When I read this, I was worried that EA might be engaged in accounting fraud... however they are just exploiting people for profit. Hooray!
That's my first reaction: I'm a stockholder, you see. Now my second reaction: shit, that's not very nice...
It's interesting to see how your priorities shift and you start rationalizing all sorts of evil when you have a financial interest. I mean, a good liberal like me, and I often find myself rooting for the tobacco companies and saying stuff like "well, it's their own damn fault for taking up smoking".
It's interesting though... we human beings seem to be able to have pretty flexible morals when it's in our own best interest to have them. It's weird , interesting and depressing to see how much your own solid convictions will shift when a buck is at stake. So keep up the good work, EA! Aw fuck, I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or sincere or a bit of each... oh the moral agony of making double-digit returns.
It grew as a 'weed' and anybody with the weed on their land could have been arrested. It took a long time to eradicate.
My Evil Scheme:
I'm gonna find a way to make drugs out of crabgrass. Then I'm gonna push to have Congress outlaw crabgrass. Meanwhile, I'm going to invest in RoundUp and other herbicides, sit back and watch my stocks soar.
I suppose criminality of "victimless crimes" is a social cost issue. What if everybody smoked pot? What is the effect on society as a whole? I opine it would carry a significant social burden to include medical costs (e.g. tobacco use), but also in lost productivity.
Try replacing "smoked pot" with "drank beer" or "had sex all the time" or "ate pizza and hamburgers" and you see the problem. Does smoking pot have its costs on society? Sure. But so does almost any behavior. Stoners may harm their lungs and not get a lot of work done. But it's arguably better than alcohol. I'm not saying better, I don't know, just that the point is definitely arguable.
I mean, you hear about fathers coming home, getting drunk, and beating on the wife and kids. Ever hear of a pothead doing that after a joint? Ever hear of a child killed because someone was "drinking and toking"? I'm not saying these things have never happened, but clearly pot doesn't contribute as much as alcohol, and if you were going to legislate on the basis of social cost, you'd probably outlaw alcohol. Of course, we tried that.
Likewise, you could argue that pizza and the Big Mac are "victimless crimes". Think of all the lost productivity and health costs due to Americans being flabby and out of shape. Think of the grief it causes families when a family member dies of a heart attack.
I'm not sure what the answer is. But the anti-drug movement is clearly too simplistic to deal with the issue in the terms it needs to be dealt with.
One thing I've noticed: whenever our soldiers have been sent to do something in Iraq, they do it. Our troops and commanders on the ground have been performing damn near flawlessly. All the screwups and "OMGWTF" moments are at the strategic level -- i.e. those things spelled out by the civilian command.
Agreed. We've won every single battle. Even as bloody as Fallujah was, the U.S. has taken out 10-20 insurgents for every one U.S. death. Problem is, you can win every battle and still lose the war. There's that famous anecdote of how a U.S. officer was talking to his North Vietnamese counterpart at the peace negotiations and says "you know, you never beat us on the battlefield," to which the Vietnamese guy says "That's true, but it's also irrelevant".
I mean, how long can we afford to go on winning like this? Assuming we manage to take out 10-20 insurgents for every Coalition soldier lost, and assuming there are 20,000 insurgents in Iraq, we're looking at 1000-2000 more U.S. war dead before this is over. To say nothing of the wounded, civilian casualties, the cost of equipment, ammunition, etc. And that's all assuming that the insurgency doesn't recruit anyone else every time we accidentally kill someone's kid/wife/mother/cousin or whoever. If we can train an Iraqi army things might be different, but word is that most of the troops cut and ran before we went into Fallujah.
Again, I think we're not having enough patience here. Iraq has never had a functioning modern democracy. Bringing order to a former dictatorship is not an easy task, and no matter how many U.N. countries you may have or whoever's in the Oval Office, that task is going to be difficult, bloody, and long.
That sure as hell isn't what they told the American people before going in... and it's pretty obvious that the Bush administration never really understood that. And the Bush administration could hardly have done a better job ensuring that it will be very difficult, bloody, and long.
First, not stopping the looting was incredibly stupid. It established a sense of anarchy and a sense that the U.S. was not fully in control; it also told Iraqis that the U.S. didn't really give a shit about their country when we sat back to watch it be ransacked (except for the Oil Ministry). Hard to predict? Maybe. But Rumsfeld's response (oh, they're just enjoying freedom!) was idiotic. That cost us a great deal of good will and convinced a lot of Iraqis that we weren't really there to help them.
Second, completely dismantling the Iraqi Army was dumb. Keeping it (at least in part) would have served several purposes. First, it would have served a symbolic purpose and let Iraqis feel that, in some way, they were still a sovereign nation, rather than under the thumb of the U.S. Second, it would have lent the U.S. a sizeable number of people for reconstruction efforts and for security. Third, it would have kept a lot of young men from becoming unemployed (idle hands).
Fallujah was a cock-up as well, by most reports. The reports are that the Administration ordered troops in against advice, but then left the job half-finished when the civilian casualties mounted. Which leaves us where we are with that.
The job is one of the most difficult in the world, sure. The problem is, we have the village idiot and his suck-ups doing that job.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ puts the number of dead to be at most 16,579
However, that's reported dead. While this is almost certainly much closer to the true figure than the Lancet estimates of 100,000 it is also going to be a substantial underestimate. There aren't a lot of reporters in Fallujah right now, for instance. It's not out of the question that it could range as high as 30,000 or so, the thing is we simply don't know. Of course, that's neglecting a hell of a lot of people who are wounded or crippled for life. Also, it's not over yet. At best, a low-intensity insurgency will drag on for years. At worst, the place becomes "Yugoslavia: Part II".
I agree that both options were unpleasant ones: murderous dictator or invasion? The thing we needed to do was sit down and look at the pros and cons of each situation, weigh things carefully, hope for the best, and plan for the worst. The Bush administration didn't do that.
And you completely discount the fact that over 400,000 tons of explosives have been secured and destroyed when you quibble about 0.075% that's supposedly "missing."
It's not the percentage or the poundage which counts, dumbass. If you've got 99 tons of black powder and 1 ton of H-bombs, the 1 ton of nukes isn't 1% as dangerous. HMX and RDX are extremely dangerous explosives because they are very stable, which makes it easy to transport or smuggle, and because very powerful. It's perfect stuff for suicide bombs, car bombs, taking out aircraft, and so on. Less than a pound of this stuff took out that flight over Lockerbie.
Resistance is different from terrorism. Iraqi resistance would be fighting against the US soldiers, not kidnapping and murdering civilians.
You can't assume all insurgents are in favor of this, any more than you can say that all American troops are in favor of the Abu Ghraib stuff. By all accounts, the insurgency has a lot of different people playing different roles- Baathists, former Intelligence guys, Nationalists, Sunni Islamists, common criminals, foreign fighters, and so on. It's like the "Judean People's Front" and "People's Front of Judea" and so on in Monty Python's "Life of Brian". They probably work together although you suspect they'd probably quickly turn on each other if the US and Allawi weren't there as common enemies. There does not seem to be a really central authority in the insurgency, nor any common motivating ideology- they haven't published a "Declaration of Independence" or anything along those lines. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that they hate us. And before we start labelling everyone shooting at us as "Terrorists" let's remind ourselves: whose country are we in, anyhow?
The articles I've read make a point of saying that the Brits are more diplomats and less cowboys, and that this has been effective. And yeah, the US really screwed up in how it handled the Iraqis- getting rid of the army, letting the looting go unchecked, and so on.
That being said, the Brits have largely been in the South, where the Shiites had little to lose and everything to gain from a change in power, along with an effective power structure (the Shiite clerics) to negotiate with. The Americans have been in the North where many of the Sunnis have lost out with the downfall of Saddam, and stand to lose if the Shiites take control of the entire country.
I don't recall any Coalition forces kidnapping people, torturing them and sawing off their heads, so I'm gonna say "yes."
The coalition, however, has thrown lots of people in jail and tortured some of them, sometimes tortured them to death- which is probably a worse way to go than having your head hacked off, which isn't pretty but at least it's quick. American soldiers have also executed unarmed prisoners.
I'm not saying that the rather amateur torture exploits of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib compare to the professional job done by Hussein, who institutionalized it, or that the occasional summary execution of an insurgent is comparable to Saddam's mass graves. But when we do imprison, torture, and execute people it sort of reduces our moral superiority argument to "Well, you see, but we don't imprison, torture, and execute people nearly as much as Saddam did," which somehow doesn't exactly fill my heart with patriotic pride. If we really want to convince the world that our intentions are decent, and if we really want to convince the world that we're better than the thugs we took out, there should be zero tolerance of this kind of shit- and the accountability should run to the top of the chain of command, where it belongs.
Please cease and desist all posting on this topic. The online discussion of patent law is the exclusive intellectual property of Microsoft, Inc., under United States Patent #513307.
The first _Matrix_ was well done, stylish, suspenseful, and had a sense of humor (unlike the later films... how can you have suspense about the outcome of a fight when your main character is basically invincible?). That being said, I think it's overrated- it doesn't hold a candle to _Blade Runner_. In _The Matrix_ you've got the whole "is reality all just made up?" as a cool premise for the first half-hour of the film... then it's clearly established what is and isn't real, and it's just action. In _Blade Runner_ you're still wondering what the hell is real and what isn't, and what it means to be human, several hours after the film ends.
Now if Philip K. Dick had done the _Matrix_ trilogy, we would have seen recursive matrices: the "real" world of Zion would just be another layer of the matrix containing the first matrix...
My professor told me how once he had a radiograph machine that wasn't working, and when he asked for an explanation, the repair technician pointed to the tube and patiently explained to him that "All the vacuum leaked out."
moral values that have served civilization for thousands of years are to be trusted over more recent notions regardless of their popularity.
Xenophobia, homophobia, racism, religious intolerance, and fear of witches have been accepted for thousands of years too... well, shee-it, I guess if it was good enough for my flea-ridden, dung-eating, covered-in-their-own-excrement ancestors living under a bridge in the Dark Ages, it's good enough for me!
Re:What his Resignation Speech should have been
on
Colin Powell Resigns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Seriously. I saw the webcast of a speech he gave at Princeton University. It was part of a conference honoring the author of a policy called "Containment", the concept which had guided the United States against the Soviet Union during the cold war... and also the strategy used by Bush and Clinton against Saddam Hussein. Basically, it's less risky to contain the threat than to engage it head-on. It was Orwellian to see him lauding this idea, after (rather defensively) saying that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein had the "intention" to produce WMD... steadfastly defending the idiocy of Bush's policies to the end. Kinda pathetic. But it seems he's got a military man's idea of honor: do what you're told, as well as you can, and don't question orders, no matter how idiotic and insane.
I count 8 resignations: 4 in the cabinet today, and another 2 senior CIA officials. Plus, Ashcroft and another CIA official earlier. Was there another cabinet level that resigned earlier?
I don't know what this means; but I think it means something. I sure don't recall this many resignations for Clinton's second term...?
In a completely unrelated story, after Bush won re-election rats were seen scurrying desperately away from the White House as fast as their little legs would take them...
Powell's replacement will - I think - send a strong signal about the strategy a Bush 43B administration will pursue.
I agree. The man who serves as our representative abroad will send a strong message to the rest of the world. So who will Bush pick? Well, I think that to tell the rest of the world just exactly how much the current Administration respects other countries, will carefully consider their suggestions, and cares about the people of all nations, President Bush will have the United States' diplomacy conducted by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
First, they say it's 1500km- over 4500 feet- under water. The sea level drop in the last ice age was maybe 100m. And the floor of the Mediterranean was dry at one point, but that was seven million years ago. Nor is it clear what kind of geological subsiding could drop a city a mile and a half, yet preserve the walls. So how the hell you could get Atlantis preserved a mile and a half underwater is beyond me. The other thing is, does the thing really look like a city? To me, it looks like a hillside has given way and slumped to create some sediment ridges (the "walls"). It doesn't look terribly city-like. But hey, maybe I'm not smoking what they're smoking.
And the Iraqi people decided that the US didn't give a shit about them when they saw American troops sit idly by as looters went wild throughout the country (except for the well-guarded oil ministry). According to a lot of interviews, that really said it all to a lot of Iraqis, and told them that we were occupiers, not liberators. Disbanding the Iraqi army drove the point home.
"We drop bombs with the precision to go through an open window of a building."
Please, what a bunch of bullshit. The way they're fighting in Fallujah is just blowing away the fucking buildings. They see a gun go off and then aim the tank guns/Paladin artillery/air strike at the building where it came from, and then open up.
Any civilians in the building? Who knows? I'm not disputing that these weapons are accurate. But a 90-lb. howitzer shell or a 500 lb. bomb has got a hell of a kill radius, so it's going to take out a lot more than just what you're aiming at. A tank round is going to go straight through a lot of these buildings..50 caliber machine guns will go through many walls, and a stray bullet remains lethal at over a mile (and they are firing thousands of those things). Things aren't pretty for anybody stuck in the city.
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That's my first reaction: I'm a stockholder, you see. Now my second reaction: shit, that's not very nice... It's interesting to see how your priorities shift and you start rationalizing all sorts of evil when you have a financial interest. I mean, a good liberal like me, and I often find myself rooting for the tobacco companies and saying stuff like "well, it's their own damn fault for taking up smoking".
It's interesting though... we human beings seem to be able to have pretty flexible morals when it's in our own best interest to have them. It's weird , interesting and depressing to see how much your own solid convictions will shift when a buck is at stake. So keep up the good work, EA! Aw fuck, I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or sincere or a bit of each... oh the moral agony of making double-digit returns.
My Evil Scheme:
I'm gonna find a way to make drugs out of crabgrass. Then I'm gonna push to have Congress outlaw crabgrass. Meanwhile, I'm going to invest in RoundUp and other herbicides, sit back and watch my stocks soar.
MWAHAHAH!!!
Try replacing "smoked pot" with "drank beer" or "had sex all the time" or "ate pizza and hamburgers" and you see the problem. Does smoking pot have its costs on society? Sure. But so does almost any behavior. Stoners may harm their lungs and not get a lot of work done. But it's arguably better than alcohol. I'm not saying better, I don't know, just that the point is definitely arguable.
I mean, you hear about fathers coming home, getting drunk, and beating on the wife and kids. Ever hear of a pothead doing that after a joint? Ever hear of a child killed because someone was "drinking and toking"? I'm not saying these things have never happened, but clearly pot doesn't contribute as much as alcohol, and if you were going to legislate on the basis of social cost, you'd probably outlaw alcohol. Of course, we tried that.
Likewise, you could argue that pizza and the Big Mac are "victimless crimes". Think of all the lost productivity and health costs due to Americans being flabby and out of shape. Think of the grief it causes families when a family member dies of a heart attack.
I'm not sure what the answer is. But the anti-drug movement is clearly too simplistic to deal with the issue in the terms it needs to be dealt with.
"2+2=4" is just another myth spread by the Liberal media.
True, Bush has gotten us in a pretty deep hole. On the other hand, Bush hasn't even finished digging yet.
...in related news, a study conducted by Born-Again Alabaman NASCAR fans found that Bush swept California.
We just need to find a way to cryogenically freeze them for four years...
Agreed. We've won every single battle. Even as bloody as Fallujah was, the U.S. has taken out 10-20 insurgents for every one U.S. death. Problem is, you can win every battle and still lose the war. There's that famous anecdote of how a U.S. officer was talking to his North Vietnamese counterpart at the peace negotiations and says "you know, you never beat us on the battlefield," to which the Vietnamese guy says "That's true, but it's also irrelevant".
I mean, how long can we afford to go on winning like this? Assuming we manage to take out 10-20 insurgents for every Coalition soldier lost, and assuming there are 20,000 insurgents in Iraq, we're looking at 1000-2000 more U.S. war dead before this is over. To say nothing of the wounded, civilian casualties, the cost of equipment, ammunition, etc. And that's all assuming that the insurgency doesn't recruit anyone else every time we accidentally kill someone's kid/wife/mother/cousin or whoever. If we can train an Iraqi army things might be different, but word is that most of the troops cut and ran before we went into Fallujah.
That sure as hell isn't what they told the American people before going in... and it's pretty obvious that the Bush administration never really understood that. And the Bush administration could hardly have done a better job ensuring that it will be very difficult, bloody, and long.
First, not stopping the looting was incredibly stupid. It established a sense of anarchy and a sense that the U.S. was not fully in control; it also told Iraqis that the U.S. didn't really give a shit about their country when we sat back to watch it be ransacked (except for the Oil Ministry). Hard to predict? Maybe. But Rumsfeld's response (oh, they're just enjoying freedom!) was idiotic. That cost us a great deal of good will and convinced a lot of Iraqis that we weren't really there to help them.
Second, completely dismantling the Iraqi Army was dumb. Keeping it (at least in part) would have served several purposes. First, it would have served a symbolic purpose and let Iraqis feel that, in some way, they were still a sovereign nation, rather than under the thumb of the U.S. Second, it would have lent the U.S. a sizeable number of people for reconstruction efforts and for security. Third, it would have kept a lot of young men from becoming unemployed (idle hands).
Fallujah was a cock-up as well, by most reports. The reports are that the Administration ordered troops in against advice, but then left the job half-finished when the civilian casualties mounted. Which leaves us where we are with that.
The job is one of the most difficult in the world, sure. The problem is, we have the village idiot and his suck-ups doing that job.
However, that's reported dead. While this is almost certainly much closer to the true figure than the Lancet estimates of 100,000 it is also going to be a substantial underestimate. There aren't a lot of reporters in Fallujah right now, for instance. It's not out of the question that it could range as high as 30,000 or so, the thing is we simply don't know. Of course, that's neglecting a hell of a lot of people who are wounded or crippled for life. Also, it's not over yet. At best, a low-intensity insurgency will drag on for years. At worst, the place becomes "Yugoslavia: Part II".
I agree that both options were unpleasant ones: murderous dictator or invasion? The thing we needed to do was sit down and look at the pros and cons of each situation, weigh things carefully, hope for the best, and plan for the worst. The Bush administration didn't do that.
It's not the percentage or the poundage which counts, dumbass. If you've got 99 tons of black powder and 1 ton of H-bombs, the 1 ton of nukes isn't 1% as dangerous. HMX and RDX are extremely dangerous explosives because they are very stable, which makes it easy to transport or smuggle, and because very powerful. It's perfect stuff for suicide bombs, car bombs, taking out aircraft, and so on. Less than a pound of this stuff took out that flight over Lockerbie.
You can't assume all insurgents are in favor of this, any more than you can say that all American troops are in favor of the Abu Ghraib stuff. By all accounts, the insurgency has a lot of different people playing different roles- Baathists, former Intelligence guys, Nationalists, Sunni Islamists, common criminals, foreign fighters, and so on. It's like the "Judean People's Front" and "People's Front of Judea" and so on in Monty Python's "Life of Brian". They probably work together although you suspect they'd probably quickly turn on each other if the US and Allawi weren't there as common enemies. There does not seem to be a really central authority in the insurgency, nor any common motivating ideology- they haven't published a "Declaration of Independence" or anything along those lines. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that they hate us. And before we start labelling everyone shooting at us as "Terrorists" let's remind ourselves: whose country are we in, anyhow?
That being said, the Brits have largely been in the South, where the Shiites had little to lose and everything to gain from a change in power, along with an effective power structure (the Shiite clerics) to negotiate with. The Americans have been in the North where many of the Sunnis have lost out with the downfall of Saddam, and stand to lose if the Shiites take control of the entire country.
The coalition, however, has thrown lots of people in jail and tortured some of them, sometimes tortured them to death- which is probably a worse way to go than having your head hacked off, which isn't pretty but at least it's quick. American soldiers have also executed unarmed prisoners.
I'm not saying that the rather amateur torture exploits of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib compare to the professional job done by Hussein, who institutionalized it, or that the occasional summary execution of an insurgent is comparable to Saddam's mass graves. But when we do imprison, torture, and execute people it sort of reduces our moral superiority argument to "Well, you see, but we don't imprison, torture, and execute people nearly as much as Saddam did," which somehow doesn't exactly fill my heart with patriotic pride. If we really want to convince the world that our intentions are decent, and if we really want to convince the world that we're better than the thugs we took out, there should be zero tolerance of this kind of shit- and the accountability should run to the top of the chain of command, where it belongs.
Another issue: if tyrannosaurs didn't attack ankylosaurs, why on earth did they have those bony plates all over their backs?
FROM: Legal Affairs Division, Microsoft, Inc.
Please cease and desist all posting on this topic. The online discussion of patent law is the exclusive intellectual property of Microsoft, Inc., under United States Patent #513307.
Now if Philip K. Dick had done the _Matrix_ trilogy, we would have seen recursive matrices: the "real" world of Zion would just be another layer of the matrix containing the first matrix...
My professor told me how once he had a radiograph machine that wasn't working, and when he asked for an explanation, the repair technician pointed to the tube and patiently explained to him that "All the vacuum leaked out."
Xenophobia, homophobia, racism, religious intolerance, and fear of witches have been accepted for thousands of years too... well, shee-it, I guess if it was good enough for my flea-ridden, dung-eating, covered-in-their-own-excrement ancestors living under a bridge in the Dark Ages, it's good enough for me!
Seriously. I saw the webcast of a speech he gave at Princeton University. It was part of a conference honoring the author of a policy called "Containment", the concept which had guided the United States against the Soviet Union during the cold war... and also the strategy used by Bush and Clinton against Saddam Hussein. Basically, it's less risky to contain the threat than to engage it head-on. It was Orwellian to see him lauding this idea, after (rather defensively) saying that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein had the "intention" to produce WMD... steadfastly defending the idiocy of Bush's policies to the end. Kinda pathetic. But it seems he's got a military man's idea of honor: do what you're told, as well as you can, and don't question orders, no matter how idiotic and insane.
In a completely unrelated story, after Bush won re-election rats were seen scurrying desperately away from the White House as fast as their little legs would take them...
I agree. The man who serves as our representative abroad will send a strong message to the rest of the world. So who will Bush pick? Well, I think that to tell the rest of the world just exactly how much the current Administration respects other countries, will carefully consider their suggestions, and cares about the people of all nations, President Bush will have the United States' diplomacy conducted by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
First, they say it's 1500km- over 4500 feet- under water. The sea level drop in the last ice age was maybe 100m. And the floor of the Mediterranean was dry at one point, but that was seven million years ago. Nor is it clear what kind of geological subsiding could drop a city a mile and a half, yet preserve the walls. So how the hell you could get Atlantis preserved a mile and a half underwater is beyond me. The other thing is, does the thing really look like a city? To me, it looks like a hillside has given way and slumped to create some sediment ridges (the "walls"). It doesn't look terribly city-like. But hey, maybe I'm not smoking what they're smoking.
And the Iraqi people decided that the US didn't give a shit about them when they saw American troops sit idly by as looters went wild throughout the country (except for the well-guarded oil ministry). According to a lot of interviews, that really said it all to a lot of Iraqis, and told them that we were occupiers, not liberators. Disbanding the Iraqi army drove the point home.
Please, what a bunch of bullshit. The way they're fighting in Fallujah is just blowing away the fucking buildings. They see a gun go off and then aim the tank guns/Paladin artillery/air strike at the building where it came from, and then open up. Any civilians in the building? Who knows? I'm not disputing that these weapons are accurate. But a 90-lb. howitzer shell or a 500 lb. bomb has got a hell of a kill radius, so it's going to take out a lot more than just what you're aiming at. A tank round is going to go straight through a lot of these buildings. .50 caliber machine guns will go through many walls, and a stray bullet remains lethal at over a mile (and they are firing thousands of those things). Things aren't pretty for anybody stuck in the city.