This makes me want to cry. How can anyone who feels confident enough to propose this on a website read by millions possibly be so ignorant about recent Korean history? And how could anyone fail to notice that, and mod it up?
Re-read your post. Substitute "light water reactors" or "aid programs" or whatever for "an extensive renewable program", and you have what the Clinton adminstration tried. The North Korean regime gladly accepted the assistance "in return for no nukes" (as you put it)... and didn't even pause their covert nuclear program. Between aid or nuclear weapons, they chose aid AND nuclear weapons.
We cannot know that the North Koreans are adhering to any agreement without full, unfettered access to every corner of their country. And therein lies the rub. The North Korean regime does not and will not let foreigners into their country. They believe (probably correctly) that allowing their starving, semi-literate and miserable subjects to come into contact with outsiders would be equivalent to signing their own death warrant. Remember: This is a regime that finds it preferable that its own citizens STARVE TO DEATH rather than accept food aid offered on the condition that the donating agencies enter the country and distribute it themselves.
EVERY F#*KING TIME! I get so tired of all this paranoid script-kiddy-level conspiracy mongering on slashdot. Bush! Haliburton! The Trilateral Commission! The boogey man!
EVERY. DAMN. TIME. there turns out to be some thoroughly unremarkable reason behind it all. But that never stops these idiots from piling on.
I mean, think about it -- it just didn't make sense. Why would:
a. Time, a magazine protected by the first amendment,
b. knuckle under, to
c. pressure improbably brought by the Bush administration
d. to remove an article available from many other sources
e. that discusses things that are well-known anyway.
Hey, they're your mod points, you can do whatever you want with them. But here's a few things to think about after you finish congratulating yourself for your devastating, witty comments:
1. From the/. moderating guidelines: "Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down."
2. Also from the guidelines: "Troll -- A Troll is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality."
3. To sum up the above, you just censored me (i.e., modded me down) not because it was a troll, but because I said something you didn't like. Not that I care -- no one would read it anyway -- but what does that say about you? How do you feel about censorship in general? Does it piss you off when you hear or read about instances of it?
4. Who the fuck says 'Frick?' Are you twelve? I don't get it. Writing "fuck" would make me sound more mature? Twelve-year-olds don't say "fuck?"
3. Read your own post again. Your whining response... who the fuck says 'frick'... You're a whiny little jackass. Is that how you talk to people in real life? I mean, seriously. If you hear someone in the hallway saying something with which you disagree, do you just fly off the handle and curse him out?
This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know -- I'm curious about what kind of person acts like that. Do you have any friends? Do people take you seriously? Are you on any kind of medication?
So there's no self-reflection? No sense that gosh, maybe I should be more skeptical when I hear about things that seem too good to be true, even if -- or *particularly* if -- they meet my preconceived notions about the way things are?
Actually I'm not surprised -- if there's one generalization I could make about/.ers, it's (of course) that they're nerds. But if there's two, they're that their nerds and have real problems admitting they're wrong. Like you, they just change the parameters of the argument and move on.
It's actually kind of discouraging. My post is buried down here, so most/.ers aren't even going to realize the story's not true. But that's par for the course today. I also posted a factual, informative rebuttal to another guy in this same thread, and got labeled a troll. WTF?
WHAT THE FRICK? Why on earth was this post moderated as a troll? I don't get it. It's factual and informative. Is it trollish just because I pointed out the parent poster didn't have his facts straight?
OK. I'm not trying to argue with you here, I'm trying to help you. Keep that in mind.
1. "We've had it cramed (sic) down our throats by every radio talk show zelot (sic), republican (sic) candidate, and conservitive (sic) figure we're willing to listen to."
Why would anyone be willing to listen to someone who crammed something down our throats?
2. Your whole thesis (News companies are owned by corporations; corporations are conservative; ergo news companies must be conservative) has been debunked so many times it's getting tiresome.
First, there's no reason a corporation has to be conservative. Levi Strauss is a corporation, yet they were among the first to grant benefits to "domestic partners." Apple Computer is a corporation. They might oppose regulation of the computer industry, but does that mean you'd call Steve Jobs a conservative?
Second, it just doesn't bear up empirically. Would you call McClatchy a conservative organization? The New York Times is a corporation, yet their editorials consistently advocate liberal positions on the various issues of the day. How can this be? Heck, under your model, no liberals would own stock. Ever hear of Warren Buffet?
3. It is *stunning* that anyone who professes to know what they are talking about would still cite that Kampfner story, which has been debunked (by the Washington Post, among others) so many times it also is getting tiresome. Some of the problems are obvious (Special Forces entering a potentially hostile area firing *blanks*?), some aren't. (It later turned out the ambulance driver never actually said the Americans were firing at *him*. He simply heard gunfire ahead and, prudently, turned around. Yet the passage in the story gives the reader the clear understanding that the Americans were firing at the ambulance.) Many more problems with it have been pointed out by others; just do a tiny bit of web research.
4. "Blatantly false information..."
Please let me know what this blatantly false information is. Is it "The British have learned...?" You may think this is weaselly, but since the British stand by it to this day, it's certainly not "blatantly false." Is it the whole WMD thing? I hope not, because I can come up with a whole list of quotes from Democrats -- including Bill Clinton -- and foreign leaders who also believed Hussein was hiding them. Wrong, perhaps, but certainly not "blatantly false."
5. "Lied about what happened IN the war"
One single example, please. That's all I ask.
6. "Systematically dismanteling (sic) the individual rights of the US population"
Oh for Pete's sake. Name one right I had in 1999 that I don't have now.
7. "Clinton was impeached for lieing (sic) before Congress."
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath before *a grand jury*, and for obstruction of justice (i.e., tampering with witnesses). For crying out loud, why was this modded as insightful? You can't even get the most basic facts straight!
Today the Washington Post ran this comment from the creators of The Simpsons:
Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion.
Now I'm curious: I don't watch Fox news (or any television news, for that matter) so I don't really have a dog in this hunt. But for all you who piled on Fox news and their viewers in this thread, do you now feel a little sheepish? Does it suggest maybe you are a little quick to believe things you believe *should* be true? Or do you just shrug it off?
OK, I read The Republic so long ago that I don't really feel comfortable arguing about it. One thing you are right about is that Plato's thinking would have been influenced by Sparta, the most extraordinarily socially-engineered state the world has ever known.
The really interesting thing about The Republic is how it foreshadows the very conundrum the framers of the U.S. constitution were grappling with -- how to reconcile the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism vs. democracy. They, of course, came up with a completely different solution; a mix of populism and authoritarianism that attempted to capitalize on the strengths of each, while minimizing the weaknesses of each. How well they succeeded is a matter upon which reasonable people can disagree.
You do realize that Plato didn't really believe in his own model, don't you? "The Republic" is just an imaginary construct he described while noodling with the problem of authoritarianism vs. democracy.
Plato despised democracy (and, truth be told, he had good reason -- the Greek model of democracy was little better than mob rule; i.e., a tyranny of the majority of those considered "citizens"), but the obvious problem with authoritarianism is that it tends to lead to tyranny.
Plato decided that the best form of government was rule by an enlighted caste of philosopher kings. But how to ensure that this is the case? In The Republic, he showed that in order to achieve such a system, you'd have to engage in a massive and utterly unrealistic regime of social engineering.
It's an interesting model to discuss, but I didn't get the impression he was actually advocating for it. I got the impression it was more like Ptolemy's model of planetary motion -- an interesting and useful model, but unreflective of the way things actually work.
The term "offensive" is kind of misleading, as it suggests I experienced some sort of personal affront. As for your question, I don't think one was more "offensive" than the other - they were both in poor taste.
Re your second paragraph -- again, not offensive, but kind of silly.
Re your third paragraph -- I don't get it. Is this a troll? I'll make the obvious point: Inferring that I have the IQ of a fish on the basis of a single post, whether you agree with it or not, says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Finally, what if the speech had nothing to do with Nazism? What if I just stood up on a park bench and started hurling strings of obscenities into the air? Perhaps all prudes and religious nutjobs would object, but does it necessarily follow that those who objected would all be prudes or religous nutjobs?
The day before yesterday, I think, my wife had on some new show -- I'm sorry, but I didn't catch the name; I think it might have been "Cold Case."
Anyway, I happened to catch a scene in which some guy was slapping around a young woman. The words used were "asshole," "slut," and a couple others I can't remember off the top of my head. Oh, also the woman gave him the finger. It was one of the most graphic -- at least verbally (if something can be "verbally graphic") -- things I've ever seen on network television.
A lot of the slashkids replying to this post seem to suggest that anyone bothered by this kind of thing must be at best a prude, at worst a "religious nutjob." But that's ridiculous. I'm neither; and as a former commercial fisherman, it's not like I've never heard any naughty words before. I've used a few of them myself in this very post.
That whole line of reasoning sort of elides the point, doesn't it? I mean, sure, I could stand on a bench in the park and launch into a profanity-laced speech touting the virtues of Nazism. And I could say it was my free speech right, and anyone bothered by it was just a childish prude. But that wouldn't change the fact that I would still be acting like human scum.
Whoa whoa whoa pardner.
I hope this reply gets modded up, because your take on history is very common, and very wrong.
(Is that Karma whoring? I'm fairly new around here and haven't mastered all the protocols.)
Anyway, I'm not slamming you for this, because like I said, it's a very common misconception. But the reason Madison, Jay, Jefferson et. al. chose representative democracy over direct democracy was *not* logistical necessity (though it may very well have been a logistical necessity). The reason they picked representative democracy was that they thought (in theory) it might be *better* than direct democracy.
What limited experience the human race had with democracy, up to that point, had been mostly bad. Most notable were the Italian city-states, which were chaotic and unstable, and ancient Greece, which was pretty much an unfiltered mobocracy with all that implies. (Fun fact: Pretty much every contempory account of Greek democracy is harshly critical of it. See, for example, Xenophon's *History of Greece*, or Plato's *Republic*, in which Socrates decides that a philosopher king would be a much better solution than democracy).
Of course, tyranny and oligarchy had been tried ad nauseum, and the American upstarts didn't like those either. So here is the key: What the founders were trying was to come up with a system that *blended* elements of populism and elitism, attempting to devise a political structure that combined the strengths of each while minimizing their respective faults.
Did they succeed? Hey, you be the judge. Just remember that what they were trying had never really been done before. (In fact, the conventional wisdom was that democracy didn't "scale up" very well, and wouldn't be practical past the level of a city-state. The Federalist Papers [Madison, Hamilton and Jay] take this argument and turn it on it's head.)
PS: Yes, I realized I simplified a lot of this, particularly the part about Plato. Sue me.
PPS: Just kidding. Please don't sue me.
I'd like to add something to this. First, a disclaimer: Everything I know about power generation/distribution would fit in a thimble.
But I recently attended a lecture by Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith. A lot of it was over my head, but he seemed to scoff at the idea that the California blackouts were the result of deregulation. He said the same thing the parent of this reply did -- that it was the result of *partial* deregulation done *badly*; and that the result basically invited companies to come in and try to game the system.
He said price controls at the local level basically led to exactly what market theory predicted: shortages (just like rent control tends to lead to a shortage of housing).
Not to debate this to death, but I did not miss the point. A *touching* episode was the one that goes over Maggie's birth, where at the end he's taped over the sign in his office so it says "Do it for her." *That's* touching. I repeat -- the "Homr" episode wasn't touching; it was tragic and depressing.
I know the whole "Jump the Shark" thing is overdone, but with the Simpsons, I can point to exactly the moment when the show jumped for me.
It was when the doctors found Homer was stupid because he had a crayon jammed in his brain. Removing it made him smart, but there was a difficult period of adjustment, so at the end of the episode, he put the crayon back.
That's not funny. That's f*&cking tragic and depressing.
Yes, I admit that is a problem. I'm not sure what we can do about it though. The whole point is to get somebody outside the LE community (i.e., someone with nothing personally at stake in the investigation) to review requests. Beyond that, I'm not sure what kind of guarantees we can make.
I do have two points though. First, I strongly suspect the "allegedly never refused any request" info is bogus. It's a secret court -- the fact is that we just have no way of knowing this, so it strongly smells like a made-up rumor.
Second, it wouldn't surprise me to learn there have been very few requests turned down. I guarantee you that the LE agents involved are constantly harangued to make sure their information is solid before they act. Contrary to what one may think, LEA culture is actually very corporate and risk-averse; CYA is the first rule of business.
You know, let me add one more thing. I didn't mean any of my posts to come across as a knee-jerk defense of the government. For example, this whole Hawash thing really concerns me. If anything, you could classify me as a reasonable (i.e., non-wingnut) libertarian. I only posted because so many/. kiddies clearly don't understand the Patriot Act, or the reasons behind it.
1. You wasted at least half your long post babbling about this:
a. The administration termed the attacks "acts of war by foreign aggressors" b. Some critics didn't like this characterization, because they arbitrarily defined war as something only states do. c. The author of the article says no, the administration is right, because whether or not the "aggressors" were states is irrelevant.
Want to waste lots and lots of words dickering over this semantic point? Fine; do it with someone else. It doesn't affect the main points.
2. THE AUTHOR SAID: "The chance that the FISA court will approve a 215 order because the FBI "doesn't like the books [a person] reads . . . or because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy" is zero."
YOU RESPONDED: "This assertion supposes that the chances of the FISA court making an error are zero; they can and will never err."
Brilliant analysis, Sherlock, except the "assertion" doesn't "suppose" this anywhere. If you intend this to be criticism, then I take it you believe the FBI should be prohibited from seeking warrants to search the houses of murderers; after all, the judge in question might "mak[e] an error."
3. You seem to have completely failed to grasp the author's two simple points:
a) Our current laws were designed to investigate and punish criminal activity, not prevent international terrorism. Therefore, they do not do a very good job of coping with the different challenges terrorism presents. Rigidly trying to cram terrorism into our preconceived ideas about criminality will just end up getting people killed.
b) All the rhetoric surrounding the issue is obscuring some basic points of fact (for example, that LEA's are still required to obtain judicial approval).
Now, you say: "Organizations can't challenge the FISA court, because that court can't move quickly enough to make a decision in time to prevent the evil plot."
I'm not exactly sure what this non-sequitur means. How quickly the court can move is irrelevant. The point is that we want to avoid this scenario:
i. FBI gets credible information that Abdul is plotting some sort of terrorist attack. ii. FBI goes to a judge and says, "Here's the information we've received. On this basis, we'd like to find out what books Abdul has checked out. We believe that might give us some insight into what he's planning." iii. The judge looks over the information and says "I judge this to be credible, and to relate to terrorism. OK, go ahead and check out his library record." iv. The FBI does so. It finds out Abdul has checked out books on poisons and the locations of major reservoirs in the area (I'm obviously exaggerating here, but you get the point). v. Right after the FBI leaves the library, Mabel the librarian calls Abdul. "Say, young man, I just thought you ought to know some G-men were snooping around here asking about your library record. I'm sure there's some misunderstanding - perhaps you should call them and get it sorted out."
To recap: WITH REGARDS TO CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS, the FBI has *always* had the authority to get a warrant and snoop into your personal life. But there was and is nothing preventing a third party from alerting you to the fact. WITH REGARDS TO TERRORISM, the Patriot Act makes it against the law for a third party to alert you; HOWEVER, the FBI must convince a FISA court that it does in fact relate to terrorism. As the author notes, they can't just tell the judge they didn't like your last letter to the editor.
Really, *my* only point was about the misconceptions. From my own experience, it is indisputable that some people vehemently opposed to the Patriot Act (and usually, this seems to mean people who are vehemently opposed to the Bush Administration, despite that fact that the "Act" was an act of Congress) aren't aware of the judical review provisions. My co-worker insists - I am not making this up, I actually had this conversation with her - that right now, the U.S. Government is locking away large numbers of U.S. citizens for indefinite periods of time, with no judicial review, under the authority of the Patriot Act. Uh-huh.
This kid is a dumbass suburbanite whose parents didn't love him enough so he rebelled against the gubbmint. If we're going to rally behind someone whose rights are trampled on, lets pick a better candidate.
A layman's (read: Slashdot punk's) guide to misconceptions about the Patriot Act.
Re:Prohibiting sedition: A fine American tradition
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Linking Dangerously
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Right. 'Cause the Patriot Act does things like lets the FBI check into our library records without obtaining judicial consent, right? Everyone knows that.
Except it's wrong. The Patriot Act doesn't do what a lot of/. kiddies seem to think it does. Go here for a pretty good explanation of this.
Seeing this guy wearing his clunky "Video I-glasses" made me wonder why these never caught on.* Three or four years ago I tried on a pair of television eyeglasses, and was sure that within a few years, the technology would improve to the point where these things would become practical, ubiquitous and cheap replacements for computer monitors. So why the total lack of demand?
* And no, I don't mean as fashion accessories. Smartass.
Scene: You're at a restaurant talking to a client, or a potential employer.
Suddenly, a crowd surrounds you. "Look, there he is!" they shout, and hoist you up on their shoulders, carring you about the room once or twice while singing "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow." Perhaps some of them could be holding signs and big pictures of you and whatnot.
When you got back to your seat you could just blush and act all modest, like you didn't want to talk about it.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes me want to cry. How can anyone who feels confident enough to propose this on a website read by millions possibly be so ignorant about recent Korean history? And how could anyone fail to notice that, and mod it up?
... and didn't even pause their covert nuclear program. Between aid or nuclear weapons, they chose aid AND nuclear weapons.
Re-read your post. Substitute "light water reactors" or "aid programs" or whatever for "an extensive renewable program", and you have what the Clinton adminstration tried. The North Korean regime gladly accepted the assistance "in return for no nukes" (as you put it)
We cannot know that the North Koreans are adhering to any agreement without full, unfettered access to every corner of their country. And therein lies the rub. The North Korean regime does not and will not let foreigners into their country. They believe (probably correctly) that allowing their starving, semi-literate and miserable subjects to come into contact with outsiders would be equivalent to signing their own death warrant. Remember: This is a regime that finds it preferable that its own citizens STARVE TO DEATH rather than accept food aid offered on the condition that the donating agencies enter the country and distribute it themselves.
EVERY F#*KING TIME! I get so tired of all this paranoid script-kiddy-level conspiracy mongering on slashdot. Bush! Haliburton! The Trilateral Commission! The boogey man!
EVERY. DAMN. TIME. there turns out to be some thoroughly unremarkable reason behind it all. But that never stops these idiots from piling on.
I mean, think about it -- it just didn't make sense. Why would:
a. Time, a magazine protected by the first amendment,
b. knuckle under, to
c. pressure improbably brought by the Bush administration
d. to remove an article available from many other sources
e. that discusses things that are well-known anyway.
Think, people.
Well, no need to be so reasonable about it.
; ^ ]
- AJ
Hey, they're your mod points, you can do whatever you want with them. But here's a few things to think about after you finish congratulating yourself for your devastating, witty comments:
1. From the /. moderating guidelines: "Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down."
2. Also from the guidelines: "Troll -- A Troll is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality."
3. To sum up the above, you just censored me (i.e., modded me down) not because it was a troll, but because I said something you didn't like. Not that I care -- no one would read it anyway -- but what does that say about you? How do you feel about censorship in general? Does it piss you off when you hear or read about instances of it?
4. Who the fuck says 'Frick?' Are you twelve? I don't get it. Writing "fuck" would make me sound more mature? Twelve-year-olds don't say "fuck?"
3. Read your own post again. Your whining response ... who the fuck says 'frick' ... You're a whiny little jackass. Is that how you talk to people in real life? I mean, seriously. If you hear someone in the hallway saying something with which you disagree, do you just fly off the handle and curse him out?
This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know -- I'm curious about what kind of person acts like that. Do you have any friends? Do people take you seriously? Are you on any kind of medication?
4. And to top it off, you post as an AC. Classic.
So there's no self-reflection? No sense that gosh, maybe I should be more skeptical when I hear about things that seem too good to be true, even if -- or *particularly* if -- they meet my preconceived notions about the way things are?
Actually I'm not surprised -- if there's one generalization I could make about /.ers, it's (of course) that they're nerds. But if there's two, they're that their nerds and have real problems admitting they're wrong. Like you, they just change the parameters of the argument and move on.
It's actually kind of discouraging. My post is buried down here, so most /.ers aren't even going to realize the story's not true. But that's par for the course today. I also posted a factual, informative rebuttal to another guy in this same thread, and got labeled a troll. WTF?
WHAT THE FRICK? Why on earth was this post moderated as a troll? I don't get it. It's factual and informative. Is it trollish just because I pointed out the parent poster didn't have his facts straight?
Strange.
OK. I'm not trying to argue with you here, I'm trying to help you. Keep that in mind.
1. "We've had it cramed (sic) down our throats by every radio talk show zelot (sic), republican (sic) candidate, and conservitive (sic) figure we're willing to listen to."
Why would anyone be willing to listen to someone who crammed something down our throats?
2. Your whole thesis (News companies are owned by corporations; corporations are conservative; ergo news companies must be conservative) has been debunked so many times it's getting tiresome.
First, there's no reason a corporation has to be conservative. Levi Strauss is a corporation, yet they were among the first to grant benefits to "domestic partners." Apple Computer is a corporation. They might oppose regulation of the computer industry, but does that mean you'd call Steve Jobs a conservative?
Second, it just doesn't bear up empirically. Would you call McClatchy a conservative organization? The New York Times is a corporation, yet their editorials consistently advocate liberal positions on the various issues of the day. How can this be? Heck, under your model, no liberals would own stock. Ever hear of Warren Buffet?
3. It is *stunning* that anyone who professes to know what they are talking about would still cite that Kampfner story, which has been debunked (by the Washington Post, among others) so many times it also is getting tiresome. Some of the problems are obvious (Special Forces entering a potentially hostile area firing *blanks*?), some aren't. (It later turned out the ambulance driver never actually said the Americans were firing at *him*. He simply heard gunfire ahead and, prudently, turned around. Yet the passage in the story gives the reader the clear understanding that the Americans were firing at the ambulance.) Many more problems with it have been pointed out by others; just do a tiny bit of web research.
4. "Blatantly false information..."
Please let me know what this blatantly false information is. Is it "The British have learned...?" You may think this is weaselly, but since the British stand by it to this day, it's certainly not "blatantly false." Is it the whole WMD thing? I hope not, because I can come up with a whole list of quotes from Democrats -- including Bill Clinton -- and foreign leaders who also believed Hussein was hiding them. Wrong, perhaps, but certainly not "blatantly false."
5. "Lied about what happened IN the war"
One single example, please. That's all I ask.
6. "Systematically dismanteling (sic) the individual rights of the US population"
Oh for Pete's sake. Name one right I had in 1999 that I don't have now.
7. "Clinton was impeached for lieing (sic) before Congress."
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath before *a grand jury*, and for obstruction of justice (i.e., tampering with witnesses). For crying out loud, why was this modded as insightful? You can't even get the most basic facts straight!
Today the Washington Post ran this comment from the creators of The Simpsons:
Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion.
Now I'm curious: I don't watch Fox news (or any television news, for that matter) so I don't really have a dog in this hunt. But for all you who piled on Fox news and their viewers in this thread, do you now feel a little sheepish? Does it suggest maybe you are a little quick to believe things you believe *should* be true? Or do you just shrug it off?
OK, I read The Republic so long ago that I don't really feel comfortable arguing about it. One thing you are right about is that Plato's thinking would have been influenced by Sparta, the most extraordinarily socially-engineered state the world has ever known.
The really interesting thing about The Republic is how it foreshadows the very conundrum the framers of the U.S. constitution were grappling with -- how to reconcile the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism vs. democracy. They, of course, came up with a completely different solution; a mix of populism and authoritarianism that attempted to capitalize on the strengths of each, while minimizing the weaknesses of each. How well they succeeded is a matter upon which reasonable people can disagree.
You do realize that Plato didn't really believe in his own model, don't you? "The Republic" is just an imaginary construct he described while noodling with the problem of authoritarianism vs. democracy.
Plato despised democracy (and, truth be told, he had good reason -- the Greek model of democracy was little better than mob rule; i.e., a tyranny of the majority of those considered "citizens"), but the obvious problem with authoritarianism is that it tends to lead to tyranny.
Plato decided that the best form of government was rule by an enlighted caste of philosopher kings. But how to ensure that this is the case? In The Republic, he showed that in order to achieve such a system, you'd have to engage in a massive and utterly unrealistic regime of social engineering.
It's an interesting model to discuss, but I didn't get the impression he was actually advocating for it. I got the impression it was more like Ptolemy's model of planetary motion -- an interesting and useful model, but unreflective of the way things actually work.
The term "offensive" is kind of misleading, as it suggests I experienced some sort of personal affront. As for your question, I don't think one was more "offensive" than the other - they were both in poor taste.
Re your second paragraph -- again, not offensive, but kind of silly.
Re your third paragraph -- I don't get it. Is this a troll? I'll make the obvious point: Inferring that I have the IQ of a fish on the basis of a single post, whether you agree with it or not, says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Finally, what if the speech had nothing to do with Nazism? What if I just stood up on a park bench and started hurling strings of obscenities into the air? Perhaps all prudes and religious nutjobs would object, but does it necessarily follow that those who objected would all be prudes or religous nutjobs?
Interesting that you should mention this.
The day before yesterday, I think, my wife had on some new show -- I'm sorry, but I didn't catch the name; I think it might have been "Cold Case."
Anyway, I happened to catch a scene in which some guy was slapping around a young woman. The words used were "asshole," "slut," and a couple others I can't remember off the top of my head. Oh, also the woman gave him the finger. It was one of the most graphic -- at least verbally (if something can be "verbally graphic") -- things I've ever seen on network television.
A lot of the slashkids replying to this post seem to suggest that anyone bothered by this kind of thing must be at best a prude, at worst a "religious nutjob." But that's ridiculous. I'm neither; and as a former commercial fisherman, it's not like I've never heard any naughty words before. I've used a few of them myself in this very post.
That whole line of reasoning sort of elides the point, doesn't it? I mean, sure, I could stand on a bench in the park and launch into a profanity-laced speech touting the virtues of Nazism. And I could say it was my free speech right, and anyone bothered by it was just a childish prude. But that wouldn't change the fact that I would still be acting like human scum.
Well, it is stored in a cool, dark place.
Whoa whoa whoa pardner. I hope this reply gets modded up, because your take on history is very common, and very wrong. (Is that Karma whoring? I'm fairly new around here and haven't mastered all the protocols.) Anyway, I'm not slamming you for this, because like I said, it's a very common misconception. But the reason Madison, Jay, Jefferson et. al. chose representative democracy over direct democracy was *not* logistical necessity (though it may very well have been a logistical necessity). The reason they picked representative democracy was that they thought (in theory) it might be *better* than direct democracy. What limited experience the human race had with democracy, up to that point, had been mostly bad. Most notable were the Italian city-states, which were chaotic and unstable, and ancient Greece, which was pretty much an unfiltered mobocracy with all that implies. (Fun fact: Pretty much every contempory account of Greek democracy is harshly critical of it. See, for example, Xenophon's *History of Greece*, or Plato's *Republic*, in which Socrates decides that a philosopher king would be a much better solution than democracy). Of course, tyranny and oligarchy had been tried ad nauseum, and the American upstarts didn't like those either. So here is the key: What the founders were trying was to come up with a system that *blended* elements of populism and elitism, attempting to devise a political structure that combined the strengths of each while minimizing their respective faults. Did they succeed? Hey, you be the judge. Just remember that what they were trying had never really been done before. (In fact, the conventional wisdom was that democracy didn't "scale up" very well, and wouldn't be practical past the level of a city-state. The Federalist Papers [Madison, Hamilton and Jay] take this argument and turn it on it's head.) PS: Yes, I realized I simplified a lot of this, particularly the part about Plato. Sue me. PPS: Just kidding. Please don't sue me.
I'd like to add something to this. First, a disclaimer: Everything I know about power generation /distribution would fit in a thimble.
But I recently attended a lecture by Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith. A lot of it was over my head, but he seemed to scoff at the idea that the California blackouts were the result of deregulation. He said the same thing the parent of this reply did -- that it was the result of *partial* deregulation done *badly*; and that the result basically invited companies to come in and try to game the system.
He said price controls at the local level basically led to exactly what market theory predicted: shortages (just like rent control tends to lead to a shortage of housing).
Not to debate this to death, but I did not miss the point. A *touching* episode was the one that goes over Maggie's birth, where at the end he's taped over the sign in his office so it says "Do it for her." *That's* touching. I repeat -- the "Homr" episode wasn't touching; it was tragic and depressing.
I know the whole "Jump the Shark" thing is overdone, but with the Simpsons, I can point to exactly the moment when the show jumped for me.
It was when the doctors found Homer was stupid because he had a crayon jammed in his brain. Removing it made him smart, but there was a difficult period of adjustment, so at the end of the episode, he put the crayon back.
That's not funny. That's f*&cking tragic and depressing.
Yes, I admit that is a problem. I'm not sure what we can do about it though. The whole point is to get somebody outside the LE community (i.e., someone with nothing personally at stake in the investigation) to review requests. Beyond that, I'm not sure what kind of guarantees we can make.
/. kiddies clearly don't understand the Patriot Act, or the reasons behind it.
I do have two points though. First, I strongly suspect the "allegedly never refused any request" info is bogus. It's a secret court -- the fact is that we just have no way of knowing this, so it strongly smells like a made-up rumor.
Second, it wouldn't surprise me to learn there have been very few requests turned down. I guarantee you that the LE agents involved are constantly harangued to make sure their information is solid before they act. Contrary to what one may think, LEA culture is actually very corporate and risk-averse; CYA is the first rule of business.
You know, let me add one more thing. I didn't mean any of my posts to come across as a knee-jerk defense of the government. For example, this whole Hawash thing really concerns me. If anything, you could classify me as a reasonable (i.e., non-wingnut) libertarian. I only posted because so many
1. You wasted at least half your long post babbling about this:
a. The administration termed the attacks "acts of war by foreign aggressors"
b. Some critics didn't like this characterization, because they arbitrarily defined war as something only states do.
c. The author of the article says no, the administration is right, because whether or not the "aggressors" were states is irrelevant.
Want to waste lots and lots of words dickering over this semantic point? Fine; do it with someone else. It doesn't affect the main points.
2. THE AUTHOR SAID: "The chance that the FISA court will approve a 215 order because the FBI "doesn't like the books [a person] reads . . . or because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy" is zero."
YOU RESPONDED: "This assertion supposes that the chances of the FISA court making an error are zero; they can and will never err."
Brilliant analysis, Sherlock, except the "assertion" doesn't "suppose" this anywhere. If you intend this to be criticism, then I take it you believe the FBI should be prohibited from seeking warrants to search the houses of murderers; after all, the judge in question might "mak[e] an error."
3. You seem to have completely failed to grasp the author's two simple points:
a) Our current laws were designed to investigate and punish criminal activity, not prevent international terrorism. Therefore, they do not do a very good job of coping with the different challenges terrorism presents. Rigidly trying to cram terrorism into our preconceived ideas about criminality will just end up getting people killed.
b) All the rhetoric surrounding the issue is obscuring some basic points of fact (for example, that LEA's are still required to obtain judicial approval).
Now, you say: "Organizations can't challenge the FISA court, because that court can't move quickly enough to make a decision in time to prevent the evil plot."
I'm not exactly sure what this non-sequitur means. How quickly the court can move is irrelevant. The point is that we want to avoid this scenario:
i. FBI gets credible information that Abdul is plotting some sort of terrorist attack.
ii. FBI goes to a judge and says, "Here's the information we've received. On this basis, we'd like to find out what books Abdul has checked out. We believe that might give us some insight into what he's planning."
iii. The judge looks over the information and says "I judge this to be credible, and to relate to terrorism. OK, go ahead and check out his library record."
iv. The FBI does so. It finds out Abdul has checked out books on poisons and the locations of major reservoirs in the area (I'm obviously exaggerating here, but you get the point).
v. Right after the FBI leaves the library, Mabel the librarian calls Abdul. "Say, young man, I just thought you ought to know some G-men were snooping around here asking about your library record. I'm sure there's some misunderstanding - perhaps you should call them and get it sorted out."
To recap: WITH REGARDS TO CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS, the FBI has *always* had the authority to get a warrant and snoop into your personal life. But there was and is nothing preventing a third party from alerting you to the fact. WITH REGARDS TO TERRORISM, the Patriot Act makes it against the law for a third party to alert you; HOWEVER, the FBI must convince a FISA court that it does in fact relate to terrorism. As the author notes, they can't just tell the judge they didn't like your last letter to the editor.
Really, *my* only point was about the misconceptions. From my own experience, it is indisputable that some people vehemently opposed to the Patriot Act (and usually, this seems to mean people who are vehemently opposed to the Bush Administration, despite that fact that the "Act" was an act of Congress) aren't aware of the judical review provisions. My co-worker insists - I am not making this up, I actually had this conversation with her - that right now, the U.S. Government is locking away large numbers of U.S. citizens for indefinite periods of time, with no judicial review, under the authority of the Patriot Act. Uh-huh.
With the nomination process already complete...
One thing you should know: The nominees all came out hot. And covered in black stuff.
This kid is a dumbass suburbanite whose parents didn't love him enough so he rebelled against the gubbmint. If we're going to rally behind someone whose rights are trampled on, lets pick a better candidate.
You mean like these guys?
A layman's (read: Slashdot punk's) guide to misconceptions about the Patriot Act.
Right. 'Cause the Patriot Act does things like lets the FBI check into our library records without obtaining judicial consent, right? Everyone knows that.
Except it's wrong. The Patriot Act doesn't do what a lot of /. kiddies seem to think it does. Go here for a pretty good explanation of this.
Video eyeglasses?
Seeing this guy wearing his clunky "Video I-glasses" made me wonder why these never caught on.* Three or four years ago I tried on a pair of television eyeglasses, and was sure that within a few years, the technology would improve to the point where these things would become practical, ubiquitous and cheap replacements for computer monitors. So why the total lack of demand? * And no, I don't mean as fashion accessories. Smartass.Scene: You're at a restaurant talking to a client, or a potential employer. Suddenly, a crowd surrounds you. "Look, there he is!" they shout, and hoist you up on their shoulders, carring you about the room once or twice while singing "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow." Perhaps some of them could be holding signs and big pictures of you and whatnot. When you got back to your seat you could just blush and act all modest, like you didn't want to talk about it.