.. this is good, because information wants to be free! Then, someone uses governmental force to get information from the internet (Wikipedia), and this is bad, because everyone has the right to privacy!
You are confused. This has nothing whatsoever to do with any nonsense about information "wanting" to be "free".
As to privacy, in practice perfect privacy is impossible. And when the measures you have instituted to protect yourself are insufficient, game is essentially over. So the complaint is not that someone has managed to obtain the information and release it to the public (at which point it is too late to put the genie back in the bottle) but the fact that random governments are using this as an excuse to institute a crackdown on unapproved view-points or dissemination of inconvenient information. In this case protecting a quite likely rather crooked business-woman from exposure at the expense of a less-connected Wikipedia contributor.
This is not the first case of such an activity I heard of, most famous case known to me being of US politicians staging BDSM parties with hookers, goings-on of which their wives were of course unaware. A blackmailer threatened to expose them to their spouses, at which point Secret Service stepped in, arrested the blackmailer and made sure that the wives never found out. Nor do we know the names of the politicians in question, only that the SS was "successful" (a fact which they proudly announced in a 1992 TV series documenting their exploits - all names changed and no other info ever released). So as you can see "privacy" is thought by various governments not as a "right" but as a "privilege" available to some select individuals, most notably the "Masters of the Universe" in three-piece suits, loaded business people, well connected lawyers etc, but not available to mere commoners, such as Wikipedia editing shlobs.
Governments are supposed to be held to different, much-higher standards than private individuals, not the other way around.
People need to know the limits of their freedom on the internet.
Signed: Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, Chinese Communist Party, The Saudi Royal Family at al.
... because it causes mental harm, long term mental harm...
As evidenced by heretical thoughts and actions, actions against The Party, The State and The Leader!
We should not be that society.
Most certainly, we should not become a society of whiny infants who have to be protected from reality by the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-digitally-surveying-all-the-time, Daddy Government who decides what is and what is not "proper" for us to see and read. For our own good, naturally.
Did you ever occur to you that every tyrannical machinery of censorship and suppression started as an effort to "protect" the poor, helpless us from some "evil" too big and great for us to confront, lest we be "mentally harmed", and so we are to perform the adult equivalent of hiding under the blankets and listening for Mommy to come tell us what we - oh so dearly - want to hear?
That is a fallacy. A lot of tiny (compared to the size of the Internet) "secret societies" are ineffective because the odds of individuals in these back-water bushes actually having the stuff that you want are minuscule. If people are actually foolish to believe that hiding in some pseudo-"secret" mouse-hole is going to improve things, then the imaginary-property crowd would be victorious by the means of the one of the oldest tricks in the book: "divide and conquer".
Me and a group of my buddies who were big fans of the Battlezone were actually quite disappointed with the Battlezone 2. The game mechanics and the general feel of the game (not to mention very awkward controls - specially on tracked vehicles) resulted with the game flopping with most of the players of the Activisions' original re-make.
And as to the following, many games have hard-core addicts who try to keep them alive long past the "best before" date. Even the original Battlezone still has servers running maintained by some truly die-hard types.
Even though I loathe Microsoft's entire mentality and their sociopathic business tricks, I think having more major search engines in the play is better than having yet another de-facto monopoly gaining unbreakable (for all practical purposes) grip on many aspects of our lives.
The optimal for us, the consumers, solution is a set of at least 5 companies constantly at each other's throats but never actually able to gain upper hand. Google is already getting far too big for its own breaches and has become a power ultimately even more dangerous to the general public than Microsoft ever was (and don't get me even started at the laughable "don't be evil" corporate PR stunt).
It is high time for some competitors to cut it down to size, before its too late.
You see, the Tzars were far worse than anything Stalin ever did, and for much, much longer, but Western history (for reasons purely coincidental - I am sure, ha!) somehow neglects to highlight (never you mind to trumpet from every roof, like it does with the Communist abuses) their countless purges, mass exterminations, internal deportations and endless famines, combined with an occasional idiotic war for some royal cousin's pride, all while maintaining a system of utter slavery where 90%+ population lived in hovels as de-facto property of the less then 1%.
That is why the Revolution occurred. If the majority of Russians were not so oppressed and abused, the Communists would have found little fertile ground for their ideology to grow, but Russia was the place where the majority despaired under the yoke of their "betters". And so that majority of Russians supported the Reds. And the rest is history.
I am completely with you on that one. It took me many years to loose my illusions of youth about any sort of "justice" or "meritocracy" as applicable to our societies. These days if I were ever to be placed in the position of these dudes, the only difference between me and them would have been the scale of my demands (they were just waaaay too meek) and an elaborate exit strategy. In short, either you are in all the way and plan for the inevitable hasty and elaborate (and thus very expensive) exit, or you do not play along at all. Anything else is just stupidity of small-time crooks who go to jail for 20 years over stealing some pathetic sum of few thousands bucks.
But then again they were lulled into complacency by the very fact that they were working with Bernie the Financial Star, who appeared to an untrained eye as just "too big to fall", he with all of his apparent connections and stature (and the fact that SEC has been deflected on multiple occasions only reinforced that impression in his code monkeys and other lackeys). With my life's experience with the worshippers of Mammon and the corporate dystopia, I would have known better.
Keep in mind however that Christianity is a double-edged sword, as the Bible was carefully crafted to endorse a strict caste hierarchy, with feudal and patriarchal orders particularly in mind. That is why it was repeatedly used over the centuries as a tool (and a justification) of oppression by tyrants innumerable, who all claimed that they were simply recreating the Biblical order in the image of the "kingdom of Heaven" (with the particular emphasis on the term "kingdom").
At least that is the interpretation which the hordes of highly-motivated theologians in the service of pyramidal schemes such as the Catholic pope-tipped one or various ones with crown-wearing jerks at the apex came up with.
So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.
Neither was I.
I asked the thing a simple question, pertinent to the minds of many: "How to get rich quick?" and it went on about some nonsense about surnames of "Quick" and "Rich" and how many of these there are in the US...
I mean, yes it was a joke but seriously, this "semantic" search engine is incapable of doing even most basic natural language parsing, something that AI research projects were capable of back in the 1960s, instead assuming that whatever you type is a list of individual terms. And then, instead of trying to clarify the context, the thing returns wild guesses which it tries to pass as "results", despite the fact that it is horribly wrong as to the whole domain of the query, never you mind specifics. This is of course far worse from the point of view of design of AI systems then simply returning an "insufficient data" or "scope too large" type of message, as it is indicative of a system incapable of knowing its own limitations.
This of course applies to many other queries I tried, where the ratio of "wild shot in the dark" to "result of logical induction" in the "results" was about 100:1.
Words "pathetic" and "next to useless" come to mind when looking at this Wolfram-Ego-Megalomania.. err... Alpha-and-Omega thing.
With all that said, I can confidently say that I have absolutely no idea how valid this survey is. It seems pretty legitimate to me but I haven't exactly scruitinized it either.
The "study" was conducted by methodology unknown, includes no references to raw data and goes completely against publicly available data (which many posters on this thread provided references to, such as the lists of CERT advisories and the like). This, combined with the fact that the company seems financially motivated to produce pro-Microsoft propaganda, leads sane observers to dismiss the thing out of hand.
So I'm assuming you don't trust surveys sponsored by rivals of MS either, right?
Why, yes! The value of a survey is in its methodology and 3rd-party verifiability, not in who produced the thing. Science and all that, no?
Lets do a little math. Good video over the net is 2 Mbps for Netflix. At that rate, this is ~9 hours of video a DAY before you get to the 250 GB cap. Do you watch 9 hours of video a DAY over netflix's service?
Your "math" is full of unwarranted assumptions. Chief amongst them the mother's-basement-dwelling single nerd's view-point. Lets try this with a family of 4 using Hulu/Netflix/iTunes/what-not combo to watch TV, movies, sports, buy music, get Anime etc. That's slightly over 2 hours a day per person. Not so "unreasonable" anymore, is it now? And 2 hours a day for kids/teenagers is somewhat a conservative estimation (and am I not master of understatement or what?).
You give a single data point - NSDAP. That's hardly enough to jump to conclusions.
Not at all. NSDAP is simply most prominent and clear-cut in recent history. There was also the Japanese Empire (a supremacist race-based entity, much of which ideology still permeates Japan), the British Empire with its "white man's burden", the USA throughout much of its history (USA is a complex case but frequently with a pronounced supremacist motive, recently very ascendant) and many earlier empires and ideologies. I also mentioned modern day supremacist ideology of Zionism.
First of all, please check out "honorary Aryan".
All supremacist ideologies allow for the "useful tool" exception in the form of a second-class, not-quite-but-good-enough "honorary" membership (revocable at a moment's notice, unlike "real" membership in the in-crowd). That does not change their key element in the slightest, it is merely a ploy to allow better control of the "inferiors" by the "superiors", by allowing a make-believe "promotion", of which only the deluded fool being "promoted" could be proud of, while everwhere around him his "superiors" would pretend acceptance while holding back their disgust behind sour smiles.
Good modern example is the Israeli Arab "citizenship" and its attendant "democracy", complete with special license plates so that these "honorary citizens" could be better appreciated...
All that you said about supremacist ideologies holds true for them - as far as both NBP and a libertarian white supremacist are concerned, a Black cannot become White (and is therefore always inferior). They do not allow you to change sides across those borders.
In that case they are supremacists and their other ideologies are of secondary status as these "libertarians" would rather have a Stalinist government than be equal to a black man or those Bolsheviks would rather slave at a 19th century-style capitalist enterprise then accept a black "comrade".
A movement doesn't have to have a single core defining element - I would define such as one the movement will not ever compromise on, under any circumstances - and there can perfectly be more than one such thing.
In the case of the Nazis and similar movements there was only the idea of their inherent supremacy that was constant throughout their history. All other policies came and went as become convenient, chiefly because ego-stroking was all there really was to that ideology. Everything else could be shaped to attract followers or to consolidate power. Hitler, for example, easily disposed of the militant socialists when they became an obstacle to his consolidation of power during the Night of the Long Knives. There was never any loyalty in the NSDAP to any particular ideology outside of the idea that they were "chosen" for a "manifest destiny", to rule as supreme beings over the whole world.
Then, of course, you have to distinguish one "supremacist" group which promotes armed worker struggle and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat (as e.g. NBP does) from another "supremacist" group that is essentially libertarian in its economic policies (many American Nazi are that). Their philosophical differences are so fundamental that they would consider each other far more important enemies than, say, some centrist party - lumping them together seems counter-productive.
No, none of these movements are "supremacist". The key element of supremacist ideologies is that one cannot move from the "inferior" group to the "superior" group. Non-Arians could not become Arians, Blacks could not become Whites, etc and so on. All of the movements you describe, such as the Bolsheviks, do allow for one to change sides. An ex-capitalist can become a communist. A Statist turn into a libertarian and so on and on.
Okay; so what do you call a political movement with strong nationalist and/or racist component, which otherwise strictly adheres to classic strong state socialist and perhaps even communist policies (class struggle and dictatorship of the proletariat, prohibition on private property and commerce, etc) - but only within the nationality/ethnicity/race that it designates as superior? You yourself claim that NSDAP was not like that either, so such groups cannot be Nazi proper by your definition. And you also say that they aren't socialist. Fascism doesn't quite fit the bill either. Then, what are they?
You call that movement "supremacist". As this, the supposed superiority of its chosen members and not its organization within that group, is its core defining element, everything else being merely secondary. Also, fascist policies had nothing whatsoever to do with Communism, or "class struggle", as the the whole idea of Fascism was predicated upon creating a kind of separation of classes, each governed within its own circle of "corpora" (the term used by Mussolini - which is why fascists were sometimes called "corporatists" and where the term "fascist" originates, from the Italian for "a bundle" to represent the unification of these "corpora"). In fact the communists were the arch enemies of fascists in Italy and Germany both. A significant fraction of the victims of the concentration camps were German communists.
It is also worth pointing out that there are many other supremacist movements around trying to masquerade as something else. Zionism for example immediately springs to mind.
No, it's you who has got private property confused with personal property. Personal property is fine in both socialism and communism. Private property which isn't personal is not fine in either.
That is total hogwash. And pointing to an unsourced (and disputed) Wikipedia page does not bolster your argument any. And even that confused Wikipedia page refers to "some Socialist philosophies".
Socialism is supposed to be a "more just" society, where wealth is distributed strictly according to one's contribution to said society, and is supposed to be achievable today (by force if necessary). More importantly, socialism does not preclude the existence of classes. On the other hand, communism is an utopian society where wealth is abundant (no scarcity) and therefore there's no need to ration it; consequently, it is also classless (everyone can at any given moment "own" more than he could possibly ever need).
More nonsense. I am starting to believe that you the kind of personality who routinely makes shit up so that he can pretend that he always "wins" his arguments, no matter what the facts. These "definitions" are total bullshit. Communism is a sub-genre of Socialism, and so one cannot claim that Socialism allows or dis-allows class based society. Some variants of Socialism, such as Communism, aim for a class-less society. Some do not! As I keep repeating, Socialism is a loose collection of ideologies attempting to address perceived injustices of Capitalism (and Feudalism). In that set of philosophies there are many that range from extremes of abolition of private property on one hand, to progressive taxation on the other. Communism is just but one sampling point in the spectrum of Socialist ideas. That is why Socialism, as a whole, does not necessarily forbid private property, nor does it demand central planning or even that all means of production are communal.
Communism doesn't need money because there's no need for rationing. It has nothing to do with having/not having property.
Nonsense. There is no such thing possible as natural resources are not infinite and even Marx knew it. He did downplay their importance in his Das Kapital, but that does not mean that he was pretending that rationing was not to be present in his system.
NSDAP was called "German's Worker Party" before Hitler even joined, and their early programmes were unabashedly socialist (some socialist claim that they weren't because they had a strong nationalist component, but I do not see why socialism cannot be nationalist or even racist)
That is because "racist socialism" is an oxymoron. You clearly cannot have a "just" society that is based on racism (by any sane definition of "justice") and social justice is the core element of all Socialist ideologies. When people talk about Socialist elements of NSDAP's ideology they do so in a very narrow context of some of its policies. On the whole, in practice, NSDAP was not Socialist at all, but it used the "Socialist" label to attract following from disgruntled workers (while at the same time pandering to their supposed enemies, the industrialists). In short, it was a scam to attain power by playing both ends against the middle.
It seems that your confusion over the matter as a whole really stems from your misunderstanding of what communism actually is (or, in practice, what it was supposed to be). Do yourself a favor - go read the primary sources: Marx and Lenin.
Don't you bullshit me. You haven't read Das Kapital (in all of its mind-numbingly boring, gory detail). I have.
I'm afraid you're confusing communists with Bolsheviks now. Bolsheviks were the faction of the Russian Communist party which decided in favor of armed struggle.
Oh give it up. There were many Communist movements in the 19th an
Their definition of socialism, however, always revolved around lack of concept of private property ownership - either because all property was owned by the state - and via it, collectively, by the people - or because it was collectively owned by the commune directly - as in anarcho-socialism
You've got Communism confused with Socialism. It is Communism that dispenses with private property, not Socialism. That is easy to see as all of the Soviet Block countries (including USSR) had both private property (people's cars, tv-sets etc) and used money (which is not present in Communist ideology at all). Socialist models do not forbid money, nor private property, although they have a lot to say about allowed sizes of enterprises, allocation of national resources, means of large scale production, social safety nets and the like. This is also the very reason why Hitler's NSDAP could have "socialist" in its name while at the same time being backed by the industrialists like Krupp. The Nazi rendition of "Socialism" had nothing whatsoever to do with abolishment of private property.
As I said before, Socialism is merely a loose collection of various ideas with the same theme of attempting to address problems of Capitalism, while Communism is the hard-core abolishment of anything even remotely smacking of private property, which in practice meant that Communism was never implemented on the large scale, even in places like USSR (hint: the Rubel never went away).
Mixed economies were never considered socialist by socialists. Any private ownership of land, or of means of production, was universally considered anti-socialist by socialists of all inclinations, even those that denounced armed struggle.
Again, you've got Communists mixed up with Socialists, which is very common with people raised on the confused mumbo-jumbo of ideologies that was the Soviet state. It was the Communists which were hard-core opponents of mixed economies and who also fought with the Socialists (whom they considered uncommitted weaklings, unwilling to take the Revolution to its logical ends) over the issue.
Socialism is when all production is directly controlled and owned by the state, and free enterprise in any form is forbidden. High taxes != socialism; and not that Canadian taxes are all that high, in fact.
You (as probably most Russians) weren't paying attention to your indoctrination classes at school. The ideologues in the USSR (and most of Eastern Europe) always insisted that their rendition of Socialism was a step on the road to Communism (which was always just around the corner) and which is why their idea of Socialism was very close to that of Communism. This however does not mean that Socialism fits your definition, in fact Socialism is merely a loose collection of ideas all revolving around addressing flaws of capitalist societies. That is why there are many variants of it ranging from the Soviet-style centrally-planed economies via so-called "market socialism" and all the way to "mixed economies" and the like. That is why Canadian economy (being a mixed model) has (admittedly rather small) Socialist elements, chief amongst them being Universal Single-payer Health-care.
Canada (and most European states) is a welfare state. It's still capitalist through and through, and you have full freedom to go and earn as much money for yourself as you can and want to do; it's just that part of that money (and not a bigger part) goes towards a safety net for the rest of the citizens. Calling that "socialist" is highly misleading (and I know that you probably used that word because many Americans use it that way, so it's really directed more towards them).
A "welfare state" is simply a state that uses a mixed Capitalist-Socialist model, Capitalist in the majority of areas, Socialist in the area of the "social safety net".
Given that you are claiming that a CD is indistinguishable from a flash drive is indistinguishable from a human brain, I would be careful about bandying about terms like "mendacious sophistry".
Speaking of mendacious sophistry.... choosing a CD or a flash drive does not have any bearing on what is being stored! A Charles Dickens novel does not magically turn into the collected works of Karl Marx just because you put it on a CD instead of a hard drive. In fact the whole point of universal media is that the same information can be stored on any type of media irrespective of the underlying storage mechanism, be it dimples in plastic or chemical bonds in synapses.
Yes, it should. Most humans have no difficulty in seeing the difference in making a photocopy of a book and reading a book.
Photocopy? You mean a copy of the textual information within a book? So people with really good ("photographic") memory are obliged to forget what they read as not to offend? What if one such person commits the book to memory and then writes it down? Still a "photocopy"?
But I tell you what. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you're not the complete idiot your posts have implied. By all means, take your argument into a legal setting--a great way might be to write a book, then sue people for reading it.
Mendacious. Sophistry. The point of the whole discussion is not that people would be sued for reading, but that they will be sued for "unauthorized" reading. Which is already occurring since most "new" media prohibits rentals or sharing of books as the intention is to eliminate the concept of a "library" from public life.
Once you've triumphed, I'll accept your notion that copies in a computer needing to be authorized that it "must logically lead to convictions for 'unauthorized copies' in your mind".
Thank you for accepting my "notions" since clearly the "triumph" occured already (although not by my hand) as DMCA and similar laws combined with DRM schemes (such as that used in Kindle) already establish a regime of "authorizations" for reading books (authorizations which can be retroactively revoked as the case of the book "1984" on Kindle so pointedly demonstrated).
Please explain how the one thing "must logically" lead to the other?
Because "copy" is a "copy". Fundamental properties of information dictate that a series of binary signals is not distinguishable on the base of the wires/beams/dendrites/what-not it travels through, only by its contents. Trying to pretend that information stored in your head by means electro-chemical is somehow qualitatively different than modulation of magnetic fields, laser beams or electrons in silicone or ink on paper is simply mendacious sophistry.
Should it be any different, then memorizing a book and then writing it down on paper would be quite legal as a "copy" was not created during the reading and since the final outcome is merely a copy of what is in one's head, which would legally be a wholly distinct entity from the supposed "original" book. In other words one cannot have the cake and eat it too. Either reading a book creates a copy in one's mind (or technically even more copies as the brain processes the data) and in which case the contents of one's brain is subject to "copyright", or it does not, in which case writing a book from memory does not involve copying of the original book.
This will become quite patently obvious once mind-enhancing implants become available (which is only a matter of time). Then their users would be able to copy books, movies and what not by simply reading them and/or watching them. And if the implants are given the ability to communicate with other electronics, they will also be able to copy those "experiences" to others with implants (or even computer users without them). I would like to see what the greed monkeys would try to do then to protect their "intellectual property". Judging by the way the stupidity is galloping throughout the "law industry" they will probably try to monitor people's thoughts and appropriate their experiences, deciding which are "unauthorized", or likely even more draconian "solutions" to combat... "movie stealing"... and "terrorism"... and "drug use"... and whatever other authoritarian bogeyman can be conjured (note that all of these "wars" have quite a symbiotic relationship).
I think what they are saying is that everytime you run an unauthorized copy of a program, you infringe its copyright.
This, in fact, is the logical consequence of the absurdity that is "copyright". Ultimately, when you look at something, the photons bouncing off its surface (a copy) enter your retinas whereby they trigger electro-chemical impulses (a copy) in your receptor cells and travel down axons to other cells (a copy) and end up bouncing around your brain (multiple copies).
As one can easily see, the argument of "unauthorized copies" in any medium, once precedents are established (as they already apparently are), must logically lead to convictions for "unauthorized copies" in your mind (also known as "illegal thoughts"). Otherwise some "copies" are unequal to others based on arbitrary rules pulled out of some law-monkey's ass.
This will become even more apparent once technology advances to the point where computer/brain integration will become feasible and deployed on a large scale in form of mind-enhancing implants, thus blurring the distinction between a "copy" in one's brain or one's implants.
Copyrights (as all so-called "Intellectual Property") are illogical, nonsensical make-believe results of greed overpowering common sense and as the time goes on and technology progresses, their utterly moronic nature will only become more and more odiously apparent.
They have become insanely and hideously expensive to build primarily because of the influence of your sign-waving hippie-hordes and mouth foaming idiotic masses. The actual cost to build a nuclear power plant would be a secondary consideration if it weren't for the likewise insane regulatory requirements, which if you ask me are slanted disproportionately at nuclear power. Ergo, the sign wavers won, and sanity lost.
You are oversimplifying things. The problem with comparing nuclear power and some other dirty source of pollution and radiation, like the coal industry, is that the nuclear power requires dynamic safety constraints, while coal is merely a long-term cumulative problem. That is nearly every commercial power nuclear reactor has a mode of failure that is potentially catastrophic on a vast scale (see Chernobyl) while even the largest and most convoluted coal power plant can, at worst, blow a boiler or two. So while long term implications of safe use of nuclear power are indeed more advantageous then that of many other types of power based on fossil fuels, it is the worst-case scenarios that make nuclear power stand out head and shoulders above all the others in terms of potential danger.
Japan is prone to earthquakes, and there haven't been significant problems.
You are confused. Japan's nuclear reactors are plagued by a very long list of failures, scandals (complete with outright falsification of inspection data), radiation leaks and other mini-disasters. The notorious Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant is a handy one-stop shopping spot for all of these. Japan is also a nation with a long tradition of large-scale corporate/government cover-ups, to the point that whole communities were poisoned by chemicals dumped by large companies into rivers for decades, causing tens of thousands of deaths, birth defects and illnesses, with tacit assistance of the government. Trying to use Japan as an example of successful nuclear power industry does your argument no favours.
There are some in Europe and other places who admire the Empire for its ruthless power and wealth, and so they wish to be a part of it (particularly those who fear the "brown and yellow hordes" of the world or have a financial stake in the Empire) and would take their nations to war alongside the Empire with total disregard of the wishes of most of their countrymen, just like there are some within in who despair at what has happened to their once revolutionary nation and how far from the ideals of their Constitution they ended up, but who have no power to stop the descent into the abyss.
Just because the intelligence that leads to the strikes is secret (no doubt to protect the details of the humint sources and also of the drones' capabilities) doesn't mean that it isn't there. The drones and their weapons are a limited resource, and even the USAF aren't stupid enough to waste millions of pounds blowing someone up because of mere suspicion.
I find it quite telling how easily you believe, wholly uncorroborated and entirely self-serving explanations of USAF, the same USAF who has been repeatedly known to hide and obfuscate facts in the many cases of blown-up weddings and mass carnage amongst villagers.
How fortunate it is, then, that the USA hasn't. Their enemies deliberately target civilians; the USAF only kills civilians by accident, often due to bad intelligence or weapon malfunction.
Unfortunately empirical evidence points to the contrary. The frequency and extent of civilian deaths is up to this point far greater on the part of the US (that including indiscriminate airborne bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, people killed at checkpoints for "looking suspicious" or "driving to close", use of corporate trigger-happy mercenaries and on and on and on). The tally is horribly unbalanced, with the US "ahead" by a few orders of magnitude in this sick farce.
So you can whine and moan about how supposedly lofty and pure the US goals are, but it is the actions of the US forces and associated mercenaries that tell a quite different story. This arrangement is actually one of the hallmarks of US foreign policy: its called Hypocrisy. It also comes with a handy set of double-standards whereby (amongst many other things) a drone firing a missile into a wedding is an act of "courage", while some maniac blowing himself up under the tracks of a US APC is a "coward".
However, trying to paint the US armed forces as the same as a bunch of terrorists is disingenuous at best.
Only to a hard-core tribalist USian. To a majority of the population of the planet its a simple fact of life: US is an Empire and "terrorism" is a tool of warfare eagerly employed by both sides, the rag-tag insurgents and the Imperial Centurions alike.
How do we exit the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without causing immense problems?
There is no way to do so. Consequences of the actions by US will arrive in one form or another. That is the basic problems with Empires, they are like Ponzi schemes, they appear to function only as the scheme grows. When it stagnates, or has to contract, massive and catastrophic repercussions abound.
The only thing you can do is to get out of the Imperial racket sooner, rather then later. It hurts less and the economic and societal collapse in the Empire is not as severe. You are already getting a preview of what is going to happen to the US economy when the US-centred economic Empire starts to sputter. Imagine what it will be like when it folds.
How do we in the future make sure that few hate us?
Easy. Stop trying to be an Empire. Focus on your own defence and internal affairs. Cut your Imperial Military budget so that it is in line with the rest of the world - which is becoming harder and harder as military spending is one of the pillars of make-believe Imperial "economies" and at this point US is nearly wholly dependant on it.
In short: If you stop meddling violently in affairs of others, a vast majority of them will stop meddling in yours (there are always kooks out there, but it is far easier to garner the sympathy and co-operation of the population of the planet to oppose them if you are genuinely a victim).
Note that this does not mean that the US cannot help deter international conflicts, as a part of a broader team of developed nations, but it means that you no longer get to play a self-appointed, swaggering Sheriff of the planet.
Actually, I hope that you take over and we will go back to being isolationist which as a policy worked out well for us in both world wars. I realize that most of this post is rather troll like but please forgive this since I have had enough second-guessing by a large percentage of the world every time we turn around.
Do you notice the level of brainwashing you were subjected to in your own statement? The unquestioned assumption that the US is somehow "needed" as a thug-in-chief and that someone else would have to "take over" its role? That is the very lie at the core of the Imperial ideology. The "manifest destiny" that "forces you", "unwillingly", "hesitantly" to "do your duty" to.... preemptively assault others who, purely by accident, no doubt, just so happen to threaten the interests of US-based elites.
Hypocrisy, dual-standards coupled with ruthlessness, but also combined with realization of how much better you could have been should you actually do as you preach, is what really makes you such a despised nation. Other nations are guilty of many of the same transgressions as the US is, but the US is by far the most obnoxious in this area, never ceasing to blow its own horn about its supposed global "leadership" and great many ways in which all should bow before its "obvious" superiority (while at the same time trying to play a hapless victim when it suits).
Slashdot Mirror
You are confused. This has nothing whatsoever to do with any nonsense about information "wanting" to be "free".
As to privacy, in practice perfect privacy is impossible. And when the measures you have instituted to protect yourself are insufficient, game is essentially over. So the complaint is not that someone has managed to obtain the information and release it to the public (at which point it is too late to put the genie back in the bottle) but the fact that random governments are using this as an excuse to institute a crackdown on unapproved view-points or dissemination of inconvenient information. In this case protecting a quite likely rather crooked business-woman from exposure at the expense of a less-connected Wikipedia contributor.
This is not the first case of such an activity I heard of, most famous case known to me being of US politicians staging BDSM parties with hookers, goings-on of which their wives were of course unaware. A blackmailer threatened to expose them to their spouses, at which point Secret Service stepped in, arrested the blackmailer and made sure that the wives never found out. Nor do we know the names of the politicians in question, only that the SS was "successful" (a fact which they proudly announced in a 1992 TV series documenting their exploits - all names changed and no other info ever released). So as you can see "privacy" is thought by various governments not as a "right" but as a "privilege" available to some select individuals, most notably the "Masters of the Universe" in three-piece suits, loaded business people, well connected lawyers etc, but not available to mere commoners, such as Wikipedia editing shlobs.
Governments are supposed to be held to different, much-higher standards than private individuals, not the other way around.
In related news:
Signed: Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, Chinese Communist Party, The Saudi Royal Family at al.
As evidenced by heretical thoughts and actions, actions against The Party, The State and The Leader!
Most certainly, we should not become a society of whiny infants who have to be protected from reality by the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-digitally-surveying-all-the-time, Daddy Government who decides what is and what is not "proper" for us to see and read. For our own good, naturally.
Did you ever occur to you that every tyrannical machinery of censorship and suppression started as an effort to "protect" the poor, helpless us from some "evil" too big and great for us to confront, lest we be "mentally harmed", and so we are to perform the adult equivalent of hiding under the blankets and listening for Mommy to come tell us what we - oh so dearly - want to hear?
That is a fallacy. A lot of tiny (compared to the size of the Internet) "secret societies" are ineffective because the odds of individuals in these back-water bushes actually having the stuff that you want are minuscule. If people are actually foolish to believe that hiding in some pseudo-"secret" mouse-hole is going to improve things, then the imaginary-property crowd would be victorious by the means of the one of the oldest tricks in the book: "divide and conquer".
Yea, it was snowing these.
Look up the term "contributing factor", idiot.
Me and a group of my buddies who were big fans of the Battlezone were actually quite disappointed with the Battlezone 2. The game mechanics and the general feel of the game (not to mention very awkward controls - specially on tracked vehicles) resulted with the game flopping with most of the players of the Activisions' original re-make.
And as to the following, many games have hard-core addicts who try to keep them alive long past the "best before" date. Even the original Battlezone still has servers running maintained by some truly die-hard types.
Even though I loathe Microsoft's entire mentality and their sociopathic business tricks, I think having more major search engines in the play is better than having yet another de-facto monopoly gaining unbreakable (for all practical purposes) grip on many aspects of our lives.
The optimal for us, the consumers, solution is a set of at least 5 companies constantly at each other's throats but never actually able to gain upper hand. Google is already getting far too big for its own breaches and has become a power ultimately even more dangerous to the general public than Microsoft ever was (and don't get me even started at the laughable "don't be evil" corporate PR stunt).
It is high time for some competitors to cut it down to size, before its too late.
Yes, improved.
You see, the Tzars were far worse than anything Stalin ever did, and for much, much longer, but Western history (for reasons purely coincidental - I am sure, ha!) somehow neglects to highlight (never you mind to trumpet from every roof, like it does with the Communist abuses) their countless purges, mass exterminations, internal deportations and endless famines, combined with an occasional idiotic war for some royal cousin's pride, all while maintaining a system of utter slavery where 90%+ population lived in hovels as de-facto property of the less then 1%.
That is why the Revolution occurred. If the majority of Russians were not so oppressed and abused, the Communists would have found little fertile ground for their ideology to grow, but Russia was the place where the majority despaired under the yoke of their "betters". And so that majority of Russians supported the Reds. And the rest is history.
I am completely with you on that one. It took me many years to loose my illusions of youth about any sort of "justice" or "meritocracy" as applicable to our societies. These days if I were ever to be placed in the position of these dudes, the only difference between me and them would have been the scale of my demands (they were just waaaay too meek) and an elaborate exit strategy. In short, either you are in all the way and plan for the inevitable hasty and elaborate (and thus very expensive) exit, or you do not play along at all. Anything else is just stupidity of small-time crooks who go to jail for 20 years over stealing some pathetic sum of few thousands bucks.
But then again they were lulled into complacency by the very fact that they were working with Bernie the Financial Star, who appeared to an untrained eye as just "too big to fall", he with all of his apparent connections and stature (and the fact that SEC has been deflected on multiple occasions only reinforced that impression in his code monkeys and other lackeys). With my life's experience with the worshippers of Mammon and the corporate dystopia, I would have known better.
Keep in mind however that Christianity is a double-edged sword, as the Bible was carefully crafted to endorse a strict caste hierarchy, with feudal and patriarchal orders particularly in mind. That is why it was repeatedly used over the centuries as a tool (and a justification) of oppression by tyrants innumerable, who all claimed that they were simply recreating the Biblical order in the image of the "kingdom of Heaven" (with the particular emphasis on the term "kingdom").
At least that is the interpretation which the hordes of highly-motivated theologians in the service of pyramidal schemes such as the Catholic pope-tipped one or various ones with crown-wearing jerks at the apex came up with.
Neither was I.
I asked the thing a simple question, pertinent to the minds of many: "How to get rich quick?" and it went on about some nonsense about surnames of "Quick" and "Rich" and how many of these there are in the US...
I mean, yes it was a joke but seriously, this "semantic" search engine is incapable of doing even most basic natural language parsing, something that AI research projects were capable of back in the 1960s, instead assuming that whatever you type is a list of individual terms. And then, instead of trying to clarify the context, the thing returns wild guesses which it tries to pass as "results", despite the fact that it is horribly wrong as to the whole domain of the query, never you mind specifics. This is of course far worse from the point of view of design of AI systems then simply returning an "insufficient data" or "scope too large" type of message, as it is indicative of a system incapable of knowing its own limitations.
This of course applies to many other queries I tried, where the ratio of "wild shot in the dark" to "result of logical induction" in the "results" was about 100:1.
Words "pathetic" and "next to useless" come to mind when looking at this Wolfram-Ego-Megalomania .. err ... Alpha-and-Omega thing.
The "study" was conducted by methodology unknown, includes no references to raw data and goes completely against publicly available data (which many posters on this thread provided references to, such as the lists of CERT advisories and the like). This, combined with the fact that the company seems financially motivated to produce pro-Microsoft propaganda, leads sane observers to dismiss the thing out of hand.
Why, yes! The value of a survey is in its methodology and 3rd-party verifiability, not in who produced the thing. Science and all that, no?
Your "math" is full of unwarranted assumptions. Chief amongst them the mother's-basement-dwelling single nerd's view-point. Lets try this with a family of 4 using Hulu/Netflix/iTunes/what-not combo to watch TV, movies, sports, buy music, get Anime etc. That's slightly over 2 hours a day per person. Not so "unreasonable" anymore, is it now? And 2 hours a day for kids/teenagers is somewhat a conservative estimation (and am I not master of understatement or what?).
Not at all. NSDAP is simply most prominent and clear-cut in recent history. There was also the Japanese Empire (a supremacist race-based entity, much of which ideology still permeates Japan), the British Empire with its "white man's burden", the USA throughout much of its history (USA is a complex case but frequently with a pronounced supremacist motive, recently very ascendant) and many earlier empires and ideologies. I also mentioned modern day supremacist ideology of Zionism.
All supremacist ideologies allow for the "useful tool" exception in the form of a second-class, not-quite-but-good-enough "honorary" membership (revocable at a moment's notice, unlike "real" membership in the in-crowd). That does not change their key element in the slightest, it is merely a ploy to allow better control of the "inferiors" by the "superiors", by allowing a make-believe "promotion", of which only the deluded fool being "promoted" could be proud of, while everwhere around him his "superiors" would pretend acceptance while holding back their disgust behind sour smiles.
Good modern example is the Israeli Arab "citizenship" and its attendant "democracy", complete with special license plates so that these "honorary citizens" could be better appreciated ...
In that case they are supremacists and their other ideologies are of secondary status as these "libertarians" would rather have a Stalinist government than be equal to a black man or those Bolsheviks would rather slave at a 19th century-style capitalist enterprise then accept a black "comrade".
In the case of the Nazis and similar movements there was only the idea of their inherent supremacy that was constant throughout their history. All other policies came and went as become convenient, chiefly because ego-stroking was all there really was to that ideology. Everything else could be shaped to attract followers or to consolidate power. Hitler, for example, easily disposed of the militant socialists when they became an obstacle to his consolidation of power during the Night of the Long Knives. There was never any loyalty in the NSDAP to any particular ideology outside of the idea that they were "chosen" for a "manifest destiny", to rule as supreme beings over the whole world.
No, none of these movements are "supremacist". The key element of supremacist ideologies is that one cannot move from the "inferior" group to the "superior" group. Non-Arians could not become Arians, Blacks could not become Whites, etc and so on. All of the movements you describe, such as the Bolsheviks, do allow for one to change sides. An ex-capitalist can become a communist. A Statist turn into a libertarian and so on and on.
You call that movement "supremacist". As this, the supposed superiority of its chosen members and not its organization within that group, is its core defining element, everything else being merely secondary. Also, fascist policies had nothing whatsoever to do with Communism, or "class struggle", as the the whole idea of Fascism was predicated upon creating a kind of separation of classes, each governed within its own circle of "corpora" (the term used by Mussolini - which is why fascists were sometimes called "corporatists" and where the term "fascist" originates, from the Italian for "a bundle" to represent the unification of these "corpora"). In fact the communists were the arch enemies of fascists in Italy and Germany both. A significant fraction of the victims of the concentration camps were German communists.
It is also worth pointing out that there are many other supremacist movements around trying to masquerade as something else. Zionism for example immediately springs to mind.
That is total hogwash. And pointing to an unsourced (and disputed) Wikipedia page does not bolster your argument any. And even that confused Wikipedia page refers to "some Socialist philosophies".
More nonsense. I am starting to believe that you the kind of personality who routinely makes shit up so that he can pretend that he always "wins" his arguments, no matter what the facts. These "definitions" are total bullshit. Communism is a sub-genre of Socialism, and so one cannot claim that Socialism allows or dis-allows class based society. Some variants of Socialism, such as Communism, aim for a class-less society. Some do not! As I keep repeating, Socialism is a loose collection of ideologies attempting to address perceived injustices of Capitalism (and Feudalism). In that set of philosophies there are many that range from extremes of abolition of private property on one hand, to progressive taxation on the other. Communism is just but one sampling point in the spectrum of Socialist ideas. That is why Socialism, as a whole, does not necessarily forbid private property, nor does it demand central planning or even that all means of production are communal.
Nonsense. There is no such thing possible as natural resources are not infinite and even Marx knew it. He did downplay their importance in his Das Kapital, but that does not mean that he was pretending that rationing was not to be present in his system.
That is because "racist socialism" is an oxymoron. You clearly cannot have a "just" society that is based on racism (by any sane definition of "justice") and social justice is the core element of all Socialist ideologies. When people talk about Socialist elements of NSDAP's ideology they do so in a very narrow context of some of its policies. On the whole, in practice, NSDAP was not Socialist at all, but it used the "Socialist" label to attract following from disgruntled workers (while at the same time pandering to their supposed enemies, the industrialists). In short, it was a scam to attain power by playing both ends against the middle.
Don't you bullshit me. You haven't read Das Kapital (in all of its mind-numbingly boring, gory detail). I have.
Oh give it up. There were many Communist movements in the 19th an
You've got Communism confused with Socialism. It is Communism that dispenses with private property, not Socialism. That is easy to see as all of the Soviet Block countries (including USSR) had both private property (people's cars, tv-sets etc) and used money (which is not present in Communist ideology at all). Socialist models do not forbid money, nor private property, although they have a lot to say about allowed sizes of enterprises, allocation of national resources, means of large scale production, social safety nets and the like. This is also the very reason why Hitler's NSDAP could have "socialist" in its name while at the same time being backed by the industrialists like Krupp. The Nazi rendition of "Socialism" had nothing whatsoever to do with abolishment of private property.
As I said before, Socialism is merely a loose collection of various ideas with the same theme of attempting to address problems of Capitalism, while Communism is the hard-core abolishment of anything even remotely smacking of private property, which in practice meant that Communism was never implemented on the large scale, even in places like USSR (hint: the Rubel never went away).
Again, you've got Communists mixed up with Socialists, which is very common with people raised on the confused mumbo-jumbo of ideologies that was the Soviet state. It was the Communists which were hard-core opponents of mixed economies and who also fought with the Socialists (whom they considered uncommitted weaklings, unwilling to take the Revolution to its logical ends) over the issue.
You (as probably most Russians) weren't paying attention to your indoctrination classes at school. The ideologues in the USSR (and most of Eastern Europe) always insisted that their rendition of Socialism was a step on the road to Communism (which was always just around the corner) and which is why their idea of Socialism was very close to that of Communism. This however does not mean that Socialism fits your definition, in fact Socialism is merely a loose collection of ideas all revolving around addressing flaws of capitalist societies. That is why there are many variants of it ranging from the Soviet-style centrally-planed economies via so-called "market socialism" and all the way to "mixed economies" and the like. That is why Canadian economy (being a mixed model) has (admittedly rather small) Socialist elements, chief amongst them being Universal Single-payer Health-care.
A "welfare state" is simply a state that uses a mixed Capitalist-Socialist model, Capitalist in the majority of areas, Socialist in the area of the "social safety net".
Speaking of mendacious sophistry .... choosing a CD or a flash drive does not have any bearing on what is being stored! A Charles Dickens novel does not magically turn into the collected works of Karl Marx just because you put it on a CD instead of a hard drive. In fact the whole point of universal media is that the same information can be stored on any type of media irrespective of the underlying storage mechanism, be it dimples in plastic or chemical bonds in synapses.
Photocopy? You mean a copy of the textual information within a book? So people with really good ("photographic") memory are obliged to forget what they read as not to offend? What if one such person commits the book to memory and then writes it down? Still a "photocopy"?
Mendacious. Sophistry. The point of the whole discussion is not that people would be sued for reading, but that they will be sued for "unauthorized" reading. Which is already occurring since most "new" media prohibits rentals or sharing of books as the intention is to eliminate the concept of a "library" from public life.
Thank you for accepting my "notions" since clearly the "triumph" occured already (although not by my hand) as DMCA and similar laws combined with DRM schemes (such as that used in Kindle) already establish a regime of "authorizations" for reading books (authorizations which can be retroactively revoked as the case of the book "1984" on Kindle so pointedly demonstrated).
Because "copy" is a "copy". Fundamental properties of information dictate that a series of binary signals is not distinguishable on the base of the wires/beams/dendrites/what-not it travels through, only by its contents. Trying to pretend that information stored in your head by means electro-chemical is somehow qualitatively different than modulation of magnetic fields, laser beams or electrons in silicone or ink on paper is simply mendacious sophistry.
Should it be any different, then memorizing a book and then writing it down on paper would be quite legal as a "copy" was not created during the reading and since the final outcome is merely a copy of what is in one's head, which would legally be a wholly distinct entity from the supposed "original" book. In other words one cannot have the cake and eat it too. Either reading a book creates a copy in one's mind (or technically even more copies as the brain processes the data) and in which case the contents of one's brain is subject to "copyright", or it does not, in which case writing a book from memory does not involve copying of the original book.
This will become quite patently obvious once mind-enhancing implants become available (which is only a matter of time). Then their users would be able to copy books, movies and what not by simply reading them and/or watching them. And if the implants are given the ability to communicate with other electronics, they will also be able to copy those "experiences" to others with implants (or even computer users without them). I would like to see what the greed monkeys would try to do then to protect their "intellectual property". Judging by the way the stupidity is galloping throughout the "law industry" they will probably try to monitor people's thoughts and appropriate their experiences, deciding which are "unauthorized", or likely even more draconian "solutions" to combat ... "movie stealing" ... and "terrorism" ... and "drug use" ... and whatever other authoritarian bogeyman can be conjured (note that all of these "wars" have quite a symbiotic relationship).
This, in fact, is the logical consequence of the absurdity that is "copyright". Ultimately, when you look at something, the photons bouncing off its surface (a copy) enter your retinas whereby they trigger electro-chemical impulses (a copy) in your receptor cells and travel down axons to other cells (a copy) and end up bouncing around your brain (multiple copies).
As one can easily see, the argument of "unauthorized copies" in any medium, once precedents are established (as they already apparently are), must logically lead to convictions for "unauthorized copies" in your mind (also known as "illegal thoughts"). Otherwise some "copies" are unequal to others based on arbitrary rules pulled out of some law-monkey's ass.
This will become even more apparent once technology advances to the point where computer/brain integration will become feasible and deployed on a large scale in form of mind-enhancing implants, thus blurring the distinction between a "copy" in one's brain or one's implants.
Copyrights (as all so-called "Intellectual Property") are illogical, nonsensical make-believe results of greed overpowering common sense and as the time goes on and technology progresses, their utterly moronic nature will only become more and more odiously apparent.
You are oversimplifying things. The problem with comparing nuclear power and some other dirty source of pollution and radiation, like the coal industry, is that the nuclear power requires dynamic safety constraints, while coal is merely a long-term cumulative problem. That is nearly every commercial power nuclear reactor has a mode of failure that is potentially catastrophic on a vast scale (see Chernobyl) while even the largest and most convoluted coal power plant can, at worst, blow a boiler or two. So while long term implications of safe use of nuclear power are indeed more advantageous then that of many other types of power based on fossil fuels, it is the worst-case scenarios that make nuclear power stand out head and shoulders above all the others in terms of potential danger.
You are confused. Japan's nuclear reactors are plagued by a very long list of failures, scandals (complete with outright falsification of inspection data), radiation leaks and other mini-disasters. The notorious Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant is a handy one-stop shopping spot for all of these. Japan is also a nation with a long tradition of large-scale corporate/government cover-ups, to the point that whole communities were poisoned by chemicals dumped by large companies into rivers for decades, causing tens of thousands of deaths, birth defects and illnesses, with tacit assistance of the government. Trying to use Japan as an example of successful nuclear power industry does your argument no favours.
There are some in Europe and other places who admire the Empire for its ruthless power and wealth, and so they wish to be a part of it (particularly those who fear the "brown and yellow hordes" of the world or have a financial stake in the Empire) and would take their nations to war alongside the Empire with total disregard of the wishes of most of their countrymen, just like there are some within in who despair at what has happened to their once revolutionary nation and how far from the ideals of their Constitution they ended up, but who have no power to stop the descent into the abyss.
I find it quite telling how easily you believe, wholly uncorroborated and entirely self-serving explanations of USAF, the same USAF who has been repeatedly known to hide and obfuscate facts in the many cases of blown-up weddings and mass carnage amongst villagers.
Unfortunately empirical evidence points to the contrary. The frequency and extent of civilian deaths is up to this point far greater on the part of the US (that including indiscriminate airborne bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, people killed at checkpoints for "looking suspicious" or "driving to close", use of corporate trigger-happy mercenaries and on and on and on). The tally is horribly unbalanced, with the US "ahead" by a few orders of magnitude in this sick farce.
So you can whine and moan about how supposedly lofty and pure the US goals are, but it is the actions of the US forces and associated mercenaries that tell a quite different story. This arrangement is actually one of the hallmarks of US foreign policy: its called Hypocrisy. It also comes with a handy set of double-standards whereby (amongst many other things) a drone firing a missile into a wedding is an act of "courage", while some maniac blowing himself up under the tracks of a US APC is a "coward".
Only to a hard-core tribalist USian. To a majority of the population of the planet its a simple fact of life: US is an Empire and "terrorism" is a tool of warfare eagerly employed by both sides, the rag-tag insurgents and the Imperial Centurions alike.
There is no way to do so. Consequences of the actions by US will arrive in one form or another. That is the basic problems with Empires, they are like Ponzi schemes, they appear to function only as the scheme grows. When it stagnates, or has to contract, massive and catastrophic repercussions abound.
The only thing you can do is to get out of the Imperial racket sooner, rather then later. It hurts less and the economic and societal collapse in the Empire is not as severe. You are already getting a preview of what is going to happen to the US economy when the US-centred economic Empire starts to sputter. Imagine what it will be like when it folds.
Easy. Stop trying to be an Empire. Focus on your own defence and internal affairs. Cut your Imperial Military budget so that it is in line with the rest of the world - which is becoming harder and harder as military spending is one of the pillars of make-believe Imperial "economies" and at this point US is nearly wholly dependant on it.
In short: If you stop meddling violently in affairs of others, a vast majority of them will stop meddling in yours (there are always kooks out there, but it is far easier to garner the sympathy and co-operation of the population of the planet to oppose them if you are genuinely a victim).
Note that this does not mean that the US cannot help deter international conflicts, as a part of a broader team of developed nations, but it means that you no longer get to play a self-appointed, swaggering Sheriff of the planet.
Do you notice the level of brainwashing you were subjected to in your own statement? The unquestioned assumption that the US is somehow "needed" as a thug-in-chief and that someone else would have to "take over" its role? That is the very lie at the core of the Imperial ideology. The "manifest destiny" that "forces you", "unwillingly", "hesitantly" to "do your duty" to .... preemptively assault others who, purely by accident, no doubt, just so happen to threaten the interests of US-based elites.
Hypocrisy, dual-standards coupled with ruthlessness, but also combined with realization of how much better you could have been should you actually do as you preach, is what really makes you such a despised nation. Other nations are guilty of many of the same transgressions as the US is, but the US is by far the most obnoxious in this area, never ceasing to blow its own horn about its supposed global "leadership" and great many ways in which all should bow before its "obvious" superiority (while at the same time trying to play a hapless victim when it suits).