OK, again I think you've basically got it right. My only quibbles are --
1. I think we actually might be agreeing that it's not the *fear* so much that's irrational, but that some of our actual *responses* to it might be? Good example with Reid -- as I've said many times, 9/11 was a trick that would only work once. In fact, one could argue that it *stopped* working that very morning -- as soon as the passengers on Flight 93 were alerted, via cellphone, to what was going on.
The whole confiscaton of nail clippers, etc was absurd. My solution was to just put a baseball bat in every overhead compartment. Problem solved -- you can't really hijack a plane with a baseball bat, but pit a box-cutter armed terrorist against an enraged, bat-wielding mob and I know who I'd put MY money on.
And again, you're right -- we should be less concerned about fighting the last war and more concerned about the form of future attacks.
2. OK, now I have one area where we may not agree. You suggest (as have a lot of other people) that 99 percent of Muslims are peaceful, but it's the 1 percent that people get all worked up about. My hunch is that it's more complex than that. As a liberal (classically speaking, I mean), I *want* to believe that Islam and democracy are not incompatible. I certainly wish that to be true. But at this point I simply don't know if it is true. I mean, if you were an alien looking at Earth from space, I think the two major geopolitical things that would strike you are:
1. The relative wealth of the northern hemisphere vs the southern; and
2. The broad swath, cutting from northwest Africa through Asia, that is uniformly a) Islam and b) undemocratic.
The fact is that there is no country that is both predominantly Islamic and also liberal/democratic. I WANT to believe that Islam and dictatorship/theocracy don't go hand-in-hand, but I also recognize that I need to be careful about believing what I want to believe.
Put another way, there certainly are many Muslims, including many powerful and knowlegeable ones, who fervently believe that democracy is not compatible with their faith, because ultimately it puts the will of the people above the will of Allah (as interpreted by the imams). They know a lot more about Islam than I do -- who am I to say they are wrong?
Oh one more thing, which I just add because you might be interested. A year or so ago there was a quote which made all the usual rounds, in which Bush supposedly said (IIRC it was at a meeting in Pennsylvania) that God "speaks to him" or somesuch. Of course this was used to show what a raving religious loony Bush is.
I researched it a little -- it set off my BS detector because it just seemed too damn convenient -- and found that not only was the reporter who reported this not at the meeting, but the guy who *TOLD* the reporter about it wasn't at the meeting either! The reporter said, basically, that someone told him that someone told HIM that Bush said something like that at the meeting. And yet of course people jumped all over it, because it met their preconceived ideas of what Bush must have said.
Just kind of an interesting aside. There truly is no stronger human impulse than to believe what we want to believe!
Let me apologize for the trolls who responded to your comment. However, while your points are good ones, I can't help but think of two concerns:
1. The question still stands -- why has the West made this journey, while the Islamic countries have stood stagnant?; and
2. The unique developments of this particular time period -- i.e., the proliferation of WMDs -- means that other countries might just not have the luxury of "giving them time."
I'm not arguing with you, I'm just not *exactly* sure what you're trying to say. First you write:
"The colonial period is why the West has advanced so much faster than any civilization before it"
But then you go on to describe a scenario in which the ability to expand rapidly (i.e., colonize) is *driven* by other advancements (society, technology, etc.), not the other way around.
The second scenario seems more accurate, to me. Lord knows the Islamic countries tried to expand, when they could. It's just that their ability to do so eventually became negligible next to the abilities of the European countries.
This is pretty funny. Would it be out of place for me to point out that the "quote" is a paraphrase from the Palestinian Prime Minister, given two years after Bush supposedly said it? And even then, you don't get it right -- you say Bush said "God told me to go to war with other countries." The closest thing the story actually says is that the Palestinian PM says that GB said "God told him to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and end the tyranny in Iraq." You simply chose to interpret the story in the most anti-Bush way you could.
(Note that, according to the quotees, Bush also supported the establishment of a Palestinian state).
Very nice commentary. Two things, though. First, I'm not sure what you mean by this:
"But if we (the West) are in a fight to prove or disprove the validity of a category of millions of individuals with a religion and region in common, is it any less valid to paint with a broad brush in response to broad-brush racism and discrimination?"
Could you explain that a little more?
Also, there is one part of your otherwise insightful post where, in an apparent desire to be evenhanded, I think you misstep. You say:
"In the U.S., we're living in completely irrational fear of nineteen hijackers who are already dead (and one apparent moron who is currently on trial)."
Actually, we're living with the perfectly rational awareness that one or more of the people behind the attack, including a certain multibillionaire who possesses the will (and possibly still the means) to carry out such an attack, is still out there. I'm not saying the U.S. has handled everything the way I think it should have been handled -- far from it. But that's not the same thing as saying it's "irrational." That's like saying from 1942-1945, the U.S. was driven by an irrational fear of a few hundred Japanese naval aviators.
When I heard they were making the re-make, I assumed it would be a film based on the actual book, where the apes live in an advanced technological society (with a lot of monkey-related modifications, like bars everywhere that they swing around on).
Instead Burton chose to film a slightly different take on the first movie, which is obviously far different than the book (it explores different themes and so forth).
Leaves the book still ripe for a re-make, but then again, I suppose two ape movies is probably enough.
The fact that there are *two* places a computer can store information -- the hard drive ("Like an LP -- data is physically written on it. It's slow but can hold a lot, and the data won't disappear if the the computer is unplugged") and the RAM ("It's where the computer stores stuff that you are actually working on at that moment -- Fast, but is essentially just a bunch of electrons zipping around. If your computer is unplugged, it's gone.)
It's important to actually understanding how to use your computer (Save vs Save As, etc), and it's one of those things that makes perfect sense to a power user, but a newbie has no clue about.
- AJ
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
You know, what's funny about this is not the comment, but the moderation.
"Insightful"? Not only is this not insightful, but it makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. Seriously -- I'm an editor, and it's my job to understand the meaning of words. I've read this several times and I still don't understand it.
What the comment seems to be suggestiong is that, by keeping some information secret, the government is causing "average uneducated person[s] [to] form irrational beliefs that could cause civil disorder... [for example], religious beliefs that make people violently protest, say, against abortion clinics.
Huh? What secret is the government keeping that would cause this -- that Jesus has appeared to them, and told them he approves of abortion? And even then, you would have to postulate that the government simply *withholding* this information is somehow enough to lead people to "form beliefs that make [them] violently protest, say, against abortion clinics"
Look, I know we people with opposed political views are supposed to ridicule, spew bile, etc., but I don't mean this that way, and I hope you don't take it that way.
1. You describe Al-Qaeda as "a very well-defined group originally trained up by the US to fight in Afghanistan in the '80s."
It's difficult to believe that anyone familiar with Al-Qaeda would describe it this way. Al-Qaeda is not IBM; it is not "well-defined" in any sense I am familiar with. It is a loose confederation of individuals and cells who all have varying motivations. Individuals involved with Al-Qaeda may or may not belong to other terrorist groups, sometimes concurrently. Indeed, Al Qaeda is *ill* defined.
This sort of leads into my next point. Saying Al-Qaeda was "trained by the U.S. to fight in Afghanistan" suggest there is a more-or-less linear, well-defined process or relationship. There is nothing of the sort. First, there was no such thing as "Al-Qaeda" back then. The Afghan mujahadeen began resisting Soviet occupation before the U.S. got involved. Later, *some* of those mujahadeen got involved, at different times, with Al-Qaeda.
2. You write several things along the lines of "You are more likely to die from the flu than a terrorist attack. Shouldn't the government spend more money on flu vaccines?"
Many, many people, including many anti-war liberals, have noted the fallaciousness of this line of thinking. Put it this way -- in the month of December, 1941, many, many more Americans died of [flu/auto accidents/heart disease/etc. etc. etc.] than died at Pearl Harbor. Does this mean Roosevelt should have put "Fighting World War II" in a list of priorities organized by the number of fatalities? Of course not -- that would be absurd.
3. You categorically state: "US government's current actions are increasing the likelihood of dying at the hands of terrorists, not decreasing the risk." You present no evidence for this, because, of course, you can't -- there is none. Sure, it's a *possibility,* but you state it as empirical fact. Meanwhile, there is *anecdotal* evidence that the opposite is true. After 9/11, who would have guessed that it would be five years and counting, and we still haven't experienced another major terrorist attack? Remember, many of the people who perpetrated 9/11 (including, presumably, the mastermind) are still out there. Logic suggests that, if they *could* have attacked again in the last five years, they would have.
4. Finally, you suggest the American goal is "US military dominance and empirialism in the Middle East."
Well, let's take a look at the places the U.S. has invaded, and their current governments. France - democracy. Germany - democracy (except the part we didn't occupy, and even that eventually democratized when it reunited with the part that we did). Japan - democracy. Phillipines - democracy. Panama - democracy. Grenada - democracy. Korea - democracy (except the part we didn't occupy). Vietnam, where we failed - dictatorship.
I just don't get it. The U.S. has certainly committed sins, sometime egregious ones. But our general philosphy is clear -- to promote democracy and *self* government. Using "imperialism" in that sense simply serves to drain any meaning from the word.
Bush has stated that our goal is to a) free the Iraqi people from one of the world's most brutal dictatorships, then b) help the Iraqi people form a new, democratic government of the people. So far, everything that has happened has borne this out.
I don't mean to ramble here, I just find this whole thing inexplicable. You talk about the "moral" fallout. So do I understand that the "moral" thing to do would have been to leave millions of people to suffer under a murdering, torturing, fascist regime? I just don't get it.
Just to establish my cred, ID isn't science and shouldn't be taught in school.
Now, having said that, I want to issue a cautionary note to my liberal friends. Let's take a sober approach toward this, shall we?: Having a federal judge deciding what is and is not science, and thus what should and should not be taught in school, is really a terrible state of affairs.
If the government didn't have a near-monopoly on education, this wouldn't be an issue, of course. But that's a whole 'nother can o' worms.
Quite clearly, my point was that we had 3,000 people who were not in fact able to "return home safely" despite the fact that "we" hadn't "declar[ed] war on people."
I guess you could say the GP is technically correct if you restrict his/her use of "them" to mean American soldiers, and not civilians. Our soldiers would indeed "return home safely" if we never used them to fight. But so what? The job of a soldier is not to be safe -- it is to put himself or herself in harm's way to protect American lives and interests. The GP's post was labeled "insightful" despite having nothing to say about whether the troops *should* be fighting. I don't get it -- what's insightful about pointing out that being a soldier is dangerous?
I basically agree with what you say, with one important distinction (and you may know this already):
The famous "three-fifths" clause is a little misleading, since southern slaveowners wanted slaves to be counted as a *full* human being, and northern abolitionists didn't want them to count for *anything*. This is because the argument was: How should a state's population be determined, when deciding representation in the House? Obviously, the southern states wanted as large a representation as they could get.
Like I said, you may know that already, but I think a lot of people probably don't.
At first I was incredulous that anyone would actually believe all that claptrap -- much less mod it INFORMATIVE, of all things. Then I realized I had been suckered, and that you were actually satirizing the way people in New York, Boston and L.A. see residents of the rest of the country.
Nice job! I agree that this is a ridiculous, paranoid vision. I especially like the part where "These people would rather kill you than listen to you." Hilarious!
My only quibble is that your satire went a bit too far; remember, it has to be *believable* to really hit home, and your vision of what blue-staters think is a little too cartoonishly exaggerated to believe. But overall, well done.
Best regards,
- AJ
PS: Kudos to the moderators, too! Playing their part by labeling your ingeniously childish rant "Informative" -- the single most inappropriate mod! Beautiful!
For dealing with a lot of comments, Google Groups has the most useful web interface I've ever seen: The "tree" view, which shows you exactly where you are in the hierarchy in a pane off to the left. I've always wondered why this paradigm never caught on -- it's so useful and intuitive. I'd love to see Slashdot adopt it.
That analysis of Ender's Game, while evidently suprisingly widespread, strikes me as pretty wide of the mark.
I guess one thing I find lacking is Card's endorsement, or advocacy. EG, like a lot of what we consider great works of literature, raises many more questions than Card "answers." It's not like Starship Troopers, which is the outlines of a plot loosely draped around a quasi-libertarian polemic.
Card is clear that Ender is manipulated in pretty awful ways, beginning with the genetic engineering that creates him. He also lets us listen in to the largely nameless, faceless military bureaucrats who are manipulating him, and who themselves realize that what they are doing is in many ways unforgivable, and who accordingly wrestle with their consciences throughout the process. They deliberately place a young child in positions of real danger, as a means of testing and strengthening him. As far as I can see, the reader is left to his/her own conclusions about whether they are doing the right thing.
You write: "The book constantly paint the opponents as completely evil with no redeeming qualities and no motivations of their own, making it a very easy choice to kill them."
Again, I find this pretty odd. Are you talking about the buggers? Because, in the book, *government propaganda* portrays the buggers that way, yet I found it pretty clear that Card was saying something else. And in fact, in the end, it is shown that the whole thing was a result of a stupid miscommunication, and a lack of understanding on both sides. The buggers killed the crew of the first human vessel they encountered because the crew members weren't sentient in a way they understood. The humans retaliated without adequately trying to understand what happened.
In the end (and as shown in subsequent books) Ender is not hostile but in fact sympathetic to the buggers. He is devastated and profoundly transformed by what he now realized he did.
Or, by "opponent," do you mean the older boy Ender kills in the shower? Because here, again, the situation is more complex than you seem to acknowledge. In the training facility, OSC sets up a "Lord of the Flies" scenario, where the kids basically run amok without any oversight from the adults. The adults, again, have morally dubious reasons for doing this -- they want to see which kids emerge as natural leaders. But I didn't find the plot progression overly "convenient" or unrealistic. Like in "Lord of the Flies," the kid with the greatest combination of size, strength and charisma gathers a clique around him and attempts to rule by force. This strikes me as being reasonably plausible.
So I guess I agree with a few of the other posters out there: Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that a lot of people who don't like OSC's politics/religion/whatever read EG and convince themselves that he is saying what they think a big bad conservative boogeyman *would* say. It's understandable, but it's still too bad -- I think such people are depriving themselves of appreciating a thoughtful and thought-provoking work.
- Alaska Jack
PS Of course, having given the matter more thought, I guess if you were a committed pacifist, none of what I just said -- or of Ender's Game, for that matter -- would make much sense. But that's because, as has been pointed out time and time again, that *pacifism* makes no sense, any more than senseless warmongering.
I mean, that quote from Ghandi sounds great, but doesn't really make any sense, unless you actually believe *there's nothing worth fighting for*. You don't really believe that, do you?
Well, I guess, although by that standard (i.e., believing in some sort of religion or superstition or higher power, the existence of which cannot be proved) the vast majority of people in the world are insane.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you beat me to it.
- AJ
OK, again I think you've basically got it right. My only quibbles are --
1. I think we actually might be agreeing that it's not the *fear* so much that's irrational, but that some of our actual *responses* to it might be? Good example with Reid -- as I've said many times, 9/11 was a trick that would only work once. In fact, one could argue that it *stopped* working that very morning -- as soon as the passengers on Flight 93 were alerted, via cellphone, to what was going on.
The whole confiscaton of nail clippers, etc was absurd. My solution was to just put a baseball bat in every overhead compartment. Problem solved -- you can't really hijack a plane with a baseball bat, but pit a box-cutter armed terrorist against an enraged, bat-wielding mob and I know who I'd put MY money on.
And again, you're right -- we should be less concerned about fighting the last war and more concerned about the form of future attacks.
2. OK, now I have one area where we may not agree. You suggest (as have a lot of other people) that 99 percent of Muslims are peaceful, but it's the 1 percent that people get all worked up about. My hunch is that it's more complex than that. As a liberal (classically speaking, I mean), I *want* to believe that Islam and democracy are not incompatible. I certainly wish that to be true. But at this point I simply don't know if it is true. I mean, if you were an alien looking at Earth from space, I think the two major geopolitical things that would strike you are:
1. The relative wealth of the northern hemisphere vs the southern; and
2. The broad swath, cutting from northwest Africa through Asia, that is uniformly a) Islam and b) undemocratic.
The fact is that there is no country that is both predominantly Islamic and also liberal/democratic. I WANT to believe that Islam and dictatorship/theocracy don't go hand-in-hand, but I also recognize that I need to be careful about believing what I want to believe.
Put another way, there certainly are many Muslims, including many powerful and knowlegeable ones, who fervently believe that democracy is not compatible with their faith, because ultimately it puts the will of the people above the will of Allah (as interpreted by the imams). They know a lot more about Islam than I do -- who am I to say they are wrong?
- Alaska Jack
Oh one more thing, which I just add because you might be interested. A year or so ago there was a quote which made all the usual rounds, in which Bush supposedly said (IIRC it was at a meeting in Pennsylvania) that God "speaks to him" or somesuch. Of course this was used to show what a raving religious loony Bush is.
I researched it a little -- it set off my BS detector because it just seemed too damn convenient -- and found that not only was the reporter who reported this not at the meeting, but the guy who *TOLD* the reporter about it wasn't at the meeting either! The reporter said, basically, that someone told him that someone told HIM that Bush said something like that at the meeting. And yet of course people jumped all over it, because it met their preconceived ideas of what Bush must have said.
Just kind of an interesting aside. There truly is no stronger human impulse than to believe what we want to believe!
- AJ
Well, no need to be so reasonable about it. This is Slashdot, you know.
- AJ
Let me apologize for the trolls who responded to your comment. However, while your points are good ones, I can't help but think of two concerns:
1. The question still stands -- why has the West made this journey, while the Islamic countries have stood stagnant?; and
2. The unique developments of this particular time period -- i.e., the proliferation of WMDs -- means that other countries might just not have the luxury of "giving them time."
Good post, though.
- AJ
I'm not arguing with you, I'm just not *exactly* sure what you're trying to say. First you write:
"The colonial period is why the West has advanced so much faster than any civilization before it"
But then you go on to describe a scenario in which the ability to expand rapidly (i.e., colonize) is *driven* by other advancements (society, technology, etc.), not the other way around.
The second scenario seems more accurate, to me. Lord knows the Islamic countries tried to expand, when they could. It's just that their ability to do so eventually became negligible next to the abilities of the European countries.
- AJ
This is pretty funny. Would it be out of place for me to point out that the "quote" is a paraphrase from the Palestinian Prime Minister, given two years after Bush supposedly said it? And even then, you don't get it right -- you say Bush said "God told me to go to war with other countries." The closest thing the story actually says is that the Palestinian PM says that GB said "God told him to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and end the tyranny in Iraq." You simply chose to interpret the story in the most anti-Bush way you could.
(Note that, according to the quotees, Bush also supported the establishment of a Palestinian state).
- AJ
Very nice commentary. Two things, though. First, I'm not sure what you mean by this:
"But if we (the West) are in a fight to prove or disprove the validity of a category of millions of individuals with a religion and region in common, is it any less valid to paint with a broad brush in response to broad-brush racism and discrimination?"
Could you explain that a little more?
Also, there is one part of your otherwise insightful post where, in an apparent desire to be evenhanded, I think you misstep. You say:
"In the U.S., we're living in completely irrational fear of nineteen hijackers who are already dead (and one apparent moron who is currently on trial)."
Actually, we're living with the perfectly rational awareness that one or more of the people behind the attack, including a certain multibillionaire who possesses the will (and possibly still the means) to carry out such an attack, is still out there. I'm not saying the U.S. has handled everything the way I think it should have been handled -- far from it. But that's not the same thing as saying it's "irrational." That's like saying from 1942-1945, the U.S. was driven by an irrational fear of a few hundred Japanese naval aviators.
But again, I enjoyed your post overall.
- AJ
What does France do with its nuclear waste?
- AJ
When I heard they were making the re-make, I assumed it would be a film based on the actual book, where the apes live in an advanced technological society (with a lot of monkey-related modifications, like bars everywhere that they swing around on).
Instead Burton chose to film a slightly different take on the first movie, which is obviously far different than the book (it explores different themes and so forth).
Leaves the book still ripe for a re-make, but then again, I suppose two ape movies is probably enough.
- AJ
The fact that there are *two* places a computer can store information -- the hard drive ("Like an LP -- data is physically written on it. It's slow but can hold a lot, and the data won't disappear if the the computer is unplugged") and the RAM ("It's where the computer stores stuff that you are actually working on at that moment -- Fast, but is essentially just a bunch of electrons zipping around. If your computer is unplugged, it's gone.)
It's important to actually understanding how to use your computer (Save vs Save As, etc), and it's one of those things that makes perfect sense to a power user, but a newbie has no clue about.
- AJ
Then why do you ask for a zip code?
- AJ
You know, what's funny about this is not the comment, but the moderation.
... [for example], religious beliefs that make people violently protest, say, against abortion clinics.
"Insightful"? Not only is this not insightful, but it makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. Seriously -- I'm an editor, and it's my job to understand the meaning of words. I've read this several times and I still don't understand it.
What the comment seems to be suggestiong is that, by keeping some information secret, the government is causing "average uneducated person[s] [to] form irrational beliefs that could cause civil disorder
Huh? What secret is the government keeping that would cause this -- that Jesus has appeared to them, and told them he approves of abortion? And even then, you would have to postulate that the government simply *withholding* this information is somehow enough to lead people to "form beliefs that make [them] violently protest, say, against abortion clinics"
"Insightful," indeed.
- AJ
Look, I know we people with opposed political views are supposed to ridicule, spew bile, etc., but I don't mean this that way, and I hope you don't take it that way.
c le?AID=/20051130/SCANNERS/51130004 )
1. You describe Al-Qaeda as "a very well-defined group originally trained up by the US to fight in Afghanistan in the '80s."
It's difficult to believe that anyone familiar with Al-Qaeda would describe it this way. Al-Qaeda is not IBM; it is not "well-defined" in any sense I am familiar with. It is a loose confederation of individuals and cells who all have varying motivations. Individuals involved with Al-Qaeda may or may not belong to other terrorist groups, sometimes concurrently. Indeed, Al Qaeda is *ill* defined.
This sort of leads into my next point. Saying Al-Qaeda was "trained by the U.S. to fight in Afghanistan" suggest there is a more-or-less linear, well-defined process or relationship. There is nothing of the sort. First, there was no such thing as "Al-Qaeda" back then. The Afghan mujahadeen began resisting Soviet occupation before the U.S. got involved. Later, *some* of those mujahadeen got involved, at different times, with Al-Qaeda.
2. You write several things along the lines of "You are more likely to die from the flu than a terrorist attack. Shouldn't the government spend more money on flu vaccines?"
Many, many people, including many anti-war liberals, have noted the fallaciousness of this line of thinking. Put it this way -- in the month of December, 1941, many, many more Americans died of [flu/auto accidents/heart disease/etc. etc. etc.] than died at Pearl Harbor. Does this mean Roosevelt should have put "Fighting World War II" in a list of priorities organized by the number of fatalities? Of course not -- that would be absurd.
(Jim Emerson, the quite liberal blogger on rogerebert.suntimes.com, provides another very good takedown of this argument here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti
3. You categorically state: "US government's current actions are increasing the likelihood of dying at the hands of terrorists, not decreasing the risk." You present no evidence for this, because, of course, you can't -- there is none. Sure, it's a *possibility,* but you state it as empirical fact. Meanwhile, there is *anecdotal* evidence that the opposite is true. After 9/11, who would have guessed that it would be five years and counting, and we still haven't experienced another major terrorist attack? Remember, many of the people who perpetrated 9/11 (including, presumably, the mastermind) are still out there. Logic suggests that, if they *could* have attacked again in the last five years, they would have.
4. Finally, you suggest the American goal is "US military dominance and empirialism in the Middle East."
Well, let's take a look at the places the U.S. has invaded, and their current governments. France - democracy. Germany - democracy (except the part we didn't occupy, and even that eventually democratized when it reunited with the part that we did). Japan - democracy. Phillipines - democracy. Panama - democracy. Grenada - democracy. Korea - democracy (except the part we didn't occupy). Vietnam, where we failed - dictatorship.
I just don't get it. The U.S. has certainly committed sins, sometime egregious ones. But our general philosphy is clear -- to promote democracy and *self* government. Using "imperialism" in that sense simply serves to drain any meaning from the word.
Bush has stated that our goal is to a) free the Iraqi people from one of the world's most brutal dictatorships, then b) help the Iraqi people form a new, democratic government of the people. So far, everything that has happened has borne this out.
I don't mean to ramble here, I just find this whole thing inexplicable. You talk about the "moral" fallout. So do I understand that the "moral" thing to do would have been to leave millions of people to suffer under a murdering, torturing, fascist regime? I just don't get it.
- AJ
You don't know any reporters, do you?
- AJ
Just to establish my cred, ID isn't science and shouldn't be taught in school.
Now, having said that, I want to issue a cautionary note to my liberal friends. Let's take a sober approach toward this, shall we?: Having a federal judge deciding what is and is not science, and thus what should and should not be taught in school, is really a terrible state of affairs.
If the government didn't have a near-monopoly on education, this wouldn't be an issue, of course. But that's a whole 'nother can o' worms.
- AJ
Hmm. Google:
"Little Red Book" Darmouth hoax = 20,800
"Little Red Book" Darmouth -hoax = 105,000
Do you have an example of a periodical that made the hoax "front page news" but buried the actual original news story?
- AJ
Quite clearly, my point was that we had 3,000 people who were not in fact able to "return home safely" despite the fact that "we" hadn't "declar[ed] war on people."
I guess you could say the GP is technically correct if you restrict his/her use of "them" to mean American soldiers, and not civilians. Our soldiers would indeed "return home safely" if we never used them to fight. But so what? The job of a soldier is not to be safe -- it is to put himself or herself in harm's way to protect American lives and interests. The GP's post was labeled "insightful" despite having nothing to say about whether the troops *should* be fighting. I don't get it -- what's insightful about pointing out that being a soldier is dangerous?
- AJ
I can think of 3,000 or so people who might disagree with this, if they could.
- AJ
I basically agree with what you say, with one important distinction (and you may know this already):
The famous "three-fifths" clause is a little misleading, since southern slaveowners wanted slaves to be counted as a *full* human being, and northern abolitionists didn't want them to count for *anything*. This is because the argument was: How should a state's population be determined, when deciding representation in the House? Obviously, the southern states wanted as large a representation as they could get.
Like I said, you may know that already, but I think a lot of people probably don't.
- AJ
Damn, you got me.
At first I was incredulous that anyone would actually believe all that claptrap -- much less mod it INFORMATIVE, of all things. Then I realized I had been suckered, and that you were actually satirizing the way people in New York, Boston and L.A. see residents of the rest of the country.
Nice job! I agree that this is a ridiculous, paranoid vision. I especially like the part where "These people would rather kill you than listen to you." Hilarious!
My only quibble is that your satire went a bit too far; remember, it has to be *believable* to really hit home, and your vision of what blue-staters think is a little too cartoonishly exaggerated to believe. But overall, well done.
Best regards,
- AJ
PS: Kudos to the moderators, too! Playing their part by labeling your ingeniously childish rant "Informative" -- the single most inappropriate mod! Beautiful!
For dealing with a lot of comments, Google Groups has the most useful web interface I've ever seen: The "tree" view, which shows you exactly where you are in the hierarchy in a pane off to the left. I've always wondered why this paradigm never caught on -- it's so useful and intuitive. I'd love to see Slashdot adopt it.
See here, for example.
It seems to me that you could set the pane to only display the info you wanted: Comments rated 4 and above, and those from "friends," for example.
I don't know spit about web programming, but it would be cool if the new design let programmers write creative and useful interfaces like this.
- AJ
That analysis of Ender's Game, while evidently suprisingly widespread, strikes me as pretty wide of the mark.
I guess one thing I find lacking is Card's endorsement, or advocacy. EG, like a lot of what we consider great works of literature, raises many more questions than Card "answers." It's not like Starship Troopers, which is the outlines of a plot loosely draped around a quasi-libertarian polemic.
Card is clear that Ender is manipulated in pretty awful ways, beginning with the genetic engineering that creates him. He also lets us listen in to the largely nameless, faceless military bureaucrats who are manipulating him, and who themselves realize that what they are doing is in many ways unforgivable, and who accordingly wrestle with their consciences throughout the process. They deliberately place a young child in positions of real danger, as a means of testing and strengthening him. As far as I can see, the reader is left to his/her own conclusions about whether they are doing the right thing.
You write: "The book constantly paint the opponents as completely evil with no redeeming qualities and no motivations of their own, making it a very easy choice to kill them."
Again, I find this pretty odd. Are you talking about the buggers? Because, in the book, *government propaganda* portrays the buggers that way, yet I found it pretty clear that Card was saying something else. And in fact, in the end, it is shown that the whole thing was a result of a stupid miscommunication, and a lack of understanding on both sides. The buggers killed the crew of the first human vessel they encountered because the crew members weren't sentient in a way they understood. The humans retaliated without adequately trying to understand what happened.
In the end (and as shown in subsequent books) Ender is not hostile but in fact sympathetic to the buggers. He is devastated and profoundly transformed by what he now realized he did.
Or, by "opponent," do you mean the older boy Ender kills in the shower? Because here, again, the situation is more complex than you seem to acknowledge. In the training facility, OSC sets up a "Lord of the Flies" scenario, where the kids basically run amok without any oversight from the adults. The adults, again, have morally dubious reasons for doing this -- they want to see which kids emerge as natural leaders. But I didn't find the plot progression overly "convenient" or unrealistic. Like in "Lord of the Flies," the kid with the greatest combination of size, strength and charisma gathers a clique around him and attempts to rule by force. This strikes me as being reasonably plausible.
So I guess I agree with a few of the other posters out there: Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that a lot of people who don't like OSC's politics/religion/whatever read EG and convince themselves that he is saying what they think a big bad conservative boogeyman *would* say. It's understandable, but it's still too bad -- I think such people are depriving themselves of appreciating a thoughtful and thought-provoking work.
- Alaska Jack
PS Of course, having given the matter more thought, I guess if you were a committed pacifist, none of what I just said -- or of Ender's Game, for that matter -- would make much sense. But that's because, as has been pointed out time and time again, that *pacifism* makes no sense, any more than senseless warmongering.
I mean, that quote from Ghandi sounds great, but doesn't really make any sense, unless you actually believe *there's nothing worth fighting for*. You don't really believe that, do you?
Well, I guess, although by that standard (i.e., believing in some sort of religion or superstition or higher power, the existence of which cannot be proved) the vast majority of people in the world are insane.
- AJ
Hmm. Are you currently taking any kind of medication?
If not, you might want to consider it.
If so, perhaps you should consider reducing or increasing your dosage.
Respectfully,
- Alaska Jack