" But I will say this: a game should not take "effort" beyond the effort required to have fun. "
I think the thing that is lost on people in all this "my game is better than your game" flame throwing is that different people are looking for different things in their games. Its cognitive dissonance, the kind of brain lock you see in Republicans, when people start lecturing other people that what I like in games is RIGHT and what you like in games is WRONG.
The challenge for successful game developers, especially successful online game developers, is that they design a game that finds an audience, enough of an audience to be successful and that they keep that audience satisfied. You could easily have two huge audiences, who will have nothing to do with each other, one who wants fun and fluffy games they can play in an hour and everything is obvious, and the other which wants their game to be bone crushing hard and time consuming.
The trick is there is more than one equation to reaching the goal of successful online game.
I hate to break it to you but the Earth's climate has always been in constant change. Don't think there is any law that says it has to stay the way it is now for eternity because now we have environmentalists to fret about it.
Though I'll grant you that the rate of change we are seeing and will see may be a cause for alarm and there is a pretty good chance it is man made. In particular if the change is to rapid many species will be wiped out because they wont be able to adapt quickly enough.
Most of the Bush administration crowd, who also happen to be the fossil fuel burning crowd, are more than willing to kid themselves that this is just the natural "greening" of a planet coming out of the ice age. They do have a point that there is no law that says we have to have huge ice packs on the poles, and there certainly have been era in earth's history when there weren't.
Heh, after all the flak I get on Slashdot everytime there is an article on global warming and I point out that a smart long term investor should be buying up coastal real estate in Canada, Alaska and Siberia. I also routinely point out you don't want to buy real estate that is to coastal since you have to allow for the fact the coastlines are going to move dramaticly as all that ice melts.
You are incorrect. They are extremely injurious to the economy, which I think is what you meant, but you are wrong because they are EXTREMELY good at "creating wealth" themselves. Its how the robber barons, Carnegie in steel, Vanderbilt and Stanford in railroads, Rockefeller in oil, Morgan in banking made their vast fortunes. The only reason you have antitrust law in the U.S. is because the wealth concentration at the begginning of the 20th century was becoming so extreme thanks to monopolies, there was a severe backlash from common folk mostly under the the umbrella of the Progressives, and Teddy Roosevelt. I wish we had a movement like it today because its needed just as bad today as it was then. They brought us the progressive income tax George W. hates so much to work against concentration of wealth and antitrust law which broke up Standard oil mostly unsuccessfully since the oil companies continued to collude and have mostly since remerged.
If you have no competition and sell something people have to buy you almost unavoidably get rich because you can charge more than you would in a competitive market place assuming no government regulation (Socialism).
The key to becoming a monopolist and getting filthy rich is jumping in to a new market before there are established players, as Gates did in PC software, and push out all your competitors before they beat you to being the monopoly. If you are successful and good at it you will become rich just as Gates has, and no one is likely to dislodge him unless there is a major market shift and Microsoft misses it, as they almost did with the browser when Netscape ruled and now in search engines and other new markets Google is dominating.
"We don't have monopoly restrictions out of some sense of 'fairness', we have them out of clear pragmatic purpose. Monopolies are one of the most innefficient methods of creating wealth, and competitive markets is one of the best."
Not sure this is exactly accurate. The progressive movement was in fact trying to force economic fairness in a place where it was sorely lacking.
I think Walmart is also a case study that shows you are wrong. They aren't quite a monopoly yet but in many towns they are. They will most likely destroy every retailer trying to sell what they sell, because they have vast economies of scale. They are in fact extremely efficient, and are also very beneficial to the economy in that they provide goods at dramaticly lower prices than you see in their absence. Unfortunately they are devastating all their competitors and moving jobs to China at a disturbing pace. They are still the height of efficiency.
You sure are throwing that "liar" word around a lot without any actual justification.
"you are lying when you say Bill Gates is calling open source developer or Linux developers communists"
This is exactly what he said:
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
He obviously didn't say LINUX in bold letters but who exactly do you think he is talking about when he is refering to "software makers" here? The "incentive" here is that software makers should hold all their software under proprietary license and get paid for it, an arguement he's been making since his famous letter in 1976.
OK if that didn't clarify who the liar is here lets hop in the wayback machine and remember when Steve Ballmer, Bill's partner called Linux "communist" outright. He said:
"Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."
"what you are doing is essentially changing that into an attack on open source."
I am doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that Linux IS communist in the classic sense of the word. It is a community working for the common good, and renouncing private ownership of the fruit of their labors for that good. There is nothing resembling an "attack" in that. It is an entirely positive thing. I'm pointing out than when Gates and Ballmer use this word it comes across as an attack because the true meaning of the word "communist" has been so distorted in today's world especially in the U.S. that it is a pejorative and they are trying to associate Linux with all the badness that was and is the U.S.S.R and China which weren't even remotely communist in reality, the were and are oppressive socialist dictatorships.
All in all you strike me as a classic anonymous coward chickenshit slinging terms like "big liar", without supporting it, while you cower under complete anonymity. If you believe what you are saying and aren't a chickenshit at least post it under your login.
Actually Communism is a way of living. It derives from living in a commune. You might note it has the same root as a word us Linux people use a lot, community. Bill Gates is in fact right, sharing MP3's and open source software development IS communism. The catch is thanks the word was hijacked by a bunch of socialist dictators, specially Stalin. Its been turned in to a dirty word and thats why Bill Gates and Co. try to lay it on file swappers and Linux. Americans in particular freak at the word and start warming up the jets on the deck of the aircraft carriers everytime the get a wiff of it in the air. That is exactly what Bill is trying to do here, mobilize the American people and government in to a reactionary frenzy in which they wipe out file sharing and Linux. Oh, and in the process he just happens to get "Trusted Computing" and he locks Linux off of the Internet and out of personal computing because it can't be "Trusted". In the process he further secures his monopoly because all computers have to be trusted and Microsoft will seek to control the implementation of that trust(in all hardware and all software). It is classic Marxism, the community versus an ever expending capitalist monpolist.
At its ideal Communism is a group of people living together sharing their resources and labor, working together for the common good. They are not dividing the world up in to personal property which at its worst usually means one percent of the people own everything, including all the land and everyone else is dirt poor and share cropping or working in outright servitude. Thats what Russia was like prior to 1917 which is why there was a revolution. Its also classic Marxism that when you have capital you have a huge advantage in making more capital over people who have no capital. And of course there is a near inevitable concentration of wealth in a few hands and ever larger monpolies because large corporations can dominate smaller ones and huge monopolies are extremely good at making money, and destroying or gobbling up their competitors. Unless government restrains it through antitrust law, which is... gasp... socialism it is a nearly inevitable evolution of Capitalism that eventually you end up with one company that owns everything, and in the computer age it would most likely be Microsoft unless they screw the pooch at some point.
"failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide"
There was a great opinion piece on Space Daily a few days ago that pointed out the irony that the Russian space program is a pragmatic group, doing a lot of great work with very limited resources and are in fact great businessmen, especially with their space tourism attempts.
The article then contrasted it with NASA's manned space program which is in fact an incompetent bureacracy with all of the worst characteristics you expect from a the "failed economic idealogy" of "statist communism". An agency laced with incompetent bureaucrats who aren't held to account for failure or rewarded for success and who squander state funds at a breathtaking pace and build incompetent empires. I hate to break it to you but if you look at the massive growth of government spending in the U.S. it is in many ways a socialist state too. Vast segments of the American economy are completely tied to and dependent on government spending and contracts which is pretty much socialism. There was a time the Republicans blamed all this socialism on the Democrats but now they have complete control of the government and they are accelerating government spending and intervention in the economy, not slowing it.
As an aside I'm pretty sure capitalism and dictatorial socialism which is what you see in China and the U.S.S.R, not really communism, are both to blame for millions of unnecessary deaths. Vietnam for example was a mutual effort of the two ideoligies as they fought proxy wars around the world see they couldn't do it directly. The U.S. most certainly did kill millions of civilians in Vietnam and is killing plenty of civilians unnecessarily in Iraq today.
There have certainly been some major slaughtering of innocents in the U.S.S.R, China and North Korea but that really has NOTHING to do with ideology. That is just what you get from dictatorships whether they be left or right leaning. The U.S. has propped up, if not outright installed, plenty of right wing dictators who slaughtered innocents, Pinochet for example may finally be held to account for all the people his U.S. backed government murdered.
First off you didn't answer the question, were your grades completely subjective or were they based on an objective test. If it was the former your on shaky ground proving anything other than your may have a bias, that students that come to you constantly after class get better grades.
A really smart student would figure out the answer on his or he own and learn even more in the process of figuring out how to find the answer. That is what you REALLY want to be teaching programming students if you are a really good teacher, thought process, how to solve problems and find answers without crutching off someone else on the team. People who are constantly crutching off you might learn all the material and get an A and not have learned a thing about problem solving or being an actual programmer. As soon as you or someone like you isn't there to explain everything your A student might well crater.
So all you are differentiating in your anecdote is some students are comfortable approaching you and motivated to ask you questions and some aren't. Ever think maybe something about your attitude and teaching style put the other students off, either they didn't like you or were afraid of you, and this one guy was the only one desperate enough to make a grade that he overcame it. Is your classroom approach to stand in front and lecture everyone in to boredom, or did you get everyone involved in a learning experience in the classroom. In a class that small you probably should be achieving the later unless either you or they are complete losers.
What about the context there changes what he said that isn't countered by "Much truth is said in jest".
So what if he was telling jokes before and after. What he said is in epic example of bad taste for the President of a representative democracy to say. It unfortunately is true of most politicians, especially Republicans, their base is the moneyed elite, but most of them have the common sense and good judgement to not say it in public, even if its packaged as a joke.
The golf cart video is just as bad and shows how much more he values his golf game and leisure pursuits over world affairs and looking like a sane head of state.
The video of him reading my pet goat once again shows that instead of jumping up, politely excusing himself and dealing with the seminal crisis of his career, he instead froze and Dick Cheney was pretty much running the crisis and deciding whether to order the Air Force to start shooting down airliners.
And then of course there was his other attempt at a joke at a press club dinner, where he is joking about finding the WMD's in Iraq by looking under the table in the oval office. Well there were no WMD's, 10,000 wounded Americans, 1300 some families of dead American's, and an unknown count of dead Iraqi's probably don't think it's a good joke at this point. Though I'm sure the robotic pen Rumsfeld was using to sign the letters to the families of the dead though it was funny. Just another example of his really bad judgement and arrogance when he opens his mouth.
Want some more?
"Bring 'em on" well they did and still are and everytime they do people die.
"If this were a dictatorship, it would
be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator" on the 2000 election debacle. Again trying to make a joke but saying something a soon to be President, in a time of great division and contested election, an election many think he stole, wouldn't say unless he can't control his mouth.
Assuming the grades you give are subjective, maybe it means you have a tendancy to give A's to the people who worship at your feet and make you feel important? Not saying thats it but your post doesn't exactly make it clear what your anecdote is proving.
Why don't you try posting about the subject of the thread and stay on topic instead of ranting about my sig. You are only about the 20th person to piss and moan about it. To them I say what I'll say to you "Much truth is said in jest".
"You should watch Farenhype 9/11."
Seen it, it is a right wing rant like Moore's is a left wing one. You know it when the Wicked Witch of the Right, Ann Coulter is front and center. The truth is somewhere in the middle though I'm inclined to agree with Moore that the Bush family are elitists whose concept of public service is to make themselves and their rich friends richer. Whether it was a joke or not its a pretty simple and obvious fact that his administration has pandered to his rich friends at every possible turn, and has enriched many of them at the expense of the rest of us, reference tax cuts for the rich and Medicare "Reform" which is a gigantic transfer of our payroll tax dollars in to the pockets of the drug and healthcare companies who don't need any more money (well the drug companies might need it since they are rushing from being one of America's most profitable sectors to deep trouble now that people realize their drugs are often not safe, they often know they aren't safe and intentionally hide it and keep selling them to make a beloved buck though they are killing people).
I hate to break it to you but my sig has nothing to do with Fahrenheit 9/11 other than Moore showed the video it came from, of little George in a White tie and tux shmoozing with his rich friends. It was just a well known example of little George's arrogance and contempt for everyone who isn't rich. Moore just gave it a wider audience. You can't impune the words coming out of Little George's own mouth by attacking Michael Moore. You can cut out all of Moore's editorializing, stunting and stretching the facts in Fahrenheit 9/11 and he still hangs Little George just showing unedited video of him being himself. There is enough tape of George embarrasing himself you could do a multiweek miniseries. Pretty much anytime he opens his mouth when he isn't reading from a teleprompter and the words aren't written by his staff, he is embarrasssing. All that alcohol in his youth must have pretty much pickled the speech center in his brain.
What was the title of this article....dumbass. So you want me to provide evidence to prove something in an article called "What do you Believe Even If you can't prove it". You are a real genius.
My contention is that white holes are obscured by the dust and high density of stars that would surround them so you can't observe them.
I believe in white holes. For every black hole there is a white hole elsewhere in space. The matter gets sucked in to the black hole and spews out elsewhere in space, with a worm hole, tear in space or whatever you want to call it connecting the two which are very far from each other in conventional space. Where are the white holes, presumably there is one at the center of most or all galaxies. I envision a continuing cycle of renewal where matter is being incinerated and compacted in one place and starting a new life elsewhere building new stars at the center of new galaxies.
I wont argue that there might be an objective reality in some arenas, but there certainly isn't any in many subjects wikipedia covers, especially all the ones involving people... history, politics, economics, sociology. So granted there is some objective reality in the hard sciences, for example, you still have the problem that you will NEVER know with certainty when you have cracked that objective reality and know something with such certainty that you can say that it an article is an indisputable fact. For the subject under discussion here, the representation of knowledge in Wikipedia whether you like it or not, you are completely at the mercy of the subjective opinions of its contributors and readers. Some of them may have pegged objective reality in some articles but you have no idea in which ones did and didn't. You can have hunches that an article is the "truth", objective reality, but its little more than that, a hunch. An earth shattering discovery could surface tomorrow that turns what you thought was objective truth today on its ear.
A key reason the U.S. was blindsided by 9/11 was becausing it was squandering such vast sums on spy satellites. The imaging satellites are really only good for monitoring nation states with large conventional and strategic military assets or maybe really obvious weapons installations like nuclear reactors or processing facilities. They are nearly worthless against insurgencies like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more worthless against terrorists like Al Qaida (well they were good for taking pictures of their training camps and mud huts which were occassionally bombed in to being just mud. Not sure Al Qaida even has mud hut camps now or if they do they probably aren't obvious about it). Not sure you couldn't be far better served now by RPV's doing tactical reconnaisance since theater commanders have a lot more control over them, and they can fly over whenever you want. Spy satellites have predictable orbits and any nation with something to hide can figure out when they are overhead. Wound't be suprised if RPV's will take over strategic reconnaisance too. There is a stealth variant of Global Hawk you can probably fly over any country you fell like without detection being developed.
The electronic eavesdropping efforts might be somewhat more useful again terrorists but I imagine most of them have figured out by now its not a good idea to use cell phones, phones in general or radios. I'm pretty sure Al Qaida is mostly using concealed and encrypted traffic on the internet. Spy satellites are also not much value as more and more traffic goes in to fiber optics, though I assume the NSA is tapping most of the world's fiber too.
I'm willing to bet a lot of people at the CIA, Pentagon and NSA, George Tenet in particular, are kicking themselves that they let traditional intelligence methodologies(i.e. spys) wither away in favor of spy satellites. They kind of obviously have a problem because they don't even have the people to translate most of the non english intercepts, especially those in Arabic, the current electronic intelligence spying yields.
That entirely depends on how you choose to subjectively define torture. You are obviously setting a higher bar than most people would. If Saddam had done that shit and the same photos were realeased you and most of America would be screamy bloody TORTURE at the top of your lungs. You are just applying a double standard because you can't cope with the fact that your beloved country got caught redhanded doing something you don't want to admit your country does.
Again, just answer my question, would it be OK if we subject you to the treatment the inmates suffered just in the publicly released photos. OK, then if we can get our hand on all the really gruesome photos that have been withheld can we subject you to that to? Also remember you are being held against your will and once your captors start doing this stuff to you, you don't know where or if they draw the line and stop. even
I didn't think so.
Even if it didn't rise to your high bar for physical torture it was obviously pegging the meter on the psychological scale and the main component of sexual torture is psychological. Its not like you are necessarily going to be physically harmed by being raped, unless its particulary brutal, most of the damage is psychological.
Is it OK if we take photos of you in homosexual poses and show them to your family and friends or maybe show them to the whole world? Didn't think so.
If we are going to use your bar you simply can't put anything on this subject in Wikipedia. There is no irrefutable evidence its ever occurred anywhere. Only people that know for sure are either the people who were a victim of it, or who inflicted or who watched it being inflicted. Its really easy to dismiss the first and last groups as liars. The middle group is usually not talking.
"But do not heap upon it crimes that did not occur there."
Once again you are making a statement you can't support. You said yourself you have no clue what is in the photos that weren't released and for all you no they do show those crimes occuring there. If you don't like me saying things I can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt why don't you stop doing it.
A misdemeanor assault by a librarian against a peaceofficer. Librarian claim she just went limp and fell on the guy. When exactly did that rate calling in the FBI on such a massive scale. The other obvious point is I imagine you can justify investigating the twelve protesters at the National Guard Base. They were pretty much asking for that with the act of disobedience anyway. Exactly what connection does this have with the peaceful exercise in free speech at Drake University? Nothing really. There simply was no justification for the action the DOJ took at Drake other than they were seeking to build files on and intimidate everyone who attended and discourage people from rallying against the war in Iraq. They were almost certainly seeking to suppress antiwar protest, no doubt remembering back to what happened to an unpopular government in an unpopular war in Vietnam. They wanted to nip the protest in the bud. It must have worked, how often do you here about protests against the war in Iraq lately.
"You mean like Cat "Terror Train" Stevens?"
No, there are a number of people who have been added to the no fly list for dissident activities. Can they prove it, no, because the names on the list and the mechanism by which they got there and, the mechanism to get off it are classified. You can put a dissident's name on it, punish them and deny it (the list is so insane in the first place since it is just a list of names both real and aliases so anyone can be banned from flying if they are unlucky enough to have the same name as a random alias of a suspected terrorist). Many people wrongfully on it have figured out they can easily beat it by slightly mutating their name on their ticket.
The problem is we don't know what is right and wrong in our knowledge base. So we make subjective judgments about what we think is right and wrong in our perception of the world. When we do we make everything subjective. Maybe there is some absolute truth down there but we will never really find it because everything is colored by our perception and understanding and our perception and understanding is not perfect. Absolute truth is irrelevent for our discussion of Wikipedia. It is like all knowledge just a stab, a best guess at truth, and guessing is subjective.
Physicists have conjured up a detailed description of our world but they will be the first to admit that they are guessing in many areas and the things we don't know yet, and may never know, might completely alter our knowledge of quantum mechanics, matter, energy and time.
I'm pretty sure the flat earth crowd or the Newton crowd would have been as strident as you are in insisting their world view was fact when it was really a very subjective view of the world that was wrong in the first instance and not entirely right in the second instance(when relativity came on the scene). A century from know relativity and quantum mechanics might be complete overturned by a giant leap forward and today's physicists might look equally quaint.
"The photo's that were NOT publicly released are irrelevant because we do NOT know what they are."
Excepting we know they exist and they are worse than the ones that were publicly released which were REALLY bad, so only someone in a severe state of denail would call them irrelevent. Like I said many Japanese are in the same state of denial about Nanking more than 60 years later.
As a reminder you said:
"Except that there was no sexual torture at that prison"
That was an absolute statement which you simply can't support and the weight of the evidence leans against you. You have zero evidence that there was no sexual torture, in fact that is an unprovable statement. Sexual torture happens in nearly every prison whether it be inmate on inmate or guard on inmate.
So I'm at a loss how you think you can get away with saying absolutely it didn't happen when you have no evidence to support that, and you have to deny a large body of photographic evidence showing severe abuse, and we know there is more evidence that has been concealed showing even worse abuse, and a there is a presumption that if they did stuff that awful on camera that they may well have done things far worse off camera.
"The link to Abu Ghraib was *subjective*. It was *biased*. It was *inappropriate* for an encyclopedia."
And so was the link to Saddam and Nanking. They are all subjective charges. Unfortunately EVERY link on this subject is going to be subjective and inflammatory. It is the nature of the subject. I guess you can either deny it exists because it is never absolutely provable, or you can include links to instances with some substantiation and Abu Graib is hands down the best documented case there is. Most torturers are smarter than American torturers because the usually strive to not leave an evidence trail, its a reason electic shock, drowning and rubber hoses are popular, no marks to take pictures of later.
Bottom line is you either include all the links or none of them. The people who were fighting over this at Wikipedia were just trying to replace ones that that offended their political view with ones that were inline with what they want to believe. The original poster was acting like he was being objective and fair when he obviously wasn't, he was replacing an anti American link with a pro American propaganda link.
"That looks interesting, until you see that it turns out to be an organization trying to cover something up."
Now who is the running of the conspiracy theory deep end, hypocrite. It was a public forum at a university. They weren't trying to hide anything. If I recall a couple people who attended it attempted an act of civil disobedience at a nearby National Guard which set it off(a real stretch on your part to call it "violence"). The DOJ swept in in an extraordinary heavy handed way and attempted to learn everything that was said by every speaker at the conference and tried to gag everyone to prevent anyone from talking about the investigation. It is a near certainty that everyone who spoke at the conference now has an FBI file, if they didn't already, and is labeled as a dissident, and everything they said was in that file.
The only thing that forced the DOJ to back off is they they went so far off the deep end that word leaked out, and public outrage started building. The whole point I've been trying to make here and that has been lost on you is suppression of dissent in America is subtler and less obvious than it would be in an openly totalitarian state but it is still happening and quite effectively. Do they throw Michael Moore in prison, no because it would stoke outrage, did they try to kill distribution of his movie yes, did they block showing it on pay per view before the election, yes, have they tried to make him out to be a liar, yes. If you are a dissident who isn't famous you are much more likely to have an FBI agent spying on you, threatening your or your name added to the do not fly list so you cant get on an airplane without risking arrest.
"Except that there was no sexual torture at that prison."
Don't think you actually know the full extent of the abuse there to make such a bold and absolute statement. The photo's that were publicly released didn't include the most graphic ones which apparently sickened most of the people that saw them behind closed doors.
I'm thinking maybe you would like to do a stint as a prisoner in a place like Abu Graib and maybe you wouldn't be so willing to downplay what happened there.
You also sound a lot like you work in the Bush administration. They try to split hairs on what constitutes torture too which is why all this ugliness happened in the first place. There is no sharp division between abuse and torture, its just gradations. I imagine you are more likely if to call it torture if you are on the receiving end and less likely if you are administering it(personally or by supporting a government which does it).
Are you saying including the link on Saddam was objective and not hyperbole? On this particular topic I think we have established that a moderator is most likely going to include links that cites torture by people he disapproves of and suppress ones that hit to close to home.
Unfortunately state sanctioned rape and torture is pretty much inevitably be the subject of innuendo, objectivity and hyperbole because it usually comes down to one persons word against anothers. What makes Abu Ghraib unique is they were stupid enough to produce reams of indisputable evidence which is why it IS such a good case study on the topic.
"For instance, the page on rape had a section called "Rape and Sexual Torture""
Excuse me, but if the article has a section on "Sexual Torture" it is obviously on topic to include Abu Graib, even if you choose to believe there wasn't rape there when there is at least a 50/50 chance there was.
Both of you are splitting the same semantic hairs the original parent did.
Bottomline here is they should have included links to all of the exmples, instead of trying to suppress the links each of the various moderators found offensive to their particular political perspective. There is a pretty high chance a Japanese moderator would have taken offense to the link to the rape of Nanking since Japan has been more than a little reluctant to officially acknowledge that it occurred as described.
Fact is their is a tendency to lay the most war crimes and atrocities claims against the country that loses a war. The moral high ground almost always goes to the winner, whether it deserves it or not, simply because it controls all the "evidence" and it controls the government and court that runs the trial after the war which decides guilt.
To quote Locke from Webster's online defining knowledge:
"Knowledge, which is the highest degree of the speculative faculties, consists in the perception of the truth of affirmative or negative propositions." -- Locke
Knowledge is "perception", it is not an absolute. Anything that involves perception is subjective to a degree. Knowledge is just less subjective than opinion, but it is still subjective. Again from Webster's:
1. That which is opined; a notion or conviction founded on probable evidence; belief stronger than impression, less strong than positive knowledge; settled judgment in regard to any point of knowledge or action.
"Pat Buchanan took the racist wing of the GOP with him when he left."
That is plain silly. The racist wing of the GOP party is alive and well. Its a defining criteria of the new Republican party, if you don't like blacks don't vote Democrat. Most of rascist wing of the Republican used to be the rascist wing of the Democratic party (a.k.a. Southern Democrats). They moved en masse to the Republican party starting in the Kennedy and Johnson Era, the Civil Rights Act sealed the deal, and it is a move that is complete today. Its why the south moved from being solidly Democratic to what it is today, solidly Republican and its why the Republican's have complete control of the government today.
"So far, you came up with a real criminal, and one silly boob that only makes people laugh."
Hate to break it to you but the right wing says the same thing about Michael Moore. No one in the current administration is going to openly persecute him. It would be:
A. Obvious B. Counterproductive C. Like I said earlier they played him like a fiddle and he ended up doing more harm than good to the left.
Michael Moore was more than a little stupid to go to the Republican Convention and give them a visible target for their bile.
You see you've been stuck on "famous" dissidents all through this thread. The "famous" people aren't the ones that are going to be persecuted in America. It causes to much media scrutiny. If you want to see an example of persecution of nameless dissidents, do a google search on "Drake University anitwar forum". That is the face of the subtler persecution you find in America.
Slashdot Mirror
" But I will say this: a game should not take "effort" beyond the effort required to have fun. "
I think the thing that is lost on people in all this "my game is better than your game" flame throwing is that different people are looking for different things in their games. Its cognitive dissonance, the kind of brain lock you see in Republicans, when people start lecturing other people that what I like in games is RIGHT and what you like in games is WRONG.
The challenge for successful game developers, especially successful online game developers, is that they design a game that finds an audience, enough of an audience to be successful and that they keep that audience satisfied. You could easily have two huge audiences, who will have nothing to do with each other, one who wants fun and fluffy games they can play in an hour and everything is obvious, and the other which wants their game to be bone crushing hard and time consuming.
The trick is there is more than one equation to reaching the goal of successful online game.
I hate to break it to you but the Earth's climate has always been in constant change. Don't think there is any law that says it has to stay the way it is now for eternity because now we have environmentalists to fret about it.
Though I'll grant you that the rate of change we are seeing and will see may be a cause for alarm and there is a pretty good chance it is man made. In particular if the change is to rapid many species will be wiped out because they wont be able to adapt quickly enough.
Most of the Bush administration crowd, who also happen to be the fossil fuel burning crowd, are more than willing to kid themselves that this is just the natural "greening" of a planet coming out of the ice age. They do have a point that there is no law that says we have to have huge ice packs on the poles, and there certainly have been era in earth's history when there weren't.
Heh, after all the flak I get on Slashdot everytime there is an article on global warming and I point out that a smart long term investor should be buying up coastal real estate in Canada, Alaska and Siberia. I also routinely point out you don't want to buy real estate that is to coastal since you have to allow for the fact the coastlines are going to move dramaticly as all that ice melts.
You are incorrect. They are extremely injurious to the economy, which I think is what you meant, but you are wrong because they are EXTREMELY good at "creating wealth" themselves. Its how the robber barons, Carnegie in steel, Vanderbilt and Stanford in railroads, Rockefeller in oil, Morgan in banking made their vast fortunes. The only reason you have antitrust law in the U.S. is because the wealth concentration at the begginning of the 20th century was becoming so extreme thanks to monopolies, there was a severe backlash from common folk mostly under the the umbrella of the Progressives, and Teddy Roosevelt. I wish we had a movement like it today because its needed just as bad today as it was then. They brought us the progressive income tax George W. hates so much to work against concentration of wealth and antitrust law which broke up Standard oil mostly unsuccessfully since the oil companies continued to collude and have mostly since remerged.
If you have no competition and sell something people have to buy you almost unavoidably get rich because you can charge more than you would in a competitive market place assuming no government regulation (Socialism).
The key to becoming a monopolist and getting filthy rich is jumping in to a new market before there are established players, as Gates did in PC software, and push out all your competitors before they beat you to being the monopoly. If you are successful and good at it you will become rich just as Gates has, and no one is likely to dislodge him unless there is a major market shift and Microsoft misses it, as they almost did with the browser when Netscape ruled and now in search engines and other new markets Google is dominating.
"We don't have monopoly restrictions out of some sense of 'fairness', we have them out of clear pragmatic purpose. Monopolies are one of the most innefficient methods of creating wealth, and competitive markets is one of the best."
Not sure this is exactly accurate. The progressive movement was in fact trying to force economic fairness in a place where it was sorely lacking.
I think Walmart is also a case study that shows you are wrong. They aren't quite a monopoly yet but in many towns they are. They will most likely destroy every retailer trying to sell what they sell, because they have vast economies of scale. They are in fact extremely efficient, and are also very beneficial to the economy in that they provide goods at dramaticly lower prices than you see in their absence. Unfortunately they are devastating all their competitors and moving jobs to China at a disturbing pace. They are still the height of efficiency.
You sure are throwing that "liar" word around a lot without any actual justification.
"you are lying when you say Bill Gates is calling open source developer or Linux developers communists"
This is exactly what he said:
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
He obviously didn't say LINUX in bold letters but who exactly do you think he is talking about when he is refering to "software makers" here? The "incentive" here is that software makers should hold all their software under proprietary license and get paid for it, an arguement he's been making since his famous letter in 1976.
OK if that didn't clarify who the liar is here lets hop in the wayback machine and remember when Steve Ballmer, Bill's partner called Linux "communist" outright. He said:
"Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."
"what you are doing is essentially changing that into an attack on open source."
I am doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that Linux IS communist in the classic sense of the word. It is a community working for the common good, and renouncing private ownership of the fruit of their labors for that good. There is nothing resembling an "attack" in that. It is an entirely positive thing. I'm pointing out than when Gates and Ballmer use this word it comes across as an attack because the true meaning of the word "communist" has been so distorted in today's world especially in the U.S. that it is a pejorative and they are trying to associate Linux with all the badness that was and is the U.S.S.R and China which weren't even remotely communist in reality, the were and are oppressive socialist dictatorships.
All in all you strike me as a classic anonymous coward chickenshit slinging terms like "big liar", without supporting it, while you cower under complete anonymity. If you believe what you are saying and aren't a chickenshit at least post it under your login.
"Communism is a method of government"
... gasp ... socialism it is a nearly inevitable evolution of Capitalism that eventually you end up with one company that owns everything, and in the computer age it would most likely be Microsoft unless they screw the pooch at some point.
Actually Communism is a way of living. It derives from living in a commune. You might note it has the same root as a word us Linux people use a lot, community. Bill Gates is in fact right, sharing MP3's and open source software development IS communism. The catch is thanks the word was hijacked by a bunch of socialist dictators, specially Stalin. Its been turned in to a dirty word and thats why Bill Gates and Co. try to lay it on file swappers and Linux. Americans in particular freak at the word and start warming up the jets on the deck of the aircraft carriers everytime the get a wiff of it in the air. That is exactly what Bill is trying to do here, mobilize the American people and government in to a reactionary frenzy in which they wipe out file sharing and Linux. Oh, and in the process he just happens to get "Trusted Computing" and he locks Linux off of the Internet and out of personal computing because it can't be "Trusted". In the process he further secures his monopoly because all computers have to be trusted and Microsoft will seek to control the implementation of that trust(in all hardware and all software). It is classic Marxism, the community versus an ever expending capitalist monpolist.
At its ideal Communism is a group of people living together sharing their resources and labor, working together for the common good. They are not dividing the world up in to personal property which at its worst usually means one percent of the people own everything, including all the land and everyone else is dirt poor and share cropping or working in outright servitude. Thats what Russia was like prior to 1917 which is why there was a revolution. Its also classic Marxism that when you have capital you have a huge advantage in making more capital over people who have no capital. And of course there is a near inevitable concentration of wealth in a few hands and ever larger monpolies because large corporations can dominate smaller ones and huge monopolies are extremely good at making money, and destroying or gobbling up their competitors. Unless government restrains it through antitrust law, which is
"failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide"
There was a great opinion piece on Space Daily a few days ago that pointed out the irony that the Russian space program is a pragmatic group, doing a lot of great work with very limited resources and are in fact great businessmen, especially with their space tourism attempts.
The article then contrasted it with NASA's manned space program which is in fact an incompetent bureacracy with all of the worst characteristics you expect from a the "failed economic idealogy" of "statist communism". An agency laced with incompetent bureaucrats who aren't held to account for failure or rewarded for success and who squander state funds at a breathtaking pace and build incompetent empires. I hate to break it to you but if you look at the massive growth of government spending in the U.S. it is in many ways a socialist state too. Vast segments of the American economy are completely tied to and dependent on government spending and contracts which is pretty much socialism. There was a time the Republicans blamed all this socialism on the Democrats but now they have complete control of the government and they are accelerating government spending and intervention in the economy, not slowing it.
As an aside I'm pretty sure capitalism and dictatorial socialism which is what you see in China and the U.S.S.R, not really communism, are both to blame for millions of unnecessary deaths. Vietnam for example was a mutual effort of the two ideoligies as they fought proxy wars around the world see they couldn't do it directly. The U.S. most certainly did kill millions of civilians in Vietnam and is killing plenty of civilians unnecessarily in Iraq today.
There have certainly been some major slaughtering of innocents in the U.S.S.R, China and North Korea but that really has NOTHING to do with ideology. That is just what you get from dictatorships whether they be left or right leaning. The U.S. has propped up, if not outright installed, plenty of right wing dictators who slaughtered innocents, Pinochet for example may finally be held to account for all the people his U.S. backed government murdered.
Actually it doesn't prove any such thing.
First off you didn't answer the question, were your grades completely subjective or were they based on an objective test. If it was the former your on shaky ground proving anything other than your may have a bias, that students that come to you constantly after class get better grades.
A really smart student would figure out the answer on his or he own and learn even more in the process of figuring out how to find the answer. That is what you REALLY want to be teaching programming students if you are a really good teacher, thought process, how to solve problems and find answers without crutching off someone else on the team. People who are constantly crutching off you might learn all the material and get an A and not have learned a thing about problem solving or being an actual programmer. As soon as you or someone like you isn't there to explain everything your A student might well crater.
So all you are differentiating in your anecdote is some students are comfortable approaching you and motivated to ask you questions and some aren't. Ever think maybe something about your attitude and teaching style put the other students off, either they didn't like you or were afraid of you, and this one guy was the only one desperate enough to make a grade that he overcame it. Is your classroom approach to stand in front and lecture everyone in to boredom, or did you get everyone involved in a learning experience in the classroom. In a class that small you probably should be achieving the later unless either you or they are complete losers.
What about the context there changes what he said that isn't countered by "Much truth is said in jest".
So what if he was telling jokes before and after. What he said is in epic example of bad taste for the President of a representative democracy to say. It unfortunately is true of most politicians, especially Republicans, their base is the moneyed elite, but most of them have the common sense and good judgement to not say it in public, even if its packaged as a joke.
The golf cart video is just as bad and shows how much more he values his golf game and leisure pursuits over world affairs and looking like a sane head of state.
The video of him reading my pet goat once again shows that instead of jumping up, politely excusing himself and dealing with the seminal crisis of his career, he instead froze and Dick Cheney was pretty much running the crisis and deciding whether to order the Air Force to start shooting down airliners.
And then of course there was his other attempt at a joke at a press club dinner, where he is joking about finding the WMD's in Iraq by looking under the table in the oval office. Well there were no WMD's, 10,000 wounded Americans, 1300 some families of dead American's, and an unknown count of dead Iraqi's probably don't think it's a good joke at this point. Though I'm sure the robotic pen Rumsfeld was using to sign the letters to the families of the dead though it was funny. Just another example of his really bad judgement and arrogance when he opens his mouth.
Want some more?
"Bring 'em on" well they did and still are and everytime they do people die.
"If this were a dictatorship, it would
be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator" on the 2000 election debacle. Again trying to make a joke but saying something a soon to be President, in a time of great division and contested election, an election many think he stole, wouldn't say unless he can't control his mouth.
Want me to go on?
What point are you trying to make?
Assuming the grades you give are subjective, maybe it means you have a tendancy to give A's to the people who worship at your feet and make you feel important? Not saying thats it but your post doesn't exactly make it clear what your anecdote is proving.
Why don't you try posting about the subject of the thread and stay on topic instead of ranting about my sig. You are only about the 20th person to piss and moan about it. To them I say what I'll say to you "Much truth is said in jest".
"You should watch Farenhype 9/11."
Seen it, it is a right wing rant like Moore's is a left wing one. You know it when the Wicked Witch of the Right, Ann Coulter is front and center. The truth is somewhere in the middle though I'm inclined to agree with Moore that the Bush family are elitists whose concept of public service is to make themselves and their rich friends richer. Whether it was a joke or not its a pretty simple and obvious fact that his administration has pandered to his rich friends at every possible turn, and has enriched many of them at the expense of the rest of us, reference tax cuts for the rich and Medicare "Reform" which is a gigantic transfer of our payroll tax dollars in to the pockets of the drug and healthcare companies who don't need any more money (well the drug companies might need it since they are rushing from being one of America's most profitable sectors to deep trouble now that people realize their drugs are often not safe, they often know they aren't safe and intentionally hide it and keep selling them to make a beloved buck though they are killing people).
I hate to break it to you but my sig has nothing to do with Fahrenheit 9/11 other than Moore showed the video it came from, of little George in a White tie and tux shmoozing with his rich friends. It was just a well known example of little George's arrogance and contempt for everyone who isn't rich. Moore just gave it a wider audience. You can't impune the words coming out of Little George's own mouth by attacking Michael Moore. You can cut out all of Moore's editorializing, stunting and stretching the facts in Fahrenheit 9/11 and he still hangs Little George just showing unedited video of him being himself. There is enough tape of George embarrasing himself you could do a multiweek miniseries. Pretty much anytime he opens his mouth when he isn't reading from a teleprompter and the words aren't written by his staff, he is embarrasssing. All that alcohol in his youth must have pretty much pickled the speech center in his brain.
What was the title of this article....dumbass. So you want me to provide evidence to prove something in an article called "What do you Believe Even If you can't prove it". You are a real genius.
My contention is that white holes are obscured by the dust and high density of stars that would surround them so you can't observe them.
I believe in white holes. For every black hole there is a white hole elsewhere in space. The matter gets sucked in to the black hole and spews out elsewhere in space, with a worm hole, tear in space or whatever you want to call it connecting the two which are very far from each other in conventional space. Where are the white holes, presumably there is one at the center of most or all galaxies. I envision a continuing cycle of renewal where matter is being incinerated and compacted in one place and starting a new life elsewhere building new stars at the center of new galaxies.
I wont argue that there might be an objective reality in some arenas, but there certainly isn't any in many subjects wikipedia covers, especially all the ones involving people ... history, politics, economics, sociology. So granted there is some objective reality in the hard sciences, for example, you still have the problem that you will NEVER know with certainty when you have cracked that objective reality and know something with such certainty that you can say that it an article is an indisputable fact. For the subject under discussion here, the representation of knowledge in Wikipedia whether you like it or not, you are completely at the mercy of the subjective opinions of its contributors and readers. Some of them may have pegged objective reality in some articles but you have no idea in which ones did and didn't. You can have hunches that an article is the "truth", objective reality, but its little more than that, a hunch. An earth shattering discovery could surface tomorrow that turns what you thought was objective truth today on its ear.
A key reason the U.S. was blindsided by 9/11 was becausing it was squandering such vast sums on spy satellites. The imaging satellites are really only good for monitoring nation states with large conventional and strategic military assets or maybe really obvious weapons installations like nuclear reactors or processing facilities. They are nearly worthless against insurgencies like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more worthless against terrorists like Al Qaida (well they were good for taking pictures of their training camps and mud huts which were occassionally bombed in to being just mud. Not sure Al Qaida even has mud hut camps now or if they do they probably aren't obvious about it). Not sure you couldn't be far better served now by RPV's doing tactical reconnaisance since theater commanders have a lot more control over them, and they can fly over whenever you want. Spy satellites have predictable orbits and any nation with something to hide can figure out when they are overhead. Wound't be suprised if RPV's will take over strategic reconnaisance too. There is a stealth variant of Global Hawk you can probably fly over any country you fell like without detection being developed.
The electronic eavesdropping efforts might be somewhat more useful again terrorists but I imagine most of them have figured out by now its not a good idea to use cell phones, phones in general or radios. I'm pretty sure Al Qaida is mostly using concealed and encrypted traffic on the internet. Spy satellites are also not much value as more and more traffic goes in to fiber optics, though I assume the NSA is tapping most of the world's fiber too.
I'm willing to bet a lot of people at the CIA, Pentagon and NSA, George Tenet in particular, are kicking themselves that they let traditional intelligence methodologies(i.e. spys) wither away in favor of spy satellites. They kind of obviously have a problem because they don't even have the people to translate most of the non english intercepts, especially those in Arabic, the current electronic intelligence spying yields.
Very good point! If I had mod points....
That entirely depends on how you choose to subjectively define torture. You are obviously setting a higher bar than most people would. If Saddam had done that shit and the same photos were realeased you and most of America would be screamy bloody TORTURE at the top of your lungs. You are just applying a double standard because you can't cope with the fact that your beloved country got caught redhanded doing something you don't want to admit your country does.
Again, just answer my question, would it be OK if we subject you to the treatment the inmates suffered just in the publicly released photos. OK, then if we can get our hand on all the really gruesome photos that have been withheld can we subject you to that to? Also remember you are being held against your will and once your captors start doing this stuff to you, you don't know where or if they draw the line and stop. even
I didn't think so.
Even if it didn't rise to your high bar for physical torture it was obviously pegging the meter on the psychological scale and the main component of sexual torture is psychological. Its not like you are necessarily going to be physically harmed by being raped, unless its particulary brutal, most of the damage is psychological.
Is it OK if we take photos of you in homosexual poses and show them to your family and friends or maybe show them to the whole world? Didn't think so.
If we are going to use your bar you simply can't put anything on this subject in Wikipedia. There is no irrefutable evidence its ever occurred anywhere. Only people that know for sure are either the people who were a victim of it, or who inflicted or who watched it being inflicted. Its really easy to dismiss the first and last groups as liars. The middle group is usually not talking.
"But do not heap upon it crimes that did not occur there."
Once again you are making a statement you can't support. You said yourself you have no clue what is in the photos that weren't released and for all you no they do show those crimes occuring there. If you don't like me saying things I can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt why don't you stop doing it.
"It did include an assault, remember?"
A misdemeanor assault by a librarian against a peaceofficer. Librarian claim she just went limp and fell on the guy. When exactly did that rate calling in the FBI on such a massive scale. The other obvious point is I imagine you can justify investigating the twelve protesters at the National Guard Base. They were pretty much asking for that with the act of disobedience anyway. Exactly what connection does this have with the peaceful exercise in free speech at Drake University? Nothing really. There simply was no justification for the action the DOJ took at Drake other than they were seeking to build files on and intimidate everyone who attended and discourage people from rallying against the war in Iraq. They were almost certainly seeking to suppress antiwar protest, no doubt remembering back to what happened to an unpopular government in an unpopular war in Vietnam. They wanted to nip the protest in the bud. It must have worked, how often do you here about protests against the war in Iraq lately.
"You mean like Cat "Terror Train" Stevens?"
No, there are a number of people who have been added to the no fly list for dissident activities. Can they prove it, no, because the names on the list and the mechanism by which they got there and, the mechanism to get off it are classified. You can put a dissident's name on it, punish them and deny it (the list is so insane in the first place since it is just a list of names both real and aliases so anyone can be banned from flying if they are unlucky enough to have the same name as a random alias of a suspected terrorist). Many people wrongfully on it have figured out they can easily beat it by slightly mutating their name on their ticket.
The problem is we don't know what is right and wrong in our knowledge base. So we make subjective judgments about what we think is right and wrong in our perception of the world. When we do we make everything subjective. Maybe there is some absolute truth down there but we will never really find it because everything is colored by our perception and understanding and our perception and understanding is not perfect. Absolute truth is irrelevent for our discussion of Wikipedia. It is like all knowledge just a stab, a best guess at truth, and guessing is subjective.
Physicists have conjured up a detailed description of our world but they will be the first to admit that they are guessing in many areas and the things we don't know yet, and may never know, might completely alter our knowledge of quantum mechanics, matter, energy and time.
I'm pretty sure the flat earth crowd or the Newton crowd would have been as strident as you are in insisting their world view was fact when it was really a very subjective view of the world that was wrong in the first instance and not entirely right in the second instance(when relativity came on the scene). A century from know relativity and quantum mechanics might be complete overturned by a giant leap forward and today's physicists might look equally quaint.
"The photo's that were NOT publicly released are irrelevant because we do NOT know what they are."
Excepting we know they exist and they are worse than the ones that were publicly released which were REALLY bad, so only someone in a severe state of denail would call them irrelevent. Like I said many Japanese are in the same state of denial about Nanking more than 60 years later.
As a reminder you said:
"Except that there was no sexual torture at that prison"
That was an absolute statement which you simply can't support and the weight of the evidence leans against you. You have zero evidence that there was no sexual torture, in fact that is an unprovable statement. Sexual torture happens in nearly every prison whether it be inmate on inmate or guard on inmate.
So I'm at a loss how you think you can get away with saying absolutely it didn't happen when you have no evidence to support that, and you have to deny a large body of photographic evidence showing severe abuse, and we know there is more evidence that has been concealed showing even worse abuse, and a there is a presumption that if they did stuff that awful on camera that they may well have done things far worse off camera.
"The link to Abu Ghraib was *subjective*. It was *biased*. It was *inappropriate* for an encyclopedia."
And so was the link to Saddam and Nanking. They are all subjective charges. Unfortunately EVERY link on this subject is going to be subjective and inflammatory. It is the nature of the subject. I guess you can either deny it exists because it is never absolutely provable, or you can include links to instances with some substantiation and Abu Graib is hands down the best documented case there is. Most torturers are smarter than American torturers because the usually strive to not leave an evidence trail, its a reason electic shock, drowning and rubber hoses are popular, no marks to take pictures of later.
Bottom line is you either include all the links or none of them. The people who were fighting over this at Wikipedia were just trying to replace ones that that offended their political view with ones that were inline with what they want to believe. The original poster was acting like he was being objective and fair when he obviously wasn't, he was replacing an anti American link with a pro American propaganda link.
"That looks interesting, until you see that it turns out to be an organization trying to cover something up."
Now who is the running of the conspiracy theory deep end, hypocrite. It was a public forum at a university. They weren't trying to hide anything. If I recall a couple people who attended it attempted an act of civil disobedience at a nearby National Guard which set it off(a real stretch on your part to call it "violence"). The DOJ swept in in an extraordinary heavy handed way and attempted to learn everything that was said by every speaker at the conference and tried to gag everyone to prevent anyone from talking about the investigation. It is a near certainty that everyone who spoke at the conference now has an FBI file, if they didn't already, and is labeled as a dissident, and everything they said was in that file.
The only thing that forced the DOJ to back off is they they went so far off the deep end that word leaked out, and public outrage started building. The whole point I've been trying to make here and that has been lost on you is suppression of dissent in America is subtler and less obvious than it would be in an openly totalitarian state but it is still happening and quite effectively. Do they throw Michael Moore in prison, no because it would stoke outrage, did they try to kill distribution of his movie yes, did they block showing it on pay per view before the election, yes, have they tried to make him out to be a liar, yes. If you are a dissident who isn't famous you are much more likely to have an FBI agent spying on you, threatening your or your name added to the do not fly list so you cant get on an airplane without risking arrest.
"Except that there was no sexual torture at that prison."
Don't think you actually know the full extent of the abuse there to make such a bold and absolute statement. The photo's that were publicly released didn't include the most graphic ones which apparently sickened most of the people that saw them behind closed doors.
I'm thinking maybe you would like to do a stint as a prisoner in a place like Abu Graib and maybe you wouldn't be so willing to downplay what happened there.
You also sound a lot like you work in the Bush administration. They try to split hairs on what constitutes torture too which is why all this ugliness happened in the first place. There is no sharp division between abuse and torture, its just gradations. I imagine you are more likely if to call it torture if you are on the receiving end and less likely if you are administering it(personally or by supporting a government which does it).
Are you saying including the link on Saddam was objective and not hyperbole? On this particular topic I think we have established that a moderator is most likely going to include links that cites torture by people he disapproves of and suppress ones that hit to close to home.
Unfortunately state sanctioned rape and torture is pretty much inevitably be the subject of innuendo, objectivity and hyperbole because it usually comes down to one persons word against anothers. What makes Abu Ghraib unique is they were stupid enough to produce reams of indisputable evidence which is why it IS such a good case study on the topic.
The parent post says:
"For instance, the page on rape had a section called "Rape and Sexual Torture""
Excuse me, but if the article has a section on "Sexual Torture" it is obviously on topic to include Abu Graib, even if you choose to believe there wasn't rape there when there is at least a 50/50 chance there was.
Both of you are splitting the same semantic hairs the original parent did.
Bottomline here is they should have included links to all of the exmples, instead of trying to suppress the links each of the various moderators found offensive to their particular political perspective. There is a pretty high chance a Japanese moderator would have taken offense to the link to the rape of Nanking since Japan has been more than a little reluctant to officially acknowledge that it occurred as described.
Fact is their is a tendency to lay the most war crimes and atrocities claims against the country that loses a war. The moral high ground almost always goes to the winner, whether it deserves it or not, simply because it controls all the "evidence" and it controls the government and court that runs the trial after the war which decides guilt.
To quote Locke from Webster's online defining knowledge:
"Knowledge, which is the highest degree of the
speculative faculties, consists in the perception of the truth of affirmative or negative propositions." -- Locke
Knowledge is "perception", it is not an absolute. Anything that involves perception is subjective to a degree. Knowledge is just less subjective than opinion, but it is still subjective. Again from Webster's:
1. That which is opined; a notion or conviction founded on probable evidence; belief stronger than impression, less strong than positive knowledge; settled judgment in regard to any point of knowledge or action.
"Pat Buchanan took the racist wing of the GOP with him when he left."
That is plain silly. The racist wing of the GOP party is alive and well. Its a defining criteria of the new Republican party, if you don't like blacks don't vote Democrat. Most of rascist wing of the Republican used to be the rascist wing of the Democratic party (a.k.a. Southern Democrats). They moved en masse to the Republican party starting in the Kennedy and Johnson Era, the Civil Rights Act sealed the deal, and it is a move that is complete today. Its why the south moved from being solidly Democratic to what it is today, solidly Republican and its why the Republican's have complete control of the government today.
"So far, you came up with a real criminal, and one silly boob that only makes people laugh."
Hate to break it to you but the right wing says the same thing about Michael Moore. No one in the current administration is going to openly persecute him. It would be:
A. Obvious
B. Counterproductive
C. Like I said earlier they played him like a fiddle and he ended up doing more harm than good to the left.
Michael Moore was more than a little stupid to go to the Republican Convention and give them a visible target for their bile.
You see you've been stuck on "famous" dissidents all through this thread. The "famous" people aren't the ones that are going to be persecuted in America. It causes to much media scrutiny. If you want to see an example of persecution of nameless dissidents, do a google search on "Drake University anitwar forum". That is the face of the subtler persecution you find in America.