The comparison was appropriate because it was aimed at YOU. I don't know how you could have read a sentence in which I call you "Mr. Chamberlain", and somehow decided that I was accusing the US government of appeasement.
Because I'm just some guy on the Internet, and not in a position to appease anyone? And because I've never proposed anything like appeasement?
That's true as far as it goes, but that sort of blame-the-victim mentality is exactly the kind of nonsense which Islamic fundamentalists use to justify the Burqa, and which men have historically used to justify rape.
I used to head an anti-sexual-violence group. Believe me, I'm familiar with victim-blaming. If you want to think that security advice constitutes victim-blaming, go ahead, but it's far from anything I've meant, said, or implied.
How do you negotiate with people who are willing to destroy themselves in order to destroy you?
Simple. You figure out what they actually want, that they're willing to destroy themselves to get it. Just as the IRA didn't want to destroy the British way of life, the people who support ObL have goals other than destroying Americans (that's a means to an end). Don't believe that "hating-freedom" claptrap; the only people who've said that are American politicians. What ObL wants is to (re-)establish a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. He attacked the US because of our military bases in Saudi Arabia, which are there to ensure the stable control of the Saud family, against any "destabilizing" armed opposition that might emerge (whether Sharia-obsessed or pro-democracy or whatever) -- the Saudi police forces can take care of the *unarmed* opposition quite handily thank you. In the absence of a US military presence in the Middle East, bin Laden would get to fight the ones he really wants to fight -- the Saud monarchy, the Jordanian monarchy, the Iranians... who would take less kindly to him when he wasn't focusing on a popularly-reviled enemy. It's the presence of Americans as a convenient target that bands together the different factions we're fighting; if we stepped back, they'd just fight each other, and we'd be rid of the lot. The highly unlikely worst case is that bin Laden would win -- and then we'd have someone we could fight an actual war against, a war where we could actually achieve a clearly-defined victory. Granted, our decision so far has been that confining the conflict to that region isn't worth what it would do to world oil prices -- that we'd rather eat the occasional terrorist act than have the place "destabilized" -- but them's the breaks. Sometimes there are things you want more than peace.
When the stated purpose of an organization is the destruction of your way of life
This is a misunderstanding of what these people are after. Terrorism, like all violence, is a tool used to achieve specific aims. It is very rare that those aims are genocidal; in the cases you're citing, they are not.
The Israel/Palestine bitch-fight is a prime example of this. One side has the power to destroy the other... but can't. The other side has the power to end the conflict... but won't.
Again, misunderstanding the situation. The PLA has always had very well-defined goals (not the destruction of Israel, whatever Israeli propaganda says), which Israel has consistently thought were too much to be accepted (no matter how much the PLA bent). The conflict persists because both sides prefer fighting to the peace they could get. If you want to judge who's more right, you have to look at what each side was offering... but the general point remains: if people can't get what they want peacefully, they'll try to use force. It doesn't matter how extreme the military imbalance is, they'll find a way to fight. This isn't news, either, it's fundamental to human psychology. It
Because the last time I saw anyone play the "appeasement" card, it was a rash of trolls doing so in 2004-2005, talking about how Saddam Hussein had to go because "the days of appeasement ended with 9/11" (obvious nonsense). But, hey, you're not American, you say you aren't trolling, maybe the inappropriate WWII comparison was just an inappropriate WWII comparison.
The part where you accept the deliberate slaughter of women and children as a legitimate response to "asymmetric diplomacy".
Who said anything about legitimate? It's not a legitimate response, it's a predictable one. I'm a sensible person; I describe the world as it inevitably is, rather than as I think it should be. Someone stealing your wallet is not a "legitimate" response to you leaving it lying around on a park bench, but that doesn't stop me from understanding how it might get stolen and recommending that you reconsider your wallet strategy.
And the part where you imply that it would be a good thing for us cooperate "under a relative balance of power" with people like Kim Jong Il and Osama Bin Laden.
That part of the comment was about MAD logic. When a relative balance of power exists (China, the USSR in the 50s-80s), it's dangerously disruptive to try to escape it -- if you're in a Mexican standoff and the other guy tries to shine a light in your eyes, then you have to shoot first, or else you'll die and he lives. So both sides have to either maintain or defuse the standoff, not try to get the upper hand.
Of course I don't want KJI or ObL to have military parity with the US. The whole point is we don't have a relative balance of power with them; we have overwhelmingly superior power, and that's why they choose the means they do (terrorism in bin Laden's case, and a desperate attempt to acquire security through nuclear armament in the North Korean case). If they had military parity, they'd fight us in conventional wars. What we have to accept is that despite overwhelmingly superior power, you can't expect to get all your own way all the time, because people will still find a way to fight you. If you want to live in peace, you have to compromise and negotiate earnestly, even when you think you're strong enough to get whatever you want while giving up nothing. That doesn't mean roll over for anyone, but military dominance isn't all-powerful, and thinking that it is will wind up being dangerous.
With regard to the Middle East, we Americans have appeased no one (except possibly the Saud family). To claim otherwise is massively ignorant.
Violence is almost always a tool used to achieve some material, social, or political end. We can agree that the IRA had specific goals aside from just "kill the British," right? Other terrorist groups (and their state sponsors, when those exist) are no different; terrorism is a tool to weaken one's enemies, used when one doesn't have a position of equal strength, the same as assassination, privateering, or guerilla warfare. With some exceptions, people are on the whole less inclined to support brutal violence when they believe they can get what they want peacefully. What part of all this do you disagree with?
...you seem to believe that the majority of beef cows in America are raised on "ranches" or "farms." You are wrong. (I've seen higher estimates, but they seem implausibly one-sided.)
Also, I think you'll find that most "ethics vegetarians" abstain from fish as well as other meats, so your accusation of hypocrisy is unfounded.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I try to minimize my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons.)
Overall I agree with your rant here, but you're nuts if you think you've seen anything like a "hard left" opinion story on American television. "Hard left" would be talking about taking the heads of major corporations out to the wall to be shot, and having the assets of the Fortune 500 redistributed to manufacturing workers or something. I don't recall anybody ever proposing something of that sort on my television.
The more horrible war is, the less likely it will happen.
Only if horrors happen to both sides. If horrible things only happen to the other guy, most of the population forgets the war is even happening. As for people not understanding that war is horrible -- of *course* people understand that; did you really think millions of Americans protested the invasion of Iraq because they liked Hussein? Complaining about civilian deaths is a weak fallback for people who don't have a clear enough anti-war position, something along the lines of "if you have to go kick in the door of some guy's shack and then shoot him forty times when he tries to defend it with a stick, at least try not to kick his dog, too."
Excellent -- someone on the internet who understands the logic of MAD! It's troubling how many Americans don't seem to get that strength is all well and good, but peace and security require cooperation under a relative balance of power. Terrorism is "asymmetric warfare," but people take those means because symmetric warfare is impossible and they won't accept asymmetric diplomacy any more...
What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
The state produces the most valuable commodity of all, and the one that no other organization is equally equipped to produce: security.
This applies at a national-security level, at a personal security level (police), a property security level (fire departments, levees). It by rights should apply at an economic level (rent stabilization for the economically vulnerable, a social safety net, a national system to provide health care), both for moral reasons and because financial security leads to increased consumer confidence and higher aggregate demand -> driving the economy, and because the state is better equipped to do this than private industry (e.g. private life and health insurance, which aim to reduce risk/increase security). It can sometimes apply in a pathological way, such as when the security institutions of the state are used to solidify unjustly or artificially stratified social orders (think things like software patents, as well as more structured, systematized oppression in the favor of specific moneyed interests). In some cases the state also produces public infrastructure, such as highways, water and electricity distribution systems, etc. (and it tends to do a better, or at least more thorough, job of this than private investment; think of the TVA ferinstance, despite its faults).
But to claim that the state produces nothing is remarkably naive.
I think you're being a little premature about declaring the death of DIY and tinkering. Maybe kids don't mess with breadboards as much as they used to, and I bet the old hobbyist electronics rags aren't being printed, but you can still pick up lots of Engineers' Notebooks at Radio Shack (er, The Shack, I guess, now, like they're a pizza joint...) And while I didn't grow up with Meccano, I assure you that basic Lego blocks are still available in bulk, in a dozen colors, in malls across America.
I agree with you about patents, though; the fear of lawsuits certainly shuts down a lot of good ideas. Maybe it's just because these days we all (myself included, heh) expect our good idea to make us rich, instead of just being some cool thing to put some time into. But I think the OSS movement, as well as the rise of DIY computer tinkering, counterbalances both this and any falling-off in electronics tinkering. Now kids play with code and with hardware instead of wires and HAM radios, but the basic human instinct to play is still there.
This is hardly a new trend. Remember eight-tracks? Or Betamax?
When it comes to consumer technology, once the quality threshold is passed, price becomes the limiting factor. That's an old and universal story (just the sort of thing Wired loves to dress up like a new insight every couple years).
The "progress" in terminology you're talking about is mostly the result of you being too young to have bothered to learn the old things.
Which is fine. Way too much stuff has happened in the past for anybody to know it all; it's just unremarkable that everything old should be new again, under a new name, as ideas get born and reborn.
Right... so what might cause an economy to stop producing as much stuff? Might it be... people aren't buying the stuff that gets made? That seems like a pretty basic cause-and-effect relationship to me.
I'm not sure what you mean by this business about "productive investments" -- GDP isn't measured by return on an individual investment dollar. And American companies could be making very profitable investments in firms located overseas without changing the American GDP a whit... decreased investment in domestic production capacity would (presumably) cause a corresponding decrease in growth of American GDP, but I don't get the sense that's what you're talking about here. Can you please explain?
Oh? Pray tell, how many games released in 2008 can you name off the top of your head? Are you pretty sure you included all the good ones? What about all the so-so ones?
Quality doesn't matter if nobody knows the game existed.
Er... aren't you assuming that review ratings actually track with the average customer's perception of game quality?
I can imagine a world in which reviews start to track with game sales, solely because reviews are bought-and-paid-for marketing efforts, so the increased correlation is actually pointing to increased marketing influence on reviews rather than increased customer preference for highly-reviewed games (or more reliably being able to use reviews as a proxy for consumer preferences).
In order for that service to actually be useful, a published schedule is required.
That's not really true, exactly. The service would still be useful even if all you know is "there should be a train sometime in the next fifteen minutes." That's how the subway and bus systems generally work (schedules exists, but next to nobody ever checks them, or believes them if they do) and those systems still move millions of people daily.
It's more of an issue of the right to create legally unencumbered derivative works. That can have major implications for the further development of the culture (which is the Constitutional basis for Congress having the power to create copyright and patent law). Ferinstance, Half of what Shakespeare's work was re-workings of plays and plots that were done by his contemporaries; he just did them better. But if they could've asserted control that would prevent him from making legal derivative works, we'd not have had Hamlet.
Slashdot Mirror
The comparison was appropriate because it was aimed at YOU. I don't know how you could have read a sentence in which I call you "Mr. Chamberlain", and somehow decided that I was accusing the US government of appeasement.
Because I'm just some guy on the Internet, and not in a position to appease anyone? And because I've never proposed anything like appeasement?
That's true as far as it goes, but that sort of blame-the-victim mentality is exactly the kind of nonsense which Islamic fundamentalists use to justify the Burqa, and which men have historically used to justify rape.
I used to head an anti-sexual-violence group. Believe me, I'm familiar with victim-blaming. If you want to think that security advice constitutes victim-blaming, go ahead, but it's far from anything I've meant, said, or implied.
How do you negotiate with people who are willing to destroy themselves in order to destroy you?
Simple. You figure out what they actually want, that they're willing to destroy themselves to get it. Just as the IRA didn't want to destroy the British way of life, the people who support ObL have goals other than destroying Americans (that's a means to an end). Don't believe that "hating-freedom" claptrap; the only people who've said that are American politicians. What ObL wants is to (re-)establish a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. He attacked the US because of our military bases in Saudi Arabia, which are there to ensure the stable control of the Saud family, against any "destabilizing" armed opposition that might emerge (whether Sharia-obsessed or pro-democracy or whatever) -- the Saudi police forces can take care of the *unarmed* opposition quite handily thank you. In the absence of a US military presence in the Middle East, bin Laden would get to fight the ones he really wants to fight -- the Saud monarchy, the Jordanian monarchy, the Iranians... who would take less kindly to him when he wasn't focusing on a popularly-reviled enemy. It's the presence of Americans as a convenient target that bands together the different factions we're fighting; if we stepped back, they'd just fight each other, and we'd be rid of the lot. The highly unlikely worst case is that bin Laden would win -- and then we'd have someone we could fight an actual war against, a war where we could actually achieve a clearly-defined victory.
Granted, our decision so far has been that confining the conflict to that region isn't worth what it would do to world oil prices -- that we'd rather eat the occasional terrorist act than have the place "destabilized" -- but them's the breaks. Sometimes there are things you want more than peace.
When the stated purpose of an organization is the destruction of your way of life
This is a misunderstanding of what these people are after. Terrorism, like all violence, is a tool used to achieve specific aims. It is very rare that those aims are genocidal; in the cases you're citing, they are not.
The Israel/Palestine bitch-fight is a prime example of this. One side has the power to destroy the other ... but can't. The other side has the power to end the conflict ... but won't.
Again, misunderstanding the situation. The PLA has always had very well-defined goals (not the destruction of Israel, whatever Israeli propaganda says), which Israel has consistently thought were too much to be accepted (no matter how much the PLA bent). The conflict persists because both sides prefer fighting to the peace they could get. If you want to judge who's more right, you have to look at what each side was offering... but the general point remains: if people can't get what they want peacefully, they'll try to use force. It doesn't matter how extreme the military imbalance is, they'll find a way to fight.
This isn't news, either, it's fundamental to human psychology. It
Quite right. Why would you bring this up?
Because the last time I saw anyone play the "appeasement" card, it was a rash of trolls doing so in 2004-2005, talking about how Saddam Hussein had to go because "the days of appeasement ended with 9/11" (obvious nonsense). But, hey, you're not American, you say you aren't trolling, maybe the inappropriate WWII comparison was just an inappropriate WWII comparison.
The part where you accept the deliberate slaughter of women and children as a legitimate response to "asymmetric diplomacy".
Who said anything about legitimate? It's not a legitimate response, it's a predictable one. I'm a sensible person; I describe the world as it inevitably is, rather than as I think it should be. Someone stealing your wallet is not a "legitimate" response to you leaving it lying around on a park bench, but that doesn't stop me from understanding how it might get stolen and recommending that you reconsider your wallet strategy.
And the part where you imply that it would be a good thing for us cooperate "under a relative balance of power" with people like Kim Jong Il and Osama Bin Laden.
That part of the comment was about MAD logic. When a relative balance of power exists (China, the USSR in the 50s-80s), it's dangerously disruptive to try to escape it -- if you're in a Mexican standoff and the other guy tries to shine a light in your eyes, then you have to shoot first, or else you'll die and he lives. So both sides have to either maintain or defuse the standoff, not try to get the upper hand.
Of course I don't want KJI or ObL to have military parity with the US. The whole point is we don't have a relative balance of power with them; we have overwhelmingly superior power, and that's why they choose the means they do (terrorism in bin Laden's case, and a desperate attempt to acquire security through nuclear armament in the North Korean case). If they had military parity, they'd fight us in conventional wars. What we have to accept is that despite overwhelmingly superior power, you can't expect to get all your own way all the time, because people will still find a way to fight you. If you want to live in peace, you have to compromise and negotiate earnestly, even when you think you're strong enough to get whatever you want while giving up nothing. That doesn't mean roll over for anyone, but military dominance isn't all-powerful, and thinking that it is will wind up being dangerous.
Oh, an "appeasement" troll, how quaint.
With regard to the Middle East, we Americans have appeased no one (except possibly the Saud family). To claim otherwise is massively ignorant.
Violence is almost always a tool used to achieve some material, social, or political end. We can agree that the IRA had specific goals aside from just "kill the British," right? Other terrorist groups (and their state sponsors, when those exist) are no different; terrorism is a tool to weaken one's enemies, used when one doesn't have a position of equal strength, the same as assassination, privateering, or guerilla warfare. With some exceptions, people are on the whole less inclined to support brutal violence when they believe they can get what they want peacefully. What part of all this do you disagree with?
You've obviously never met some of the Hard-Core Biking Douchebags who'll drop five figures on a pair of wheels!
...you seem to believe that the majority of beef cows in America are raised on "ranches" or "farms." You are wrong. (I've seen higher estimates, but they seem implausibly one-sided.)
Also, I think you'll find that most "ethics vegetarians" abstain from fish as well as other meats, so your accusation of hypocrisy is unfounded.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I try to minimize my meat consumption for environmental and health reasons.)
there are people who cannot feel pain.
...so you're saying, by the transitive property, it's morally okay to eat them?
Obligatory goatse link denied because I'd like to keep my job...
Overall I agree with your rant here, but you're nuts if you think you've seen anything like a "hard left" opinion story on American television. "Hard left" would be talking about taking the heads of major corporations out to the wall to be shot, and having the assets of the Fortune 500 redistributed to manufacturing workers or something. I don't recall anybody ever proposing something of that sort on my television.
The more horrible war is, the less likely it will happen.
Only if horrors happen to both sides. If horrible things only happen to the other guy, most of the population forgets the war is even happening.
As for people not understanding that war is horrible -- of *course* people understand that; did you really think millions of Americans protested the invasion of Iraq because they liked Hussein? Complaining about civilian deaths is a weak fallback for people who don't have a clear enough anti-war position, something along the lines of "if you have to go kick in the door of some guy's shack and then shoot him forty times when he tries to defend it with a stick, at least try not to kick his dog, too."
Excellent -- someone on the internet who understands the logic of MAD!
It's troubling how many Americans don't seem to get that strength is all well and good, but peace and security require cooperation under a relative balance of power. Terrorism is "asymmetric warfare," but people take those means because symmetric warfare is impossible and they won't accept asymmetric diplomacy any more...
What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
The state produces the most valuable commodity of all, and the one that no other organization is equally equipped to produce: security.
This applies at a national-security level, at a personal security level (police), a property security level (fire departments, levees). It by rights should apply at an economic level (rent stabilization for the economically vulnerable, a social safety net, a national system to provide health care), both for moral reasons and because financial security leads to increased consumer confidence and higher aggregate demand -> driving the economy, and because the state is better equipped to do this than private industry (e.g. private life and health insurance, which aim to reduce risk/increase security). It can sometimes apply in a pathological way, such as when the security institutions of the state are used to solidify unjustly or artificially stratified social orders (think things like software patents, as well as more structured, systematized oppression in the favor of specific moneyed interests). In some cases the state also produces public infrastructure, such as highways, water and electricity distribution systems, etc. (and it tends to do a better, or at least more thorough, job of this than private investment; think of the TVA ferinstance, despite its faults).
But to claim that the state produces nothing is remarkably naive.
I think you're being a little premature about declaring the death of DIY and tinkering. Maybe kids don't mess with breadboards as much as they used to, and I bet the old hobbyist electronics rags aren't being printed, but you can still pick up lots of Engineers' Notebooks at Radio Shack (er, The Shack, I guess, now, like they're a pizza joint...) And while I didn't grow up with Meccano, I assure you that basic Lego blocks are still available in bulk, in a dozen colors, in malls across America.
I agree with you about patents, though; the fear of lawsuits certainly shuts down a lot of good ideas. Maybe it's just because these days we all (myself included, heh) expect our good idea to make us rich, instead of just being some cool thing to put some time into. But I think the OSS movement, as well as the rise of DIY computer tinkering, counterbalances both this and any falling-off in electronics tinkering. Now kids play with code and with hardware instead of wires and HAM radios, but the basic human instinct to play is still there.
This is hardly a new trend. Remember eight-tracks? Or Betamax?
When it comes to consumer technology, once the quality threshold is passed, price becomes the limiting factor. That's an old and universal story (just the sort of thing Wired loves to dress up like a new insight every couple years).
less than $220,000
...dude, that's half a mortgage in most of the country, an order of magnitude greater than all but the most out-there extreme luxury cars.
You aren't talking about consumer items here.
The "progress" in terminology you're talking about is mostly the result of you being too young to have bothered to learn the old things.
Which is fine. Way too much stuff has happened in the past for anybody to know it all; it's just unremarkable that everything old should be new again, under a new name, as ideas get born and reborn.
So in other words, it's Yet Another Buzzword?
Recession is defined as negative GDP growth
Right... so what might cause an economy to stop producing as much stuff? Might it be... people aren't buying the stuff that gets made? That seems like a pretty basic cause-and-effect relationship to me.
I'm not sure what you mean by this business about "productive investments" -- GDP isn't measured by return on an individual investment dollar. And American companies could be making very profitable investments in firms located overseas without changing the American GDP a whit... decreased investment in domestic production capacity would (presumably) cause a corresponding decrease in growth of American GDP, but I don't get the sense that's what you're talking about here. Can you please explain?
You watch Cartoon Network? PIG!
your vibrator will tweet when it turns on.
Sounds like you'd have a better business model if the vibrator tweets you when you're turned on.
Oh?
Pray tell, how many games released in 2008 can you name off the top of your head? Are you pretty sure you included all the good ones? What about all the so-so ones?
Quality doesn't matter if nobody knows the game existed.
Er... aren't you assuming that review ratings actually track with the average customer's perception of game quality?
I can imagine a world in which reviews start to track with game sales, solely because reviews are bought-and-paid-for marketing efforts, so the increased correlation is actually pointing to increased marketing influence on reviews rather than increased customer preference for highly-reviewed games (or more reliably being able to use reviews as a proxy for consumer preferences).
Late response on this, but just to say it sounds like we see eye to eye on a lot. Good luck and keep safe.
And when you win a Darwin award, here I'll be able to say, "I knew him when..."
In order for that service to actually be useful, a published schedule is required.
That's not really true, exactly. The service would still be useful even if all you know is "there should be a train sometime in the next fifteen minutes." That's how the subway and bus systems generally work (schedules exists, but next to nobody ever checks them, or believes them if they do) and those systems still move millions of people daily.
Quibbling, I know...
It's more of an issue of the right to create legally unencumbered derivative works.
That can have major implications for the further development of the culture (which is the Constitutional basis for Congress having the power to create copyright and patent law). Ferinstance, Half of what Shakespeare's work was re-workings of plays and plots that were done by his contemporaries; he just did them better. But if they could've asserted control that would prevent him from making legal derivative works, we'd not have had Hamlet.