But one thing is abundantly clear: low cost drugs and efficient health care cannot exist in the current highly regulated environment, in particular since a lot of the regulations are written by drug companies and insurance companies themselves
The obvious solution to a non-free-market fanboy is to fully nationalise the drug and insurance companies, as well as healthcare. I don't see any merit whatsoever in companies making a profit from things that should be the right of everybody in society to enjoy equally.
As an individual, you were fully entitled to feel anger. As a country, you were not entitled to act illogically based on those feelings and invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
To non-Americans, your internal paranoid security theatre is your own problem, as it just means that at some point we'll all just stop visiting the US by choice. Lucky for us there's not a world US/N government, eh?
And anyhow we had a mass stabbing in a school (community college of some sort in California just this month. It's not the weapon: it's the nutjob.
There was one in Texas recently. 14 people were injured but no one was killed. That's the difference between a nutter with a blade and a nutter with even one 30 round magazine in a rifle, never mind a bunch of them.
I don't want to be stabbed, but I'd rather take my chances being stabbed than shot half a dozen times from a rifle. Plus, me and 1 or 2 other people have a much better chance of subduing someone with a knife than a gun.
I didn't say "directly responsible for causing", I said "directly responsible for preventing". The FBI anti-terrorism unit is there specifically to prevent bombings. They have agents that can and have directly infiltrated and stopped bomb plots (e.g. this one [newsnet5.com]). That's their job description, and that this happens means they screwed up.
Unless you have a society like the old DDR, with police spies at every family and social level, no intelligence agency can prevent a one-off attack by a serious nutcase. That is just a fact of life.
Just wait for the media to start using the words "extremist" which is a complete lie - jihad is a mainstream and central tenet of Islam.
There are an awful lot of people who aren't "real" Muslims then, aren't there? Surely all these bloodthirsty fanatics could have organised themselves into a proper army by now?
Wikipedia says that the shooter was armed with "a.223-caliber Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle (with a 30 round magazine)".
Whatever you class it as, it is still capable of firing 30 shots very quickly. Does it really matter that it's not a fully automatic assault rifle except to gun nerds?
Most news sites don't have a decent comment system. At least on slashdot you get some intelligent postings, as well as some good jokes and a whole heap of paranoid right wing crap for entertainment.
Speaking as a detached outsider (I'm not American) everything I have read or watched about the Tea Party shows them to be right wing even by US standards, anti-government, anti-tax, obsessed with "the Constitution" so as to justify repealing all civil rights legislation, against firearms restrictions, against any non-private healthcare provision and so on.
Pretty much like most people on slashdot form what I've seen.
It's several hours after the marathon winners have passed the finish line, so not timed to maximize "on air" publicity. However, the timing may be designed to maximize injury/death (since there will be a much denser crowd of slower runners a couple hours after the few top athletes trickle across the finish line).
No, there were much bigger crowds earlier when the professional athletes were finishing. Unless the bombers have a soft sport for professional runners, it sounds more like it didn't go off when it was supposed to
I'm not a fan of drone strikes. But there's a big difference between the killing of civilians while you're aiming for fighters (even if your aim is super sloppy), and
deliberately killing civilians.
If you blow up someone's house where there are three women, six children and one terrorist, killing them all, you have killed 9 civilians. Even assuming you are justified in summarily executing suspected terrorists (rather than capturing and putting them through the justice system) you simply cannot pretend that you didn't mean to kill those civilians.
It's also not exactly contributing to winning hearts and minds, which I thought we were now supposed to be doing.
Drones killing civilians is an accident; people thought there was a military target there. Sometimes mistakes happen, and innocent people die, but the intent is to target military forces and largely that is what happens.
Civilians being killed as in Boston - there is no possibility of it being a military target, the target is as explicitly non-military as you can get.
Can you truly not discern any kind of difference?
If your wife and children are blown up by a drone, do you really think you're going to care that it was just a "mistake"?
If you can't differentiate a military from a civilian target, you should just be honest and admit you are happy to kill civilians too. Although, they're generally classed as collaborators or shields anyway, so it really serves them right.
It's good to see that someone's worked everything out so quickly. You really are a fucking Renaissance guy, able to move from coding apps to change the ringtone on your phone to global political analysis in your break times. Well done!
Indeed. Jihadists would have put the second device in the rubble of the first, made the delay closer to 5 minutes than 20 seconds, and would have made it much larger. This is clearly by someone too concerned with his own safety to do it "right". Thank heavens.
You're describing the u.s funded ira
I think if you drew up a list of possible terrorist groups likely to target Boston, the IRA or any of its variants would be pretty near the bottom.
The world has changed in the last 12 years, Slashdot is now a little fish in a much bigger pond. In case you haven't noticed, there's now many sites with live video coverage that suck waaaaay more bandwidth and server power than this little mostly text based site.
Having live video coverage of a load of emergency services vehicles parked on the streets hours after a terrorist event is entirely useless in providing information.
No, it's not sad, it's logical given past experience. I'm not typically into conspiracy theories, but I can already see this as some sort of attempt to try and sway people on gun control. They'll find some way to link this to a militia group or something like that.
That would sound a lot more convincing if this had been an attack by one or two nutjobs armed down with assault rifles (like in Mumbai) wouldn't it?
Bringing the issue of gun control into a discussion about (presumed) terrorist bombings is paranoia. Terrorists will obviously get explosives and guns regardless of whether they're illegal. It's irrelevant.
Why the hell do you want to claim the libertarains are the idiots? I'm libertarian, and the government being behind this never occurred to me.
There was an initial flurry of deranged "the government did this in order to increase surveillance/take away our guns/raise taxes" here. If you missed them, I think your own bias is showing.
I know libertarian doesn't just mean "anti-government" but there is a large crossover.
Followed by "I wonder if they - the government - was somehow behind this." Not themselves, not directly, but involved. Perhaps prompting and arming some stupid schmuck in order to entrap him for terrorism, and not catching him in time. Or turning a blind eye to foreign operatives so they could make a dramatic arrest to further some political goal.
I'm fairly sure the entire US government could come up with something a bit more dramatic than a couple of IEDs if they were capable of such cynicism.
At least the 9/11 conspiracy theorists had a genuinely spectacular terrorist outrage to work with. This is the sort of thing we used to get all the time in London during the 1980s from the PIRA. It's pointless and deeply unpleasant but life goes on.
It's liberal doublespeak. They talk out of both sides of their mouth because they know the populace has been so dumbed down by public education that they'll never know the difference. Oh and should anyone actually point it out the news media will just ignore it anyway because it doesn't advance the new world order agenda.
You forgot to point out that (a) it is "liberals" who carry out these terrorist attacks purely in order to provide an excuse for higher taxation, (b) if only the US had nuked North Korea and/or Iran these bombs would never have been planted and (c) ZOG is reading your brainwaves and poisoning your water with fluoride as you speak.
You've been living in a soft martial law for years now. It won't become hard martial law until the can take the guns from all the civilians.
Then you'll really be in trouble.
It will be hard martial law when the army is on the streets. Then you'll really see how many people will fight against the government, with guns or otherwise.
Revolutions depend on the sheer weight of numbers who are prepared to stand up and die. The army can't kill everyone, even if the citizens just have sticks and stones.
But well done for shoe-horning the issue of gun control into an article about unarmed civilian victims of terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
Android is becoming the primary gaming platform.
Christ, and I thought Apple fanboys were out of touch with reality...
But one thing is abundantly clear: low cost drugs and efficient health care cannot exist in the current highly regulated environment, in particular since a lot of the regulations are written by drug companies and insurance companies themselves
The obvious solution to a non-free-market fanboy is to fully nationalise the drug and insurance companies, as well as healthcare. I don't see any merit whatsoever in companies making a profit from things that should be the right of everybody in society to enjoy equally.
Blah blah, socialism, I know.
To non-Americans, your internal paranoid security theatre is your own problem, as it just means that at some point we'll all just stop visiting the US by choice. Lucky for us there's not a world US/N government, eh?
Yes, and in the 80s and 90s the US had absolutely no involvement in the Middle East, so they were just imagining all their grievances? Grow up.
And anyhow we had a mass stabbing in a school (community college of some sort in California just this month. It's not the weapon: it's the nutjob.
There was one in Texas recently. 14 people were injured but no one was killed. That's the difference between a nutter with a blade and a nutter with even one 30 round magazine in a rifle, never mind a bunch of them.
I don't want to be stabbed, but I'd rather take my chances being stabbed than shot half a dozen times from a rifle. Plus, me and 1 or 2 other people have a much better chance of subduing someone with a knife than a gun.
On the other hand, the Obama administration has been actively suppressing [csmonitor.com] use of phrases by the government such as "War on Terror"
But that's a good thing.
I didn't say "directly responsible for causing", I said "directly responsible for preventing". The FBI anti-terrorism unit is there specifically to prevent bombings. They have agents that can and have directly infiltrated and stopped bomb plots (e.g. this one [newsnet5.com]). That's their job description, and that this happens means they screwed up.
Unless you have a society like the old DDR, with police spies at every family and social level, no intelligence agency can prevent a one-off attack by a serious nutcase. That is just a fact of life.
Just wait for the media to start using the words "extremist" which is a complete lie - jihad is a mainstream and central tenet of Islam.
There are an awful lot of people who aren't "real" Muslims then, aren't there? Surely all these bloodthirsty fanatics could have organised themselves into a proper army by now?
The only way to reduce fatal violence is to minimise the number of really fucked-off people.
Whatever you class it as, it is still capable of firing 30 shots very quickly. Does it really matter that it's not a fully automatic assault rifle except to gun nerds?
Most news sites don't have a decent comment system. At least on slashdot you get some intelligent postings, as well as some good jokes and a whole heap of paranoid right wing crap for entertainment.
Tell me again how gun legislation would have prevented this???
Because you can have guns to keep the government in line or overthrow it if you don't like the way they respond to terror attacks. It's your right.
TMYK
At what point did the word "democracy" become a dirty one in the US?
Relying on armed strength is fascism, not democracy.
Pretty much like most people on slashdot form what I've seen.
It's several hours after the marathon winners have passed the finish line, so not timed to maximize "on air" publicity. However, the timing may be designed to maximize injury/death (since there will be a much denser crowd of slower runners a couple hours after the few top athletes trickle across the finish line).
No, there were much bigger crowds earlier when the professional athletes were finishing. Unless the bombers have a soft sport for professional runners, it sounds more like it didn't go off when it was supposed to
I'm not a fan of drone strikes. But there's a big difference between the killing of civilians while you're aiming for fighters (even if your aim is super sloppy), and deliberately killing civilians.
If you blow up someone's house where there are three women, six children and one terrorist, killing them all, you have killed 9 civilians. Even assuming you are justified in summarily executing suspected terrorists (rather than capturing and putting them through the justice system) you simply cannot pretend that you didn't mean to kill those civilians.
It's also not exactly contributing to winning hearts and minds, which I thought we were now supposed to be doing.
Drones killing civilians is an accident; people thought there was a military target there. Sometimes mistakes happen, and innocent people die, but the intent is to target military forces and largely that is what happens.
Civilians being killed as in Boston - there is no possibility of it being a military target, the target is as explicitly non-military as you can get.
Can you truly not discern any kind of difference?
If your wife and children are blown up by a drone, do you really think you're going to care that it was just a "mistake"?
If you can't differentiate a military from a civilian target, you should just be honest and admit you are happy to kill civilians too. Although, they're generally classed as collaborators or shields anyway, so it really serves them right.
It's good to see that someone's worked everything out so quickly. You really are a fucking Renaissance guy, able to move from coding apps to change the ringtone on your phone to global political analysis in your break times. Well done!
This is also doesn't feel like Jihadists...
Indeed. Jihadists would have put the second device in the rubble of the first, made the delay closer to 5 minutes than 20 seconds, and would have made it much larger. This is clearly by someone too concerned with his own safety to do it "right". Thank heavens.
You're describing the u.s funded ira
I think if you drew up a list of possible terrorist groups likely to target Boston, the IRA or any of its variants would be pretty near the bottom.
The world has changed in the last 12 years, Slashdot is now a little fish in a much bigger pond. In case you haven't noticed, there's now many sites with live video coverage that suck waaaaay more bandwidth and server power than this little mostly text based site.
Having live video coverage of a load of emergency services vehicles parked on the streets hours after a terrorist event is entirely useless in providing information.
No, it's not sad, it's logical given past experience. I'm not typically into conspiracy theories, but I can already see this as some sort of attempt to try and sway people on gun control. They'll find some way to link this to a militia group or something like that.
That would sound a lot more convincing if this had been an attack by one or two nutjobs armed down with assault rifles (like in Mumbai) wouldn't it?
Bringing the issue of gun control into a discussion about (presumed) terrorist bombings is paranoia. Terrorists will obviously get explosives and guns regardless of whether they're illegal. It's irrelevant.
Why the hell do you want to claim the libertarains are the idiots? I'm libertarian, and the government being behind this never occurred to me.
There was an initial flurry of deranged "the government did this in order to increase surveillance/take away our guns/raise taxes" here. If you missed them, I think your own bias is showing.
I know libertarian doesn't just mean "anti-government" but there is a large crossover.
Followed by "I wonder if they - the government - was somehow behind this." Not themselves, not directly, but involved. Perhaps prompting and arming some stupid schmuck in order to entrap him for terrorism, and not catching him in time. Or turning a blind eye to foreign operatives so they could make a dramatic arrest to further some political goal.
I'm fairly sure the entire US government could come up with something a bit more dramatic than a couple of IEDs if they were capable of such cynicism.
At least the 9/11 conspiracy theorists had a genuinely spectacular terrorist outrage to work with. This is the sort of thing we used to get all the time in London during the 1980s from the PIRA. It's pointless and deeply unpleasant but life goes on.
It's liberal doublespeak. They talk out of both sides of their mouth because they know the populace has been so dumbed down by public education that they'll never know the difference. Oh and should anyone actually point it out the news media will just ignore it anyway because it doesn't advance the new world order agenda.
You forgot to point out that (a) it is "liberals" who carry out these terrorist attacks purely in order to provide an excuse for higher taxation, (b) if only the US had nuked North Korea and/or Iran these bombs would never have been planted and (c) ZOG is reading your brainwaves and poisoning your water with fluoride as you speak.
Fucking. Rightwing. Batshit-crazy. Twat.
You've been living in a soft martial law for years now. It won't become hard martial law until the can take the guns from all the civilians.
Then you'll really be in trouble.
It will be hard martial law when the army is on the streets. Then you'll really see how many people will fight against the government, with guns or otherwise.
Revolutions depend on the sheer weight of numbers who are prepared to stand up and die. The army can't kill everyone, even if the citizens just have sticks and stones.
But well done for shoe-horning the issue of gun control into an article about unarmed civilian victims of terrorists.
Well done for sharing your stupidity with the rest of us, do you feel better now?