In fact, on the contrary- as a group conservatives in America seem to have an idealized vision of their nation that views racism as a thing of the past, a former problem that has largely been fixed by now, and as individuals they fancy themselves to be racially color-blind.
I definitely agree with the above statement (I consider myself middle-of-the-road conservative). You haven't seen real racism until you've spent some time overseas. I felt much more welcome as a non-white in the deep south - like Montgomery, Alabama - than I ever did in any European city.
Not to sound like a politician or a naive idealist, but people really take for granted how well our society handles racial diversity.
Does it really matter if OBL is dead or alive? The effects of being a rallying banner for terrorism are limited. With his financial assets mostly frozen, his means of communication greatly curtailed, and constantly on the run, I don't think OBL is as much a contributor to existing terrorist efforts as the (frankly) well thought-out, distributive nature of the Al-Qaeda organization structure and its well-known (and effective) doctrine of leveraging the media as a weapon.
I'm also pretty certain that we get diminishing returns from putting more money into cancer research, as there are a relatively limited number of qualified people to which we can apply those monies. Therefore, the two efforts are not by any means mutually exclusive and we should do both (and are).
Even using 15K as an accurate measurement of civilian casualties (and, to say the least, there is a large amount of contention over the exact number and how many 'combatants' were accidentally included), it still beats the number of people Saddam killed per time -- estimated at 300K over 23 years. 300K / 23 = 13K, 15K / 1.5 = 10K. From just a numbers point of view, I'd say things are better now than under Saddam. More importantly, the civilians that have been killed are collateral damage vs the terrorist philosophy of using them as targets with the goal of spreading fear among a wider population.
War is hell and innocent people die, its redeeming quality is that we end up with a better, more lasting peace, and advance the interests of our culture in having a safer world. If you (not the parent poster, the generic "you") can't see that that's worth more than a status quo world of dictators "contained", that it's something worth risking and taking lives for, then just do us all a favor and put away your megaphone, protest sign, and STFU so we can defend civilization.
Oh, and in response to OBL's reasoning behind the 9/11 attacks, I would support Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, any day over the dictatorships trying to push it into the sea.
And by the time we fix SS, and have healthcare and education for all, our position in the world will have been completely eroded due to the rise of others all too willing to fill the power vacuum. With our wise decision to completely cut all our military funding (and the R&D that goes along with it), our production of innovative technologies will be significantly curtailed. But hell, who needs to go to Mars, make technological breakthroughs, or move civilization ahead. We can just maintain our modern-day subsistence indefinitely.
it'd be way cheaper to have the govt send real men out to get fragged and then have some "do your duty for the nation, please have sex more often" ad campaigns than to build 10000 of these drones.
Except that we intrinsically value life, which is why we spend copious amounts of money on technology to attempt to save the lives of our own and the other side.
The Concorde has been proven unprofitable, not supersonic passenger aircraft in general. The Concorde was designed and prototyped in the 1960s, with production aircraft delivered in the late 60s / early 70s. I'm sure the next organization (government or commercial) to attempt a supersonic passenger aircraft will have much more advanced and proven technologies at their disposal.
A roughly (though not exactly) equivalent parallel is the F-15, which was also designed at about the same time period, and the upcoming F/A-22.
I know I must be hitting a few nerves when someone has to resort to implying I'm crazy rather than defend a situation.
Prone to illusion of persecution, specifically.
I think it's more likely you're just willfully blind to the fact that America stopped being a real democracy quite some time ago
America never was a 'real democracy', it founded as a 'republic' or 'representative democracy'. In contrast with (what I take you to mean by) a 'real democracy', we choose representatives to act in 'our' interests. However the constituency (county, congressional district, state, etc.) being represented usually have a variety of conflicting interests. When a rep steps up to the plate on any given issue, it's going to make some people all warm and fuzzy inside and it's going to piss some people off.
Now if you're a rep trying to decide what slant to take on an issue, are you more likely to listen to some ranting dork in bubble wrap, or someone who's willing to form a Political Action Committee and put their money where their mouth is?
You are only one vote, and it's all about keeping the majority, not your particular vote.
Yeah, that's pretty much the notion of democracy. The majority wins, with certain checks to built into the system to protect the minority, such as the bicameral legislature and Electoral College. Whether those checks are insufficient or give too much power to a minority of people is another debate altogether.
The vote is a sham to keep select people in a visible position of power, while the corp financing pretty much dictates what actually happens.
Corporate interests do indeed have a lot of influence and, amazingly enough, they represent a lot of people! However, there are a lot of groups that similarly have a lot of power without being aligned with corporate America or having an enormous warchest of money (the ACLU is one example, although I believe they are more focused on working with the judicial than legislative branches of government).
Bottom line, just because the majority is against you doesn't necessarily mean that they are controlled by some dark master. It could mean, however, they are actually committed to their views and are willing to spend resources to gain support for them, rather than just bitching on a chat board.
My school used a (relatively benign) version of collective punishment.
We had many smaller living units - fraternities, sororities, independent living groups, dorms. They used a policy where each living group had a network administrator, and if a computer on that living group's subnet was found with a virus or a vulnerable port (through active port scanning, etc.) they would notify the computer user and the net admin. Failing to correct the problem or take the computer off the network usually resulted in the entire living group's connection being dropped.
In my fraternity, this led to the offending individual getting the piss beat out of him, which was usually a pretty good incentive to fix (or beg someone else to fix) the problem.
It'll be interesting to see the implications of this and future private spaceflight from a national security point of view. Spacelift technology is remarkably similar to that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Many existing lift vehicles, such as the Titan and Delta family, have their roots in modified ICBMs.
If (when) we have the ability to terraform another planet, we should definitely do so.
From an environmental habitat point of view, I would argue that we are an overly successful species in terms of reproduction (mostly due to awesome public health and healthcare systems). Combine that with the fact that we are naturally pre-disposed against culling significant portions of our world population, and it's apparent that there aren't going to be any less of us in the foreseeable future.
Creating / expanding our existing habitat by a significant amount (e.g., 1 red planet's worth) would allow us to decrease our average environmental impact per area.
This might also have the side effect of easing existing social inequities in our world; we spend a lot of collective effort both trying to get 'more of the pie' and trying to 'divide up the pie equally'. I say it'd be better to just make a bigger pie.
On the issue of possibly impacting existing life, I'd argue that exploration and colonization is more important than microbes and red dust.
I'm not sure how much fuel is required to break orbit and send a satellite to the sun, but I'm pretty sure that an old GPS I satellite doesn't have it. It's easier just to slow the satellite down a bit so it burns up in the atmosphere as it falls to earth, which is what they do. Every US Air Force satellite that goes up nowadays has some sort of end-of-life plan.
Part of the appeal of the first 3 Star Wars movies (episodes 4-6) for me is that it combines several hero archetypes -- the cowboy, the knight, and the fighter pilot -- into one story. Unfortunately the subtlety and ingenuity of that is crowded out of the picture in ep's 1 & 2.
Dude, you lost me with the cooks analogy... just made me realize that I'm really hungry and I don't care at this point how many cooks are making how many cakes, as long as I get to eat.
Battery life VERY dependant on usage habits -- what kind of applications you run, how often they need to spin up the HD. My friend and I got the exact same laptop (this was a couple years ago) and I was getting about twice the run time on batteries that he was.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree with the above statement (I consider myself middle-of-the-road conservative). You haven't seen real racism until you've spent some time overseas. I felt much more welcome as a non-white in the deep south - like Montgomery, Alabama - than I ever did in any European city.
Not to sound like a politician or a naive idealist, but people really take for granted how well our society handles racial diversity.
Does it really matter if OBL is dead or alive? The effects of being a rallying banner for terrorism are limited. With his financial assets mostly frozen, his means of communication greatly curtailed, and constantly on the run, I don't think OBL is as much a contributor to existing terrorist efforts as the (frankly) well thought-out, distributive nature of the Al-Qaeda organization structure and its well-known (and effective) doctrine of leveraging the media as a weapon.
Umm ... because we already are
http://www3.cancer.gov/public/factbk97/varican.htm
I'm also pretty certain that we get diminishing returns from putting more money into cancer research, as there are a relatively limited number of qualified people to which we can apply those monies. Therefore, the two efforts are not by any means mutually exclusive and we should do both (and are).
Even using 15K as an accurate measurement of civilian casualties (and, to say the least, there is a large amount of contention over the exact number and how many 'combatants' were accidentally included), it still beats the number of people Saddam killed per time -- estimated at 300K over 23 years. 300K / 23 = 13K, 15K / 1.5 = 10K. From just a numbers point of view, I'd say things are better now than under Saddam. More importantly, the civilians that have been killed are collateral damage vs the terrorist philosophy of using them as targets with the goal of spreading fear among a wider population.
War is hell and innocent people die, its redeeming quality is that we end up with a better, more lasting peace, and advance the interests of our culture in having a safer world. If you (not the parent poster, the generic "you") can't see that that's worth more than a status quo world of dictators "contained", that it's something worth risking and taking lives for, then just do us all a favor and put away your megaphone, protest sign, and STFU so we can defend civilization.
Oh, and in response to OBL's reasoning behind the 9/11 attacks, I would support Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, any day over the dictatorships trying to push it into the sea.
actually, the Marines (and all other services) have their recruiting website on the more-recognized .com and their general news on .mil
And by the time we fix SS, and have healthcare and education for all, our position in the world will have been completely eroded due to the rise of others all too willing to fill the power vacuum. With our wise decision to completely cut all our military funding (and the R&D that goes along with it), our production of innovative technologies will be significantly curtailed. But hell, who needs to go to Mars, make technological breakthroughs, or move civilization ahead. We can just maintain our modern-day subsistence indefinitely.
it'd be way cheaper to have the govt send real men out to get fragged and then have some "do your duty for the nation, please have sex more often" ad campaigns than to build 10000 of these drones.
Except that we intrinsically value life, which is why we spend copious amounts of money on technology to attempt to save the lives of our own and the other side.
The Concorde has been proven unprofitable, not supersonic passenger aircraft in general. The Concorde was designed and prototyped in the 1960s, with production aircraft delivered in the late 60s / early 70s. I'm sure the next organization (government or commercial) to attempt a supersonic passenger aircraft will have much more advanced and proven technologies at their disposal. A roughly (though not exactly) equivalent parallel is the F-15, which was also designed at about the same time period, and the upcoming F/A-22.
Paradoxically, "viable useful research on things that would benefit mankind" often comes out of our brilliant an innovative ways to kill people.
I know I must be hitting a few nerves when someone has to resort to implying I'm crazy rather than defend a situation.
Prone to illusion of persecution, specifically.
I think it's more likely you're just willfully blind to the fact that America stopped being a real democracy quite some time ago
America never was a 'real democracy', it founded as a 'republic' or 'representative democracy'. In contrast with (what I take you to mean by) a 'real democracy', we choose representatives to act in 'our' interests. However the constituency (county, congressional district, state, etc.) being represented usually have a variety of conflicting interests. When a rep steps up to the plate on any given issue, it's going to make some people all warm and fuzzy inside and it's going to piss some people off.
Now if you're a rep trying to decide what slant to take on an issue, are you more likely to listen to some ranting dork in bubble wrap, or someone who's willing to form a Political Action Committee and put their money where their mouth is?
You are only one vote, and it's all about keeping the majority, not your particular vote.
Yeah, that's pretty much the notion of democracy. The majority wins, with certain checks to built into the system to protect the minority, such as the bicameral legislature and Electoral College. Whether those checks are insufficient or give too much power to a minority of people is another debate altogether.
The vote is a sham to keep select people in a visible position of power, while the corp financing pretty much dictates what actually happens.
Corporate interests do indeed have a lot of influence and, amazingly enough, they represent a lot of people! However, there are a lot of groups that similarly have a lot of power without being aligned with corporate America or having an enormous warchest of money (the ACLU is one example, although I believe they are more focused on working with the judicial than legislative branches of government).
Bottom line, just because the majority is against you doesn't necessarily mean that they are controlled by some dark master. It could mean, however, they are actually committed to their views and are willing to spend resources to gain support for them, rather than just bitching on a chat board.
I really need to patent the reflective aluminum head covering so I can make a fortune collecting royalties from people like you
My school used a (relatively benign) version of collective punishment.
We had many smaller living units - fraternities, sororities, independent living groups, dorms. They used a policy where each living group had a network administrator, and if a computer on that living group's subnet was found with a virus or a vulnerable port (through active port scanning, etc.) they would notify the computer user and the net admin. Failing to correct the problem or take the computer off the network usually resulted in the entire living group's connection being dropped.
In my fraternity, this led to the offending individual getting the piss beat out of him, which was usually a pretty good incentive to fix (or beg someone else to fix) the problem.
It'll be interesting to see the implications of this and future private spaceflight from a national security point of view. Spacelift technology is remarkably similar to that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Many existing lift vehicles, such as the Titan and Delta family, have their roots in modified ICBMs.
If (when) we have the ability to terraform another planet, we should definitely do so.
From an environmental habitat point of view, I would argue that we are an overly successful species in terms of reproduction (mostly due to awesome public health and healthcare systems). Combine that with the fact that we are naturally pre-disposed against culling significant portions of our world population, and it's apparent that there aren't going to be any less of us in the foreseeable future.
Creating / expanding our existing habitat by a significant amount (e.g., 1 red planet's worth) would allow us to decrease our average environmental impact per area.
This might also have the side effect of easing existing social inequities in our world; we spend a lot of collective effort both trying to get 'more of the pie' and trying to 'divide up the pie equally'. I say it'd be better to just make a bigger pie.
On the issue of possibly impacting existing life, I'd argue that exploration and colonization is more important than microbes and red dust.
I'm not sure how much fuel is required to break orbit and send a satellite to the sun, but I'm pretty sure that an old GPS I satellite doesn't have it. It's easier just to slow the satellite down a bit so it burns up in the atmosphere as it falls to earth, which is what they do. Every US Air Force satellite that goes up nowadays has some sort of end-of-life plan.
Part of the appeal of the first 3 Star Wars movies (episodes 4-6) for me is that it combines several hero archetypes -- the cowboy, the knight, and the fighter pilot -- into one story. Unfortunately the subtlety and ingenuity of that is crowded out of the picture in ep's 1 & 2.
Dude, you lost me with the cooks analogy ... just made me realize that I'm really hungry and I don't care at this point how many cooks are making how many cakes, as long as I get to eat.
or what I end up paying after I route it to my five neighbors?
Battery life VERY dependant on usage habits -- what kind of applications you run, how often they need to spin up the HD. My friend and I got the exact same laptop (this was a couple years ago) and I was getting about twice the run time on batteries that he was.