I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?
Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future.
Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.
As for current grievances, yes, the US has done some things that are inconsistent with its ideals. The cure is to start acting consistently and supporting the end of tyranny in the ME. Oh! that's what we're doing now and are being opposed by people who want to maintain the corrupt status quo.
Your argument doesn't hold up.
I think the parent poster probably meant that "acting consistently and supporting the end of tyranny" means to stop propping up tyrants in the first place, before we have to "undo" our mistakes with force of arms. Otherwise, yes, I agree with you. Going further, we might want to engage the world diplomatically at present, to ensure peace for the future. This is, of course, difficult, but that doesn't mean that we should just say, "Fuck it! We're strong enough to go it alone!" as the current administration seems to be saying. The current mess that we're in is due to the bad decisions of the past coming back to haunt us. So we should be saying, "Fuck it! We're strong enough to go it *together*, including everyone, starting right now!" Y'know, sort of short-circuiting history, and refusing to be held hostage by it, while still acknowledging it. Otherwise, we get into the sort of tit-for-tat bullshit that you mention in your first paragraph -- "I Crusaded you before you Crusaded me, so it's my turn to strike..." "No way, my claim to this land predates yours, so..." "Well, my holy book says..." ad nauseum.
Seems to me (a EE from Purdue) that the only thing that makes engineering engineering as opposed to arts or crafts is the use of metrics. That is, you're s'posed to be able to design something to fit within a certain set of constraints, and have a way to objectively measure how well you've done. It seems to me that a lot of software is built by artisans, who "just build the damn thing" without really worrying about what constraints may exist in the problem domain. That's certainly how I seem to write my code... Most of these software artisans wouldn't be able to do a comparison with another piece of software that purports to solve the same design problem without a side-by-side benchmark after the code is written. Real engineers know before build-time how well their design compares to others.
I guess it's time for me to go re-read some algorithm books:).
I read Resolution 687 after finding it using AltaVista three or four years ago:). It's the "future ongoing verification" part of the language in that resolution that jobbed the Iraqis. That language was used by the US and UK to cement the sanctions, for all practical purposes.
I'm lost now. What are you talking about? The organization formerly known as the PKK, now called KADEK, is a Marxist-Stalinist terrorist organization that used to operate out of Turkey, but since 1999 has been based in northwestern Iraq. Bringing them to the bargaining table, as you suggested, would be a diplomatic nightmare for the United States. But that's okay; it could never happen. Turkey will never negotiate with that group.
My bad, and I'm sorry -- you were mistaken, because I was mistaken -- I assumed that you were calling Iraq the Marxist-Stalinist organization, and Israel the only US ally in the region! Of course you're right, it's the future relations between Turkey and the PUK that are critical currently -- not the PKK, no matter how much they change their name -- especially since there are radical Islamic elements among the Kurds that the PUK can't control whose actions might offer pretexts for Turkey to start running Kashmir-style counter-insurgencies. I think we have to make sure that we deal fairly with all the parties involved, and soon, since nation-building is hard work, and you can't keep a strong nationalistic movement down forever...
Which leads me to a new point, which you don't want me "the fuck" to talk about: Why isn't Israel considered to be part of the discussion for any regional solution? Every member of the "Arab street," and every member of the Iranian street, for that matter, would consider its treatment of the Palestinians to be the pressing issue. Shit, the fact that the occupation is ongoing strengthens any radical in the Arab world that you care to choose, Saddam included. We can only talk about legitimate enforcement of UN resolutions when we start holding Israel to be in the same contempt that we hold Iraq to be in, and that's why this war has damaged US relations with most of the mideast so badly. We can also only mention WMD nonproliferation when we can admit in the same breath that Israel has a strapping young nuclear program. Serious talks, not fear-mongering and provocations from both sides, are what are required. Only the US can compel it. Remove the conflict, and you've removed the rhetoric and the radicalization from any splinter group you care to name.
We are not going to have a conversation about Israel, okay?
Someday, we have to. For now, it's apparently a "red line" for you to even discuss examples of bad judgement in American policy. You're not the only one, of course -- MSNBC and Fox News specialize in it. But that's the wrong way to go! There's an awful lot of bad news about to come raining down on my head (and in the worst case, perhaps actual chunks of buildings) because of attitudes like that. We can all sit around and say "why do they hate us," (which is what the Iraqis will say if their humanitarian aid isn't forthcoming at the end of the war), and refuse to listen to the "utterly wrong" things that we hear in reply, only hearing what we want to hear. Or, we can use the right kind of preemption -- diplomacy, not war -- when we still have the chance, and before things get bad. Let's hope we give everyone involved a fair hearing, too, and not just play favorites for short-term strategic gain. We would take the first step. Think of the example we could set to the rest of the world if we would try it. Whenever I see how things are done with my taxes, things I think are terrible mistakes, my feelings of disenfrachisement reappear -- although "disenfranchisement" isn't the right word, you're right, it should be more like "lack of agency" or something. That rosy picture you painted at the beginning of this too-long thread two days ago about the shiny new Iraqi Federation had better come true, all of it, and super-quick, or the responsibility will be all of ours (50% yours, 25% mine, quit whining) for whatever intentionally-unforseen consequences occur.
Wow. OK, I suspect that the person who is disinterested in diplomacy might be you, moreso than even our government. And I've definitely become left-wing, and I'm definitely not typical. And if you want to "shut down" our conversation, perhaps with an exciting televised MOAB bomb on my personal palaces, or even by not responding, that's cool -- although I'd prefer to not be on the receiving end of the MOAB, thanks...
The UNSCOM inspections were compromised by Iraq's well-founded suspicions of Richard Butler's spying. He was certainly "guided" by the US. After him, Iraq wasn't going to trust inspectors. That's why El-Baredei's currently in UNMOVIC -- he doesn't offend Iraq as much. Good cop to Blix's bad cop, is the way I see it. But back to UNSCOM: I think that Scott Ritter was able to get a lot done, before we yanked the inspectors out for Operation Desert Fox. He was able to find and destroy those Russian-built centrifuges, and dump that yeasty precursor goop into a pit back in '97, remember?
Al-Samoud missles, and their extra 10 km range, aren't weapons of mass destruction without warheads, which was apparently how their range was determined -- but you're right, they were proscribed by the unending, sanctions-preserving Resolution 687 -- so good thing the inspectors found them and started destroying them, right? Whoops, that means that inspections were working, and we mght be nearing an end to sanctions, which would be results achieved through (slow and steady) diplomacy! I don't know why this administration seemed to resent when the inspectors didn't find a smoking gun, and actually reduced whatever was left of Iraq's pathetic military. This administration, and you too, presumably, appreciate the UN when it advances short-term US interests at the expense of future stability, and dislike it otherwise. Correct me if I'm wrong. You might also want to look at this article for the reasons why Iraq might not have had anything left to declare with regards to chemical and biological weapons.
Now, at least we agree that sanctions didn't do a damn bit of good -- if for wildly different reasons, of course. That's at least a starting point. You are a serious hanging judge, and I'm the bleeding-heart "left-wing fool," who believes that US policy in that region was servely limited by our clumsy diplomacy, typified by the way we're currently acting. Let me try to convince you of some of our failures by elaborating on the earlier examples. Had we performed better in the mideast during previous crises, including never propping up Saddam mutherfucking Hussein's regime in the first place, we would have had a much better outcome in future crises.
Regarding "a solution to the Kurdish question that the parties could agree on:"
How would you gather those representatives? How would you "work out a solution?" And, most importantly, how would you justify the fact to the people of the United States that you are negotiating with a Marxist-Stalinist group with the declared purpose of bringing down a legitimate ally of the United States through terrorist means? Finally, how would you repair our relationship with Turkey after this abortive attempt at negotiation?
This is obviously the most important nut to crack, and was the source of my worries about the outcome of this war waaay back in my original post. Since you demand total satisfaction, and insist on peaceful conflict resolution in 500 words or less, I guess I'd better roll up my sleves and get started, which is of course more than anybody else (including you) seems to want to do. Remember first of all that the US, as the sole hyperpower with excellent-looking jets, can bring anybody to the table. We need to be in the national mood for it, of course, which is why American politics is international politics. If we're not quite able to galvanize ourselve into action when important events call for it, there are int
Okay, as long as we're playing armchair president, let's go all the way with it. It's January 1. Resolution 1441 is on the books, and you've got Iraq's declaration of December 7. You know, by know, that the declaration is neither complete nor accurate, which is technically a violation of 1441. What do you do? And how do imagine events would have resolved themselves?
Well, since you've already made up my mind for me, in a very enfranchising way (thanks, boss!), that "the declaration is neither complete nor accurate," and since you've already obtained resolution 1441 for me, then I, as president, would be in a pretty limited policy space. This wouldn't mean that I would have to do what Bush opted to do, though. But I don't like the current situation -- let's relax the time constraints instead, say, back to 1998 or thereabouts. I would have ended the sanctions back then, as they only strengthed Saddam Hussein's hand, at the cost of Iraqi civilian lives. I would then allow the Iraqis to determine their own history. I would accuse Hussein (as well as Kissinger and Ariel Sharon, but later for that) of war crimes, with the idea of building respect for future US policy in the area. I would gather representatives from Turkey, Syria, the PKK, and even Iraq (yes, even though I've accused their dictator of war crimes), and work out a solution to the Kurdish question that the parties could agree on. Carrot and stick again. I would insist on an equally valid, good faith roadmap to peace in Occupied Palestine -- taking as long as it takes, and without Clinton-style election bumrushing -- one that wouldn't be abused like Oslo was. I would use the UN in its peacekeeping and humanitarian roles in both areas. I would engage the Iranians, in order to strengthen the moderates' tenuous grasp in that country. The Sudanese, with their civil war, would not have their medicine factory bombed if I was caught getting a blow job, but would instead get free blow jobs as well ^H^H^H^H -- strike that, I don't know why I said that! In short, as your president, I would push for a solution of the Iraqi crisis as part of a wider regionaldiplomacy (that word again), concluding agreements that would respect the actual aspirations of Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, Israelis, Kurds, etc., without forcing them to accept, at the point of my guns or in the noose of my sanctions, my idea of a proper way to run their affairs.
Moving back to our discouraging reality: the current "war" is looking like a cakewalk so far -- which doesn't surprise me, and begs the question "What did those 12 years of sanctions actually achieve politically, besides misery for Iraqi civilians?". Obviously, Saddam didn't rebuild either his army, the Osirak reactor -- to say nothing of Iraq's conventional power grid -- or is WMD to prewar status. So I guess a good result of the sanctions is that they ensured that no US soldiers will die at Iraqi hands in Gulf War II, at least so far. Pretty cynical strategy, though, since the best way to protect American lives is to not invade another country.
I hope that there's no need for a siege of Baghdad, which would be the worst possible result. GIs would die in that case. As your president, I would avoid the "Shock and Awe" terror bombardment, and I'm glad that Bush has avoided it so far. But if there's a siege, my prediction is for constant bombing until nothing is left alive, then tanks rolling in to lift cement blocks off of the heads of the shocked and awed survivors. Yay! Liberation! Think Stalingrad redux, but again, with only one side dieing. I honestly doubt it'll come to that, though, if the reports of the surrender of the Revolutionary Guardsmen are true. The next phase would have to be immediate humanitarian aid, using the current Iraqi distribution network, to avoid mass starvation. Dennis Halliday estimated that civilians will have 6 weeks of food or so -- this war had better be over before the NCAA tournament, or we will have succeeded in showing the average Iraqi that "American rule = starvation, Saddam = no starvation."
You say again and again that the United States kept "moving the goalposts," and that we would never have been satisfied. What evidence to you have to support that idea? When have the goalposts ever been moved, short of early this week when we said that regime change was inevitable?
Let me ask this question again. When has Iraq ever come anywhere even close to compliance?
Apparently never, if you only asked US policy wonks. But to quote Scott Ritter: "Today, Iraq no long possesses arms of mass destruction." - From an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, March 31, 1999. Now, I know you won't be impressed with Ritter's credibility, but I wasn't impressed with Richard Butler's credibility, what with his UNSCOM spying scandal and all. Even then, I thought that it was better for the inspectors, including Richard Butler, to destroy Iraq's WMD than for us to remove UNSCOM and proceed with the pointless Operation Desert Fox in 1998 (Clinton had a bad habit of bombing people). Furthermore, I think we could both agree that El-Baradei and Blix are both more credible than either of the previous mission leaders. Why not let them work? How much bending over does Iraq have to do, before they are allowed out from under the sanctions? I can see that you interpret these Resolutions quite strictly, so you must certainly see how the wording of Resolution 687 (namely "future ongoing monitoring and verification") allowed Iraq's prosecutors (chiefly the US) to determine the timing and nature of "compliance." "Moving the goalposts," as I use the phrase, means "Make Iraqi civilians feel like they might all shit themselves to death until Saddam leaves, and never release the pressure until he does." This was of course, US policy for a decade, and "regime change" doesn't appear anywhere in the relevant resolutions that set up the sanctions. Ain't no way that tin-pot dictator was going to leave -- but that doesn't mean that Iraq isn't complying under the sanctions protocol. At some point, we should've agreed that Gulf War I was over and Saddam Hussein was contained, but that wasn't part of US strategy. For an example of US tactics, we turn to:
Okay, I've had it. What about resolution 1441, or any other demand placed on Iraq, was "undanceable?" What part of it could they not have complied with? You've made this assertion repeatedly in this post; back it up. What part of the US and UN demands were unreasonable?
Don't get angry; I think you're arguing quite diplomatically so far, and I mean that with all due respect. Removing 8,000 pages of the 12,000 submitted to the UN before the UN received it seems unreasonable to me. The huge effort by the Administration to paint anything the Iraqis did as a "material breach" of Resolution 1441 (such as AA fire on hostile fighters in the no-fly zone) seemed pretty unreasonable to me. Rediscovery of the empty battlefield mustard gas shells (originally found by UNSCOM, who were removed before destroying them in 1998), and trumpeting to the world that they were a deal-breaker, was unreasonable. But the main problem is that it didn't suitably define the vague moment to end the sanctions after the endless "future ongoing monitoring and verification" mentioned in the relvant paragraphs of Resolution 687. Since the US, through its "diplomacy," had tied the end of Saddam to the end of sanctions, that endless future could never arrive. Resolution 1441 was a fig leaf for the US, which would allow us to declare Iraq to be noncompliant at a time of our choosing, but also provided Iraq with a few more ways to blunder in the endgame. At the same time, it was a fig leaf for the rest of the members of the UN, who thought that through it, they could buy more time before the US declared war. I guess they thought that they might blindly find an acorn somehow. Instead, of course, the US simply declared Iraq to be in noncompliance once the troops were in position. Perhaps the UN also thought that drafting a resolution and providing the US with political
You don't write for the Times, do you? The position that this war is the result of a failure of diplomacy cannot be argued with. The position that the failure was on the part of the United States is as absurd as it is widespread.
Man, it's safe to say that the Times usually pisses me off more than you, but for completely different reasons. No, I don't write for them. And it's the aggresion of the US, not the "diplomacy" of the US, that started this phase of war.
On a foundation of defiance, diplomacy cannot succeed. Even if the entire world had done everything perfectly every time, diplomacy still would have failed, because Iraq still would have been in blatant defiance of the cease-fire to which they agreed.
I certainly didn't see any semblance of US diplomacy reported in the media (of course, I had to read between the lines, since reporting isn't what the mass media does well anymore). Instead, I saw the US "defiance" in refusing to believe that inspections were working. I saw a cynical shifting of compliance goalposts further and further back -- starting before '98 with the Clinton administration, and obviously gathering steam with Bush's administration in the past year. There would never be a moment, "even for a second," when Iraq would be able to comply with the Safwan Accords. Yes, I understand the meaning of "burden of proof," and yes, we totally jobbed the Iraqis throughout the '90's, in a way that guaranteed they'd never be able to satisfy us, then or now. Resolution 687 turned into a trap that we could spring on Saddam any time we wanted, as there was no way for him to satisfy us with his compliance if we didn't want to be satisfied. We could move the goalposts right off the field and into the parking lot, if we wanted to. And we did. In that sense, I agree with you that "We started with the position that the terms of the cease-fire were not open for negotiation, and that Iraq was unwilling to comply with those terms."
I could've been satisfied with the surrender terms if there was some sort of incentive for the Iraqis, like gradually loosening the sanctions the more he complied with inspections. Some sort of rehabilitative measure taken in good faith -- 'cause after all, we were apparently willing to do business with him with a clean conscience throught the '80's. See, the point of diplomacy is to give the person sitting at the table across from you a reason to comply with your wishes, not to only brandish a stick without offering a carrot. Think back to the Weimar republic and how "well" that sanctions regime worked out for France in the end... Of course, Iraq's far weaker now, relatively speaking, than Germany was after WWI. Inspections, sanctions, and the 12-year old no-fly zones (without a UN Resolution granting legitimacy, by the way) totally humiliated and incapacitated Iraq, the sanctions alone causing dire circumstances for a large segment of Iraqi civil society. Can anyone possibly deny that no country on earth has ever been more contained than Iraq was through the '90's? The containment process, including UNSCOM in the '90's and UNMOVIC, had most certainly "gotten off of the ground." So why the disregard for diplomacy, and the rush to war? I'll leave that answer to the conspiracy theorists.
Given their weakness, and given the stated policies of this administration by the Project For A New American Century, and with the catalyst of 9/11 removing any domestic reaction besides cringing fear, it became obvious to any observer, Saddam included, that we were simply going to have our war, no matter what. And it was equally obvious that during the preparations, the tyrant Saddam would dig in his heels -- again, he's totally predictable that way. Why should he comply with our bad-faith offer to disarm him before we attack? We could use our permament membership in the (broken) Security Council to ram through resolutions loaded up with any proof-burdens we wanted, such as proving that he doesn't have an invisible dragon pe
A decent accounting of the facts, but there's one big one that you forget which wrecks your analysis of them: oil, and who controls it. The Kurds will control the oil-rich cities to the north. Why they would then submit to joining a weak middle section of Iraq, in a federation dominated by an different ethnic group, isn't immediately obvious. The Shia in the south would get Basra and its oil, plus the coastline, too. The Sunni in the middle inherit Baghdad and a huge reconstruction bill (if the war takes a long time to wrap up). I think an Iraq Federation is a recipe for another Balkan war, unless we install a new iron-fisted dictator. (Any of the INC people would do just fine in that role, by the way -- they've got plenty of righteous anger, and an invincible backer in the US. Or maybe they won't. Only one way to find out, right? -- install one of them from the outside!)
Sounds like a recipe for total destabilization to me, even factoring in the Turkish/Syrian desires regarding the Kurds. How are we going to extract oil from the region during the Iraqi Federation's civil war? I don't think Condi Rice and the other Exxon-Mobil executives have thought this through.
I'm honestly not sure how to resolve this, except to blame the British for the inexpert way that they redrew their former colonies' borders in the first half of this century, then to hop in our time machine, and go back and "fix" everything...
The State Department is not staffed entirely by idiots. They've already thought of all of this stuff, as well as plenty of things that you haven't even considered yet. They're pros; they know what they're doing.
This is kinda funny -- obviously, they're not pros, or our diplomatic efforts would've been more effective. A few of our highly experienced "pros" have resigned because of our bungling, arrogant "diplomacy." The straw man of blaming the French for their threatened veto is just so much "killing the messenger" instead of listening to the message. It's our fault for getting caught telling lies and fabrications on the floor of the UN, and for not finding any of the "obvious" WMD that would've provided a pretext, and for prolonging policies of thumbing the nose at UN resolutions in some parts of the world (Israel-Palestine?), while sanctimoniously demanding letter-of-the-law adherence to UN resolutions in others. This sorry mess didn't have to get to this point. The "pros" fucked up. It didn't have to get to the point of Gulf War I, either, but that's another story.
It's time for all Americans to work right now at preventing Gulf War III, "Operation Enduring Ratings," which is scheduled for China in 2009, unless we start educating ourselves about the world we live in, where the trouble spots in the world are, how they got that way, what our govt's positions there are, etc. etc. etc. Let's listen to what people in those regions have to say. Let's learn about their cultures. Let's form educated opinions, then vote based on them.
It is amazing how a group that believes Muslims shoudl rule the world knocked down the WTC and thus allowed Republicans to lay the ground work to rule the US for geenrations with tatics the communists would have used. How ironic and sad that my country is being taken over by conservative and religious zealots and nobody seems to care because it might, just might, allow them to prevent a terrorist attack (yeah right)
Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, whether it's Islamic Medevialism or Christian Hypercapitalist. The trick is to recognize it for what it is when it's running for political office, and get off of your ass and vote it away. We've let the right wing fundamentalists of both sides dominate the political agenda out of fear and ignorance, while the media sets the bounds of acceptable thoughts about that agenda by self-censoring any other kinds of thinking and speech -- thus perpetuating the ignorance. Let's turn down the volume on CNN and the "experts," and read some books that we might not otherwise read. Let's not settle for the fundamentalist's simplistic "solutions." Let's try to use our brains, not our brainstems. These are dangerous times -- we can't afford to act rashly and fuck things up.
I agree, even if everyone else thinks you're flamebait. I think that if you'd said that "No one newsperson can objectively decide with certainty which particular tragedy might be relevant (i.e. causal) to some other future tragedy weeks, months, or years down the road," people would agree with you, and less with the original poster. It's obvious that picking news stories, writing headlines, and projecting a particular editorial stance are crucial activities when building consensus. Unfortunately, most Americans (and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here) prefer to see their own cozy worldview reflected back upon them in the media, and are thus completely blindsided by tragedy that could've been predicted moths or years in advance, had they simply been better informed. "Why do they hate us?" is a valid question, with obvious and easy-to-find answers, if you bother to look. It's now time to look, America, wouldn't you say? It's harder to be thoughtful when the public sphere of ideas is (intentionally?) shrinking -- and conversely, it's easier to advertise and/or get elected...
..recognize that many Palestinians are Christians. I know that you're just playing around, but try not to treat both sides of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as Clone-like monoliths, especially when posting for thousands to see...
But most importantly, don't make the mistake of thinking that the fighting in Occupied Palestine is religious violence in the first place -- instead, recognize that the Intifada is, at heart, a political, grassroots movement, aimed at resisting the colonial aspirations of a large bloc of Israeli politicians. Religous extremists *on both sides* (many of whom belong to organizations with a great deal of political clout) simply add disorienting smoke to an already-hot fire, as they harness the propoganda surrounding the Intifada for their own ends.
<rant> As for the parallels between Pinochet and Palpatine, or the Rebellion and whatever -- who gives a fuck! Don't we have better things to talk about? Or act upon? And can't the well-fed, cigar-smoking frat-boy that transmitted the original piece from his ivory tower say something more constructive? Like, for instance, offering *insightful* political analysis? That's supposedly his goddammed job, right? Gimme something worth reading! Where are the pundits with brains? Who can I turn to for inspiration? Where is the non-trivial Internet? Help me find satisfaction! Let's browse at +6! </rant>
This is the kind of thing that XML's supposed to fix. Let's all speed up the migration to a better markup language, and pronto! Then, we'd just diff against the content, not the presentation...
I watched the returns coming in with a few of my intellectual Cuban-American friends, and they were wincing -- shouting to their imagined reactionary brothers and sisters in Florida, "Don't do it! Don't vote payback! You'll get exactly what you *don't* want if you do!" I think they're probably right, sadly enough.
Argh. The Supreme Court, decided by a two-year-old blowjob. What a depressing night.
Jeezis, that was a stupid comment. Ralph Nader's been talking like this since Pintos were bursting into flames 25 years ago. Jello's been a shrill and hilarious antiestablishment crusader since before the Macintosh - maybe even before your birth, or at least since the last time you read a book critically.
I bemoan the lack of historical perspective displayed by today's high-tech "leaders." Fuck, put down your anime and look around, people.
He want's to like his work, that's why the hell not.
Just rob some old ladies or something. They're being stupid and unfit by walking on the same sidewalk as you, right? It's blind rapacious greed that made this country, right?
Some of us try to live and work ethically. We might hire you after we truly add value to the economy.
It's not a fake - QAZ is a real trojan, and can worm from one Win32 box to another. Look at some of the anti-virus vendors' websites. It got onto my Win95 box sometime in September, and I didn't notice it until two weeks ago. Note that I don't use a mail reader on the 95 box, I just browse with Netscape. Seems to me that the QAZ payload is deliverable in more ways than simply double-clicking an attachment in Outlook. It sends your IP address as a raw SMTP message to an address in China, over port 7192 or something. I'll bet that the receiving box sifts through the incoming addresses until an interesting one is found. Like, say, Microsoft's.
To check whether or not you've been caught, look at the Notepad executable. It shouldn't be over 100 Kb. If it is, delete it, and move note.com in the same directory back to notepad.exe. There is also a registry entry you must remove - somewhere down in HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run .
Dammit, somebody moderate this up. Both points are well-made.
And, by the way, we're all gonna die very shortly. Let's use our money, 'cause the moral thing to do is to pay our progeny for all of the oxygen we've breathed, and shit we've excreted. The inheritance tax forces wealthy people to use their money.
It would be great, though, if our entropy-products could somehow become useful to society - then, perhaps, taxation would become unneeded. But, somehow I don't see that happenning.
Seems like Slashdot itself is responsible for a number of "Third Wave" attacks... and at the same time, is a perfect vector for a third-party Third Wave...
(I hate replying to a post before I've read all the replies, but bear with me - I've got a show to play tonight, and I've gotta run!)
Music doesn't belong to the musician in the same way that, for instance, his pants belong to him, and the word "theft" doesn't apply in the way that you're intimating. It does apply, however, in a weaker sense.
Producing art is never anything *but* a shared experience. Art isn't something someone makes in order to sell -- selling is just an accident. Great art is tough to make, and easy to enjoy, and that's just the way it is. Art that someone else created *is* free for the world -- free for consumption, but not for production, *and the production isn't forced*. You, as a listener, don't owe the artist anything to listen to his/her music, or to hum his/her tune. This is why the strong sense of the word "theft" is innapropriate. The only time that something akin to theft occurs with an artist's creation is when another "artist" comes along and steals the original objet d'art, claiming that it is his/her own work, and enjoys the increased recognition that results. Plagarism, in other words. I'd use the word "theft" in that case, even if the original work itself isn't lost to the world -- just the original artist's reputation! This is gonna be the tough issue in the digitized world, it seems to me... Copying the object and misrepresenting its origin might occur faster than the proper recognition of the artist... (But even now, the boundaries are fuzzy. Are collage artists, or sampling musicians, or others producing original art, or misrepresenting the source? This is certainly artistic "sharing" as most people understand it -- ideas were germinated, spread, mutated, and other ideas were created... hm. I've heard of works that consisted of a frame placed around somebody else's framed canvas, or of a photograph of a photograph, considered by some to be legitimate art.. Too post-modern for me to understand!)
Back to the subject - the issue is not whether or not musicians can still get paid, but whether or not they can receive *recognition* for producing something of cultural value, which is a subtle distinction that most everyone misses. Stardom must not necessarily lead to riches! Not everything must have a price! Artists are only due recognition and respect. Remember, Big Money Rock Stardom is an anomaly in the first place. It emerged from, and is sustained by, the combined technological and cultural accidents of the intentionaly inefficient recording industry ("the gatekeepers"), and a leisure class with some spare change, who used to buy sheet music from songwriters and play piano, but who now buy magnetic media, with the music pre-played by hired cats and/or pretty boys("the consumers"). As the physical realities of the act of recording and distributing music change, the recording industry will change. And as the recording industry (and the cultural context surrounding it) change, Big Rock Stardom could wither away. There will be other ways to voluntarily express your gratitude as an enjoyer of the art, though, besides paying outragous mark-ups to CD-packagers and distributors. Hell, more people might make more music themselves, or they might appreciate a wider variety of music, or they might directly subsidise musicians... and more people will certainly copy the recorded instance of a given objet d'art, copy protected or not. Will they claim it to be their own? They'd better not. That's the problem we need to focus on...
As far as people who perform works for hire, or enter into a contract with an orchestra are concerned -- sure, paying them makes sense, for playing music is presumably a skill that they're good at, and they can work out how much they should be paid with the artist. But the composer? The guy that struggled for years to produce the music that the hired performers play? He'd better be doing it out of love, 'cause I don't owe him any money for following his muse - his art is *his* compulsion, not mine.
But if it's good, it could be mine, too:). Lemme hear it!
"Stealing songs" happens anyway, with or without IP laws. There's a funny story about the group Angel (refer to Frank Zappa's song "Punky's Whips" for more info) hearing Eddie Van Halen play some material that would eventually end up on VH's first album at a live show. Angel quickly ran back to the studio and started "stealing" it. VH's version came out first, so Angel lost.
Of course, nobody could've possibly played it like Eddie anyway, and everybody in the LA scene would've known that the song was VH's in the first place (I think it was "Eruption" -- anybody else remember this?).
The moral is, if you have the intention of selling musical IP, don't play it EVER until your lawyers have battenned down the hatches. If you've got an insightful idea, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT, fer chrissakes -- you're contributing to black market inefficiencies in the capitalist system by not selling it. Haven't you heard of the Free Rider problem?
Hmm.
I think the IP concept will (note - *will* - this is about the present day, not the past) cause more problems for society than it'll solve. If you insist on recognition for your creations (which is reasonable:) ) in the world of billions of free-flying copies of art, you've gotta start coming up with something that can scale; something that can keep up with the infinite copies... It'll have to involve the copies themselves, I guess. Or perhaps the billions of listeners, if you're lucky.
What we need is some sort of PKI authentication scheme, using steganography in the recorded artifact. Tough to do, of course, and I certainly don't know what all of the issues are (Ask Slashdot, anyone?). It also doesn't prevent the kinds of "theft" described above - good enough musicians can bite your shit as soon as you play it, anyway. But that's the point - the artifact itself (the copy) is somehow watermarked, but the expression of the idea (the music in your ears) is unhindered. Don't play if you don't intend for the world to hear.
Dunno. Time to practice. WITH THE WINDOWS SHUT - can't have anybody steal "my" paradiddles.
Slashdot Mirror
Guns, guns... Jeezis.
You goddamn pussies. Use your fists!
I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?
Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future. Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.
Seems to me (a EE from Purdue) that the only thing that makes engineering engineering as opposed to arts or crafts is the use of metrics. That is, you're s'posed to be able to design something to fit within a certain set of constraints, and have a way to objectively measure how well you've done. It seems to me that a lot of software is built by artisans, who "just build the damn thing" without really worrying about what constraints may exist in the problem domain. That's certainly how I seem to write my code... Most of these software artisans wouldn't be able to do a comparison with another piece of software that purports to solve the same design problem without a side-by-side benchmark after the code is written. Real engineers know before build-time how well their design compares to others.
:).
I guess it's time for me to go re-read some algorithm books
I'm lost now. What are you talking about? The organization formerly known as the PKK, now called KADEK, is a Marxist-Stalinist terrorist organization that used to operate out of Turkey, but since 1999 has been based in northwestern Iraq. Bringing them to the bargaining table, as you suggested, would be a diplomatic nightmare for the United States. But that's okay; it could never happen. Turkey will never negotiate with that group.
My bad, and I'm sorry -- you were mistaken, because I was mistaken -- I assumed that you were calling Iraq the Marxist-Stalinist organization, and Israel the only US ally in the region! Of course you're right, it's the future relations between Turkey and the PUK that are critical currently -- not the PKK, no matter how much they change their name -- especially since there are radical Islamic elements among the Kurds that the PUK can't control whose actions might offer pretexts for Turkey to start running Kashmir-style counter-insurgencies. I think we have to make sure that we deal fairly with all the parties involved, and soon, since nation-building is hard work, and you can't keep a strong nationalistic movement down forever...
Which leads me to a new point, which you don't want me "the fuck" to talk about: Why isn't Israel considered to be part of the discussion for any regional solution? Every member of the "Arab street," and every member of the Iranian street, for that matter, would consider its treatment of the Palestinians to be the pressing issue. Shit, the fact that the occupation is ongoing strengthens any radical in the Arab world that you care to choose, Saddam included. We can only talk about legitimate enforcement of UN resolutions when we start holding Israel to be in the same contempt that we hold Iraq to be in, and that's why this war has damaged US relations with most of the mideast so badly. We can also only mention WMD nonproliferation when we can admit in the same breath that Israel has a strapping young nuclear program. Serious talks, not fear-mongering and provocations from both sides, are what are required. Only the US can compel it. Remove the conflict, and you've removed the rhetoric and the radicalization from any splinter group you care to name.
We are not going to have a conversation about Israel, okay?
Someday, we have to. For now, it's apparently a "red line" for you to even discuss examples of bad judgement in American policy. You're not the only one, of course -- MSNBC and Fox News specialize in it. But that's the wrong way to go! There's an awful lot of bad news about to come raining down on my head (and in the worst case, perhaps actual chunks of buildings) because of attitudes like that. We can all sit around and say "why do they hate us," (which is what the Iraqis will say if their humanitarian aid isn't forthcoming at the end of the war), and refuse to listen to the "utterly wrong" things that we hear in reply, only hearing what we want to hear. Or, we can use the right kind of preemption -- diplomacy, not war -- when we still have the chance, and before things get bad. Let's hope we give everyone involved a fair hearing, too, and not just play favorites for short-term strategic gain. We would take the first step. Think of the example we could set to the rest of the world if we would try it. Whenever I see how things are done with my taxes, things I think are terrible mistakes, my feelings of disenfrachisement reappear -- although "disenfranchisement" isn't the right word, you're right, it should be more like "lack of agency" or something. That rosy picture you painted at the beginning of this too-long thread two days ago about the shiny new Iraqi Federation had better come true, all of it, and super-quick, or the responsibility will be all of ours (50% yours, 25% mine, quit whining) for whatever intentionally-unforseen consequences occur.
You're up.
Wow. OK, I suspect that the person who is disinterested in diplomacy might be you, moreso than even our government. And I've definitely become left-wing, and I'm definitely not typical. And if you want to "shut down" our conversation, perhaps with an exciting televised MOAB bomb on my personal palaces, or even by not responding, that's cool -- although I'd prefer to not be on the receiving end of the MOAB, thanks...
The UNSCOM inspections were compromised by Iraq's well-founded suspicions of Richard Butler's spying. He was certainly "guided" by the US. After him, Iraq wasn't going to trust inspectors. That's why El-Baredei's currently in UNMOVIC -- he doesn't offend Iraq as much. Good cop to Blix's bad cop, is the way I see it. But back to UNSCOM: I think that Scott Ritter was able to get a lot done, before we yanked the inspectors out for Operation Desert Fox. He was able to find and destroy those Russian-built centrifuges, and dump that yeasty precursor goop into a pit back in '97, remember?
Al-Samoud missles, and their extra 10 km range, aren't weapons of mass destruction without warheads, which was apparently how their range was determined -- but you're right, they were proscribed by the unending, sanctions-preserving Resolution 687 -- so good thing the inspectors found them and started destroying them, right? Whoops, that means that inspections were working, and we mght be nearing an end to sanctions, which would be results achieved through (slow and steady) diplomacy! I don't know why this administration seemed to resent when the inspectors didn't find a smoking gun, and actually reduced whatever was left of Iraq's pathetic military. This administration, and you too, presumably, appreciate the UN when it advances short-term US interests at the expense of future stability, and dislike it otherwise. Correct me if I'm wrong. You might also want to look at this article for the reasons why Iraq might not have had anything left to declare with regards to chemical and biological weapons.
Now, at least we agree that sanctions didn't do a damn bit of good -- if for wildly different reasons, of course. That's at least a starting point. You are a serious hanging judge, and I'm the bleeding-heart "left-wing fool," who believes that US policy in that region was servely limited by our clumsy diplomacy, typified by the way we're currently acting. Let me try to convince you of some of our failures by elaborating on the earlier examples. Had we performed better in the mideast during previous crises, including never propping up Saddam mutherfucking Hussein's regime in the first place, we would have had a much better outcome in future crises.
Regarding "a solution to the Kurdish question that the parties could agree on:"
How would you gather those representatives? How would you "work out a solution?" And, most importantly, how would you justify the fact to the people of the United States that you are negotiating with a Marxist-Stalinist group with the declared purpose of bringing down a legitimate ally of the United States through terrorist means? Finally, how would you repair our relationship with Turkey after this abortive attempt at negotiation?
This is obviously the most important nut to crack, and was the source of my worries about the outcome of this war waaay back in my original post. Since you demand total satisfaction, and insist on peaceful conflict resolution in 500 words or less, I guess I'd better roll up my sleves and get started, which is of course more than anybody else (including you) seems to want to do. Remember first of all that the US, as the sole hyperpower with excellent-looking jets, can bring anybody to the table. We need to be in the national mood for it, of course, which is why American politics is international politics. If we're not quite able to galvanize ourselve into action when important events call for it, there are int
Morning!
Okay, as long as we're playing armchair president, let's go all the way with it. It's January 1. Resolution 1441 is on the books, and you've got Iraq's declaration of December 7. You know, by know, that the declaration is neither complete nor accurate, which is technically a violation of 1441. What do you do? And how do imagine events would have resolved themselves?
Well, since you've already made up my mind for me, in a very enfranchising way (thanks, boss!), that "the declaration is neither complete nor accurate," and since you've already obtained resolution 1441 for me, then I, as president, would be in a pretty limited policy space. This wouldn't mean that I would have to do what Bush opted to do, though. But I don't like the current situation -- let's relax the time constraints instead, say, back to 1998 or thereabouts. I would have ended the sanctions back then, as they only strengthed Saddam Hussein's hand, at the cost of Iraqi civilian lives. I would then allow the Iraqis to determine their own history. I would accuse Hussein (as well as Kissinger and Ariel Sharon, but later for that) of war crimes, with the idea of building respect for future US policy in the area. I would gather representatives from Turkey, Syria, the PKK, and even Iraq (yes, even though I've accused their dictator of war crimes), and work out a solution to the Kurdish question that the parties could agree on. Carrot and stick again. I would insist on an equally valid, good faith roadmap to peace in Occupied Palestine -- taking as long as it takes, and without Clinton-style election bumrushing -- one that wouldn't be abused like Oslo was. I would use the UN in its peacekeeping and humanitarian roles in both areas. I would engage the Iranians, in order to strengthen the moderates' tenuous grasp in that country. The Sudanese, with their civil war, would not have their medicine factory bombed if I was caught getting a blow job, but would instead get free blow jobs as well ^H^H^H^H -- strike that, I don't know why I said that! In short, as your president, I would push for a solution of the Iraqi crisis as part of a wider regional diplomacy (that word again), concluding agreements that would respect the actual aspirations of Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, Israelis, Kurds, etc., without forcing them to accept, at the point of my guns or in the noose of my sanctions, my idea of a proper way to run their affairs.
Moving back to our discouraging reality: the current "war" is looking like a cakewalk so far -- which doesn't surprise me, and begs the question "What did those 12 years of sanctions actually achieve politically, besides misery for Iraqi civilians?". Obviously, Saddam didn't rebuild either his army, the Osirak reactor -- to say nothing of Iraq's conventional power grid -- or is WMD to prewar status. So I guess a good result of the sanctions is that they ensured that no US soldiers will die at Iraqi hands in Gulf War II, at least so far. Pretty cynical strategy, though, since the best way to protect American lives is to not invade another country.
I hope that there's no need for a siege of Baghdad, which would be the worst possible result. GIs would die in that case. As your president, I would avoid the "Shock and Awe" terror bombardment, and I'm glad that Bush has avoided it so far. But if there's a siege, my prediction is for constant bombing until nothing is left alive, then tanks rolling in to lift cement blocks off of the heads of the shocked and awed survivors. Yay! Liberation! Think Stalingrad redux, but again, with only one side dieing. I honestly doubt it'll come to that, though, if the reports of the surrender of the Revolutionary Guardsmen are true. The next phase would have to be immediate humanitarian aid, using the current Iraqi distribution network, to avoid mass starvation. Dennis Halliday estimated that civilians will have 6 weeks of food or so -- this war had better be over before the NCAA tournament, or we will have succeeded in showing the average Iraqi that "American rule = starvation, Saddam = no starvation."
What do you think?
Apparently never, if you only asked US policy wonks. But to quote Scott Ritter: "Today, Iraq no long possesses arms of mass destruction." - From an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, March 31, 1999. Now, I know you won't be impressed with Ritter's credibility, but I wasn't impressed with Richard Butler's credibility, what with his UNSCOM spying scandal and all. Even then, I thought that it was better for the inspectors, including Richard Butler, to destroy Iraq's WMD than for us to remove UNSCOM and proceed with the pointless Operation Desert Fox in 1998 (Clinton had a bad habit of bombing people). Furthermore, I think we could both agree that El-Baradei and Blix are both more credible than either of the previous mission leaders. Why not let them work? How much bending over does Iraq have to do, before they are allowed out from under the sanctions? I can see that you interpret these Resolutions quite strictly, so you must certainly see how the wording of Resolution 687 (namely "future ongoing monitoring and verification") allowed Iraq's prosecutors (chiefly the US) to determine the timing and nature of "compliance." "Moving the goalposts," as I use the phrase, means "Make Iraqi civilians feel like they might all shit themselves to death until Saddam leaves, and never release the pressure until he does." This was of course, US policy for a decade, and "regime change" doesn't appear anywhere in the relevant resolutions that set up the sanctions. Ain't no way that tin-pot dictator was going to leave -- but that doesn't mean that Iraq isn't complying under the sanctions protocol. At some point, we should've agreed that Gulf War I was over and Saddam Hussein was contained, but that wasn't part of US strategy. For an example of US tactics, we turn to:
Okay, I've had it. What about resolution 1441, or any other demand placed on Iraq, was "undanceable?" What part of it could they not have complied with? You've made this assertion repeatedly in this post; back it up. What part of the US and UN demands were unreasonable?
Don't get angry; I think you're arguing quite diplomatically so far, and I mean that with all due respect. Removing 8,000 pages of the 12,000 submitted to the UN before the UN received it seems unreasonable to me. The huge effort by the Administration to paint anything the Iraqis did as a "material breach" of Resolution 1441 (such as AA fire on hostile fighters in the no-fly zone) seemed pretty unreasonable to me. Rediscovery of the empty battlefield mustard gas shells (originally found by UNSCOM, who were removed before destroying them in 1998), and trumpeting to the world that they were a deal-breaker, was unreasonable. But the main problem is that it didn't suitably define the vague moment to end the sanctions after the endless "future ongoing monitoring and verification" mentioned in the relvant paragraphs of Resolution 687. Since the US, through its "diplomacy," had tied the end of Saddam to the end of sanctions, that endless future could never arrive. Resolution 1441 was a fig leaf for the US, which would allow us to declare Iraq to be noncompliant at a time of our choosing, but also provided Iraq with a few more ways to blunder in the endgame. At the same time, it was a fig leaf for the rest of the members of the UN, who thought that through it, they could buy more time before the US declared war. I guess they thought that they might blindly find an acorn somehow. Instead, of course, the US simply declared Iraq to be in noncompliance once the troops were in position. Perhaps the UN also thought that drafting a resolution and providing the US with political
Man, it's safe to say that the Times usually pisses me off more than you, but for completely different reasons. No, I don't write for them. And it's the aggresion of the US, not the "diplomacy" of the US, that started this phase of war.
On a foundation of defiance, diplomacy cannot succeed. Even if the entire world had done everything perfectly every time, diplomacy still would have failed, because Iraq still would have been in blatant defiance of the cease-fire to which they agreed.
I certainly didn't see any semblance of US diplomacy reported in the media (of course, I had to read between the lines, since reporting isn't what the mass media does well anymore). Instead, I saw the US "defiance" in refusing to believe that inspections were working. I saw a cynical shifting of compliance goalposts further and further back -- starting before '98 with the Clinton administration, and obviously gathering steam with Bush's administration in the past year. There would never be a moment, "even for a second," when Iraq would be able to comply with the Safwan Accords. Yes, I understand the meaning of "burden of proof," and yes, we totally jobbed the Iraqis throughout the '90's, in a way that guaranteed they'd never be able to satisfy us, then or now. Resolution 687 turned into a trap that we could spring on Saddam any time we wanted, as there was no way for him to satisfy us with his compliance if we didn't want to be satisfied. We could move the goalposts right off the field and into the parking lot, if we wanted to. And we did. In that sense, I agree with you that "We started with the position that the terms of the cease-fire were not open for negotiation, and that Iraq was unwilling to comply with those terms."
I could've been satisfied with the surrender terms if there was some sort of incentive for the Iraqis, like gradually loosening the sanctions the more he complied with inspections. Some sort of rehabilitative measure taken in good faith -- 'cause after all, we were apparently willing to do business with him with a clean conscience throught the '80's. See, the point of diplomacy is to give the person sitting at the table across from you a reason to comply with your wishes, not to only brandish a stick without offering a carrot. Think back to the Weimar republic and how "well" that sanctions regime worked out for France in the end... Of course, Iraq's far weaker now, relatively speaking, than Germany was after WWI. Inspections, sanctions, and the 12-year old no-fly zones (without a UN Resolution granting legitimacy, by the way) totally humiliated and incapacitated Iraq, the sanctions alone causing dire circumstances for a large segment of Iraqi civil society. Can anyone possibly deny that no country on earth has ever been more contained than Iraq was through the '90's? The containment process, including UNSCOM in the '90's and UNMOVIC, had most certainly "gotten off of the ground." So why the disregard for diplomacy, and the rush to war? I'll leave that answer to the conspiracy theorists.
Given their weakness, and given the stated policies of this administration by the Project For A New American Century, and with the catalyst of 9/11 removing any domestic reaction besides cringing fear, it became obvious to any observer, Saddam included, that we were simply going to have our war, no matter what. And it was equally obvious that during the preparations, the tyrant Saddam would dig in his heels -- again, he's totally predictable that way. Why should he comply with our bad-faith offer to disarm him before we attack? We could use our permament membership in the (broken) Security Council to ram through resolutions loaded up with any proof-burdens we wanted, such as proving that he doesn't have an invisible dragon pe
Sounds like a recipe for total destabilization to me, even factoring in the Turkish/Syrian desires regarding the Kurds. How are we going to extract oil from the region during the Iraqi Federation's civil war? I don't think Condi Rice and the other Exxon-Mobil executives have thought this through.
I'm honestly not sure how to resolve this, except to blame the British for the inexpert way that they redrew their former colonies' borders in the first half of this century, then to hop in our time machine, and go back and "fix" everything...
This is kinda funny -- obviously, they're not pros, or our diplomatic efforts would've been more effective. A few of our highly experienced "pros" have resigned because of our bungling, arrogant "diplomacy." The straw man of blaming the French for their threatened veto is just so much "killing the messenger" instead of listening to the message. It's our fault for getting caught telling lies and fabrications on the floor of the UN, and for not finding any of the "obvious" WMD that would've provided a pretext, and for prolonging policies of thumbing the nose at UN resolutions in some parts of the world (Israel-Palestine?), while sanctimoniously demanding letter-of-the-law adherence to UN resolutions in others. This sorry mess didn't have to get to this point. The "pros" fucked up. It didn't have to get to the point of Gulf War I, either, but that's another story.It's time for all Americans to work right now at preventing Gulf War III, "Operation Enduring Ratings," which is scheduled for China in 2009, unless we start educating ourselves about the world we live in, where the trouble spots in the world are, how they got that way, what our govt's positions there are, etc. etc. etc. Let's listen to what people in those regions have to say. Let's learn about their cultures. Let's form educated opinions, then vote based on them.
Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, whether it's Islamic Medevialism or Christian Hypercapitalist. The trick is to recognize it for what it is when it's running for political office, and get off of your ass and vote it away. We've let the right wing fundamentalists of both sides dominate the political agenda out of fear and ignorance, while the media sets the bounds of acceptable thoughts about that agenda by self-censoring any other kinds of thinking and speech -- thus perpetuating the ignorance. Let's turn down the volume on CNN and the "experts," and read some books that we might not otherwise read. Let's not settle for the fundamentalist's simplistic "solutions." Let's try to use our brains, not our brainstems. These are dangerous times -- we can't afford to act rashly and fuck things up.
I agree, even if everyone else thinks you're flamebait. I think that if you'd said that "No one newsperson can objectively decide with certainty which particular tragedy might be relevant (i.e. causal) to some other future tragedy weeks, months, or years down the road," people would agree with you, and less with the original poster. It's obvious that picking news stories, writing headlines, and projecting a particular editorial stance are crucial activities when building consensus. Unfortunately, most Americans (and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here) prefer to see their own cozy worldview reflected back upon them in the media, and are thus completely blindsided by tragedy that could've been predicted moths or years in advance, had they simply been better informed. "Why do they hate us?" is a valid question, with obvious and easy-to-find answers, if you bother to look. It's now time to look, America, wouldn't you say? It's harder to be thoughtful when the public sphere of ideas is (intentionally?) shrinking -- and conversely, it's easier to advertise and/or get elected...
pretty kick-ass, but "Sony weeps openly" is 6!
..recognize that many Palestinians are Christians. I know that you're just playing around, but try not to treat both sides of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as Clone-like monoliths, especially when posting for thousands to see...
But most importantly, don't make the mistake of thinking that the fighting in Occupied Palestine is religious violence in the first place -- instead, recognize that the Intifada is, at heart, a political, grassroots movement, aimed at resisting the colonial aspirations of a large bloc of Israeli politicians. Religous extremists *on both sides* (many of whom belong to organizations with a great deal of political clout) simply add disorienting smoke to an already-hot fire, as they harness the propoganda surrounding the Intifada for their own ends.
<rant>
As for the parallels between Pinochet and Palpatine, or the Rebellion and whatever -- who gives a fuck! Don't we have better things to talk about? Or act upon? And can't the well-fed, cigar-smoking frat-boy that transmitted the original piece from his ivory tower say something more constructive? Like, for instance, offering *insightful* political analysis? That's supposedly his goddammed job, right? Gimme something worth reading! Where are the pundits with brains? Who can I turn to for inspiration? Where is the non-trivial Internet? Help me find satisfaction! Let's browse at +6!
</rant>
This is the kind of thing that XML's supposed to fix. Let's all speed up the migration to a better markup language, and pronto! Then, we'd just diff against the content, not the presentation...
I watched the returns coming in with a few of my intellectual Cuban-American friends, and they were wincing -- shouting to their imagined reactionary brothers and sisters in Florida, "Don't do it! Don't vote payback! You'll get exactly what you *don't* want if you do!" I think they're probably right, sadly enough.
Argh. The Supreme Court, decided by a two-year-old blowjob. What a depressing night.
Jeezis, that was a stupid comment. Ralph Nader's been talking like this since Pintos were bursting into flames 25 years ago. Jello's been a shrill and hilarious antiestablishment crusader since before the Macintosh - maybe even before your birth, or at least since the last time you read a book critically.
I bemoan the lack of historical perspective displayed by today's high-tech "leaders." Fuck, put down your anime and look around, people.
I know you're trying to be flip, but I gotta ask - you ever wonder where the poisonous chemicals inside air conditioners and refrigerators go?
OK troll, I'll bite.
.com. Shit, join a .org :).
He want's to like his work, that's why the hell not.
Just rob some old ladies or something. They're being stupid and unfit by walking on the same sidewalk as you, right? It's blind rapacious greed that made this country, right?
Some of us try to live and work ethically. We might hire you after we truly add value to the economy.
Quit your
It's not a fake - QAZ is a real trojan, and can worm from one Win32 box to another. Look at some of the anti-virus vendors' websites. It got onto my Win95 box sometime in September, and I didn't notice it until two weeks ago. Note that I don't use a mail reader on the 95 box, I just browse with Netscape. Seems to me that the QAZ payload is deliverable in more ways than simply double-clicking an attachment in Outlook. It sends your IP address as a raw SMTP message to an address in China, over port 7192 or something. I'll bet that the receiving box sifts through the incoming addresses until an interesting one is found. Like, say, Microsoft's.
n .
To check whether or not you've been caught, look at the Notepad executable. It shouldn't be over 100 Kb. If it is, delete it, and move note.com in the same directory back to notepad.exe. There is also a registry entry you must remove - somewhere down in HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Ru
Dammit, somebody moderate this up. Both points are well-made.
And, by the way, we're all gonna die very shortly. Let's use our money, 'cause the moral thing to do is to pay our progeny for all of the oxygen we've breathed, and shit we've excreted. The inheritance tax forces wealthy people to use their money.
It would be great, though, if our entropy-products could somehow become useful to society - then, perhaps, taxation would become unneeded. But, somehow I don't see that happenning.
See you in hell!
Seems like Slashdot itself is responsible for a number of "Third Wave" attacks... and at the same time, is a perfect vector for a third-party Third Wave...
Too lazy to look up examples - fire away...
(I hate replying to a post before I've read all the replies, but bear with me - I've got a show to play tonight, and I've gotta run!)
:). Lemme hear it!
Music doesn't belong to the musician in the same way that, for instance, his pants belong to him, and the word "theft" doesn't apply in the way that you're intimating. It does apply, however, in a weaker sense.
Producing art is never anything *but* a shared experience. Art isn't something someone makes in order to sell -- selling is just an accident. Great art is tough to make, and easy to enjoy, and that's just the way it is. Art that someone else created *is* free for the world -- free for consumption, but not for production, *and the production isn't forced*. You, as a listener, don't owe the artist anything to listen to his/her music, or to hum his/her tune. This is why the strong sense of the word "theft" is innapropriate. The only time that something akin to theft occurs with an artist's creation is when another "artist" comes along and steals the original objet d'art, claiming that it is his/her own work, and enjoys the increased recognition that results. Plagarism, in other words. I'd use the word "theft" in that case, even if the original work itself isn't lost to the world -- just the original artist's reputation! This is gonna be the tough issue in the digitized world, it seems to me... Copying the object and misrepresenting its origin might occur faster than the proper recognition of the artist... (But even now, the boundaries are fuzzy. Are collage artists, or sampling musicians, or others producing original art, or misrepresenting the source? This is certainly artistic "sharing" as most people understand it -- ideas were germinated, spread, mutated, and other ideas were created... hm. I've heard of works that consisted of a frame placed around somebody else's framed canvas, or of a photograph of a photograph, considered by some to be legitimate art.. Too post-modern for me to understand!)
Back to the subject - the issue is not whether or not musicians can still get paid, but whether or not they can receive *recognition* for producing something of cultural value, which is a subtle distinction that most everyone misses. Stardom must not necessarily lead to riches! Not everything must have a price! Artists are only due recognition and respect. Remember, Big Money Rock Stardom is an anomaly in the first place. It emerged from, and is sustained by, the combined technological and cultural accidents of the intentionaly inefficient recording industry ("the gatekeepers"), and a leisure class with some spare change, who used to buy sheet music from songwriters and play piano, but who now buy magnetic media, with the music pre-played by hired cats and/or pretty boys("the consumers"). As the physical realities of the act of recording and distributing music change, the recording industry will change. And as the recording industry (and the cultural context surrounding it) change, Big Rock Stardom could wither away. There will be other ways to voluntarily express your gratitude as an enjoyer of the art, though, besides paying outragous mark-ups to CD-packagers and distributors. Hell, more people might make more music themselves, or they might appreciate a wider variety of music, or they might directly subsidise musicians... and more people will certainly copy the recorded instance of a given objet d'art, copy protected or not. Will they claim it to be their own? They'd better not. That's the problem we need to focus on...
As far as people who perform works for hire, or enter into a contract with an orchestra are concerned -- sure, paying them makes sense, for playing music is presumably a skill that they're good at, and they can work out how much they should be paid with the artist. But the composer? The guy that struggled for years to produce the music that the hired performers play? He'd better be doing it out of love, 'cause I don't owe him any money for following his muse - his art is *his* compulsion, not mine.
But if it's good, it could be mine, too
"Stealing songs" happens anyway, with or without IP laws. There's a funny story about the group Angel (refer to Frank Zappa's song "Punky's Whips" for more info) hearing Eddie Van Halen play some material that would eventually end up on VH's first album at a live show. Angel quickly ran back to the studio and started "stealing" it. VH's version came out first, so Angel lost.
:) ) in the world of billions of free-flying copies of art, you've gotta start coming up with something that can scale; something that can keep up with the infinite copies... It'll have to involve the copies themselves, I guess. Or perhaps the billions of listeners, if you're lucky.
Of course, nobody could've possibly played it like Eddie anyway, and everybody in the LA scene would've known that the song was VH's in the first place (I think it was "Eruption" -- anybody else remember this?).
The moral is, if you have the intention of selling musical IP, don't play it EVER until your lawyers have battenned down the hatches. If you've got an insightful idea, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT, fer chrissakes -- you're contributing to black market inefficiencies in the capitalist system by not selling it. Haven't you heard of the Free Rider problem?
Hmm.
I think the IP concept will (note - *will* - this is about the present day, not the past) cause more problems for society than it'll solve. If you insist on recognition for your creations (which is reasonable
What we need is some sort of PKI authentication scheme, using steganography in the recorded artifact. Tough to do, of course, and I certainly don't know what all of the issues are (Ask Slashdot, anyone?). It also doesn't prevent the kinds of "theft" described above - good enough musicians can bite your shit as soon as you play it, anyway. But that's the point - the artifact itself (the copy) is somehow watermarked, but the expression of the idea (the music in your ears) is unhindered. Don't play if you don't intend for the world to hear.
Dunno. Time to practice. WITH THE WINDOWS SHUT - can't have anybody steal "my" paradiddles.