I thought the same thing at first, but this is a lot more complicated of an issue.
Suppose I go to france, upon up my breifcase on the streets of Paris and start hawking my neo-nazi wear. When they try to fine me, it would be absurd for me to evoke my first-admendment rights. They don't apply to the french government, and when I'm in france I'm under their jurisdiction.
That's not what Yahoo was doing, and it's going to be interesting to see how the courts take this one. Even if yahoo didn't have any servers in france, the mere fact that the content was accessible to french citizens prompted the french government to levy the fine.
The argument by the french is not that yahoo servers based in france were responsible.less They're saying that anyone who sells nazi memorobilia in such a way that french citzens are capable of buying it is legally liable and subject to a fine. If the french government succeeds in fining Yahoo, then there would be a legal basis to levy a fine against any online merchant who sells nazi memorbilia, regardless of his location if he doesn't block people attempting to access his website from france. The argument could be extened even further - if a brick and mortar store accepts orders placed by phone, and they don't make sure no one from france orders nazi stuff, a precent set by the courts' ruling in this case could hold that US-based brick and mortar store liable to fines by the french for violating french law.
At first I thought yahoo's case seemed stupid for the same reasons you mentioned. But if you think about the possible results if this case sets a precedent (and when don't they) it gets really scary.
Does anyone actually bother to use those special hotkeys on their keyboards? I had such a keyboard, but you needed to run special software in order for those hotkeys to do anything, and most of them were useless anyhow. There were controls to interface with a crappy music program, buttons that would bring up IE and Outlook express and one button that you could program to run a single.exe file. The small benefits didnt' seem worth having an extra proram runnning in the system tray.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I find that I have to think about what the machine is doing while I program. With Java it seems all neat and tidy and squared away and abstracted. I learned C++ first, and so I like to think about what's going on in the memory locations while I'm programming. With java, that seems to disspear. It's almost like programming with pseudo-code.
OpenSourcing IE would just entice a ton of people to move away from it. The only reason I ever use it right now is because some sites are IE-only. If Microsoft OpenSourced-it, im sure Mozilla would just pick up that functionality and then there'd be nothing stoping a lot of people from switching over to Mozilla.
I came off as really angry because I was. When you say that "The conservatives will automatically think, "They are attacking our soldiers! And disruptin' our brave leader Bush's plan for giving Iraq democracy! They are bad for killing American soldiers!" you portary conseratives as flat out iditos; slobbering morons who do nothing but obey their 'brave leader' regardless of what's going on in the world around them. And that made me angry. I'm not a slobbering idiot, and I don't particularly like Bush. But I do consider myself a conservative, and I don't like being portrayed as a moron. Maybe you were attempting you make a caricature of conservative viewpoints and I should have taken it a bit more lightly. It seemed more likely to me that you were attempting to show what you beleived to be a converstive viewpoint - a stupid, slavish adherence to the president. I really don't like being talked down to and considered a fool, and I felt as if you were doing just that.
I'm sure that the al-sadr militia is highly trained and all that sort of thing, but I highly doubt that they represent the views of most Iraqis. I think your link to the movie 'braveheart' is entirely valid. The men who sold out their countrymen for titles were cowards and traitors. They didn't represent the views of the majority of the people in Ireland; they represented their own selfish interests. The same is true of muqtada al-sadr - he doesn't seem to be concerned with the best interests of the iraqi people but with his own particular group. Most iraqis, I think, want to have their own democratic government. I'm sure they're not too happy about having american troops all over the place in their country, but I sincerely doubt they'd prefer a bunch of clans fighting for control over a democractic government.
As for CNN international showing a different picture of what's going on in Iraq, I don't doubt it at all. Most europeans watch state-run televsion news stations, which are inredibly liberal, - so if CNN is going to have any traction at all, they're going to have to show the same sort of things going on. As for American TV not showing any fighting, I've seen plenty of videos of americans shooting at iraqis on Fox.
I do agree with the arugment about people being more unlikely to change as they get older. I maybe should have put something like that in there.
As for the part about objective good or bad, I think that comes up a lot. However, I myself don't beleive in objective truth but I consider myself a conservative. I know that puts me in a very small minority, but there you have it. I think it's just a hell of a lot easier for people who do beleive in objective truth to label some people as good and some people as bad, than it is for someone who thinks it's all subjective.
I looks like you've got a little of both in you. I certaintly don't beleive that no one is affected by the way they were brought up, nor do I mean to imply that liberals don't think that some immutable personal characterstics determine behavior. What I meant to do was a establish a simple theoretical basis for the two different ideologies, and show how this theoretical basis gives rise to differing opinions on societal phenomona.
Your idea of character determining the outcome of a person born into a poor situation looks like a very reasonable mix of the idea of personal characteristics (character) determining what we do, and the idea that our behavior is shaped and molded by our environments.
I don't at all mean to say that conservatives think it doesn't matter whether you're born into poverty, whereas liberals think that means all the difference in the world. It's just my observation that conservatives tend to see personal character flaws and inhibitions as being the primary reason why some people can't achieve personal wealth and satisfaction. That's one reason why they don't like things such as affirmative action and welfare - because they feel that such actions don't do anything to help inviduals who are having trouble succeeding develop a personal intiative and drive.
Liberals, on the other hand, seem to believe that it's mainly institutional and environmental factors that prevent some people from suceeding. I'm not a liberal myself, and so my understanding of what they beleive and why comes mainly from years of arguing and talking with my liberal friends, in an attempt to find out just what exactly is different about us that makes us see the world so differently. Maybe I'm way off base with the idea that liberals see societal factors as the main agents in preventing some people from succeeding, but that's the impression I've gotten repeatedly.
I know that the idea of saying some people are good and some people are bad is entirely based upon opinion in the real world; for the sake of my post it was just a model. I'm a conservative myself, but I'm also an agostic who doesn't beleive in any objective moral truth, and I have my personal doubts as to the existence of right and wrong. So I don't label people as 'good' or 'bad' per se, but I do strongly beleive in the idea that certain people are prone to behave in certain ways, and there isn't much you can do about it.
As for your enron example, I think it validates the Conservative model of thinking but goes against the liberal model. The guys who pulled that stunt were anything but poor, but they still did bad things. What they did destroyed their company and put a lot of people in a bad financial situation - thus crime caused poverty.
Oh, no. I wouldn't say that by any stretch of the imagination. I consider myself to be an agnostic and a good person. I was trying to typify what in my mind appears to be the mainstream conservative viewpoint. There are a lot of conservatives who do think that going to church reguarly is one sign of a good person, which is why they were particularly happy when the recent polls showed that people who regularly attend religious services are more likely to vote republican. As I said, I'm a conservative but also agnostic. That puts me in a rather small minority. I don't think most religious conservatives would say you can't be a good person if you don't attend church regularly; I think they'd say that knowing a given person goes to church every week makes them more likely to consider that person good.
Fuck you. I at least tried to write a post respecting the intelligence of liberals, because I happen to think they're resonable people. Do not presume yourself to be an intellgent individual and me to be some slack-jawed yokel with a confederate flag draped over my pickup truck just because I happen to be conservative. I think about about my politics and I resent your assinine portrayal of my views. Your arrogance is the sort of behavior that only furthers the rediculous divide between liberals and conservatives in this country.
You say that the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq are Iraqis who feel they've been invaded - fine. Such an explanation of why they're doing what they're doing typifies my description of liberal reasoning as to why bad people are bad: " We made them do it; we changed the environment around them and caused them to misbehave."
Why do I think people are attacking our soldiers over there? I can tell you it's not ordinary Iraqi citizens who have feel invaded and opressed. If that were the case, they wouldn't be attacking iraqi citizens who cooperated with Americans - they'd only be attacking the Americans. I think it's two bit punks like Muqtada al-Sadr who simply want to be in power for themselves, aided by jihadists who are crossing over the iraqi border to participate in what they see as a holy war. Notice that I have not explained their behavior in terms of anything we've done or anything about their situation - I've explained it in terms of who they are and what they tend to do.
In my mind, the main difference between liberals and conservatives is a preference for
nature or nurture. This ties in to your idea abou the loss of free will. Disclaimer: I
consider myself a conservative, athough I think I have a good understanding of how
liberals think because a lot of my friends are liberals and I like to talk about politics.
I'd love to hear feedback on this idea to see how valid it is.
Conservatives tend to believe that people behave in the way they do as a result of
something about them in particular - their nature. Some people are just good and some
people are just bad. Nothing can be done to change or fix the situation- it's just how
they are. Good people tend to obey the law, pay taxes, go to church and be good citizens.
Bad people don't. When a bad person does something bad, it's because he's a bad person and
therefore likely to do bad things.
Liberals, on the other hand, see everyone as more or less products of our environment
- the way we are nurtured. We're affected by what goes on around us and the things we see
and experience. Bad people are bad not because of some intrinsic difference between them
and good people; they're bad because of their childhood or the atmosphere they live in. A
bad person does something bad because there was some sort of external influence upon him,
causing him to be bad.
To illustrate my point, consider gun control. Conservatives are generally against it
- and this makes perfect sense considering their ideas on how people behave. Good people
should be allowed to own guns becuase they're good. They'll only use them for
self defense and as a result society will be safer. Bad people on the other had, don't
have any respect for the law. They'll get their hands on guns regardless of the law, and
use the guns to do bad things because they're bad. To a conservative, gun control simply
punishes good people and prevents them from defending themselves from the bad people.
Now look at Gun control from the liberal perspective - people are influenced by the
environment and the situation they're. Since no one is inherently good or bad, gun control
simply decreases the probablity that a given individual will be in possesion of a firearm.
This is good because if you have a firearm, you're probably more likely to shoot someone
with it. Perhaps if you're angry you wouldn't normally hurt someone, but having a
gun in your hand changes your mindset and makes you more likely to do something bad. Gun
control legislation is an attempt to remove the external stimulus that can cause people to
be bad - so most liberals support it.
Poverty is another example of the difference. There is obviously some sort of
connection between poverty and crime. Most of the nations involved in terrorism are not
particularly wealthy, and crime is ramapant in poorer urban areas. Why?
Ask a conservative, and most likely she'll tell you that crime causes poverty. No one
wants to start a buisness in a crime-ridden city. Because crime prevents economic
activity, it causes poverty. To fix the poverty situation, just crack down on the crime.
Once you've made the neighborhood safer, jobs will show up and poverty will go away. Note
that no attempt is made to explain crime. The Conservative uses crime to explain
poverty.
Ask a liberal, and most likely he'll tell you that the poverty causes the crime. If
you grow up in a situation devoid of any opportunity for a job and a good life for
yourself, you've got a good chance of turning to crime because of the hopelessness and
despair of your situation. To fix the situation, you need to get rid of poverty. Try to
lure companies in to provide jobs, and the crime will go away once the people have an
opportunity for economic advancement. Unlike the conservative, the liberal uses poverty
to explain why there's crime.
How does this tie into free will? Conservatives make no effort or attempt to explain
why bad people are bad. They just are.
The point of my post was that we've gotten to a point in this country where both sides think the other side is evil. To me, saying that the president would deliberately mislead the american people in order to drum up support for a war that willl boost his popularity ratings is the same as saying that the president is not just evil, but incredibly stupid.
Of course Bush got an immediate rise in public opinion from going to war; but if you think that Bush went to war just for that boost, then you must think bush is a total Idiot. If he wanted to go war in order to gain public opinion, why on earth would he do so in early 2003, when there was still almost two years untill his bid for re-election? If his goal was public opinion support, he could have done one hell of a better job. He could have talked about going to war for two years, repeatedly sending in inspectors, pleading with the french, building a coalition, planning for the aftermath, and waiting untill july 2004 to send in the troops. That way, he could coast into re-election, riding on the surge of public support. No one could criticize him for 'rushing to war' since he spent so much time trying to gather a coalition, and no one could criticize him for not having found WMD, since he could just say 'give us more time.' If he was intentionally misleading everyone to war, he'd have to have been a complete idiot to have done so when he did. The only explanation (which seems like a perfectly reasonable one) is that Bush really, honestly beleived that there were WMD in Iraq.
The whole 'Joe Wilson' escapade proves my point perfectly here. This guy comes out and accuses bush of lying with his '16 words' about Saddam attempting to buy yellowcake. Everyone was calling bush a liar and saying that he was trying to spook everyone based on intelligence that he knew was incorrect and that he was misleading us. In July, Bush apologized for putting the statement in the address, and said it was a mistake. Now it's come out that it was Joe Wilson who was the liar, and that the statement bush made in his State of the Union address was perfectly valid. Why on earth would bush apologize for making such a mistake, if his main goal was to mislead everyone ? Why would he wrongfully concede a point to his critics, rather than correctly accuse Joe Wilson of being a liar, if his goal was to dupe everyone? It just doesn't make any sense.
If you think that we should have had better intelligence, fine. That's an argument I'd love to have. If you think that going to iraq weakend our hand in the war in terror by distracting our troops from hunting saddam and by distancing once close allies, I'd love to have that argument as well. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable critcisms of the war on Iraq, but the 'Bush lied and people died' argument isn't one of them. Unfortunately, that seems to be the argument most frequently made Bush's opposition, and that's what I'm lamenting here - It's a stupid argument that only makes sense if you beleive that Bush is both incredibly stupid and a very, very bad man.
Ad-hominem means attacking a person rather than their ideas. Calling the president incompetent is most definately ad-hominem because it is an insult towards him personally, rather than his ideas. Again, I totally agree that saying the president is incompetent is a step above saying that he's evil or simian, but it still doesn't really get us anywhere.
The only valid comparison I can think of is the following : Suppose you say you've seen the latest Michael Moore movie, and I reply that Michael Moore is a liar. That's an ad-hominem attack on Michael Moore, and it doesn't get us anywhere. It'd be better for me to say that Michael Moore's film is full of lies, and then show you what I beleived those lies were. I'm still calling him a liar, but by directing my critcism towards his movie, rather than him, we can start talking about the movie itself rather than debating the pros and cons of Michael Moore personally.
It's one thing to say that the president has made some mistakes and not performed his job as well as he should. In my mind, that's not incompetence. If you are incompetent, you lack the fundamental qualities necessary to lead and do the job. I do agree that saying he's incompetent isn't nearly the same level of vitriol as saying he's evil, but it's still not the best form of discourse. Calling the president incompetent is a nice ad-hominem way of saying you don't like the job he's doing.
I love slashdot. Where else would you find wild anti-republican conspiracy theories considered insightful? Ohh... wait...
The whole situation in this country is just getting rediculous. Is it possible for people to believe that George W. Bush is a terrible politician, but a decent guy who just has a difference of opinion with you? I'm so sick of republicans acting as if they represent all of what's right and good in this country and claiming that the democrats represent immorality and stupidity. I'm also tired of the democrats acting as if all the republicans are either slaves to the corporate interests, and either evil crooks or else slobbering boobs who've been convinced to go along with the crooks. Jesus Christ ! Is it that unlikely that we just have differences of opinion? Is is that hard to beleive that Bush isn't trying to gather more power for himself for evil purposes - that he's just trying to keep us safe?
You can bitch all you want about Bush having said that he'd be a uniter and not a divider. Personally I think that's a stupid thing to say, but it's definately not as if Bush is intentionally trying piss off half the country. He's been being attacked since before he got into the office, with liberals saying he looked like a monkey, that he was stupid and talked funny and a religious zealot and incompetent. Are you at all surprised that this country is very divided, when half the people think their president is defeding them from evil, and the other half thinks the president looks/talks like a monkey?
I understand completely if you disagree with the president's policies, and you'd like to voice your opinion. I think there are plenty of valid disagreements you could make with the bush administration. The problem is that all I seem to hear is : "Ohhh that Bush - He's just evil! We invaded an innocent country all for oil and haliburton, after he stole the election in florida. And have you heard how talks all goofy?"
I can take criticism of the president - it's important and needs to be done. But not when the main critisim is that he's :
1) evil
2) incompetent
3) looks/talks like a monkey
If I beleived half of the critcisms being made of Bush, I'd be calling for armed revolution. The problem is that most of them just don't hold water at all. So he lied to us about iraq having WMD? What about the governments of Russia, Germany, Britain, even France coming to similiar conclusions about WMD? Why is it that Bush is called a Liar when John Kerry and Hillary Clinton came to the same conclusion that Bush did, re WMD. Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie? That doesn't do anything at all to help him. You'd have to beleive (which i'm under the impression that a lot of liberals do these days) that bush has the intelligence of a four-year old and about as much morality as Adolf Hitler.
Can we please raise the level of political discourse in this country? I would love to argue about the military efficacy of invading Iraq. I'd love to debate the merits of McCain Fiengold. I'd love to talk about social security and whether it can or should be exteneded and fixed. It looks like all i've got to look at this election year is a man who is an evil, stupid, incompetent ape, or a man who was apparently in vietnam thirty years ago where, depending different sides of the story, was either a hero or a shmuck. Do you honestly think that if Kerry gets elected, this country will be 'unified' again? You're going to hear all sorts of outrages charges against him, too. Just you wait...
There are several steps pointed out in the Gamespy article that need to happen before competitive gaming becomes a reality. One of the major ones is the need for a game that looks great, is TV friendly, doesn't require hacked up config files to allow you to be good, and is fun to watch. Ladies and gentlemen: that game is Halo.
Halo is already tremendously popular on college campuses, and you'll get many guys who don't normally enjoy video games excited about 8 on 8 capture the flag games. It's almost as fun to watch as it is to play. It definately requires a good amount of skill. The capture the flag games require immense teamwork and cooperation if you're going to suceed, while the 1 on 1 deathmatches can be very exciting. Everything I've heard about Halo 2 sounds like an improvement over the original, and most of these improvements would lend themselves great to the game being a spectator sport. Dual weilding looks really cool and adds layers of tactics. The covanent energy sword looks awesome and surely could be entertaining to watch. The new vehical destruction physics will make entertaining and exciting flag runs possible - Will his vehicle hold out just long enough for him to make it back to the base? The fact that the game runs on an Xbox means that it looks great and costs very little to play, while ensuring there aren't going to be many cheaters and making config files nonexistant.
There are already some video games that are fun to watch. the Grand Theft Auto series is one of them - the reason is because you can see all sorts of entertaining things and there is generally nonstop action. The same is going to be true of Halo 2. If bungie plays things right by adding a pure spectator mode and the ability to host tournaments, we could see the start of something really big.
I'm sorry, but M Night Shyamalan's movies are full of just absurd plot holes. You mean to tell me that you've got a race of creatures that are capable of traveling through space, but they can't figure out how to break through a door? That those same aliens apparently lack any sort of telescopic device that would show them the Earth being covered in water ? How the hell do you miss that ? That a life form that reacts violently with water is cabale of surviving in an oxygen based atmosphere that is heavily saturated with water vapor? That when faced with an army of invading aliens, you would choose to lock yourself in your basement rather than heading towards a military base?
Even if you just look at the movie for its message, it's still retarded. You're supposed to come out of that thing thinking like 'oh there was someone looking out for them all along' - of course there was someone looking out for them -it's a movie! It wasn't 'god' that killed Gibson's wife and then set all that stuff up so that the aliens would die - it was M. Night Shyamalan, who wrote the script for the film. Of course it all worked out just right. Gah!
There's a difference between 'questioning the US's actions in Vietnam' and accusing your fellow soldiers of raping and mudering innocent civilians. The Viet Cong had no chance of defeating the US - we were just a far superior fighting force, and if the war was being fought by the generals instead of the politicians, it would have been over very quickly. Unfortunately, control of the war was highly politicized. The US eventually pulled out, not because it was being defeated but because the war became unpopular. Thanks in part to people like John Kerry, making unsubstantiated claims that our soldiers were all war criminals.
You can lament the simplistic worldview present in the "you're either with us or you're against us" idea all you want, but the facts are quite clear. Ho Chi Minh said in his memoirs that at some points in the war, the only thing that gave them hope of a US withdrawal were all the westerners protesting the war. People like Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda would go to hanoi and have interviews with the NVA and talk about how horrible they felt the war was. Such actions are most definately pro-hanoi. You might not like the ramifications of this line of thought, and you may not like the fact that it's such a simple idea. But if you're in a fight, any sort of fight, if you don't throw all of your support behind your side in the fight, you most definately provide a service to your enemies.
I know most liberals detest the idea of fighting, and this is perfectly understandable. Once a fight is started, however, you want to finish it quickly and effectively. Getting into a war and then backing out out of it is a total waste of lives - the only thing that's going to be accomplished is that you'll lose your credibility in the face of other nations of the world, who'll take that as a license to start pushing you around. Look at that situation in Iraq right now. The other day there was a firefight in Najaf, where the Insurgents lost 300 men, while the Coalition suffered 'minimal casualties.' A 300:0 kill ration is just outstanding. There's absolutely no way the US army can be defeated militarily. The only way we're going to lose a war is if public opinion turns strongly against it. If everoyne in the US threw their full, unconditional support behind the war in Iraq, the insurgency would die down once they realized they weren't going to get us to leave. There isn't a doubt in my mind that guys like Howard Dean and Paul Krugman are giving hope to the insurgents over there. I really don't think that's their intention by any means, but I think it's one result of their actions.
I know it sounds like I'm some big facist. I'm not - I hate government as much if not more than the next guy. I do, however, realize the necessity of supporting your side in a fight. If your side is fighting a war you don't agree with, it's better to support the fight untill it's over, and then question reasoning the led up to the fight. Questioning before and after a fight is important. Questioning the fight while it's going on is only going to make things worse, and will most likely result in more deaths.
How much money do you think they get? They don't make any money selling new games - there's way too much fierce competition to let anybody get any profit. That's why they all started buying and selling used games, and that's why they all have those goofy deals whereby you get the new game cheaper if you trade in the old one - it's the only way they can make any money. If you go to EB games just to buy new games, they will hate you forever and ever because they make no money selling new games.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't consider this guy a fool.
Actually, you're wrong, too. "Virii" would be the plural of "virius," which doesn't mean anything. The latin word 'virus' doesn't have a plural.
How will I be so productive at work ?
oh... wait..
I thought the same thing at first, but this is a lot more complicated of an issue.
Suppose I go to france, upon up my breifcase on the streets of Paris and start hawking my neo-nazi wear. When they try to fine me, it would be absurd for me to evoke my first-admendment rights. They don't apply to the french government, and when I'm in france I'm under their jurisdiction.
That's not what Yahoo was doing, and it's going to be interesting to see how the courts take this one. Even if yahoo didn't have any servers in france, the mere fact that the content was accessible to french citizens prompted the french government to levy the fine.
The argument by the french is not that yahoo servers based in france were responsible.less They're saying that anyone who sells nazi memorobilia in such a way that french citzens are capable of buying it is legally liable and subject to a fine. If the french government succeeds in fining Yahoo, then there would be a legal basis to levy a fine against any online merchant who sells nazi memorbilia, regardless of his location if he doesn't block people attempting to access his website from france. The argument could be extened even further - if a brick and mortar store accepts orders placed by phone, and they don't make sure no one from france orders nazi stuff, a precent set by the courts' ruling in this case could hold that US-based brick and mortar store liable to fines by the french for violating french law.
At first I thought yahoo's case seemed stupid for the same reasons you mentioned. But if you think about the possible results if this case sets a precedent (and when don't they) it gets really scary.
If things keep going the way they are, I hear you might be able to find them at www.GOP.org.
Does anyone actually bother to use those special hotkeys on their keyboards? I had such a keyboard, but you needed to run special software in order for those hotkeys to do anything, and most of them were useless anyhow. There were controls to interface with a crappy music program, buttons that would bring up IE and Outlook express and one button that you could program to run a single .exe file. The small benefits didnt' seem worth having an extra proram runnning in the system tray.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I find that I have to think about what the machine is doing while I program. With Java it seems all neat and tidy and squared away and abstracted. I learned C++ first, and so I like to think about what's going on in the memory locations while I'm programming. With java, that seems to disspear. It's almost like programming with pseudo-code.
I stopped playing that when Duke Nukem Forever came out.
OpenSourcing IE would just entice a ton of people to move away from it. The only reason I ever use it right now is because some sites are IE-only. If Microsoft OpenSourced-it, im sure Mozilla would just pick up that functionality and then there'd be nothing stoping a lot of people from switching over to Mozilla.
I came off as really angry because I was. When you say that "The conservatives will automatically think, "They are attacking our soldiers! And disruptin' our brave leader Bush's plan for giving Iraq democracy! They are bad for killing American soldiers!" you portary conseratives as flat out iditos; slobbering morons who do nothing but obey their 'brave leader' regardless of what's going on in the world around them. And that made me angry. I'm not a slobbering idiot, and I don't particularly like Bush. But I do consider myself a conservative, and I don't like being portrayed as a moron. Maybe you were attempting you make a caricature of conservative viewpoints and I should have taken it a bit more lightly. It seemed more likely to me that you were attempting to show what you beleived to be a converstive viewpoint - a stupid, slavish adherence to the president. I really don't like being talked down to and considered a fool, and I felt as if you were doing just that.
I'm sure that the al-sadr militia is highly trained and all that sort of thing, but I highly doubt that they represent the views of most Iraqis. I think your link to the movie 'braveheart' is entirely valid. The men who sold out their countrymen for titles were cowards and traitors. They didn't represent the views of the majority of the people in Ireland; they represented their own selfish interests. The same is true of muqtada al-sadr - he doesn't seem to be concerned with the best interests of the iraqi people but with his own particular group. Most iraqis, I think, want to have their own democratic government. I'm sure they're not too happy about having american troops all over the place in their country, but I sincerely doubt they'd prefer a bunch of clans fighting for control over a democractic government.
As for CNN international showing a different picture of what's going on in Iraq, I don't doubt it at all. Most europeans watch state-run televsion news stations, which are inredibly liberal, - so if CNN is going to have any traction at all, they're going to have to show the same sort of things going on. As for American TV not showing any fighting, I've seen plenty of videos of americans shooting at iraqis on Fox.
I'm not sure why I'm conservative. Maybe something to do with the way I was brought up?
I do agree with the arugment about people being more unlikely to change as they get older. I maybe should have put something like that in there.
As for the part about objective good or bad, I think that comes up a lot. However, I myself don't beleive in objective truth but I consider myself a conservative. I know that puts me in a very small minority, but there you have it. I think it's just a hell of a lot easier for people who do beleive in objective truth to label some people as good and some people as bad, than it is for someone who thinks it's all subjective.
I looks like you've got a little of both in you. I certaintly don't beleive that no one is affected by the way they were brought up, nor do I mean to imply that liberals don't think that some immutable personal characterstics determine behavior. What I meant to do was a establish a simple theoretical basis for the two different ideologies, and show how this theoretical basis gives rise to differing opinions on societal phenomona.
Your idea of character determining the outcome of a person born into a poor situation looks like a very reasonable mix of the idea of personal characteristics (character) determining what we do, and the idea that our behavior is shaped and molded by our environments.
I don't at all mean to say that conservatives think it doesn't matter whether you're born into poverty, whereas liberals think that means all the difference in the world. It's just my observation that conservatives tend to see personal character flaws and inhibitions as being the primary reason why some people can't achieve personal wealth and satisfaction. That's one reason why they don't like things such as affirmative action and welfare - because they feel that such actions don't do anything to help inviduals who are having trouble succeeding develop a personal intiative and drive.
Liberals, on the other hand, seem to believe that it's mainly institutional and environmental factors that prevent some people from suceeding. I'm not a liberal myself, and so my understanding of what they beleive and why comes mainly from years of arguing and talking with my liberal friends, in an attempt to find out just what exactly is different about us that makes us see the world so differently. Maybe I'm way off base with the idea that liberals see societal factors as the main agents in preventing some people from succeeding, but that's the impression I've gotten repeatedly.
I know that the idea of saying some people are good and some people are bad is entirely based upon opinion in the real world; for the sake of my post it was just a model. I'm a conservative myself, but I'm also an agostic who doesn't beleive in any objective moral truth, and I have my personal doubts as to the existence of right and wrong. So I don't label people as 'good' or 'bad' per se, but I do strongly beleive in the idea that certain people are prone to behave in certain ways, and there isn't much you can do about it.
As for your enron example, I think it validates the Conservative model of thinking but goes against the liberal model. The guys who pulled that stunt were anything but poor, but they still did bad things. What they did destroyed their company and put a lot of people in a bad financial situation - thus crime caused poverty.
Oh, no. I wouldn't say that by any stretch of the imagination. I consider myself to be an agnostic and a good person. I was trying to typify what in my mind appears to be the mainstream conservative viewpoint. There are a lot of conservatives who do think that going to church reguarly is one sign of a good person, which is why they were particularly happy when the recent polls showed that people who regularly attend religious services are more likely to vote republican. As I said, I'm a conservative but also agnostic. That puts me in a rather small minority. I don't think most religious conservatives would say you can't be a good person if you don't attend church regularly; I think they'd say that knowing a given person goes to church every week makes them more likely to consider that person good.
Fuck you. I at least tried to write a post respecting the intelligence of liberals, because I happen to think they're resonable people. Do not presume yourself to be an intellgent individual and me to be some slack-jawed yokel with a confederate flag draped over my pickup truck just because I happen to be conservative. I think about about my politics and I resent your assinine portrayal of my views. Your arrogance is the sort of behavior that only furthers the rediculous divide between liberals and conservatives in this country.
You say that the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq are Iraqis who feel they've been invaded - fine. Such an explanation of why they're doing what they're doing typifies my description of liberal reasoning as to why bad people are bad: " We made them do it; we changed the environment around them and caused them to misbehave."
Why do I think people are attacking our soldiers over there? I can tell you it's not ordinary Iraqi citizens who have feel invaded and opressed. If that were the case, they wouldn't be attacking iraqi citizens who cooperated with Americans - they'd only be attacking the Americans. I think it's two bit punks like Muqtada al-Sadr who simply want to be in power for themselves, aided by jihadists who are crossing over the iraqi border to participate in what they see as a holy war. Notice that I have not explained their behavior in terms of anything we've done or anything about their situation - I've explained it in terms of who they are and what they tend to do.
In my mind, the main difference between liberals and conservatives is a preference for nature or nurture. This ties in to your idea abou the loss of free will. Disclaimer: I consider myself a conservative, athough I think I have a good understanding of how liberals think because a lot of my friends are liberals and I like to talk about politics. I'd love to hear feedback on this idea to see how valid it is.
Conservatives tend to believe that people behave in the way they do as a result of something about them in particular - their nature. Some people are just good and some people are just bad. Nothing can be done to change or fix the situation- it's just how they are. Good people tend to obey the law, pay taxes, go to church and be good citizens. Bad people don't. When a bad person does something bad, it's because he's a bad person and therefore likely to do bad things.
Liberals, on the other hand, see everyone as more or less products of our environment - the way we are nurtured. We're affected by what goes on around us and the things we see and experience. Bad people are bad not because of some intrinsic difference between them and good people; they're bad because of their childhood or the atmosphere they live in. A bad person does something bad because there was some sort of external influence upon him, causing him to be bad.
To illustrate my point, consider gun control. Conservatives are generally against it - and this makes perfect sense considering their ideas on how people behave. Good people should be allowed to own guns becuase they're good. They'll only use them for self defense and as a result society will be safer. Bad people on the other had, don't have any respect for the law. They'll get their hands on guns regardless of the law, and use the guns to do bad things because they're bad. To a conservative, gun control simply punishes good people and prevents them from defending themselves from the bad people.
Now look at Gun control from the liberal perspective - people are influenced by the environment and the situation they're. Since no one is inherently good or bad, gun control simply decreases the probablity that a given individual will be in possesion of a firearm. This is good because if you have a firearm, you're probably more likely to shoot someone with it. Perhaps if you're angry you wouldn't normally hurt someone, but having a gun in your hand changes your mindset and makes you more likely to do something bad. Gun control legislation is an attempt to remove the external stimulus that can cause people to be bad - so most liberals support it.
Poverty is another example of the difference. There is obviously some sort of connection between poverty and crime. Most of the nations involved in terrorism are not particularly wealthy, and crime is ramapant in poorer urban areas. Why?
Ask a conservative, and most likely she'll tell you that crime causes poverty. No one wants to start a buisness in a crime-ridden city. Because crime prevents economic activity, it causes poverty. To fix the poverty situation, just crack down on the crime. Once you've made the neighborhood safer, jobs will show up and poverty will go away. Note that no attempt is made to explain crime. The Conservative uses crime to explain poverty.
Ask a liberal, and most likely he'll tell you that the poverty causes the crime. If you grow up in a situation devoid of any opportunity for a job and a good life for yourself, you've got a good chance of turning to crime because of the hopelessness and despair of your situation. To fix the situation, you need to get rid of poverty. Try to lure companies in to provide jobs, and the crime will go away once the people have an opportunity for economic advancement. Unlike the conservative, the liberal uses poverty to explain why there's crime.
How does this tie into free will? Conservatives make no effort or attempt to explain why bad people are bad. They just are.
Thank you for forcefully and clearly illustrating my point.
The point of my post was that we've gotten to a point in this country where both sides think the other side is evil. To me, saying that the president would deliberately mislead the american people in order to drum up support for a war that willl boost his popularity ratings is the same as saying that the president is not just evil, but incredibly stupid.
Of course Bush got an immediate rise in public opinion from going to war; but if you think that Bush went to war just for that boost, then you must think bush is a total Idiot. If he wanted to go war in order to gain public opinion, why on earth would he do so in early 2003, when there was still almost two years untill his bid for re-election? If his goal was public opinion support, he could have done one hell of a better job. He could have talked about going to war for two years, repeatedly sending in inspectors, pleading with the french, building a coalition, planning for the aftermath, and waiting untill july 2004 to send in the troops. That way, he could coast into re-election, riding on the surge of public support. No one could criticize him for 'rushing to war' since he spent so much time trying to gather a coalition, and no one could criticize him for not having found WMD, since he could just say 'give us more time.' If he was intentionally misleading everyone to war, he'd have to have been a complete idiot to have done so when he did. The only explanation (which seems like a perfectly reasonable one) is that Bush really, honestly beleived that there were WMD in Iraq.
The whole 'Joe Wilson' escapade proves my point perfectly here. This guy comes out and accuses bush of lying with his '16 words' about Saddam attempting to buy yellowcake. Everyone was calling bush a liar and saying that he was trying to spook everyone based on intelligence that he knew was incorrect and that he was misleading us. In July, Bush apologized for putting the statement in the address, and said it was a mistake. Now it's come out that it was Joe Wilson who was the liar, and that the statement bush made in his State of the Union address was perfectly valid. Why on earth would bush apologize for making such a mistake, if his main goal was to mislead everyone ? Why would he wrongfully concede a point to his critics, rather than correctly accuse Joe Wilson of being a liar, if his goal was to dupe everyone? It just doesn't make any sense.
If you think that we should have had better intelligence, fine. That's an argument I'd love to have. If you think that going to iraq weakend our hand in the war in terror by distracting our troops from hunting saddam and by distancing once close allies, I'd love to have that argument as well. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable critcisms of the war on Iraq, but the 'Bush lied and people died' argument isn't one of them. Unfortunately, that seems to be the argument most frequently made Bush's opposition, and that's what I'm lamenting here - It's a stupid argument that only makes sense if you beleive that Bush is both incredibly stupid and a very, very bad man.
Ad-hominem means attacking a person rather than their ideas. Calling the president incompetent is most definately ad-hominem because it is an insult towards him personally, rather than his ideas. Again, I totally agree that saying the president is incompetent is a step above saying that he's evil or simian, but it still doesn't really get us anywhere.
The only valid comparison I can think of is the following : Suppose you say you've seen the latest Michael Moore movie, and I reply that Michael Moore is a liar. That's an ad-hominem attack on Michael Moore, and it doesn't get us anywhere. It'd be better for me to say that Michael Moore's film is full of lies, and then show you what I beleived those lies were. I'm still calling him a liar, but by directing my critcism towards his movie, rather than him, we can start talking about the movie itself rather than debating the pros and cons of Michael Moore personally.
It's one thing to say that the president has made some mistakes and not performed his job as well as he should. In my mind, that's not incompetence. If you are incompetent, you lack the fundamental qualities necessary to lead and do the job. I do agree that saying he's incompetent isn't nearly the same level of vitriol as saying he's evil, but it's still not the best form of discourse. Calling the president incompetent is a nice ad-hominem way of saying you don't like the job he's doing.
I love slashdot. Where else would you find wild anti-republican conspiracy theories considered insightful? Ohh... wait...
The whole situation in this country is just getting rediculous. Is it possible for people to believe that George W. Bush is a terrible politician, but a decent guy who just has a difference of opinion with you? I'm so sick of republicans acting as if they represent all of what's right and good in this country and claiming that the democrats represent immorality and stupidity. I'm also tired of the democrats acting as if all the republicans are either slaves to the corporate interests, and either evil crooks or else slobbering boobs who've been convinced to go along with the crooks. Jesus Christ ! Is it that unlikely that we just have differences of opinion? Is is that hard to beleive that Bush isn't trying to gather more power for himself for evil purposes - that he's just trying to keep us safe?
You can bitch all you want about Bush having said that he'd be a uniter and not a divider. Personally I think that's a stupid thing to say, but it's definately not as if Bush is intentionally trying piss off half the country. He's been being attacked since before he got into the office, with liberals saying he looked like a monkey, that he was stupid and talked funny and a religious zealot and incompetent. Are you at all surprised that this country is very divided, when half the people think their president is defeding them from evil, and the other half thinks the president looks/talks like a monkey?
I understand completely if you disagree with the president's policies, and you'd like to voice your opinion. I think there are plenty of valid disagreements you could make with the bush administration. The problem is that all I seem to hear is : "Ohhh that Bush - He's just evil! We invaded an innocent country all for oil and haliburton, after he stole the election in florida. And have you heard how talks all goofy?"
I can take criticism of the president - it's important and needs to be done. But not when the main critisim is that he's :
1) evil
2) incompetent
3) looks/talks like a monkey
If I beleived half of the critcisms being made of Bush, I'd be calling for armed revolution. The problem is that most of them just don't hold water at all. So he lied to us about iraq having WMD? What about the governments of Russia, Germany, Britain, even France coming to similiar conclusions about WMD? Why is it that Bush is called a Liar when John Kerry and Hillary Clinton came to the same conclusion that Bush did, re WMD. Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie? That doesn't do anything at all to help him. You'd have to beleive (which i'm under the impression that a lot of liberals do these days) that bush has the intelligence of a four-year old and about as much morality as Adolf Hitler.
Can we please raise the level of political discourse in this country? I would love to argue about the military efficacy of invading Iraq. I'd love to debate the merits of McCain Fiengold. I'd love to talk about social security and whether it can or should be exteneded and fixed. It looks like all i've got to look at this election year is a man who is an evil, stupid, incompetent ape, or a man who was apparently in vietnam thirty years ago where, depending different sides of the story, was either a hero or a shmuck. Do you honestly think that if Kerry gets elected, this country will be 'unified' again? You're going to hear all sorts of outrages charges against him, too. Just you wait...
There are several steps pointed out in the Gamespy article that need to happen before competitive gaming becomes a reality. One of the major ones is the need for a game that looks great, is TV friendly, doesn't require hacked up config files to allow you to be good, and is fun to watch. Ladies and gentlemen: that game is Halo.
Halo is already tremendously popular on college campuses, and you'll get many guys who don't normally enjoy video games excited about 8 on 8 capture the flag games. It's almost as fun to watch as it is to play. It definately requires a good amount of skill. The capture the flag games require immense teamwork and cooperation if you're going to suceed, while the 1 on 1 deathmatches can be very exciting. Everything I've heard about Halo 2 sounds like an improvement over the original, and most of these improvements would lend themselves great to the game being a spectator sport. Dual weilding looks really cool and adds layers of tactics. The covanent energy sword looks awesome and surely could be entertaining to watch. The new vehical destruction physics will make entertaining and exciting flag runs possible - Will his vehicle hold out just long enough for him to make it back to the base? The fact that the game runs on an Xbox means that it looks great and costs very little to play, while ensuring there aren't going to be many cheaters and making config files nonexistant.
There are already some video games that are fun to watch. the Grand Theft Auto series is one of them - the reason is because you can see all sorts of entertaining things and there is generally nonstop action. The same is going to be true of Halo 2. If bungie plays things right by adding a pure spectator mode and the ability to host tournaments, we could see the start of something really big.
I'm sorry, but M Night Shyamalan's movies are full of just absurd plot holes. You mean to tell me that you've got a race of creatures that are capable of traveling through space, but they can't figure out how to break through a door? That those same aliens apparently lack any sort of telescopic device that would show them the Earth being covered in water ? How the hell do you miss that ? That a life form that reacts violently with water is cabale of surviving in an oxygen based atmosphere that is heavily saturated with water vapor? That when faced with an army of invading aliens, you would choose to lock yourself in your basement rather than heading towards a military base?
Even if you just look at the movie for its message, it's still retarded. You're supposed to come out of that thing thinking like 'oh there was someone looking out for them all along' - of course there was someone looking out for them -it's a movie! It wasn't 'god' that killed Gibson's wife and then set all that stuff up so that the aliens would die - it was M. Night Shyamalan, who wrote the script for the film. Of course it all worked out just right. Gah!There's a difference between 'questioning the US's actions in Vietnam' and accusing your fellow soldiers of raping and mudering innocent civilians. The Viet Cong had no chance of defeating the US - we were just a far superior fighting force, and if the war was being fought by the generals instead of the politicians, it would have been over very quickly. Unfortunately, control of the war was highly politicized. The US eventually pulled out, not because it was being defeated but because the war became unpopular. Thanks in part to people like John Kerry, making unsubstantiated claims that our soldiers were all war criminals.
You can lament the simplistic worldview present in the "you're either with us or you're against us" idea all you want, but the facts are quite clear. Ho Chi Minh said in his memoirs that at some points in the war, the only thing that gave them hope of a US withdrawal were all the westerners protesting the war. People like Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda would go to hanoi and have interviews with the NVA and talk about how horrible they felt the war was. Such actions are most definately pro-hanoi. You might not like the ramifications of this line of thought, and you may not like the fact that it's such a simple idea. But if you're in a fight, any sort of fight, if you don't throw all of your support behind your side in the fight, you most definately provide a service to your enemies.
I know most liberals detest the idea of fighting, and this is perfectly understandable. Once a fight is started, however, you want to finish it quickly and effectively. Getting into a war and then backing out out of it is a total waste of lives - the only thing that's going to be accomplished is that you'll lose your credibility in the face of other nations of the world, who'll take that as a license to start pushing you around. Look at that situation in Iraq right now. The other day there was a firefight in Najaf, where the Insurgents lost 300 men, while the Coalition suffered 'minimal casualties.' A 300:0 kill ration is just outstanding. There's absolutely no way the US army can be defeated militarily. The only way we're going to lose a war is if public opinion turns strongly against it. If everoyne in the US threw their full, unconditional support behind the war in Iraq, the insurgency would die down once they realized they weren't going to get us to leave. There isn't a doubt in my mind that guys like Howard Dean and Paul Krugman are giving hope to the insurgents over there. I really don't think that's their intention by any means, but I think it's one result of their actions.
I know it sounds like I'm some big facist. I'm not - I hate government as much if not more than the next guy. I do, however, realize the necessity of supporting your side in a fight. If your side is fighting a war you don't agree with, it's better to support the fight untill it's over, and then question reasoning the led up to the fight. Questioning before and after a fight is important. Questioning the fight while it's going on is only going to make things worse, and will most likely result in more deaths.
How much money do you think they get? They don't make any money selling new games - there's way too much fierce competition to let anybody get any profit. That's why they all started buying and selling used games, and that's why they all have those goofy deals whereby you get the new game cheaper if you trade in the old one - it's the only way they can make any money. If you go to EB games just to buy new games, they will hate you forever and ever because they make no money selling new games.