in the door.
I'm not saying that it's fair, or right, but that's how it is. It's like going to Iran with an American flag stitchd to your backpack, wearing a crucifix, and humming the American anthem as you walk around. It's not fair or right that you'll get stabbed to death in an alley by someone whose family was killed by American-made chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, but that's just how it is. Guilt-by-association is a very fundamental aspect of Human psychology, and there's absolutely no getting around it.
After menopause may be a different story of course, but a great deal about female psychology changes at that point. That's no doubt why post-menopausal women weren't included in the study.
Seriously, this is the most bizarre, meaningless, and basically stuid post I've read in a long-time, at least since the last time I conversed with an anarchist.
The longer a nation goes without having to see the results of war up-close, the less they fear and oppose war. Conservatives start to fill peoples' heads with ideas about the glory of war and the honour of the soldier. Soon, people are comfortable with the idea of going to war again, and need very little to convince them that a war would be a wonderful idea. And so war recurs, again and again.
Uh... handouts? No. Most countries are complaining about, you know, little things ... like the US firing rockets into their sovereign territory, the US violating trade deals that the US originally pushed for (spoiled bitches can't handle it when another country embraces capitalism and bests the US at it), the US describing their democratically elected leaders as despots while allowing massive amounts of electoral fraud in American elections, the use of the CIA to assassinate democratically elected leaders and replace reasons. Those nations are all supported by the US for purely selfish reasons. The handful that remain are supported because there is basically NOTHING the people there can do to better themselves right now. Americans just aren't sufficiently sociopathic to consistently refrain from aiding people that are in dire peril. A positive attitude and an independent spirit wont make droughts go away or reverse the effects of earthquakes. No amount of Ayn Randian thinking will protect you from malaria or the dozens of other parasites that keep people in equatorial zones too sick to accomplish anything of merit.
I've gotten the impression that Russia is focusing more on a commercial space program. The ESA is probably the biggest competitor to NASA right now, in terms of how likely they are to do something big and impressive. Not that NASA can't trump them, but it would require the American government to reduce the extent to which it engages in cronyism, earmarking, and all of the other things that make accomplishing anything of merit next-to-impossible. The ESA is comparitively lean and efficient and has so many nations' scientific and technical resources to draw upon that it can provide serious competition to the vastly better-funded NASA. But if the US Congress were to give NASA a free hand to manage themselves reasonably and to budget sanely, well ... the other space programs would probably be lining up just for a chance to participate in NASA's ventures.
And yet they vote for a government run by "The Decider", which spies on people and tries to tell people how to live their lives. See homosexuality, abortion, or religion for examples of just how much modern Americans LOVE to have their government tell people how to live their lives. Alright, to be fair, it's just a few million rednecks in the middle of the country that like to have their personal lives micromanaged by the feds. But it's still an amazingly high number given that in most western nations, basically EVERYONE rejects the idea that the government should have a say in how you fuck or which fairy tales you believe or what non-sentient parasites you have expunged from your body.
I totally agree. I had to measure half a litre yesterday, and all I could think about was how much easier it is to measure half a cup or half a gallon. For some reason, fractions of imperial units are just ... happier, than fractions of SI units. I mean, half a foot. It sounds great! Half a metre. Only a jackass would want half a metre. Fractions are imperial, and American, and they are the way of Jesus, and no Frenchy atheist is going to use them with metric units so long as I have my gun, a porch to sit on with my gun, and 7/9ths of a pint of moonshine. I'll be cold and dead in the ground before I accept that talking about 3/4 of a litre isn't a sign of apocalypse.
You know, this really misses the whole problem with the Imperial system -- it was not that the units had weird conversions, because no one has ever actually given the slightest worry to that. It's that if you ask "what is a pound?", there's no concrete answer. The pound was a hideously imprecise unit. So was the yard. That's why there are so many different versions of the foot, of the yard, of the ounce, of the gallon, of the ton. Every national government, every local government, every industrial association, every club, and every scientific society had it's own standards for the units. And they didn't match up very well. This made industry, commerce, science, and technology extremely annoying. People would beat children to death just to relieve the stress of dealing with the thousands of incompatible standards that comprised the imperial system. The point of the SI system was to establish really solid, singular standards for the units, and avoid the proliferation of ambiguous units and standards. The kilogram, the metre, the second, they were all defined in just one way. There were just one set of primary standards. You could ensure that your own standard matched the primaries, and be as precise as your time, money, and technology allowed. You knew that your standard would match other people's. That's a powerful tool if you deal in very precise measurements. A VERY powerful tool. Ironically, SI's success has reinvigorated the Imperial system -- all of those units have retroactively been given rock-solid definitions, based on SI units. There's no longer any uncertainty about how long an inch is: it's EXACTLY 0.0254 metres, which in turn is precisely defined by the speed of light in a vacuum and the timing oscillations of the cesium atom in atomic clocks. The inch is now every bit as exact as any other SI unit (except the kilogram, which has lagged behind the ultra-exact definitions of the rest of SI system). Imperial is ultimately a dying system, but SI has definitely given Imperial enough scientific vigor to last for a little while yet.
Hey, thanks. But really, the mod system tends to be a bit deranged at the best of times. I've had absolutely trollish posts get insightful mods and extremely well-thought out posts get flamebait mods. Just the nature of public debate I suppose.
It's not about Americans, it's about America. Most of the time when I meet Americans, I can't even tell that they're not local (to be fair, I only meet Americans sufficiently lacking in xenophobic insanity that they're willing to travel to Canada). Americans aren't the problem. It's America itself. The political and economic system that is designed to foster shittiness and evil at every turn. That glorifies selfishness, greed, and (paradoxically) blind obedience, while condemning virtuous behaviour, reason, and critical political thought. America is not at all unlike Iran in some ways. I've NEVER met an Iranian that wasn't an absolutely wonderful person -- kind, polite, generous to a fault, accepting and tolerant, and possessing only the best aspects of spirituality. Iran, on the other hand ... well, you know. Stupid, paranoid, irrational, belligerent, hateful, and possessing of only the very worst aspects of religion.
Do you really think that when a politician is ahead in the polls, his/her campaign staff sit around saying "now that we're ahead, let's just stop. I think we've done enough." Of course not. They keep doing what they're paid to do -- acquire the biggest lead possible. And information about your opponents' strategies provides a proven advantage in elections. If you can beat your opponent to the punch on every issue, on every topic, they come off looking like incompetent boobs and you look cool and in control. Is it any wonder that Nixon supporters would want to have the Democrat's campaign plans?
Show me one election in which the party that was ahead suddenly stopped campaigning, and maybe you will no longer qualify as a humongous retard or a braindead partisan dipshit. But of course, that doesn't happen. Ever. It's just not how politics works.
I guess maybe none of that matters, right? The worst president in all of American history, but any attempt to fire him is just partisan discord. What are you waiting for -- does he need to rape a few babies and curb-stomp senior citizens before you'll acknowledge that he's got to go?
You know, where I come from, if someone is bad at their job, they generally get fired. Bush ain't union, he's got no contract guaranteeing him two verbal warnings and a written warning before he can be fired. If I were to lie to my employer, I'd be looking for a new job as soon as it was discovered. Bush has lied to his employers, but continues to snatch his six figure salary out of their pockets every year. He's let his employers down, he's failed to do his job, he's taken way more sick days than is reasonable. He's done everything required to warrant disciplinary action at ANY job on the planet. Any job other than being the president of the US, apparently.
It's sad and a bit pathetic that you hold your president to a lower standard than you would your doctor, a contractor who's brought in to rebuild the balcony on your house, a sleazy defence lower, or even an ex-con working at Burger King.
I don't really see what Jews have to do with this. They lie completely outside the scope of the analogy, in much the same way that corn subsidies, laser printer manufacturing techniques, or the study of the symbiotic bacterial relationships in coral reefs do. That is, they're only being brought up because you are very uncomfortable with the idea that Americans are losing their free speech. Unless you're trying to make the (completely inane and retarded) claim that critics of the Nazi party were NOT put into concentration camps, along with Jews and Roma and whatnot. But of couse, we know that critics of the Nazi party and members of competing political groups were all put into concentration camps as well. The fact that America has yet to begin massacring people on the same scale as the Nazis doesn't make American free speech any less tenuous. Although give them time -- the secret prisons are already in place and the people have been convinced that they have a fictitious enemy. The pieces are certainly in place.
And yet you totally ignored the point: killing is banned in our society, much like free speech is banned in despotic regimes. And in exactly the same way that killing still goes on in our society (and frequently goes unpunished), free speech goes on in despotic regimes. Only a naive sap would claim that because some people criticize the government, that we MUST still be living in a wonderful liberal free society, rather than one that is spiralling into fascism.
I might have been listening until the part about South America -- the CIA is responsible for most South American dictatorships. Many South Americans like the idea of socialism and communism, but when they try to set up those economic systems within a democratic framework, the CIA comes along and brings a capitalist despot into power. That's YOUR fault, YOUR stupidity, not theirs. Sorry, try again.
How about "here in Canada, things are comparitively peachy"? None of our recent governments were appointed by judges. Gerrymandering and other trickery is minimized by having an impartial, non-partisan election group that can be independently overseen by anyone and everyone (who is honestly stupid enough to let the current administration decide who gets to vote and how?!). We've had significant campaign finance reform to reduce the effect of lobbying. It's not too shabby at all.
Bashing America is not only ludicrously easy, but it's completely appropriate -- this is a nation that bills itself as "the home of the free", the greatest nation on Earth, the land of opportunity. Big words for a nation that locks up reporters and runs prison camps where people don't get trials and are tortured into giving false confessions. Where a majority of the population is still pissed off that executing the mentally retarded was banned, but are pleased that executing children is still fair game. Where the government will happily block the purchase of a sports franchise if the buyer's politics are too dissimilar from their own. Where any criminal record, no matter how petty the offense and how long ago it was, bars people from getting anything but the most unpleasant demeaning jobs and eliminates the possibility of attending a college or university without some vast source of independtly acquired wealth. I could go on and on...
Suffice to say, America invites criticism by braying to the entire world about how wonderful and free it is. Can you really blame people for taking the bait and engaging in some critical analysis of those claims?
Killing still goes on, doesn't it?
More significantly, look at all the people in Nazi Germany, Theocratic Iran, or Communist China that DO speak out. Many of them don't even get called on it. Some do. That's what the lack of free speech is all about -- having to take significant risks to speak your mind.
My whole point was that the existence of people that criticize the government doesn't even remotely indicate that you are still living in a free society, because even the most brutal dictatorial societies in all of history had people doing precisely the same thing. A free society is one where those people don't have to worry that they'll be imprisoned by the police, have their careers destroyed by government intervention, or murdered by some national "security" organization.
Note: you knew exactly what I meant, and deliberately misinterpreted it because the idea of facing up to what is going on the US right now scares the shit out of you. Sorry, but that's reality. Deal with it.
Sorry, the US constitution hasn't been a meaningful force in US politics since ... well, ever. It's a joke. Lincoln destroyed an last vestiges of meaning that it may have possessed. Dubya treats it like a used sanitary napkin; something too unpleasant to mention in polite conversation.