When I have a good, constructive response and refuse to join you in the universal condemnation of Slashdot's readership, some little part of you doesn't like that, does it? I regret the likelihood that most or all good people you have ever seen were also weak and more interested in people-pleasing than in revealing what is good and right. That little part of you which cannot stand the brightness that is in me is quite powerless -- all it can do is come up with some insult like this and hope that I fall to it by getting angry and upset. That part is not really you at all, but rather, it was put there by folks who may have been well-meaning but had no real love to give, so quite naturally they could not help but teach you by their example how to be resentful and judgmental and belligerent. If you did not listen so intently to that part of yourself you'd realize that there is nothing I am doing or becoming that is not also available to you.
If people would stop downloading free_porn.jpg from 4chan, renaming it to free_porn.exe, and running it... we would not be having these problems.
If people would stop jumping to conclusions and assuming the answer is that simple, we would not be having these problems.
Most things which develop into complex, apparently insurmountable problems have very simple origins. The way I like to say it is that we ignore the acorns that are planted and years later we wonder how the hell that giant mighty oak tree got there and we curse at how hard it's going to be to chop it down and at how much damage it's going to do when it falls. This situation is no exception. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any exception to this rule among all the problems known to man.
There was a time when these malware attacks were not nearly so sophisticated as the ones we know today. Like so many other things, this appears to begin and end with the actions of those who write the malware and those who are compromised by it. That's the mundane level. There is an abstract level as well, in which a system arises, tries to thrive in the current environment, and only if it can establish a foothold does it then become more sophisticated and widespread. If this system were a body, the malware authors with their individual selfish motivations would be the cells. Cells must first thrive before they can grow into the tissues and organs that we know as the large botnets and professional criminals which perpetrate the exploits that we know so well today.
That system was once simple to the point of idiocy. There was a time when "free_porn.jpg.exe" was about the limit of the sophistication of these attacks. That was when this system was trying to thrive in its current environment. To thrive, it needs food and shelter. People who feel no need to learn and obtain understanding of what they are working with, who because of that, quite naturally neglect their security and their well-being, have provided plenty of both. So now this system has established a foothold and from there it has grown into the enormously complex and sophisticated underground criminal element that we know today. Before it had a chance to do so would have been the best time to stop it. Equipping users so that they stop being such easy targets would not have been easy back then; you can imagine how much more difficult it would be to do that now.
All things are in a process of becoming, of trying to refine and better express their true nature. The funny thing is that anyone who is aware of this and tries to explain the inevitable progression of those little things that we ignore because they are small at the time is quite likely to be ignored or dismissed. I have also said before that I believe we as a culture have largely abandoned principle in favor of immediate convenience and gratification and that this has made us weak and timid. What immediate convenience would view as a gross overreaction to something small is what principle would view as stopping a problem in its early stages before it can take root.
I realize that the GP was joking. However, you were not. I hope you can see that there is some truth to that saying about every joke having an element of truth.
But by all means do NOT mention morality. Management is trained to be suspicious of such things, and you'll be on the shit list.
That part got my attention. May I ask what you mean when you say that they are trained to be suspicious of such things? Is this actually a component of formal training such as business classes or leadership seminars?
It's not that morality gets nice'd down in management priorities. It's that profitability gets nice'd way up. The end result is the same though, morality doesn't get enough cycles and never gets a chance to run.
(/. has to be the only place where it makes sense to use computer analogies to explain the real world.)
What I had in mind was something a bit farther away from the obvious. Just as politicians destroy precious things like freedom in the name of our safety, that post made me wonder if errant or rogue employees might take some very undesirable actions and excuse them on the basis of some nebulous "greater good" and then claim that this constitutes morality. If this were a known scenario that is repeated from time to time and from company to company, then teaching managers to regard "morality" arguments as possible red flags may indeed be part of some kind of training program. Allowing a small minority who abuses an otherwise good thing to spoil that good thing for everyone else is unfortunately a frequent reality in large organizations with bureaucratic rules.
The other possibility I had in mind was like what you describe. That is, that businesses seldom do anything "for the principle of it." For example, if a business that is completely innocent and has broken no laws and done no damage is faced with a lawsuit, they are likely to settle the suit anyway if doing so is much cheaper than successfully defending against it. There is little concern in such a scenario for the idea that if they did nothing wrong, then they should defend themselves and prevail on principle. In such a fashion it's possible that management sees concerns about morality or principles as unwanted competition for concerns about profit. I think it's reasonable to say that this is generally undesirable but is a business reality. What I wondered is whether this is part of any sort of formal training or if it's simply a part of that culture.
No, I'm assuming "good faith" and extending benefit of doubt; thus, I asked him to elucidate. That's not what you describe. The assumption you just made, and several like it, are why such benefit of doubt is a rare occurrence. I consider it Nature's way of separating those who have something to prove from those who are secure, as only the former would perceive your assumption as a stumbling block.
It's simple Slashdottian populist class warfare. Obviously anyone in management is a scumbag and any techie is a saint.
If it is as you say then the prevailing view is black-and-white and self-limiting. If that be the case, then I cannot improve the situation if I am resenting such people for being the way that they are or dismissing what they say without examination. By engaging them instead and showing that a higher perspective not only exists but is also available to them, then with my reason and by my example I stand a chance of effecting change. Just a chance, mind you, but there is no room for disappointment when you are doing something truly worthwhile.
The people who most strongly advocate wrong beliefs are the people who are most imprisoned by them. What they need is to see what another perspective looks like. Someone who has already written them off has no hope of showing that to them; in fact, someone who has done that has failed a test that he did not know he was taking.
Oh and one last thing. Don't bill for excess usage - just shape their connection. Because if Joe Sixpack gets a virus and their connection downloads 100s of GB without their knowledge, they are not going to want a huge bill.
Think of it as an incentive to secure your system. In that capacity, it would be one of the only such measures that doesn't suffer from the drawback of impacting or restricting users who already do secure their systems. I notice that people who care about little else will often care about their wallets so this may be an effective incentive for even the most negligent users. This is may be the only desirable effect of metering; or at least, there isn't anything else I like about it.
Do you really have reason to believe that dissenting is "a down-moddable 'offense'," or are you just letting off steam because AC's always start at -1 and seldom get up-modded unless they're presenting a view that is relevant to the discussion? I can't speak for anyone else but I use about 95-98% of any mod points I'm given to reward those who say something meaningful, informative and/or funny in relation to the subject raised in the original summary. So, in answer to your implied question, I'd be glad to have the same moderation standards applied to my submissions.
FYI, Anonymous Cowards don't start at -1 by default. By default, they start at 0. You can modify your personal preferences so that they are displayed as -1 (or +5 if you really wanted...) but of course that is unique to your own account.
Incidentally, you really don't sound like the sort of moderator that the GP was talking about and I mean for that to be a compliment. That you realize promoting good posts is a better use of your points than demoting bad ones is strong evidence that you're one of the better moderators. As someone who values constructive criticism (the real thing, not personal attacks veiled as constructive criticism), who often takes relatively controversial positions and enjoys challenging people to think in new ways, I can tell you from my own personal experience that there is a lot of poor-quality moderation going on. You won't see that very much for posts that just repeat a "party line" (almost anyone's party line) but you do see this targeting some of the more freethinking posters. It became much more noticable after the old metamoderation system was "upgraded". I am not at all surprised that I more and more frequently see a backlash against it to be honest with you. It's not that it's so terrible so much as it is that this is heading in the wrong direction so the bad examples are slowly becoming more common.
To me the situation is quite easy to understand: weak or insecure people think that even the most civil disagreement or the most constructive criticism is an attack against them and they look for ways to retaliate. When those people are moderators, they retaliate by enforcing drastically distorted standards of "flamebait" or "troll" or "offtopic".
But by all means do NOT mention morality. Management is trained to be suspicious of such things, and you'll be on the shit list.
That part got my attention. May I ask what you mean when you say that they are trained to be suspicious of such things? Is this actually a component of formal training such as business classes or leadership seminars? Or is it more of a situation where it's unfortunate that lots of people who are actually up to no good have been known to such excuses to cover up their wrongdoing and managers just learn this by experience?
You're so right. A kid uploads a CD and should go to prison, but on a daily basis around here the jails are so full they release criminals constantly. They have some sort of computer program that tries to determine the "least bad" crimes and criminals and let those ones out first.
People here in our county know for most crimes they will "maybe" spend a single night in jail for anything other then murder before they are let go the next day.
It's a joke around here when litterally there is no room for rapists, drunk drivers, and other 'violent' criminals in jail, but some one uploads some MP3s and OH MY GOD, get him.. Give me freakin' break.
You can thank the War on (Some) Drugs for that one, as well as all of the naive, ignorant, well-meaning individuals who never heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences who continue to support it. The War on (Some) Drugs led to a practice known as "proactive policing" and both of them have worked together to ensure that the USA has the highest percentage of its population in prison. Many of these prisons are privately owned and quite profitable and you can bet that the companies which own them employ lobbyists.
If we can legitimize the use of overwhelming state police power against adult people because we dislike what they choose to do with their own bodies, even when they quite clearly are harming no one other than themselves, then it should be little surprise that this has led to the situation that you describe. You may think that this isn't directly related to the issue you raise but that issue had a predecessor which helped to pave the way for this sort of hysteria and injustice. You are dealing with what you might call "social technology" or machinery. It is a system that accepts an arbitrary input, processes it, and produces a desired output (desired by our rulers, that is). The input can be "drugs" or it can be "copyrighted music" or anything really, the processing is the hysteria and the situational ethics and the demonization, while the output is gross injustice and dehumanization and all of the problems that go with it that you have highlighted. It is dehumanization because the message they reinforce is that the lifeless corporation is somehow more important than real human beings.
It was Henry David Thoreau who once said, "there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Drugs, piracy, etc. are the branches. The absence of real love that would never permit one to view your fellow human beings as exploitable resources or objects of power and control is the root. The systems and social technologies and their goal of demoralizing the people and intimidating through injustice so that they feel powerless is the means. Never underestimate the power of seeing how simple this really is.
The problem is that we NEED someone to care about the underlying architecture. If nobody does, the system fails.
Yeah, sure - most users see computers as magic black boxes. But they wouldn't exist if everyone just sat around looking at a box and wishing for rainbows and unicorns (although you might get some nice books / movies). Someone's got to open the box and figure out what's going to go in to it to make it do the things people will take for granted tomorrow.
It's for just that reason that I question this mostly unstated assumption that anywhere there is a gap between developers and users, that it is somehow entirely and automatically the job of the developers to bridge that gap. When you are talking about Open Source software that is both free as in speech and free as in beer, there is certainly no moral expectation that this should be the case.
The average users in this scenario are non-contributing beneficiaries. Non-contributing beneficiaries who are demanding instead of helpful are beggars who are trying to be choosers. Here, I'm not talking so much about what is said and done so much as the way it is said and done and the intent behind it. It's one thing to politely ask for a feature or a change because you think it would be great. It's quite another to make judgments about someone's character or their ability to figure something out because their free contribution was not to your liking.
By and large, these users are unwilling to acquire the skills necessary to implement the changes that they demand from the developers and yet some of them are willing to pontificate about how a developer should think. When the GP said "Sadly, many developers never figure this part out", that is a manipulative way of saying "they seem to disagree with me about what should be important." I say that because some things genuinely are "sad" while others are merely differences of opinion and it is intellectually dishonest to conflate the two. The only reason for doing it is to give an undue appearance of superiority to your own viewpoint but if your viewpoint were truly superior, no such tactics would be needed.
Furthermore, this is a difference of opinion not between two equal viewpoints but between a contributor and a non-contributor. Beware the tendency to automatically consider all viewpoints to be equal. It has a certain allure because it can sound noble but there are many times when it just isn't the case.
When you unnecessarily phrase something in a manipulative fashion, subtle though that may be, it has some interesting effects. Most people are not aware enough to understand why or to see this process as it occurs, but what happens is that they instinctively sense that there is a "wrong feeling" to it. Unfortunately many people, even those who can see this happening, lack the strength to just calmly point it out and show by their example that there is another way. They don't know how to experience it without being affected by it because they are externally motivated and it is external ("externally motivated" = "responds to pressure"). So when they sense this "wrong" feeling there is a tendency to either appease it or to fight it, depending on the character of the person. Both are wrong because both are harmful.
Appeasing it is a mistake because it validates the tactic and sends the message that it's acceptable and will obtain the desired results. It also robs the appeaser of much of the joy that could have been found in the creative process by replacing noble service with demeaning servitude, a process that tends to breed resentment. Fighting it results in senseless pissing contests and personal arguments which reinforce the "us against them" mentality, in this case "the interests of developers vs. the interests of users". It also makes sure that your position is no better than that of the other person and so it destroys your ability to lead by example even if you were initially correct. There a
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
I propose we come up with a name or a term for this argument so that it doesn't have to be rewritten verbatim every single time there's an article that even begins to hint at either a usability issue or the expectations of the average end-user. It'd save all of us a lot of typing and would save Slashdot a ton of storage space. You see, it keeps getting raised as an "issue" only it's not getting anywhere; this "issue" never seems to develop its reasoning. The result is that lots of people are speaking about it, only they're all saying the same thing. If this name or term became a common one, perhaps then we can all just acknowledge the reality that developers are not average users and may think differently from average users. Why, one day, it may even be considered so obvious as to not bear repeating! Or at least, not without also suggesting a constructive solution.
I'll add that constructive feedback is one thing and developers often appreciate it, but I don't feel like I have a moral right to actually complain to an open-source developer when I am benefitting from his or her generosity. If I were buying commercial software or hiring the services of a programmer to perform custom work for me, I would then feel like it's reasonable to expect that the result matches my exact specifications. But when a complete stranger has decided to benefit me expecting nothing in return, that is a different situation in my opinion. Like I said, constructive feedback is one thing, but to complain about not even the software itself but the developer and what they should and should not care about or what their priorities should be seems a little out of line to me.
I think too that we forget that much of the technology we now enjoy is the direct result of advances made by those horribly out-of-touch developers (sarcasm) who did care about the underlying architecture and did think of how awesome the comp sci might be. You don't usually do difficult, painstakingly detailed work like that unless you find something creative or expressive in it that pleases you. This creative force is something that should be appreciated and cultivated. I could make a silly play on your post by saying "sadly, many users never figure this part out." When people lack understanding, they lack understanding; that's all. There's really nothing special about this particular "users and developers" issue except that a little mutual understanding would be a significant improvement.
Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5.
What is the point of the two WD 300GB drives? They provide 300GB usable disk space, while the system has another 4TB of usable space. They are RAID1 -- just like the pair of Samsung drives. Are they just for show? Or to fill more of the available drive bays? Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
I have not personally had any Microsoft software on my own computers for close to ten years, so I am not sure how much of what I am about to say would apply to Windows Server 2008. Having said that, the 300GB RAID-1 sounds like a good boot/system volume (on Linux, I would probably mount it at/, as the root partition) while the four 1TB drives in RAID-5 would be a good user data volume (i.e./home in Linux) and maybe the 1TB RAID-1 volume would be good for supplementary storage (perhaps/usr or possibly for the contents of a fileserver or a Web server).
I am not sure if Windows has such capabilities, but on Unix-like systems, this would give several advantages other than organization and reliability. One that comes to mind is that you can place restrictions on those separate partitions that you may not want to have throughout the system. For example, you would probably want to use the "nodev" and "nosuid" and perhaps also "noexec" on/home but obviously this won't work system-wide.
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, andCooler Master Stacker 810 case. By a remarkable coincidence, these are almost exactly the hardware requirements for Windows 8!
You beat me to it:-). So, I'll say that maybe Vista will be snappy and responsive on this machine.
Hmmm, +5 scary conspiracy theory. Have you stayed up all night playing Deus Ex and drinking coffee?
You'll find that there is a conditioned response (not unlike Pavlov's dogs) to instantly ridicule anything that even looks like a conspiracy theory without ever spending a moment to think about its plausibility. Like all self-limiting responses, this one reduces thinking and limits possibility, not in reality of course but in your mind. Like most of our self-limiting responses, this one appears to come from the media. I mean, if you work at Company X and that company makes widgets, you and all of your co-workers are "conspiring" to make widgets. Some of you reallly need to get over this word and realize that it has no magical connotations. All corruption is a conspiracy because all corruption consists of at least two people who are trying to get away with something, be it bribery or whatever. By your "logic" (well, more like scoffing) there is no such thing as corruption and that is patently false. Incidentally, some things can appear to be about "the other guy" but are not; that built-in absurdity of your position is why you had to adopt a smarmy mocking tone against someone who has not provoked you.
Now if you are willing to examine something before you dismiss it (I know, I know, not as fun that way), there have been real, documented conspiracies -- one of the scariest I know of is Operation Northwoods. That one alone demonstrates that there is certainly the willingness and the ability for a politically powerful group to conspire against the people of the United States. There is no question that such things do in fact happen. The real question is whether we want to guard against them. Another real question is how many events in our history books have been engineered in this manner? How many of these were successful and were not discovered as Operation Northwoods was discovered?
I don't think you understand that if I were to find out that you're right and that my beliefs about this really are absurd, that everything in the USA is okay and is exactly as it appears to be, this would be good news to me. There are times when I would like to be wrong and this is one of them. I understand why this is a stumbling block for you -- no one really wants to think that from the highest government officials to the media, we are all being lied to every day. It is not a pleasant thought. The problem with that is that I can quite clearly see the world around me and how it operates, well enough that my choices are to either take the coward's way out and lie to myself or to deal with the reality of the situation. If I were to lie to myself, I would exhibit the sort of mocking denial that you demonstrate. That's because denigrating others is the wrong way of being "right" but it's one of the only ways available to the cowardly. I submit that the naivete you demonstrate is not going to bring you any comfort, nor is it going to bring you any understanding of why things happen the way they do.
So, I think Obama or any other President [emphasis mine -mi]...
Were you as forgiving towards the previous President?
Did the previous president give any evidence of indication...
The GGP said: "any other President". Hence it was logical to wonder, if he was as tolerant towards corruption under Bush (who, BTW, had no problems appointing cabinet members without problems of tax-dodging).
Understanding corruption and accepting the reality of it is not at all the same thing as feeling "tolerant towards corruption" (or excusing it, as you seem to imply), and on that basis I believe you have misunderstood me. I was attempting the former, not the latter.
I find it useful to understand that this sort of corruption is systemic. We'd like to believe that it's the fault of $ONE_GUY, with the exact identity of $ONE_GUY varying depending on whom you ask. Most people you ask will select someone they don't like for this role, especially someone who personally offends them in some way. Extra points if the perceived "offense" comes solely from subscribing to an opposing viewpoint. This occurs because most people are egomaniacs and don't know it but has little to do with true inquiry. This is part of the "us against them" thinking that has been around for so very long and hasn't done anything to improve our situation. In fact, it has been one of the more active agents of our stagnation, tying up much energy that could be applied elsewhere.
What I discussed was the reason why the people generally feel under-represented. I also wrote about why it's a rare occurrence that anyone who is in a position to do so would try to remedy this. I wanted to keep the last post simple so there was another reason for this that I did not mention in it. It is something of an issue of probability.
It is unfortunate that selfless, compassionate, loving people who have wisdom and courage are still relatively rare among the general population. Incidentally, it is for this reason alone that I consider this period of our history to be a Dark Age that is awaiting something far better and will cherish it when it arrives. It may or may not be unfortunate that many people who fit that description are not interested in wielding political power, but certainly the more selfish, controlling, and fearful among us are very interested in political power. In addition to what I described in my last post, these factors also work to ensure that a true servant of the people, a more enlightened type of leader, one who understands pure motive, is unlikely to occupy a high office at any given time. Little or none of this depends on the actual intentions of the person who wins the election.
On a more mundane level, there were plenty of actions taken by the Bush administration which troubled me quite a bit more than tax evasion. I have personally written about several of them on this site when they were the subject of discussion. I just won't buy into this idea that there should be some contest to see whether "our guy" or "their guy" is easier to denigrate. I don't consider either of them to be "my guy" and far more important things are at stake than a popularity contest masquerading as reasonable discourse. Therefore, I don't see your point. The systemic view I discussed is orthogonal to the question of whether all politicians should be held responsible for any illegal or immoral behavior.
Knowing that it's not what I was speaking about before, if you still wish to know how I feel about that, I will tell you: yes, I believe that all politicians, no matter who they are, should be held responsible for any illegal or immoral behavior. I believe you felt a need to mention Bush solely because you thought that I was talking specifically or exclusively about Obama. Corruption is universal
Were you as forgiving towards the previous President? More importantly, were the moderators?
Did the previous president give any evidence of indication that he was a fluke ala JFK ( going against the interests of his class), or was he like JFK solely in the fact that, like JFK, he was born into a wealthy and politically powerful East Coast family?
Are slashdotters really this simple minded? "This guy seems to think both JFK and Obama don't necessarily represent the interests of the wealthy. I wonder if he would extend the same courtesy to Bush?" Well, can you name a few things Bush did that were more in the interests of the common person, rather than the wealthy?
Brevity is something I've yet to master, so I think you just saved me some effort by explaining that.
No shit. I am busting my everliving ass to get as many negative mods in this thread as I can, and some jackass comes along and mods me intersting. Trust me, you're nowhere near as unhappy as I am right now.
Just curious: if you really meant that and were not just being facetious, then what is the purpose? That's not intended as sarcasm or a put-down or anything like that; I really want to know.
Is Obama just making really bad choices, or is everyone at that high a level in.gov just corrupt?
They're puppets who may or may not falsely believe that they have anything like a will of their own or ideas of their own. The real political power is not the President but the corporations and old-money families who put him into office. They don't put a President into office unless he has views that they find to be either favorable or convenient. That's not a conspiracy theory so much as a proposition that entrenched power tends to act in its own interests, and as such, it should be self-evident.
I cannot prove this but I will offer some speculation: the more I have heard of his speeches and his intentions and his beliefs, the more I think that John F. Kennedy was a fluke. He was a fluke because he really did want to represent the people and not the interests that got him into office. I believe that is why he was assassinated -- to those interests, this represented a betrayal or a "double-crossing" and they made an example. Certainly the Mafia could arrange such an event, and I will say that I believe that the monied interests who truly run this country make the Mafia look like a bunch of amateurs, though they prefer to buy people off rather than use brute force. Most people's princples are indeed for sale if the price is high enough, and they know this because they know what corruption is. It's just that occasionally there comes someone who cannot be bought and against whom they don't have some other form of leverage.
I apologize that I do not know the time or place, but this is a quote from a speech delivered by JFK:
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies,
to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far
outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its
arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And
there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very
limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit, to the extent that it's in my control. And no official of my
administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to
stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press or public the facts they deserve to know.
An open government of the sort he advocated is quite terrifying to the powers behind the throne. So, I think Obama or any other President probably cannot help but to make bad choices or to have corruption. Even if he himself is a sincere man, he is working within a system that is not designed for sincerity.
In the spirit of embracing both viewpoints, have you considered that a lack of efficiency in government is no mistake? One could speculate that the government is as it is simply to ensure their own success. Not saying I think this, but it is the other side of your argument I suppose.
That's absolutely true, but it doesn't usually happen the way you think it does.
Most of the time, no one sets out to do that. It's rare that anyone plots and plans to have government become a self-feeding, self-justifying answer to the problems that it either created or had a hand in creating or could have easily prevented. Yet, this happens all the time. It's not just government. Anyone and anything that wants to rule you has to get you to depend on them first, typically by catering to your weakness. When government does that, it usually takes the form of doing for you things you should be doing for yourself.
A classic example of this is the Social Security system. At the beginning of young adulthood, I saw that one day I would grow old and would want to stop working and retire, and that the time to start saving up for that is right now. I could have just depended on government to take care of this for me as many people have done, but this is a no-win proposition. For one, that system is like a Ponzai scheme and is likely to have collapsed by the time I reach retirement age. Even if that does not happen, the price is too high. By abdicating a responsibility that is rightfully mine, I would become weak and would therefore have to surrender some of my integrity. It's a subtle and intangible effect that wrong decision-making always has on your nature. I can tell you that real strength and real courage and real peace of mind cannot exist together with that kind of weakness because it makes you experience something like guilt (of failure) and thus inner conflict. The mundane explanation that is also true on its level is that such a weakness would, to a greater degree than is necessary, put my financial future at the mercy of the government and this is not a good position. Imagine how many people are going to find themselves in an unenviable position when Social Security finally does collapse -- that is only the outward form or the outward expression of what is really an inner weakness.
So where does the drive to run government this way come from? The thing you absolutely must understand about people if you are going to change or improve anything is that each person always does what they believe is right, or at least what they believe is necessary, and so each person feels quite justified no matter how wrong they actually are. That's why confonting them in the wrong way, that is with anger and condemnation, only makes them more determined. They will label you an attacker and resist you and do what they do in spite of anything you say. Such an angry response may even be the reaction they wanted to get from you because miserable people who suffer because of how they live want to spread their misery; seeing their misery in you, even if they had to put it there first, is how they deny that you are in any position to tell them that they are doing something wrong, either verbally or by your example. Our attempts to control behavior have no power to address this actual problem because you can only effectively do that by force or by deceit and neither of those trees knows how to bear good fruit. At best, that can only replace one tyrant with a slightly less malevolent one and this is hardly a victory.
If each person always does what they believe is right, no matter how right or wrong that actually is, then the matter of importance is where they obtain their view of what "right" is. Human beings have the ability to see that for themselves and to know it when they see it, but not when they suppress their real selves by falling for the allure of greed and power and other corrupting temptations. The people who run government and truly believe that it has so
What public support? History is littered with examples of totalitarian regimes from both sides of the political spectrum. Almost everybody, regardless of their political view, realises what kind of society they should hope to live in by granting more power to the state.
You have just summed up the true nature of "divide and conquer". This is a thing that many people believe they understand but have never seen in action.
The state sits and watches the two sides squabble and lets them argue all they want. Meanwhile the two sides are too busy opposing each other to notice that no matter what happens, the state always becomes more powerful. When overwhelming state power becomes an undeniable threat, usually in the form of an openly totalitarian regime, the two sides then find themselves powerless to oppose it because by this time it is far too late. Then "go along to get along" changes from the favorite tool of the apologist or an excuse for not having the courage to stand up, to a method of survival, sort of like that saying "it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." How many examples of this must history provide before we learn to recognize these patterns?
I cannot tell you whether it was designed deliberately or if it arose on its own and was promoted because of how very convenient it is for the statists, but the left-vs-right method of politics is designed to limit possibility. This is shallow and superficial one-dimensional thinking, which is precisely why it can be represented as a linear continuum by drawing two points and one line. One side favors economic freedoms and is willing to reduce personal freedoms, while the other favors personal freedoms and is willing to reduce economic freedoms. It doesn't work that way, which is why the Left, or the Right, or the Left working with the RIght are always going to reduce freedom because neither of them value it for its own sake in all of its forms. That's a serious error and no amount of reform or adjustment of any party platform is going to fix it.
When I repeatedly try to warn against buying into this system and believing for one moment that it has our interests at heart, this is not an exercise or an intellectual debate. There is a real danger here, only it's a subtle one. It's a corrupting, compromising type of danger that demoralizes and weakens. If the media were truly your friend, you would hear about this every day on CNN and Fox News and ABC and MSNBC, and you'd probably believe it then, not because they have the authority of self-evident truth but because they have the kind of authority to which most of you respond. That is not at all natural but it's what you might call unnaturally natural. It is evidence of the compromising, corrupting, demoralizing influence of which I speak that for most of you, even your thinking and your truth needs to be prepackaged for you.
If you don't like the tone of this post, well that makes two of us. I don't like it either, but I'm really tired of the systemic failure to recognize things that are really quite basic and simple. The denial and the "can't happen here" surrounding these issues are staggering. These things should be so obvious that I am beginning to wonder whether Western culture has a collective death wish or a suicidal tendency. Especially in the USA, I don't believe that any outside threat is going to harm us. I think we're doing a fine job of that all on our own. I'd like to see that change, I'd like to see it change peacefully, and I'd like to see people wake up and start daring to dream that if we will just settle a few basic questions once and for all, and then learn to love one another, then something like "heaven on earth" might emerge. I think that's inevitable because nothing else is going to work long-term, it's just a question of how badly we need to suffer before we get there and how many unsustainable systems must fail before we make the realization that we're missing something simple and fundamental. How long that will take is entirely up to us.
Our impulses are being redirected
We are living in an artificially induced
state of consciousness that resembles sleep.
The poor and the underclass are growing
Racial justice and human rights are non-existant
They have created a repressive society
and we are their unwitting accomplices.
Their intention to rule
rests with the annihilation of consciousness.
We have been lulled into a trance.
They have made us indifferent, to each other,
We are focused only on our own gain.
Please understand,
they are safe as long as they are not discovered,
that is their primary method of survival,
To keep us asleep, to keep us selfish, to keep us sedated.
They are dismantling the sleeping middle class.
More and more people are becoming poor.
We are their cattle.
We are being bred for slavery.
I can easily enough find reasons why you were modded down, in fact it seems like classic shoot-the-messenger to me. Your message here isn't the easist thing to handle especially for people who are just starting to realize that all is not what it appears. It does not help that the more petty people will judge the truth of a thing according to how palatable it is and whether it fits in with their current worldview, rather than questioning their reliance on palatability and being willing to abandon any worldview that they may have outgrown.
Having said that, I think what you said more or less does sum up what's happening. We like to think that the political forces arrayed against us are haphazard and petty and disorganized and merely selfish but I do not believe they would be so effective at slowly suffocating liberty if this were the case. It seems obvious to me that this has been a long-term plan enacted by people who did not care whether their goal would ever occur during their own lifetimes, and in that manner the acquisition of power has taken on more of a religious nature. We tend to look at individual politicians and their faults and their ambitions without understanding that they have bought into an abstract system and are merely parts in that system. Most of these parts are interchangeable. Those parts are "true believers" and many of them don't have to actually "lie" to you because they really believe in what they are doing.
We really need to get beyond the superficial realm of names and personalities and start looking at intent and allegiance. Otherwise what you have described will continue and it will be built mostly on a foundation of apologists with good intentions who will believe that all of this is for our own good right up until they learn the goose step.
The people comparing today's Britain to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are not taking everything into account. For a start the government isn't trying to insert cameras in everyone's bedrooms, they're not that cynical. They actually believe what they're doing is for the benefit of the people.
You really think so? So the politicians are just a bunch of bumbling golly-gee-how'd-THAT-happen idiots who somehow always manage to try to increase state power. Their intentions are great and all of this is just an accident hmm? Incompetence and malice can be hard to distinguish, not that the difference is very important, for the only difference that makes is in the timetable. Otherwise, they are both equally dangerous.
This is not Orwellian. The British government have not set out to control the populace, that will just be a purely unintentional side-effect. What they are doing is creating Kafka-esque bureaucracies -- particularly at local level, see: local authorities using anti-terror laws to check whether kids actually live within the catchment area of their schools, for example -- with the power to decide a persons guilt without giving that person an opportunity to defend themselves. Indeed, without that person even realising they're being investigated, or that they're committing a crime. They may not be using The Trial as a reference when doing this, but they certainly seem to think government should be able to determine guilt without any interference from annoying things like defence lawyers and juries.:)
Again you really believe that this doesn't quite naturally go together with a desire for increased state power and a desire for further control and subjugation of the people? Politicians are a bunch of good-hearted, good-natured people who really care about us, yet the world over they just accidentally coincidentally happen to always have this same effect? They're not professional students of statecraft with thousands of years of history of what worked and what didn't work who know how to tell us exactly what we want to hear? The people aren't just trying to live their lives and aren't largely ignorant of such things as propaganda techniques, thesis antithesis synthesis, bread-and-circus, and divide-and-conquer? This doesn't create a gross imbalance of the sophisticated and entrenched versus the naive and under-represented? Really?
I'm sure their intentions are pure *cough*. The only thing worse than abuses of power are the apologists and useful idiots who defend and promote them. If not for them, the power grabs would easily be recognized for what they are and swiftly dealt with, probably in the form of public pressure. I think that happened here only because of the UK's record of the protection of private data, certainly they handle this much better than the USA does. The people of the UK who opposed this measure have enjoyed something like real privacy during a time when it's become more important than ever and they now appreciate it and don't want to have it taken away. They have an advantage also, in that "data privacy" is more of an intellectual debate that doesn't have the sort of thought-killing fear-mongering that surrounds other issues.
What it seems you are not handling better than the USA is the "terrorism threat" and the realization that your reaction to it can be much worse than the initial threat. If the Western nations lose their traditions of individual liberty because a few evil men blow up a few buildings, then we are only showing those evil men that we are better at causing our destruction than they are. That's an odd way to win a contest against them.
But I wonder whether authorities in those countries would be any more willing to pursue cyber crooks in their own countries if they were forced to confront just how deeply those groups have penetrated key government and private computer networks in those regions?
There are a few problems that really will go away if you ignore them. This doesn't sound like one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet you jerk off into your own mouth frequently
When I have a good, constructive response and refuse to join you in the universal condemnation of Slashdot's readership, some little part of you doesn't like that, does it? I regret the likelihood that most or all good people you have ever seen were also weak and more interested in people-pleasing than in revealing what is good and right. That little part of you which cannot stand the brightness that is in me is quite powerless -- all it can do is come up with some insult like this and hope that I fall to it by getting angry and upset. That part is not really you at all, but rather, it was put there by folks who may have been well-meaning but had no real love to give, so quite naturally they could not help but teach you by their example how to be resentful and judgmental and belligerent. If you did not listen so intently to that part of yourself you'd realize that there is nothing I am doing or becoming that is not also available to you.
May you find your completion.
Most things which develop into complex, apparently insurmountable problems have very simple origins. The way I like to say it is that we ignore the acorns that are planted and years later we wonder how the hell that giant mighty oak tree got there and we curse at how hard it's going to be to chop it down and at how much damage it's going to do when it falls. This situation is no exception. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any exception to this rule among all the problems known to man.
There was a time when these malware attacks were not nearly so sophisticated as the ones we know today. Like so many other things, this appears to begin and end with the actions of those who write the malware and those who are compromised by it. That's the mundane level. There is an abstract level as well, in which a system arises, tries to thrive in the current environment, and only if it can establish a foothold does it then become more sophisticated and widespread. If this system were a body, the malware authors with their individual selfish motivations would be the cells. Cells must first thrive before they can grow into the tissues and organs that we know as the large botnets and professional criminals which perpetrate the exploits that we know so well today.
That system was once simple to the point of idiocy. There was a time when "free_porn.jpg.exe" was about the limit of the sophistication of these attacks. That was when this system was trying to thrive in its current environment. To thrive, it needs food and shelter. People who feel no need to learn and obtain understanding of what they are working with, who because of that, quite naturally neglect their security and their well-being, have provided plenty of both. So now this system has established a foothold and from there it has grown into the enormously complex and sophisticated underground criminal element that we know today. Before it had a chance to do so would have been the best time to stop it. Equipping users so that they stop being such easy targets would not have been easy back then; you can imagine how much more difficult it would be to do that now.
All things are in a process of becoming, of trying to refine and better express their true nature. The funny thing is that anyone who is aware of this and tries to explain the inevitable progression of those little things that we ignore because they are small at the time is quite likely to be ignored or dismissed. I have also said before that I believe we as a culture have largely abandoned principle in favor of immediate convenience and gratification and that this has made us weak and timid. What immediate convenience would view as a gross overreaction to something small is what principle would view as stopping a problem in its early stages before it can take root.
I realize that the GP was joking. However, you were not. I hope you can see that there is some truth to that saying about every joke having an element of truth.
That part got my attention. May I ask what you mean when you say that they are trained to be suspicious of such things? Is this actually a component of formal training such as business classes or leadership seminars?
It's not that morality gets nice'd down in management priorities. It's that profitability gets nice'd way up. The end result is the same though, morality doesn't get enough cycles and never gets a chance to run.
(/. has to be the only place where it makes sense to use computer analogies to explain the real world.)
What I had in mind was something a bit farther away from the obvious. Just as politicians destroy precious things like freedom in the name of our safety, that post made me wonder if errant or rogue employees might take some very undesirable actions and excuse them on the basis of some nebulous "greater good" and then claim that this constitutes morality. If this were a known scenario that is repeated from time to time and from company to company, then teaching managers to regard "morality" arguments as possible red flags may indeed be part of some kind of training program. Allowing a small minority who abuses an otherwise good thing to spoil that good thing for everyone else is unfortunately a frequent reality in large organizations with bureaucratic rules.
The other possibility I had in mind was like what you describe. That is, that businesses seldom do anything "for the principle of it." For example, if a business that is completely innocent and has broken no laws and done no damage is faced with a lawsuit, they are likely to settle the suit anyway if doing so is much cheaper than successfully defending against it. There is little concern in such a scenario for the idea that if they did nothing wrong, then they should defend themselves and prevail on principle. In such a fashion it's possible that management sees concerns about morality or principles as unwanted competition for concerns about profit. I think it's reasonable to say that this is generally undesirable but is a business reality. What I wondered is whether this is part of any sort of formal training or if it's simply a part of that culture.
No, I'm assuming "good faith" and extending benefit of doubt; thus, I asked him to elucidate. That's not what you describe. The assumption you just made, and several like it, are why such benefit of doubt is a rare occurrence. I consider it Nature's way of separating those who have something to prove from those who are secure, as only the former would perceive your assumption as a stumbling block.
If it is as you say then the prevailing view is black-and-white and self-limiting. If that be the case, then I cannot improve the situation if I am resenting such people for being the way that they are or dismissing what they say without examination. By engaging them instead and showing that a higher perspective not only exists but is also available to them, then with my reason and by my example I stand a chance of effecting change. Just a chance, mind you, but there is no room for disappointment when you are doing something truly worthwhile.
The people who most strongly advocate wrong beliefs are the people who are most imprisoned by them. What they need is to see what another perspective looks like. Someone who has already written them off has no hope of showing that to them; in fact, someone who has done that has failed a test that he did not know he was taking.
Think of it as an incentive to secure your system. In that capacity, it would be one of the only such measures that doesn't suffer from the drawback of impacting or restricting users who already do secure their systems. I notice that people who care about little else will often care about their wallets so this may be an effective incentive for even the most negligent users. This is may be the only desirable effect of metering; or at least, there isn't anything else I like about it.
Do you really have reason to believe that dissenting is "a down-moddable 'offense'," or are you just letting off steam because AC's always start at -1 and seldom get up-modded unless they're presenting a view that is relevant to the discussion? I can't speak for anyone else but I use about 95-98% of any mod points I'm given to reward those who say something meaningful, informative and/or funny in relation to the subject raised in the original summary. So, in answer to your implied question, I'd be glad to have the same moderation standards applied to my submissions.
FYI, Anonymous Cowards don't start at -1 by default. By default, they start at 0. You can modify your personal preferences so that they are displayed as -1 (or +5 if you really wanted...) but of course that is unique to your own account.
Incidentally, you really don't sound like the sort of moderator that the GP was talking about and I mean for that to be a compliment. That you realize promoting good posts is a better use of your points than demoting bad ones is strong evidence that you're one of the better moderators. As someone who values constructive criticism (the real thing, not personal attacks veiled as constructive criticism), who often takes relatively controversial positions and enjoys challenging people to think in new ways, I can tell you from my own personal experience that there is a lot of poor-quality moderation going on. You won't see that very much for posts that just repeat a "party line" (almost anyone's party line) but you do see this targeting some of the more freethinking posters. It became much more noticable after the old metamoderation system was "upgraded". I am not at all surprised that I more and more frequently see a backlash against it to be honest with you. It's not that it's so terrible so much as it is that this is heading in the wrong direction so the bad examples are slowly becoming more common.
To me the situation is quite easy to understand: weak or insecure people think that even the most civil disagreement or the most constructive criticism is an attack against them and they look for ways to retaliate. When those people are moderators, they retaliate by enforcing drastically distorted standards of "flamebait" or "troll" or "offtopic".
That part got my attention. May I ask what you mean when you say that they are trained to be suspicious of such things? Is this actually a component of formal training such as business classes or leadership seminars? Or is it more of a situation where it's unfortunate that lots of people who are actually up to no good have been known to such excuses to cover up their wrongdoing and managers just learn this by experience?
You can thank the War on (Some) Drugs for that one, as well as all of the naive, ignorant, well-meaning individuals who never heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences who continue to support it. The War on (Some) Drugs led to a practice known as "proactive policing" and both of them have worked together to ensure that the USA has the highest percentage of its population in prison. Many of these prisons are privately owned and quite profitable and you can bet that the companies which own them employ lobbyists.
If we can legitimize the use of overwhelming state police power against adult people because we dislike what they choose to do with their own bodies, even when they quite clearly are harming no one other than themselves, then it should be little surprise that this has led to the situation that you describe. You may think that this isn't directly related to the issue you raise but that issue had a predecessor which helped to pave the way for this sort of hysteria and injustice. You are dealing with what you might call "social technology" or machinery. It is a system that accepts an arbitrary input, processes it, and produces a desired output (desired by our rulers, that is). The input can be "drugs" or it can be "copyrighted music" or anything really, the processing is the hysteria and the situational ethics and the demonization, while the output is gross injustice and dehumanization and all of the problems that go with it that you have highlighted. It is dehumanization because the message they reinforce is that the lifeless corporation is somehow more important than real human beings.
It was Henry David Thoreau who once said, "there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Drugs, piracy, etc. are the branches. The absence of real love that would never permit one to view your fellow human beings as exploitable resources or objects of power and control is the root. The systems and social technologies and their goal of demoralizing the people and intimidating through injustice so that they feel powerless is the means. Never underestimate the power of seeing how simple this really is.
It's for just that reason that I question this mostly unstated assumption that anywhere there is a gap between developers and users, that it is somehow entirely and automatically the job of the developers to bridge that gap. When you are talking about Open Source software that is both free as in speech and free as in beer, there is certainly no moral expectation that this should be the case.
The average users in this scenario are non-contributing beneficiaries. Non-contributing beneficiaries who are demanding instead of helpful are beggars who are trying to be choosers. Here, I'm not talking so much about what is said and done so much as the way it is said and done and the intent behind it. It's one thing to politely ask for a feature or a change because you think it would be great. It's quite another to make judgments about someone's character or their ability to figure something out because their free contribution was not to your liking.
By and large, these users are unwilling to acquire the skills necessary to implement the changes that they demand from the developers and yet some of them are willing to pontificate about how a developer should think. When the GP said "Sadly, many developers never figure this part out", that is a manipulative way of saying "they seem to disagree with me about what should be important." I say that because some things genuinely are "sad" while others are merely differences of opinion and it is intellectually dishonest to conflate the two. The only reason for doing it is to give an undue appearance of superiority to your own viewpoint but if your viewpoint were truly superior, no such tactics would be needed.
Furthermore, this is a difference of opinion not between two equal viewpoints but between a contributor and a non-contributor. Beware the tendency to automatically consider all viewpoints to be equal. It has a certain allure because it can sound noble but there are many times when it just isn't the case.
When you unnecessarily phrase something in a manipulative fashion, subtle though that may be, it has some interesting effects. Most people are not aware enough to understand why or to see this process as it occurs, but what happens is that they instinctively sense that there is a "wrong feeling" to it. Unfortunately many people, even those who can see this happening, lack the strength to just calmly point it out and show by their example that there is another way. They don't know how to experience it without being affected by it because they are externally motivated and it is external ("externally motivated" = "responds to pressure"). So when they sense this "wrong" feeling there is a tendency to either appease it or to fight it, depending on the character of the person. Both are wrong because both are harmful.
Appeasing it is a mistake because it validates the tactic and sends the message that it's acceptable and will obtain the desired results. It also robs the appeaser of much of the joy that could have been found in the creative process by replacing noble service with demeaning servitude, a process that tends to breed resentment. Fighting it results in senseless pissing contests and personal arguments which reinforce the "us against them" mentality, in this case "the interests of developers vs. the interests of users". It also makes sure that your position is no better than that of the other person and so it destroys your ability to lead by example even if you were initially correct. There a
It was a nice thought anyway. I for one am glad to see your username!
I propose we come up with a name or a term for this argument so that it doesn't have to be rewritten verbatim every single time there's an article that even begins to hint at either a usability issue or the expectations of the average end-user. It'd save all of us a lot of typing and would save Slashdot a ton of storage space. You see, it keeps getting raised as an "issue" only it's not getting anywhere; this "issue" never seems to develop its reasoning. The result is that lots of people are speaking about it, only they're all saying the same thing. If this name or term became a common one, perhaps then we can all just acknowledge the reality that developers are not average users and may think differently from average users. Why, one day, it may even be considered so obvious as to not bear repeating! Or at least, not without also suggesting a constructive solution.
I'll add that constructive feedback is one thing and developers often appreciate it, but I don't feel like I have a moral right to actually complain to an open-source developer when I am benefitting from his or her generosity. If I were buying commercial software or hiring the services of a programmer to perform custom work for me, I would then feel like it's reasonable to expect that the result matches my exact specifications. But when a complete stranger has decided to benefit me expecting nothing in return, that is a different situation in my opinion. Like I said, constructive feedback is one thing, but to complain about not even the software itself but the developer and what they should and should not care about or what their priorities should be seems a little out of line to me.
I think too that we forget that much of the technology we now enjoy is the direct result of advances made by those horribly out-of-touch developers (sarcasm) who did care about the underlying architecture and did think of how awesome the comp sci might be. You don't usually do difficult, painstakingly detailed work like that unless you find something creative or expressive in it that pleases you. This creative force is something that should be appreciated and cultivated. I could make a silly play on your post by saying "sadly, many users never figure this part out." When people lack understanding, they lack understanding; that's all. There's really nothing special about this particular "users and developers" issue except that a little mutual understanding would be a significant improvement.
What is the point of the two WD 300GB drives? They provide 300GB usable disk space, while the system has another 4TB of usable space. They are RAID1 -- just like the pair of Samsung drives. Are they just for show? Or to fill more of the available drive bays? Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
I have not personally had any Microsoft software on my own computers for close to ten years, so I am not sure how much of what I am about to say would apply to Windows Server 2008. Having said that, the 300GB RAID-1 sounds like a good boot/system volume (on Linux, I would probably mount it at /, as the root partition) while the four 1TB drives in RAID-5 would be a good user data volume (i.e. /home in Linux) and maybe the 1TB RAID-1 volume would be good for supplementary storage (perhaps /usr or possibly for the contents of a fileserver or a Web server).
/home but obviously this won't work system-wide.
I am not sure if Windows has such capabilities, but on Unix-like systems, this would give several advantages other than organization and reliability. One that comes to mind is that you can place restrictions on those separate partitions that you may not want to have throughout the system. For example, you would probably want to use the "nodev" and "nosuid" and perhaps also "noexec" on
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, andCooler Master Stacker 810 case. By a remarkable coincidence, these are almost exactly the hardware requirements for Windows 8!
You beat me to it :-). So, I'll say that maybe Vista will be snappy and responsive on this machine.
Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
It would be what dishonest people keep trying to turn the Constitution into in order to justify their desire for state power?
I know that isn't what you were getting at. I'm being somewhat facetious but I do have a point.
Hmmm, +5 scary conspiracy theory. Have you stayed up all night playing Deus Ex and drinking coffee?
You'll find that there is a conditioned response (not unlike Pavlov's dogs) to instantly ridicule anything that even looks like a conspiracy theory without ever spending a moment to think about its plausibility. Like all self-limiting responses, this one reduces thinking and limits possibility, not in reality of course but in your mind. Like most of our self-limiting responses, this one appears to come from the media. I mean, if you work at Company X and that company makes widgets, you and all of your co-workers are "conspiring" to make widgets. Some of you reallly need to get over this word and realize that it has no magical connotations. All corruption is a conspiracy because all corruption consists of at least two people who are trying to get away with something, be it bribery or whatever. By your "logic" (well, more like scoffing) there is no such thing as corruption and that is patently false. Incidentally, some things can appear to be about "the other guy" but are not; that built-in absurdity of your position is why you had to adopt a smarmy mocking tone against someone who has not provoked you.
Now if you are willing to examine something before you dismiss it (I know, I know, not as fun that way), there have been real, documented conspiracies -- one of the scariest I know of is Operation Northwoods. That one alone demonstrates that there is certainly the willingness and the ability for a politically powerful group to conspire against the people of the United States. There is no question that such things do in fact happen. The real question is whether we want to guard against them. Another real question is how many events in our history books have been engineered in this manner? How many of these were successful and were not discovered as Operation Northwoods was discovered?
I don't think you understand that if I were to find out that you're right and that my beliefs about this really are absurd, that everything in the USA is okay and is exactly as it appears to be, this would be good news to me. There are times when I would like to be wrong and this is one of them. I understand why this is a stumbling block for you -- no one really wants to think that from the highest government officials to the media, we are all being lied to every day. It is not a pleasant thought. The problem with that is that I can quite clearly see the world around me and how it operates, well enough that my choices are to either take the coward's way out and lie to myself or to deal with the reality of the situation. If I were to lie to myself, I would exhibit the sort of mocking denial that you demonstrate. That's because denigrating others is the wrong way of being "right" but it's one of the only ways available to the cowardly. I submit that the naivete you demonstrate is not going to bring you any comfort, nor is it going to bring you any understanding of why things happen the way they do.
The GGP said: "any other President". Hence it was logical to wonder, if he was as tolerant towards corruption under Bush (who, BTW, had no problems appointing cabinet members without problems of tax-dodging).
Understanding corruption and accepting the reality of it is not at all the same thing as feeling "tolerant towards corruption" (or excusing it, as you seem to imply), and on that basis I believe you have misunderstood me. I was attempting the former, not the latter.
I find it useful to understand that this sort of corruption is systemic. We'd like to believe that it's the fault of $ONE_GUY, with the exact identity of $ONE_GUY varying depending on whom you ask. Most people you ask will select someone they don't like for this role, especially someone who personally offends them in some way. Extra points if the perceived "offense" comes solely from subscribing to an opposing viewpoint. This occurs because most people are egomaniacs and don't know it but has little to do with true inquiry. This is part of the "us against them" thinking that has been around for so very long and hasn't done anything to improve our situation. In fact, it has been one of the more active agents of our stagnation, tying up much energy that could be applied elsewhere.
What I discussed was the reason why the people generally feel under-represented. I also wrote about why it's a rare occurrence that anyone who is in a position to do so would try to remedy this. I wanted to keep the last post simple so there was another reason for this that I did not mention in it. It is something of an issue of probability.
It is unfortunate that selfless, compassionate, loving people who have wisdom and courage are still relatively rare among the general population. Incidentally, it is for this reason alone that I consider this period of our history to be a Dark Age that is awaiting something far better and will cherish it when it arrives. It may or may not be unfortunate that many people who fit that description are not interested in wielding political power, but certainly the more selfish, controlling, and fearful among us are very interested in political power. In addition to what I described in my last post, these factors also work to ensure that a true servant of the people, a more enlightened type of leader, one who understands pure motive, is unlikely to occupy a high office at any given time. Little or none of this depends on the actual intentions of the person who wins the election.
On a more mundane level, there were plenty of actions taken by the Bush administration which troubled me quite a bit more than tax evasion. I have personally written about several of them on this site when they were the subject of discussion. I just won't buy into this idea that there should be some contest to see whether "our guy" or "their guy" is easier to denigrate. I don't consider either of them to be "my guy" and far more important things are at stake than a popularity contest masquerading as reasonable discourse. Therefore, I don't see your point. The systemic view I discussed is orthogonal to the question of whether all politicians should be held responsible for any illegal or immoral behavior.
Knowing that it's not what I was speaking about before, if you still wish to know how I feel about that, I will tell you: yes, I believe that all politicians, no matter who they are, should be held responsible for any illegal or immoral behavior. I believe you felt a need to mention Bush solely because you thought that I was talking specifically or exclusively about Obama. Corruption is universal
Were you as forgiving towards the previous President? More importantly, were the moderators?
Did the previous president give any evidence of indication that he was a fluke ala JFK ( going against the interests of his class), or was he like JFK solely in the fact that, like JFK, he was born into a wealthy and politically powerful East Coast family? Are slashdotters really this simple minded? "This guy seems to think both JFK and Obama don't necessarily represent the interests of the wealthy. I wonder if he would extend the same courtesy to Bush?" Well, can you name a few things Bush did that were more in the interests of the common person, rather than the wealthy?
Brevity is something I've yet to master, so I think you just saved me some effort by explaining that.
Thank you.
Just curious: if you really meant that and were not just being facetious, then what is the purpose? That's not intended as sarcasm or a put-down or anything like that; I really want to know.
Is Obama just making really bad choices, or is everyone at that high a level in .gov just corrupt?
They're puppets who may or may not falsely believe that they have anything like a will of their own or ideas of their own. The real political power is not the President but the corporations and old-money families who put him into office. They don't put a President into office unless he has views that they find to be either favorable or convenient. That's not a conspiracy theory so much as a proposition that entrenched power tends to act in its own interests, and as such, it should be self-evident.
I cannot prove this but I will offer some speculation: the more I have heard of his speeches and his intentions and his beliefs, the more I think that John F. Kennedy was a fluke. He was a fluke because he really did want to represent the people and not the interests that got him into office. I believe that is why he was assassinated -- to those interests, this represented a betrayal or a "double-crossing" and they made an example. Certainly the Mafia could arrange such an event, and I will say that I believe that the monied interests who truly run this country make the Mafia look like a bunch of amateurs, though they prefer to buy people off rather than use brute force. Most people's princples are indeed for sale if the price is high enough, and they know this because they know what corruption is. It's just that occasionally there comes someone who cannot be bought and against whom they don't have some other form of leverage.
I apologize that I do not know the time or place, but this is a quote from a speech delivered by JFK:
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit, to the extent that it's in my control. And no official of my administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press or public the facts they deserve to know.
An open government of the sort he advocated is quite terrifying to the powers behind the throne. So, I think Obama or any other President probably cannot help but to make bad choices or to have corruption. Even if he himself is a sincere man, he is working within a system that is not designed for sincerity.
In the spirit of embracing both viewpoints, have you considered that a lack of efficiency in government is no mistake? One could speculate that the government is as it is simply to ensure their own success. Not saying I think this, but it is the other side of your argument I suppose.
That's absolutely true, but it doesn't usually happen the way you think it does.
Most of the time, no one sets out to do that. It's rare that anyone plots and plans to have government become a self-feeding, self-justifying answer to the problems that it either created or had a hand in creating or could have easily prevented. Yet, this happens all the time. It's not just government. Anyone and anything that wants to rule you has to get you to depend on them first, typically by catering to your weakness. When government does that, it usually takes the form of doing for you things you should be doing for yourself.
A classic example of this is the Social Security system. At the beginning of young adulthood, I saw that one day I would grow old and would want to stop working and retire, and that the time to start saving up for that is right now. I could have just depended on government to take care of this for me as many people have done, but this is a no-win proposition. For one, that system is like a Ponzai scheme and is likely to have collapsed by the time I reach retirement age. Even if that does not happen, the price is too high. By abdicating a responsibility that is rightfully mine, I would become weak and would therefore have to surrender some of my integrity. It's a subtle and intangible effect that wrong decision-making always has on your nature. I can tell you that real strength and real courage and real peace of mind cannot exist together with that kind of weakness because it makes you experience something like guilt (of failure) and thus inner conflict. The mundane explanation that is also true on its level is that such a weakness would, to a greater degree than is necessary, put my financial future at the mercy of the government and this is not a good position. Imagine how many people are going to find themselves in an unenviable position when Social Security finally does collapse -- that is only the outward form or the outward expression of what is really an inner weakness.
So where does the drive to run government this way come from? The thing you absolutely must understand about people if you are going to change or improve anything is that each person always does what they believe is right, or at least what they believe is necessary, and so each person feels quite justified no matter how wrong they actually are. That's why confonting them in the wrong way, that is with anger and condemnation, only makes them more determined. They will label you an attacker and resist you and do what they do in spite of anything you say. Such an angry response may even be the reaction they wanted to get from you because miserable people who suffer because of how they live want to spread their misery; seeing their misery in you, even if they had to put it there first, is how they deny that you are in any position to tell them that they are doing something wrong, either verbally or by your example. Our attempts to control behavior have no power to address this actual problem because you can only effectively do that by force or by deceit and neither of those trees knows how to bear good fruit. At best, that can only replace one tyrant with a slightly less malevolent one and this is hardly a victory.
If each person always does what they believe is right, no matter how right or wrong that actually is, then the matter of importance is where they obtain their view of what "right" is. Human beings have the ability to see that for themselves and to know it when they see it, but not when they suppress their real selves by falling for the allure of greed and power and other corrupting temptations. The people who run government and truly believe that it has so
What public support? History is littered with examples of totalitarian regimes from both sides of the political spectrum. Almost everybody, regardless of their political view, realises what kind of society they should hope to live in by granting more power to the state.
You have just summed up the true nature of "divide and conquer". This is a thing that many people believe they understand but have never seen in action.
The state sits and watches the two sides squabble and lets them argue all they want. Meanwhile the two sides are too busy opposing each other to notice that no matter what happens, the state always becomes more powerful. When overwhelming state power becomes an undeniable threat, usually in the form of an openly totalitarian regime, the two sides then find themselves powerless to oppose it because by this time it is far too late. Then "go along to get along" changes from the favorite tool of the apologist or an excuse for not having the courage to stand up, to a method of survival, sort of like that saying "it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." How many examples of this must history provide before we learn to recognize these patterns?
I cannot tell you whether it was designed deliberately or if it arose on its own and was promoted because of how very convenient it is for the statists, but the left-vs-right method of politics is designed to limit possibility. This is shallow and superficial one-dimensional thinking, which is precisely why it can be represented as a linear continuum by drawing two points and one line. One side favors economic freedoms and is willing to reduce personal freedoms, while the other favors personal freedoms and is willing to reduce economic freedoms. It doesn't work that way, which is why the Left, or the Right, or the Left working with the RIght are always going to reduce freedom because neither of them value it for its own sake in all of its forms. That's a serious error and no amount of reform or adjustment of any party platform is going to fix it.
When I repeatedly try to warn against buying into this system and believing for one moment that it has our interests at heart, this is not an exercise or an intellectual debate. There is a real danger here, only it's a subtle one. It's a corrupting, compromising type of danger that demoralizes and weakens. If the media were truly your friend, you would hear about this every day on CNN and Fox News and ABC and MSNBC, and you'd probably believe it then, not because they have the authority of self-evident truth but because they have the kind of authority to which most of you respond. That is not at all natural but it's what you might call unnaturally natural. It is evidence of the compromising, corrupting, demoralizing influence of which I speak that for most of you, even your thinking and your truth needs to be prepackaged for you.
If you don't like the tone of this post, well that makes two of us. I don't like it either, but I'm really tired of the systemic failure to recognize things that are really quite basic and simple. The denial and the "can't happen here" surrounding these issues are staggering. These things should be so obvious that I am beginning to wonder whether Western culture has a collective death wish or a suicidal tendency. Especially in the USA, I don't believe that any outside threat is going to harm us. I think we're doing a fine job of that all on our own. I'd like to see that change, I'd like to see it change peacefully, and I'd like to see people wake up and start daring to dream that if we will just settle a few basic questions once and for all, and then learn to love one another, then something like "heaven on earth" might emerge. I think that's inevitable because nothing else is going to work long-term, it's just a question of how badly we need to suffer before we get there and how many unsustainable systems must fail before we make the realization that we're missing something simple and fundamental. How long that will take is entirely up to us.
Our impulses are being redirected We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep.
The poor and the underclass are growing Racial justice and human rights are non-existant They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices.
Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness.
We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent, to each other, We are focused only on our own gain. Please understand, they are safe as long as they are not discovered, that is their primary method of survival, To keep us asleep, to keep us selfish, to keep us sedated.
They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.
I can easily enough find reasons why you were modded down, in fact it seems like classic shoot-the-messenger to me. Your message here isn't the easist thing to handle especially for people who are just starting to realize that all is not what it appears. It does not help that the more petty people will judge the truth of a thing according to how palatable it is and whether it fits in with their current worldview, rather than questioning their reliance on palatability and being willing to abandon any worldview that they may have outgrown.
Having said that, I think what you said more or less does sum up what's happening. We like to think that the political forces arrayed against us are haphazard and petty and disorganized and merely selfish but I do not believe they would be so effective at slowly suffocating liberty if this were the case. It seems obvious to me that this has been a long-term plan enacted by people who did not care whether their goal would ever occur during their own lifetimes, and in that manner the acquisition of power has taken on more of a religious nature. We tend to look at individual politicians and their faults and their ambitions without understanding that they have bought into an abstract system and are merely parts in that system. Most of these parts are interchangeable. Those parts are "true believers" and many of them don't have to actually "lie" to you because they really believe in what they are doing.
We really need to get beyond the superficial realm of names and personalities and start looking at intent and allegiance. Otherwise what you have described will continue and it will be built mostly on a foundation of apologists with good intentions who will believe that all of this is for our own good right up until they learn the goose step.
You really think so? So the politicians are just a bunch of bumbling golly-gee-how'd-THAT-happen idiots who somehow always manage to try to increase state power. Their intentions are great and all of this is just an accident hmm? Incompetence and malice can be hard to distinguish, not that the difference is very important, for the only difference that makes is in the timetable. Otherwise, they are both equally dangerous.
Again you really believe that this doesn't quite naturally go together with a desire for increased state power and a desire for further control and subjugation of the people? Politicians are a bunch of good-hearted, good-natured people who really care about us, yet the world over they just accidentally coincidentally happen to always have this same effect? They're not professional students of statecraft with thousands of years of history of what worked and what didn't work who know how to tell us exactly what we want to hear? The people aren't just trying to live their lives and aren't largely ignorant of such things as propaganda techniques, thesis antithesis synthesis, bread-and-circus, and divide-and-conquer? This doesn't create a gross imbalance of the sophisticated and entrenched versus the naive and under-represented? Really?
I'm sure their intentions are pure *cough*. The only thing worse than abuses of power are the apologists and useful idiots who defend and promote them. If not for them, the power grabs would easily be recognized for what they are and swiftly dealt with, probably in the form of public pressure. I think that happened here only because of the UK's record of the protection of private data, certainly they handle this much better than the USA does. The people of the UK who opposed this measure have enjoyed something like real privacy during a time when it's become more important than ever and they now appreciate it and don't want to have it taken away. They have an advantage also, in that "data privacy" is more of an intellectual debate that doesn't have the sort of thought-killing fear-mongering that surrounds other issues.
What it seems you are not handling better than the USA is the "terrorism threat" and the realization that your reaction to it can be much worse than the initial threat. If the Western nations lose their traditions of individual liberty because a few evil men blow up a few buildings, then we are only showing those evil men that we are better at causing our destruction than they are. That's an odd way to win a contest against them.
There are a few problems that really will go away if you ignore them. This doesn't sound like one of those.
Warning: NSFW.
Have you seen this video before? It's called The Internet Is For Porn and It's hilarious.