Only on slashdot are you able to find people who achieved the supreme level of geekiness that enables you to spot that obscure fact, and then have the balls to ironically protesting it.
Kudos to you...
Come on mate, admit it. You are browsing raw html to calm your craving soul? Most likely by telnet port 80, GET, ubergeek style, am i right? =)
Well, I do agree that targeting civilians is morally detestable indeed, however I fail to see how the Palestinian offenses is anything other then in par with the Israeli offenses when it comes this specific issue but that is beside the point.
The point I think he was trying to make is that terror is a weapon for the weak. I don't agree, I think terror is a weapon for the strong, only that its labeled "interventions", "search for WMD/criminals", "liberation", "terrorism perventions" (as in the case of Israel) etc instead of international terrorism.
Ohh, and of course to point out that you boarderlining the law of Godwin in your first reply. It is custom to wait a couple of replies before invoking it, but that seldom apply to discussions regarding Israel =)
Well, valid or not is beside the point, I believe the core issue is that it was most likely intended as a rethoric analogy of Israeli policy in the middle-east, not a racial critique per se. Discussing this subject with a pro-Israeli usually have a tendency to imply just that, instead of focusing on the issue at hand.
That was the point i was trying to make.
"In other words, we seek freedom for ourselves and believe others should have the same choice."
This statement only goes to show that you are totally oblivious to the history of your own country. You have certainly shown to countries such as Chile, Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Ecuador, etc the American concern over other nations rights to freedom.
If you take the time to study your own history instead of mindlessly believe whatever propaganda your government tries to force-feed you with, you will find that there are no other country in the world withsuch a nasty record of international terrorism and supporting dictatorships as the good ole US.
The arrogance toward international law and the reluctance to deal with your shady past is what these type of crackpot terrorists feed on. To hear statements such as yours which hails freedom while your government tries to limit it to a minimum in every country it can influence, makes most people sick to their stomachs.
Indeed, you may have a point. However the tragic reality regarding the "representative democracy" of EU is that it is nothing but a fable in most countries. A myth that many countries representatives need to believe to feel good about themselves while they transfer the little power people had to a super-national structure which they have little or no way to influence. In fact if you study the statistics of elections for MEP and alike, you will reach the conclusion that they hardly represent the people of their respective countries. My greatest fear is that people actually start to vote come election time, in a feeble attempt to rectify their bad call to vote yes for EU membership. This will only give the EU representatives the mandate they need to screw us over yet again, as in this case. Do not grant them validity in claiming they represent the people of their respective countries. If you feel the need to do something, please do so locally due to the lack of democratic mechanisms within the EU. Place EU hostile politicians within your government, that is the correct forum to achieve the changes you desire.
I live in Sweden and I have opposed the "EU-project" since the beginning and finally I see some light at the end of the tunnel. The dishonest and shady tactics to circumvent the will of the people are finally starting to shine through the shroud of self-righteousness achieved through rhetorical statements about brotherhood amongst countries and such crap. People over here are beginning to wise up substantially which is showing in local polls and in the convincing way the unified currency project was shoot down in flames here in Sweden. People are beginning to realize that the EU project is a construction to obfuscate corporate involvement in policy making and a place for the elite to pat each others backs, something that have been very hard to do with the political mechanisms active within Swedish government.
If you go against the people, you will get burned in a country with a strong belief in democracy.
OK, first off. I will admit that disclaimers such as the one I inserted at the bottom could be indicative of what you are speaking of, however there are at least two instances on slashdot were i believe such can be useful. 1 - topics concerning religion. 2 - US policy critique. I have watched the moderation for posts concerning these topics many times with a joyful grin as they from being dubbed "5 interesting" become "trollified" in less then a half hour at a specific moment which magically correlates to US "busy-hours". So, its very indicative, with your reaction in mind that my ironic remark became well delivered. And if you then if applied some retrospective thought to that kind of reasoning, I would hardly touch such a topic if i was in it for the sake of karma now would I? Ohh yeah, another thing, speculative theories about others mental capacity in the first sentence is also quite indicative of the type of responses you get from people taking offense from karma disclaimers.
Anyhow to your points, I will not go semantic or discuss linguistics concerning definitions of the term extortion since I am not capable to do so as the English language is not my native tongue. However, my intentions here was never to find a specifically nasty word to label the US aid "tradition" but rather an attempt to provide a measurement to how low I think the ethics behind it is, and believe me, there are few words in my English vocabulary that expresses it. I think the majority of the world could subscribe to the fact that it is a highly questionable and quite a nasty deed from an ethical standpoint to offer a starving person aid, if he just were to "sign the dotted line" with a smile and exempt his benefactor from legal liability for his actions. Add to that fact, as was the point i was trying to make that in the case of US aid, these agreements are not even done in a democratic fashion since the US strikes these "deals" with non-democratically elected leaders.
As for paying attention to American media, you have a point. I have never studied it any further. My discourse is quite limited due to the fact that I only have access to CNN, Fox and such "newsworthy" channels. However, I seldom watch em, cause frankly they suck. In my highly objective opinion they are politically shallow to the point that it becomes silly and cause i am in favor of capital punishment for the offense: Broadcasting world weather reports for 20 minutes for every 10 minutes of news, as is the case of Fox.
So you do indeed have a point about my knowledge of American media, it was clearly a generalization which i made due to the fact that my American friends seldom have a clue to any of the subjects which in world opinion is non-beneficial to American self-image.
As for your point of Noriega, I figured that would come up and I would hate to even touch the horrific topic about the innocent victims of 9/11 with a 20 inch pole. That was as i said earlier, a very insensitive thing to even mention. If you try to look past that poor phrasing for a moment you will notice that Noriega is quite the posterchild for US foreign "aid". As long as he was loyal to US intentions in the region (contra war/panama/etc) he was made untouchable through the loving hand of US taxpayers, with CIA to proxy the physical transactions and to provide the international protection for his smuggling operations obviously. The day he decided to go against the US policy in the region (which at that time was nice activites US minds such as stealing elections and generally serving US interests) he was given thumbs down and had to be taken out of the equation. The point is this, US foreign "aid" is not commonly know throughout the world as philanthropic acts of goodness, but rather as an instrument to suppress people to walk along the line of US policy.
And as for the atrocity issue I do indeed claim that the Indonesian genocides is "on par" or greater then the holocaust if you consider that we are speaking about a people with obviously smaller population then th
A novel idea indeed, and I'm quite sure that you feel warm and fuzzy inside reaching that conclusion. However, life is rather more complicated then the "If ya don't like it, stick it" retorics. You conviniantly tend look past the fact that the US is in the habit of offering international "aid" to non-democratically elected leaders, which gladly sign away their fellow inhabitants human rights in a heart-beat when they can monetize on it. If there are a democratically elected leader non-sympathetic to US foreign policy (think Allende), thats just a slight obstacle since they are easily overthrown as was the case in Chile. If people subjected to these types of policies then have the bad taste of protesting, they have a nasty tendency of ending up in red-cross statistics over disappeared dissidents.
When it becomes time to collect, the US gladly extends its humane arms with kindness and reclaim the loan with a fat interest leaving the population in extreme poverty which in rare cases might briefly be mentioned on CNN. Even when US policies results in atrocities which in many cases compare to, or is in par to, Hitlers genocidal deeds, the US public is partly oblivious to that fact due to the "free press Americas" self-proclaimed patriotic feelings which makes them put the lid on it, as was the case of Suharto which I'm guessing less the 10% of the American population even heard of.
The media on the other hand is quite responsive to critique of the US, which is illustrated quite clearly by the tendency to portraits the rest of the world as blasphemous "ragheads" or unappreciative bastards as in the case of France's critique over the Iraq issue.
This makes it easy enough for policy makers to use the "everyone hates us" argument for every deed known to man. Invade a country? "Well, they hate us anyhow.. 9/11 is quite indicative of that,, lets go!" When in fact the worldly opinion of the American people is quite good. Hell, Some of my best friends are American. The rest of the world hates US foreign policy, not the people. But that fact seems to be distorted enough by media to become an invalid thought in the minds of the American public.
This have lead to the point that critique of US foreign policy will never reach the US public cause it will be shoot down in flames from day one with the argument of misdirected hate toward US. I pointed out to a US friend once, which i regret, an ironic claim i once read that the, to use a insensitive word, "body-count" of 9/11 was almost smack on the nose, to that of the slain people, during the US forces "arrest" of Manual Noriega. Indeed a quite insensitive statement but quite illustrative. One case is considered terrorism and the other is deemed intervention.
Anyhow, i kinda drifted OT there but my point is:
Why does America need to drum up support for their exclusion from international laws by simple extortion? The answer is quite obvious to me and the rest of the world. You don't seek amnesty if you ain't done anything wrong. To claim righteousness while committing atrocities is logical somersault worthy of ample ironic applauds..
Ohh, BTW. This post could also be used as an educational tool for illustrating "instant karma kill".
I certainly don't encourage vigilante actions, but it would be nice to be able to refer to my girlfriend as "darling" once again without suffer the headache involved being whacked across the head with a 5kg Unix manual.
Yeah, Back when i was toddle at my first tech job we used a somewhat similar IP tracking system on our sparcserver10 to keep track of who was awarded a specific IP and additional info. It was a plain text file into which the techs were supposed to enter any ip/mac/info issued to users with the aid of mighty 'vi'.
This was of course a trivial task, but after a huge restructure of the different machines across the complex there was a lot of running back and fourth the server-room and a lot of typing to everyones dismay.
Then the typical windows tech, full of clever ideas, thought that he would make it easier for himself and telnet to the server and edit the files, which the non windows handicapped had done since day one. However, as the sparc had nice useful buttons on the keyboard to perform tasks such as copy/cut/paste/etc from within 'vi' which a windows machine lacks the tech guy was scratching his head trying out all button combinations imaginable to achieve a exit from 'vi'. Needless to say, 'vi' is quite unforgiving to those who walks amongst us with faith in easy drop-down win-style archive menus, thus his feeble attempts resulted in severe damage to the file in question.
We of course laughed as hell and awarded the windows techguy with ample of lovely remarks regarding competence and intellect and headed to the the section manager(Posterchild PHB) to retrieve a backup. He gasped at the stupidity and explained that the backups for said systems was snailmailed to another location due to security reasons, and wouldn't be retrievable without ALOT of bureaucracy since this was a governmental institution.
The windows tech guys error all of the sudden looked less amusing by the minute as the implications of said actions dawned upon us and we started to get a small glimpse of the work required to recreate the file without the use of a backup. Booting 1000+ machines to retrieve info seemed like a non-stimulating activity so we did what every admin would do in our situation, we applied for a intern under the premise of graphmem upgrades needed in workstations.
So, its not only users that are asshats there are quite a few admins that possess the same fine qualities as well..
I call this troll, I believe have a quite extensive experience in theese matters since I work with schizophrenic people full time, None of his rants seems to indicate anything but a quite stereotypic/cinematic view of schizophrenia. I can be wrong however, since i dont do instant diagnose on/. post basis, in such case I urge him to seek help, but I strongly and firmly believe that this is your average troll which needs a proper spanking for utilizing other peoples misery as an excuse to troll.
I hear they have an excellent testing facility for said product, Im certain that a kind and warmhearted fellow slashdot'er armed with a GPS will provide the needed coordinates for the test site area which i hear is situated somewhere in Utah.
Heads up Darl,
Slashdot Mirror
Only on slashdot are you able to find people who achieved the supreme level of geekiness that enables you to spot that obscure fact, and then have the balls to ironically protesting it.
Kudos to you...
Come on mate, admit it. You are browsing raw html to calm your craving soul? Most likely by telnet port 80, GET, ubergeek style, am i right? =)
Well, I do agree that targeting civilians is morally detestable indeed, however I fail to see how the Palestinian offenses is anything other then in par with the Israeli offenses when it comes this specific issue but that is beside the point.
The point I think he was trying to make is that terror is a weapon for the weak. I don't agree, I think terror is a weapon for the strong, only that its labeled "interventions", "search for WMD/criminals", "liberation", "terrorism perventions" (as in the case of Israel) etc instead of international terrorism.
Ohh, and of course to point out that you boarderlining the law of Godwin in your first
reply. It is custom to wait a couple of replies before invoking it, but that seldom apply to discussions regarding Israel =)
Well, valid or not is beside the point, I believe the core issue is that it was most likely intended as a rethoric analogy of Israeli policy in the middle-east, not a racial critique per se. Discussing this subject with a pro-Israeli usually have a tendency to imply just that, instead of focusing on the issue at hand. That was the point i was trying to make.
My oh my, what have you been smoking?
"In other words, we seek freedom for ourselves and believe others should have the same choice."
This statement only goes to show that you are totally oblivious to the history of your own country. You have certainly shown to countries such as Chile, Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Ecuador, etc the American concern over other nations rights to freedom. If you take the time to study your own history instead of mindlessly believe whatever propaganda your government tries to force-feed you with, you will find that there are no other country in the world withsuch a nasty record of international terrorism and supporting dictatorships as the good ole US.
The arrogance toward international law and the reluctance to deal with your shady past is what these type of crackpot terrorists feed on. To hear statements such as yours which hails freedom while your government tries to limit it to a minimum in every country it can influence, makes most people sick to their stomachs.
I wonder how many decades it will take before one can criticize Israeli policy and not automagically be branded as an anti-Semite?
Indeed, you may have a point. However the tragic reality regarding the "representative democracy" of EU is that it is nothing but a fable in most countries. A myth that many countries representatives need to believe to feel good about themselves while they transfer the little power people had to a super-national structure which they have little or no way to influence. In fact if you study the statistics of elections for MEP and alike, you will reach the conclusion that they hardly represent the people of their respective countries. My greatest fear is that people actually start to vote come election time, in a feeble attempt to rectify their bad call to vote yes for EU membership. This will only give the EU representatives the mandate they need to screw us over yet again, as in this case. Do not grant them validity in claiming they represent the people of their respective countries. If you feel the need to do something, please do so locally due to the lack of democratic mechanisms within the EU. Place EU hostile politicians within your government, that is the correct forum to achieve the changes you desire.
I live in Sweden and I have opposed the "EU-project" since the beginning and finally I see some light at the end of the tunnel. The dishonest and shady tactics to circumvent the will of the people are finally starting to shine through the shroud of self-righteousness achieved through rhetorical statements about brotherhood amongst countries and such crap. People over here are beginning to wise up substantially which is showing in local polls and in the convincing way the unified currency project was shoot down in flames here in Sweden. People are beginning to realize that the EU project is a construction to obfuscate corporate involvement in policy making and a place for the elite to pat each others backs, something that have been very hard to do with the political mechanisms active within Swedish government.
If you go against the people, you will get burned in a country with a strong belief in democracy.
OK, first off. I will admit that disclaimers such as the one I inserted at the bottom could be indicative of what you are speaking of, however there are at least two instances on slashdot were i believe such can be useful. 1 - topics concerning religion. 2 - US policy critique. I have watched the moderation for posts concerning these topics many times with a joyful grin as they from being dubbed "5 interesting" become "trollified" in less then a half hour at a specific moment which magically correlates to US "busy-hours". So, its very indicative, with your reaction in mind that my ironic remark became well delivered. And if you then if applied some retrospective thought to that kind of reasoning, I would hardly touch such a topic if i was in it for the sake of karma now would I? Ohh yeah, another thing, speculative theories about others mental capacity in the first sentence is also quite indicative of the type of responses you get from people taking offense from karma disclaimers.
Anyhow to your points, I will not go semantic or discuss linguistics concerning definitions of the term extortion since I am not capable to do so as the English language is not my native tongue. However, my intentions here was never to find a specifically nasty word to label the US aid "tradition" but rather an attempt to provide a measurement to how low I think the ethics behind it is, and believe me, there are few words in my English vocabulary that expresses it. I think the majority of the world could subscribe to the fact that it is a highly questionable and quite a nasty deed from an ethical standpoint to offer a starving person aid, if he just were to "sign the dotted line" with a smile and exempt his benefactor from legal liability for his actions. Add to that fact, as was the point i was trying to make that in the case of US aid, these agreements are not even done in a democratic fashion since the US strikes these "deals" with non-democratically elected leaders.
As for paying attention to American media, you have a point. I have never studied it any further. My discourse is quite limited due to the fact that I only have access to CNN, Fox and such "newsworthy" channels. However, I seldom watch em, cause frankly they suck. In my highly objective opinion they are politically shallow to the point that it becomes silly and cause i am in favor of capital punishment for the offense: Broadcasting world weather reports for 20 minutes for every 10 minutes of news, as is the case of Fox.
So you do indeed have a point about my knowledge of American media, it was clearly a generalization which i made due to the fact that my American friends seldom have a clue to any of the subjects which in world opinion is non-beneficial to American self-image.
As for your point of Noriega, I figured that would come up and I would hate to even touch the horrific topic about the innocent victims of 9/11 with a 20 inch pole. That was as i said earlier, a very insensitive thing to even mention. If you try to look past that poor phrasing for a moment you will notice that Noriega is quite the posterchild for US foreign "aid". As long as he was loyal to US intentions in the region (contra war/panama/etc) he was made untouchable through the loving hand of US taxpayers, with CIA to proxy the physical transactions and to provide the international protection for his smuggling operations obviously. The day he decided to go against the US policy in the region (which at that time was nice activites US minds such as stealing elections and generally serving US interests) he was given thumbs down and had to be taken out of the equation. The point is this, US foreign "aid" is not commonly know throughout the world as philanthropic acts of goodness, but rather as an instrument to suppress people to walk along the line of US policy.
And as for the atrocity issue I do indeed claim that the Indonesian genocides is "on par" or greater then the holocaust if you consider that we are speaking about a people with obviously smaller population then th
A novel idea indeed, and I'm quite sure that you feel warm and fuzzy inside reaching that
conclusion. However, life is rather more complicated then the "If ya don't like it, stick it"
retorics. You conviniantly tend look past the fact that the US is in the habit of offering
international "aid" to non-democratically elected leaders, which gladly sign away their
fellow inhabitants human rights in a heart-beat when they can monetize on it. If there are
a democratically elected leader non-sympathetic to US foreign policy (think Allende), thats
just a slight obstacle since they are easily overthrown as was the case in Chile. If people
subjected to these types of policies then have the bad taste of protesting, they have a nasty
tendency of ending up in red-cross statistics over disappeared dissidents.
When it becomes time to collect, the US gladly extends its humane arms with kindness and
reclaim the loan with a fat interest leaving the population in extreme poverty which in
rare cases might briefly be mentioned on CNN. Even when US policies results in atrocities
which in many cases compare to, or is in par to, Hitlers genocidal deeds, the US public is
partly oblivious to that fact due to the "free press Americas" self-proclaimed patriotic
feelings which makes them put the lid on it, as was the case of Suharto which I'm guessing
less the 10% of the American population even heard of.
The media on the other hand is quite responsive to critique of the US, which is illustrated
quite clearly by the tendency to portraits the rest of the world as blasphemous "ragheads" or
unappreciative bastards as in the case of France's critique over the Iraq issue.
This makes it easy enough for policy makers to use the "everyone hates us" argument for
every deed known to man. Invade a country? "Well, they hate us anyhow.. 9/11 is quite
indicative of that,, lets go!" When in fact the worldly opinion of the American people is
quite good. Hell, Some of my best friends are American. The rest of the world hates US
foreign policy, not the people. But that fact seems to be distorted enough by media to
become an invalid thought in the minds of the American public.
This have lead to the point that critique of US foreign policy will never reach the US
public cause it will be shoot down in flames from day one with the argument of misdirected
hate toward US. I pointed out to a US friend once, which i regret, an ironic claim i once
read that the, to use a insensitive word, "body-count" of 9/11 was almost smack on the nose,
to that of the slain people, during the US forces "arrest" of Manual Noriega. Indeed a quite
insensitive statement but quite illustrative. One case is considered terrorism and the
other is deemed intervention.
Anyhow, i kinda drifted OT there but my point is:
Why does America need to drum up support for their exclusion from international laws by
simple extortion? The answer is quite obvious to me and the rest of the world. You don't seek
amnesty if you ain't done anything wrong. To claim righteousness while committing atrocities
is logical somersault worthy of ample ironic applauds..
Ohh, BTW. This post could also be used as an educational tool for illustrating "instant
karma kill".
I certainly don't encourage vigilante actions, but it would be nice to be able to refer to my girlfriend as "darling" once again without suffer the headache involved being whacked across the head with a 5kg Unix manual.
Yeah, Back when i was toddle at my first tech job we used a somewhat similar IP tracking system on our sparcserver10 to keep track of who was awarded a specific IP and additional info. It was a plain text file into which the techs were supposed to enter any ip/mac/info issued to users with the aid of mighty 'vi'.
This was of course a trivial task, but after a huge restructure of the different machines across the complex there was a lot of running back and fourth the server-room and a lot of typing to everyones dismay.
Then the typical windows tech, full of clever ideas, thought that he would make it easier for himself and telnet to the server and edit the files, which the non windows handicapped had done since day one. However, as the sparc had nice useful buttons on the keyboard to perform tasks such as copy/cut/paste/etc from within 'vi' which a windows machine lacks the tech guy was scratching his head trying out all button combinations imaginable to achieve a exit from 'vi'. Needless to say, 'vi' is quite unforgiving to those who walks amongst us with faith in easy drop-down win-style archive menus, thus his feeble attempts resulted in severe damage to the file in question.
We of course laughed as hell and awarded the windows techguy with ample of lovely remarks regarding competence and intellect and headed to the the section manager(Posterchild PHB) to retrieve a backup. He gasped at the stupidity and explained that the backups for said systems was snailmailed to another location due to security reasons, and wouldn't be retrievable without ALOT of bureaucracy since this was a governmental institution.
The windows tech guys error all of the sudden looked less amusing by the minute as the implications of said actions dawned upon us and we started to get a small glimpse of the work required to recreate the file without the use of a backup. Booting 1000+ machines to retrieve info seemed like a non-stimulating activity so we did what every admin would do in our situation, we applied for a intern under the premise of graphmem upgrades needed in workstations.
So, its not only users that are asshats there are quite a few admins that possess the same fine qualities as well..
I call this troll, I believe have a quite extensive experience in theese matters since I work with schizophrenic people full time, None of his rants seems to indicate anything but a quite stereotypic/cinematic view of schizophrenia. I can be wrong however, since i dont do instant diagnose on /. post basis, in such case I urge him to seek help, but I strongly and firmly believe that this is your average troll which needs a proper spanking for utilizing other peoples misery as an excuse to troll.
I hear they have an excellent testing facility for said product, Im certain that a kind and warmhearted fellow slashdot'er armed with a GPS will provide the needed coordinates for the test site area which i hear is situated somewhere in Utah. Heads up Darl,