Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital,
The day they figure out how to make cars run on boner pills will be the day oil subsidies stop and fucking subsidies start!
We'll continue the "lie" in the hopes that our children will take up the mantle and fight for freedom from domestic spying and all the other Constitutional abuses that we have permitted to creep into our lives. Since us adults have utterly failed at the job.
This. I bet if you asked Snowden himself, he'd say that as a child he completely bought into all the lies about the US's moral superiority and that is precisely what led him to become a whistle-blowing fugitive today.
FWIW, Ever since he redesigned the site it has been very noscript-unfriendly, all that multiple page stuff simply doesn't work, not even by manually clicking the "next page" button at the bottom. I'm not a fan, just an occasional visitor, so if enabling one or two javascript sources doesn't fix basic navigation on a site I don't bother to try any harder, I just browse what's easy to read and visit even less frequently.
To say it's not from their religion is disingenuous.
Every religion has shit in it. Even the people who say Jesus was 100% non-violent can't explain away his beating of the money-changers and then there are all the others who are happy to point at the verses in the new testament where jesus says that he's basically there to update the old testament but not to throw it out, so all the crap that was in there still gives them carte blanche. Even Buddhists occasionally decide that all the Buddha's teaching about non-violence don't apply to themselves.
People who want to find justification in religion for violence and cruelty will find it no matter what. The violence and cruelty does not stat with their religion, it starts with their hearts. They're just looking for a way to avoid responsibility for their actions.
Sorry, but if the percentage of people in Egypt who believe apostates should be executed is anywhere close to 80%, that's not a meaningless number.
Numbers without context ARE meaningless and the only context you have for understanding what's going on over there is the crap that guys like Pipes serve up in a vastly over-simplified western-lensed form.
Can you link to something which explains it? He sure does have a hard-on for Greenwald, so much of what Johnson writes is meaningless invective basically everything Greenwald says is apparently self-evidently WRONG!!! That makes it hard to discern a rational argument in the background of all that noise.
After your contributions to this thread, you don't have much credibility to say who is a "muslim-hater" and who isn't.
I say YOU are a muslim hater. You are smart enough to avoid the spittle spewing crazy rhetoric but you still use the same arguments that trivialize the vast majority of muslims who aren't crazy and put the blame for the ones who are crazy on their religion.
Every once in a while you let your own crazy slip out - like how your apologia for daniel pipes brushed over the entire issue - that what the fundies think matters. When the SPLC calls the guy out, the argument is pretty much over.
There it is again: your idea that religious craziness is foisted on people by dictators.
No not "foisted," cultivated either as a useful tool or as a side-effect of their absolutism. The Saudis support the salafists because it is a useful tool for them, so did Mubarak encourage the muslim brotherhood to a lesser degree. It worked so well that even Gaddafi thought he'd give it a try in the 90s but it didn't take because of his very public flamboyant lifestyle. In other places under conflict like Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, etc the fundies become popular because religion is a unifying force. In a country with long-term stability and without massive inequality there is very little opportunity for fundamentalism. Look at most muslim-majority countries back through the 1960s - far less extremism because there was far less stress on their societies. Afghani cities were some of the most relaxed in the entire region.
Furthermore, I've noticed that you have strong objections to certain facts, and seem to prefer that people simply pretend those facts don't exist.
No, I have a strong objection to your mis-characterization of certain facts. Numbers without context are meaningless - your context is that of ignorance of and is biased towards bigotry. You've never been to a mosque and you get your information from guys like Daniel Pipes a hater and a war-monger.
Islam is nothing special when it comes to nasty conservatives.
I strongly agree with everything you said in the last paragraph.
Sometimes people just don't realize the full implications of their own analogies...
Ceasar's Palace exists for one reason and one reason only - to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible. They (and all of the other modern casino/resorts) pioneered "Big Data" techniques to figure out just how much they could squeeze out of every person that comes into contact with them. They've got official policies on paper to deny it. but they are happy to manipulate and exploit addiction to get all of the money.
Same story, different day. They are speaking publicly, but not everyone is listening, paying attention, or caring.
Actually, pretty much anyone who has been paying attention to the leaks has seen those "disclosures" and also seen just how flimsy they are - full of carefully parsed wording meant to mislead, statements that contradict public testimony in the trials and even a refusal to answer the question of how much the NSA participation was key rather than ancillary to stopping the plots.
I'm betting you could run a pretty good election campaign just on that alone, because the demonizing isn't going to well except among the circle jerks in DC.
Get of the slashdot technerd bubble and I think you will be amazed at just how well the demonization is going. Yesterday I dropped by Little green footballs a blog famous for doing a 180 on islamaphobia a few years back and calling the bigots out for what they are.
Turns out those guys fucking hate Snowden. This surveillance shit is ridiculous bordering on evil to anyone like us, but the people who aren't like us make up a majority of the country and they just can't grasp the implications.
Come on man, linking to danielpipes? That's one of the top 5 muslim-hater websites. He's one of those nutjobs who lost his shit claiming Obama was a former muslim with all kinds of massive geo-political implications. A man is known by the company he keeps. Maybe you'd like to cite his buddies Robert Spencer or Pamela Gellar to?
country that held to modern Western "hippie Islam"... As you noted, some Muslim majority nations are leaning that way, which is wonderful.
Wow, way to profoundly misunderstand the situation. Countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakstan aren't even remotely close to being westernized there ain't nothing progressive about them. They don't have much religious craziness because the dictators there never needed to cultivate it in the first place, they inherited a massive state control apparatus from the USSR. The whole concept of "western hippie islam" is so much arrogance built on ignorance. You keep saying shit like that you are surprised people judge you a bigot?
Turkey on the other hand has been basically a democracy since the 1940s so there wasn't a dictator looking to harness religion for his own purposes.
(Ten percent of a nation wanting to kill me for insulting their prophet is still enough to justify my pointing a finger and shrilly screeching about them, though.)
There will always be assholes. You want to point fingers look at Russia - 30% of the country thinks sending Pussy Riot to hard labor camps notorious for frequent and regular rapes was appropriate and only 5% think they shouldn't have been punished at all. If the death penalty was legal in Russia some of those 30% would surely have thought that appropriate too. Until 1856 the death penalty for homosexuality was basically law of the land in the USA. Islam is nothing special when it comes to nasty conservatives.
But I didn't make any generalizations about everybody who calls themselves Muslim, but rather specifically about Islamists
And just WTF is an "islamist?" When you hang your hat on stats that imply entire countries are "islamist" then whatever your definition is, it ain't precise enough to be meaningful.
Consider this Pew Research poll, which found that in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan, there were 84%, 86%, and 76% of the populace, respectively, who favored the death penalty for leaving Islam. How does that fit with your characterization? Poorly, it seems to me.
Consider the same poll which found that in Azerbaijan, Kazakstan and Turkey there were 93%, 96% and 89% of the populace, respectively, who opposed the death penalty for leaving islam. How does that fit with your characterization? Poorly, it seems to me. Clearly there is something else beyond simply being muslim that is going on in the countries which favor the death penalty for apostasy.
And that's the problem with guys like you - its all confirmation bias based on ignorance which you end up characterizing as "indisputable facts."
Fundamentalist Islam is no less "Islamic" than modern liberal Islam.
Well at least you've dropped the charade that you aren't here to tell muslims you know better than they do about their religion.
I'm not really interested in judging you. I assume that everybody is imperfect but reasonably decent until they behave otherwise.
I'm more interested in judging God since he's the big kahuna and all. That's why I think you kind of punted on the "I will ask him when I get there" line - if by that what you really mean is that you take it as an article of faith, I can accept that. Faith is fundamental to religion, but faith itself is not persuasive to people who have not taken that leap because the very definition of faith is something which you believe but can not prove.
I am responding to your statement that you only find good in the bible. My point is that is what everybody who calls themselves a Christian would say, regardless of exactly how "Christian" they act. It's meaningless.
Don't take this as a judgment on you because I don't know you, it is a general statement: Nobody ever admits to being evil - even to their inner selves. Sometimes in hindsight they will realize their error (in the news today Alan Manning Chambers is very publicly coming to terms with his), but never before they actually do evil.
Everyone, even the most notorious, right down to Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, they all were convinced of their righteousness. None of them thought of themselves as a bad guy.
No. God is a big boy. He isn't frustrated in heaven wondering what went wrong. It's no a surprise to him that evil would take the course it did. It was his plan back at the time of creation that He would send His son to die for our evil. That is what Jesus did.
I don't see how deliberately choosing to create a system that includes evil so that people can struggle with it is a good thing when there is the option to simply not have evil at all.
I didn't say that God couldn't create a universe without evil. He chose to create it this way. When I get to heaven, I'll ask Him why he did it this way.
That sounds like a version of "it is not for us to judge" which isn't particularly convincing.
BTW...thank you for not being rude, condescending, or arrogant in this discussion. It makes an intelligent discourse possible. It seems to show lack of intelligence when people just end with calling names. So, thank you again for that!
Don't worry, I save that for people who use their faith to rationalize persecution of other people. I believe in the saying that "When you read the Bible, the Bible also reads you" - people with malice in their heart will find malice in the bible, those with good intentions will only find good in the bible.
God is all powerful but in allowing free will (giving you the ability to choose) He has allowed evil as much as we desire it.
You appear to be arguing that the potential for evil is a necessary requirement of free will. Correct?
If so, that's just another way of saying that god is not omnipotent. That His will is constrained by some other force that requires free will to include the potential for evil. That God can not create a universe in which evil simply does not exist, just as this universe has all kinds of physical laws of nature that He could have defined to work some other way if He so desired it. A truly omnipotent God could create a universe in which the metaphysical laws work such that free will can exist without evil.
The rest of that sentence was "actual core religion (not a perversion thereof) of a substantial fraction of humanity",
Breaking my promise - but that is a distinction without a difference. Unless you are prepared to say that what you mean by a "substantial fraction of humanity" is really a minority of muslims with extremist views. I'm pretty sure you didn't mean that, because everything else in your argument falls apart if you did.
If you either apostatize or insult the so-called prophet in Riyadh or Tehran or many other places, then the local religion says you must be put to death
No, the extremist theocratic government says that you must be put to death. Dictators who have co-opted a religion and encouraged extremism for their political goals are, by definition, not representative. That's like saying the Inquisition defines christianity.
They can't get it into their minds that the actual core religion (not a perversion thereof) of a substantial fraction of humanity wants to kill us.
Whoop! There it is. The only true muslim is a psycho-muslim. Just like the westboro baptist church are the only true Christians. Of course the non-muslim who can't read arabic, has never been to a mosque in his life is imminently qualified to tell all those people they aren't real muslims.
All the parts of the quaran that talk about peace don't count because they've been 'abrogated' but all the parts that talk about warfare in specific cases actually apply everywhere and always because thats the excuse the crazies use to rationalize violence in pursuit of their own goals and obviously bloodthirsty nutjobs are the people best qualified to understand a religion.
Stupid libtards, they'll never learn!!!
I know you will never change your mind, your premise is basically unfalsifiable just like any conspiracy theory. This summary is for everyone else who might possibly have started to be fooled by your bullshit.
They do it for exactly the same reason they put japanese americans in internment camps during WWII - it is easy for them to do and they don't give a damn about the impact on the innocent and effectiveness is something to be worried about later.
Yeah, you'd need something the size of a "truck" to carry around that much shielding.
Unlike the suitcase and backpack the previous poster postulated.
The problem with the truck is that it is going to be a lot further away from your target, which means lots of juice. You park a truck with a constantly running diesel generator outside of someone's house, people are going to notice pretty quick.
You've also upped your costs to the point where you are going to need funding from people who are probably going to report you...
Slashdot Mirror
Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital,
The day they figure out how to make cars run on boner pills will be the day oil subsidies stop and fucking subsidies start!
You can count on it being IRS compliant too.
We'll continue the "lie" in the hopes that our children will take up the mantle and fight for freedom from domestic spying and all the other Constitutional abuses that we have permitted to creep into our lives. Since us adults have utterly failed at the job.
This. I bet if you asked Snowden himself, he'd say that as a child he completely bought into all the lies about the US's moral superiority and that is precisely what led him to become a whistle-blowing fugitive today.
Thanks for the summary.
FWIW, Ever since he redesigned the site it has been very noscript-unfriendly, all that multiple page stuff simply doesn't work, not even by manually clicking the "next page" button at the bottom. I'm not a fan, just an occasional visitor, so if enabling one or two javascript sources doesn't fix basic navigation on a site I don't bother to try any harder, I just browse what's easy to read and visit even less frequently.
To say it's not from their religion is disingenuous.
Every religion has shit in it. Even the people who say Jesus was 100% non-violent can't explain away his beating of the money-changers and then there are all the others who are happy to point at the verses in the new testament where jesus says that he's basically there to update the old testament but not to throw it out, so all the crap that was in there still gives them carte blanche. Even Buddhists occasionally decide that all the Buddha's teaching about non-violence don't apply to themselves.
People who want to find justification in religion for violence and cruelty will find it no matter what. The violence and cruelty does not stat with their religion, it starts with their hearts. They're just looking for a way to avoid responsibility for their actions.
Sorry, but if the percentage of people in Egypt who believe apostates should be executed is anywhere close to 80%, that's not a meaningless number.
Numbers without context ARE meaningless and the only context you have for understanding what's going on over there is the crap that guys like Pipes serve up in a vastly over-simplified western-lensed form.
Can you link to something which explains it? He sure does have a hard-on for Greenwald, so much of what Johnson writes is meaningless invective basically everything Greenwald says is apparently self-evidently WRONG!!! That makes it hard to discern a rational argument in the background of all that noise.
After your contributions to this thread, you don't have much credibility to say who is a "muslim-hater" and who isn't.
I say YOU are a muslim hater. You are smart enough to avoid the spittle spewing crazy rhetoric but you still use the same arguments that trivialize the vast majority of muslims who aren't crazy and put the blame for the ones who are crazy on their religion.
Every once in a while you let your own crazy slip out - like how your apologia for daniel pipes brushed over the entire issue - that what the fundies think matters. When the SPLC calls the guy out, the argument is pretty much over.
There it is again: your idea that religious craziness is foisted on people by dictators.
No not "foisted," cultivated either as a useful tool or as a side-effect of their absolutism. The Saudis support the salafists because it is a useful tool for them, so did Mubarak encourage the muslim brotherhood to a lesser degree. It worked so well that even Gaddafi thought he'd give it a try in the 90s but it didn't take because of his very public flamboyant lifestyle. In other places under conflict like Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, etc the fundies become popular because religion is a unifying force. In a country with long-term stability and without massive inequality there is very little opportunity for fundamentalism. Look at most muslim-majority countries back through the 1960s - far less extremism because there was far less stress on their societies. Afghani cities were some of the most relaxed in the entire region.
Furthermore, I've noticed that you have strong objections to certain facts, and seem to prefer that people simply pretend those facts don't exist.
No, I have a strong objection to your mis-characterization of certain facts. Numbers without context are meaningless - your context is that of ignorance of and is biased towards bigotry. You've never been to a mosque and you get your information from guys like Daniel Pipes a hater and a war-monger.
Islam is nothing special when it comes to nasty conservatives.
I strongly agree with everything you said in the last paragraph.
Then why all the focus on islam?
Sometimes people just don't realize the full implications of their own analogies...
Ceasar's Palace exists for one reason and one reason only - to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible. They (and all of the other modern casino/resorts) pioneered "Big Data" techniques to figure out just how much they could squeeze out of every person that comes into contact with them. They've got official policies on paper to deny it. but they are happy to manipulate and exploit addiction to get all of the money.
Same story, different day. They are speaking publicly, but not everyone is listening, paying attention, or caring.
Actually, pretty much anyone who has been paying attention to the leaks has seen those "disclosures" and also seen just how flimsy they are - full of carefully parsed wording meant to mislead, statements that contradict public testimony in the trials and even a refusal to answer the question of how much the NSA participation was key rather than ancillary to stopping the plots.
I'm betting you could run a pretty good election campaign just on that alone, because the demonizing isn't going to well except among the circle jerks in DC.
Get of the slashdot technerd bubble and I think you will be amazed at just how well the demonization is going. Yesterday I dropped by Little green footballs a blog famous for doing a 180 on islamaphobia a few years back and calling the bigots out for what they are.
Turns out those guys fucking hate Snowden. This surveillance shit is ridiculous bordering on evil to anyone like us, but the people who aren't like us make up a majority of the country and they just can't grasp the implications.
Because:
Officials from President Obama down have said they welcomed the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs...
But only to secret judges on secret courts.
Come on man, linking to danielpipes? That's one of the top 5 muslim-hater websites. He's one of those nutjobs who lost his shit claiming Obama was a former muslim with all kinds of massive geo-political implications. A man is known by the company he keeps. Maybe you'd like to cite his buddies Robert Spencer or Pamela Gellar to?
country that held to modern Western "hippie Islam" ... As you noted, some Muslim majority nations are leaning that way, which is wonderful.
Wow, way to profoundly misunderstand the situation. Countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakstan aren't even remotely close to being westernized there ain't nothing progressive about them. They don't have much religious craziness because the dictators there never needed to cultivate it in the first place, they inherited a massive state control apparatus from the USSR. The whole concept of "western hippie islam" is so much arrogance built on ignorance. You keep saying shit like that you are surprised people judge you a bigot?
Turkey on the other hand has been basically a democracy since the 1940s so there wasn't a dictator looking to harness religion for his own purposes.
(Ten percent of a nation wanting to kill me for insulting their prophet is still enough to justify my pointing a finger and shrilly screeching about them, though.)
There will always be assholes. You want to point fingers look at Russia - 30% of the country thinks sending Pussy Riot to hard labor camps notorious for frequent and regular rapes was appropriate and only 5% think they shouldn't have been punished at all. If the death penalty was legal in Russia some of those 30% would surely have thought that appropriate too. Until 1856 the death penalty for homosexuality was basically law of the land in the USA. Islam is nothing special when it comes to nasty conservatives.
But I didn't make any generalizations about everybody who calls themselves Muslim, but rather specifically about Islamists
And just WTF is an "islamist?" When you hang your hat on stats that imply entire countries are "islamist" then whatever your definition is, it ain't precise enough to be meaningful.
Consider this Pew Research poll, which found that in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan, there were 84%, 86%, and 76% of the populace, respectively, who favored the death penalty for leaving Islam. How does that fit with your characterization? Poorly, it seems to me.
Consider the same poll which found that in Azerbaijan, Kazakstan and Turkey there were 93%, 96% and 89% of the populace, respectively, who opposed the death penalty for leaving islam. How does that fit with your characterization? Poorly, it seems to me. Clearly there is something else beyond simply being muslim that is going on in the countries which favor the death penalty for apostasy.
And that's the problem with guys like you - its all confirmation bias based on ignorance which you end up characterizing as "indisputable facts."
Fundamentalist Islam is no less "Islamic" than modern liberal Islam.
Well at least you've dropped the charade that you aren't here to tell muslims you know better than they do about their religion.
I'm not really interested in judging you. I assume that everybody is imperfect but reasonably decent until they behave otherwise.
I'm more interested in judging God since he's the big kahuna and all. That's why I think you kind of punted on the "I will ask him when I get there" line - if by that what you really mean is that you take it as an article of faith, I can accept that. Faith is fundamental to religion, but faith itself is not persuasive to people who have not taken that leap because the very definition of faith is something which you believe but can not prove.
I am responding to your statement that you only find good in the bible. My point is that is what everybody who calls themselves a Christian would say, regardless of exactly how "Christian" they act. It's meaningless.
Don't take this as a judgment on you because I don't know you, it is a general statement: Nobody ever admits to being evil - even to their inner selves. Sometimes in hindsight they will realize their error (in the news today Alan Manning Chambers is very publicly coming to terms with his), but never before they actually do evil.
Everyone, even the most notorious, right down to Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, they all were convinced of their righteousness. None of them thought of themselves as a bad guy.
No. God is a big boy. He isn't frustrated in heaven wondering what went wrong. It's no a surprise to him that evil would take the course it did. It was his plan back at the time of creation that He would send His son to die for our evil. That is what Jesus did.
I don't see how deliberately choosing to create a system that includes evil so that people can struggle with it is a good thing when there is the option to simply not have evil at all.
I didn't say that God couldn't create a universe without evil. He chose to create it this way. When I get to heaven, I'll ask Him why he did it this way.
That sounds like a version of "it is not for us to judge" which isn't particularly convincing.
BTW...thank you for not being rude, condescending, or arrogant in this discussion. It makes an intelligent discourse possible. It seems to show lack of intelligence when people just end with calling names. So, thank you again for that!
Don't worry, I save that for people who use their faith to rationalize persecution of other people. I believe in the saying that "When you read the Bible, the Bible also reads you" - people with malice in their heart will find malice in the bible, those with good intentions will only find good in the bible.
God is all powerful but in allowing free will (giving you the ability to choose) He has allowed evil as much as we desire it.
You appear to be arguing that the potential for evil is a necessary requirement of free will. Correct?
If so, that's just another way of saying that god is not omnipotent. That His will is constrained by some other force that requires free will to include the potential for evil. That God can not create a universe in which evil simply does not exist, just as this universe has all kinds of physical laws of nature that He could have defined to work some other way if He so desired it. A truly omnipotent God could create a universe in which the metaphysical laws work such that free will can exist without evil.
The rest of that sentence was "actual core religion (not a perversion thereof) of a substantial fraction of humanity",
Breaking my promise - but that is a distinction without a difference. Unless you are prepared to say that what you mean by a "substantial fraction of humanity" is really a minority of muslims with extremist views. I'm pretty sure you didn't mean that, because everything else in your argument falls apart if you did.
If you either apostatize or insult the so-called prophet in Riyadh or Tehran or many other places, then the local religion says you must be put to death
No, the extremist theocratic government says that you must be put to death. Dictators who have co-opted a religion and encouraged extremism for their political goals are, by definition, not representative. That's like saying the Inquisition defines christianity.
Notice that it is YOU who are making claims about what is the "one true Islam",
A phrase i've not used nor intimated, while you wrote: "the actual core religion"
And that is the last response you'll get from me in this thread, your brand of crazy is never worth the effort to engage with.
They can't get it into their minds that the actual core religion (not a perversion thereof) of a substantial fraction of humanity wants to kill us.
Whoop! There it is. The only true muslim is a psycho-muslim. Just like the westboro baptist church are the only true Christians. Of course the non-muslim who can't read arabic, has never been to a mosque in his life is imminently qualified to tell all those people they aren't real muslims.
All the parts of the quaran that talk about peace don't count because they've been 'abrogated' but all the parts that talk about warfare in specific cases actually apply everywhere and always because thats the excuse the crazies use to rationalize violence in pursuit of their own goals and obviously bloodthirsty nutjobs are the people best qualified to understand a religion.
Stupid libtards, they'll never learn!!!
I know you will never change your mind, your premise is basically unfalsifiable just like any conspiracy theory. This summary is for everyone else who might possibly have started to be fooled by your bullshit.
They do it for exactly the same reason they put japanese americans in internment camps during WWII - it is easy for them to do and they don't give a damn about the impact on the innocent and effectiveness is something to be worried about later.
To be fair, Obama didn't win the Nobel prize for ending wars. He won the prize for not being Bush.
To be fair, the genetic engineering techniques pioneered by Monsanto have enabled us to correct that.
Yeah, you'd need something the size of a "truck" to carry around that much shielding.
Unlike the suitcase and backpack the previous poster postulated.
The problem with the truck is that it is going to be a lot further away from your target, which means lots of juice. You park a truck with a constantly running diesel generator outside of someone's house, people are going to notice pretty quick.
You've also upped your costs to the point where you are going to need funding from people who are probably going to report you...