Fair play, although I'd dispute with you (now - I used to think differently) that it's necessarily that cut-and-dried - everything I've read tends to be split between the "he just wants us out of the middle east" and "he sincerely wants war between the middle east and west" (either to dominate the west or simply to keep us out of the region) camps.
Supporting the second one is the fact that OBL's latest message was concluded by US intelligence agencies to be an attempt to help Bush win the 2004 election.
If all he wants is the West out of the middle east, he'd be best off getting Bush out of power as soon as possible in favour of someone more tractable. However, if he's looking to incite war between the two by provoking the US into overreaching and uniting the Arab world against it, it's essential to keep Bush's abrasive foreign policies and grade-school understanding of consequences in power for as long as possible.
Either way, even if OBL was in favour of starting a war, until 9/11 and the US overreaction he lacked popular support - Al Qaeda was just a small group of isolated fanatics, and was hounded out of almost every country they set up shop in by the local governments. They were being tolerated in Afghanistan when they caused 9/11, and the ensuing US overreaction had exactly the effect they desired - the US invasion and some propaganda (and a few thoughtless remarks form Bush) convinced the arab world they were under attack by the west, and suddenly people were more receptive to the extreme views advocated by OBL and his group. And, if you think about it, the Neocons in the USA.
Then you need to read. If you will not be converted, you are to be killed.
What should I read, exactly? The oh-so-clued-up-and-impartial US media? Or maybe the Qur'an? And how about all those passages in the bible about smiting the unbeliever, razing his lands and killing his family and children?
You can pick anything you like out of a thousand-year-old book - this doesn't prove "modern Islam" == "genocidal mania" any more than the bible proves "modern Christianity" == "genocidal mania", idiot funadmentalists notwithstanding.
Both sides have their extremes, and it's completely unfair and incorrect to characterise either side by their lunatic fringe.
You left out that they died at the hands of Islamic fanatics, just like the Americans.
Not all of them. Quite a few died in the invasion. And given the destabilisation of the entire region is the joint fault of the historical european and modern US powers, refusing to see any of that blood on our hands is willfully obtuse.
Seriously - read up on the history of the West's interference in the middle east some time, specifically between (say) 1850 and 1950.
Here's some more of that you gotta read stuff. Islamic history goes back further than that and has always been predicated on lethal conversion.
s/Islamic/Christianity/
Your point?
The difference being, of course, the first is a natural occurrance beyond human control and the second is a murder.
Sorry - not following you. We're talking about how scared you should be of something, right?
If you're killed by an natural disaster, are you less dead?
No, it lacks the murder angle. You have blinders to that, why?
Because I don't care if I'm killed by a natural accident or a person - I'm still dead.
We're talking about how scared you should be of something. Deadness and the likelihood of it happening is all that matters.
It is irrelevant to anyone if they're killed by a bomb blast, a lightning strike or a bizarre accident involving an aardvark - they're still dead, and the only factors to weigh in your reaction should be the likelihood of it happening and the cost of preventative action.
It would be a lot cheaper to supply everyone in the US with earthed metal hats and mandate their wearing by law whenever it was a bit cloudy, and you'd save more lives. Now tell me the US government's reaction wasn't/isn't disproportionate.
I think the government really does have its priorities, but monitoring 10 million computers to find out what porn sites people like to visit isn't one of them.
And with a handy backdoor installed monitoring computers would be even easier to automate.
I'm not saying they have, merely that your pooh-poohing of the whole idea is a bit baseless when they've already been caught doing essentially the same thing in a different medium.
While I'm not going to deny the possibility that they do have more up their sleeves, I think the past couple years have made me less likely to don the tin foil. With the terrorist attacks, resulting WMD wars, Gee Dubya elections, and blatant fear-tactics, I've really begun to realize that "government intelligence" truly is an oxymoron.
Sorry, just to clarify:
The constant exposes of systematic corruption throughout all levels of the US government, from pre-warnings of 9/11 through to financial scandals to the gutting of judicial oversight and introduction of almost limitless executive power for the Whitehouse... two blatantly corrupt elections, at least one illegal war and enough lying, bullshit and willful misrepresentation to indict and incarcerate any normal group of people ten times over... and all this means you're less likely to don your tinfoil hat?
The only way this makes sense to me is if you're saying conspiracy theories shouldn't attract tinfoil hat accusations any more... because everyone knows they're watching you, lying to you and breaking the law all the damn time?
You have more chance of being personally hit by lighning than killed in a terrorist attack, even post-9/11 and post-7/7.
So, fly all you want. And if you don't fly because you're scared to, remember also to never go outside when it's raining or there are clouds in the sky.
Nah, I favour simply dessicating all passengers before flying and reuniting them with their bodily fluids at the other end. Assuming, of course, they're better with bodily fluids than they are with luggage.
"Ah yes, Mrs Smith. I'm afraid your urine and stomach acids were mistakenly routed to LAX instead of JFK, so we'll get them flown back as soon as possible - shouldn't be more than two days, I'm afraid. Ah... and your blood appears to be in Bangkok. Did you need it any time soon?"
The fact is and has always been the same. Radical Islam wants to destroy the West.
Actually, I think you'll find they merely want to convert us all to Islam and make us live under a theocracy, not literally destroy us.
And I've heard plenty of US fundamentalists advocating (further!) romping through the middle east, invading Syria, Iran, Iraq (before we went in), even Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Given the US is currently occupying two countries in the middle east, one under only the flimsiest of excuses, what gives you the right to such a moral high-ground? Especially given you tolerate mainstream religious leaders calling for the assassination of democratically-elected leaders, and/or the wholesale invasion of other countries?
And don't try the "targeting innocents" angle - do you think more or less innocent Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq invasion than Americans died in 9/11?
Here's a clue: the two numbers differ by (over) a factor of 14.
So?
The best way to bring down their target is through fear.
Right. And invoking the spectre of 9/11 on every possible occasion, restricting civil liberties and sliding towards a police state and issuing handy colour-coded threat levels that tell you exactly how scared you should be all the time... those things are having the opposite effect, right?
So they're not, y'know helping the terrorists win?
Ignoring it got us in the mess in the first place.
I think you'll find that meddling in (and destabilising) the entire middle east region for the best part of half a century got the US in this mess, actually.
If you'd kept to yourselves and not tried to arm-twist, destabilise and generally manipulate governments into acting in your own best interests, there wouldn't be as many people hating you and trying to attack you right now.
Not, of course, that there are actually that many people trying, even now. You're still more likely to get killed by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack... so where are the colour-coded "federal threat-level" charts for lightning strikes?
Oh right - the threat of lightning lacks a clear us-and-them angle to get the sheeple voting for you, and doesn't provide for nearly as many heroic-looking stage-managed photo-ops.
You're completely right - this is merely wimpy, pussy-like reactive defence.
We should be out there like real men, pro-actively fighting the terrorist threat... by educating people, improving their quality of life, allowing them self-determination and treating them fairly - that's how you stop terrorism, by taking away its recruits.
Oh, sorry, you meant we should be go stomping into countries which might or might not even support them and blow up or shoot a lot of brown people. I can see how that would stop all the other brown people who weren't terrorists before. And it'll certainly not prompt any of them to become terrorists. Good plan!
Thoughts for the day:
Terrorism's only raw material is recruits.
You can kick over snowmen all day long - they'll keep popping because anyone can make them. However, remove the supply of snow and there will be no more snowmen.
Bias is like "goodness" - nobody's good all the time, and nobody's perfectly good. But does that mean we shouldn't try to be good people, even while recognising that we won't ever be perfect?
Bias is an inescapable part of... psychology, but a good journalist... attempts to minimise it. Corrupt journalists often recognise it but don't care, and bad journalists don't even recognise it.
My emphasis. Erm, that is, emphasis added this time.;-)
Sure, the BBC isn't always perfectly unbiased. However, it does strive for impartiality, and doesn't merely pay lip-service to the idea while fellating corporate interests.
While it's not perfect, I don't think you can argue it's out-and-out partisan like Fox, or even CNN/Al Jazeera.
If I'm wrong please respond, and give some examples of overt or deliberate bias - I'd be curious to try to work out if it's actually "objectively" biased, or merely presenting a different viewpoint to the biases of the viewer.
So what happened to all your firearms, privacy (video monitoring), and pocket knives then? Couple people get hurt and suddenly you all roll over on your back as easily and enthusiastically as the family pet.
Actually, most people are uncomfortable or opposed to increased CCTV monitoring, firearms were never commonly available[1] and you can still carry a knife[2]. Oh, and most of the important legislation that actually restricts our freedoms was pushed through my Tony Blair (et al) in defiance of the public's wishes, and often even the wishes of their own party members, and he's now copping all hell for it in the public opinion stakes.
Just look at the kerfuffle around ID cards and I think you'll find the Blitz-inspired backbone is hale and hearty as ever - the government's trying to frighten people into accepting Id cards, but people just aren't scared.
I've been living in Suffolk for about a month and a half now, but it seems to me any back bone left over from the Blitz departed the scene years ago. There are posters and giant metal collection bins here and there. They are scaring people to turn in their cooking knives because they might be used in a crime someday.
Erm, that's a knife amnesty. It's kind of a voluntary request you turn in any pointed knives you might have to reduce the number in general circulation. It's not a heavy-handed pressure tactic from the government, just a polite request. The big secure box was to make sure nobody nicked the tens or hundreds of knives that other people handed in.
Oh, and the knife amnesty didn't go very well - most people flatly ignored it because it's blatantly ineffectual and stupid.
What was your point again?
(P.S. I grew up in Suffolk - nice area of the country, if a bit rural).
Footnotes:
[1] They're still legal, IIRC, but must be left at a gun-club or kept in a locked gun cabinet. They're also legal for farmers or anyone else with a sensible reason for needing one.
[2] As long as it's not a flick-knife, has a fold-away blade that doesn't exceed 3 inches in lenghth.
USAians and paranoiacs, please take note - this is not an isolated incident, we are not living in denial, Brits who refuse to be traumatised into acting differently by 7/7 are not isolated freaks, and (despite both our governments' and your media's best efforts) we are not the kind of people to fearmonger, lock ourselves in our cellars and let the terrorists win.
You would not believe how many times I've been accused of any or all of the above by (mostly American)/. readers, simply for stating that most British people took 7/7 on the chin and got on with their lives.
It's just a difference in culture, dig? We've been shot at, bombed, hijacked and had full passenger aircraft brought down on villages more or less ever since the end of the second world war (if not longer).
You're still more likely to get hit by lightning than even injured in a terrorist attack, so we're not even blasé about it. We're simply reacting in proportion.
(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this post is not intended to be anti-American - just anti-hysteria.)
Your view of what is biased is of course dependent on what bias you already hold.
Indeed. So if, for instance, you're entirely used to a biased media corrupted from the get-go by corporate and/or political interests, then you're not going to realise quite how bad your media is, and are going to assume at a very basic level that everyone's media is just as bad.
It is not.
Such is the nature of how we view truth. That you think the BBC is unbiased just tells me that you think their view of the world is the closest to yours.
Not at all. I regularly disagree with a lot of what I see on the BBC - particularly (I'm adult enough to admit) when it conflicts with my worldview or preconceptions. However, whenever I've gone away and read up on a point that's annoyed me (even just to convince myself "I was right"), I've almost always found that either I was wrong, or at least that the "true" case was more evenly-balanced than my previous opinion was.
I like to think a better measure of a news organization's worth is the value of news they bring to the viewer... What I mean by 'done well' is: did it explore different angles of a story. How did he/she get recruited? Did they get any fame/infame from the act? How do the rest of the family feel about what happened? What goal were they trying to acomplish, specifically how does killing oneself and a few disco kids further a cause? Their side of the story is very interesting no matter what your view of the world is.
You appear to be judging news coverage by how "interesting" it is, not how factually accurate the coverage is. Many people (especially in the US) do this, and news organisations tend to follow what the audience demands. This explains why your media is so shockingly partial and (frequently) blatantly biased.
In other countries we prioritise the factual content and lack of bias in the news, not how entertaining it is.
Pop quiz - do most people like having their preconceptions and prejudices flattered, or hearing hard truths that make them re-evaluate their worldview? Prejudices, right. So which are they going to find more entertaining and interesting? So which direction are the news shows going to move towards?
What's not interesting is being told what to think about an event without substantial information.
Again, if you watched decent news coverage it doesn't tell you what to think, merely what's happening. "Telling you what to think" is what so frequently annoys the rest of thw world when they watch American news media.
All news is biased.
Right, in the same way that "all men are attracted to young girls", or "all people are violent".
These are basic elements of our psychology. However, you don't attempt to punch every person who irritates you or have sex with every young girl you see - bias is an urge, not an action.
Urges can be identified and restrained. Actions can't. By painting bias as an action you implicitly indicate that it's somehow "ok", and that attempting to minimise or eradicate it it worthless, naive or pointless.
It is not. Bias is like "goodness" - nobody's good all the time, and nobody's perfectly good. But does that mean we shouldn't try to be good people, even while recognising that we won't ever be perfect?
Bias is an inescapable part of your psychology, but a good journalist recognises it and attmepts to minimise it. Corrupt journalists often recognise it but don't care, and bad journalists don't even recognise it.
I would say that the BBC is amazingly biased,
Bullshit. Please provide any kind of evidence backing up your position, or admit you pulled that out of your arse.
but that their style of reporting is excellent and i
The music industry has for years struggled to develop a new physical format that could spark increased sales by replacing the CD.
CDs have been replaced. By digital music files.
And it's not just CDs that are dead or dying - the entire idea of media coming on a physical disk is, like, just so last-century it's untrue.
Seriously, though - when even my grey-haired aunty has heard of MP3s, iTunes and iPods, and when the majority of people in the west have broadband access WTF are the chances that you'll be able to replace a dying physical medium with another dying physical medium?
This, if nothing else, proves quite how out-of-touch the record industry is. They're talking about "introducing" a new physical medium, requiring users to buy new hardware for their cars, offices, bedrooms, portable devices, etc, and expecting it to take off?
What kind of tool is going to spring for a portable DVD (audio-only!) player, when for £30 he can pick up a crappy MP3 player with the same kind of playtime and a form-factor about a tenth the size? (And that's completely ignoring the whole ease-of-piracy angle, too).
Music industry: We all know you don't like digital music, but for god's sake Just Give It Up. You've lost, utterly, as always happens when you pit yourself against the march of progress, and you're only making yourselves look more silly now. Back out and get a clue before you do us all a favour and bankrupt yourselves.
The horse is long dead and buried, but now you're even insisting on whipping the ground the horse was on.
What I mean is that maybe there was (relatively) unbiased media but they were unprofitable and hence failed. Market forces at work.
With respect, that's apparently complete supposition on your part. Several other posters have claimed (with some evidence) that the USA has never had an unbiased media, so market forces were never an issue.
Score one for unchecked capitalism, eh?
The other part of that is that yes, some people do indeed prefer to have their preconceptions flattered than to discover they were wrong and actually learn something about the world. Unfortunately this is a cultural problem, but it's a pretty damniig indictment of a country if it's so bad that there's no place for an independant media - just a collection of partisan biased propagandists with different political leanings.
The point about bias being inescapable is that it is disengenuous for a news outlet to claim to be unbiased or even attempting to be so. Best to recognise the biases and just try not to go too wild with them.
I call BS on that. Well, I call "the product of a completely biased and partisan news industry" on it, anyway.;-)
Maybe (unconscious) bias is inescapable, but there's nothing wrong with attempting to recognise your own biases and compensate for them. The British and other news media manage to do this quite well, so your assertion it's "disingenuous" to claim (implication: it's impossible) is simply incorrect.
Once again the phrase "(unconscious) bias is inescapable" acts as a universal get-out to be as biased and partisan as you want to be. People spout the phrase without thinking, and are lead into thinking that biased, partisan reporting is not only ok, but the only thing that's possible.
You guys do know that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" was a joke, right?;-)
The difference is, I doubt you're the kind of person Microsoft sincerely wishes would just disappear. Or at least shut up and sit down.
Hey, even better, if you could get this guy on-side you could turn him around and point him at other peoples' products. Then he wouldn't even be a liability - he'd be an asset!
Oh yes.
On July 3, Mr. Moore got an email from Mike Reavey, a manager at Microsoft's security-response center. Mr. Reavey was concerned that Mr. Moore's latest project -- a high-profile effort to catalog the bugs in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser -- could give ammunition to hackers. He offered to fly to Austin to talk about it. Mr. Moore, saying a visit wasn't necessary, offered to post vulnerabilities in non-Microsoft browsers for a few days instead.
When political considerations like this start interfering with security work, you know MS's charm offensive is working. And that ain't a good thing. The Microsoft contact tried to haul him down to see them because they were worried about the details he released helping hackers, right?
So why would going after their competitors for a few days negate that problem? The hackers will still get the info, just a few days later. This clearly has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with public perception and spin.
Not, of course, that researchers shouldn't look for security holes in other browsers as well. However, when the most insecure browser on the market still holds 60-80% market-share and researchers are "persuaded" by its owners to delay or avoid research on it to go chasing minority competitors (whose bugs will affect proportionately less people, and people whose security knowledge is generally likely to be a bit better anyway) instead, well... how is that the most useful work they could be doing?
Sounds like Microsoft's successfully pulling a Papa Lazarou on the independant security companies.
Exactly. I just love the way the middle-eastern Islamic and western Christian fundamentalists are die-hard enemies... and yet to an outsider they're increasingly coming to resemble each other.
What planet are you living on? It was a clothed picture of a woman.
If it was hardcore porn, you'd have a point. If it was softcore porn, you'd have a point. If it was even a sexually-suggestive bikini picture, you'd have a point.
This is a picture of a woman in an evening gown, much less indecent (from the description) than the kind of pictures you find on the front of many women's magazines.
Just how puritan has the USA got if fully-clothed women are now considered indecent?
What's next, the default Windows wallpaper is indecent because if you turn your head sideways and squint the rolling green hill looks a bit like a deformed green breast?
Slashdot Mirror
How's that whole Internet Debating 101 going?
I see you've got to the section on avoiding unanswerable points by launching irrelevant ad-hominem attack.
Please call again when you've got to the "responding to the points raised" module, mmkay?
(P.S. It's near the end - most people seem to drop out before they get that far.)
Fair play, although I'd dispute with you (now - I used to think differently) that it's necessarily that cut-and-dried - everything I've read tends to be split between the "he just wants us out of the middle east" and "he sincerely wants war between the middle east and west" (either to dominate the west or simply to keep us out of the region) camps.
Supporting the second one is the fact that OBL's latest message was concluded by US intelligence agencies to be an attempt to help Bush win the 2004 election.
If all he wants is the West out of the middle east, he'd be best off getting Bush out of power as soon as possible in favour of someone more tractable. However, if he's looking to incite war between the two by provoking the US into overreaching and uniting the Arab world against it, it's essential to keep Bush's abrasive foreign policies and grade-school understanding of consequences in power for as long as possible.
Either way, even if OBL was in favour of starting a war, until 9/11 and the US overreaction he lacked popular support - Al Qaeda was just a small group of isolated fanatics, and was hounded out of almost every country they set up shop in by the local governments. They were being tolerated in Afghanistan when they caused 9/11, and the ensuing US overreaction had exactly the effect they desired - the US invasion and some propaganda (and a few thoughtless remarks form Bush) convinced the arab world they were under attack by the west, and suddenly people were more receptive to the extreme views advocated by OBL and his group. And, if you think about it, the Neocons in the USA.
What should I read, exactly? The oh-so-clued-up-and-impartial US media? Or maybe the Qur'an? And how about all those passages in the bible about smiting the unbeliever, razing his lands and killing his family and children?
You can pick anything you like out of a thousand-year-old book - this doesn't prove "modern Islam" == "genocidal mania" any more than the bible proves "modern Christianity" == "genocidal mania", idiot funadmentalists notwithstanding.
Both sides have their extremes, and it's completely unfair and incorrect to characterise either side by their lunatic fringe.
Not all of them. Quite a few died in the invasion. And given the destabilisation of the entire region is the joint fault of the historical european and modern US powers, refusing to see any of that blood on our hands is willfully obtuse.
Seriously - read up on the history of the West's interference in the middle east some time, specifically between (say) 1850 and 1950.
s/Islamic/Christianity/
Your point?
Sorry - not following you. We're talking about how scared you should be of something, right?
If you're killed by an natural disaster, are you less dead?
Because I don't care if I'm killed by a natural accident or a person - I'm still dead.
We're talking about how scared you should be of something. Deadness and the likelihood of it happening is all that matters.
It is irrelevant to anyone if they're killed by a bomb blast, a lightning strike or a bizarre accident involving an aardvark - they're still dead, and the only factors to weigh in your reaction should be the likelihood of it happening and the cost of preventative action.
It would be a lot cheaper to supply everyone in the US with earthed metal hats and mandate their wearing by law whenever it was a bit cloudy, and you'd save more lives. Now tell me the US government's reaction wasn't/isn't disproportionate.
How about monitoring 10 million phone calls?
And with a handy backdoor installed monitoring computers would be even easier to automate.
I'm not saying they have, merely that your pooh-poohing of the whole idea is a bit baseless when they've already been caught doing essentially the same thing in a different medium.
Sorry, just to clarify:
The constant exposes of systematic corruption throughout all levels of the US government, from pre-warnings of 9/11 through to financial scandals to the gutting of judicial oversight and introduction of almost limitless executive power for the Whitehouse... two blatantly corrupt elections, at least one illegal war and enough lying, bullshit and willful misrepresentation to indict and incarcerate any normal group of people ten times over... and all this means you're less likely to don your tinfoil hat?
The only way this makes sense to me is if you're saying conspiracy theories shouldn't attract tinfoil hat accusations any more... because everyone knows they're watching you, lying to you and breaking the law all the damn time?
Fly all you want.
You have more chance of being personally hit by lighning than killed in a terrorist attack, even post-9/11 and post-7/7.
So, fly all you want. And if you don't fly because you're scared to, remember also to never go outside when it's raining or there are clouds in the sky.
My god you're right!
No, really. I mean, we all know reality famously has a well-known liberal bias.
Oh no. Who ever would think that?
Ah yes, the unmistakable sign of the bad-debate-loser.
IF position_untenable THEN attack(spelling|grammar|phraseology);
Stripped naked?
Nah, I favour simply dessicating all passengers before flying and reuniting them with their bodily fluids at the other end. Assuming, of course, they're better with bodily fluids than they are with luggage.
"Ah yes, Mrs Smith. I'm afraid your urine and stomach acids were mistakenly routed to LAX instead of JFK, so we'll get them flown back as soon as possible - shouldn't be more than two days, I'm afraid. Ah... and your blood appears to be in Bangkok. Did you need it any time soon?"
Actually, I think you'll find they merely want to convert us all to Islam and make us live under a theocracy, not literally destroy us.
And I've heard plenty of US fundamentalists advocating (further!) romping through the middle east, invading Syria, Iran, Iraq (before we went in), even Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Given the US is currently occupying two countries in the middle east, one under only the flimsiest of excuses, what gives you the right to such a moral high-ground? Especially given you tolerate mainstream religious leaders calling for the assassination of democratically-elected leaders, and/or the wholesale invasion of other countries?
And don't try the "targeting innocents" angle - do you think more or less innocent Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq invasion than Americans died in 9/11?
Here's a clue: the two numbers differ by (over) a factor of 14.
So?
Right. And invoking the spectre of 9/11 on every possible occasion, restricting civil liberties and sliding towards a police state and issuing handy colour-coded threat levels that tell you exactly how scared you should be all the time... those things are having the opposite effect, right?
So they're not, y'know helping the terrorists win?
I think you'll find that meddling in (and destabilising) the entire middle east region for the best part of half a century got the US in this mess, actually.
If you'd kept to yourselves and not tried to arm-twist, destabilise and generally manipulate governments into acting in your own best interests, there wouldn't be as many people hating you and trying to attack you right now.
Not, of course, that there are actually that many people trying, even now. You're still more likely to get killed by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack... so where are the colour-coded "federal threat-level" charts for lightning strikes?
Oh right - the threat of lightning lacks a clear us-and-them angle to get the sheeple voting for you, and doesn't provide for nearly as many heroic-looking stage-managed photo-ops.
You're completely right - this is merely wimpy, pussy-like reactive defence.
We should be out there like real men, pro-actively fighting the terrorist threat... by educating people, improving their quality of life, allowing them self-determination and treating them fairly - that's how you stop terrorism, by taking away its recruits.
Oh, sorry, you meant we should be go stomping into countries which might or might not even support them and blow up or shoot a lot of brown people. I can see how that would stop all the other brown people who weren't terrorists before. And it'll certainly not prompt any of them to become terrorists. Good plan!
Thoughts for the day:
Terrorism's only raw material is recruits.
You can kick over snowmen all day long - they'll keep popping because anyone can make them. However, remove the supply of snow and there will be no more snowmen.
Except, y'know, now the analogy works, neatly ruining the joke.
(Shakes head sadly...)
My emphasis. Erm, that is, emphasis added this time.
Sure, the BBC isn't always perfectly unbiased. However, it does strive for impartiality, and doesn't merely pay lip-service to the idea while fellating corporate interests.
While it's not perfect, I don't think you can argue it's out-and-out partisan like Fox, or even CNN/Al Jazeera.
If I'm wrong please respond, and give some examples of overt or deliberate bias - I'd be curious to try to work out if it's actually "objectively" biased, or merely presenting a different viewpoint to the biases of the viewer.
Actually, most people are uncomfortable or opposed to increased CCTV monitoring, firearms were never commonly available[1] and you can still carry a knife[2]. Oh, and most of the important legislation that actually restricts our freedoms was pushed through my Tony Blair (et al) in defiance of the public's wishes, and often even the wishes of their own party members, and he's now copping all hell for it in the public opinion stakes.
Just look at the kerfuffle around ID cards and I think you'll find the Blitz-inspired backbone is hale and hearty as ever - the government's trying to frighten people into accepting Id cards, but people just aren't scared.
Erm, that's a knife amnesty. It's kind of a voluntary request you turn in any pointed knives you might have to reduce the number in general circulation. It's not a heavy-handed pressure tactic from the government, just a polite request. The big secure box was to make sure nobody nicked the tens or hundreds of knives that other people handed in.
Oh, and the knife amnesty didn't go very well - most people flatly ignored it because it's blatantly ineffectual and stupid.
What was your point again?
(P.S. I grew up in Suffolk - nice area of the country, if a bit rural).
Footnotes:
[1] They're still legal, IIRC, but must be left at a gun-club or kept in a locked gun cabinet. They're also legal for farmers or anyone else with a sensible reason for needing one.
[2] As long as it's not a flick-knife, has a fold-away blade that doesn't exceed 3 inches in lenghth.
Here. Fucking. Here!
/. readers, simply for stating that most British people took 7/7 on the chin and got on with their lives.
As a fellow Brit, thank you beyond words.
USAians and paranoiacs, please take note - this is not an isolated incident, we are not living in denial, Brits who refuse to be traumatised into acting differently by 7/7 are not isolated freaks, and (despite both our governments' and your media's best efforts) we are not the kind of people to fearmonger, lock ourselves in our cellars and let the terrorists win.
You would not believe how many times I've been accused of any or all of the above by (mostly American)
It's just a difference in culture, dig? We've been shot at, bombed, hijacked and had full passenger aircraft brought down on villages more or less ever since the end of the second world war (if not longer).
You're still more likely to get hit by lightning than even injured in a terrorist attack, so we're not even blasé about it. We're simply reacting in proportion.
(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this post is not intended to be anti-American - just anti-hysteria.)
I can't believe we haven't had a failed car analogy yet.
So... it's a bit like a car that goes forwards and backwards, right?
Except this is Slashdot, not ESPN. For clarity analogies should probably be restricted to politics, code, IT infrastructure and cars (failed).
Plus, of course, the analogy in the summary was so long by the time it finished I'd almost forgotten what the summary was about...
Indeed. So if, for instance, you're entirely used to a biased media corrupted from the get-go by corporate and/or political interests, then you're not going to realise quite how bad your media is, and are going to assume at a very basic level that everyone's media is just as bad.
It is not.
Not at all. I regularly disagree with a lot of what I see on the BBC - particularly (I'm adult enough to admit) when it conflicts with my worldview or preconceptions. However, whenever I've gone away and read up on a point that's annoyed me (even just to convince myself "I was right"), I've almost always found that either I was wrong, or at least that the "true" case was more evenly-balanced than my previous opinion was.
You appear to be judging news coverage by how "interesting" it is, not how factually accurate the coverage is. Many people (especially in the US) do this, and news organisations tend to follow what the audience demands. This explains why your media is so shockingly partial and (frequently) blatantly biased.
In other countries we prioritise the factual content and lack of bias in the news, not how entertaining it is.
Pop quiz - do most people like having their preconceptions and prejudices flattered, or hearing hard truths that make them re-evaluate their worldview? Prejudices, right. So which are they going to find more entertaining and interesting? So which direction are the news shows going to move towards?
Again, if you watched decent news coverage it doesn't tell you what to think, merely what's happening. "Telling you what to think" is what so frequently annoys the rest of thw world when they watch American news media.
Right, in the same way that "all men are attracted to young girls", or "all people are violent".
.
These are basic elements of our psychology. However, you don't attempt to punch every person who irritates you or have sex with every young girl you see - bias is an urge, not an action
Urges can be identified and restrained. Actions can't. By painting bias as an action you implicitly indicate that it's somehow "ok", and that attempting to minimise or eradicate it it worthless, naive or pointless.
It is not. Bias is like "goodness" - nobody's good all the time, and nobody's perfectly good. But does that mean we shouldn't try to be good people, even while recognising that we won't ever be perfect?
Bias is an inescapable part of your psychology, but a good journalist recognises it and attmepts to minimise it. Corrupt journalists often recognise it but don't care, and bad journalists don't even recognise it.
Bullshit. Please provide any kind of evidence backing up your position, or admit you pulled that out of your arse.
Actually, smartarse, one could argue that the minute digital media files were available (even on CD) the physical media was nevertheless obsolete.
:-p
So there
CDs have been replaced. By digital music files.
And it's not just CDs that are dead or dying - the entire idea of media coming on a physical disk is, like, just so last-century it's untrue.
Seriously, though - when even my grey-haired aunty has heard of MP3s, iTunes and iPods, and when the majority of people in the west have broadband access WTF are the chances that you'll be able to replace a dying physical medium with another dying physical medium?
This, if nothing else, proves quite how out-of-touch the record industry is. They're talking about "introducing" a new physical medium, requiring users to buy new hardware for their cars, offices, bedrooms, portable devices, etc, and expecting it to take off?
What kind of tool is going to spring for a portable DVD (audio-only!) player, when for £30 he can pick up a crappy MP3 player with the same kind of playtime and a form-factor about a tenth the size? (And that's completely ignoring the whole ease-of-piracy angle, too).
Music industry: We all know you don't like digital music, but for god's sake Just Give It Up. You've lost, utterly, as always happens when you pit yourself against the march of progress, and you're only making yourselves look more silly now. Back out and get a clue before you do us all a favour and bankrupt yourselves.
The horse is long dead and buried, but now you're even insisting on whipping the ground the horse was on.
With respect, that's apparently complete supposition on your part. Several other posters have claimed (with some evidence) that the USA has never had an unbiased media, so market forces were never an issue.
Score one for unchecked capitalism, eh?
The other part of that is that yes, some people do indeed prefer to have their preconceptions flattered than to discover they were wrong and actually learn something about the world. Unfortunately this is a cultural problem, but it's a pretty damniig indictment of a country if it's so bad that there's no place for an independant media - just a collection of partisan biased propagandists with different political leanings.
I call BS on that. Well, I call "the product of a completely biased and partisan news industry" on it, anyway.
Maybe (unconscious) bias is inescapable, but there's nothing wrong with attempting to recognise your own biases and compensate for them. The British and other news media manage to do this quite well, so your assertion it's "disingenuous" to claim (implication: it's impossible) is simply incorrect.
Once again the phrase "(unconscious) bias is inescapable" acts as a universal get-out to be as biased and partisan as you want to be. People spout the phrase without thinking, and are lead into thinking that biased, partisan reporting is not only ok, but the only thing that's possible.
You guys do know that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" was a joke, right?
Meh, even so, IMO it's still ridiculously heavy-handed.
:-/
A verbal warning, even a written one would have made the point.
Immediately firing someone for something so bloody trivial just makes them look like knee-jerk reactionary paranoics, frankly.
And I don't recall the OP even mentioning anything about an actual complaint being lodged...
Hey, even better, if you could get this guy on-side you could turn him around and point him at other peoples' products. Then he wouldn't even be a liability - he'd be an asset!
Oh yes.
When political considerations like this start interfering with security work, you know MS's charm offensive is working. And that ain't a good thing. The Microsoft contact tried to haul him down to see them because they were worried about the details he released helping hackers, right?
So why would going after their competitors for a few days negate that problem? The hackers will still get the info, just a few days later. This clearly has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with public perception and spin.
Not, of course, that researchers shouldn't look for security holes in other browsers as well. However, when the most insecure browser on the market still holds 60-80% market-share and researchers are "persuaded" by its owners to delay or avoid research on it to go chasing minority competitors (whose bugs will affect proportionately less people, and people whose security knowledge is generally likely to be a bit better anyway) instead, well... how is that the most useful work they could be doing?
Sounds like Microsoft's successfully pulling a Papa Lazarou on the independant security companies.
Exactly. I just love the way the middle-eastern Islamic and western Christian fundamentalists are die-hard enemies... and yet to an outsider they're increasingly coming to resemble each other.
What planet are you living on? It was a clothed picture of a woman.
If it was hardcore porn, you'd have a point.
If it was softcore porn, you'd have a point.
If it was even a sexually-suggestive bikini picture, you'd have a point.
This is a picture of a woman in an evening gown, much less indecent (from the description) than the kind of pictures you find on the front of many women's magazines.
Just how puritan has the USA got if fully-clothed women are now considered indecent?
What's next, the default Windows wallpaper is indecent because if you turn your head sideways and squint the rolling green hill looks a bit like a deformed green breast?