Asymmetric warfare has been waged successfully numerous times throughout history, and the more weapons the general populace holds, the higher the chances of success.
The M1 would be rather useless in a civil war today anyways - it already is mostly useless in the war on terror as well. I used to serve in an armored unit by the way, and tank crews know very well that if they run into infantry, especially in an urban environment, they're fucked. This isn't command and conquer where you simply order your tank to run over the bad guy. It's actually rather trivial for dismounted units to disable tanks (that scene from Saving Private Ryan comes to mind, though today there are easier methods.) A well aimed bullet inside of the turret is good enough to disable that component. It still has a 50 cal and m240 at its disposal at this point, but for the remainder of the battle it isn't the devastatingly destructive force it was built to be.
The most effective weapon I think they would have in a civil war would be the same one that is the most effective in the war on terror: the drones. Drones have by and large replaced the M1. However unlike in the middle east, there are a lot more tools here that could be useful against those drones, and it would be quite a bit more difficult to determine friend from foe as well, which is critical for the success of a drone campaign.
In the end what would be required for pacification of any grassroots revolution is to take political control over the dissidents. That will be very hard to do if all of them are carrying small arms. Imagine sending police walking uniformed into a known hostile neighborhood, knocking on doors arresting people...yeah. And killing all of the dissidents wouldn't really win you any favors, especially if your goal is to have a functional economy afterwards.
In the early days, some states (I know New York was one of them) didn't have federal elections. Instead they voted for their state government, and then the state government would pick representatives, senators, and presidential electors when it came time for federal elections.
So yeah, technically when it comes to matters of the federal election, the individual states have the right to make their own call about (for example) who can vote and who can't.
You may as well call this a wasted effort then. One group is fighting this, so why does the other need to get involved?
The ACLU has been very much just the lawyer arm of the democratic party, for good or bad. When you look at their history, if it is a civil liberty that the democratic party doesn't want, then the ACLU doesn't defend it.
The best indicator of this would be the copyright trolls. Hollywood basically owns the democratic party, and the ACLU doesn't seem to do much of anything about censorship that comes from the **AA.
That has more to do with how lazy and complacent most Americans are.
In the southwest US, particularly the hotter regions, it can be hard as hell to find anybody to do unskilled hard labor (e.g. trenching) because nobody wants to do it. However first or second generation Mexicans (especially illegals) are almost always willing to do it. I'm not trying to bait or troll here, it's just a fact.
Most Americans have this stupid attitude that some kinds of jobs are just somehow below them. I remember watching a documentary a while back where somebody was offering jobs at McDonalds to homeless people, and they balked at it as being below them, being perfectly content to just live at a homeless shelter with no income at all for the rest of their lives instead. It really is pathetic.
Would work in principle, but I don't think these little planes have either the speed or the agility. If it became a problem, the drones to then be equipped with some kind of heat sensors that could make avoiding them become rather trivial, at which point their best hope would be to somehow train birds to fly into these drones.
GPS spoofing - I don't know for certain, but I don't think it would be difficult at all to add RSA signing to the timing beacons, even if they did it to existing satellites in orbit. Maybe not the older members of the constellation (which are constantly being phased out,) but the newer ones for sure. Something akin to that is long overdue anyways. As far as all out jamming goes, there is already ample technology available to allow navigation in small areas without the need for GPS, just enough to seek and destroy targets in a given area after reconnaissance photography has already been taken (which it presumably has been, unless we're just blindly picking targets.)
Unless Al-Qaeda can secure some automated targeting systems of its own (i.e. unmanned interceptors) their chances of waging a successful war against these drones is rather non-existent.
These drones are pretty fucking scary to be anywhere near the receiving end of, and if you ask me, the fact that being in Al-Qaeda puts you in their crosshairs is a pretty good deterrent to recruitment - or at least it should be to any sane person (but the religious viewpoints of its members sort of rules out sanity.) I think at best this might be their way of saying "we're doing something about the drones" when in reality they are probably making approximately zero progress, but saying they are making progress might be good enough to help with recruitment efforts.
I think that is genuinely the problem with this trial. Those who believe Zimmerman was guilty tend to believe one or all of the following:
Zimmerman simply followed and then shot Trayvon. Trayvon was being followed, which gave him the right to assault Zimmerman. Zimmerman "created a situation" which gave Trayvon the right to assault him. Being straddled on your back and having your head banged on concrete while that same person is trying to smother you to death doesn't permit you to use lethal force to defend yourself.
Also a lot of them tend to use this as justification for removal of all "stand your ground" laws, even though stand your ground was never used as a defense here.
- Zimmerman followed Trayvon, then turned around and went back to his truck. 911 tapes and witness testimony confirmed this (prosecution witness no less.) - He got out of his truck to check the address so that he could tell the police and so they could find him. Again, confirmed by 911 tapes. - Trayvon, who was 3 minutes away from being home, decides to turn around and go after "that cracker" (referring to Zimmerman) instead of continuing home. - While Zimmerman is checking the address, Trayvon assaults Zimmerman, tells him he's going to die tonight. A witness sees Trayvon straddling Zimmerman on the ground and assaulting him. Zimmerman has wounds on both the front and back of his head, including a broken nose and lacerations. Trayvon has no notable injuries.
You can clearly see, which prosecution witnesses even testified to, that Zimmerman not only stopped following him, but Trayvon, who could have returned home, instead came after Zimmerman and then assaulted him.
The problem is that people like you who believe Zimmerman was guilty think it was just a simple matter of "Zimmerman followed and then killed Trayvon" when that statement isn't even remotely accurate due to how much context it discards.
Let's suppose that "creating the situation" gives the other party permission to assault you (it doesn't,) that "situation" was over the minute Zimmerman returned to his truck to wait for the police. The "situation" in which Trayvon was killed was started when Trayvon decided to return to assault Zimmerman.
I don't think you can say this. There have been numerous other Americans tried when they murdered another person and claimed self-defense. Trying Zimmerman was not a race thing. Not trying Zimmerman was what many of us felt was a race thing. Maybe there was enough evidence to convict and maybe the prosecution did a poor job; maybe there wasn't enough evidence and the verdict was correct. However, Zimmerman was charged, as he should have been in a case where there was some doubt as to how valid his self-defense claim was.
If there ever was any good case against Zimmerman at all, the special prosecutor would have been all over this trying to score points with photo shoots like she did with other major trials past. Instead she avoided it completely, because even she knew that they stood no chance of a conviction, so she didn't want it to impact her image. The witnesses that the prosecution brought up did nothing to paint Zimmerman as guilty. Not a damn thing. If anything they made the case for the defense. A few major figures even quit their jobs over this because they knew it was a complete miscarriage of justice.
Why isn't there any prosecution of the black panther party leadership when they put a bounty on Zimmerman's head? That is quite literally solicitation of murder for hire, a pretty serious crime. No prosecution, very little media attention.
Now think back to that incident where those two journalists were riding their car through a black neighborhood, had a large rock thrown at their car and were then dragged out and beaten. There never was nor ever will be a trial over it. And, very little press coverage.
Now a guy who looks white shoots a black guy? Stop the presses!
How does affirmative action make the civil rights movement a joke? It was one of the movement's crowning achievements. You do realize that affirmative action was instituted to counteract widespread institutional discrimination against African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics, women, and so on, right? Are you claiming that institutional discrimination no longer exists, and that the need for affirmative action is no longer there? I totally disagree, and I think information such as this [infoplease.com] supports me.
Affirmative action works under a very bad assumption, which I'm going to explain by comparing it to game design. I don't know if you play League of Legends or World of Warcraft, but a common complaint by their players about class/character balance and representation, especially in WoW arena statistics, is that there aren't enough of X class being represented in the top ranks. The issue actually comes down to the fact that there simply aren't enough people interested in playing X class/spec to begin with, and even among them there may just be very few who are actually skilled enough players. Yet still the playerbase constantly hound the developers about this, using these numbers as a basis to argue that their class needs a boost.
Affirmative action works based on the same flawed assumption. It says that since there are 15% blacks (I don't know the exact percent - but it doesn't matter) then the college campus must also be 15% black, and employers must hire 15% black. Let's ignore completely that there may not be enough blacks that are interested in this school or this particular job, and keep throwing out more qualified candidates until we meet that quota. Often times those more qualified candidates that they throw out end up being Asian. Asians come from highly disciplined cultures, and (at least Japanese in particular) tend to really like engineering jobs, which in my opinion stems from their cultural background. Because they are both very disciplined and very interested in that, you may have 30% of your candidates for an engineering school or job be Asian, but since Asians are only 7% of the population, you have to keep throwing them out until you meet your quotas of other races.
He followed Trayvon -- he was the one doing the assaulting.
And see this is the problem. You, like many others who pushed for this prosecution, believe what you just said. Following somebody isn't assault, nor does it give that person justification to pound your head into the sidewalk.
However pounding somebody's head into a sidewalk does indeed give them justification to use lethal force to defend themselves. This has been established long before the Zimmerman trial.
In the 1700's and 1800's we had a concept called fighting words. If somebody used "fighting words" (words that provoked a fight) then that person was responsible for whatever happened afterwards.
That concept sort of fell apart when it became questionable what constituted fighting words, and what constituted provocation. So, the new standard became whoever made the first physical assault was then responsible. Both the physical evidence and witness testimony showed that it was indeed Trayvon who not only initiated physical contact, but also caused physical injuries and was seen straddling Zimmerman. That is why Zimmerman was found not guilty, and it is also why they chose not to prosecute him in the beginning. It was only after public pressure, and public pressure alone, not evidence or anything else, which is why this went to trial. Also contrary to popular opinion, "stand your ground" was never used as a defense in this case.
The detectives themselves who investigated the case didn't even want to prosecute it, by the way, because they believed Zimmerman to be innocent. One of the things that convince me personally that Zimmerman is telling the truth is that one of the detectives told Zimmerman that they had the incident on camera, to which Zimmerman replied "thank god" without even thinking about it.
Besides, if we stuck to "being followed" as a justification for turning around and pummeling somebody's head against concrete, I'd sure hate to be a mall cop.
MLK's legacy has largely been decimated by those who claim to support him the most.
One of his most famous sayings was that he had a dream that his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who are now seen as civil rights leaders, basically threw that out completely.and shit on it at almost every turn. Groups like the NAACP are pushing for criminal prosecution of, for example, the rodeo clown who made fun of Obama, even though people in much bigger areas of the limelight have done much worse things to make fun of other presidents. George Zimmerman would never have seen prosecution if he was black or Trayvon was white; guilty or not the evidence just wasn't there which is why they originally chose not to prosecute, and only did so after pressure from racial groups, which goes to show that in America, now the only requirement for prosecution is that public opinion be against you regardless of whether or not you can be proven guilty.
And how are programs like affirmative action following in that spirit? They tell you that, for example, if you have slanted eyes then you immediately deserve lower preference than anybody, but if you have black skin then you automatically get to be first in line.
I'm not a conservative first of all, and I stopped once it said it helps your survivors when you die (because it had already told another lie just before that.) What a load of crap. You know what the survivor death benefit is? A whopping $255. Wow what a payout. That doesn't even cover a third of the cost of cremation.
Meanwhile when he was still alive, he was completely unable to work. His doctor literally insisted he use a handicap plate on his car. You know what social security does? First of all, they deny disability and instead provide SSI, and only after he hires a lawyer. Imagine that, an actual doctor tells him that he's disabled, and he has to get a lawyer to claim not even full benefits.
With insurance you can actually negotiate the terms of your coverage. Social security they just bill you and tell you that you might get something some day, but it is designed so that in all likelihood you probably won't ever see a dime of it back.
Try actually having to make a claim against social security one day, witness how broken it is first hand before you insist that everybody else is just trying to spread propaganda. Being pissed off about being royally screwed in the ass by the government and then voicing your complaints about it isn't propaganda.
I'm setting up my own retirement plan. In 20 years when social security doesn't have enough money to pay out diddly and those who were relying on it to survive start complaining, I'm just going to say I told you so.
Personally I think social security is fraud. My dad paid a ton of money into social security, literally maxing out the benefits for 30 years in a row, and he only started collecting SSI just a few months due to back pain from all of those years of being an auto mechanic (they wouldn't give him disability, so he only collected about $700 a month.) He died just a day before the next check would have come. I tried to get at least a partial payment so that I could give it to my mom to pay her mortgage, and the asshole on the other end of the line told me how SSI is welfare and he had to live the whole month to get anything at all.
What a fucking joke. The whole thing is setup with the promise that you pay into it and you're taken care of should any problems come down, so how is collecting on that promise welfare? He paid I'm guessing close to a hundred thousand dollars into it over his lifetime (he made quite a lot as a mechanic because he was pretty damn good at what he did) and they won't even give his widow a single $700 check.
Fraud is defined as being deceptive, which is exactly what social security is. It's a Ponzi scheme that you are forced by law to "invest" into. I honestly can't wait until the whole thing collapses, which is exactly what it is going to end up doing soon.
Sure we've all been screwed over by private entities/individuals plenty of times, but almost none of us have been ripped off and outright scammed as bad as social security is doing to us right now.
Do you even realize what you're doing? 99% of the worlds wealth? That's just plain stupid. Do you even know what wealth is?
I think you don't even know the difference between wealth and money.
People at OWS don't have jobs because they have no concept of how an economy actually works. Like you, they too confuse money and wealth. They also don't understand that work is about performing a service that somebody else needs or wants, and how much you get paid is how much somebody values your service. A job isn't something you're entitled to, nor should you ever be. This really shouldn't even need to be said, yet people at OWS think that there ought to be a social bill of rights that includes the right to a job, even if you're totally useless.
Well compared to third world countries probably. After all, if you make $40,000 per year, you are among the top 1% of income earners. Don't tell OWS that though, especially the ones who had their ipads stolen...I mean think about that, spending all of those nights in a tent only to have your ipad stolen, and for what?
I personally know somebody who doesn't have a personal computer or internet connection at home, and last week they went down to the public library to play video poker online with the money they got from their social security check. I'm guessing they do this often because I'm not quite sure what the hell else they spend their money on other than cigarettes. I'm not even quite sure how they do it because as far as I'm aware the US has made online gambling difficult to do, but obviously they're smart enough to have figured out a way around it, so sheer incompetence doesn't explain it.
Personally I believe you can do whatever the hell you want with your own money, which at that point is theirs, but I think it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use half of one of those checks to buy a computer, pay for the lowest tier broadband connection you can get, and play league of legends instead of slots. Save the rest up for a vacation or something ffs.
So you just don't tell them you hate them to their face. How noble of you.
No, I actually tell them this when the matter comes forward. I'm also poor by government standards myself as my income falls below the federal poverty level. I already know the cause of it, and to be honest I'm not interested in changing it at the moment. That puts me in the lack of incentive category.
And now, higher education is being rapidly priced into extinction, and it is disproportionately affecting the working class.
So when you say "they don't really understand", consider the possibility that it's not because they can't understand, but lack access to resources that would allow them to.
Sorry but this is complete and utter bullshit. Plain and simple, a flat out lie to convince yourself that life's problems aren't your own, and everybody is to blame but you. You're basically repeating a lie that keeps getting said all over slashdot. I'm actually living proof that you can in fact even make a living off of going to school. Literally, I was just paid $1,255 two weeks ago to start this semester at NAU. That was after about $5k worth of grants that already paid for all of the expenses, and they just handed me what was left over as cash.
You know what I did to get this grant? I just went to fafsa.gov and answered a bunch of questions. That's it. Fafsa dropped about $3k and the university another $2k based on the fafsa results.
I've got other grants as well, but really I can live off of only about $250 a week. Some derp on slashdot earlier told me that I can only do this because I live below human standards. WTF?! Seriously, substandard to who? $250 a week is more than what 90% of the world makes, good grief. Let them eat cake much? I'm actually happy with how I'm living right now. And to be honest, life is only as crappy as you think it is. India is poor as shit, yet they're the happiest country in the world. What a concept.
People who call my standard of living substandard go around making themselves feel like shit because they can't afford a low rate apartment in upscale New York rather than actually trying to live somewhere practical and within their means, and then wonder why they have to work two jobs to maintain that. So, they go down to occupy wall street bitching at a very arbitrary set of people (the top 1%, or the top 3.14159%, or whatever) about why their life sucks and somebody else needs to pay. Meanwhile they don't realize that they constitute less than 1% of the population themselves. What a bunch of losers, yet they gain sympathy from stupid fucking politicians.
But handing money to CEOs "too big to fail" and banks so corrupt they put the entire economy in the drink for over a decade is? Why do you feel that it is more likely that hundreds of millions of Americans are lazy than that a few thousand of them are greedy?
Now who exactly are you blaming for this. Me? People of my political persuasion are completely against this. GM and Crystal should have been allowed to fail, period. Just like everybody else who makes bad business decisions. You know who are the biggest believers in corporate welfare? Democrats. You know, the same ones who you believe are on your side on this issue. Some Republicans too, and they're just as bad.
My experience with poor people is so varied, because I've seen them all. I live around poor people all the time. I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts. I've seen those who are very stingy with money, and I've seen those whose pockets have a bigger hole than an opening.
They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be. If what I'm saying weren't true, then lottery winners would stay rich after getting all of that money. They don't though, that money eventually runs out, and usually within only a few years.
It's a common thing I say, even though I'm poor by government spreadsheet standards (literally quite a way below the federal poverty level,) and I wasn't born into money either.
Does that make me right wing? I believe in the complete legalization of firearms, prostitution, drugs, and gambling. These are clearly things that the right supports, right?
To be honest, people like you who pigeonhole somebody of a particular view into either left or right are the reason I hate American politics and don't bother to vote in these stupid useless elections anymore. That, and the pathetic way that people rally behind clearly corrupt politicians to the point that they win a nobel prize just for being a cool dude with a big smile.
You don't need to be a manager (I'm not) to understand what that is, you just have to simply understand business, which sadly many of the "I wonder where my CS job went" types fail to do, which is why they don't have a job.
The answer to #2 is rather simple: It's quite possible that they've changed their business process in such a way that these positions are no longer required.
1. IT in particular has a funny way of making many non-IT related jobs irrelevant. For example, a new invoicing system might make it so that they need fewer accountants.
2. Of course there's outsourcing, and by that I am not referring to offshoring. Any job anywhere can be outsourced to another company - and that typically happens domestically. For example, they might have fired some janitors and hired some other company to do it because they can either do it better, cheaper, or both.
3. A close relative of 2 is when a company stops doing a certain business function in-house and the company that they are going to contract with hires them instead.
In some SEC filings you can at times see all three of these listed as simple reduction in workforce.
I know how much slashdot hates the word outsource, but most of time doing so only makes sense for the same reason that you'd hire a plumber to replace an old toilet than to simply do it yourself. The plumber is specialized in it and probably knows how to do it better than you do. Only in this case, everybody in the firm, from management on down, knows the business better and since they are more specialized and presumably operate in that particular area on a larger scale, they can operate more efficiently. As far as offshoring, comparative advantage is why we work on a global economy these days, and why in spite of some jobs (e.g. textiles) almost being non-existent here, we're all wealthier today - all of us, including the poor in all countries involved in the transaction.
And by the way, in response to another post: This is synergy in action.
Slashdot Mirror
Asymmetric warfare has been waged successfully numerous times throughout history, and the more weapons the general populace holds, the higher the chances of success.
The M1 would be rather useless in a civil war today anyways - it already is mostly useless in the war on terror as well. I used to serve in an armored unit by the way, and tank crews know very well that if they run into infantry, especially in an urban environment, they're fucked. This isn't command and conquer where you simply order your tank to run over the bad guy. It's actually rather trivial for dismounted units to disable tanks (that scene from Saving Private Ryan comes to mind, though today there are easier methods.) A well aimed bullet inside of the turret is good enough to disable that component. It still has a 50 cal and m240 at its disposal at this point, but for the remainder of the battle it isn't the devastatingly destructive force it was built to be.
The most effective weapon I think they would have in a civil war would be the same one that is the most effective in the war on terror: the drones. Drones have by and large replaced the M1. However unlike in the middle east, there are a lot more tools here that could be useful against those drones, and it would be quite a bit more difficult to determine friend from foe as well, which is critical for the success of a drone campaign.
In the end what would be required for pacification of any grassroots revolution is to take political control over the dissidents. That will be very hard to do if all of them are carrying small arms. Imagine sending police walking uniformed into a known hostile neighborhood, knocking on doors arresting people...yeah. And killing all of the dissidents wouldn't really win you any favors, especially if your goal is to have a functional economy afterwards.
In the early days, some states (I know New York was one of them) didn't have federal elections. Instead they voted for their state government, and then the state government would pick representatives, senators, and presidential electors when it came time for federal elections.
So yeah, technically when it comes to matters of the federal election, the individual states have the right to make their own call about (for example) who can vote and who can't.
You may as well call this a wasted effort then. One group is fighting this, so why does the other need to get involved?
The ACLU has been very much just the lawyer arm of the democratic party, for good or bad. When you look at their history, if it is a civil liberty that the democratic party doesn't want, then the ACLU doesn't defend it.
The best indicator of this would be the copyright trolls. Hollywood basically owns the democratic party, and the ACLU doesn't seem to do much of anything about censorship that comes from the **AA.
That has more to do with how lazy and complacent most Americans are.
In the southwest US, particularly the hotter regions, it can be hard as hell to find anybody to do unskilled hard labor (e.g. trenching) because nobody wants to do it. However first or second generation Mexicans (especially illegals) are almost always willing to do it. I'm not trying to bait or troll here, it's just a fact.
Most Americans have this stupid attitude that some kinds of jobs are just somehow below them. I remember watching a documentary a while back where somebody was offering jobs at McDonalds to homeless people, and they balked at it as being below them, being perfectly content to just live at a homeless shelter with no income at all for the rest of their lives instead. It really is pathetic.
Would work in principle, but I don't think these little planes have either the speed or the agility. If it became a problem, the drones to then be equipped with some kind of heat sensors that could make avoiding them become rather trivial, at which point their best hope would be to somehow train birds to fly into these drones.
GPS spoofing - I don't know for certain, but I don't think it would be difficult at all to add RSA signing to the timing beacons, even if they did it to existing satellites in orbit. Maybe not the older members of the constellation (which are constantly being phased out,) but the newer ones for sure. Something akin to that is long overdue anyways. As far as all out jamming goes, there is already ample technology available to allow navigation in small areas without the need for GPS, just enough to seek and destroy targets in a given area after reconnaissance photography has already been taken (which it presumably has been, unless we're just blindly picking targets.)
Unless Al-Qaeda can secure some automated targeting systems of its own (i.e. unmanned interceptors) their chances of waging a successful war against these drones is rather non-existent.
These drones are pretty fucking scary to be anywhere near the receiving end of, and if you ask me, the fact that being in Al-Qaeda puts you in their crosshairs is a pretty good deterrent to recruitment - or at least it should be to any sane person (but the religious viewpoints of its members sort of rules out sanity.) I think at best this might be their way of saying "we're doing something about the drones" when in reality they are probably making approximately zero progress, but saying they are making progress might be good enough to help with recruitment efforts.
I think that is genuinely the problem with this trial. Those who believe Zimmerman was guilty tend to believe one or all of the following:
Zimmerman simply followed and then shot Trayvon.
Trayvon was being followed, which gave him the right to assault Zimmerman.
Zimmerman "created a situation" which gave Trayvon the right to assault him.
Being straddled on your back and having your head banged on concrete while that same person is trying to smother you to death doesn't permit you to use lethal force to defend yourself.
Also a lot of them tend to use this as justification for removal of all "stand your ground" laws, even though stand your ground was never used as a defense here.
He followed and provoked someone then killed him.
You skipped a few steps there.
- Zimmerman followed Trayvon, then turned around and went back to his truck. 911 tapes and witness testimony confirmed this (prosecution witness no less.)
- He got out of his truck to check the address so that he could tell the police and so they could find him. Again, confirmed by 911 tapes.
- Trayvon, who was 3 minutes away from being home, decides to turn around and go after "that cracker" (referring to Zimmerman) instead of continuing home.
- While Zimmerman is checking the address, Trayvon assaults Zimmerman, tells him he's going to die tonight. A witness sees Trayvon straddling Zimmerman on the ground and assaulting him. Zimmerman has wounds on both the front and back of his head, including a broken nose and lacerations. Trayvon has no notable injuries.
You can clearly see, which prosecution witnesses even testified to, that Zimmerman not only stopped following him, but Trayvon, who could have returned home, instead came after Zimmerman and then assaulted him.
The problem is that people like you who believe Zimmerman was guilty think it was just a simple matter of "Zimmerman followed and then killed Trayvon" when that statement isn't even remotely accurate due to how much context it discards.
Let's suppose that "creating the situation" gives the other party permission to assault you (it doesn't,) that "situation" was over the minute Zimmerman returned to his truck to wait for the police. The "situation" in which Trayvon was killed was started when Trayvon decided to return to assault Zimmerman.
I don't think you can say this. There have been numerous other Americans tried when they murdered another person and claimed self-defense. Trying Zimmerman was not a race thing. Not trying Zimmerman was what many of us felt was a race thing. Maybe there was enough evidence to convict and maybe the prosecution did a poor job; maybe there wasn't enough evidence and the verdict was correct. However, Zimmerman was charged, as he should have been in a case where there was some doubt as to how valid his self-defense claim was.
If there ever was any good case against Zimmerman at all, the special prosecutor would have been all over this trying to score points with photo shoots like she did with other major trials past. Instead she avoided it completely, because even she knew that they stood no chance of a conviction, so she didn't want it to impact her image. The witnesses that the prosecution brought up did nothing to paint Zimmerman as guilty. Not a damn thing. If anything they made the case for the defense. A few major figures even quit their jobs over this because they knew it was a complete miscarriage of justice.
Why isn't there any prosecution of the black panther party leadership when they put a bounty on Zimmerman's head? That is quite literally solicitation of murder for hire, a pretty serious crime. No prosecution, very little media attention.
Now think back to that incident where those two journalists were riding their car through a black neighborhood, had a large rock thrown at their car and were then dragged out and beaten. There never was nor ever will be a trial over it. And, very little press coverage.
Now a guy who looks white shoots a black guy? Stop the presses!
How does affirmative action make the civil rights movement a joke? It was one of the movement's crowning achievements. You do realize that affirmative action was instituted to counteract widespread institutional discrimination against African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics, women, and so on, right? Are you claiming that institutional discrimination no longer exists, and that the need for affirmative action is no longer there? I totally disagree, and I think information such as this [infoplease.com] supports me.
Affirmative action works under a very bad assumption, which I'm going to explain by comparing it to game design. I don't know if you play League of Legends or World of Warcraft, but a common complaint by their players about class/character balance and representation, especially in WoW arena statistics, is that there aren't enough of X class being represented in the top ranks. The issue actually comes down to the fact that there simply aren't enough people interested in playing X class/spec to begin with, and even among them there may just be very few who are actually skilled enough players. Yet still the playerbase constantly hound the developers about this, using these numbers as a basis to argue that their class needs a boost.
Affirmative action works based on the same flawed assumption. It says that since there are 15% blacks (I don't know the exact percent - but it doesn't matter) then the college campus must also be 15% black, and employers must hire 15% black. Let's ignore completely that there may not be enough blacks that are interested in this school or this particular job, and keep throwing out more qualified candidates until we meet that quota. Often times those more qualified candidates that they throw out end up being Asian. Asians come from highly disciplined cultures, and (at least Japanese in particular) tend to really like engineering jobs, which in my opinion stems from their cultural background. Because they are both very disciplined and very interested in that, you may have 30% of your candidates for an engineering school or job be Asian, but since Asians are only 7% of the population, you have to keep throwing them out until you meet your quotas of other races.
How fucked up is that? You're denied entry into
He followed Trayvon -- he was the one doing the assaulting.
And see this is the problem. You, like many others who pushed for this prosecution, believe what you just said. Following somebody isn't assault, nor does it give that person justification to pound your head into the sidewalk.
However pounding somebody's head into a sidewalk does indeed give them justification to use lethal force to defend themselves. This has been established long before the Zimmerman trial.
In the 1700's and 1800's we had a concept called fighting words. If somebody used "fighting words" (words that provoked a fight) then that person was responsible for whatever happened afterwards.
That concept sort of fell apart when it became questionable what constituted fighting words, and what constituted provocation. So, the new standard became whoever made the first physical assault was then responsible. Both the physical evidence and witness testimony showed that it was indeed Trayvon who not only initiated physical contact, but also caused physical injuries and was seen straddling Zimmerman. That is why Zimmerman was found not guilty, and it is also why they chose not to prosecute him in the beginning. It was only after public pressure, and public pressure alone, not evidence or anything else, which is why this went to trial. Also contrary to popular opinion, "stand your ground" was never used as a defense in this case.
The detectives themselves who investigated the case didn't even want to prosecute it, by the way, because they believed Zimmerman to be innocent. One of the things that convince me personally that Zimmerman is telling the truth is that one of the detectives told Zimmerman that they had the incident on camera, to which Zimmerman replied "thank god" without even thinking about it.
Besides, if we stuck to "being followed" as a justification for turning around and pummeling somebody's head against concrete, I'd sure hate to be a mall cop.
So the answer, clearly, is to prejudge based on the color of their skin. That just makes a whole lot of sense.
MLK's legacy has largely been decimated by those who claim to support him the most.
One of his most famous sayings was that he had a dream that his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who are now seen as civil rights leaders, basically threw that out completely.and shit on it at almost every turn. Groups like the NAACP are pushing for criminal prosecution of, for example, the rodeo clown who made fun of Obama, even though people in much bigger areas of the limelight have done much worse things to make fun of other presidents. George Zimmerman would never have seen prosecution if he was black or Trayvon was white; guilty or not the evidence just wasn't there which is why they originally chose not to prosecute, and only did so after pressure from racial groups, which goes to show that in America, now the only requirement for prosecution is that public opinion be against you regardless of whether or not you can be proven guilty.
And how are programs like affirmative action following in that spirit? They tell you that, for example, if you have slanted eyes then you immediately deserve lower preference than anybody, but if you have black skin then you automatically get to be first in line.
What a joke the civil rights movement has become.
Are you sure you did it right in your hosts file? You should go ask APK just to make sure, nobody knows hosts files better than he does.
I'm not a conservative first of all, and I stopped once it said it helps your survivors when you die (because it had already told another lie just before that.) What a load of crap. You know what the survivor death benefit is? A whopping $255. Wow what a payout. That doesn't even cover a third of the cost of cremation.
Meanwhile when he was still alive, he was completely unable to work. His doctor literally insisted he use a handicap plate on his car. You know what social security does? First of all, they deny disability and instead provide SSI, and only after he hires a lawyer. Imagine that, an actual doctor tells him that he's disabled, and he has to get a lawyer to claim not even full benefits.
With insurance you can actually negotiate the terms of your coverage. Social security they just bill you and tell you that you might get something some day, but it is designed so that in all likelihood you probably won't ever see a dime of it back.
Try actually having to make a claim against social security one day, witness how broken it is first hand before you insist that everybody else is just trying to spread propaganda. Being pissed off about being royally screwed in the ass by the government and then voicing your complaints about it isn't propaganda.
I'm setting up my own retirement plan. In 20 years when social security doesn't have enough money to pay out diddly and those who were relying on it to survive start complaining, I'm just going to say I told you so.
Personally I think social security is fraud. My dad paid a ton of money into social security, literally maxing out the benefits for 30 years in a row, and he only started collecting SSI just a few months due to back pain from all of those years of being an auto mechanic (they wouldn't give him disability, so he only collected about $700 a month.) He died just a day before the next check would have come. I tried to get at least a partial payment so that I could give it to my mom to pay her mortgage, and the asshole on the other end of the line told me how SSI is welfare and he had to live the whole month to get anything at all.
What a fucking joke. The whole thing is setup with the promise that you pay into it and you're taken care of should any problems come down, so how is collecting on that promise welfare? He paid I'm guessing close to a hundred thousand dollars into it over his lifetime (he made quite a lot as a mechanic because he was pretty damn good at what he did) and they won't even give his widow a single $700 check.
Fraud is defined as being deceptive, which is exactly what social security is. It's a Ponzi scheme that you are forced by law to "invest" into. I honestly can't wait until the whole thing collapses, which is exactly what it is going to end up doing soon.
Sure we've all been screwed over by private entities/individuals plenty of times, but almost none of us have been ripped off and outright scammed as bad as social security is doing to us right now.
Do you even realize what you're doing? 99% of the worlds wealth? That's just plain stupid. Do you even know what wealth is?
I think you don't even know the difference between wealth and money.
People at OWS don't have jobs because they have no concept of how an economy actually works. Like you, they too confuse money and wealth. They also don't understand that work is about performing a service that somebody else needs or wants, and how much you get paid is how much somebody values your service. A job isn't something you're entitled to, nor should you ever be. This really shouldn't even need to be said, yet people at OWS think that there ought to be a social bill of rights that includes the right to a job, even if you're totally useless.
Uh...wut? 300,000,000 people in America are rich?
Well compared to third world countries probably. After all, if you make $40,000 per year, you are among the top 1% of income earners. Don't tell OWS that though, especially the ones who had their ipads stolen...I mean think about that, spending all of those nights in a tent only to have your ipad stolen, and for what?
I personally know somebody who doesn't have a personal computer or internet connection at home, and last week they went down to the public library to play video poker online with the money they got from their social security check. I'm guessing they do this often because I'm not quite sure what the hell else they spend their money on other than cigarettes. I'm not even quite sure how they do it because as far as I'm aware the US has made online gambling difficult to do, but obviously they're smart enough to have figured out a way around it, so sheer incompetence doesn't explain it.
Personally I believe you can do whatever the hell you want with your own money, which at that point is theirs, but I think it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use half of one of those checks to buy a computer, pay for the lowest tier broadband connection you can get, and play league of legends instead of slots. Save the rest up for a vacation or something ffs.
So you just don't tell them you hate them to their face. How noble of you.
No, I actually tell them this when the matter comes forward. I'm also poor by government standards myself as my income falls below the federal poverty level. I already know the cause of it, and to be honest I'm not interested in changing it at the moment. That puts me in the lack of incentive category.
And now, higher education is being rapidly priced into extinction, and it is disproportionately affecting the working class.
So when you say "they don't really understand", consider the possibility that it's not because they can't understand, but lack access to resources that would allow them to.
Sorry but this is complete and utter bullshit. Plain and simple, a flat out lie to convince yourself that life's problems aren't your own, and everybody is to blame but you. You're basically repeating a lie that keeps getting said all over slashdot. I'm actually living proof that you can in fact even make a living off of going to school. Literally, I was just paid $1,255 two weeks ago to start this semester at NAU. That was after about $5k worth of grants that already paid for all of the expenses, and they just handed me what was left over as cash.
You know what I did to get this grant? I just went to fafsa.gov and answered a bunch of questions. That's it. Fafsa dropped about $3k and the university another $2k based on the fafsa results.
I've got other grants as well, but really I can live off of only about $250 a week. Some derp on slashdot earlier told me that I can only do this because I live below human standards. WTF?! Seriously, substandard to who? $250 a week is more than what 90% of the world makes, good grief. Let them eat cake much? I'm actually happy with how I'm living right now. And to be honest, life is only as crappy as you think it is. India is poor as shit, yet they're the happiest country in the world. What a concept.
People who call my standard of living substandard go around making themselves feel like shit because they can't afford a low rate apartment in upscale New York rather than actually trying to live somewhere practical and within their means, and then wonder why they have to work two jobs to maintain that. So, they go down to occupy wall street bitching at a very arbitrary set of people (the top 1%, or the top 3.14159%, or whatever) about why their life sucks and somebody else needs to pay. Meanwhile they don't realize that they constitute less than 1% of the population themselves. What a bunch of losers, yet they gain sympathy from stupid fucking politicians.
But handing money to CEOs "too big to fail" and banks so corrupt they put the entire economy in the drink for over a decade is? Why do you feel that it is more likely that hundreds of millions of Americans are lazy than that a few thousand of them are greedy?
Now who exactly are you blaming for this. Me? People of my political persuasion are completely against this. GM and Crystal should have been allowed to fail, period. Just like everybody else who makes bad business decisions. You know who are the biggest believers in corporate welfare? Democrats. You know, the same ones who you believe are on your side on this issue. Some Republicans too, and they're just as bad.
Sorry but that's a BS statement. Again I'll link:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/joshua-rauh-what-forbes-400-list-says-about-american-wealth
As much as I'm sure you like to believe those in wealth don't deserve it, it can be proven otherwise in the majority of cases:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/joshua-rauh-what-forbes-400-list-says-about-american-wealth
My experience with poor people is so varied, because I've seen them all. I live around poor people all the time. I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts. I've seen those who are very stingy with money, and I've seen those whose pockets have a bigger hole than an opening.
They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be. If what I'm saying weren't true, then lottery winners would stay rich after getting all of that money. They don't though, that money eventually runs out, and usually within only a few years.
It's a common thing I say, even though I'm poor by government spreadsheet standards (literally quite a way below the federal poverty level,) and I wasn't born into money either.
Does that make me right wing? I believe in the complete legalization of firearms, prostitution, drugs, and gambling. These are clearly things that the right supports, right?
To be honest, people like you who pigeonhole somebody of a particular view into either left or right are the reason I hate American politics and don't bother to vote in these stupid useless elections anymore. That, and the pathetic way that people rally behind clearly corrupt politicians to the point that they win a nobel prize just for being a cool dude with a big smile.
My first response to that question would be to describe what I did in my last paragraph here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4149031&cid=44721647
You don't need to be a manager (I'm not) to understand what that is, you just have to simply understand business, which sadly many of the "I wonder where my CS job went" types fail to do, which is why they don't have a job.
The answer to #2 is rather simple: It's quite possible that they've changed their business process in such a way that these positions are no longer required.
1. IT in particular has a funny way of making many non-IT related jobs irrelevant. For example, a new invoicing system might make it so that they need fewer accountants.
2. Of course there's outsourcing, and by that I am not referring to offshoring. Any job anywhere can be outsourced to another company - and that typically happens domestically. For example, they might have fired some janitors and hired some other company to do it because they can either do it better, cheaper, or both.
3. A close relative of 2 is when a company stops doing a certain business function in-house and the company that they are going to contract with hires them instead.
In some SEC filings you can at times see all three of these listed as simple reduction in workforce.
I know how much slashdot hates the word outsource, but most of time doing so only makes sense for the same reason that you'd hire a plumber to replace an old toilet than to simply do it yourself. The plumber is specialized in it and probably knows how to do it better than you do. Only in this case, everybody in the firm, from management on down, knows the business better and since they are more specialized and presumably operate in that particular area on a larger scale, they can operate more efficiently. As far as offshoring, comparative advantage is why we work on a global economy these days, and why in spite of some jobs (e.g. textiles) almost being non-existent here, we're all wealthier today - all of us, including the poor in all countries involved in the transaction.
And by the way, in response to another post: This is synergy in action.