trying to make a site compatible across all browsers in existence for the past 10 years leads to all kinds of horrible css&html hacks which turn the source into a maintenance nightmare
This only happens when trying to get some latest design fad to "look cool" across multiple browsers, which is only ever a problem if you are doing something utterly stupid - which of course is the norm amongst "designers" - who then proceed to whine about having to "hack" to make their "uber" site appear "uber" in the latest revision of top two browsers.
If you, on the other hand, use HTML as it was intended - i.e. to format contents for portable readability instead for "snazzy effects", then there is never a problem.
However the idea behind HTML is abhorrent to marketing and sales drones who cannot stand clean, readable and portable contents because it is "not standing out from the competition enough".
And thus the gates to The Hell Of Idiocy open.
Plus, it also encourages people to keep using obsolete browsers.
Define "obsolete". And no, working 100% as designed but "no longer cool" is not it. Unless the new way is clearly and objectively superior, "obsolescence" is just another name for the scheme called: "Break their old shit so we can force them to buy our new crap!"
See also under the previously mentioned "marketing and sales". Cross reference with "avarice".
As I pointed out to others, Ctrl+/- fails after just a few steps because the side panel starts overlapping the contents, in addition to many other atrocious problems with the new layout.
Of the top of my head: Pick any phpBB site. phpBB is a sophisticated forum system which has all sorts of bells and whistles and which degrades gracefully and is usable even on Blackberries and the like.
Ctrl+/- do not work (past certain basic magnification) because the the floating side panels then start overlapping the comment section.
It is the result of the atrociously inflexible layout design.
Of course this is only one of many egregious design errors, which would be still left if the zoom issue was fixed.
It does not solve the issue because it causes the floating side panel to overlap the comment section. That is what happens if you have fixed size panels and similar crap in the site layout.
Looks like crap also in IE3... This is unacceptable!
Guess what? The basic principle behind a markup language such as HTML is presentation device neutrality. That is any website that is properly formatted should degrade gracefully on devices that are not capable of supporting all of the latest and shiniest bullshit "features". Old browsers, resource-restricted embedded and mobile browsers, browsers for people visually impaired, off-screen presentation modes such as printed paper, etc... all the way down to text-mode-only browsers such as lynx.
If you can't design a site that follows this basic principle, you have no business calling yourself a web designer, let alone a "professional" one. At best you are an incompetent hack, probably originating in the "marketing and sales" background who thinks web design is something that can be learned by reading some "Teach yourself professional web design during your bathroom break!" book and acts accordingly. Sadly, the web is full of websites "designed" by ignorant idiots like you.
I can no longer stand Slashdot because of this. I have a very high resolution monitor and the text is simply unreadable because of this. In the past I used the "nosquint" Mozilla plugin to correct this issue but it is no longer possible with this new nonsensical design.
The new layout is a study in all the worst excesses and stupidity foisted on the Internet users by "professional" designers: non-optional ajax, non re-sizable contents, breakage of most basic principle of "presentation device neutrality" that is behind markup languages such as HTML, etc and so on.
It is a total disaster.
If this is not reversed pronto, my days here are numbered.
Interesting that I mentioned attempts at social engineering by the sword and you went strait for communism. Read a little history. The communists didn't invent the field.
Interesting that you have a reading comprehension problem. I mentioned communism as one end of a huge spectrum of choices, chiefly because it is one of the most recent examples. The other, yet completely ignored by you, end was "religious cults" who probably were the original inventors as our earliest historical records indicate these activities by the cultists well in progress by the time they were written.
This is why discussions with the likes of you are rather pointless. You ignore what I write - only picking the parts that suit you - and then proceed to spew nonsense about incompatibility of logic and Kant's insane, religiously motivated ramblings (which naturally makes him popular amongst cultists of all stripes).
I also note, with great amusement, your comical attempts at gravitas: "non-invariant", "treatise on" etc. If you could somehow manage to transmit via Slashdot a deep rumbling voice and an image of yourself in a wizardly robe in mysterious shadows of some ancient, candle-lit library, you'd waste no time doing it - and I'd waste no time laughing at it.
I think the core issue here, which makes the discussion really difficult, is really the definitions of the 'left' and 'right' (which historically referred to the locations of chairs in the French National Assembly where various people with similar ideas were made to sit - the supporters of the King and monarchy were on the right and the Revolutionaries and anti-monarchists on the left).
People who do not understand what their own core values are supposed to be end up 'confused' and support causes that are in direct opposition to their supposed beliefs. But that phenomenon occurs everywhere where poorly defined terms are commonly used. The supposed meaning of terms like 'liberal' for example is completely unrecognizable to people who are familiar with their historical genesis (or even who come from abroad). And so you end up with sillines like the idea that Democrats in the US are on the 'left'. The immediate question "left of what?" comes to mind. Technically they are on the 'left' of most of the Republican ideas, but they would be considered to be 'far right' anywhere in Europe of 1920s. Today most foreign observers mark them as 'centre-right', yet if you listen to rhetoric in the US, some of the Tea Party members believe them to be Marxist/Leninist!
or maybe they just got sick of mining planets for resources - have to admit, though it was better than ME1, that aspect is still a bit of a grind - would be nice later in the game to have some way to automate it
I am actually in the minority of those who liked the MAKO. It gave me more of a feeling of actual exploration (complete with random monsters popping up) and strange finds that were not on the scanner. So I found the ME2 exploration system both a major step back and a major chore.
But it appears most people want to have their "adventure" fed to them by a spoon.
RANDOM QUESTION:
When I'm playing a 50-hour RPG, how do I shorten the time so it only takes half that? Replaying these things is a challenge when it takes so darn long.
Easy. Wait 3 years so that you forget everything and then when you play it its all new again and at the end you feel that 50 hours is too short, like the first time!
On first play, just by a fluke (and by being pedantic in collecting all the ship upgrades) I ended up with no one lost.
It was only later when I went into the ME2 forums that discovered, to my surprise, that you could lose people in the end game! I had that feeling I imagine people get when they are told that the plane they just missed ended up in the field just outside the airport...
Time and political philosphy doesn't stand still. Definitions of left and right change with each generation as the political landscape changes. Complaining about this is like complaining about the sun rising and setting. A "classic" nazi has very little in common philosophically with Glen Beck, yet they're both considered right wing if you look at the roots of their political thinking. Is that comparison useful in a practical discussion?
Yet if you that two groups share the same philosophies political goals (perhaps they have different methods of achieving those goals or the extent to which they are to be taken), it can be said that the two groups are related to one another.
For instance, ELF strongly advocates environmental sensitivity, sustainable development, pervasive legislation regarding the treatment of animals, etc. are all shared value with many on the left. Certainly there would be profound disagreement with these groups regarding the methods ELF imposes, and the extent to which these regulations should go, but there are many share values to be sure. Along the same vein, neo-nazi's share some values (e.g. limited government and states rights) and could be placed on the same political spectrum together.
Just as I thought. "People I disagree with and whom I do not like" is your definition of the "left". In actuality however nothing has changed much, the core issues of the "left" always having to do with social justice. All the other stuff you mention is part of agendas of many different movements from libertarians to Green parties (many of whom are firmly on the "right").
PETA has funded ELF directly and prominent ELF members who condone violence. I suppose PETA isn't a left wing organization either?
PETA is a single-issue organization that has nothing to do with the "left". Their agenda is all about animals. Sometimes people who associate with the "left" also associate with causes like PETA but this by no means a requirement or even a dominant trend.
Again, your definition of the "left" is "People I disagree with and whom I do not like".
The crimes listed are from the 70's all the way to this decade. I suppose you're excluding ALF / ELF and that's how you get to a dated figure.
Your baseless insistence that Eco-terrorists and PETA are "leftist" is how you arrived at your flawed conclusions.
And I'm still waiting for evidence regarding "near daily" events involving rampaging rednecks. You were exaggerating for effect seemingly.
Of course I did. The incidents of course vary wildly in frequency and in severity. Actual statistics are hard to come by however and all one can do is form a subjective opinion based on news reports.
Environmentalism is a left leaning movement which has some radical aspects.
That would be big news to environmentalist libertarians...
I'm not sure how much clearer that could possibly be.
The only thing clear here is your insistence on lumping together all those you disagree with into "left".
If you want to disown ELF and ALF from your list, then you'll need to take McVeigh off the 'right wing' tally since his neo-nazi dogma has little to do with the US' right wing political landscape of today.
Lets compare: McVeigh's pre-occupation: power of government, guns, individual rights (his). ELF's and ALF's fixation: plants and animals.
Such false equivalences are what makes people desperately defending the "right" against any criticism seem so hypocritical. For comparison: a worker's union would be a "leftist" (by definition) organization, not something like ELF!
Finally, you are moving the goal posts big time. First you say that most ecoterrorists are anarchists. Then, when confronted with inf
That is total bullshit. A society isn't successful if hasn't secured its own survival. When a society builds itself into a strong space-faring civilzation, it has enjoyed some success. Even the happiest of us hasn't done that.
Being happy is not the same as being successful.
So, by this criterion, a society where 99% of people are slaves and are tortured daily but cannot break out of their slavery because of a very, very creative and efficient slavery enforcement system which persists through centuries, but which achieved space-flight is then more successful than a society which was defeated by the Tortured Slave Empire but which, during its brief existence, achieved near universal happiness for its members? Do elaborate.
Actually, my criterion for a successful society is scientific innovation that objectively increases the standard of living for all members.
If the "standard of living" does not correlate to "happiness" then your assertion fails.
A society of rich people who are all viciously competing against each other and are continuously pissed off is worse off than a relatively poor and isolated village where people are happy (and do not even realize that they are poor).
However, this is not an objective standard of happiness.
There is no "objective" standard of happiness and this is where the main difficulty of turning the obvious truth of what I said into a practical application lies. That is also why we cannot externally measure happiness.
And so the rest of your argument based on the idea of "objective happiness" is flawed.
Seriously, I'd like to know what my place is in all this. Would you care to expand on your theory? I'd appreciate it if you did.
I already did. The "leader" and "follower" are merely two patterns out of many possibilities, patterns that achieved dominance due the evolutionary selection process. But "dominance" does not mean "exclusivity". It is in fact the key aspect of evolution that the "search algorithm" probes the search space in a random manner and so in every population you will end up with a lot of variation, although more radical the difference from the "mean" parameters, rarer it is.
It is the basic mathematical property of the genetic search algorithm.
So there are many people that do not follow these two patterns. Some will be a detriment to the overall population and so the evolutionary process will actively select against them (in the long run). Some patterns are simply neutral and thus are ignored, as long as their frequency of occurrence is low enough.
Note that this analysis does not involve things like 'ethics' or 'morality', simply the properties of the evolutionary process as applied to herd or pack animals.
For fuck's sake, all I said was that particular phrase you said sounded like something out of an Orwell novel. Here, take a puff of this, it'll help you calm down.
"Chill out dude, all I did was compare you to Hitler, imply that you sound like Stalin and misquoted Mao to make it seem like you are his disciple. No harm intended. Honest. Hey, smoke this, it will make you feel better and I can later also add 'drug-addict' to my description of you! Cool, no?"
"the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
His manifest echoes the sentiments of leftist luminaries Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Ellul. His manifesto echoes left wing, environmental, anti-industrialist, and to a lesser extent Malthusian sentiments. You can't get much more left wing than that.
Those are "Luddite" not "leftist" sentiments. The 'leftists' and anti-technology people have very little overlap. In fact most classical 'leftist' movements embraced technology and industry (that was what the "hammer" in the Soviet "hammer and sickle" stood for).
It only goes to show that the definitions of 'left' and 'right' seem to be for some people so malleable as to be useless.
Finally, there are major left wing groups which advocate terrorism that have been quite active perpetrating violence (PETA, ELF, BLA, etc.).
This discussion is becoming meaningless as your definition of the 'left' seems to be simply 'all the people I do not like'.
I presume you will accept the FBI's most wanted list fulfills this request and then some?
Actually, no. Look at the dates of the crimes. My thesis was not that the 'left' is not involved in violence or that there is no terrorism from the 'left' historically or that it cannot be so again, only that presently the 'right' dominates at both the violent rhetoric and actual acts of violence.
I even pointed out in many posts that the situation was reversed in 1960-1970s when the 'left' was far ahead. The FBI list merely confirms this assertion. And no, Eco-terrorists and the 'left' are not one and the same.
Trust me I could go tit for tat on voilent rhetoric from left and right.
Historically, over a long time-frame, quite likely.
The fact is average sane Americans do not open fire in public places because someone someone called Pelosi a loon or Glenn Beck a fascist.
But unfortunately in the current stage of the cycle, there is no denying that the so-called 'right' dominates both the violent discourse and in actual acts of violence. I was merely pointing out the situation and possible causes of such state of affairs.
And of course people immediately jumped to some kind of Pavlovian, knee-jerk conclusion that I must be defending the 'left' or pretending that the violence is always on the 'right'. And off to the races we went.
That is actually the point, the near complete lack of emphasis on "happiness" in favour of near total emphasis on "progress" that seems to be the modus-operandi of Western societies.
The result is that by doing so we essentially destroy much of the value of progress which then becomes a religion-like pursuit for the sake of the pursuit itself.
The term "Orwellian" does not refer to Orwell's beliefs and philosophies, it refers to what he wrote about, which is the exact opposite of his beliefs and philosophies. The More You Know.
And it also involves "a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the 'unperson'..." which fit into the scenarios I mentioned soooo well.... oh wait.
You can't just grab a piece of a definition that you like and ignore the rest so that you can use a negative term to try to club your opponents with regardless if it fits the situation or not, although it is a very common strategy amongst somewhat-less-than-honest participants in discussions.
What on earth does he have to do with the Tea Party except that you have been manipulated into seeing Tea Party as violent and therefore you associate any incidents of violence with them? Is it his video of burning of the US flag? Or the fact that he lists Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as his favorite books? Or that he was an atheist? Or that he was described by his classmate as a leftist radical?
Or maybe it was his claim that he identified with the Tea Party as a movement? No, surely not.
If there is anything however that I can agree with you on is that labels like the Tea Party and 'left' and 'right' are imprecise to the point of uselessness and thus perpetually lead to discussions such as this where it soon becomes impossible to determine anything.
Other, that is, than the fact that politicians and pundits concocting this confusion and the security apparatus they feed end up more powerful year after year no matter what supposed "side" they take in this.
I suppose that is why prosecutors are charging the SEIU members instead of Kenneth and also why many of the SEIU members fled the scene?
How so? The last police statement mentioned no prosecution of any kind. Last I heard no charges were even laid.
Sure, the Unabomber...
So now an anti-social hermit with a diagnosed mental disorder who lives a survivalist life-style in a cabin in the woods is a 'leftist'? I think your definitions are broadening so rapidly as to pretty soon include all violence of any kind...
... and more recently ecoterrorism.
Oh, that didn't take long.
Look, eco-terrorists come from all sorts of backgrounds and quite a lot of them are libertarians, anarchists and the like.
If you really wanted a 'leftist' example you would have to go back to 1970s or 1960s which was indeed full of the likes of The Weather Underground etc. But today, thanks mostly to the take-over of the mass media by the somewhat deranged fringe of the 'right' the political violence in the US is pretty much monopolized by the 'right'. This of course can change, but we were talking of what is at present and not what could be in the future.
Sorry for the misspelling but I fail to see how natural selection lacks impact on culture. Just look around: sex appeal used in marketing everywhere, sex used by religions of all stripe as a club to beat their followers on their heads to keep them in line, children and raising of them being the focus of whole swaths of culture in all corners of the world.. etc and so on.
Then there are the issues of genetically-mandated disparities in mental capacities between people, genetics controlling dominant and submissive behavioural patterns, genetically programmed tastes and dislikes...
In fact most of our "culture" is shaped and formed by some evolutionary trait or another, either directly or indirectly.
Slashdot Mirror
This only happens when trying to get some latest design fad to "look cool" across multiple browsers, which is only ever a problem if you are doing something utterly stupid - which of course is the norm amongst "designers" - who then proceed to whine about having to "hack" to make their "uber" site appear "uber" in the latest revision of top two browsers.
If you, on the other hand, use HTML as it was intended - i.e. to format contents for portable readability instead for "snazzy effects", then there is never a problem.
However the idea behind HTML is abhorrent to marketing and sales drones who cannot stand clean, readable and portable contents because it is "not standing out from the competition enough".
And thus the gates to The Hell Of Idiocy open.
Define "obsolete". And no, working 100% as designed but "no longer cool" is not it. Unless the new way is clearly and objectively superior, "obsolescence" is just another name for the scheme called: "Break their old shit so we can force them to buy our new crap!"
See also under the previously mentioned "marketing and sales". Cross reference with "avarice".
As I pointed out to others, Ctrl+/- fails after just a few steps because the side panel starts overlapping the contents, in addition to many other atrocious problems with the new layout.
Of the top of my head: Pick any phpBB site. phpBB is a sophisticated forum system which has all sorts of bells and whistles and which degrades gracefully and is usable even on Blackberries and the like.
Ctrl+/- do not work (past certain basic magnification) because the the floating side panels then start overlapping the comment section. It is the result of the atrociously inflexible layout design.
Of course this is only one of many egregious design errors, which would be still left if the zoom issue was fixed.
It does not solve the issue because it causes the floating side panel to overlap the comment section. That is what happens if you have fixed size panels and similar crap in the site layout.
Guess what? The basic principle behind a markup language such as HTML is presentation device neutrality. That is any website that is properly formatted should degrade gracefully on devices that are not capable of supporting all of the latest and shiniest bullshit "features". Old browsers, resource-restricted embedded and mobile browsers, browsers for people visually impaired, off-screen presentation modes such as printed paper, etc ... all the way down to text-mode-only browsers such as lynx.
If you can't design a site that follows this basic principle, you have no business calling yourself a web designer, let alone a "professional" one. At best you are an incompetent hack, probably originating in the "marketing and sales" background who thinks web design is something that can be learned by reading some "Teach yourself professional web design during your bathroom break!" book and acts accordingly. Sadly, the web is full of websites "designed" by ignorant idiots like you.
I can no longer stand Slashdot because of this. I have a very high resolution monitor and the text is simply unreadable because of this. In the past I used the "nosquint" Mozilla plugin to correct this issue but it is no longer possible with this new nonsensical design.
The new layout is a study in all the worst excesses and stupidity foisted on the Internet users by "professional" designers: non-optional ajax, non re-sizable contents, breakage of most basic principle of "presentation device neutrality" that is behind markup languages such as HTML, etc and so on.
It is a total disaster.
If this is not reversed pronto, my days here are numbered.
Interesting that you have a reading comprehension problem. I mentioned communism as one end of a huge spectrum of choices, chiefly because it is one of the most recent examples. The other, yet completely ignored by you, end was "religious cults" who probably were the original inventors as our earliest historical records indicate these activities by the cultists well in progress by the time they were written.
This is why discussions with the likes of you are rather pointless. You ignore what I write - only picking the parts that suit you - and then proceed to spew nonsense about incompatibility of logic and Kant's insane, religiously motivated ramblings (which naturally makes him popular amongst cultists of all stripes).
I also note, with great amusement, your comical attempts at gravitas: "non-invariant", "treatise on" etc. If you could somehow manage to transmit via Slashdot a deep rumbling voice and an image of yourself in a wizardly robe in mysterious shadows of some ancient, candle-lit library, you'd waste no time doing it - and I'd waste no time laughing at it.
I think the core issue here, which makes the discussion really difficult, is really the definitions of the 'left' and 'right' (which historically referred to the locations of chairs in the French National Assembly where various people with similar ideas were made to sit - the supporters of the King and monarchy were on the right and the Revolutionaries and anti-monarchists on the left).
People who do not understand what their own core values are supposed to be end up 'confused' and support causes that are in direct opposition to their supposed beliefs. But that phenomenon occurs everywhere where poorly defined terms are commonly used. The supposed meaning of terms like 'liberal' for example is completely unrecognizable to people who are familiar with their historical genesis (or even who come from abroad). And so you end up with sillines like the idea that Democrats in the US are on the 'left'. The immediate question "left of what?" comes to mind. Technically they are on the 'left' of most of the Republican ideas, but they would be considered to be 'far right' anywhere in Europe of 1920s. Today most foreign observers mark them as 'centre-right', yet if you listen to rhetoric in the US, some of the Tea Party members believe them to be Marxist/Leninist!
Talk about confusion!
I am actually in the minority of those who liked the MAKO. It gave me more of a feeling of actual exploration (complete with random monsters popping up) and strange finds that were not on the scanner. So I found the ME2 exploration system both a major step back and a major chore.
But it appears most people want to have their "adventure" fed to them by a spoon.
Easy. Wait 3 years so that you forget everything and then when you play it its all new again and at the end you feel that 50 hours is too short, like the first time!
Apparently even if you have all the upgrades you still can lose a lot of people by choosing wrong people for different team members at the end game.
I just couldn't bring myself to do it...
LOL.
On first play, just by a fluke (and by being pedantic in collecting all the ship upgrades) I ended up with no one lost.
It was only later when I went into the ME2 forums that discovered, to my surprise, that you could lose people in the end game! I had that feeling I imagine people get when they are told that the plane they just missed ended up in the field just outside the airport...
Just as I thought. "People I disagree with and whom I do not like" is your definition of the "left". In actuality however nothing has changed much, the core issues of the "left" always having to do with social justice. All the other stuff you mention is part of agendas of many different movements from libertarians to Green parties (many of whom are firmly on the "right").
PETA is a single-issue organization that has nothing to do with the "left". Their agenda is all about animals. Sometimes people who associate with the "left" also associate with causes like PETA but this by no means a requirement or even a dominant trend.
Again, your definition of the "left" is "People I disagree with and whom I do not like".
Your baseless insistence that Eco-terrorists and PETA are "leftist" is how you arrived at your flawed conclusions.
Of course I did. The incidents of course vary wildly in frequency and in severity. Actual statistics are hard to come by however and all one can do is form a subjective opinion based on news reports.
That would be big news to environmentalist libertarians ...
The only thing clear here is your insistence on lumping together all those you disagree with into "left".
Lets compare: McVeigh's pre-occupation: power of government, guns, individual rights (his). ELF's and ALF's fixation: plants and animals.
Such false equivalences are what makes people desperately defending the "right" against any criticism seem so hypocritical. For comparison: a worker's union would be a "leftist" (by definition) organization, not something like ELF!
So, by this criterion, a society where 99% of people are slaves and are tortured daily but cannot break out of their slavery because of a very, very creative and efficient slavery enforcement system which persists through centuries, but which achieved space-flight is then more successful than a society which was defeated by the Tortured Slave Empire but which, during its brief existence, achieved near universal happiness for its members? Do elaborate.
If the "standard of living" does not correlate to "happiness" then your assertion fails.
A society of rich people who are all viciously competing against each other and are continuously pissed off is worse off than a relatively poor and isolated village where people are happy (and do not even realize that they are poor).
There is no "objective" standard of happiness and this is where the main difficulty of turning the obvious truth of what I said into a practical application lies. That is also why we cannot externally measure happiness.
And so the rest of your argument based on the idea of "objective happiness" is flawed.
I already did. The "leader" and "follower" are merely two patterns out of many possibilities, patterns that achieved dominance due the evolutionary selection process. But "dominance" does not mean "exclusivity". It is in fact the key aspect of evolution that the "search algorithm" probes the search space in a random manner and so in every population you will end up with a lot of variation, although more radical the difference from the "mean" parameters, rarer it is.
It is the basic mathematical property of the genetic search algorithm.
So there are many people that do not follow these two patterns. Some will be a detriment to the overall population and so the evolutionary process will actively select against them (in the long run). Some patterns are simply neutral and thus are ignored, as long as their frequency of occurrence is low enough.
Note that this analysis does not involve things like 'ethics' or 'morality', simply the properties of the evolutionary process as applied to herd or pack animals.
"Chill out dude, all I did was compare you to Hitler, imply that you sound like Stalin and misquoted Mao to make it seem like you are his disciple. No harm intended. Honest. Hey, smoke this, it will make you feel better and I can later also add 'drug-addict' to my description of you! Cool, no?"
Those are "Luddite" not "leftist" sentiments. The 'leftists' and anti-technology people have very little overlap. In fact most classical 'leftist' movements embraced technology and industry (that was what the "hammer" in the Soviet "hammer and sickle" stood for).
It only goes to show that the definitions of 'left' and 'right' seem to be for some people so malleable as to be useless.
PETA? "Dogs of the world Unite!" ... err, what?
This discussion is becoming meaningless as your definition of the 'left' seems to be simply 'all the people I do not like'.
Actually, no. Look at the dates of the crimes. My thesis was not that the 'left' is not involved in violence or that there is no terrorism from the 'left' historically or that it cannot be so again, only that presently the 'right' dominates at both the violent rhetoric and actual acts of violence.
I even pointed out in many posts that the situation was reversed in 1960-1970s when the 'left' was far ahead. The FBI list merely confirms this assertion. And no, Eco-terrorists and the 'left' are not one and the same.
Historically, over a long time-frame, quite likely.
But unfortunately in the current stage of the cycle, there is no denying that the so-called 'right' dominates both the violent discourse and in actual acts of violence. I was merely pointing out the situation and possible causes of such state of affairs.
And of course people immediately jumped to some kind of Pavlovian, knee-jerk conclusion that I must be defending the 'left' or pretending that the violence is always on the 'right'. And off to the races we went.
That is actually the point, the near complete lack of emphasis on "happiness" in favour of near total emphasis on "progress" that seems to be the modus-operandi of Western societies.
The result is that by doing so we essentially destroy much of the value of progress which then becomes a religion-like pursuit for the sake of the pursuit itself.
And it also involves "a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the 'unperson' ..." which fit into the scenarios I mentioned soooo well .... oh wait.
You can't just grab a piece of a definition that you like and ignore the rest so that you can use a negative term to try to club your opponents with regardless if it fits the situation or not, although it is a very common strategy amongst somewhat-less-than-honest participants in discussions.
Or maybe it was his claim that he identified with the Tea Party as a movement? No, surely not.
If there is anything however that I can agree with you on is that labels like the Tea Party and 'left' and 'right' are imprecise to the point of uselessness and thus perpetually lead to discussions such as this where it soon becomes impossible to determine anything.
Other, that is, than the fact that politicians and pundits concocting this confusion and the security apparatus they feed end up more powerful year after year no matter what supposed "side" they take in this.
How so? The last police statement mentioned no prosecution of any kind. Last I heard no charges were even laid.
So now an anti-social hermit with a diagnosed mental disorder who lives a survivalist life-style in a cabin in the woods is a 'leftist'? I think your definitions are broadening so rapidly as to pretty soon include all violence of any kind...
Oh, that didn't take long.
Look, eco-terrorists come from all sorts of backgrounds and quite a lot of them are libertarians, anarchists and the like.
If you really wanted a 'leftist' example you would have to go back to 1970s or 1960s which was indeed full of the likes of The Weather Underground etc. But today, thanks mostly to the take-over of the mass media by the somewhat deranged fringe of the 'right' the political violence in the US is pretty much monopolized by the 'right'. This of course can change, but we were talking of what is at present and not what could be in the future.
Sorry for the misspelling but I fail to see how natural selection lacks impact on culture. Just look around: sex appeal used in marketing everywhere, sex used by religions of all stripe as a club to beat their followers on their heads to keep them in line, children and raising of them being the focus of whole swaths of culture in all corners of the world.. etc and so on.
Then there are the issues of genetically-mandated disparities in mental capacities between people, genetics controlling dominant and submissive behavioural patterns, genetically programmed tastes and dislikes ...
In fact most of our "culture" is shaped and formed by some evolutionary trait or another, either directly or indirectly.