grant all citizens access to all governmental information
Oh, well, as long as you're only going to make it available to citizens. There shouldn't be any problem at all with foreign hackers, people who want to blow up one of our ambassadors, or anyone who might want to know when President Obama will be crossing a certain intersection at a certain time of day on his way to attending some event. As long as it's only citizens with access to all government information, we should be fine. There aren't any citizens that would make inappropriate use of police communications, or air traffic systems, or anything like that.
Or is it possible that your comment being modded as 'insightful' is perhaps a big ol' troll, just like your comment?
No, he wants you to pay their bills so he can still have the illusion of it being "free" to run that web site. He just didn't get around to suggesting tax dollars, but that would be his next stop. Because, you know, tax money is always free to the person who wants it spent on their pet project.
I preferred his orginal working title...
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"My Accountant Told Me That This Is The Only Way I Can Write Off What I Spend On Comic Books"
Subtitled, "And By Having SOME Sort Of Financial Strategy, It's Possible That I Won't Die A Virgin"
Seriously! This looks like something straight out of the RIAA playbook
You mean, kind of like how slashdot runs twenty panicky anti-RIAA articles every week, followed by tens of thousands of identical, breathless accusations of fascism? Why so many?
When someone is trying to make a point about someone else's behavior, it's pretty reasonable to point out patterns, rather than single incidences.
Sounds like you've been left out in the Cold... a Fusion of problems, it seems.
But seriously, it's worth mentioning that sometimes the word "platform" is confused with the word "framework" or some other level of organization. A perfectly good scripting language can be used to build up a web site with an intolerably obtuse nested include file strategery. The web site's platform could be a poor implementation of a perfectly usable technology - but with such momentum that it's hard to turn it into something fresher without putting a bullet in it. Yeah, we need a little more to go on here. The advice you need is, ultimately, going to be in the form of a cost/benefit analysis. And that's going to depend on the nature of your web content, who the authors/editors are and how well they can adapt to a new CMS, etc. Those group culture issues can have as much or more to do with the viability of a change than will the decision over whether you have an extra $5k/year to woo a better coder.
You are so right. First, Dennis Kucinich will use much less life support than most other guys, and Ron Paul will require less fuel since he's already in his own orbit. And they've both pretty well already punched out of the election, so they can start training now.
I don't think that there are too many people who are innocent of having their company pay for an expense that was not 100% appropriate.
Well, you can be sure that Barack Obama has never done that! I mean, have you ever listened to that guy speak in front of a crowd? It's like music (if you can hear it above the shrieking girls). So, there's no way that he's ever put a US Senate pencil in his pocket, or used extra sugar in his coffee to avoid paying for more calories when he gets home. If only he would win, then it would Bring Change, even to Wikipedia. Change is in the air! Change! Change change change. Of some sort.
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another.
Right. Unless it's your brother that was robbed, your mother's house that burned, your life savings tied up in the boat that sank, your cow that was run down, or your new neighbor's rabid dog that needs killing.
But Ahmadinejad is no more the absolute voice of the Iranian people than George W. Bush... for America.
Or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, or Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, etc. But the point is that those people all have constituencies for whom they speak, and they can do it all day long without fear of being jailed for what they say. That isn't a question of whether Iran's president is or isn't good on foreign policies or his domestic economy... we're talking about a regime that sees fit to shut down the internet during elections.
There is nothing Iran can do, short of revolution, that will ever pacify the United States or Israel
Um, how about ceasing to fund terrorism-using militant religious extremists? How about stopping shipments of cash and arms over the northern Iraqi border and through Syria to people who use them against civilians, blow up police stations, etc? How about simply recognizing that Israel exists, in the way that, say, Egypt, or Jordan have?
Iran actually has a surprisingly sophisticated political system, and unfortunately an extremely large part of it is held essentially unaccountable
So, what good is sophistication when it can't serve the people it governs? Stalin's bureaucracy was sophisticated, too. China is very sophisticated, and far more subtle and clever (than Iran) in how they present their repression to the rest of the world. Sophistication has nothing to do with whether or not a citizen can stand up and say what they want to say, or form a political movement that might challenge the militant theocracy that, in practice, runs Iran and is working so hard to prevent its next door neighbors from developing a secular society that actually functions on behalf of its people.
Unfortunately, their country is at war with both the United States and Israel
No. They like to talk that way, to stir up at least some common nationalistic sentiment among their people, the better to gloss over the repressive things they do in running the country. When you have a hugely unemployed population of young males (who are also told what sort of haircuts they're allowed to have, and whether then can use the word "pizza" or not, lest they become corrupted by evil foreign sensibilities and habits like... having what you want for dinner and calling it what the rest of the world calls it), continuing with the ongoing theatrical exercise in describing a state of war that doesn't actually exist is a timeless classic. Actual war would look very different. And you wouldn't have all of Europe just as worried (and voting the same way in the UN) if this was just the US and Israel that finds Iranian behavior to be alarming. Israel isn't lobbing missiles into Iran. But Iranian missles were hitting towns in Israel just yesterday.
Oh God, not this again.
How many times, and how many variations on "they will soon be gone," and "they will disappear from the map," etc., do you need to hear?
In other words, to the legislator who is trying to make it safe for teachers who want to talk about ID.... this bill won't have the effect you think it will...
But it would probably turn into hundreds, or thousands, of contests over whether what a particular teacher said, on a particular day, was "scientific" or not. A lot of students would get handed some bad crap from their uneducated teachers this way. The bill essentially says, "we have to protect teachers from following the curriculum or from presenting the facts, if they find the facts to be challenging to their world view." You're saying that the actual facts would win when weighed by any reasonably objective viewer... which, they would. The problem is that what is, and is not science would have to be continually re-established on a teacher-by-teacher, day-by-day basis. To avoid that, there could be simple standards and an agreed-upon body of knowldedge and concepts... a curriculum! But this bill seeks to protect teachers from having to adhere to one. It's not a Trojan Horse, it's a swamp of hearings, suits, and wasted classroom hours for students. It should be be blocked, now, and forever.
And yet, here we are, having an open conversation about it. Don't you see? I was responding to a comment that implied you could do the same thing in Iran, if not quite so conveniently. That's clearly not true, and he was just being an apologist for the Iranian regime, and somehow making it the fault of the US that the mullahs in Iran enable a government that kills and jails people for doing what we're doing, right now.
To be completely fair, I sure wouldn't want people to judge me or make assumptions about me based on the leader that we (Americans) elected and the actions of the current administration.
How about the last administration, and its current attempt to become the next one? How about congress and the senate?
It wants Iran to be and to be perceived as a bunch of all isolated religious fanatics.
No, Iran itself wants to be, and wants to be perceived that way. There's no other way to explain it, and the frequently repeated ravings of its top elected official. You seem to think that Iran is a reasonable place full of professionals that vote their conscience. If that's true, then the expression of their will is their current leader, and their current program of funding all sorts of extremist militants, terrorists, and cutthroat muderers who send mentally disabled women into markets full of children to blow up bombs. No? That's NOT what the people of Iran want? Then why do they put forth a government that acts in that way, and talks in terms of wiping other countries off the map? Or perhaps you're wrong, and the place IS ruthlessly controlled by militant religious crazies. You can't have it both ways. Either it's NOT a moderate, forward-looking country with a professional middle class that can shape the government - in which case you've been painting the wrong picture and you know it, OR, those people do have liberty to do as they choose, and the government you see there now - and its actions - IS what they choose... in which case you're also painting the wrong picture. Reformers there are shot down at every turn - both literally and figuratively.
Oh, please. I'm making fun of the people who do crap like that. Burning down expensive model homes is the ultimate temper tantrum. The twits of ELF (who appear to have done this) are so unable to get people to see their point of view that they have to resort to torching other people's property in order to get enough cred with their fellow twits. That was all about bragging rights among a group of people so disconnected from reality, and so unable to communicate a lucid point of view or rational perspective that they behave like two year olds smashing someone else's toys in a fit of pique over being unable to articulate anything sensible or persuasive. It's the height of asshattery. I hope they go to jail, for a long time. And not jail for the "I like to watch things burn" damaged goods type characters, but jail for the "I like to destroy other people's property in an attempt to make political points through shock and destruction, which means I'm actually a classical terrorist" types.
BSG actually addresses a great number of the questions you ask. And the answer, in the fiction that they've elected to write, is, "These are humans. They're not very far removed from us at all, evolutionarily, and thus their culture and their personal capacity to take in the world around them and react to it isn't very different at all from our own." That you don't find fiction built around that to be interesting is certainly reasonable, but that doesn't make it bad scifi. By your standards, really good scifi would involve gasesous or jellyfish aliens living under unimaginably different circumstances using though patterns and sensory input that we can't possibly understand and which can't be conveyed usefully in writing or on screen. This would not be compelling to a large enough audience to allow the producers of the series to risk the millions of dollars it costs to make the fiction visible on your screen in the first place.
Most people like to connect to their entertainment in some way. They want a surrogate, for themselves, experiencing something in the narrative. Call him Ishmael. Or Tolkien's hobbits. They're there to provide us an anchor within the events. BSG is proposing an all but destroyed space-faring culture, sentient beings that they've constructed, the reality of some seemingly semi-mystical connection between parties as yet unclearly defined, and the torturous wrestling that the characters we see are having to do with those circumstances. Sure there's some fairly familiar interpersonal stuff playing out in that context, but the larger arc was launched by circumstances that - were they to happen to us - WOULD be world-view-changing. When your practical reality completely changes (and happens to involve FTL travel in rickety ships running away from hot-looking theocratic meat robots), that's not just a space western or As The Solar System Turns.
Way to keep a falsehood going. Obama was talking about 10 or 20 years down the line, if Al Queda showed up again in Iraq.
Except, they are there now, and Obama's talking about getting out immediately, as if it didn't matter that they'd rather be there than try to claw their way back into the cozy digs they had in Afghanistan while the Taliban thugs were (sort of) running the place. Al Queda isn't going to leave Iraq just because coalition troops do.
A huge part of the problem is that you're occupying their country
The Al Queda people that are causing the problem aren't from that country. They're Moroccans, Saudis, Syrians, Iranians, etc. These are extremists that do not want to see a constitutional, democratic state settle down into modernity next door to theocratic thugocracies like Iran. It's not the Iraqis that are attacking themselves with cash and weapons shipped in from Iran through Syria, you know?
And also.... since when is it bad to talk to other leaders?
When the very act of doing so gives them more propoganda leverage. Not all leaders are the same, and you can't use the same tactics and strategies across the board. Giving Kim, in North Korea, the ability to tell his information-(and food-)-starved people that he "commanded an appearance by the president of the United States" would be just pouring more salt into the wounds of having to live under a regime like that. He needs to be starved of media coverage, not showered with more of it.
Stop being so afraid of everything.
Ask the South Koreans who is actually afraid of what. Ask the people who would have been overrun by NK a long time ago if not for our presence there whether or not they think we should give Kim more credibility, and lighten up on him. You're confusing "fear" with "reality." Fear is allowing your elections to be altered by terrorists blowing up trains in your capital city. Fear is being so worried that stupid people will confuse rational immigration laws with the policies of a long-dead Fascist regime in your country that you allow your country to slip towards bankruptcy and major civil unrest as a flood of immigrants from Africa and Middle East swamp your economy while barely contributing to it. Fear is committing to help keep murderous thugs like the Taliban from regaining power over the women and children in Afghanistan, and then not actually meeting those commitments because it plays badly in your local politics. Fear is being so afraid that you'll lose some votes in a local election that you'd rather back down from a promise, and let other countries deal with foreigners in Afghanistan that drag women into the town square and shoot them in the head for offending Allah by taking a job to feed her family. That's fear. And supreme cowardice. As is pretending that the very same movement, funded by foreigners, is going to magically go away as the young government in Iraq tries to deal with it in the wake of a precipitous withdrawl of the troops that are there to help.
If I'm hopeful I'd say the cultural, unconscious biases are very strong
Right, because it would be far more appropriate for a show written by Americans for a primarily US audience to make sure that the social dynamics depicted in the show completely embraced, instead, the perspective of people from rural Nigeria? Or made it be all about Tibet? Or perhaps focused the entire thing on a subculture of young, cosmopolitan Italian girls who are utterly convinced that sunglasses and shoes are the most important thing in the universe, and who would root for the blond Cylon because she has Fabulous Outfits?
No, what you're saying is the only thing that would make the show better would be if it were a non-stop condemnation of US culture, and was instead more diverse, which we can understand to mean, "more like some other specific culture that hasn't managed to scrape together the cash or interest to produce a similarly interesting entertainment vehicle that explores their own issues."
Well, you got that part right, anyway. Because a whole of people get warm and fuzzy looking at him, romanticizing what they hope he is, and all he does is deliver vague platitudes with a nice, poetic cadence. He's a blank canvas on which people are projecting their personal wishses, and he's more than happy to take that and run with it. The level of delusion and naivete in his concert-style shows is really remarkable.
he's the Prince of Peace
Oh, except for that part. On that front, he's willing to let untold thousands die by precipitously pulling out of a country that Al Queda itself says is central to their plans. He's willing to say that if (his words) Al Queda were to show up in Iraq, he'd consider air strikes, and then occupying that country to deal with the problem. The whole point of depriving Al Queda of a friendly host "government" in Afghanistan (if you can call the Taliban rule that was ended there a government), and in making Iraq a place where Al Queda is placing (and now badly losing) so much of their resources was to break up that movement's capacity to operate in a central way. Obama doesn't seem to think that Al Queda ia a problem at this point, but is will to talk about bombing and invasion in Iraq "should the become established there" blah blah. Wow. Just, wow. That's your peace-loving saint?
If he's even a fraction as smart as his fainting crowds of worshippers think he is, then he has to know he's very wrong in saying all of that. So, there are two options: he's lying through his teeth to buy feel-good votes from fools, or he's himself that poorly informed. Either thing makes him iredeemingly a bad choice. Just his willingness (as he's repeated over and over) to unconditionally make camera time with tyrants both petty and big-league, giving them exactly the stage time and ego boost they need by traveling to their dens and giving them free PR is... incredible.
At this point, he's more likely an Obama supporter
The thing is, Obama - through sheer audacity of hope and lefty rhetoric - actually can bring the dead back to life. Also, college girls actually faint when he talks. Now that's qualifications for being Commander in Chief, no matter how extensive is your opponent's collection of Pentagon-briefing-ready pantsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
grant all citizens access to all governmental information
Oh, well, as long as you're only going to make it available to citizens. There shouldn't be any problem at all with foreign hackers, people who want to blow up one of our ambassadors, or anyone who might want to know when President Obama will be crossing a certain intersection at a certain time of day on his way to attending some event. As long as it's only citizens with access to all government information, we should be fine. There aren't any citizens that would make inappropriate use of police communications, or air traffic systems, or anything like that.
Or is it possible that your comment being modded as 'insightful' is perhaps a big ol' troll, just like your comment?
Leave it to historical figures, world leaders, sports figures and the like
Well, mister, I see that you're the author of this Wiki entry , so I think you need to better define your criteria.
Look up the Bog people
They a e the Bo g. esistance is futile.
(there was a serious "R" shortage back then)
And you are offering to pay their bills?
No, he wants you to pay their bills so he can still have the illusion of it being "free" to run that web site. He just didn't get around to suggesting tax dollars, but that would be his next stop. Because, you know, tax money is always free to the person who wants it spent on their pet project.
"My Accountant Told Me That This Is The Only Way I Can Write Off What I Spend On Comic Books"
Subtitled, "And By Having SOME Sort Of Financial Strategy, It's Possible That I Won't Die A Virgin"
Seriously! This looks like something straight out of the RIAA playbook
You mean, kind of like how slashdot runs twenty panicky anti-RIAA articles every week, followed by tens of thousands of identical, breathless accusations of fascism? Why so many?
When someone is trying to make a point about someone else's behavior, it's pretty reasonable to point out patterns, rather than single incidences.
Sounds like you've been left out in the Cold... a Fusion of problems, it seems.
But seriously, it's worth mentioning that sometimes the word "platform" is confused with the word "framework" or some other level of organization. A perfectly good scripting language can be used to build up a web site with an intolerably obtuse nested include file strategery. The web site's platform could be a poor implementation of a perfectly usable technology - but with such momentum that it's hard to turn it into something fresher without putting a bullet in it. Yeah, we need a little more to go on here. The advice you need is, ultimately, going to be in the form of a cost/benefit analysis. And that's going to depend on the nature of your web content, who the authors/editors are and how well they can adapt to a new CMS, etc. Those group culture issues can have as much or more to do with the viability of a change than will the decision over whether you have an extra $5k/year to woo a better coder.
You are so right. First, Dennis Kucinich will use much less life support than most other guys, and Ron Paul will require less fuel since he's already in his own orbit. And they've both pretty well already punched out of the election, so they can start training now.
I don't think that there are too many people who are innocent of having their company pay for an expense that was not 100% appropriate.
Well, you can be sure that Barack Obama has never done that! I mean, have you ever listened to that guy speak in front of a crowd? It's like music (if you can hear it above the shrieking girls). So, there's no way that he's ever put a US Senate pencil in his pocket, or used extra sugar in his coffee to avoid paying for more calories when he gets home. If only he would win, then it would Bring Change, even to Wikipedia. Change is in the air! Change! Change change change. Of some sort.
*sigh*
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another.
Right. Unless it's your brother that was robbed, your mother's house that burned, your life savings tied up in the boat that sank, your cow that was run down, or your new neighbor's rabid dog that needs killing.
Nah, It's probably better to ignore them. That will make them see things our way better then talking to them :-)
I suppose it's possible you haven't seen the fine documentary, Mars Attacks. Well you should, mister.
It was nice knowing you.
It's OK! Barack Obama will know what to do! If this thing can just... hold... off... until... next... year.
Maybe if we just planned an unconditional sit-down with the people running that star, they'd like us again.
But Ahmadinejad is no more the absolute voice of the Iranian people than George W. Bush ... for America.
Or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, or Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, etc. But the point is that those people all have constituencies for whom they speak, and they can do it all day long without fear of being jailed for what they say. That isn't a question of whether Iran's president is or isn't good on foreign policies or his domestic economy... we're talking about a regime that sees fit to shut down the internet during elections.
There is nothing Iran can do, short of revolution, that will ever pacify the United States or Israel
Um, how about ceasing to fund terrorism-using militant religious extremists? How about stopping shipments of cash and arms over the northern Iraqi border and through Syria to people who use them against civilians, blow up police stations, etc? How about simply recognizing that Israel exists, in the way that, say, Egypt, or Jordan have?
Iran actually has a surprisingly sophisticated political system, and unfortunately an extremely large part of it is held essentially unaccountable
So, what good is sophistication when it can't serve the people it governs? Stalin's bureaucracy was sophisticated, too. China is very sophisticated, and far more subtle and clever (than Iran) in how they present their repression to the rest of the world. Sophistication has nothing to do with whether or not a citizen can stand up and say what they want to say, or form a political movement that might challenge the militant theocracy that, in practice, runs Iran and is working so hard to prevent its next door neighbors from developing a secular society that actually functions on behalf of its people.
Unfortunately, their country is at war with both the United States and Israel
No. They like to talk that way, to stir up at least some common nationalistic sentiment among their people, the better to gloss over the repressive things they do in running the country. When you have a hugely unemployed population of young males (who are also told what sort of haircuts they're allowed to have, and whether then can use the word "pizza" or not, lest they become corrupted by evil foreign sensibilities and habits like... having what you want for dinner and calling it what the rest of the world calls it), continuing with the ongoing theatrical exercise in describing a state of war that doesn't actually exist is a timeless classic. Actual war would look very different. And you wouldn't have all of Europe just as worried (and voting the same way in the UN) if this was just the US and Israel that finds Iranian behavior to be alarming. Israel isn't lobbing missiles into Iran. But Iranian missles were hitting towns in Israel just yesterday.
Oh God, not this again.
How many times, and how many variations on "they will soon be gone," and "they will disappear from the map," etc., do you need to hear?
In other words, to the legislator who is trying to make it safe for teachers who want to talk about ID.... this bill won't have the effect you think it will...
But it would probably turn into hundreds, or thousands, of contests over whether what a particular teacher said, on a particular day, was "scientific" or not. A lot of students would get handed some bad crap from their uneducated teachers this way. The bill essentially says, "we have to protect teachers from following the curriculum or from presenting the facts, if they find the facts to be challenging to their world view." You're saying that the actual facts would win when weighed by any reasonably objective viewer... which, they would. The problem is that what is, and is not science would have to be continually re-established on a teacher-by-teacher, day-by-day basis. To avoid that, there could be simple standards and an agreed-upon body of knowldedge and concepts... a curriculum! But this bill seeks to protect teachers from having to adhere to one. It's not a Trojan Horse, it's a swamp of hearings, suits, and wasted classroom hours for students. It should be be blocked, now, and forever.
And yet, here we are, having an open conversation about it. Don't you see? I was responding to a comment that implied you could do the same thing in Iran, if not quite so conveniently. That's clearly not true, and he was just being an apologist for the Iranian regime, and somehow making it the fault of the US that the mullahs in Iran enable a government that kills and jails people for doing what we're doing, right now.
To be completely fair, I sure wouldn't want people to judge me or make assumptions about me based on the leader that we (Americans) elected and the actions of the current administration.
How about the last administration, and its current attempt to become the next one? How about congress and the senate?
It wants Iran to be and to be perceived as a bunch of all isolated religious fanatics.
No, Iran itself wants to be, and wants to be perceived that way. There's no other way to explain it, and the frequently repeated ravings of its top elected official. You seem to think that Iran is a reasonable place full of professionals that vote their conscience. If that's true, then the expression of their will is their current leader, and their current program of funding all sorts of extremist militants, terrorists, and cutthroat muderers who send mentally disabled women into markets full of children to blow up bombs. No? That's NOT what the people of Iran want? Then why do they put forth a government that acts in that way, and talks in terms of wiping other countries off the map? Or perhaps you're wrong, and the place IS ruthlessly controlled by militant religious crazies. You can't have it both ways. Either it's NOT a moderate, forward-looking country with a professional middle class that can shape the government - in which case you've been painting the wrong picture and you know it, OR, those people do have liberty to do as they choose, and the government you see there now - and its actions - IS what they choose... in which case you're also painting the wrong picture. Reformers there are shot down at every turn - both literally and figuratively.
Yes. Arson is a real laugh riot.
Oh, please. I'm making fun of the people who do crap like that. Burning down expensive model homes is the ultimate temper tantrum. The twits of ELF (who appear to have done this) are so unable to get people to see their point of view that they have to resort to torching other people's property in order to get enough cred with their fellow twits. That was all about bragging rights among a group of people so disconnected from reality, and so unable to communicate a lucid point of view or rational perspective that they behave like two year olds smashing someone else's toys in a fit of pique over being unable to articulate anything sensible or persuasive. It's the height of asshattery. I hope they go to jail, for a long time. And not jail for the "I like to watch things burn" damaged goods type characters, but jail for the "I like to destroy other people's property in an attempt to make political points through shock and destruction, which means I'm actually a classical terrorist" types.
No, I think that the people from Opera just went to Seattle and burned the houses of the project managers .
BSG actually addresses a great number of the questions you ask. And the answer, in the fiction that they've elected to write, is, "These are humans. They're not very far removed from us at all, evolutionarily, and thus their culture and their personal capacity to take in the world around them and react to it isn't very different at all from our own." That you don't find fiction built around that to be interesting is certainly reasonable, but that doesn't make it bad scifi. By your standards, really good scifi would involve gasesous or jellyfish aliens living under unimaginably different circumstances using though patterns and sensory input that we can't possibly understand and which can't be conveyed usefully in writing or on screen. This would not be compelling to a large enough audience to allow the producers of the series to risk the millions of dollars it costs to make the fiction visible on your screen in the first place.
Most people like to connect to their entertainment in some way. They want a surrogate, for themselves, experiencing something in the narrative. Call him Ishmael. Or Tolkien's hobbits. They're there to provide us an anchor within the events. BSG is proposing an all but destroyed space-faring culture, sentient beings that they've constructed, the reality of some seemingly semi-mystical connection between parties as yet unclearly defined, and the torturous wrestling that the characters we see are having to do with those circumstances. Sure there's some fairly familiar interpersonal stuff playing out in that context, but the larger arc was launched by circumstances that - were they to happen to us - WOULD be world-view-changing. When your practical reality completely changes (and happens to involve FTL travel in rickety ships running away from hot-looking theocratic meat robots), that's not just a space western or As The Solar System Turns.
Way to keep a falsehood going. Obama was talking about 10 or 20 years down the line, if Al Queda showed up again in Iraq.
Except, they are there now, and Obama's talking about getting out immediately, as if it didn't matter that they'd rather be there than try to claw their way back into the cozy digs they had in Afghanistan while the Taliban thugs were (sort of) running the place. Al Queda isn't going to leave Iraq just because coalition troops do.
A huge part of the problem is that you're occupying their country
The Al Queda people that are causing the problem aren't from that country. They're Moroccans, Saudis, Syrians, Iranians, etc. These are extremists that do not want to see a constitutional, democratic state settle down into modernity next door to theocratic thugocracies like Iran. It's not the Iraqis that are attacking themselves with cash and weapons shipped in from Iran through Syria, you know?
And also.... since when is it bad to talk to other leaders?
When the very act of doing so gives them more propoganda leverage. Not all leaders are the same, and you can't use the same tactics and strategies across the board. Giving Kim, in North Korea, the ability to tell his information-(and food-)-starved people that he "commanded an appearance by the president of the United States" would be just pouring more salt into the wounds of having to live under a regime like that. He needs to be starved of media coverage, not showered with more of it.
Stop being so afraid of everything.
Ask the South Koreans who is actually afraid of what. Ask the people who would have been overrun by NK a long time ago if not for our presence there whether or not they think we should give Kim more credibility, and lighten up on him. You're confusing "fear" with "reality." Fear is allowing your elections to be altered by terrorists blowing up trains in your capital city. Fear is being so worried that stupid people will confuse rational immigration laws with the policies of a long-dead Fascist regime in your country that you allow your country to slip towards bankruptcy and major civil unrest as a flood of immigrants from Africa and Middle East swamp your economy while barely contributing to it. Fear is committing to help keep murderous thugs like the Taliban from regaining power over the women and children in Afghanistan, and then not actually meeting those commitments because it plays badly in your local politics. Fear is being so afraid that you'll lose some votes in a local election that you'd rather back down from a promise, and let other countries deal with foreigners in Afghanistan that drag women into the town square and shoot them in the head for offending Allah by taking a job to feed her family. That's fear. And supreme cowardice. As is pretending that the very same movement, funded by foreigners, is going to magically go away as the young government in Iraq tries to deal with it in the wake of a precipitous withdrawl of the troops that are there to help.
If I'm hopeful I'd say the cultural, unconscious biases are very strong
Right, because it would be far more appropriate for a show written by Americans for a primarily US audience to make sure that the social dynamics depicted in the show completely embraced, instead, the perspective of people from rural Nigeria? Or made it be all about Tibet? Or perhaps focused the entire thing on a subculture of young, cosmopolitan Italian girls who are utterly convinced that sunglasses and shoes are the most important thing in the universe, and who would root for the blond Cylon because she has Fabulous Outfits?
No, what you're saying is the only thing that would make the show better would be if it were a non-stop condemnation of US culture, and was instead more diverse, which we can understand to mean, "more like some other specific culture that hasn't managed to scrape together the cash or interest to produce a similarly interesting entertainment vehicle that explores their own issues."
he's Santa Claus
Well, you got that part right, anyway. Because a whole of people get warm and fuzzy looking at him, romanticizing what they hope he is, and all he does is deliver vague platitudes with a nice, poetic cadence. He's a blank canvas on which people are projecting their personal wishses, and he's more than happy to take that and run with it. The level of delusion and naivete in his concert-style shows is really remarkable.
he's the Prince of Peace
Oh, except for that part. On that front, he's willing to let untold thousands die by precipitously pulling out of a country that Al Queda itself says is central to their plans. He's willing to say that if (his words) Al Queda were to show up in Iraq, he'd consider air strikes, and then occupying that country to deal with the problem. The whole point of depriving Al Queda of a friendly host "government" in Afghanistan (if you can call the Taliban rule that was ended there a government), and in making Iraq a place where Al Queda is placing (and now badly losing) so much of their resources was to break up that movement's capacity to operate in a central way. Obama doesn't seem to think that Al Queda ia a problem at this point, but is will to talk about bombing and invasion in Iraq "should the become established there" blah blah. Wow. Just, wow. That's your peace-loving saint?
If he's even a fraction as smart as his fainting crowds of worshippers think he is, then he has to know he's very wrong in saying all of that. So, there are two options: he's lying through his teeth to buy feel-good votes from fools, or he's himself that poorly informed. Either thing makes him iredeemingly a bad choice. Just his willingness (as he's repeated over and over) to unconditionally make camera time with tyrants both petty and big-league, giving them exactly the stage time and ego boost they need by traveling to their dens and giving them free PR is... incredible.
lefty rhetoric
The funny thing is, I meant to say "lofty" rhetoric, but my typo/Freudian slip is actually more accurate.
At this point, he's more likely an Obama supporter
The thing is, Obama - through sheer audacity of hope and lefty rhetoric - actually can bring the dead back to life. Also, college girls actually faint when he talks. Now that's qualifications for being Commander in Chief, no matter how extensive is your opponent's collection of Pentagon-briefing-ready pantsuits.