but modularity theory, in its most accepted forms, precludes symbolic representations in favor of domain specific input patterns.
What on earth do you mean by this? A domain specific input pattern can perfectly well be a symbolic representation. Fodor, the initial advocate of the modularity thesis in modern times, is very strongly in favour of classical cognitivism. In fact, the modularity thesis is primarily expounded by classical cognitivists.
Despite the largely vacuous claims of connectionists to have invented the New Big Thing in cogntive science, classical cognitivsm hasn't really gone out of fashion to the extent you make out. It still has some pretty powerful advocates (e.g. Fodor, Pinker,...)
Yes it is. Lisp has features optimised for embedding little languages.
So has Haskell (see for example Parsec). Often, I find Haskell more suitable than Lisp for developing domain specific minilanguages because of its more modern features (e.g. currying, lazy evaluation, better support for HOFs, pattern matching...), all of which are built into the language, well-tested, widely used and standardised. It's possible to develop a parser combinator library in Lisp (I've done it), but it's a lot more work when you don't have the abstraction offered by lazy lists/streams.
Lisp and Haskell are different languages out-of-box. Given an electronic components factory and a TV, which is more likely to be able to churn out new electronic components?
This is where your silly analogy breaks down. Haskell is fully capable of churning out new components, just as Lisp is. Out-of-box, Lisp is less capable than Haskell. I agree that Lisp is very extensible, but Haskell already exists and you don't have to waste time extending it. And when you do need to extend it, it's almost as extensible as Lisp.
I freely acknowledge you might prefer Haskell, just as some weirdos prefer Perl.
Why are you comparing Haskell syntax to Perl? Haskell syntax is very minimal. It's almost entirely function application by juxtaposition and function application by infix operator. There's not much else to it. Haskell's concise syntax is a win over S-exprs in terms of productivity and readability, and Haskell is still pretty extensible despite not having S-exprs.
Lisp certainly does have some advantages over Haskell. Mostly that if you want to write low-level, eficient code you can do it very easily. But Lisp's relatively low-level of programming comes at a price. When you want to do the heavy-lifting of abstraction, you have to use clumsy devices like macros instead of the much nicer alternatives in Haskell (mostly, HOFs, laziness and user-defined operators).
And you're still arguing that "Lisp is extensible therefore no language is better than Lisp". This argument is fine in the abstract but it doesn't work in the real world. I don't want to extend Lisp, I want to write a program!
That's like saying a TV is more modern than a electronic equipment factory.
No it isn't. Think.
s/fully/purely/ functional - meaning it DOESN'T HAVE all the other stuff, at least not without hideous kludgery of inelegant monads and arrows (yes, I think monads are INELEGANT. You should take off your HASKELL IS GOD glasses if you don't;-) )
More kludgey thn uncontrolled side effects dependent on eager evaluation for predictable semantics? Whatever.
For you, maybe. It just sucks royally, as far as I'm concerned. Compare: "Perl syntax works very well, and it's certainly not nausea-inducing" - there are people in the world who honestly believe that!
Sorry! I forgot that your opinion is inherently more important than mine.
No, I'm arguing that since one can merge the ideas from any language into lisp, lisp is perhaps the best language for merging ideas from any language into it.
So what's that argument got to do with the original bone of contention, which was whether Haskell is more modern than Lisp? Sure, you can shoe-horn all of Haskell's modern features into Lisp (in a way that you absolutely can't in say C++ or Java) (*), but in its baseline configuration Haskell is more modern in design than Lisp. As I've repeatedly said, it's no use saying, "Oh well Lisp doesn't have that feature by default, but you could add it". Nobody wants to do the extra work when Haskell exists already as a fully functional, mature programming language.
All the stuff that isn't Haskell? Non- nausea-inducing syntax?:-)
Haskell syntax is a lot more concise than Lisp syntax. In fact, I once tried to come up with an S-expr syntax for Haskell, and it's almost impossible to come up with anything that isn't considerably more verbose and less expressive. I like S-expr syntax, but Haskell's syntax works very well, and it's certainly not nausea-inducing. You need to take off you LISP IS GOD glasses and try to see design decisions in a sympathetic light, instead of automatically discounting them because they're not the Lisp Way.
To be clear, I like Lisp, and I don't think that Haskell is better than Lisp. But it's undoubtably a more modern programming language, and it's undoubtably better as a pure functional programming language.
(*)Actually, you couldn't properly add laziness to Lisp without creating a new compiler or interpreter for a lazy variant of Lisp.
It's not that one can implement any language "on top" of lisp, it's that one can nick the ideas of any language and merge them with lisp and any other languages you might have implemented "on top". I'd say "synergy" if it didn't cause a learned barf-reaction due to working in a corporate environment.
The distinction you're making is misses the point. You seem to be arguing "since I can merge the ideas from any language into Lisp, no language is better than Lisp". My previous points still stand against this argument. In practice, no-one has developed a pure, lazy, functional programming evironment on top of, to the side of, under, over or around Lisp that's as good as Haskell. And if you're going to counter that by saying that my value of "good" is subjective, then guess what, yours is too! Yeah, you could write a Haskell compiler that targetted common lisp and which integrated Haskell with Lisp. But no-one has done this, and to do it would require an enormous waste of time and effort which would be better spent writing the program in Haskell and compiling it using a normal Haskell compiler. What does Haskell-on-Lisp buy me that plain old Haskell doesn't? A few things, maybe, but nothing worth shouting about.
N.B. Commmon Lisp compilers such as CMUCL and SBCL do type-inferencing.
Sure, but it's not part of the language. It's also nowhere near as sophisticated as Haskell's type inference (e.g. you can't even specify the type of the members of a list using the CL type system).
There are lazy-evaluation packages for Lisp, it's another programming technique.
It's nowhere near as easy to use lazy evaluation in Lisp as it is in Haskell.
There has long been a pure functional subset of Lisp one can program in if one is a bit of a masochist.
Precisely -- if one is a masochist. Lisp doesn't make pure functional programming easy. Haskell does.
Now, you might argue "that's Qi, not Lisp!", but to do so is to miss the point of Lisp as a metalanguage. Lisp, like a human, is a "specialised non-specialist": if evolved "for" anything, is evolved for dealing with continuous change - Qi is Lisp pushed heavily in the Haskell/ML direction.
Qi isn't Lisp, it's a programming language implemented on top of Lisp. It's not as good as Haskell, though it's an interesting project.
If you want to argue, "I can implement any language on top of Lisp, therefore no language is better than Lisp", that's your perogative, but if we're interested in the real world, it's pretty clear that in practice Lisp's support for functional programming is very poor compared to Haskell's. This doesn't stop Lisp being a great language, but it's a fact nontheless.
0. (Aside: "More modern?" - lisp started a long time ago but has been evolving continuously. The latest Lisp standard is from the 1990s, not the newest standard, but hardly "old")
Haskell is more modern in the sense that it makes use of more modern ideas in computer science. E.g. lazy evaluation, type inference, pure functional programming, monads, etc. Common Lisp is an old-fashioned imperative language, though it does have decent support for higher order functions and closures, and is perhaps the best OO/imperative language ever designed.
First, Dr Scheme is obviously a Scheme IDE, not a Common Lisp IDE. The differences between Scheme and Common Lisp are not so trivial that someone looking for a good CL IDE will be just as satisfied with a good Scheme IDE.
Second, while Dr. Scheme is in many ways superb, it's maddeningly simple in others. It has an unforgiveably awful multiple document interface. I don't want a new toplevel window for every file I'm editing! And why can't I transparently use the same REPL with multiple buffers? For all the fancy features in Slime, the biggest productivity gain for me is the ease of managing multiple buffers in Emacs, and C-c-c to compile a file and load it into the currently running REPL. Without these simple features, the other (excellent) features of Dr. Scheme are more or less irrelavent.
Having said all this, Slime could really use the brilliant debugger and code-stepper in Dr. Scheme. Unfortunately, the underlying Emacs environment would probably make it difficult to do such a good job.
If you're really that worried about the initial investment made by the US then the UN could always pay them compensation. The fact is that if the internet is going to have a global reach (and this is surely in US interests) it will eventually have to be globally regulated. Or alternatively, once control of the internet becomes a bigger political issue, the US may find that the rest of the world wants to run its own internet indepedent of US interests. The US can't claim control of the internet indefinitely just because it made the initial investment decades ago. The situation now is that the infrastructure is payed for by a large number of countries.
Because if they didn't, they wouldn't be connected to the same internet as everyone else. However, this article shows that the rest of the world is willing to change this, so what's your point?
The infrastructure for the internet outside the US was not built by the US! Obviously TCP/IP was invented in America, but it's not like you went around building the physical network for the rest of the world.
That's a circular argument, based on falsehood. "We treat intelligence differently because we think intelligence is different". No, it's affected by environment and exercise just like physical fitness.
I agree. However, despite the fact that it's irrational, society does treat intelligence differently. Everyone is (supposed to be) dedicated to self-improvement in wieght, fashion, money, etc., but the prevailing assumption regarding intellectual persuits seems to be that they're only for clever people. Also, your quoted argument isn't circular, it's just trivial, and it's not an argument that I made. Anyway, I think intelligence is probably inhereted to a greater extent than weight or the ability to buy designer clothes.
How is this so different from American culture constantly telling people they're fat/awkward/unattractive/etc, yet they fawn over the achievements of athletes and actresses?
There's an important difference: if you're fat, you're supposed to aspire to being thin, and there's a lot of products/TV programs targetted at you. If you're stupid, you're not generally expected to aspire to being intelligent (or more realisticly, using your intellectual abilities as best you can). So there is always hope if you're overweight, but if you haven't gone to college then you're dumb for life. Since there is (supposedly) little hope of improvement intellectually, people tend to resent intellectuals becuase they feel they have no hope of ever improving themselves in that way.
This is problem number one, and I firmly point the finger at pop culture in America. Success in school is not rewarded with prestige in our pop culture. In our TV programs, you don't ever see the stock character of "the popular kid that's good at everything." Popular kids in American pop culture are very rarely acadmeic success stories, while good students are always unpopular.
Competition always breeds resentment. The more you praise people with good grades and elevate them above their peers, the more they'll be resented and the more they'll get bullied. The solution is not for everyone to start sucking up to geeks, it's to get rid of the completely artificial levels of competition in education. The point of education is to learn stuff, not to be better than other people. Is it any wonder that there's a culture of "anti-intellectualism" when the majority of the population are more or less told that they're not clever enough to be intellectuals? You can't tell people they're dumb and then expect them to respect the achievements of the uber-intelligent.
There's no way of proving that they're *not* armed.
There's no way of proving that you're not an idiot. There's no way of proving Santa Claus doesn't exist. So what? Is it likely that this kind of terrorist suspect would be armed? Not very. Certainly not likely enough to justify a summary execution.
At what point did I say I wanted them shot dead?
You said that you thought the SAS option was "cooler", where the SAS option involved the person in question being shot dead on sight (while sleeping, no less). So you more or less said that you wanted them shot dead, or at least that you weren't particularly averse to the idea.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden because the US refused to provide any evidence that he was guilty. Obviously I'm no fan of the Taliban, but in this case I have to say "fair enough". Remember that this was shortly after the event, and there really wasn't any publicly available evidence of bin Laden's guilt at the time.
PS: I expect Pakistan would be falling over themselves to hand over suspected terrorists, since they're trying hard to paint themselves as US allies at the moment.
As a gun nerd and a former Londoner, the SAS option would be cooler!:)
Killing suspected criminals without trial isn't cool. In fact killing people in general isn't cool. If you think it is, get help.
These jihadist fuckwits are highly likely to be armed and dangerous
Are they? I'd say most of those living in Europe at least are unlikely to be armed -- if you're an undercover terrorist, the last thing you want to do is criminalise yourself by keeping a gun.
I would trust the task of bringing them to justice to the SAS, more than I trust SO19 to deal with them.
You seem to be confusing "justice" with "slaughter" here.
They do. Where have you been for the past 3-4 years? Stuffing straw men, perhaps.
And if the polls are showing people thinking Bush is "evil" I'm losing faith in the mindset of the left even more than ever. Just because you're not under attack on home ground and don't hear people running and screaming is no reason to get so content that you call the guy who kept the attacks from happening for 4 years evil.
How evil Saddam Hussein is, and the fact that America happens not to have experienced a terrorist attack in the past 4 years, are totally irrelavent to the question of whether or not GWB is evil. Personally, I wouldn't pretend to know enough about the man to know one way or the other, but one thing's for sure: the sooner he's out of office, the better for everyone.
You guys do know that it is natural to die at 40 or 50 and that it is unnatural for the average lifespan to be 70+.
That's true, but the average lifespan can be misleading. Until 100-300 years ago, most people did die around age 40-60, but that was usually from disease or starvation rather than general old age. It's perfectly natural to live to 70+ if you have a reasonable diet and are lucky enough not to get a life-threatening illness (or these days, if you are lucky enough to have access to good medical care).
So, are you saying the the Americans came up with an arbitrary policy in unconditional surrender?
Not arbitrary, just stupid. Sure, the surrender should have been unconditional in terms of territory, but I thought the Japanese actually offered to withdraw (without actually technically surrendering). Requiring absolute unconditional surrender was just asking for trouble when dealing with Japan.
If the US had just surrendered to the Japanese right after Pearl Harbor, a tremendous number of lives on both side would have been saved. Should that have been policy, then?
No, nations have a right to continue wars in order to preserve their soverignty.
am sorry, but wake the fuck up man. You can argue this all you want, but IT WASN'T AN OPTION. Japan WAS NOT OPEN TO DISCUSSING THIS WITH THE US.
The Japanese were pretty much split down the middle on whether or not they should surrender, and disagreed over exactly what the terms should be. Some of the military wanted to fight a battle somewhere or other (I forget where), and then negotiate a surrender. It's entirely false to suggest that Japan was not open to discussing surrender in any way, shape or form. A reasonable offer from the US might have met with some success.
Slashdot Mirror
but modularity theory, in its most accepted forms, precludes symbolic representations in favor of domain specific input patterns.
What on earth do you mean by this? A domain specific input pattern can perfectly well be a symbolic representation. Fodor, the initial advocate of the modularity thesis in modern times, is very strongly in favour of classical cognitivism. In fact, the modularity thesis is primarily expounded by classical cognitivists.
Despite the largely vacuous claims of connectionists to have invented the New Big Thing in cogntive science, classical cognitivsm hasn't really gone out of fashion to the extent you make out. It still has some pretty powerful advocates (e.g. Fodor, Pinker, ...)
Yes it is. Lisp has features optimised for embedding little languages.
So has Haskell (see for example Parsec). Often, I find Haskell more suitable than Lisp for developing domain specific minilanguages because of its more modern features (e.g. currying, lazy evaluation, better support for HOFs, pattern matching...), all of which are built into the language, well-tested, widely used and standardised. It's possible to develop a parser combinator library in Lisp (I've done it), but it's a lot more work when you don't have the abstraction offered by lazy lists/streams.
Lisp and Haskell are different languages out-of-box. Given an electronic components factory and a TV, which is more likely to be able to churn out new electronic components?
This is where your silly analogy breaks down. Haskell is fully capable of churning out new components, just as Lisp is. Out-of-box, Lisp is less capable than Haskell. I agree that Lisp is very extensible, but Haskell already exists and you don't have to waste time extending it. And when you do need to extend it, it's almost as extensible as Lisp.
I freely acknowledge you might prefer Haskell, just as some weirdos prefer Perl.
Why are you comparing Haskell syntax to Perl? Haskell syntax is very minimal. It's almost entirely function application by juxtaposition and function application by infix operator. There's not much else to it. Haskell's concise syntax is a win over S-exprs in terms of productivity and readability, and Haskell is still pretty extensible despite not having S-exprs.
Lisp certainly does have some advantages over Haskell. Mostly that if you want to write low-level, eficient code you can do it very easily. But Lisp's relatively low-level of programming comes at a price. When you want to do the heavy-lifting of abstraction, you have to use clumsy devices like macros instead of the much nicer alternatives in Haskell (mostly, HOFs, laziness and user-defined operators).
And you're still arguing that "Lisp is extensible therefore no language is better than Lisp". This argument is fine in the abstract but it doesn't work in the real world. I don't want to extend Lisp, I want to write a program!
That's like saying a TV is more modern than a electronic equipment factory.
No it isn't. Think.
s/fully/purely/ functional - meaning it DOESN'T HAVE all the other stuff, at least not without hideous kludgery of inelegant monads and arrows (yes, I think monads are INELEGANT. You should take off your HASKELL IS GOD glasses if you don't ;-) )
More kludgey thn uncontrolled side effects dependent on eager evaluation for predictable semantics? Whatever.
For you, maybe. It just sucks royally, as far as I'm concerned. Compare: "Perl syntax works very well, and it's certainly not nausea-inducing" - there are people in the world who honestly believe that!
Sorry! I forgot that your opinion is inherently more important than mine.
No, I'm arguing that since one can merge the ideas from any language into lisp, lisp is perhaps the best language for merging ideas from any language into it.
So what's that argument got to do with the original bone of contention, which was whether Haskell is more modern than Lisp? Sure, you can shoe-horn all of Haskell's modern features into Lisp (in a way that you absolutely can't in say C++ or Java) (*), but in its baseline configuration Haskell is more modern in design than Lisp. As I've repeatedly said, it's no use saying, "Oh well Lisp doesn't have that feature by default, but you could add it". Nobody wants to do the extra work when Haskell exists already as a fully functional, mature programming language.
All the stuff that isn't Haskell? Non- nausea-inducing syntax? :-)
Haskell syntax is a lot more concise than Lisp syntax. In fact, I once tried to come up with an S-expr syntax for Haskell, and it's almost impossible to come up with anything that isn't considerably more verbose and less expressive. I like S-expr syntax, but Haskell's syntax works very well, and it's certainly not nausea-inducing. You need to take off you LISP IS GOD glasses and try to see design decisions in a sympathetic light, instead of automatically discounting them because they're not the Lisp Way.
To be clear, I like Lisp, and I don't think that Haskell is better than Lisp. But it's undoubtably a more modern programming language, and it's undoubtably better as a pure functional programming language.
(*)Actually, you couldn't properly add laziness to Lisp without creating a new compiler or interpreter for a lazy variant of Lisp.
It's not that one can implement any language "on top" of lisp, it's that one can nick the ideas of any language and merge them with lisp and any other languages you might have implemented "on top". I'd say "synergy" if it didn't cause a learned barf-reaction due to working in a corporate environment.
The distinction you're making is misses the point. You seem to be arguing "since I can merge the ideas from any language into Lisp, no language is better than Lisp". My previous points still stand against this argument. In practice, no-one has developed a pure, lazy, functional programming evironment on top of, to the side of, under, over or around Lisp that's as good as Haskell. And if you're going to counter that by saying that my value of "good" is subjective, then guess what, yours is too! Yeah, you could write a Haskell compiler that targetted common lisp and which integrated Haskell with Lisp. But no-one has done this, and to do it would require an enormous waste of time and effort which would be better spent writing the program in Haskell and compiling it using a normal Haskell compiler. What does Haskell-on-Lisp buy me that plain old Haskell doesn't? A few things, maybe, but nothing worth shouting about.
N.B. Commmon Lisp compilers such as CMUCL and SBCL do type-inferencing.
Sure, but it's not part of the language. It's also nowhere near as sophisticated as Haskell's type inference (e.g. you can't even specify the type of the members of a list using the CL type system).
There are lazy-evaluation packages for Lisp, it's another programming technique.
It's nowhere near as easy to use lazy evaluation in Lisp as it is in Haskell.
There has long been a pure functional subset of Lisp one can program in if one is a bit of a masochist.
Precisely -- if one is a masochist. Lisp doesn't make pure functional programming easy. Haskell does.
Now, you might argue "that's Qi, not Lisp!", but to do so is to miss the point of Lisp as a metalanguage. Lisp, like a human, is a "specialised non-specialist": if evolved "for" anything, is evolved for dealing with continuous change - Qi is Lisp pushed heavily in the Haskell/ML direction.
Qi isn't Lisp, it's a programming language implemented on top of Lisp. It's not as good as Haskell, though it's an interesting project.
If you want to argue, "I can implement any language on top of Lisp, therefore no language is better than Lisp", that's your perogative, but if we're interested in the real world, it's pretty clear that in practice Lisp's support for functional programming is very poor compared to Haskell's. This doesn't stop Lisp being a great language, but it's a fact nontheless.
0. (Aside: "More modern?" - lisp started a long time ago but has been evolving continuously. The latest Lisp standard is from the 1990s, not the newest standard, but hardly "old")
Haskell is more modern in the sense that it makes use of more modern ideas in computer science. E.g. lazy evaluation, type inference, pure functional programming, monads, etc. Common Lisp is an old-fashioned imperative language, though it does have decent support for higher order functions and closures, and is perhaps the best OO/imperative language ever designed.
Maybe you want Dr Scheme?
First, Dr Scheme is obviously a Scheme IDE, not a Common Lisp IDE. The differences between Scheme and Common Lisp are not so trivial that someone looking for a good CL IDE will be just as satisfied with a good Scheme IDE.
Second, while Dr. Scheme is in many ways superb, it's maddeningly simple in others. It has an unforgiveably awful multiple document interface. I don't want a new toplevel window for every file I'm editing! And why can't I transparently use the same REPL with multiple buffers? For all the fancy features in Slime, the biggest productivity gain for me is the ease of managing multiple buffers in Emacs, and C-c-c to compile a file and load it into the currently running REPL. Without these simple features, the other (excellent) features of Dr. Scheme are more or less irrelavent.
Having said all this, Slime could really use the brilliant debugger and code-stepper in Dr. Scheme. Unfortunately, the underlying Emacs environment would probably make it difficult to do such a good job.
Yes, you do not have a right to remain silent in court. Although in the US you do of course have a right not to say anything which incriminates you.
If you're really that worried about the initial investment made by the US then the UN could always pay them compensation. The fact is that if the internet is going to have a global reach (and this is surely in US interests) it will eventually have to be globally regulated. Or alternatively, once control of the internet becomes a bigger political issue, the US may find that the rest of the world wants to run its own internet indepedent of US interests. The US can't claim control of the internet indefinitely just because it made the initial investment decades ago. The situation now is that the infrastructure is payed for by a large number of countries.
Because if they didn't, they wouldn't be connected to the same internet as everyone else. However, this article shows that the rest of the world is willing to change this, so what's your point?
What did [Europe/the UN/the bad guys] do about WMD use in Iran-Iraq?
Erm, they got rid of the WMDs in Iraq. That's why the US didn't find any after it invaded, remember?
The infrastructure for the internet outside the US was not built by the US! Obviously TCP/IP was invented in America, but it's not like you went around building the physical network for the rest of the world.
That's a circular argument, based on falsehood. "We treat intelligence differently because we think intelligence is different". No, it's affected by environment and exercise just like physical fitness.
I agree. However, despite the fact that it's irrational, society does treat intelligence differently. Everyone is (supposed to be) dedicated to self-improvement in wieght, fashion, money, etc., but the prevailing assumption regarding intellectual persuits seems to be that they're only for clever people. Also, your quoted argument isn't circular, it's just trivial, and it's not an argument that I made. Anyway, I think intelligence is probably inhereted to a greater extent than weight or the ability to buy designer clothes.
How is this so different from American culture constantly telling people they're fat/awkward/unattractive/etc, yet they fawn over the achievements of athletes and actresses?
There's an important difference: if you're fat, you're supposed to aspire to being thin, and there's a lot of products/TV programs targetted at you. If you're stupid, you're not generally expected to aspire to being intelligent (or more realisticly, using your intellectual abilities as best you can). So there is always hope if you're overweight, but if you haven't gone to college then you're dumb for life. Since there is (supposedly) little hope of improvement intellectually, people tend to resent intellectuals becuase they feel they have no hope of ever improving themselves in that way.
This is problem number one, and I firmly point the finger at pop culture in America. Success in school is not rewarded with prestige in our pop culture. In our TV programs, you don't ever see the stock character of "the popular kid that's good at everything." Popular kids in American pop culture are very rarely acadmeic success stories, while good students are always unpopular.
Competition always breeds resentment. The more you praise people with good grades and elevate them above their peers, the more they'll be resented and the more they'll get bullied. The solution is not for everyone to start sucking up to geeks, it's to get rid of the completely artificial levels of competition in education. The point of education is to learn stuff, not to be better than other people. Is it any wonder that there's a culture of "anti-intellectualism" when the majority of the population are more or less told that they're not clever enough to be intellectuals? You can't tell people they're dumb and then expect them to respect the achievements of the uber-intelligent.
There's no way of proving that they're *not* armed.
There's no way of proving that you're not an idiot. There's no way of proving Santa Claus doesn't exist. So what? Is it likely that this kind of terrorist suspect would be armed? Not very. Certainly not likely enough to justify a summary execution.
At what point did I say I wanted them shot dead?
You said that you thought the SAS option was "cooler", where the SAS option involved the person in question being shot dead on sight (while sleeping, no less). So you more or less said that you wanted them shot dead, or at least that you weren't particularly averse to the idea.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden because the US refused to provide any evidence that he was guilty. Obviously I'm no fan of the Taliban, but in this case I have to say "fair enough". Remember that this was shortly after the event, and there really wasn't any publicly available evidence of bin Laden's guilt at the time.
PS: I expect Pakistan would be falling over themselves to hand over suspected terrorists, since they're trying hard to paint themselves as US allies at the moment.
As a gun nerd and a former Londoner, the SAS option would be cooler! :)
Killing suspected criminals without trial isn't cool. In fact killing people in general isn't cool. If you think it is, get help.
These jihadist fuckwits are highly likely to be armed and dangerous
Are they? I'd say most of those living in Europe at least are unlikely to be armed -- if you're an undercover terrorist, the last thing you want to do is criminalise yourself by keeping a gun.
I would trust the task of bringing them to justice to the SAS, more than I trust SO19 to deal with them.
You seem to be confusing "justice" with "slaughter" here.
Why do people not count Hussein as a terrorist?
They do. Where have you been for the past 3-4 years? Stuffing straw men, perhaps.
And if the polls are showing people thinking Bush is "evil" I'm losing faith in the mindset of the left even more than ever. Just because you're not under attack on home ground and don't hear people running and screaming is no reason to get so content that you call the guy who kept the attacks from happening for 4 years evil.
How evil Saddam Hussein is, and the fact that America happens not to have experienced a terrorist attack in the past 4 years, are totally irrelavent to the question of whether or not GWB is evil. Personally, I wouldn't pretend to know enough about the man to know one way or the other, but one thing's for sure: the sooner he's out of office, the better for everyone.
You guys do know that it is natural to die at 40 or 50 and that it is unnatural for the average lifespan to be 70+.
That's true, but the average lifespan can be misleading. Until 100-300 years ago, most people did die around age 40-60, but that was usually from disease or starvation rather than general old age. It's perfectly natural to live to 70+ if you have a reasonable diet and are lucky enough not to get a life-threatening illness (or these days, if you are lucky enough to have access to good medical care).
"Star Wars" doesn't pretend to be anything other than a piece of fluff entertainment. I think that makes a small bit of difference.
Yes, it makes Starwars more honest.
So, are you saying the the Americans came up with an arbitrary policy in unconditional surrender?
Not arbitrary, just stupid. Sure, the surrender should have been unconditional in terms of territory, but I thought the Japanese actually offered to withdraw (without actually technically surrendering). Requiring absolute unconditional surrender was just asking for trouble when dealing with Japan.
If the US had just surrendered to the Japanese right after Pearl Harbor, a tremendous number of lives on both side would have been saved. Should that have been policy, then?
No, nations have a right to continue wars in order to preserve their soverignty.
You know it wasn't offered formally? And yet you've been using that argument all over this thread insinuating that it was fact?
How does its informality prevent it from being a fact?
And you have personal insight into the inner workings and thoughts of both the US government and the significant faction within Japan?
As much as you do.
am sorry, but wake the fuck up man. You can argue this all you want, but IT WASN'T AN OPTION. Japan WAS NOT OPEN TO DISCUSSING THIS WITH THE US.
The Japanese were pretty much split down the middle on whether or not they should surrender, and disagreed over exactly what the terms should be. Some of the military wanted to fight a battle somewhere or other (I forget where), and then negotiate a surrender. It's entirely false to suggest that Japan was not open to discussing surrender in any way, shape or form. A reasonable offer from the US might have met with some success.