Hey, I'm sure the East Timorese tragedy is getting discussed right now in other venues. Would you also walk up to them, and tell them to stop, because the tragedy in Kosovo is worse?
Hey, lots of tragedies are happening in this world. This is very sad, but unfortunately, we don't live long enough to address them all one at a time.
Go back to the top of the thread, and follow along, if you please. Maybe you'll get the gist of it. If you have the attitude that "we don't live long enough to address them all one at a time", why is that? Why is it so hard to get you to address one problem? I'll not be long-winded here; I've already typed a bunch of words on this subject before.
Eighteen people were murdered by Indonesian troops in the province of Aceh; we won't really know if they were murdered or if the troops were acting in self-defense, since the likes of CNN don't give these things wall-to-wall coverage. I do know that Indonesian governments ("it was self-defense, honest") have had a tendency to be compulsive liars. The people of Aceh are really different (the BBC describes it as "a staunchly Muslim province"); Aceh wants a referendum on independence, much like the one being proposed for East Timor (unfortunately in the latter case, many potential "Yes" voters have been murdered by Indonesian troops -- and their expensive American weaponry -- over the past quarter-century). You want Hellmouth? There's Hellmouth for you. I can grab a bunch of past and current headlines that trump your little Hellmouth, folks. Funnily enough, a lot of you could have banded together to stop them from being Hellmouths. But you're all too busy buying mass-produced products that make you "different". Meanwhile, the blood of Archbishop Romero is on your hands; the bruises and welts on the bodies of countless people -- political prisoners, democracy advocates, union organizers; people who are really different and trying to make a difference -- are on your hands. Some babies in the US have died, because welfare "reform" made it next to impossible to get them the nutrition and health care necessary to live to a ripe young age; some of you may have voted for the pols who made this "reform" a priority.
Where's your outrage? Where was your outrage? Nonexistent, apparently. You really are a bunch of commodity-besotted sheep. You can tell me all sorts of things about Brian Warner, a certain prequel, SPECint readings, polygons, and other corporate-commodity minutiae, but when real shit is going down in the Big Room, you're all amazingly silent. Except for one extremely regrettable and overhyped incident in Colorado. Shame on you, and shame on Katz, who must be hoping the hype will still have some juice when his next Geek Book is published.
I'd say most of the third world is up to their neck in trouble, but it's not because of exploitation or pauperization. Overpopulation, instability of governament and tradition in civil war are much more severe causes for poverty.
Exploitation and pauperization were their starting points, even before most of those countries were independent. If there's overpopulation and instability (this latter point I dispute, since those countries that have attracted Western corporations have made it their mission to be stable -- By Any Means Necessary, if you get my drift), it comes as a result of the exploitation and pauperization. If you're reasonably happy about your day-to-day existence, you have no interest in fighting a civil war or joining a revolution. There's legitimate cause to blame a lot of African countries for being their own worst enemies, but in many parts of the Third World, the blame can be equally shared between their governments, Western governments (especially the US), and the Disneys and Nikes of the world, who make a handful of Third World people rich (and it's amazing how many of them seem to be connected in some way to their government) at the expense of millions of people making 15 an hour.
To get a little closer the original idea: I think the wealth of this planet will stay unevenly distributed, there is no way to lift a country to higher a higher standard of living from outside.
OTOH this doesn't mean it's not our duty to try to help and at least not knowingly rob other countries.
If you have labels on your belongings that say "Made in Indonesia", "Made in China", or even, in some cases, "Made in USA" (for garments made in places like the Northern Marianas commonwealth), then you are, in effect, robbing those countries. You're getting a Free Lunch in terms of labor costs, and the wealth tends to trickle into the hands of the (Western and Japanese) shareholders of the corporations who manufacture their goods at these sweatshops. Millions of people are working their asses off all around the Third World, but are getting paid 1-10% of what they would be paid if they were sitting in a factory in the First World; they are being robbed by us. On top of that, they're being robbed of years from their lives; the hazardous working conditions will surely shorten the life expectancies of many.
If we would insist on applying Western labor standards (fair wages, unionizing rights, collective bargaining, worker safety) to the rest of the world, maybe we'd see some positive changes; it's not a magic bullet, but it's a step in the right direction. If we stop seeing these people as less-than-human (by being complicit in their wage-slavery), maybe the pauperization and instability will start to recede. But too many powerful people (and us, the consumers and shareholders) have a vested interest in the Third World being the Lowest Common Denominator; in the end, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot -- we may all be dragged down to that Lowest Common Denominator, with all the overpopulation and instability that seems to come with it.
Although menial jobs and the lower class have always existed, as more and more things are automated, it's likely that the menial jobs will slowly shift towards entertainment. They would still be considered "lower class" but would be orientated towards providing entertainment to others. As the cost of providing survival becomes proportionaly less, the amount of "work" needed to earn a living is likely to decrease and be replaced with less boring "work".
Arguably, the recent trend is toward an increase in the percentages of the lower class; manufacturing jobs get shifted from the First World to the Third World, creating an overall erosion in per-hour earnings for many, many people, offset by the creation of a relative handful of middle/upper class incomes in the emerging economies. It ultimately results in a shrinkage (per 1,000 population) in the audiences for entertainers to entertain.
This apparently means we'll have eleventy-gazillion bad pop singers in this Grand Future. The notion that "entertainin' th' rich folks" is some sort of great improvement is neither true nor a new concept. Some slaves were entertainers in the US, IIRC; a step up from menial labor, but at the end of the day, you're still a slave.
Alongside this, the history of modern professional sport has its roots in "entertainin' massa'n'his friends" (the 20th Century racial slur "lawn jockey" has its roots in those horrid statues "commemorating" those early athletes); post-slavery, many boxers, basketball players, baseball players, etc, found sports a better gig than working in the coalmines, but the pay wasn't all that good -- you still had to get a job in the offseason, and you still were quite likely to be poor after your sports career was over. Back to the coalmines, if some serious sports injury didn't preclude that... It wasn't until the latter half of this century that athletes could even begin to think of sports as a lucrative career, and that really didn't come to fruition until the last 25 years.
And that lucrativeness comes, in part, from the exclusivity -- there's no way that eleventy-gazillion goaltenders will be a workable possibility, just as there can't be 17,305 songs or movies in the Top Ten.
And if you think entertainment is "fun", you try working roomfuls of middle-aged, middle-class drunks (or their equally putrid offspring) for a living.
Maybe we can have a dozen restaurants at every street corner. And, of course, that will trigger a growth industry in teaching people how to say "Would you like more coffee, sir?"
Let a thousand theme parks bloom...
In this sort of future, I see an increase in guerrillas, both in the First and Third World; no matter how many ways you find to say "Let Them Eat Cake", the result is you're pissing off more and more people. Beware the Critical Mass(es).
Linus is a great hacker, but a lousy futurist; of course, I won't be able to prove it for another 150 years.
I think something in the California water must have gotten to Linus. I'm worried about the future of the kernel.
"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
-- Henry David Thoreau (from Walden), 1854
Anyone right of center is an extremist in the eyes of many media moguls.
This is absolute bullshit! The only one this applies to, off the top of my head, would be Ted Turner. Rupert Murdoch is the archetype and apotheosis of modern media moguls -- not only are they right of center, they actively promote right-wing causes with their dollars, airtime, and column-inches, far more than the moguls of previous eras. Bill Paley is long gone, and the myth of the "liberal media" should have died about 20 years ago. Even Pat Buchanan admits to being tongue-in-cheek when he uses such a phrase. You are so force-fed and out-of-touch that you probably didn't even know that your beloved Barry Goldwater was pro-choice and a supporter of Planned Parenthood. Were you born yesterday?
Sure, lots of people other than nerds are abused. Far worse things are happening out there. But that isn't on topic. If you don't think nerds are more important than the herded masses, I have to wonder why you're using our forum.
I'm user #783, IIRC. I'm not some interloper here; I'd like to think it's my forum too --/. is my browsers' start page. I'm as on-topic as anyone else. I love Ask Slashdot, the GPL, RMS, tarballs, OO, DSP, Java, a certain anti-trust case, and any number of "relevant" topics (turnoffs: sunlight, aspartame, bad hair days, and mean people). I have about seven toolkits installed on my box, and I'm wrestling with all of them in search of The Right One. Unfortunately, what we have here this week is a mania far removed from hardware, software, and licenses.
You hit the nail on the head, surely by accident: "Far worse things are happening out there". That's why I'm on-topic. Geeks, being part of society, are often complicit (directly or, more often, indirectly) in those "far worse things"; that shows me that whatever they may have suffered in high school failed to register permanently on their brains -- it shows me that their radius of compassion is woefully small. (Yes, Eric, if you're reading this, you are one of many exceptions:)
If you can't make the leap from feeling sorry for yourself (or a fellow "oppressed" geek) to feeling anger and remorse over a political prisoner or a sweatshop laborer's plight, then Katz's whole exercise is just shallow pimping. If you can't make the leap from jocks abusing geeks to being angry about the plight of the political footballs in the ghettos that your commute and your subdivision so deftly avoid, then Katz's shallow pimping is as obscene as the abuse of geek students.
Do you get it now? If not, then please explain -- in 3000 words or more -- why you think "nerds are more important than the herded masses". Can any of you explain? It is the impression I get, just as I get the impression from Katz's peers in Big Media that the deaths of affluent suburban kids are more important than, say, deaths from malnutrition occurring in the very same country.
Let me close with a quote from my favorite nerd, a bookish lawyer (and one-time journalist, IIRC), who never quite learned how to fight his way out of a paper bag, though he was often provoked.
Poverty is the worst form of violence.
We will learn far more about real solutions from reading the writings of that nerd (his name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) than we will from reading Katz and the often-hysterical "Geek Power Now!" threads from our peers here.
...as I've ranted before, we're obsessing here about a 3-4 year period of abuse, maybe more if you include junior high. I suspect minority or gay students have to deal with abuse, neglect, and a number of other things before and after high school, and deal with it even after the final bell rings. Plus to only mention geeks, goths, gays, and minorities just scratches the surface of the laundry list. After high school, a geek can lucratively escape his/her "other" status and go on to abuse whatever others he/she wishes to. Meanwhile, many other "others" remain troubled, oppressed, demonized, neglected, etc, for a lifetime -- they don't get much hype, and to even try to champion them gets you branded as a "do-gooder" or a "paternalist" or something, even by geeks. My complaint is that Katz and most of the posters here are committing the same sins as the mass media. Some suffering is, apparently, more important than others. CNN and MSNBC are reporting huge ratings boosts. There will, no doubt, be TV-movies and best-sellers that come from this. Katz will hype this stuff on his next book's book tour (not that there's anything wrong with that:). I prayed/grieved/mourned as the events in Littleton took place; the resultant commercial and political exploitation of what should have been a town's private grief has sickened me almost as much as the killings.
Don't get me wrong. I luv Katz, and he'll never be un-preferenced in my User Prefs. But this is getting ridiculous. This is more Genuflecting at the Altar of Geek. Apparently the only "otherness" worth championing is the otherness that has the means to e-mail jonkatz@slashdot.org in large numbers.
Is this really a step up from your old gigs, sir? How is this any better than Phyllis George interviewing some "grief counsellor" in between laxative ads and a station break? It's better because we all get to genuflect interactively? Either way, it's just some more bourgeois dispensing of band-aids, a bunch of RN-cyclopses in the private hospitals of the kingdom of the blind. Old Media or New, it's still Garbage In, Garbage Out. Some things are timeless.
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Re: Who gives the most to the UN? Not the U.S....
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... it owes over $2 billion dollars in dues and your paranoid, right-wing extremist congress is preventing your president from doing the right thing and paying it.
Clinton doesn't care all that much about paying it either; he'd rather pander to the voters who put the "right-wing extremist congress" in office -- many of those voters seem to be convinced that the UN is some commie, anti-American, one-world-government conspiracy that only "liberals" (a pejorative word in US politics) would be willing to support. American politicians are generally afraid to bite the hand that feed$ them, and afraid to upbraid their clueless electorates (the last president to try real candor was Jimmy Carter; he got voted out of office). That makes them little better than entertainers.
Culture? What culture? The culture of Disney and Time Warner and General Electric, or the culture of Thoreau and Ives and Hemingway? The culture of attack ads, $5000-a-table fundraising, and sound bites, or the culture of democracy and E Pluribus Unum? The culture of greed and materialism and end-justifies-the-means, or the culture of common sense? The culture of admen, hucksters, and consumers, or the culture of citizens and statesmen? The culture of inclusiveness, or the culture of dog-eat-dog, tribal warfare, and devil-take-the-hindmost? It's the very "culture" of modern-day America that is its undoing. Take a gander at Deuteronomy 30:15-20 for an analogue, of sorts, from Moses.
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Decline and Fall: Kano's piece of the action
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It is your sort of unrivaled arrogance and ignorance -- shared, I'm sure, with many other Merkins -- that will doom the United States to dinosaur status, in time. Guns aren't the problem; they're but one of dozens of symptoms. "The sun never sets on the British Empire"; it does now. The Merkin Empire will be one for the coroners, too; attitudes like your will only hasten the day of the autopsy.
Nobody is interested in your skill at the Kevin Bacon game of tying the subject under discussion to your personal hobbyhorse in six steps or less.
If you haven't noticed, we're all here posting comments on the "personal hobbyhorse" of Jon Katz, et al. Your attempt at cuteness pretty much exhibits the very nonsense I'm ranting against. If you think it's just a "Kevin Bacon game", that's your problem. And it will beyour problem, especially if you're a Merkin. It's the old "what goes around comes around thing" -- a "see no evil" society will eventually visit upon itself evils from which it can't turn a blind eye. Like Littleton, for instance.
Me? A hippie? I was a punk, dammit! My "hippie" attitudes were programmed in me (in the early 70's) by my elementary-school teachers and other adults; they were the hippies -- my later teen rebellion took the form of being as non-hippie as possible. Of course, I could probably use a haircut these days.
And giving a damn about Indonesian sweatshops is a trait that's timeless, and goes back at least as far as John Brown's mid-19th-Century crusades. Or the late-19th-Century Progressives and Populists. A lot of them had long hair and beards, come to think of it. But we had better dope and music:)
I was a geek back in the late 70's; we didn't get picked on because we also fit in with other cliques in the school, via our various non-geek interests in soccer, dope, politics, Monty Python, etc (being as this was before the era of dual-Xeon toys and Doom, and Linux, it wasn't easy to become engrossed 24/7 in one's PC). I hated school because it was an assembly-line of conformity and because the curriculum was lame (both for the public and private schools I attended in those years). I got out quite early to go to college, because I "knew the right people". I have no horror stories other than my disgust for "the system".
But that's not why I have little sympathy for this/. empathy-fest. In this hotbed of Social-Darwinist-non-empathy, you easily do the "I feel your pain" bit for geeks, but many of you have repeatedly failed in the past to feel one damn bit of pain for all those people around the world who suffer at the hands of bullies, be those bullies armies, governments, smug well-fed citizens, or corporations.
It doesn't bother you that Air Jordans, carburetors, peripherals, and the like, are assembled by people working in hazardous working conditions and for cents an hour; it doesn't bother you that some of your food is produced under similar sad conditions. These people can't peruse/., since the cheapest PC costs them more than a year's wages in many cases. It doesn't bother you that US economic and political life is built upon the backs of these people. You Merkins don't even give a damn about your own country's long (and continuing) history of abuse of its minority populations, and you fail to see in your own attitudes the greed and non-sympathy that ensures that the future will contain just as much violence as the present -- there will be more shootings, more riots, and catastrophes (not necessarily violent) heretofore uncontemplated, all bred in the ill will that isn't going to go away any time soon, it seems. The deaths in Littleton weren't the fault of the guns, the blame goes to the ill will that seems to be the air that American society breathes.
You're no different than the rest of society. Geeks are the ultimate in conformists. I say to all troubled geeks what many of you say to those who have suffered for decades worldwide, and will continue to suffer: "May the devil take the hindmost". I don't mean it, of course, but I'm really tired of all you people who will only walk a mile in your own shoes. The vast majority of you having trouble in school will survive it, thrive, and then proceed to become part of the problem. Screw that, and screw this bogus love-fest.
Pull your head out of the sand. Not every black or Latino is poor and uneducated; nor is every white male affluent or handed opportunity on a silver platter.
You missed the "certainly there's umpteen-zillion exceptions" line; there is no head-in-the-sand here. I've quoted examples from reality, including mine. You also seemed to miss the point of my post; whites, affluent or not, enjoy the privilege of "normalcy" in US society -- while a white punk or goth can look threatening to J Random Merkin, one of those Jenny Jones makeovers can remove the visual threat. Minorities don't have the ability to simply remove the visual characteristics that produce a kneejerk aversion in many segments of the populace.
And of course not every black and Latino is poor and uneducated -- I never said that; in fact, I come from a city (NYC) where I grew up around affluent blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Asians, etc. I merely spoke of numbers: the vast majority of pols and CEOs in this country, dating back to the leadership in colonial days, have been white males. For white males to whine about discrimination is no better than neo-Nazi nonsense; why not focus more on relevant topics like: being a male in a male-dominated power structure, and the assumptions and demands that are foist upon you to be the "breadwinner"? Or focus on why those pols and CEOs have completely destroyed the notion of a "breadwinner" by exporting jobs overseas, thus putting the hourly wage on a slippery slide? I have no problems with the whining of Angry White Males. but I do have a problem with people who have fallen for the trap of making it some sort of tribal issue instead of a political and economic issue.
I don't mean to downplay the problems of school; I just want to point out the bigger picture (where I do think many people have a lot more to whine about, but YMMV, and that's fine).
The hazing and ridicule and victimhood is society-wide and worldwide, though it's usually much subtler when adults do it -- and it gets handed down to our offspring to play out in classrooms and hallways and athletic fields.
And the notion of many posters here that an alienated high-school geek should just bide his/her time and "get revenge" by succeeding later in life just perpetuates the vicious cycle: the grown-up geek's kids will carry on the tale of Dr Seuss' Sneeches for another generation. And we'll go through this bullshit again; all the media attention and hype will amount to nothing until we do some serious, honest introspection -- which is hard to squeeze in with all the Audi, SmithBarney, and MasterCard ads cutting into Jon Gibson and Dan Rather's face time and all the satellite feeds from Our Man in Yugoslavia and Our Woman in Littleton.
We, the well-fed techno-masses on/., and the young techno-masses-to-be (God willing), are more part of the problem than part of the solution -- that's why I'm a little less than enthusiastic about all these threads that Our Man in Cyberspace (Katz, God bless him!) has unleashed. But maybe I just need my nap:)
Public education is the greatest melting pot; people from all walks of life are tossed together without the jailers' keys -- in adult life we are more able to avoid classes of people we don't wish to acknowledge.
In that school melting pot, there's the same adversarial relationships that exist in society at large, except they exist in cruder, crueler form in schools -- it's gang warfare, whether Bloods v Crips, Jocks v Geeks, or the politician-inspired farce Soccer Moms v The Unlucky Sperm Club. The power relationships are similar, but the rules and scorecards shift around in the outside world, e.g. a jock can't derive as much value from his jockhood unless his talents take him from high school to college to pro sports.
"Geek Profiling" a problem? Try "Driving While Black" in Westchester County (or on Interstate 95), where all the adult status points you've garnered amount to nothing when a cop ruins your day for no useful reason.
It's not a geek thing, it's a societal thing. Alienation and Orwellian nonsense aren't the exclusive preserve of schools. Why don't we work on the bigger picture instead, rather than let this devolve into yet another/. Veneration of the Geeks article? Society's other victims don't have such inflated egos. Which victimhood is more dire, that of a teenage Merkin geek or that of a teenage Honduran toiling on a banana plantation?
Get over yourselves. "The big story out of Littleton" is that the mass media (isn't Katz an alumnus of Big Media?) and its consumers judge some lives (cruelly murdered kids in posh suburbia) to be of more value than others (all the nameless, faceless homicides that happened elsewhere; all the poor kids who died from malnutrition in the name of "fiscal responsibility"; all the kids who died stillbirths from the fallout of US depleted-uranium weapons in Iraq, etc, etc). When I see Al Gore attend a memorial for all the kids born deformed in Basra as a result of Desert Storm, or when I see Phil Knight apologize and make amends to his ongoing Indonesian or Filipino victims, maybe I'll begin to see a glimmer of hope.
Most of the Angry Whites[tm] have gotten nothing but screwed from being white. Everyone else gets all the quotas and sympathy, just because of a few rich old fscks who look like us yet don't give a damn about us.
Maybe if you would realize that nobody gets "quotas and sympathy", you'd be better able to focus your anger constructively. "Rich old fscks" don't give a damn about anything but the preservation of their privilege -- everybody else is just a tool, a means to an end.
This FUD about "quotas and sympathy" was spread by a bunch of "rich old fscks" called the Republican Party; it was so wildly successful that many Democrats have now bought into it. At the very same time, the latter-day careers of J C Watts, Gary Franks, and Clarence Thomas are due to Republicans practicing the very thing they preach against. If you're going to let a bunch of hypocrites define reality for you, you'll get no sympathy from me. You've fallen for a game that has been played since the era of indentured servitude. Do your homework.
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Look past what you're encouraged to see
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I sent an e-mail to Katz expressing slightly similar sentiments; I was dismayed at the absence of posts like yours, as I rummaged through the 2000 or so on/. this past week.
If you hold any of the traditional, altruistically or reciprocally based moral philosophies, it is incumbent on you to see the profound evil on which everything about current mass-capitalist society is based. Shootings in schools are an effect. The wars in Yugoslavia are an effect: the arms manufacturers have to field-test their products somehow. The media oligopoly which concentrates your attention on the previous two phenomena is an effect. The prison system which you are encouraged to forget about is an effect.
I'm a Christian, one of those Christians who gets really pissed when politicians who profess to Christian values -- or, worse, proclaim that the US is a "Christian nation" -- lock themselves into perpetuating this very un-Christian status quo; their real gods seem to be Money and Power.
I've given up trying to save the world. Even knowing a little of what goes on, and a little of how thoroughly penetrated and programmed I am, a worm of cynical, elitist doubt remains, that most people aren't really worth saving anyway and will fight me if I try. I just try not to go crazy today, today, and leave not going crazy tomorrow for tomorrow. But please, look around you, and look inside yourself. Try to see the ways in which both you and your surroundings have been modified to serve the power structure. Understanding begins with the realization that anything like a shooting in a school, no matter how shattering to its victims, is irrelevant.
From my particular religious discipline, it's not my job to save anybody -- that's JC's job:) -- but I'm supposed to live and serve as best I can, given His model and His Spirit. But the old punk in me comes to the fore on weeks like this; the killings and the disgustingly saccharine media circus remind me of Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" line about JFK's assassination. As long as contemporary capitalism insists on its dysfunctional and malevolent course, led by leaders as corrupt as the worst Pharisee, the chickens will come home to roost again and again. And the old punk in me will just laugh, either nervously or uproariously, depending on whether I'm inside or outside the borders of the Evil Empire on that day.
People like you are reminiscent of some of the Old Testament prophets, who received nothing but scorn and ridicule and marginalization when they pointed out the grave flaws in Israelite society. Israel would end up ravaged either by its internal corruption or its external enemies (or both), and then -- finally -- it would awaken from its cloud of FUD and start to realize that the "crazy" prophet might have had a valid point or two.
The white-male-middle class is the fulcrum of society, we get no breaks, no quota, no glass ceiling to blame for our shortcomings. We are not discriminated against in ways the media is willing to make known. We are expected to be the hard working providers, to suck it up and deliver on the expectation of having had all the advantages while growing up.
There's another part of the problem -- a whole egomaniacal mass of people thinking they're "the fulcrum of society", and that they're being "discriminated against" despite being having been the demographic sweet-spot of society for centuries. I seem to have missed the meeting when White Middle-Class Males joined the Unlucky Sperm Club. The vast majority of elected officials are white males; the vast majority of CEOs, for companies large and small, are white males. For decades (including this one) success for white middle-class males was as simple as showing up and getting with the program ("I got in 'cause my parents are alumni..."; "I'm joining the family business..."; "Dad's golfing buddy got me an interview..."); certainly there's umpteen-zillion exceptions, but to whine about discrimination is just childish. Save that for when blacks and Latinos have had a national majority for a generation or two or three, or at least wait until they dominate the PGA Tour and the corporate boardrooms and the state legislatures.
Better yet, leave this sort of whining to the neo-Nazis.
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They grew up feeling like a minority, but seeing another minority get breaks and special treatment.
Minorities rule the roost, don't they? All that "special treatment" worked like a charm. Wiped out all the dysfunction of slavery, Jim Crow, "wetback"-bashing, no voting rights, unequal pay, lynchings, beatings...
There isn't a White History month, is there?
No, but that's because there's twelve such months.
It's little wonder, from this perspective, to blame these kids for turing to neo-Nazism, racism and seclusion. These were the only niches of our demented culture that actually offered these misfits a sense of belonging to a community.
A community that's little different from the mainstream, a venue of coded race-baiting (neo-Nazis, at least, don't bother sugarcoating it), cocooning, gated communities, and NIMBY; they were part of the melting pot of Merkin high schools, in the not-unusual market segment of Angry White Males (an anger stemming from their imagined disenfranchisement in the high school venue, as well as the FUD/crap I cite in your above paragraph). Yes, they took it slightly to an extreme, but the very fact that the media (and its consumers) are grasping at silly-straws to find a scapegoat might be an indication that the motivating factors hit a little closer to home than Merkins would like. The US is a country that refuses to come to grips with its own history of supporting terrorism and murder (e.g. Chile and Central America, not to mention within its own borders; support for past and present enemies like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden) -- why should I harbor any hope of honest introspection resulting from this week's events?
Those kids were murderers. They weren't crazy, or strange, or all that different from the mainstream. They just looked different, and their actions (especially on Hitler's birthday) were different. The very fact that few politicians/pundits/voters challenge statements like the one I quoted enables people to commit themselves to neo-Nazi solutions; politicians just talk about solving those "problems" (but only because they're pimping for votes), while extremists propose action. It doesn't matter that those "problems" are half-truths at best, it only matters that a majority of people believe they're real.
Aside from a wee piece of thoughtlessness on your part -- views that I hope you don't take seriously -- it was a cool post.
I still think the producers wouldn't have let the report see the light of day if they weren't convinced of its authenticity. The same armed forces that can secretly (i.e. unbeknownst to stateside civilians) bomb Cambodia could have pulled something like Tailwind.
I took a cheap shot at you because you took one at CNN; I'm not the sort of person who normally defends them, but I was trying to be as unfair to you as you were being to them. If they made a mistake, fine; it doesn't automatically invalidate every second of CNN reportage.
CNN didn't make any great attempt to find the truth of the matter (whatever that truth may be); they weren't in any position to stand up for anything or anyone, IMO -- they just wanted the controversy to go away, and they wanted to remain in the Pentagon's good graces. Then, according to one of the producers...
CNN didn't [fire Arnett] last summer because they felt it would raise too much of an uproar. They hoped they could do it in such a way as to keep it off of the radar screen, so to speak...
His firing was a direct result of Pentagon pressure. Perry Smith [a retired major general and former CNN consultant who resigned in protest over the Tailwind report] told the Wall Street Journal last July that CNN would not get cooperation from the Pentagon unless Peter Arnett was fired.
Arnett's been in limbo since that time, IIRC; now he's officially fired -- I await his uncoerced-by-higher-ups version of events, years hence. All I know is: Doc Kissinger, pissed veterans, and the DoD have enough clout to tell people -- even Turner and Johnson -- that 2+2=5.
I'd like to take a bong hit for every time the words "Slashdot Effect", "Windoze", "BSOD", and "Libertarian" are mentioned, but I no longer have a bong.
100 points if Slashdot is the home page for your browser It is, but I actually start with a blank page.
500 points if you check Slashdot 11 or more times a day 250 per non-Anonymous Coward comment you wrote that reached a score of 3 Once, I think.
100 per non-Anonymous Coward comment you wrote that reached a score of 2 Three times, I think.
subtract 100 if you had a comment demoted from its original score Twice, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, lots of tragedies are happening in this world. This is very sad, but unfortunately, we don't live long enough to address them all one at a time.
Go back to the top of the thread, and follow along, if you please. Maybe you'll get the gist of it. If you have the attitude that "we don't live long enough to address them all one at a time", why is that? Why is it so hard to get you to address one problem? I'll not be long-winded here; I've already typed a bunch of words on this subject before.
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Eighteen people were murdered by Indonesian troops in the province of Aceh; we won't really know if they were murdered or if the troops were acting in self-defense, since the likes of CNN don't give these things wall-to-wall coverage. I do know that Indonesian governments ("it was self-defense, honest") have had a tendency to be compulsive liars. The people of Aceh are really different (the BBC describes it as "a staunchly Muslim province"); Aceh wants a referendum on independence, much like the one being proposed for East Timor (unfortunately in the latter case, many potential "Yes" voters have been murdered by Indonesian troops -- and their expensive American weaponry -- over the past quarter-century). You want Hellmouth? There's Hellmouth for you. I can grab a bunch of past and current headlines that trump your little Hellmouth, folks. Funnily enough, a lot of you could have banded together to stop them from being Hellmouths. But you're all too busy buying mass-produced products that make you "different". Meanwhile, the blood of Archbishop Romero is on your hands; the bruises and welts on the bodies of countless people -- political prisoners, democracy advocates, union organizers; people who are really different and trying to make a difference -- are on your hands. Some babies in the US have died, because welfare "reform" made it next to impossible to get them the nutrition and health care necessary to live to a ripe young age; some of you may have voted for the pols who made this "reform" a priority.
Where's your outrage? Where was your outrage? Nonexistent, apparently. You really are a bunch of commodity-besotted sheep. You can tell me all sorts of things about Brian Warner, a certain prequel, SPECint readings, polygons, and other corporate-commodity minutiae, but when real shit is going down in the Big Room, you're all amazingly silent. Except for one extremely regrettable and overhyped incident in Colorado. Shame on you, and shame on Katz, who must be hoping the hype will still have some juice when his next Geek Book is published.
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Exploitation and pauperization were their starting points, even before most of those countries were independent. If there's overpopulation and instability (this latter point I dispute, since those countries that have attracted Western corporations have made it their mission to be stable -- By Any Means Necessary, if you get my drift), it comes as a result of the exploitation and pauperization. If you're reasonably happy about your day-to-day existence, you have no interest in fighting a civil war or joining a revolution. There's legitimate cause to blame a lot of African countries for being their own worst enemies, but in many parts of the Third World, the blame can be equally shared between their governments, Western governments (especially the US), and the Disneys and Nikes of the world, who make a handful of Third World people rich (and it's amazing how many of them seem to be connected in some way to their government) at the expense of millions of people making 15 an hour.
To get a little closer the original idea: I think the wealth of this planet will stay unevenly distributed, there is no way to lift a country to higher a higher standard of living from outside.
OTOH this doesn't mean it's not our duty to try to help and at least not knowingly rob other countries.
If you have labels on your belongings that say "Made in Indonesia", "Made in China", or even, in some cases, "Made in USA" (for garments made in places like the Northern Marianas commonwealth), then you are, in effect, robbing those countries. You're getting a Free Lunch in terms of labor costs, and the wealth tends to trickle into the hands of the (Western and Japanese) shareholders of the corporations who manufacture their goods at these sweatshops. Millions of people are working their asses off all around the Third World, but are getting paid 1-10% of what they would be paid if they were sitting in a factory in the First World; they are being robbed by us. On top of that, they're being robbed of years from their lives; the hazardous working conditions will surely shorten the life expectancies of many.
If we would insist on applying Western labor standards (fair wages, unionizing rights, collective bargaining, worker safety) to the rest of the world, maybe we'd see some positive changes; it's not a magic bullet, but it's a step in the right direction. If we stop seeing these people as less-than-human (by being complicit in their wage-slavery), maybe the pauperization and instability will start to recede. But too many powerful people (and us, the consumers and shareholders) have a vested interest in the Third World being the Lowest Common Denominator; in the end, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot -- we may all be dragged down to that Lowest Common Denominator, with all the overpopulation and instability that seems to come with it.
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Arguably, the recent trend is toward an increase in the percentages of the lower class; manufacturing jobs get shifted from the First World to the Third World, creating an overall erosion in per-hour earnings for many, many people, offset by the creation of a relative handful of middle/upper class incomes in the emerging economies. It ultimately results in a shrinkage (per 1,000 population) in the audiences for entertainers to entertain.
This apparently means we'll have eleventy-gazillion bad pop singers in this Grand Future. The notion that "entertainin' th' rich folks" is some sort of great improvement is neither true nor a new concept. Some slaves were entertainers in the US, IIRC; a step up from menial labor, but at the end of the day, you're still a slave.
Alongside this, the history of modern professional sport has its roots in "entertainin' massa'n'his friends" (the 20th Century racial slur "lawn jockey" has its roots in those horrid statues "commemorating" those early athletes); post-slavery, many boxers, basketball players, baseball players, etc, found sports a better gig than working in the coalmines, but the pay wasn't all that good -- you still had to get a job in the offseason, and you still were quite likely to be poor after your sports career was over. Back to the coalmines, if some serious sports injury didn't preclude that... It wasn't until the latter half of this century that athletes could even begin to think of sports as a lucrative career, and that really didn't come to fruition until the last 25 years.
And that lucrativeness comes, in part, from the exclusivity -- there's no way that eleventy-gazillion goaltenders will be a workable possibility, just as there can't be 17,305 songs or movies in the Top Ten.
And if you think entertainment is "fun", you try working roomfuls of middle-aged, middle-class drunks (or their equally putrid offspring) for a living.
Maybe we can have a dozen restaurants at every street corner. And, of course, that will trigger a growth industry in teaching people how to say "Would you like more coffee, sir?"
Let a thousand theme parks bloom...
In this sort of future, I see an increase in guerrillas, both in the First and Third World; no matter how many ways you find to say "Let Them Eat Cake", the result is you're pissing off more and more people. Beware the Critical Mass(es).
Linus is a great hacker, but a lousy futurist; of course, I won't be able to prove it for another 150 years.
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I think something in the California water must have gotten to Linus. I'm worried about the future of the kernel.
Meet the new future, same as the old future.--
This is absolute bullshit! The only one this applies to, off the top of my head, would be Ted Turner. Rupert Murdoch is the archetype and apotheosis of modern media moguls -- not only are they right of center, they actively promote right-wing causes with their dollars, airtime, and column-inches, far more than the moguls of previous eras. Bill Paley is long gone, and the myth of the "liberal media" should have died about 20 years ago. Even Pat Buchanan admits to being tongue-in-cheek when he uses such a phrase. You are so force-fed and out-of-touch that you probably didn't even know that your beloved Barry Goldwater was pro-choice and a supporter of Planned Parenthood. Were you born yesterday?
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I'm user #783, IIRC. I'm not some interloper here; I'd like to think it's my forum too -- /. is my browsers' start page. I'm as on-topic as anyone else. I love Ask Slashdot, the GPL, RMS, tarballs, OO, DSP, Java, a certain anti-trust case, and any number of "relevant" topics (turnoffs: sunlight, aspartame, bad hair days, and mean people). I have about seven toolkits installed on my box, and I'm wrestling with all of them in search of The Right One. Unfortunately, what we have here this week is a mania far removed from hardware, software, and licenses.
You hit the nail on the head, surely by accident: "Far worse things are happening out there". That's why I'm on-topic. Geeks, being part of society, are often complicit (directly or, more often, indirectly) in those "far worse things"; that shows me that whatever they may have suffered in high school failed to register permanently on their brains -- it shows me that their radius of compassion is woefully small. (Yes, Eric, if you're reading this, you are one of many exceptions :)
If you can't make the leap from feeling sorry for yourself (or a fellow "oppressed" geek) to feeling anger and remorse over a political prisoner or a sweatshop laborer's plight, then Katz's whole exercise is just shallow pimping. If you can't make the leap from jocks abusing geeks to being angry about the plight of the political footballs in the ghettos that your commute and your subdivision so deftly avoid, then Katz's shallow pimping is as obscene as the abuse of geek students.
Do you get it now? If not, then please explain -- in 3000 words or more -- why you think "nerds are more important than the herded masses". Can any of you explain? It is the impression I get, just as I get the impression from Katz's peers in Big Media that the deaths of affluent suburban kids are more important than, say, deaths from malnutrition occurring in the very same country.
Let me close with a quote from my favorite nerd, a bookish lawyer (and one-time journalist, IIRC), who never quite learned how to fight his way out of a paper bag, though he was often provoked.
We will learn far more about real solutions from reading the writings of that nerd (his name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) than we will from reading Katz and the often-hysterical "Geek Power Now!" threads from our peers here.--
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Is this really a step up from your old gigs, sir? How is this any better than Phyllis George interviewing some "grief counsellor" in between laxative ads and a station break? It's better because we all get to genuflect interactively? Either way, it's just some more bourgeois dispensing of band-aids, a bunch of RN-cyclopses in the private hospitals of the kingdom of the blind. Old Media or New, it's still Garbage In, Garbage Out. Some things are timeless.
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Clinton doesn't care all that much about paying it either; he'd rather pander to the voters who put the "right-wing extremist congress" in office -- many of those voters seem to be convinced that the UN is some commie, anti-American, one-world-government conspiracy that only "liberals" (a pejorative word in US politics) would be willing to support. American politicians are generally afraid to bite the hand that feed$ them, and afraid to upbraid their clueless electorates (the last president to try real candor was Jimmy Carter; he got voted out of office). That makes them little better than entertainers.
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If you haven't noticed, we're all here posting comments on the "personal hobbyhorse" of Jon Katz, et al. Your attempt at cuteness pretty much exhibits the very nonsense I'm ranting against. If you think it's just a "Kevin Bacon game", that's your problem. And it will be your problem, especially if you're a Merkin. It's the old "what goes around comes around thing" -- a "see no evil" society will eventually visit upon itself evils from which it can't turn a blind eye. Like Littleton, for instance.
Drink Linux!
Is that better?
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And giving a damn about Indonesian sweatshops is a trait that's timeless, and goes back at least as far as John Brown's mid-19th-Century crusades. Or the late-19th-Century Progressives and Populists. A lot of them had long hair and beards, come to think of it. But we had better dope and music :)
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But that's not why I have little sympathy for this /. empathy-fest. In this hotbed of Social-Darwinist-non-empathy, you easily do the "I feel your pain" bit for geeks, but many of you have repeatedly failed in the past to feel one damn bit of pain for all those people around the world who suffer at the hands of bullies, be those bullies armies, governments, smug well-fed citizens, or corporations.
It doesn't bother you that Air Jordans, carburetors, peripherals, and the like, are assembled by people working in hazardous working conditions and for cents an hour; it doesn't bother you that some of your food is produced under similar sad conditions. These people can't peruse /., since the cheapest PC costs them more than a year's wages in many cases. It doesn't bother you that US economic and political life is built upon the backs of these people. You Merkins don't even give a damn about your own country's long (and continuing) history of abuse of its minority populations, and you fail to see in your own attitudes the greed and non-sympathy that ensures that the future will contain just as much violence as the present -- there will be more shootings, more riots, and catastrophes (not necessarily violent) heretofore uncontemplated, all bred in the ill will that isn't going to go away any time soon, it seems. The deaths in Littleton weren't the fault of the guns, the blame goes to the ill will that seems to be the air that American society breathes.
You're no different than the rest of society. Geeks are the ultimate in conformists. I say to all troubled geeks what many of you say to those who have suffered for decades worldwide, and will continue to suffer: "May the devil take the hindmost". I don't mean it, of course, but I'm really tired of all you people who will only walk a mile in your own shoes. The vast majority of you having trouble in school will survive it, thrive, and then proceed to become part of the problem. Screw that, and screw this bogus love-fest.
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You missed the "certainly there's umpteen-zillion exceptions" line; there is no head-in-the-sand here. I've quoted examples from reality, including mine. You also seemed to miss the point of my post; whites, affluent or not, enjoy the privilege of "normalcy" in US society -- while a white punk or goth can look threatening to J Random Merkin, one of those Jenny Jones makeovers can remove the visual threat. Minorities don't have the ability to simply remove the visual characteristics that produce a kneejerk aversion in many segments of the populace.
And of course not every black and Latino is poor and uneducated -- I never said that; in fact, I come from a city (NYC) where I grew up around affluent blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Asians, etc. I merely spoke of numbers: the vast majority of pols and CEOs in this country, dating back to the leadership in colonial days, have been white males. For white males to whine about discrimination is no better than neo-Nazi nonsense; why not focus more on relevant topics like: being a male in a male-dominated power structure, and the assumptions and demands that are foist upon you to be the "breadwinner"? Or focus on why those pols and CEOs have completely destroyed the notion of a "breadwinner" by exporting jobs overseas, thus putting the hourly wage on a slippery slide? I have no problems with the whining of Angry White Males. but I do have a problem with people who have fallen for the trap of making it some sort of tribal issue instead of a political and economic issue.
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The hazing and ridicule and victimhood is society-wide and worldwide, though it's usually much subtler when adults do it -- and it gets handed down to our offspring to play out in classrooms and hallways and athletic fields.
And the notion of many posters here that an alienated high-school geek should just bide his/her time and "get revenge" by succeeding later in life just perpetuates the vicious cycle: the grown-up geek's kids will carry on the tale of Dr Seuss' Sneeches for another generation. And we'll go through this bullshit again; all the media attention and hype will amount to nothing until we do some serious, honest introspection -- which is hard to squeeze in with all the Audi, SmithBarney, and MasterCard ads cutting into Jon Gibson and Dan Rather's face time and all the satellite feeds from Our Man in Yugoslavia and Our Woman in Littleton.
We, the well-fed techno-masses on /., and the young techno-masses-to-be (God willing), are more part of the problem than part of the solution -- that's why I'm a little less than enthusiastic about all these threads that Our Man in Cyberspace (Katz, God bless him!) has unleashed. But maybe I just need my nap :)
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In that school melting pot, there's the same adversarial relationships that exist in society at large, except they exist in cruder, crueler form in schools -- it's gang warfare, whether Bloods v Crips, Jocks v Geeks, or the politician-inspired farce Soccer Moms v The Unlucky Sperm Club. The power relationships are similar, but the rules and scorecards shift around in the outside world, e.g. a jock can't derive as much value from his jockhood unless his talents take him from high school to college to pro sports.
"Geek Profiling" a problem? Try "Driving While Black" in Westchester County (or on Interstate 95), where all the adult status points you've garnered amount to nothing when a cop ruins your day for no useful reason.
It's not a geek thing, it's a societal thing. Alienation and Orwellian nonsense aren't the exclusive preserve of schools. Why don't we work on the bigger picture instead, rather than let this devolve into yet another /. Veneration of the Geeks article? Society's other victims don't have such inflated egos. Which victimhood is more dire, that of a teenage Merkin geek or that of a teenage Honduran toiling on a banana plantation?
Get over yourselves. "The big story out of Littleton" is that the mass media (isn't Katz an alumnus of Big Media?) and its consumers judge some lives (cruelly murdered kids in posh suburbia) to be of more value than others (all the nameless, faceless homicides that happened elsewhere; all the poor kids who died from malnutrition in the name of "fiscal responsibility"; all the kids who died stillbirths from the fallout of US depleted-uranium weapons in Iraq, etc, etc). When I see Al Gore attend a memorial for all the kids born deformed in Basra as a result of Desert Storm, or when I see Phil Knight apologize and make amends to his ongoing Indonesian or Filipino victims, maybe I'll begin to see a glimmer of hope.
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Maybe if you would realize that nobody gets "quotas and sympathy", you'd be better able to focus your anger constructively. "Rich old fscks" don't give a damn about anything but the preservation of their privilege -- everybody else is just a tool, a means to an end.
This FUD about "quotas and sympathy" was spread by a bunch of "rich old fscks" called the Republican Party; it was so wildly successful that many Democrats have now bought into it. At the very same time, the latter-day careers of J C Watts, Gary Franks, and Clarence Thomas are due to Republicans practicing the very thing they preach against. If you're going to let a bunch of hypocrites define reality for you, you'll get no sympathy from me. You've fallen for a game that has been played since the era of indentured servitude. Do your homework.
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If you hold any of the traditional, altruistically or reciprocally based moral philosophies, it is incumbent on you to see the profound evil on which everything about current mass-capitalist society is based. Shootings in schools are an effect. The wars in Yugoslavia are an effect: the arms manufacturers have to field-test their products somehow. The media oligopoly which concentrates your attention on the previous two phenomena is an effect. The prison system which you are encouraged to forget about is an effect.
I'm a Christian, one of those Christians who gets really pissed when politicians who profess to Christian values -- or, worse, proclaim that the US is a "Christian nation" -- lock themselves into perpetuating this very un-Christian status quo; their real gods seem to be Money and Power.
I've given up trying to save the world. Even knowing a little of what goes on, and a little of how thoroughly penetrated and programmed I am, a worm of cynical, elitist doubt remains, that most people aren't really worth saving anyway and will fight me if I try. I just try not to go crazy today, today, and leave not going crazy tomorrow for tomorrow. But please, look around you, and look inside yourself. Try to see the ways in which both you and your surroundings have been modified to serve the power structure. Understanding begins with the realization that anything like a shooting in a school, no matter how shattering to its victims, is irrelevant.
From my particular religious discipline, it's not my job to save anybody -- that's JC's job :) -- but I'm supposed to live and serve as best I can, given His model and His Spirit. But the old punk in me comes to the fore on weeks like this; the killings and the disgustingly saccharine media circus remind me of Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" line about JFK's assassination. As long as contemporary capitalism insists on its dysfunctional and malevolent course, led by leaders as corrupt as the worst Pharisee, the chickens will come home to roost again and again. And the old punk in me will just laugh, either nervously or uproariously, depending on whether I'm inside or outside the borders of the Evil Empire on that day.
People like you are reminiscent of some of the Old Testament prophets, who received nothing but scorn and ridicule and marginalization when they pointed out the grave flaws in Israelite society. Israel would end up ravaged either by its internal corruption or its external enemies (or both), and then -- finally -- it would awaken from its cloud of FUD and start to realize that the "crazy" prophet might have had a valid point or two.
Oh well...
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There's another part of the problem -- a whole egomaniacal mass of people thinking they're "the fulcrum of society", and that they're being "discriminated against" despite being having been the demographic sweet-spot of society for centuries. I seem to have missed the meeting when White Middle-Class Males joined the Unlucky Sperm Club. The vast majority of elected officials are white males; the vast majority of CEOs, for companies large and small, are white males. For decades (including this one) success for white middle-class males was as simple as showing up and getting with the program ("I got in 'cause my parents are alumni..."; "I'm joining the family business..."; "Dad's golfing buddy got me an interview..."); certainly there's umpteen-zillion exceptions, but to whine about discrimination is just childish. Save that for when blacks and Latinos have had a national majority for a generation or two or three, or at least wait until they dominate the PGA Tour and the corporate boardrooms and the state legislatures.
Better yet, leave this sort of whining to the neo-Nazis.
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Minorities rule the roost, don't they? All that "special treatment" worked like a charm. Wiped out all the dysfunction of slavery, Jim Crow, "wetback"-bashing, no voting rights, unequal pay, lynchings, beatings...
There isn't a White History month, is there?
No, but that's because there's twelve such months.
It's little wonder, from this perspective, to blame these kids for turing to neo-Nazism, racism and seclusion. These were the only niches of our demented culture that actually offered these misfits a sense of belonging to a community.
A community that's little different from the mainstream, a venue of coded race-baiting (neo-Nazis, at least, don't bother sugarcoating it), cocooning, gated communities, and NIMBY; they were part of the melting pot of Merkin high schools, in the not-unusual market segment of Angry White Males (an anger stemming from their imagined disenfranchisement in the high school venue, as well as the FUD/crap I cite in your above paragraph). Yes, they took it slightly to an extreme, but the very fact that the media (and its consumers) are grasping at silly-straws to find a scapegoat might be an indication that the motivating factors hit a little closer to home than Merkins would like. The US is a country that refuses to come to grips with its own history of supporting terrorism and murder (e.g. Chile and Central America, not to mention within its own borders; support for past and present enemies like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden) -- why should I harbor any hope of honest introspection resulting from this week's events?
Those kids were murderers. They weren't crazy, or strange, or all that different from the mainstream. They just looked different, and their actions (especially on Hitler's birthday) were different. The very fact that few politicians/pundits/voters challenge statements like the one I quoted enables people to commit themselves to neo-Nazi solutions; politicians just talk about solving those "problems" (but only because they're pimping for votes), while extremists propose action. It doesn't matter that those "problems" are half-truths at best, it only matters that a majority of people believe they're real.
Aside from a wee piece of thoughtlessness on your part -- views that I hope you don't take seriously -- it was a cool post.
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I took a cheap shot at you because you took one at CNN; I'm not the sort of person who normally defends them, but I was trying to be as unfair to you as you were being to them. If they made a mistake, fine; it doesn't automatically invalidate every second of CNN reportage.
CNN didn't make any great attempt to find the truth of the matter (whatever that truth may be); they weren't in any position to stand up for anything or anyone, IMO -- they just wanted the controversy to go away, and they wanted to remain in the Pentagon's good graces. Then, according to one of the producers...
CNN didn't [fire Arnett] last summer because they felt it would raise too much of an uproar. They hoped they could do it in such a way as to keep it off of the radar screen, so to speak...
His firing was a direct result of Pentagon pressure. Perry Smith [a retired major general and former CNN consultant who resigned in protest over the Tailwind report] told the Wall Street Journal last July that CNN would not get cooperation from the Pentagon unless Peter Arnett was fired.
Arnett's been in limbo since that time, IIRC; now he's officially fired -- I await his uncoerced-by-higher-ups version of events, years hence. All I know is: Doc Kissinger, pissed veterans, and the DoD have enough clout to tell people -- even Turner and Johnson -- that 2+2=5.
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100 points if Slashdot is the home page for your browser
It is, but I actually start with a blank page.
500 points if you check Slashdot 11 or more times a day
250 per non-Anonymous Coward comment you wrote that reached a score of 3
Once, I think.
100 per non-Anonymous Coward comment you wrote that reached a score of 2
Three times, I think.
subtract 100 if you had a comment demoted from its original score
Twice, I think.
My score, FWIW... 950
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