You know, I think the reconstruction of Germany has much more to do with the incredible levels of investment involved in the Marshall plan than censorship and puppet governments.
Rebuilding Germany certainly helped. But the political and social situation there was unable to support popular and peaceful government.
Before our social engineering projects in Germany, the number of people on the far left or far right who favored totalitarianism dwarfed by a large margin the number of people who favored freedom and popular government. Our policies of only allowing proven believers in democracy into positions of leadership shifted the focus away from totalitarianism and established a very stable political culture. We also made sure that they were bombarded with propaganda supporting an individualistic lifestyle to counter their natural submissiveness to authority.
Much the same situtation applies to Iraq. Most of the people in Iraq don't know how to live in a democracy. They don't have a culture that supports it. If we handed them a democratic government and just said, "Have fun guys, see ya later", they would end up reverting to the same kind of regime they have now--a fascist dictatorship.
And what do you mean their "tendencies" to lord it over the rest of Europe?
Germany was far more militaristic than their neighbors. One of Hitler's most effective means of appealing to the population was to dress his armies in dazzling uniforms, to appeal to their love of military display. They went nuts over it. And the British and the French were nowhere near as bad as they were. Germany was more expansive and more domineering. There was a long-standing feud between the Germans and the French. You can hardly say that Germany is anything like this anymore; they're astonishingly dove-ish.
I want to know what apologists for US actions in Iraq say about Afghanistan
The reason for going into Iraq is to kick out Saddam Hussein and his oligarchy. So there's no way you could possibly dicuss it in terms of what's going to happen afterward. There will be an attempt to clean it up, of course, but that's not the reason for the war.
which has received none of the promised investment for reconstruction
I didn't know that it hadn't. I heard they were destroying all their old currency and switching over to a new and more balanced standard (in terms of exchange rates). But I haven't heard much else about it.
and is simply doing terribly. Why should I imagine that Iraq will be doing any differently?
Of course, in relation to their recoveries, you can't really compare the two since Iraq will have a high-yield industry right off the bat with which to support themselves (if Saddam doesn't destroy all the oil fields) and build back an economy. Afghanistan has nothing of the kind. I'm really not sure what Afghanistan will ever have something that will be of interest to anyone. Maybe if they can make it safe enough, tourism could flourish there. From the pictures I've seen, they have some very beautiful mountain ranges.
We need to make sure we set up a very strictly controlled government in Iraq after the war; and we need extremely tight censorship over there with a limited pseudo-democracy. This was exactly what we did with Germany after WWII and it worked beautifully.
We traded the short-term political freedom and self-rule of the German people for a very effective social engineering program that eliminated their tendencies to lord it over the rest of Europe. Censorship and a puppet-government made this possible.
Such a campaign, if appropriately carried out in Iraq, would result in a very judicious situation in that country.
You have to get a lot of people behind an amendment to get it passed; and that's extremely difficult. This is intentional.:-)
But those who really want to change things have realized that you're much more likely to get what you want if you simply ignore the Constitution and use judicial activism to set precedent. We are extremely far from what our founders intended and almost none of the changes, relatively speaking, have been properly approved amendments to the Constitution.
Also, having limited copyrights that are renewable an indeterminite number of times isn't really limited either. They can just keep renewing on and on. Copyright (and Patent, for that matter) wasn't intended to be a cash cow or a business model. It was a means of recouping the cost of publishing.
Congress has no obligation to be corrupt and do what "paying constituents" want them to do. Their real obligation is to do what is right for the people of the USA.
Many of those people would be out of work if the (admittedly ridiculous) Copyright industry were to fall. That's why being responsible for political decisions is such a tough and thankless job.
Don't get me wrong; those who have read my posts on the subject know that I think the concept of Intellectual Property is completely contrary to the Constitution and needs to go away. At the same time, however, a lot of people are putting food on the table because of this twisting of the Constitution. And I'm not just talking about CEOs and CFOs (though I certainly care just as much for their financial well-being as for others--they're not necessarily the terrible ogres or idle playboys that some people fashion them to be).
Ah, I see, yes. I've heard so many people lately complaining about not having manned missions to Mars/Pluto/Zorak-16 and I thought maybe you were one of them.
This is the sticking point for many who oppose NASA. The truth is, NASA is doing research. It's just not propulsion research.
Simply because they're not doing as much with new propulsion technology as they used to (when there was more to understand about rocketry) doesn't mean they're not doing anything. I think we've reaped many more practical benefits out of materials research done on the shuttle than we have in building better rockets.
But those who are livid with NASA for "losing its vision" are really just upset because they aren't seeing the high profile "exploration" missions that we saw in the 60s.
Heh, I fear things are even more homogenized than I had previously thought. Only our CBS affiliate (ch. 7) has the 'ProblemSolvers' thing though; and that threw me off.
Heh, actually it kind of is. The kind of people who use Solaris seem to be pretty happy with it to me. And I don't think many Linux users are interested in the enormous critical server applications.
But the two are connected. Linux is what it is because of the people who work on it (who are also the users). They don't care about what the NYSE or CitiBank needs. And that's what high-end UNIX is about. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's not exciting to Linux users, ergo it isn't a priority or even an issue for them.
I remember a Pac-Man style game that was done in 3D (where you were actually in the maze) on the IBM PC in the early 80s. Then there was a game called Space Station Oblivion released in 1988 that used a 3D engine with 360 degrees of motion. You had to use the keyboard, but you could look in any direction, and even tilt your viewing angle.
The company that produced the engine (can't remember their name at the moment) was years ahead of their time. But the keyboard made it difficult to use. They're still around, I think, but they're out of the gaming industry now. Anybody got a link?
You've confirmed my suspicion that UNIX(r)(tm)(c)(Patent Pending) is primarily about marketing and licensing, rather than any real significant standard.
Not only that, but OS X is really OPENSTEP 5.0. And we all know that NeXT is really dead! Where can I send flowers while I read email with GNUMail.app and design software with Gorm.app?:-)
HP-UX may not run on x86 platforms, but Solaris does. So does OPENSTEP, which could certainly be considered a commercial UNIX (though few use it now). And then there's SCO.
Not that you'd want to actually *use* Solaris on x86--if you can afford Solaris, you *need* huge Sun hardware. And unless you love Objective-C and the OpenStep API, you don't own a copy of OPENSTEP. And who in their right mind would want SCO? But you *can* run these things on Intel hardware....
You use screwdrivers and hammers to build houses. But the houses aren't *made* of screwdrivers and hammers. Besides, you *can* build the kernel with other compilers you know.
Marketing and advertising *are* about determining what the market wants and communicating to them when you have it.
* People want to make a lot of money * The best way to make a lot of money is to have something a lot of people want. * Ergo, you have to find out something that a lot of people want and find a way of letting them know you have it.
But there's a fly in the ointment: a surprising amount of other people are doing the same thing. So, you have to try to make your voice more noticible than theirs. One way you can do this is to make it heard more widely. Another is to make it a more appealing voice. This is done with the fruit of research in psychology.
To many, perhaps even yourself, this seems like manipulation or coercion. That perception is not really correct, but it *feels* like it because psychology holds a mystique for many people that equates to "black magic." "They're using psychology to make people want what they're selling!" Or even worse: "They're using psychology to hypnotize people into buying what they sell."
The fact that you can feel this way is evidence that it's false. If they were *really* able to practice "magic mind control", you wouldn't realize you were being controlled.
All that's really going on is that they're using psychology to make their product as pleasant (in a very general sense of the word) as possible to the average consumer.
This is very much like what you do when someone visits your home. You don't grab a beer and throw it at them saying, "I hope that's what you want to drink 'cause it's what you're getting! Wanna hear me fart the Blue Danube?" OK, so some people might enjoy that. But most would feel very uneasy and wouldn't want to stay in your home very long. They would probably want to leave as soon as possible. And then they wouldn't be around to take part in a great discussion you had planned.
You also don't show them your kid's messy room. Yeah, it's the *truth* about how you live, but it's not pleasant, so you don't show it to them. You want to have a good discussion and a nice dinner. That won't happen if they're disgusted.
It's the same way with advertisers. It's merely a tool to portray a company and the things it sells in the best light and to make them as appealing, pleasant, and memorable as possible. And there's nothing wrong with that.
You just have to remember that things may not be as nice as they look. The same way you wouldn't necessarily have as much fun living with people that you had a great time visiting with. Real life has warts (and messy bedrooms) that you don't see with a brief sanitized inspection.
Once you scale yourself up to large mega-cabinet servers with dozens of processors, hardware partitioning, OS virtualization, etc., you're in the right ballpark, and Linux doesn't play there yet.
Yeah, but who the hell cares about that? The kind of people who have millions of dollars to spend on support contracts and who employ DBAs. And if I may make another sweeping generalization: most Linux users don't give a damn about that stuff. It's just plain boring.
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Rebuilding Germany certainly helped. But the political and social situation there was unable to support popular and peaceful government.
Before our social engineering projects in Germany, the number of people on the far left or far right who favored totalitarianism dwarfed by a large margin the number of people who favored freedom and popular government. Our policies of only allowing proven believers in democracy into positions of leadership shifted the focus away from totalitarianism and established a very stable political culture. We also made sure that they were bombarded with propaganda supporting an individualistic lifestyle to counter their natural submissiveness to authority.
Much the same situtation applies to Iraq. Most of the people in Iraq don't know how to live in a democracy. They don't have a culture that supports it. If we handed them a democratic government and just said, "Have fun guys, see ya later", they would end up reverting to the same kind of regime they have now--a fascist dictatorship.
And what do you mean their "tendencies" to lord it over the rest of Europe?
Germany was far more militaristic than their neighbors. One of Hitler's most effective means of appealing to the population was to dress his armies in dazzling uniforms, to appeal to their love of military display. They went nuts over it. And the British and the French were nowhere near as bad as they were. Germany was more expansive and more domineering. There was a long-standing feud between the Germans and the French. You can hardly say that Germany is anything like this anymore; they're astonishingly dove-ish.
I want to know what apologists for US actions in Iraq say about Afghanistan
The reason for going into Iraq is to kick out Saddam Hussein and his oligarchy. So there's no way you could possibly dicuss it in terms of what's going to happen afterward. There will be an attempt to clean it up, of course, but that's not the reason for the war.
which has received none of the promised investment for reconstruction
I didn't know that it hadn't. I heard they were destroying all their old currency and switching over to a new and more balanced standard (in terms of exchange rates). But I haven't heard much else about it.
and is simply doing terribly. Why should I imagine that Iraq will be doing any differently?
Of course, in relation to their recoveries, you can't really compare the two since Iraq will have a high-yield industry right off the bat with which to support themselves (if Saddam doesn't destroy all the oil fields) and build back an economy. Afghanistan has nothing of the kind. I'm really not sure what Afghanistan will ever have something that will be of interest to anyone. Maybe if they can make it safe enough, tourism could flourish there. From the pictures I've seen, they have some very beautiful mountain ranges.
We traded the short-term political freedom and self-rule of the German people for a very effective social engineering program that eliminated their tendencies to lord it over the rest of Europe. Censorship and a puppet-government made this possible.
Such a campaign, if appropriately carried out in Iraq, would result in a very judicious situation in that country.
Didn't you know? The Constitution is no longer valid since we're now under International Law, Comrade Rossz...er, I mean, buddy.
But those who really want to change things have realized that you're much more likely to get what you want if you simply ignore the Constitution and use judicial activism to set precedent. We are extremely far from what our founders intended and almost none of the changes, relatively speaking, have been properly approved amendments to the Constitution.
Also, having limited copyrights that are renewable an indeterminite number of times isn't really limited either. They can just keep renewing on and on. Copyright (and Patent, for that matter) wasn't intended to be a cash cow or a business model. It was a means of recouping the cost of publishing.
Many of those people would be out of work if the (admittedly ridiculous) Copyright industry were to fall. That's why being responsible for political decisions is such a tough and thankless job.
Don't get me wrong; those who have read my posts on the subject know that I think the concept of Intellectual Property is completely contrary to the Constitution and needs to go away. At the same time, however, a lot of people are putting food on the table because of this twisting of the Constitution. And I'm not just talking about CEOs and CFOs (though I certainly care just as much for their financial well-being as for others--they're not necessarily the terrible ogres or idle playboys that some people fashion them to be).
Ah, I see, yes. I've heard so many people lately complaining about not having manned missions to Mars/Pluto/Zorak-16 and I thought maybe you were one of them.
This is the sticking point for many who oppose NASA. The truth is, NASA is doing research. It's just not propulsion research.
Simply because they're not doing as much with new propulsion technology as they used to (when there was more to understand about rocketry) doesn't mean they're not doing anything. I think we've reaped many more practical benefits out of materials research done on the shuttle than we have in building better rockets.
But those who are livid with NASA for "losing its vision" are really just upset because they aren't seeing the high profile "exploration" missions that we saw in the 60s.
Heh, I fear things are even more homogenized than I had previously thought. Only our CBS affiliate (ch. 7) has the 'ProblemSolvers' thing though; and that threw me off.
Just out of curiosity, do you live in upstate SC or does some other podunk Channel 7 news team have a "ProblemSolvers" segment too?
Nothing unfortunate about it. Use GNUstep instead. :-) Hey, it's a much more elegant design anyway!
Heh, actually it kind of is. The kind of people who use Solaris seem to be pretty happy with it to me. And I don't think many Linux users are interested in the enormous critical server applications.
Yeah, or listening to either one when we were looking for Jack Teagarden.
But the two are connected. Linux is what it is because of the people who work on it (who are also the users). They don't care about what the NYSE or CitiBank needs. And that's what high-end UNIX is about. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's not exciting to Linux users, ergo it isn't a priority or even an issue for them.
The company that produced the engine (can't remember their name at the moment) was years ahead of their time. But the keyboard made it difficult to use. They're still around, I think, but they're out of the gaming industry now. Anybody got a link?
You've confirmed my suspicion that UNIX(r)(tm)(c)(Patent Pending) is primarily about marketing and licensing, rather than any real significant standard.
Not only that, but OS X is really OPENSTEP 5.0. And we all know that NeXT is really dead! Where can I send flowers while I read email with GNUMail.app and design software with Gorm.app? :-)
Not that you'd want to actually *use* Solaris on x86--if you can afford Solaris, you *need* huge Sun hardware. And unless you love Objective-C and the OpenStep API, you don't own a copy of OPENSTEP. And who in their right mind would want SCO? But you *can* run these things on Intel hardware....
You use screwdrivers and hammers to build houses. But the houses aren't *made* of screwdrivers and hammers. Besides, you *can* build the kernel with other compilers you know.
Just resting.
And that's exactly what I do. Even on Windows. :-)
* People want to make a lot of money
* The best way to make a lot of money is to have something a lot of people want.
* Ergo, you have to find out something that a lot of people want and find a way of letting them know you have it.
But there's a fly in the ointment: a surprising amount of other people are doing the same thing. So, you have to try to make your voice more noticible than theirs. One way you can do this is to make it heard more widely. Another is to make it a more appealing voice. This is done with the fruit of research in psychology.
To many, perhaps even yourself, this seems like manipulation or coercion. That perception is not really correct, but it *feels* like it because psychology holds a mystique for many people that equates to "black magic." "They're using psychology to make people want what they're selling!" Or even worse: "They're using psychology to hypnotize people into buying what they sell."
The fact that you can feel this way is evidence that it's false. If they were *really* able to practice "magic mind control", you wouldn't realize you were being controlled.
All that's really going on is that they're using psychology to make their product as pleasant (in a very general sense of the word) as possible to the average consumer.
This is very much like what you do when someone visits your home. You don't grab a beer and throw it at them saying, "I hope that's what you want to drink 'cause it's what you're getting! Wanna hear me fart the Blue Danube?" OK, so some people might enjoy that. But most would feel very uneasy and wouldn't want to stay in your home very long. They would probably want to leave as soon as possible. And then they wouldn't be around to take part in a great discussion you had planned.
You also don't show them your kid's messy room. Yeah, it's the *truth* about how you live, but it's not pleasant, so you don't show it to them. You want to have a good discussion and a nice dinner. That won't happen if they're disgusted.
It's the same way with advertisers. It's merely a tool to portray a company and the things it sells in the best light and to make them as appealing, pleasant, and memorable as possible. And there's nothing wrong with that.
You just have to remember that things may not be as nice as they look. The same way you wouldn't necessarily have as much fun living with people that you had a great time visiting with. Real life has warts (and messy bedrooms) that you don't see with a brief sanitized inspection.
Heh. Nicely put. Except the part about Democracy. Democracy really sucks. But a Republic is nice. :-)
Yeah, but who the hell cares about that? The kind of people who have millions of dollars to spend on support contracts and who employ DBAs. And if I may make another sweeping generalization: most Linux users don't give a damn about that stuff. It's just plain boring.
This has never happened before. My whole world is crushed!
Why not? We know that the nature of mathematics changes in restaurants, right?