OK then, Halley's comet makes regular appearances (every 75 years or so) but you wouldn't say it's a common occurrence in the scope of a single human lifetime, would you?
There, happy now?
Jesus Christ! And some people wonder why they don't get laid.
How about refraining from deposing democratic governments (like Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973) and installing dictators in their place? How about no longer consuming 25% of the world's resources and surrounding the planet with military bases in other peoples' countries to keep the oil flowing? How about refraining from propping up brutal dictatorships like the House of Saud?
I once saw a new magazine on the news stand called "The world in Focus" billing itself as a whole newsstand of features for £1.75. It later became Focus, which became BBC Focus, which I think is still running. Was a pretty good read last time I saw it in the UK. There was a time when it had an editor who had a good sense of humour and the articles were written in a light-hearted way. For example there was one about what Europe would have looked like had Napoleon stopped trying to annex every bit of land that touched his, referred to him as 'Boney' all the way through the article.
Print is dead? Not quite yet. There's something about the experience of a nice glossy magazine with an attractive magazine layout, instantly accessible and not so big that you need a search engine.
I too would like to apologize to all the dead people. I am sorry that I let democrats take away your right to defend yourself and kill you by depriving you of your second amendment rights, and your dignity just because your state representatives happened to be democrats. I am so sorry that so many policepersons stood by while democrats cozied up to hysterical soccer mommies, allowing them to send your rights into the null and void of irrelevancy, and helping them kill you.
I'm sorry that democrats are such nice and cozy people, and that we've allowed them to destroy our country due to a need to control the populace so that they themselves don't have to die when accountability comes due.
It's about time that more peple started saying things like this. It's our nation, and our world. On the line here.
I know I'm neg-karma but ideology doesn't help in a police state. Congratulations America, apathy is our new anthem.
Oh. My God. Are you fucking insane?
Let's just take one of your claims. Second amendment rights. When was the second amendment abolished? Jesus wept! You people are fucking crazy!
So much garbage in there I hardly know where to start. Lemme just deal with this little intellectual turd:
Most people can save far more money as a reserve against poor health than they will ever use.
'Most people?' What about the exception to the rules? Like the occasional people who end up with cancer? They sure as hell can't save enough for treatment. What do you propose they do? Hmm?
So claiming that the Republican plan for health reform is "Die quickly" is trying to be "Mr Nice Guy"? Pot, kettle, black and all that.
Er, read the post again. Grayson is one of a rare brand of Democrats who have finally decided to man up and hit back at the Republican spin machine with emotionally charged messages of their own instead of trying to be all logical about it like Carter, Dukakis, Gore, or Kerry.
If your eyes are so bad that you missed that point, I hope for your sake that it's not a pre-existing condition.
People who can step back and look at this whole thing impartially realize what we have are a bunch of people with a few negligible external differences but they all pretty much do the same things.
Are you one of these people who couldn't tell the difference between Al Gore and GW Bush?
It's not like some dude named Bill was regularly lambasted for him hammy appeals to emotion. Back in like, 92. Totally never happened. People still to this day don't say things like "for the children" and "i feel your pain" in a poor impression of some guy named Bill in an ironic manner.
Oh yeah, Bill. I'd forgotten about him. Yup, he used emotional language too, and he got elected too.
My point stands - use emotional language and you stand a better chance of getting elected. What is different about the two parties is that Republicans have been more consistently good at it than the Democrats.
Are you saying that someone was prevented from getting chemotherapy because they had cancer? That makes no sense, given that chemotherapy is worse than useless to people that don't have cancer.
Oh. Wait. You are upset that someone else won't pay for it. Not the same thing at all.
No, if you could read you would see that I was saying that someone was denied chemo because it was a pre-existing condition.
I think you need to get your eyes tested. For your sake I hope it's not a pre-existing condition.
It's impossible to say one side is worse than the other without having the blinders of partisanship in place. They are all repulsive in the extreme and anyone who tries to argue that their party is "not as bad as the other guys" is deluded. That's not necessarily throwing up one's hands to let the problem continue, though it will continue as long as we keep letting these corrupt people into office.
For every example of 'bad' behavior on the part of one party, there is a corresponding example from the other. How they keep so many people hoodwinked into think it is all the others groups fault is completely beyond me.
Realizing that isn't giving up, it is necessary to get on track to take meaningful action rather than swinging back and forth between two 'options' that are just different sides of the same coin.
People seem to be missing the point. First of all I never said one way or another whether it's good or bad that politicians campaign using emotional language. Is it good? Is it bad? Who cares? In my opinion it doesn't get 'bad' until you start adding lies into the deal.
Secondly, what I'm saying is that Republicans have been masters of emotional campaigning for ages and Democrats never really caught up until the Obama era, and Alan Grayson takes the emotional message to the same kind of extremes that Republicans have been doing for years. Sarah Palin talks about 'death panels?' Nobody bats an eyelid. Conservatives refer to the inheritance tax as the 'death tax' (misleadingly implying that we all have to pay it since we all die)? Nobody bats an eyelid. Alan Grayson reads out the numbers of people who have died from lack of health care coverage? Whoa! What's going on here? A Democrat using emotionally charged language? What's going on? This is new!
Take Dukakis. He thought he could respond to emotionally-charged questions, like on the death penalty, with facts and figures. The voters dumped him because he didn't connect with them on an emotional level and because he looked ridiculous being driven around in a tank.
Take Gore. Bush's quirky human interest stories were a much bigger hit than Al's not inconsiderable intellect.
John (yawn) Kerry? Don't get me started!
Compare those old Democrats with their facts and statistics to the emotional intelligence of Obama and Grayson. It's a considerable difference.
And by the way, I reject your assertion that for every lie told on one side there must be an equal and opposite lie told on the other. We're not talking about Newton's laws of motion here. That's just another lazy assessment, the same kind of attitude that leads to the 'equal time to nutjobs' approach that some media organizations use. If one party is lying more than the other, it's okay to say so.
Not true. Democrats have stood idly by for too long while Republicans get up in the House and make hyperbolic speeches about 'death panels' and 'socialism' while the Dems have just tried to be Mr Nice Guy in the hope that the voters will reward them.
Yep. I mean, something like comparing opposition to a bill to being in favor of slavery. A Democrat would NEVER do something like that.
Holy shit, are your eyes really that crossed or is your brain damage that complete? I hope that some day you can step back and see exactly how incredibly backwards your statements are. I know you won't though, because you're just as blinded by ideology as the people you claim to be against. God bless you, and merry Christmas.
Holy shit, are your eyes really that crossed or is your brain damage that complete? I hope that some day you can step back and see exactly how incredibly backwards your statements are. I know you won't though, because you're just as blinded by ideology as the people you claim to be against. Flying Spaghetti Monster bless you, and merry Christmas.
And the 2008 election was immune? Barack Obama's entire campaign was one of sweeping emotion. Emotion that "change" was on the way, emotion that we'd be able to "rise above" our "petty differences", emotion that he would "transcend" race, etc, etc.
Yup, Obama is another recent Democratic convert to the world of emotional campaigning. Sure he had his facts and figures lined up in true Democratic fashion, but what was new was that he was able to couch it in emotional terms using 'human interest' stories to illustrate the point. Look what happened - he got elected. QED.
And OF COURSE,/. forgets to add "D-Fla" to the Reps name.
Anyone think, even for a second, if Grayson was "R-Fla" that it would have been missed?
Yeah, didn't think so.
This is what conservatives and libertarians mean when we are talking about "liberal bias" in the media. Those soft, subtle things used to quietly tweak the story to emphasize or de-emphasize precisely the point of view the writer wants his or her readers to end up with after reading the story.
Interestingly, TFA is from Fox News, which pretty much NEVER fails to note the party of a political official in a scandal, regardless of the party they are in, including this one.
Nice omission there/.
Are you fucking kidding me? Fox 'News' can be relied on to mislabel a Republican involved in a scandal with a D almost every time the story breaks.
No, but denying health care to people resulting in the deaths of thousands sounds pretty close to me.
You know what's gonna happen? This profit-over-human-life doctrine is eventually going to be abolished, and it will be remembered in the future the way slavery is remembered now. A small number of special interests and their hillbilly followers thought it was a great idea at the time, but eventually peoples' values changed and the full extent of the suffering and loss of life became clear.
BTW, his use of the word 'holocaust' was entirely appropriate. 'Holocaust' is not a word that has been reserved exclusively for the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. If people are dying in their hundreds every day at the hands of profit making health insurance extortionists, then to call it a holocaust is putting it fucking mildly.
You seem to be confused in thinking it's "Republican Standard Operating Procedure" when in reality it's "Politician Standard Operating Procedure."
Not true. Democrats have stood idly by for too long while Republicans get up in the House and make hyperbolic speeches about 'death panels' and 'socialism' while the Dems have just tried to be Mr Nice Guy in the hope that the voters will reward them. They don't. Republicans have become masters of the art of pressing the emotional buttons over and over again even if their message is laced with lies and half truths, while Democrats have tried to counter it with facts, figures, and logic. As you can see from the 2000 and 2004 elections, the voters respond much better to emotional messages (particularly the emotion known as 'fear' as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney know too well) than they do to something as mundane as logic.
All Mr Grayson is doing is what Democrats should have been doing years ago. Republicans want to talk about death panels and pulling the plug on grandma? Fine, they should be prepared to listen to the other side using the same kind of emotional language.
Press-release service Internet Wire is hoaxed by a former employee/community college student who uses it to distribute a fake release saying electronics firm Emulex is restating its earnings. The company loses $2.5 billion of value and the student pockets $250,000 by shorting its stock before being arrested.
Excuse me, but why the need to refer to him as a community college student? I thought that community colleges were actually a respected type of institution in the US and are seen as a place where people can go to get an affordable education and make better of themselves. Why, then, does TFA need to highlight that this particular criminal happened to be a community college student? Why not also mention the type of car he drives or some other irrelevant detail? Does the author of the article have something he'd like to tell us about his views on community colleges?
It reminds me of a discussion on NPR the other day about the mistresses of Tiger Woods. The media felt the need to refer to them as 'lingerie saleswomen' or 'cocktail waitresses' as if their occupation was all you needed to know about their character.
Why and how did Darth Vader become so evil? How did he get seduced to the dark side? The films hand-waved through the most important question that everyone had.
No, the big question was how did Vader switch from an American to an English accent. That question has never been answered. Ever. By anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
OK then, Halley's comet makes regular appearances (every 75 years or so) but you wouldn't say it's a common occurrence in the scope of a single human lifetime, would you?
There, happy now?
Jesus Christ! And some people wonder why they don't get laid.
This problem isn't common but it happens regularly.
So what you are saying is that it is common?
Regular != common. Halley's comet makes regular appearances (every 75 years or so) but you wouldn't say it's a common occurrence, would you?
How about refraining from deposing democratic governments (like Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973) and installing dictators in their place? How about no longer consuming 25% of the world's resources and surrounding the planet with military bases in other peoples' countries to keep the oil flowing? How about refraining from propping up brutal dictatorships like the House of Saud?
Just saying.
I once saw a new magazine on the news stand called "The world in Focus" billing itself as a whole newsstand of features for £1.75. It later became Focus, which became BBC Focus, which I think is still running. Was a pretty good read last time I saw it in the UK. There was a time when it had an editor who had a good sense of humour and the articles were written in a light-hearted way. For example there was one about what Europe would have looked like had Napoleon stopped trying to annex every bit of land that touched his, referred to him as 'Boney' all the way through the article.
Print is dead? Not quite yet. There's something about the experience of a nice glossy magazine with an attractive magazine layout, instantly accessible and not so big that you need a search engine.
I too would like to apologize to all the dead people. I am sorry that I let democrats take away your right to defend yourself and kill you by depriving you of your second amendment rights, and your dignity just because your state representatives happened to be democrats. I am so sorry that so many policepersons stood by while democrats cozied up to hysterical soccer mommies, allowing them to send your rights into the null and void of irrelevancy, and helping them kill you.
I'm sorry that democrats are such nice and cozy people, and that we've allowed them to destroy our country due to a need to control the populace so that they themselves don't have to die when accountability comes due.
It's about time that more peple started saying things like this. It's our nation, and our world. On the line here.
I know I'm neg-karma but ideology doesn't help in a police state. Congratulations America, apathy is our new anthem.
Oh. My God. Are you fucking insane?
Let's just take one of your claims. Second amendment rights. When was the second amendment abolished? Jesus wept! You people are fucking crazy!
Oh. My. God.
So much garbage in there I hardly know where to start. Lemme just deal with this little intellectual turd:
Most people can save far more money as a reserve against poor health than they will ever use.
'Most people?' What about the exception to the rules? Like the occasional people who end up with cancer? They sure as hell can't save enough for treatment. What do you propose they do? Hmm?
My post is entirely in order and yet you manage to mod it as follows:
60% Troll
20% Insightful
10% Informative
Guess what, my karma is still 'excellent.' Looks like mod bombing is all you have left now that you've lost the argument.
So claiming that the Republican plan for health reform is "Die quickly" is trying to be "Mr Nice Guy"? Pot, kettle, black and all that.
Er, read the post again. Grayson is one of a rare brand of Democrats who have finally decided to man up and hit back at the Republican spin machine with emotionally charged messages of their own instead of trying to be all logical about it like Carter, Dukakis, Gore, or Kerry.
If your eyes are so bad that you missed that point, I hope for your sake that it's not a pre-existing condition.
Sure I can list differences between Gore and Bush but to what end?
It would refute your claim about all politicians being the same.
no one actually likes him.
[Citation needed]
People who can step back and look at this whole thing impartially realize what we have are a bunch of people with a few negligible external differences but they all pretty much do the same things.
Are you one of these people who couldn't tell the difference between Al Gore and GW Bush?
that's easy: Olbermann.
Show me the batshit insane crying clip and I'll believe you.
Yeah, totally new idea.
It's not like some dude named Bill was regularly lambasted for him hammy appeals to emotion. Back in like, 92. Totally never happened. People still to this day don't say things like "for the children" and "i feel your pain" in a poor impression of some guy named Bill in an ironic manner.
Oh yeah, Bill. I'd forgotten about him. Yup, he used emotional language too, and he got elected too.
My point stands - use emotional language and you stand a better chance of getting elected. What is different about the two parties is that Republicans have been more consistently good at it than the Democrats.
Are you saying that someone was prevented from getting chemotherapy because they had cancer? That makes no sense, given that chemotherapy is worse than useless to people that don't have cancer.
Oh. Wait. You are upset that someone else won't pay for it. Not the same thing at all.
No, if you could read you would see that I was saying that someone was denied chemo because it was a pre-existing condition.
I think you need to get your eyes tested. For your sake I hope it's not a pre-existing condition.
It's impossible to say one side is worse than the other without having the blinders of partisanship in place. They are all repulsive in the extreme and anyone who tries to argue that their party is "not as bad as the other guys" is deluded. That's not necessarily throwing up one's hands to let the problem continue, though it will continue as long as we keep letting these corrupt people into office.
For every example of 'bad' behavior on the part of one party, there is a corresponding example from the other. How they keep so many people hoodwinked into think it is all the others groups fault is completely beyond me.
Realizing that isn't giving up, it is necessary to get on track to take meaningful action rather than swinging back and forth between two 'options' that are just different sides of the same coin.
People seem to be missing the point. First of all I never said one way or another whether it's good or bad that politicians campaign using emotional language. Is it good? Is it bad? Who cares? In my opinion it doesn't get 'bad' until you start adding lies into the deal.
Secondly, what I'm saying is that Republicans have been masters of emotional campaigning for ages and Democrats never really caught up until the Obama era, and Alan Grayson takes the emotional message to the same kind of extremes that Republicans have been doing for years. Sarah Palin talks about 'death panels?' Nobody bats an eyelid. Conservatives refer to the inheritance tax as the 'death tax' (misleadingly implying that we all have to pay it since we all die)? Nobody bats an eyelid. Alan Grayson reads out the numbers of people who have died from lack of health care coverage? Whoa! What's going on here? A Democrat using emotionally charged language? What's going on? This is new!
Take Dukakis. He thought he could respond to emotionally-charged questions, like on the death penalty, with facts and figures. The voters dumped him because he didn't connect with them on an emotional level and because he looked ridiculous being driven around in a tank.
Take Gore. Bush's quirky human interest stories were a much bigger hit than Al's not inconsiderable intellect.
John (yawn) Kerry? Don't get me started!
Compare those old Democrats with their facts and statistics to the emotional intelligence of Obama and Grayson. It's a considerable difference.
And by the way, I reject your assertion that for every lie told on one side there must be an equal and opposite lie told on the other. We're not talking about Newton's laws of motion here. That's just another lazy assessment, the same kind of attitude that leads to the 'equal time to nutjobs' approach that some media organizations use. If one party is lying more than the other, it's okay to say so.
Yep. I mean, something like comparing opposition to a bill to being in favor of slavery. A Democrat would NEVER do something like that.
Not until Grayson came along they wouldn't.
Yeah...paying for services and free emergency room service for everyone who can't is a true holocaust. Way to put it "fucking mildly."
Getting sick and dying is natural.
Gassing 6 million scapegoats is not.
Get some perspective.
Hey Adolf, what's so 'natural' about being denied chemo (something you can't get in the ER) because cancer is a 'pre-existing condition?'
Holy shit, are your eyes really that crossed or is your brain damage that complete? I hope that some day you can step back and see exactly how incredibly backwards your statements are. I know you won't though, because you're just as blinded by ideology as the people you claim to be against. God bless you, and merry Christmas.
Holy shit, are your eyes really that crossed or is your brain damage that complete? I hope that some day you can step back and see exactly how incredibly backwards your statements are. I know you won't though, because you're just as blinded by ideology as the people you claim to be against. Flying Spaghetti Monster bless you, and merry Christmas.
And the 2008 election was immune? Barack Obama's entire campaign was one of sweeping emotion. Emotion that "change" was on the way, emotion that we'd be able to "rise above" our "petty differences", emotion that he would "transcend" race, etc, etc.
Yup, Obama is another recent Democratic convert to the world of emotional campaigning. Sure he had his facts and figures lined up in true Democratic fashion, but what was new was that he was able to couch it in emotional terms using 'human interest' stories to illustrate the point. Look what happened - he got elected. QED.
And OF COURSE, /. forgets to add "D-Fla" to the Reps name.
Anyone think, even for a second, if Grayson was "R-Fla" that it would have been missed?
Yeah, didn't think so.
This is what conservatives and libertarians mean when we are talking about "liberal bias" in the media. Those soft, subtle things used to quietly tweak the story to emphasize or de-emphasize precisely the point of view the writer wants his or her readers to end up with after reading the story.
Interestingly, TFA is from Fox News, which pretty much NEVER fails to note the party of a political official in a scandal, regardless of the party they are in, including this one.
Nice omission there /.
Are you fucking kidding me? Fox 'News' can be relied on to mislabel a Republican involved in a scandal with a D almost every time the story breaks.
health care == Holocaust??
No, but denying health care to people resulting in the deaths of thousands sounds pretty close to me.
You know what's gonna happen? This profit-over-human-life doctrine is eventually going to be abolished, and it will be remembered in the future the way slavery is remembered now. A small number of special interests and their hillbilly followers thought it was a great idea at the time, but eventually peoples' values changed and the full extent of the suffering and loss of life became clear.
BTW, his use of the word 'holocaust' was entirely appropriate. 'Holocaust' is not a word that has been reserved exclusively for the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. If people are dying in their hundreds every day at the hands of profit making health insurance extortionists, then to call it a holocaust is putting it fucking mildly.
Why? Should anything the New York Times reports on a Republican also be assumed to be false? Don't be so intellectually lazy.
New York Times != Democratic equivalent of Fox News.
MSNBC might be a bit closer, but then again I can't think of who their equivalent of Glenn Beck is.
You seem to be confused in thinking it's "Republican Standard Operating Procedure" when in reality it's "Politician Standard Operating Procedure."
Not true. Democrats have stood idly by for too long while Republicans get up in the House and make hyperbolic speeches about 'death panels' and 'socialism' while the Dems have just tried to be Mr Nice Guy in the hope that the voters will reward them. They don't. Republicans have become masters of the art of pressing the emotional buttons over and over again even if their message is laced with lies and half truths, while Democrats have tried to counter it with facts, figures, and logic. As you can see from the 2000 and 2004 elections, the voters respond much better to emotional messages (particularly the emotion known as 'fear' as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney know too well) than they do to something as mundane as logic.
All Mr Grayson is doing is what Democrats should have been doing years ago. Republicans want to talk about death panels and pulling the plug on grandma? Fine, they should be prepared to listen to the other side using the same kind of emotional language.
From item 4 in TFA:
Press-release service Internet Wire is hoaxed by a former employee/community college student who uses it to distribute a fake release saying electronics firm Emulex is restating its earnings. The company loses $2.5 billion of value and the student pockets $250,000 by shorting its stock before being arrested.
Excuse me, but why the need to refer to him as a community college student? I thought that community colleges were actually a respected type of institution in the US and are seen as a place where people can go to get an affordable education and make better of themselves. Why, then, does TFA need to highlight that this particular criminal happened to be a community college student? Why not also mention the type of car he drives or some other irrelevant detail? Does the author of the article have something he'd like to tell us about his views on community colleges?
It reminds me of a discussion on NPR the other day about the mistresses of Tiger Woods. The media felt the need to refer to them as 'lingerie saleswomen' or 'cocktail waitresses' as if their occupation was all you needed to know about their character.
Why and how did Darth Vader become so evil? How did he get seduced to the dark side? The films hand-waved through the most important question that everyone had.
No, the big question was how did Vader switch from an American to an English accent. That question has never been answered. Ever. By anyone.