certainly violence, but not significantly more per volume than the christian or jewish holy texts. the pedophilia thing gets slightly murkier because you've got more cultural norms to account for, but the same statement probably holds (there's certainly plenty of rape incest, and other manner of sexual depravity amongst our spiritual fathers). it's a simple matter of reading the text. i doubt you've been contradicted overly much on that point; i suspect it's really the bizarre conclusions you're coming to that people are taking issue with. your posted straw man, however, makes you look like less of a tool.
okay, say a correlation exists. i actually agree. but how strong is that correlation, and at what point does some correlation justify restricting the freedoms of everyone else? again, it's not particularly the claim you're making here that gets you slammed (although i'd love to see some citations there), it's the questionable and unsupported conclusions you draw from it.
"anything"? really? here let me try: George W Bush is the worst US president since the beginning of the 20th century, and possibly ever. now, start the timer for deletion, or even editorial mods to unattainable negative numbers. again, i think what's behind your straw man is that particular claims regarding bush you make get ridiculed, shot down, and/or laughed at (probably deservedly so). are we seeing the pattern yet?
a question of terms. many people don't believe abortion kills a human being because the human in question isn't finished being made yet. you're defining your terms to suit your argument, but ignoring the fact that those definitions are not universal by any means. you certainly don't have to go back very far in history (200 years is way more than enough; i can't pinpoint it much better than that) to find where the universal understanding for the creation of a human was birth. at lest your argument has a different problem than the last several here.
i've seen a pretty good debate on this topic on/., actually. but the claim that a significant increase will not have catastrophic effects is pretty well unfounded as far as i'm aware. can you cite? i think you're just upset your particular assertions aren't taken as authoritative.
just false. here, again, we can time the deletion or ultra-demoding: most violent deaths in Iraq in the past year or two have been muslim-on-muslim violence due to religious or pseudo-religious differences (although this might interfere with the above experiment, i'm willing to take that risk). now we're back to your straw man tactic. nobody would seriously doubt that, i think. but moving from that to some sort of assertion that the hundreds of thousands of deaths the US-led occupation is responsible for somehow don't matter, or the hundreds of direct killings by US troops every year don't matter, or that the US-led overthrow of Iraq's former sovereign government doesn't have a role to play in the current sectarian strife, is all further unfounded conclusions skipping several steps in reasoning from your stated starting point.
um, what? on the one hand, it sounds like you're asserting that the majority of/. readers would deny the American Revolution ever happened; i think it's safe to say that's patently false. on the other hand, it sounds like you're condoning vigilantism, armed rebellion, and/or sectarian violence, which, yeah, i think you're going to have a hard time getting support for. i don't think that's actually your intent, but here you've set up a straw man so far removed from the point you're actually trying to argue that i can't even tell what that is.
you're free to mention it. you're just stupid and wrong. Bush, by his actions, words, and decisions, is directly responsible for all sorts of badness - hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, an uncounted (but almost certainly much smaller) number in the US, trillions of dollars pissed away, giving our children an
y'know, i actually liked that movie when it first came out, but in retrospect the damage it's done to an otherwise sound philosophical principle is unforgivable.
one more time, with emphasis: occam's razor neither proves nor solves anything! there. got it? please pass the message along.
the original form isn't even useful for comparing unrelated theories of an event, but rather for simplifying a single theory (eg, if i have a theory of why planets move in orbits involving the force of angel's wings, and the theory works just as well without the angels, eliminate the angels). the more modern (and less accurate) version of comparing unrelated theories based on their comparative complexity is a useful principle for comparing probabilities, but in no way helps you get any closer to proof. it points you at where an answer might be, but does not provide an answer itself.
Not to mention their stock is the highest its been in 5 years.
They've had a good few weeks, sure, but there's been very little motion for years. they've substantially underperformed the NASDAQ, S&P 500, Dow Jones, and HP (!!!). They've been roughly competitive with SUN (!), and of course they don't hold a candle to the stars like GOOG and APPL. you've got to go back after a decade for those comparisons to stop being true (overall). The company's been moving mostly on inertia since about 2000 (coincidentally, related or not, the same year Gates started backing away from Microsoft and focused more on his philanthropic efforts). Their increasing difficulty to entice users into successive upgrades - making themselves their own biggest competitor - is very troubling for their longevity. They did very well turning themselves around circa 1996 after a late arrival to the internet game, but that was very much thanks to Gates' direction. They've been unable to extend their dominance to anywhere beyond Windows and Office, despite the fact that the filed continues to broaden around them.
Microsoft's huge, and will be around for a very long time, but that's a far cry from saying their "healthy". People live with terminal diseases for decades all the time.
2) The games companies give them things they could do to make porting easier.
the primary problem here is that we have no idea what was asked for. if Valve told Apple "give us DirectX", it's no wonder they were ignored. same problem with your step 3. without know what was asked for, we have no way of knowing whether anything was done.
4) The games companies assume from their conduct and lack of contact that Apple don't give a rat's ass about assisting porting.
the problem here - and it's one Newell has as well - is that you're inappropriately generalizing from Valve's claims to the overall industry. the fact of the matter is that there's plenty of game shops that do nice fancy stuff on the Mac using whatever APIs they provide. sure, not nearly as many, but that's mostly a market/business decision. that's fine, but Newell's claim is that there's a technological issue that Apple doesn't care about addressing. and that's clearly not the case.
Valve, like a bunch of other companies in a similar position most of a decade ago, had a choice to make and got into bed with Microsoft and DirectX. you can argue about the business or technical justification, but the effects are that those companies now have a much steeper road for porting, to the detriment of all (except Microsoft).
until Newell puts forward some specific complaints with gaming development on the Mac, i'm afraid it simply sounds like he doesn't want to admit that they make money-based decisions around their games.
Also, no mainstream Christian church exists in the harsh climate--both social and environmental--of the middle east. The old testamenteers were big on the Word, and it was only when the whole focal point of the religion moved to the happy land of Europe that things got a little softer.
false. christianity didn't soften at all when it moved to europe; for hundreds of years afterwards, in fact, it stayed a hard, ignorant mess. while the christians in the middle east - the Eastern Orthodox church and similar - got educated and more nuanced in their understanding of religion and the world around them (and had a very mutually profitable intercourse with their jewish and muslim neighbors), the western european christians remained a step or two above barbarians. the First crusade looked very much like a barbarian invasion from the west. european christianity started softening when the europeans (primarily french and english) who'd participated in crusades brought back what they'd learned or observed there.
It would be nice if you learned english. I'm not even entirely sure what that last sentence is supposed to say. "if only" what?
in addition to being hypocritically ungrammatical, you're factually incorrect. English is not "the language" of the US in any legally significant way beyond custom. Several individual states have explicit recognition of additional languages, either as co-equal with english or as recognized official secondary languages (California has a list of like 17 or some such). Stay in the right parts of the country, and one could live quite happily and productively, contributing to the national economy, culture, and broader society, without ever speaking english.
This also isn't a Mexican thing, either; your "every other immigrant class" comment is just as wrong. Check out Chinatown in most of your larger coastal cities. Check out Miami, Florida or Union City, New Jersey for Cuban populations large enough to be self-sustaining. New Jersey's also got Fort Lee, a huge Japanese community, and Edison, an overwhelmingly Indian community. There's Hawai'i and our hundred-plus reservations where english is quite commonly a second language. Hawai'i' also has lots of Chinese, Japanese, and other Islanders. That's just off the top of my head. The point is that the US is a wonderfully multicultural place with intentionally low barriers to entry into society which welcomes contributions from as many types of people as are able. Or that's the theory, anyway.
You're correct in saying take-up has been low amongst operators, but that's really the problem isn't it?
it's not just amongst the operators; device manufacturers have been very slow to produce R-UIM-capable versions of their phones. customer demand simply isn't there, at least not in North America. while you're correct about the technical and expectational (huh?) differences having a removable ID card makes, the practical matter is different. there isn't customer demand in North America because the artificial restrictions placed on GSM phones dulls the competitive point. the vast bulk of mobile phone users in the US don't think of the portability of their ID as a feature, except in the case where they'd be buying a new phone anyway, which is an event that occurs on average less than once every two years. events on that frequency aren't good differentiators, so the CDMA market simply isn't under any pressure. unsurprisingly, what uptake for R-UIM there has been has mostly happened in south- and southeast-asia, where there's more significant competition (and, of course, the technology just has a few-year lead time over what we get here). i don't know much about what the newly-developing CDMA markets in the former soviet bloc countries are doing; that'd be interesting to watch.
Verizon has always been about lock in and keeping away choice.
not always. for a long time, they repeated what every other operator in the country said about Wireless Local Number Portability: bad for the industry, unfair, will ruin everything, we'll all go out of business, and that won't help anyone. then one day they realized "hey, we've got the best network in the country. i bet people want to use verizon!" and they decided to support WLNP. first major operator in the country to do so. and they were right: worked out really well for them (worked out really well for most of the large operators, except Sprint). took them a long time, but they eventually got it. sadly, that's more the excepting than the rule.
That is why they never wanted to go with a sim card based cellphone system.
that's a misunderstanding of history and technical reality. when Verizon went digital, CDMA didn't have R-UIM (the modern CDMA equivalent of a GSM SIM card) as an option, and CDMA was far superior to GSM in terms of cost, data rates, and efficient use of resources (it's still ahead, but GSM has closed the gap in most areas - in part, by incorporating lots of CDMA technology). R-UIM uptake has been very poor globally, resulting in (or caused by? who knows) a much narrower selection of R-UIM capable phones.
it eliminates your ability to buy a unlocked phone and activating it without them getting their "fees" in their sideways.
first: it does no such thing. all US-based GSM operators lock their phones. the device ID is transmitted to the network even in SIM-based GSM networks, and the operators can make decisions about how to handle individual devices (note their ability to deactivate stolen phones). the fact that GSM operators don't restrict bringing phones onto their network has much more to do with market forces. second: Verizon acts the same way. i've brought non-verizon-purchased phones onto their network without issue: call up customer service, read them the phone's ID, say thank you.
i wish they weren't so schizophrenic. verizon toed the industry line about Wireless Local Number Portability for a long time, too, but were eventually the first major carrier to back off. why? they realized they simply have the best network out there and could compete favorably on that. and, as they expected, it worked out very well for them.
they really do have the best network. if only they didn't get everything else wrong...
this is true, but not really relevant. the real issue isn't a removable ID card, but device locking. the US-based GSM operators have just as bad lock-in as Verizon, even with SIM cards in all their devices. being able to move your number around yourself is certainly a nice feature, but isn't what determines this level of lock-in. it's also worth noting that R-UIM uptake globally has been quite poor and the phone selection is much smaller (nice chicken-and-egg problem there).
absolutely. but someone should've pointed that out to esr and friends before they chose to name their "movement" and resulting organization after an industry term with pre-existing meaning in the context they were concerned with. the old USENIX tape swaps were excellent examples of a widespread practice. OSI did an effective job with marketing during the Internet's pubescent growth spurt, leading some (like yourself) to believe they coined the term and defined its meaning, but the reality is that they re-used and re-defined a term with an existing use.
if esr and friends are concerned with making things clear when they're talking about code which preserves the rights they care about (which is a positive thing), they should use something without that pre-existing ambiguity. oh, wait, they already do: OSI doesn't certify things "Open Source", they certify them using "OSI Approved" and similar marks. they should stress that more; that term is clearly unambiguous (not to mention legally protected).
Royalty-free redistribution is one of the freedoms that you get with Open Source. Free Software, too.
so says the OSI and FSF, anyway. but OSI doesn't own the words "open source". if you'd like to be more specific, use "OSI Approved" or similar; otherwise, deal with the linguistic ambiguity esr and friend introduced when they chose to name their movement and organization using a term with pre-existing industry meaning.
if i promise not to drink QNX's, will you promise not to drink OSI's?
OSI does not own the words "open source". in an (implicit) acknowledgment of the ambiguity introduced by their poorly chosen name, they don't approve labeling things "Open Source(TM)"; indeed, there is no such trademark. rather, what you're probably looking for is "Open Source Initiative Approved" or similar. "open source" had industry meaning for a decade or two before OSI came along in 1998.
and, on an entirely unrelated topic, when did slashdot start replacing my (TM) (which i input as the proper Unicode trademark character) with (TM)? that's kinda obnoxious.
"Open source", in the context of software development and licensing, is ambiguous only as a convenience for those who wish to create confusion and either sabotage, or ride the coat-tails of, the Open Source movement.
the "Open Source movement" was started in, what, 1997? it was an attempt at formalizing an existing ethic of open source software (read: software who's source code you could read). OSI is free to use "Open Source" as a trademark, but they do not thereby get the rights to redefine common english words with pre-existing domain-specific meanings. the term "open system" was in the wild at least as early as 1980, and "open source", as commonly used before 1998, is a parallel concept.
nobody here's disputing the OSI's rights to their trademark, but the fact is they chose a term (chosen in a single day "strategy session", by an engineer, described by the OSI as "the best they could come up with") with a pre-existing meaning in the context they were concerned with. it's worth noting that OSI themselves claim no (legal) right on marking things "Open Source(TM)"; if you want that meaning, you mean "OSI Approved" or similar.
Besides, if you follow the politically-correct FSF model it's OK to charge......as long as you're willing to share any modifications you make to the trash with the community.
yup. i think that's an excellent description of what goes on in most Free Software projects.
um, no, i didn't miss any such thing; i was referring only to modern Spain.. don't try to get me to defend Franco; ain't gonna happen. but things started getting better very soon after his death. by 1978 the Basque were largely (certainly not entirely) self-governing in internal affairs. suppression of the language ended by then. it became official in 1982.
as noted by a sibling, you're wrong: this wasn't in response to you at all, but my immediate parent. threading is useful.
on the 98% figure, however: i think you're confusing the turnout with the results. the turnout for the 1973 plebiscite was about 58% (due at least in part to the boycott of a large portion of the Catholic population); the results were over 98% in favor of remaining in the United Kingdom. CAIN has a summary of the plebiscite. Catholics are still a minority in Northern Ireland today, so if you're correct about the population growing there (i have no idea) i imagine they still would've been trounced without the boycott. also of note is this more recent (but smaller) opinion survey showing that 40% of folks in Northern Ireland think of themselves as Unionist while only 22% think of themselves as Nationalist.
the rest of your argument seems to mostly be trying to convince me to hold the position i'm already arguing for. so, um, good job!:-)
First, in response to the whole Muslims are merciful bit, I invite you to read this post. So either Muslims are not doing what they are taught when the kill all these people, or they are being taught something different entirely.
the post you cite shows nothing of the sort. it links to examples, but i don't see anybody trying to deny that such examples exist. just like when "Christians" do things abhorrent to Christianity, it's resonable to posit that the examples your citing are isolated zealots acting in contradiction of the teachings of their religion.
the abortion clinic violence, on its own, is certainly not on the scale of what we see in the Islamist Arab world, sure, but it's of like kind. oh, and that number's not zero; there's at least one bombing in 2001, an attempt on 2006-09-11 (nice pick for a date, jackass), and numerous cases of arson throughout this decade (although it has been backing off since about 2002). but the abortion clinic violence isn't the only issue. throw in Matthew Shepard and all the other men and women persecuted or killed for their sexual orientation; in the US, at least, that's an overwhelmingly religious-motivated hatred. one's bound to throw in the KKK and the Army of God. there's the NLFT in India. certainly the numbers are different, but don't pretend it doesn't happen.
if you want to look for large-scale examples of Christians behaving in profoundly un-Christian ways, take a look at much of Africa. many of the conflicts going on there are at least largely religious in nature, and the Christians certainly don't get to come off as the "good guys" there (nor do the Muslims; they're all behaving pretty abhorrently).
and i take objection to your claim that, on a case-by-case basis, it's not a fair comparison. murder is murder. you don't have the right to kill people. i don't care whether it's because you have a philosophical difference with them over when ensoulment happens (because that's really what the religious aspect of objections to abortion is) or a philosophical difference with them over the honor of the creator. neither does anything to justify the act, so murder is still murder.
kinda colors the tone of the rest of your post, no?
this whole thing is full of unfounded statements. you don't know any "Christians" who thought the abortion bombing was okay? well, i do. and i spent most of my time in a very moderate, affluent, northern-NJ presbyterian church. i certainly imagine it's worse elsewhere.
and no, i don't believe you. the Koran has rules for how Muslims are to treat other people (at least Jews and Christians; i think non-Abrahamites are more or less fair game). this is abundantly clear if you take a historical perspective somewhat longer than what Americans are generally comfortable with; early in the last millennium, Muslims were far more accepting of both Jews and Christians in their territory than the Christians were of either the others. the Crusades provided the most vivid examples of this (with Christians slaughtering whole cities, including just folks who weren't the right kind of Christians), but there's plenty of others. a thousand years ago, the center of Jewish thought and scholarship on the planet was Baghdad. what a difference a millennium - and a few dozen wars - make.
i see Muslims condemning the actions of the radicals all the time. leaders of the faith as well as people on the street. i've never met one who thought it was a good idea. if you need to go find some (do you know any Muslims?), check out CAIR, or MPAC, or IEC, or CSM, or MCB, or... you get the idea. even the heads of Iran said it was outside what Islam supports.
but that last one gets to the heart of the problem: you're conflating politics with religion (which is understandable, i guess, since the leaders of very many middle eastern countries do that intentionally). Iran hates us not because Islam tells them to, but because our idiot president entirely discarded their reform efforts and publicly called them "Evil", thus giving substantial support to their previously-waning hard-liners. oh, and because (and this goes for the rest of the area) we've destabilized the part of the world they have to live in, caused significant increases to regional terrorism, and acted unilaterally, without UN consent, to overthrow a sovereign nation who'd made no offensive moves towards us. oh, and because we continue to support the nation with the worst human rights record in the region, including supplying them billions of dollars in arms and giving tacit support to their WMD program.
i'm not arguing that there aren't differences between religions, and especially not in the forms witnessed today. in my (rather politically risky) opinion, Islam is a few centuries behind Christianity and Judaism in terms of their understanding of their own faith, mainly because they lack an continuous tradition of free exegesis (when Christianity opened up to the idea that maybe the bible wasn't the literal word of God we saw very dramatic transformations). Jews have had a continuous overwhelming emphasis on traditions of study, questioning, and interpretation for about three thousand years (largely picked up from the Greeks). they taught it to the muslims, who were doing pretty well indeed (certainly better than their contemporary western Christian counterparts) until the Crusades destroyed the high point of their civilization and thrust them back into the dark ages. to say that there's a fundamental difference in the teaching of mercy is pretty flatly false, and a grotesque (and unhelpful) oversimplification of some very complex issues.
A major Christian protest where someone is carrying a sign saying "Behead those who Insult Christianity" and maybe we've got something to start talking about.
go check out Fred Phelps. i can't be bothered gathering links because the guy makes me ill. he's pretty darned close to what you're looking for. listening to Pat Robertson ask his audience to pray for some Supreme Court justices to die is pretty far afield of behavior i'd expect of a Christian minister, too. and there's plenty more violent things on large signs by less prominent folks outside abortion clinics quite frequently. choosing not to see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Right now the public face of Islam is that of violent jihad.
no, right now the media face of Islam is the violent jihad. it's certainly not the face that the majority of muslims put forward. i'm just as certain that the vast majority of Catholic priests do not have pedophiliac leanings, but those are the ones we hear most about on the news.
...we have things like a cartoon being refused because it happens to mention Islam and jihad. Have you read the strip in question?
indeed; did you? because i don't see a mention of jihad anywhere in there. care to point it out for me?
oh, and i didn't think the strip was particularly funny.
this post has so many problems in it i hardly know where to begin. you start off with this gem:
Whether you like the Chinese government or not, and whether you feel that they are wrongfully occupying Tibet or not, the fact is that they feel that this is their territory, and nobody in the world offers any serious challenge; ergo, Tibet is de facto a part of China.
except, um, the Tibetans? that's pretty much exactly the issue: the Tibetans feel they're being occupied. you're making a pretty lame attempt to cut out the most important point of the argument without actually making any arguments against it. bad form, and your statement is obviously false up front. moving on...
Nobody in their right mind would expect a country to allow an external, hostile, political power to influence the internal affairs of the country
well, that rather depends on the interpretation of very many things. Germany didn't particularly "allow" the Allies to tell them to stop taking over lands and killing people, but we made it happen anyway. there are limits to how far we expect countries to be allowed to go before the rest of the world intervenes. certainly that limit goes down significantly when the behavior crosses borders, but it exists even within a country (witness Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example). you're right that nobody in their right mind would expect a sovereign nation to allow a foreign power (hostile or not) to dictate, say, monetary policy or administration of social programs, but the same people would damn well expect to see involvement with a million people dead. the Red Scare in the US is a particularly dark failing of our political and civil institutions, but it did not result in mass executions. it was clearly very bad, but the scale doesn't even compare.
The Dalai Lama is undeniably a political influence in Tibet, and he is undeniably hostile to the Chinese government...
define "hostile to". one could make a sound argument that he is "hostile" (that is, "in opposition to") their colonial agenda, but i'm not aware of anything he's said or done that challenges their right to exist or control China (just not Tibet).
...it is pure common sense that they want to minimize his influence on any part of the Chinese population...
they may want to do so, but does that make it right? does it give China the right to violate his human rights, or those of their citizens, in the process? and, again, that's to say nothing of the human rights of Tibetans, who're only "Chinese" by occupation. oh, but:
...and as I pointed out, the Tibetans are de facto part of the Chinese population...
yes, you said this, but it doesn't make it true in any useful sense. you're basing it on an unfounded assertion and a statement which is trivially observably false.
It is not only common sense, it is the duty of any government to oppose any influence that would destabilise the society they are governing...
again, nonsense. the censorship and control of information that takes place in China is disgusting, all done in the name of opposing things that destabilize society. China, like any totalitarian regime, equates "society" with their own rule; the two are not equivalent.
...and it is only fair to say that the Dalai Lama wants to destabilize the situation - after all, he wants the Chinese to leave and Tibet to be an independent nation.
mmm, not really. at least, not today; he's significantly softened his position. i want Tibet to be independent; the Dalai Lama wants Tibet to be self-governing on at least internal affairs. the two are not the same.
How could that be achieved without a war of independence? And even more - if the Chinese government were to say 'OK, we agree; we simply leave Tibet',
[some further suggested substitutions omitted] with the exception of #2 (which is unchanged from the list you seem to be responding to), your examples are all flawed in a similar way: there is not an overwhelming support for independence by the subordinate party.
Quebec came close in 1995, but was still edged out by the federalists; i don't have any numbers more recent than that, and there certainly haven't been any formal referendums on the subject.
Hawai'i has an identifiable independence movement, but it is a minority (exact numbers are difficult to get as there's been no formal referendum, but it's support comes overwhelmingly from ethnic Hawai'ians, which number less than 20% of the population of the state). even if you were willing to back out the ~50 years of US citizens migrating there, before statehood Hawai'i was already quite diverse, with lots of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and other islanders living there.
your Northern Ireland example is the best of the set, but that's still problematic. the last plebiscite on Northern Ireland's continued membership in the United Kingdom was overwhelmingly affirmative (>98%). while the fight has been bloody, it's a poor contemporary example of a foreign power occupying a nation that doesn't want them there (although that's certainly historically true if you go back one or two hundred years). rather, Northern Ireland is a cautionary tale to even well-intentioned would-be colonialists. it has a much greater similarity to what's going on in Israel and Palestine than any of the other examples cited so far, and is very dissimilar from Tibet.
i suspect you're fishing for examples of proponents of Tibetan self-determination being inconsistent with those claims. keep looking.
BTW, China controls Tibet long before Hawaii (or Texas) becomes one state of US!
true for Hawai'i, false for Texas. China invaded Tibet in 1949; Texas became a state in 1845. only Hawai'i and Alaska (maybe that's what you were thinking of?), both in 1959, postdate the Tibetan occupation.
This is the place where a lot of the Chinese disagree.
maybe, but they're wrong. your argument goes on to note that there are lots of differences within China, and supposes that this invalidates the claim that Tibet is culturally and linguistically distinct. the differences within Mandarin Chinese are roughly akin to the differences in English spoken worldwide. throw in Cantonese, and you're getting into the relationship between, say, English and German or French. i can, with moderate success, tell where in the US someone is from by their accent; my mother can do a much better job telling where in Italy someone's from by the accent of their Italian. and it's true that the US, for example, has a diverse background. but that argument in no way lessens the truth of the statement that our Native American populations are linguistically, culturally, and ethnically unique.
besides, this is all sort of a non sequitur. nobody in the US would argue we should invade the english-speaking parts of Canada just because they speak the same language, have mostly the same culture, and we have some shared history. let alone the french-speaking parts or Mexico which, while they speak a distinct language and have a distinct culture, share lots of historical roots (the political philosophy of the US founders was heavily influenced by the French, for example, and English is linguistically largely a mix of German and French (with lots of other bits thrown in)).
My point is that if you are trying to convince a Chinese person that Tibet deserve to be separated, and used their distinct culture and language as the reason, then by that reason many more parts of China also deserve to be separated.
you misunderstand the argument. Tibetans deserve to be independent because all people have an inherent right of self-determination and they choose to exercise that right in the form of an independent government. history and their linguistic/cultural/religious/ethnic identity are reasons influencing that choice, but are not central to the point.
1. Western governments see it as a way to punish china by supporting it.
that's interesting; which western governments do you see punishing China over Tibet? i'd love to find some and thank them, because mine certainly isn't calling them out on it. we (the USA) continue to extend them Most Favored Nation status (although we changed the name, largely because it was embarrassing with regard to China), going as far as making it permanent (that is, no longer up for yearly debate) in 2000. the same is true to various degrees for at least most of Europe.
2. Westerners have bought the tibetan propaganda and see it on par with the Holocaust.
i'll assume you use "the Holocaust" to refer to the Nazi mass killings, including the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. i don't know anyone who argues that what's going on in Tibet is on that scale, but the estimated death toll from Chinese occupation in Tibet over the past nearly 60 years is around 1 million Tibetans. there are more than 1/6th fewer Tibetans in Tibet now (although much of that is due to migration (forced or otherwise), it's still shocking given the overall growth in the region). please do remember that the word "holocaust" was not invented for the Nazi actions, and killing a million people anywhere almost certainly qualifies for the term (what we're seeing in Darfur is a holocaust in the making, for example). while the Chinese don't seem to particularly care about wiping out Tibetans outside their borders, the government is certainly interested in destroying the culture, language, religion, and ethnic identity of Tibet for the purpose of furthering their colonial/nationalist agenda.
you argue that it somehow makes historical sense for China to assert totalitarian authority over Tibet, but this is a nonesense claim fuled by either outright ignorance or Chinese propaganda. it's senseless to claim that "China" controlled Tibet before there was anything resembling a unified "China". treaties do not confer unity; at best, Tibet was in a suzerain relationship with historical China, and has clear periods of independence. even if history had overwhelming sway over the question of self-determination (it should not, nor does it generally (the US is not controlled by Britain, nor Mexico by the Spanish)), the answer to the historical question is certainly no slam-dunk for Chinese nationalists.
your point about the USA's treatment of our indigenous people is an interesting and valid comparison. the US certainly has a pretty bleak history here, breaking pretty much every treaty we've ever signed, kicking people off their land, forcing migration, and setting them up in land almost designed to kill people. but the modern story is very different: the US courts are very favorable to Native claims; the tribes have significant autonomy on their own territory; there is no program for their extermination. the situation is much more similar to Spain's treatment of the Basque (except there aren't significant Native American movements for independence today (with some exceptions), as there are among the Basque). with federal government support, the situation for Native Americans (both on and off the reservations) is generally improving (not uniformly, of course) and has been for decades; in Tibet, things are as bad for Tibetans as they've been for most of the last 60 years, and from most standpoints only getting worse.
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one more time, with emphasis: occam's razor neither proves nor solves anything! there. got it? please pass the message along.
the original form isn't even useful for comparing unrelated theories of an event, but rather for simplifying a single theory (eg, if i have a theory of why planets move in orbits involving the force of angel's wings, and the theory works just as well without the angels, eliminate the angels). the more modern (and less accurate) version of comparing unrelated theories based on their comparative complexity is a useful principle for comparing probabilities, but in no way helps you get any closer to proof. it points you at where an answer might be, but does not provide an answer itself.
Microsoft's huge, and will be around for a very long time, but that's a far cry from saying their "healthy". People live with terminal diseases for decades all the time.
Valve, like a bunch of other companies in a similar position most of a decade ago, had a choice to make and got into bed with Microsoft and DirectX. you can argue about the business or technical justification, but the effects are that those companies now have a much steeper road for porting, to the detriment of all (except Microsoft).
until Newell puts forward some specific complaints with gaming development on the Mac, i'm afraid it simply sounds like he doesn't want to admit that they make money-based decisions around their games.
It would be nice if you learned english. I'm not even entirely sure what that last sentence is supposed to say. "if only" what?
in addition to being hypocritically ungrammatical, you're factually incorrect. English is not "the language" of the US in any legally significant way beyond custom. Several individual states have explicit recognition of additional languages, either as co-equal with english or as recognized official secondary languages (California has a list of like 17 or some such). Stay in the right parts of the country, and one could live quite happily and productively, contributing to the national economy, culture, and broader society, without ever speaking english.
This also isn't a Mexican thing, either; your "every other immigrant class" comment is just as wrong. Check out Chinatown in most of your larger coastal cities. Check out Miami, Florida or Union City, New Jersey for Cuban populations large enough to be self-sustaining. New Jersey's also got Fort Lee, a huge Japanese community, and Edison, an overwhelmingly Indian community. There's Hawai'i and our hundred-plus reservations where english is quite commonly a second language. Hawai'i' also has lots of Chinese, Japanese, and other Islanders. That's just off the top of my head. The point is that the US is a wonderfully multicultural place with intentionally low barriers to entry into society which welcomes contributions from as many types of people as are able.
Or that's the theory, anyway.
unsurprisingly, what uptake for R-UIM there has been has mostly happened in south- and southeast-asia, where there's more significant competition (and, of course, the technology just has a few-year lead time over what we get here). i don't know much about what the newly-developing CDMA markets in the former soviet bloc countries are doing; that'd be interesting to watch.
second: Verizon acts the same way. i've brought non-verizon-purchased phones onto their network without issue: call up customer service, read them the phone's ID, say thank you.
i wish they weren't so schizophrenic. verizon toed the industry line about Wireless Local Number Portability for a long time, too, but were eventually the first major carrier to back off. why? they realized they simply have the best network out there and could compete favorably on that. and, as they expected, it worked out very well for them.
they really do have the best network. if only they didn't get everything else wrong...
this is true, but not really relevant. the real issue isn't a removable ID card, but device locking. the US-based GSM operators have just as bad lock-in as Verizon, even with SIM cards in all their devices. being able to move your number around yourself is certainly a nice feature, but isn't what determines this level of lock-in.
it's also worth noting that R-UIM uptake globally has been quite poor and the phone selection is much smaller (nice chicken-and-egg problem there).
if esr and friends are concerned with making things clear when they're talking about code which preserves the rights they care about (which is a positive thing), they should use something without that pre-existing ambiguity. oh, wait, they already do: OSI doesn't certify things "Open Source", they certify them using "OSI Approved" and similar marks. they should stress that more; that term is clearly unambiguous (not to mention legally protected).
OSI does not own the words "open source". in an (implicit) acknowledgment of the ambiguity introduced by their poorly chosen name, they don't approve labeling things "Open Source(TM)"; indeed, there is no such trademark. rather, what you're probably looking for is "Open Source Initiative Approved" or similar. "open source" had industry meaning for a decade or two before OSI came along in 1998.
and, on an entirely unrelated topic, when did slashdot start replacing my (TM) (which i input as the proper Unicode trademark character) with (TM)? that's kinda obnoxious.
nobody here's disputing the OSI's rights to their trademark, but the fact is they chose a term (chosen in a single day "strategy session", by an engineer, described by the OSI as "the best they could come up with") with a pre-existing meaning in the context they were concerned with. it's worth noting that OSI themselves claim no (legal) right on marking things "Open Source(TM)"; if you want that meaning, you mean "OSI Approved" or similar.
i don't think 5 years qualifies as "long after his death". Spain got a new government in 1978. i've been referring to the actions of this government.
um, no, i didn't miss any such thing; i was referring only to modern Spain.. don't try to get me to defend Franco; ain't gonna happen. but things started getting better very soon after his death. by 1978 the Basque were largely (certainly not entirely) self-governing in internal affairs. suppression of the language ended by then. it became official in 1982.
as noted by a sibling, you're wrong: this wasn't in response to you at all, but my immediate parent. threading is useful.
:-)
on the 98% figure, however: i think you're confusing the turnout with the results. the turnout for the 1973 plebiscite was about 58% (due at least in part to the boycott of a large portion of the Catholic population); the results were over 98% in favor of remaining in the United Kingdom. CAIN has a summary of the plebiscite. Catholics are still a minority in Northern Ireland today, so if you're correct about the population growing there (i have no idea) i imagine they still would've been trounced without the boycott. also of note is this more recent (but smaller) opinion survey showing that 40% of folks in Northern Ireland think of themselves as Unionist while only 22% think of themselves as Nationalist.
the rest of your argument seems to mostly be trying to convince me to hold the position i'm already arguing for. so, um, good job!
the abortion clinic violence, on its own, is certainly not on the scale of what we see in the Islamist Arab world, sure, but it's of like kind. oh, and that number's not zero; there's at least one bombing in 2001, an attempt on 2006-09-11 (nice pick for a date, jackass), and numerous cases of arson throughout this decade (although it has been backing off since about 2002). but the abortion clinic violence isn't the only issue. throw in Matthew Shepard and all the other men and women persecuted or killed for their sexual orientation; in the US, at least, that's an overwhelmingly religious-motivated hatred. one's bound to throw in the KKK and the Army of God. there's the NLFT in India. certainly the numbers are different, but don't pretend it doesn't happen.
if you want to look for large-scale examples of Christians behaving in profoundly un-Christian ways, take a look at much of Africa. many of the conflicts going on there are at least largely religious in nature, and the Christians certainly don't get to come off as the "good guys" there (nor do the Muslims; they're all behaving pretty abhorrently).
and i take objection to your claim that, on a case-by-case basis, it's not a fair comparison. murder is murder. you don't have the right to kill people. i don't care whether it's because you have a philosophical difference with them over when ensoulment happens (because that's really what the religious aspect of objections to abortion is) or a philosophical difference with them over the honor of the creator. neither does anything to justify the act, so murder is still murder.
this whole thing is full of unfounded statements. you don't know any "Christians" who thought the abortion bombing was okay? well, i do. and i spent most of my time in a very moderate, affluent, northern-NJ presbyterian church. i certainly imagine it's worse elsewhere.
and no, i don't believe you. the Koran has rules for how Muslims are to treat other people (at least Jews and Christians; i think non-Abrahamites are more or less fair game). this is abundantly clear if you take a historical perspective somewhat longer than what Americans are generally comfortable with; early in the last millennium, Muslims were far more accepting of both Jews and Christians in their territory than the Christians were of either the others. the Crusades provided the most vivid examples of this (with Christians slaughtering whole cities, including just folks who weren't the right kind of Christians), but there's plenty of others. a thousand years ago, the center of Jewish thought and scholarship on the planet was Baghdad. what a difference a millennium - and a few dozen wars - make.
i see Muslims condemning the actions of the radicals all the time. leaders of the faith as well as people on the street. i've never met one who thought it was a good idea. if you need to go find some (do you know any Muslims?), check out CAIR, or MPAC, or IEC, or CSM, or MCB, or... you get the idea. even the heads of Iran said it was outside what Islam supports.
but that last one gets to the heart of the problem: you're conflating politics with religion (which is understandable, i guess, since the leaders of very many middle eastern countries do that intentionally). Iran hates us not because Islam tells them to, but because our idiot president entirely discarded their reform efforts and publicly called them "Evil", thus giving substantial support to their previously-waning hard-liners. oh, and because (and this goes for the rest of the area) we've destabilized the part of the world they have to live in, caused significant increases to regional terrorism, and acted unilaterally, without UN consent, to overthrow a sovereign nation who'd made no offensive moves towards us.
oh, and because we continue to support the nation with the worst human rights record in the region, including supplying them billions of dollars in arms and giving tacit support to their WMD program.
i'm not arguing that there aren't differences between religions, and especially not in the forms witnessed today. in my (rather politically risky) opinion, Islam is a few centuries behind Christianity and Judaism in terms of their understanding of their own faith, mainly because they lack an continuous tradition of free exegesis (when Christianity opened up to the idea that maybe the bible wasn't the literal word of God we saw very dramatic transformations). Jews have had a continuous overwhelming emphasis on traditions of study, questioning, and interpretation for about three thousand years (largely picked up from the Greeks). they taught it to the muslims, who were doing pretty well indeed (certainly better than their contemporary western Christian counterparts) until the Crusades destroyed the high point of their civilization and thrust them back into the dark ages. to say that there's a fundamental difference in the teaching of mercy is pretty flatly false, and a grotesque (and unhelpful) oversimplification of some very complex issues.
oh, and i didn't think the strip was particularly funny.
except, um, the Tibetans? that's pretty much exactly the issue: the Tibetans feel they're being occupied. you're making a pretty lame attempt to cut out the most important point of the argument without actually making any arguments against it. bad form, and your statement is obviously false up front. moving on...
well, that rather depends on the interpretation of very many things. Germany didn't particularly "allow" the Allies to tell them to stop taking over lands and killing people, but we made it happen anyway. there are limits to how far we expect countries to be allowed to go before the rest of the world intervenes. certainly that limit goes down significantly when the behavior crosses borders, but it exists even within a country (witness Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example). you're right that nobody in their right mind would expect a sovereign nation to allow a foreign power (hostile or not) to dictate, say, monetary policy or administration of social programs, but the same people would damn well expect to see involvement with a million people dead.
the Red Scare in the US is a particularly dark failing of our political and civil institutions, but it did not result in mass executions. it was clearly very bad, but the scale doesn't even compare.
define "hostile to". one could make a sound argument that he is "hostile" (that is, "in opposition to") their colonial agenda, but i'm not aware of anything he's said or done that challenges their right to exist or control China (just not Tibet).
they may want to do so, but does that make it right? does it give China the right to violate his human rights, or those of their citizens, in the process? and, again, that's to say nothing of the human rights of Tibetans, who're only "Chinese" by occupation. oh, but:
yes, you said this, but it doesn't make it true in any useful sense. you're basing it on an unfounded assertion and a statement which is trivially observably false.
again, nonsense. the censorship and control of information that takes place in China is disgusting, all done in the name of opposing things that destabilize society. China, like any totalitarian regime, equates "society" with their own rule; the two are not equivalent.
mmm, not really. at least, not today; he's significantly softened his position. i want Tibet to be independent; the Dalai Lama wants Tibet to be self-governing on at least internal affairs. the two are not the same.
well, there's one way it could
with the exception of #2 (which is unchanged from the list you seem to be responding to), your examples are all flawed in a similar way: there is not an overwhelming support for independence by the subordinate party.
- Quebec came close in 1995, but was still edged out by the federalists; i don't have any numbers more recent than that, and there certainly haven't been any formal referendums on the subject.
- Hawai'i has an identifiable independence movement, but it is a minority (exact numbers are difficult to get as there's been no formal referendum, but it's support comes overwhelmingly from ethnic Hawai'ians, which number less than 20% of the population of the state). even if you were willing to back out the ~50 years of US citizens migrating there, before statehood Hawai'i was already quite diverse, with lots of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and other islanders living there.
- your Northern Ireland example is the best of the set, but that's still problematic. the last plebiscite on Northern Ireland's continued membership in the United Kingdom was overwhelmingly affirmative (>98%). while the fight has been bloody, it's a poor contemporary example of a foreign power occupying a nation that doesn't want them there (although that's certainly historically true if you go back one or two hundred years). rather, Northern Ireland is a cautionary tale to even well-intentioned would-be colonialists. it has a much greater similarity to what's going on in Israel and Palestine than any of the other examples cited so far, and is very dissimilar from Tibet.
i suspect you're fishing for examples of proponents of Tibetan self-determination being inconsistent with those claims. keep looking.true for Hawai'i, false for Texas. China invaded Tibet in 1949; Texas became a state in 1845. only Hawai'i and Alaska (maybe that's what you were thinking of?), both in 1959, postdate the Tibetan occupation.besides, this is all sort of a non sequitur. nobody in the US would argue we should invade the english-speaking parts of Canada just because they speak the same language, have mostly the same culture, and we have some shared history. let alone the french-speaking parts or Mexico which, while they speak a distinct language and have a distinct culture, share lots of historical roots (the political philosophy of the US founders was heavily influenced by the French, for example, and English is linguistically largely a mix of German and French (with lots of other bits thrown in)).you misunderstand the argument. Tibetans deserve to be independent because all people have an inherent right of self-determination and they choose to exercise that right in the form of an independent government. history and their linguistic/cultural/religious/ethnic identity are reasons influencing that choice, but are not central to the point.
you argue that it somehow makes historical sense for China to assert totalitarian authority over Tibet, but this is a nonesense claim fuled by either outright ignorance or Chinese propaganda. it's senseless to claim that "China" controlled Tibet before there was anything resembling a unified "China". treaties do not confer unity; at best, Tibet was in a suzerain relationship with historical China, and has clear periods of independence. even if history had overwhelming sway over the question of self-determination (it should not, nor does it generally (the US is not controlled by Britain, nor Mexico by the Spanish)), the answer to the historical question is certainly no slam-dunk for Chinese nationalists.
your point about the USA's treatment of our indigenous people is an interesting and valid comparison. the US certainly has a pretty bleak history here, breaking pretty much every treaty we've ever signed, kicking people off their land, forcing migration, and setting them up in land almost designed to kill people. but the modern story is very different: the US courts are very favorable to Native claims; the tribes have significant autonomy on their own territory; there is no program for their extermination. the situation is much more similar to Spain's treatment of the Basque (except there aren't significant Native American movements for independence today (with some exceptions), as there are among the Basque). with federal government support, the situation for Native Americans (both on and off the reservations) is generally improving (not uniformly, of course) and has been for decades; in Tibet, things are as bad for Tibetans as they've been for most of the last 60 years, and from most standpoints only getting worse.