This is just evidence of the accuracy of your nickname and I think a possible sign of mental illness as well due to excessively fearful personality susceptible to paranoia. What part of he was not a Tea Party Member do you not understand? If you are afraid of the Tea Party, fine. But the fact that, as I keep repeating, there was not a single incident of violence coming from them means that this irrational fear is all in your head. The sooner you can understand that the sooner you can try dealing with it.
Hold on. As far as I understand, the Tea Party is a supposed grass-roots movement (with a few billionaire "grassroots" chipping in) that does not hold any official membership lists or has no official 'card' to carry. Thus if he says all the common things that all the other people who call themselves "members" do, does that not automatically make him a "member" also? No?
It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter's speech to be cancelled this week.
Back in March actually. Also Coulter was laughing all the way to the bank (she did not return the huge fees she usually charges) and of course this is exactly what she wanted anyway. Her entire revenue stream depends on her being "controversial" and causing upheavals. Hence her verbal abuse, racist tirades and the like. If she could not manage to incite a riot on a regular basis, her bank account would suffer significantly. Out of all people, trotting her out as your first example of a 'victim' is quite comical.
was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare.
The link does not work.
It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers.
There is no mention of any political motivations in any of her assaults, which were all motivated by personal reasons. The last one being a direct result of her being denied tenure.
Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto.
A tax hating, self-employed leftist? Really? That is some rather rare bird of unusual plumage...
Etc and so on, the usual nonsense.
I could literally go on and on,
I am sure, as I am also sure that the quality of your examples would not improve much.
The media and politicians who are trying to construct a meme of conservative violence as we run up to the 2010 elections should only face the weapon they fear most; the ballot.
2010? I see, you are a cut-and-paste-who-needs-any-brains-to-debate type.
Then it is no surprise perhaps that you missed the fact that violence follows cyclical patterns and so while the 'leftist' violence indeed dominated 1960s and 1970s, things have changed and it is now the 'right' that is far ahead. Things will probably change again, but simply pretending that the situation is not what it obviously is makes you look just pathetic.
While that was indeed an oversimplification, one has to only take a look at the polls about gun ownership and regulation to see what I mean.
Although I will admit that this perception is slowly changing as more and more of the so-called "liberals" start to realize what the future holds in store.
... on the left's alliances with groups that "confused leftists" don't understand...
The only inevitable confusion results from the simplistic definitions like 'left' and 'right' (which is why I hate using them but which it seems is unavoidable in any discussion).
Movements like the Black Panthers have a lot of elements to them and I am sure that some of them could be somehow part of the so-called-'left'. But then again there are some parts that belong to the 'right'. That is why I focus on the supposed 'main' mission of the group, which was strictly race-centric.
The truth is that there is no monolithic 'left' or 'right'. That is why ideas like the political compass were thought up in an attempt to better measure the actual positions people hold in respect to individual issues and which provide a much more accurate understanding.
Err, you somehow forgot that there was a video of it. It which the entire thing lasted 2 seconds (and which begins with a SEIU member already incapacitated on the ground) and during which Kenneth was pulled to the ground but not punched or kicked and after which Kenneth walked away on his own.
But do, by all means, embellish on.
Face it, both right and left have their radical and violent factions in roughly equal measures.
As soon as you present an example like the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing perpetrated by the leftists in a similar time frame, you will make your point.
Face it, the Radical Left with its terrorist activities petered out in 1970s. Can it come back? Probably, but the 1980s till present belong firmly to the Radical Right and its terrorists. And it has to do with the morphing of the "liberal" media of the 1950-1970s into the bastions of corporate infotainment of now, appearance of oligarchy-serving propaganda channels like Fox and the vast reach of right-wing talk shows today, which is the exact reverse of what was going on in mid 1960s.
You are right that happiness is next to impossible to quantify, but if a society that happily self-destructs is less than the one that endures unhappily - that is in the eye of the beholder. One can extrapolate further: is a person that lived a short, happy life worse off than one that lived 100 years of utter misery?
The only "remodeling" I see is the overthrowing of dictatorships run by shady radical religious groups that kill their women for committing the crime of being raped and peacekeeping operations in war-torn nations that kill their people for getting in the way of killing other people. I guess giving people the ability to lead stable lives without fear of being murdered is a bad thing in your idea of the perfect society.
That is a view that is so at odds with reality that only a totally brainwashed believer in "Manifest Destiny" and "US exceptionalism" would believe such hogwash. The US is yet another Imperial Power in a long history of Imperial Powers who meddled everywhere for their own benefit and who all claimed to be doing so for the victims "own good". Every single one brayed about the evils of whatever ruler or whatever order they were deposing while setting up their own presence in the conquered territory. In this regard the US is not even particularly creative or subtle as its rulers no longer really care if their true purposes are obvious.
You're the one that's proposing the impossible. It doesn't matter if you mentioned the US, SOMEBODY is going to have to move out of the way in order to implement your "obvious and universal solution" that's so perfect and Utopian.
Not at all. There are a lot of places still where people can move (and in fact they still do). What I discussed is simply a logical outcome of rational analysis. If people are willing to follow it and how many are willing to do so, is an entirely different matter. But new societies will be created that do not conform to your Corporatist-US-centric world-view, sooner or later. And I fully expect you to call for their destruction as their existence would invalidate your entire world-view and you have far too much ego invested in that.
The phrase "obvious and universal solution" and the general way you go about proposing such perfect and amazing ideas is exactly the way I imagine an Orwellian society would come to fruition masquerading as.
An idea that says that people with similar ideas should be able to gather and organize themselves according to them? To increase the number of choices available to them? This the exact opposite of all of the totalitarian solutions Orwell ever spoke against. He cautioned against use of language to support restrictions of the thought process to reduce choices.
It seems to me that you are simply so used to screaming "Orwellian" at any concept that somehow does not fit your One And Only True World-view that you did not even bother trying to understand what Orwell stood for.
You lost credibility at "organization of human societies can be completely arbitrary." if there's one thing humanity has learned from the political experiments of the last hundred years it is that humanity is not infinitely mutable. No matter how many you kill.
You should read up some history dude. The societies we see today are but a tiny fraction of various schemes that were in place all over the world over the last few millenia, anything from communist (loooong before Marx) matriarchies to war-like religious cults etc.
"Happiness is the only value" . . . I won't try to dissuade you of that. I likely won't get anywhere. But that is a perversion of an absolutist utilitarianism that is as mind bogglingly false to me as I'm sure it is self evident to you. Ethics is not so easy as you think.
Well, the corollary is that "happiness is not the most important thing" in which case being unhappy in pursuit of some Unbelievably Important Cosmic Goal is. Well as soon as you define that End That Justifies All Means all will see how wrong I am. Or maybe, just maybe, your unwillingness to do so has something to do with the fact that your Ultimate Purpose is not exactly based on any sort of logic and its importance is entirely arbitrary, no?
I said that there was more violence on the left, which you have done nothing to contest...
You presented no evidence of any kind to support this (i.e. the amount of violence). The few examples you provided were very weak and when contrasted with examples of the violence of the other side they faded into total insignificance. If you cannot provide examples within the US that even compare to but just the few top examples I gave, your whole thesis is utter delusional bullshit and not worth discussing.
If you are going to go decades back and count actions of every crazy cultist, white supremacist, religious fundamentalist or a mentally ill person as an example of "right wing" violence should I start mentioning Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?
The examples I gave were all very recent US history, unless 2008 is as far back as 1950s as you are concerned. In fact this false equivalence bullshit you are attempting goes hand in hand with all the other false equivalence bullshit you tried to peddle already, its a whole pattern of delusional thought: "A mosquito bites a Tea Party member = Violent Leftist Conspiracy!! A Tea Party member shoots up a political gathering... well it was an expression of Free Speech and he was not really a Tea Party member, really, only part-time and he was driven to this by the Leftist Conspiracy!!! And it is all the Leftist Media fault!!! All those Leftist CEOs pining to corrupt the innocent, pure and All-American bodily fluids of the Tea Party members..." etc and so on.
I've come to understand that for a, surprisingly large, portion of the population, that is exactly the way they think. It's like they have no concept that it is the duty of the citizenry to judge the law.
Yup. Realizing this was the epiphany that changed my view on pretty much all political systems.
Following further analysis it became obvious that the condition is endemic and genetic. That is in a species bread for operation in small hunter-gatherer communes (whole recorded history is but a blink in evolutionary terms) there is a natural process of random generation of statistically few "leaders" (who then duke it out for the position of the "alpha dog") amid a vast majority of "followers" whose brains are wired to blindly accept authority. It does not matter what system or what idea is used to structure the authority around, it is the authority itself that is the goal because it introduces "order" in the tribe that facilitates favourable conditions for reproducing and raising offspring and thus is selected for as part of the "fitness" variable in evolutionary terms.
This genetically-wired override is so strong as to essentially disable any higher functions of the brain in the "followers" as well as in the "leaders" whose whole existence is but mindless clawing to the "top" for reasons they would find hard to explain if pressed.
And it appears that exceptions to this are very far and few in between, numerically significant only because of vast population sizes today.
Once I saw that, it probably was the very moment when I realized that humanity, in its current form, is essentially a bunch of animals fucked up beyond repair and no political or economic system is going to fix this state of affairs.
Actually, the analysis I was thinking of was simply to have a list of these sites (there is thankfully only a rather limited number of them) and to check against it. One could also create a "short URL" digest periodically from the database of posts to see if there are any new ones cropping up or simply to allow mods to flag such crap at moderation time and compose the list from such flagged posts. Or something like it. There are many options that do not involve actual connections by Slashcode and which are fairly cheap to implement.
A truly comprehensive solution would be to create a ranking/moderation system for all external links embedded in posts which would allow people to get an idea of the value of the link by simply glancing at it. Mods could assign tags to the links (like "URL shortener" or "Ad infested" etc) and rate the quality of the link itself (independent of the post). If a separate database was kept, then you could get auto-categorization going from it for new URLs people insert, etc.
Y'know, there ARE multiple societies on this planet. If you don't like the way ours works, go choose one that fits you best.
That is patently not true. While there are many nations, most subscribe to a very limited set of recipes for their organization.
Worse, powerful nations, with US in the forefront, attempt to remodel the weak nations for the benefit of the powerful ones and to make them fit the world-view held dear by the dominant forces in these powerful nations and so the number of choices is actually shrinking.
If you think that America should make room for whatever new political philosophy rears its ugly head and allow them to live in total separation from all the other political philosophies for the sake of carrying out the "obvious and universal solution" (that combination of words sounds so Orwellian that I can actually hear Wallace Breen saying it right now) and not forcing our "one-size-fits-all, simplistic pet solution down everyone else's throat" then you are completely delusional and need psychiatric attention.
Your assumptions are telling - I never even mentioned the US - as well as your arrogant, pig-headed belief that anyone opposing your beloved pet idea must be "insane" for only "insane" people would not recognize your self-assessed, infinite genius so vast and brilliant that it makes whole galaxies seem puny and dim and so naturally any choices other than the one you officially and personally anointed with your Divine Insight must be completely deranged...
Also, an idea of offering many, many choices and "Orwellian" do not really mix, unless you've been reading books by some completely different George Orwell then the rest of us.
How about a peaceful Tea Party member being sent to the hospital by union goons during the health care debate? Or maybe the unprosecuted, clear voter intimidation brought to you by club weilding Blank Panther thugs. I guess those violent groups don't exit since they're on the left and therefore must be live and let live types? There are plenty of crazies on the right, but claiming the left doesn't have its share goons and enforcers is blind mindedness.
As I replied to the other poster, the level of violence and the frequency of it is orders of magnitude lower on the side of the US 'left' then the 'right' affiliated groups (BTW, Black Panthers are a racially motivated group and have little to do with the 'left').
Can this change in the future? Quite likely. But to pretend that scuffles on one hand and bombings and shooting rampages on the other are somehow 'equivalent' is pure hogwash.
Ever heard of Allee Bautsch, the woman savagely beaten for attending a Republican fundraiser?
Frankly, no. There are hundreds of assaults and beatings daily throughout the US and there was no (objective) evidence ever presented that this particular one was politically motivated. The police never found the alleged attackers.
Ever heard of Kenneth Gladney,
Wasn't that the man who got caught on video faking the injuries after a 2 second scuffle? As far as I know the police did not find sufficient evidence for any sort of assault case despite of abundance of witnesses.
Btw, have you heard of an incident at Rand Paul's event where a leftist protester was briefly held down for about one second by a Tea Party member who placed his foot on her shoulder. I'm sure you have, because it was all over headline news, while the other two incidents were never mentioned at all on MSNBC, and barely so on CNN.
That is for the simple reason that there was footage of it like in the case of Kenneth Gladney, of whom I heard (that is the nature of infotainment). Should someone have a film of the other assault, it would have been cheerfully exploited and squeezed for its last advertising dollar by the "media".
Ok, since they are such adaily occurrence, can you provide some example of this "rampage". Or perhaps, the rampage is all in your, easily frightened, brain.
Frankly, these few examples are a pretty good illustration of the difference in the level and quality of the violence of the two sides. On one hand (if true) you get a broken leg and a skinned knee and on the other there are body parts littering a few city blocks.
Since organization of human societies can be completely arbitrary, there are literally an infinite number of possible permutations.
Anything from religious communes all the way to totalitarian corporate empires.
I sense however that you somehow, for reasons probably personal, have invested all your ego into "solutions" based on philosophies that center on individual greed as being the cure-all for all ills of humanity as the only possibility.
May I point out that the level of happiness of the members of a society is the only criterion of its success, and that, for example, "innovation" and "enterprise" are four letter words to people whose existence becomes unhappy because of them.
So ultimately it does not matter how the society is organized, as long as its members are happy with the state of affairs. And this is the point a lot of hard-core ideologues, like yourself, seem to forget. A "primitive" agrarian society that has 90%+ of happy members is in actuality far superior to a high-tech empire where 90% of people are depressed in their pan-global-information-network interface equipped climate-controlled apartments complete with automated anti-depressant dispensers.
But then again all this is probably entirely lost on you, because greed-centered world-views have a way of making their victims evaluate everything only in terms of amassing of possessions and the degree of power one has over others and so consequently you probably cannot be happy until someone else is enslaved and in pain. And so all your scenarios revolve around that theme.
The obvious and universal solution is to create multiple societies so that people can choose one that fits them best and then work on making those people and their society mesh to maximum of their potential, rather then trying to force your one-size-fits-all, simplistic pet solution down everyone else's throat.
That would open up an attack vector on Slashdot itself by making it access potentially malicious websites. At present there is no need for Slashcode to attempt connections anywhere.
... despite most of the actual incidents of violence coming from the left...
Now that would be news indeed as the 'left' in the US is composed mostly of people who find guns scary and whose idea of "sticking it to the man" involves bickering endlessly over trivial minutiae at Starbucks while wearing "provocative" t-shirts...
On the other hand gun-totting rednecks on a rampage seem like near daily occurrence.
Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility. Unless your post was meant to be some very subtle satire, that is.
which in reality is a peaceful and law-abiding movement if there ever was one...
Members of which only occasionally resort to showing up with assault rifles at public meetings held by their political opponents...
Strangely, there appears to be no equivalent of such activity by 'the left' at meetings held by their opponents that I am aware of. It must be that clever "passive violence" them tricky leftists have come up with to incite unwary folk to!
Look here dude, leftists are not immune from being inciters or perpetrators of violence, as history amply shows, but at present in the US they are far, far, far outstripped in both rhetoric and actions of all the other factions in US politics. This may change in the future, but pretending that the situation is somehow different today is the very height of disingenuity.
Also, 'the left' in the US would be classified as "centre-right" pretty much everywhere else in the world.
This is a false equivalence, at least for the media figures, because although they are rather vocal in criticizing the "other side" they, unlike Beck and his ilk, do not actually try to entice violence by making thinly veiled references and innuendo to it. Kos and Huffingtonpost do have user generated contents and there is a lot of vile stuff in it, but then again so it is in a lot of other places, like Slashdot (even more so as Slashdot does not have actual staff moderators).
So the point is that people like Beck, unlike - say - Olbermann, walk a very thin edge of the division between being a mere loudmouth-for-profit and an actual enticer to violence in the old tradition of such things.
Now if enticing political violence is justified is a wholly another matter. I personally think that wide-spread political violence in the US is a pretty much a done deal and the only real question is "when?".
I think Slashcode should auto-detect these idiotic URL shorteners and either just refuse to accept them like it does for "all caps" posts and the like or preemptively down-mod the post by 2 points at least...
... superior solutions for the iPhone/iPad like AirVideo
You mean "free to try" bait-and-switchware as opposed to an actual free open-source app?
... dogmatic horseshit about supporting "open source" and not getting on the h.264 bandwagon with the rest of the grownups,...
Translation: they refused to bend over and to assume a cheeks-spread-wide-and-ready stance and to meekly submit to vigorous reaming with big, fat wad of millions of dollars of royalty payments to the h.264 patent holders, like the rest of the "grownups"?
It seems to me that you are having some difficulties mixing up the concepts of "will-do-absolutely-anything-for-profit whores" and "grownups".
Out of belief in a deeper meaning behind what one encounters and does in life, one may strive to be constructive and altruistic, and gradually grow to really have a bigger heart. You may be cynical and say it's just concealed selfishness. I say that being able to wholeheartedly conduct yourself according to your understanding of a spiritual or moral principle, amounts to the manifestation of your enlightenment of that principle. It's a very real and concrete process that stems from belief. It requires self-discipline and dedication, and it doesn't require denigration or abortion of the intellect. To speak in Chinese self-cultivation terms, enlightenment is an aspect of man's state of mind/heart (xinxing) that plays out in everyday life. The broader you cultivate your xinxing, the deeper your spiritual realm and inner peace. I think that researching the implications of this requires to broaden the scope defined by the conventions of modern western research. It's exactly what Chinese, through various schools, have been researching for several thousands of years.
On the face value this is plausible. Modern science has very little true understanding of the processes involved in sentience or even far more fundamental questions such as "what is the nature of information itself?" and "what is its actual relationship to the physical universe?".
Subsequently it is quite possible that some insights into the nature of consciousness were obtained over the millenia by various researchers in China and other places where the local philosophy/religion combinations encouraged such analysis (as opposed to the pursuit of power and control with their attendant refinement of dogma and authoritarianism employed by Judeo-Christian-Muslim flavours of woo-woo).
But this is where the good news ends.
The outcome of this research - the realm of spiritual cultivation - and that of "modern western conventional research" are often regarded as mutually exclusive, but I think many deeply carved conceptions are derived from intolerance, and are translated in gross generalizations, and a quite arrogant disposition that "we have already discovered what is currently technically possible to discover, so there is no reason to alter our premises".
As here comes the setup for pretty much every cult out there: poor-oppressed-us versus the-all-powerful-evil-them. "We are misunderstood!", "We are morally superior and the evil ones hate use because of it!", "Our divine knowledge is just tooo advanced for their puny minds to comprehend - and they hate us for it!" etc and so on.
This is a basic trick: you setup a premise with which reasonable people can agree, then you perform a bit of non-sequitur sleigh of hand and presto - a "justification" for any hokum, no matter how loosely related to the supposed premise.
Case in point: while your previous point was reasonable, the second point does not follow from it. It is quite possible for a mountain of "research" by Chinese monks to be - for example - 99.9% bogus and only 0.1% revolutionary insight. Given the subject matter and the wholly unscientific methodologies employed by pretty much all of these "researchers" it is in fact quite likely that such a staggering ratio of hokum-to-brilliance is the case. And so it is also quite natural that the scientific method as understood by the traditional Western science is going to be very efficient and detecting and demolishing any such gibberish.
It is not arrogance, it is simply an application of a knowledge gathering and verification process upon which the whole of modern western science is based (with rather spectacular technological results to highlight the validity of that system). And so any serious research into the nature of consciousness must produce a set of results that is ultimately compatible with the western scientific method in some way. For any conflict that exists to be resolved
see what moral integrity and freedom mean to these people.
Lemme see: According to their messiah/founder, the afterlife of the "enlightened" is problematic for children of multi-racial couples because paradise is racially segregated (with an unspoken implication of Asians being somewhat more pure)...
And it goes downhill from there.
Look, every cult out there, large and small - from African hunter-gatherer tribes through the entire recorded history culminating with globe-spanning dominance of massive cults of modernity who due to their (sometimes direct) control of governments managed to re-brand themselves (usually rather violently) as something "special" and call themselves "organized religions" - has some kind of mumbo-jumbo "moral code" claiming to bring about paradise on Earth (or failing that, in afterlife) if only one were to leave all those horribly inconvenient reasoning faculties of ones brain behind...
These turkeys are no different at all. Just yet another flavour of woo-woo.
I would agree however that they are (mostly) harmless as their core tenets involve non-violence. I also agree that the Chinese authorities have gone ape-shit on them, buy they usually do that when faced with even the smallest competition to their absolute, totalitarian power and so this cult is not even particularly special in this regard.
But trying to pretend that they are not a cult is just intellectually dishonest.
Slashdot Mirror
Hold on. As far as I understand, the Tea Party is a supposed grass-roots movement (with a few billionaire "grassroots" chipping in) that does not hold any official membership lists or has no official 'card' to carry. Thus if he says all the common things that all the other people who call themselves "members" do, does that not automatically make him a "member" also? No?
Back in March actually. Also Coulter was laughing all the way to the bank (she did not return the huge fees she usually charges) and of course this is exactly what she wanted anyway. Her entire revenue stream depends on her being "controversial" and causing upheavals. Hence her verbal abuse, racist tirades and the like. If she could not manage to incite a riot on a regular basis, her bank account would suffer significantly. Out of all people, trotting her out as your first example of a 'victim' is quite comical.
The link does not work.
There is no mention of any political motivations in any of her assaults, which were all motivated by personal reasons. The last one being a direct result of her being denied tenure.
A tax hating, self-employed leftist? Really? That is some rather rare bird of unusual plumage ...
Etc and so on, the usual nonsense.
I am sure, as I am also sure that the quality of your examples would not improve much.
2010? I see, you are a cut-and-paste-who-needs-any-brains-to-debate type.
Then it is no surprise perhaps that you missed the fact that violence follows cyclical patterns and so while the 'leftist' violence indeed dominated 1960s and 1970s, things have changed and it is now the 'right' that is far ahead. Things will probably change again, but simply pretending that the situation is not what it obviously is makes you look just pathetic.
While that was indeed an oversimplification, one has to only take a look at the polls about gun ownership and regulation to see what I mean.
Although I will admit that this perception is slowly changing as more and more of the so-called "liberals" start to realize what the future holds in store.
The only inevitable confusion results from the simplistic definitions like 'left' and 'right' (which is why I hate using them but which it seems is unavoidable in any discussion).
Movements like the Black Panthers have a lot of elements to them and I am sure that some of them could be somehow part of the so-called-'left'. But then again there are some parts that belong to the 'right'. That is why I focus on the supposed 'main' mission of the group, which was strictly race-centric.
The truth is that there is no monolithic 'left' or 'right'. That is why ideas like the political compass were thought up in an attempt to better measure the actual positions people hold in respect to individual issues and which provide a much more accurate understanding.
Err, you somehow forgot that there was a video of it. It which the entire thing lasted 2 seconds (and which begins with a SEIU member already incapacitated on the ground) and during which Kenneth was pulled to the ground but not punched or kicked and after which Kenneth walked away on his own.
But do, by all means, embellish on.
As soon as you present an example like the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing perpetrated by the leftists in a similar time frame, you will make your point.
Face it, the Radical Left with its terrorist activities petered out in 1970s. Can it come back? Probably, but the 1980s till present belong firmly to the Radical Right and its terrorists. And it has to do with the morphing of the "liberal" media of the 1950-1970s into the bastions of corporate infotainment of now, appearance of oligarchy-serving propaganda channels like Fox and the vast reach of right-wing talk shows today, which is the exact reverse of what was going on in mid 1960s.
You are right that happiness is next to impossible to quantify, but if a society that happily self-destructs is less than the one that endures unhappily - that is in the eye of the beholder. One can extrapolate further: is a person that lived a short, happy life worse off than one that lived 100 years of utter misery?
That is a view that is so at odds with reality that only a totally brainwashed believer in "Manifest Destiny" and "US exceptionalism" would believe such hogwash. The US is yet another Imperial Power in a long history of Imperial Powers who meddled everywhere for their own benefit and who all claimed to be doing so for the victims "own good". Every single one brayed about the evils of whatever ruler or whatever order they were deposing while setting up their own presence in the conquered territory. In this regard the US is not even particularly creative or subtle as its rulers no longer really care if their true purposes are obvious.
Not at all. There are a lot of places still where people can move (and in fact they still do). What I discussed is simply a logical outcome of rational analysis. If people are willing to follow it and how many are willing to do so, is an entirely different matter. But new societies will be created that do not conform to your Corporatist-US-centric world-view, sooner or later. And I fully expect you to call for their destruction as their existence would invalidate your entire world-view and you have far too much ego invested in that.
An idea that says that people with similar ideas should be able to gather and organize themselves according to them? To increase the number of choices available to them? This the exact opposite of all of the totalitarian solutions Orwell ever spoke against. He cautioned against use of language to support restrictions of the thought process to reduce choices.
It seems to me that you are simply so used to screaming "Orwellian" at any concept that somehow does not fit your One And Only True World-view that you did not even bother trying to understand what Orwell stood for.
You should read up some history dude. The societies we see today are but a tiny fraction of various schemes that were in place all over the world over the last few millenia, anything from communist (loooong before Marx) matriarchies to war-like religious cults etc.
Well, the corollary is that "happiness is not the most important thing" in which case being unhappy in pursuit of some Unbelievably Important Cosmic Goal is. Well as soon as you define that End That Justifies All Means all will see how wrong I am. Or maybe, just maybe, your unwillingness to do so has something to do with the fact that your Ultimate Purpose is not exactly based on any sort of logic and its importance is entirely arbitrary, no?
You presented no evidence of any kind to support this (i.e. the amount of violence). The few examples you provided were very weak and when contrasted with examples of the violence of the other side they faded into total insignificance. If you cannot provide examples within the US that even compare to but just the few top examples I gave, your whole thesis is utter delusional bullshit and not worth discussing.
The examples I gave were all very recent US history, unless 2008 is as far back as 1950s as you are concerned. In fact this false equivalence bullshit you are attempting goes hand in hand with all the other false equivalence bullshit you tried to peddle already, its a whole pattern of delusional thought: "A mosquito bites a Tea Party member = Violent Leftist Conspiracy!! A Tea Party member shoots up a political gathering ... well it was an expression of Free Speech and he was not really a Tea Party member, really, only part-time and he was driven to this by the Leftist Conspiracy!!! And it is all the Leftist Media fault!!! All those Leftist CEOs pining to corrupt the innocent, pure and All-American bodily fluids of the Tea Party members ..." etc and so on.
Yup. Realizing this was the epiphany that changed my view on pretty much all political systems.
Following further analysis it became obvious that the condition is endemic and genetic. That is in a species bread for operation in small hunter-gatherer communes (whole recorded history is but a blink in evolutionary terms) there is a natural process of random generation of statistically few "leaders" (who then duke it out for the position of the "alpha dog") amid a vast majority of "followers" whose brains are wired to blindly accept authority. It does not matter what system or what idea is used to structure the authority around, it is the authority itself that is the goal because it introduces "order" in the tribe that facilitates favourable conditions for reproducing and raising offspring and thus is selected for as part of the "fitness" variable in evolutionary terms.
This genetically-wired override is so strong as to essentially disable any higher functions of the brain in the "followers" as well as in the "leaders" whose whole existence is but mindless clawing to the "top" for reasons they would find hard to explain if pressed.
And it appears that exceptions to this are very far and few in between, numerically significant only because of vast population sizes today.
Once I saw that, it probably was the very moment when I realized that humanity, in its current form, is essentially a bunch of animals fucked up beyond repair and no political or economic system is going to fix this state of affairs.
Actually, the analysis I was thinking of was simply to have a list of these sites (there is thankfully only a rather limited number of them) and to check against it. One could also create a "short URL" digest periodically from the database of posts to see if there are any new ones cropping up or simply to allow mods to flag such crap at moderation time and compose the list from such flagged posts. Or something like it. There are many options that do not involve actual connections by Slashcode and which are fairly cheap to implement.
A truly comprehensive solution would be to create a ranking/moderation system for all external links embedded in posts which would allow people to get an idea of the value of the link by simply glancing at it. Mods could assign tags to the links (like "URL shortener" or "Ad infested" etc) and rate the quality of the link itself (independent of the post). If a separate database was kept, then you could get auto-categorization going from it for new URLs people insert, etc.
That is patently not true. While there are many nations, most subscribe to a very limited set of recipes for their organization.
Worse, powerful nations, with US in the forefront, attempt to remodel the weak nations for the benefit of the powerful ones and to make them fit the world-view held dear by the dominant forces in these powerful nations and so the number of choices is actually shrinking.
Your assumptions are telling - I never even mentioned the US - as well as your arrogant, pig-headed belief that anyone opposing your beloved pet idea must be "insane" for only "insane" people would not recognize your self-assessed, infinite genius so vast and brilliant that it makes whole galaxies seem puny and dim and so naturally any choices other than the one you officially and personally anointed with your Divine Insight must be completely deranged ...
Also, an idea of offering many, many choices and "Orwellian" do not really mix, unless you've been reading books by some completely different George Orwell then the rest of us.
As I replied to the other poster, the level of violence and the frequency of it is orders of magnitude lower on the side of the US 'left' then the 'right' affiliated groups (BTW, Black Panthers are a racially motivated group and have little to do with the 'left').
Can this change in the future? Quite likely. But to pretend that scuffles on one hand and bombings and shooting rampages on the other are somehow 'equivalent' is pure hogwash.
Frankly, no. There are hundreds of assaults and beatings daily throughout the US and there was no (objective) evidence ever presented that this particular one was politically motivated. The police never found the alleged attackers.
Wasn't that the man who got caught on video faking the injuries after a 2 second scuffle? As far as I know the police did not find sufficient evidence for any sort of assault case despite of abundance of witnesses.
That is for the simple reason that there was footage of it like in the case of Kenneth Gladney, of whom I heard (that is the nature of infotainment). Should someone have a film of the other assault, it would have been cheerfully exploited and squeezed for its last advertising dollar by the "media".
Just of the top of my head.
Frankly, these few examples are a pretty good illustration of the difference in the level and quality of the violence of the two sides. On one hand (if true) you get a broken leg and a skinned knee and on the other there are body parts littering a few city blocks.
Since organization of human societies can be completely arbitrary, there are literally an infinite number of possible permutations.
Anything from religious communes all the way to totalitarian corporate empires.
I sense however that you somehow, for reasons probably personal, have invested all your ego into "solutions" based on philosophies that center on individual greed as being the cure-all for all ills of humanity as the only possibility.
May I point out that the level of happiness of the members of a society is the only criterion of its success, and that, for example, "innovation" and "enterprise" are four letter words to people whose existence becomes unhappy because of them.
So ultimately it does not matter how the society is organized, as long as its members are happy with the state of affairs. And this is the point a lot of hard-core ideologues, like yourself, seem to forget. A "primitive" agrarian society that has 90%+ of happy members is in actuality far superior to a high-tech empire where 90% of people are depressed in their pan-global-information-network interface equipped climate-controlled apartments complete with automated anti-depressant dispensers.
But then again all this is probably entirely lost on you, because greed-centered world-views have a way of making their victims evaluate everything only in terms of amassing of possessions and the degree of power one has over others and so consequently you probably cannot be happy until someone else is enslaved and in pain. And so all your scenarios revolve around that theme.
The obvious and universal solution is to create multiple societies so that people can choose one that fits them best and then work on making those people and their society mesh to maximum of their potential, rather then trying to force your one-size-fits-all, simplistic pet solution down everyone else's throat.
I believe this particular logical fallacy is called a "false dichotomy".
That would open up an attack vector on Slashdot itself by making it access potentially malicious websites. At present there is no need for Slashcode to attempt connections anywhere.
Which would open up a vector for attack on Slashdot itself by making it access malicious websites.
Now that would be news indeed as the 'left' in the US is composed mostly of people who find guns scary and whose idea of "sticking it to the man" involves bickering endlessly over trivial minutiae at Starbucks while wearing "provocative" t-shirts...
On the other hand gun-totting rednecks on a rampage seem like near daily occurrence.
Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility. Unless your post was meant to be some very subtle satire, that is.
Members of which only occasionally resort to showing up with assault rifles at public meetings held by their political opponents...
Strangely, there appears to be no equivalent of such activity by 'the left' at meetings held by their opponents that I am aware of. It must be that clever "passive violence" them tricky leftists have come up with to incite unwary folk to!
Look here dude, leftists are not immune from being inciters or perpetrators of violence, as history amply shows, but at present in the US they are far, far, far outstripped in both rhetoric and actions of all the other factions in US politics. This may change in the future, but pretending that the situation is somehow different today is the very height of disingenuity.
Also, 'the left' in the US would be classified as "centre-right" pretty much everywhere else in the world.
This is a false equivalence, at least for the media figures, because although they are rather vocal in criticizing the "other side" they, unlike Beck and his ilk, do not actually try to entice violence by making thinly veiled references and innuendo to it. Kos and Huffingtonpost do have user generated contents and there is a lot of vile stuff in it, but then again so it is in a lot of other places, like Slashdot (even more so as Slashdot does not have actual staff moderators).
So the point is that people like Beck, unlike - say - Olbermann, walk a very thin edge of the division between being a mere loudmouth-for-profit and an actual enticer to violence in the old tradition of such things.
Now if enticing political violence is justified is a wholly another matter. I personally think that wide-spread political violence in the US is a pretty much a done deal and the only real question is "when?".
I think Slashcode should auto-detect these idiotic URL shorteners and either just refuse to accept them like it does for "all caps" posts and the like or preemptively down-mod the post by 2 points at least...
LMAO.
You mean "free to try" bait-and-switchware as opposed to an actual free open-source app?
Translation: they refused to bend over and to assume a cheeks-spread-wide-and-ready stance and to meekly submit to vigorous reaming with big, fat wad of millions of dollars of royalty payments to the h.264 patent holders, like the rest of the "grownups"?
It seems to me that you are having some difficulties mixing up the concepts of "will-do-absolutely-anything-for-profit whores" and "grownups".
This is actually a very typical of various cults:
On the face value this is plausible. Modern science has very little true understanding of the processes involved in sentience or even far more fundamental questions such as "what is the nature of information itself?" and "what is its actual relationship to the physical universe?".
Subsequently it is quite possible that some insights into the nature of consciousness were obtained over the millenia by various researchers in China and other places where the local philosophy/religion combinations encouraged such analysis (as opposed to the pursuit of power and control with their attendant refinement of dogma and authoritarianism employed by Judeo-Christian-Muslim flavours of woo-woo).
But this is where the good news ends.
As here comes the setup for pretty much every cult out there: poor-oppressed-us versus the-all-powerful-evil-them. "We are misunderstood!", "We are morally superior and the evil ones hate use because of it!", "Our divine knowledge is just tooo advanced for their puny minds to comprehend - and they hate us for it!" etc and so on.
This is a basic trick: you setup a premise with which reasonable people can agree, then you perform a bit of non-sequitur sleigh of hand and presto - a "justification" for any hokum, no matter how loosely related to the supposed premise.
Case in point: while your previous point was reasonable, the second point does not follow from it. It is quite possible for a mountain of "research" by Chinese monks to be - for example - 99.9% bogus and only 0.1% revolutionary insight. Given the subject matter and the wholly unscientific methodologies employed by pretty much all of these "researchers" it is in fact quite likely that such a staggering ratio of hokum-to-brilliance is the case. And so it is also quite natural that the scientific method as understood by the traditional Western science is going to be very efficient and detecting and demolishing any such gibberish.
It is not arrogance, it is simply an application of a knowledge gathering and verification process upon which the whole of modern western science is based (with rather spectacular technological results to highlight the validity of that system). And so any serious research into the nature of consciousness must produce a set of results that is ultimately compatible with the western scientific method in some way. For any conflict that exists to be resolved
Lemme see: According to their messiah/founder, the afterlife of the "enlightened" is problematic for children of multi-racial couples because paradise is racially segregated (with an unspoken implication of Asians being somewhat more pure) ...
And it goes downhill from there.
Look, every cult out there, large and small - from African hunter-gatherer tribes through the entire recorded history culminating with globe-spanning dominance of massive cults of modernity who due to their (sometimes direct) control of governments managed to re-brand themselves (usually rather violently) as something "special" and call themselves "organized religions" - has some kind of mumbo-jumbo "moral code" claiming to bring about paradise on Earth (or failing that, in afterlife) if only one were to leave all those horribly inconvenient reasoning faculties of ones brain behind ...
These turkeys are no different at all. Just yet another flavour of woo-woo.
I would agree however that they are (mostly) harmless as their core tenets involve non-violence. I also agree that the Chinese authorities have gone ape-shit on them, buy they usually do that when faced with even the smallest competition to their absolute, totalitarian power and so this cult is not even particularly special in this regard.
But trying to pretend that they are not a cult is just intellectually dishonest.
I think he meant that it was a very kinky kind of rape which involved poultry....