Maybe that's why she can hire better female programmers easier - because if you pick someone at random, you'll get more retarded males - and at the same time, the more brilliant males are ignored, since anyone about average can write easy-to-follow code pretty well. Also, here, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the kind of thinking that encourages obfuscated code.
If there are evolutionary explanations for the different distributions between genders on the curve, don't you think, maybe, there's explanations for why men produce less communicative code than women do?
People are selective about their tolerance for difference. There's a saying now: modern conservatives accept genetic explanations for everything except sexual orientation, and modern liberals accept genetic explanations for nothing except sexual orientation. How many of the people horrified by this claim about a gendered basis for code-writing style were just as hostile to Larry Summer's claims about women in the sciences? Few, I suspect. When these explanations serve to naturalize advantages that they already enjoy, it's all fine and well: it's only when those explanations threaten their tenure in the catbird seat that they throw up a fuss and yell "sexism!"
They did the research because they were working on the case. The sources they used were publicly available and the accuracy uncontested. There has been no claim by informed people on the other side that their data was wrong.
What gets me: the current cost of the Iraq fiasco is, what, 3 trillion dollars?
We could have easily taken 1% of that, had a sit-down with Saddam Hussein and said, "look, you and your family and your core leadership take this money and transition quickly out of power and set up in a nice Caribbean resort for the rest of your life, and we won't wipe you out," then gradually shifted to a more representative government, and still had 2.7 trillion to throw around for little things like rebuilding after Katrina, widespread environmental projects, and lap dances for every adult male in America and Iraq put together.
I don't know if you're talking at me. I'm not a conservative: I'm quite solidly on the left, and I've never voted for Bush. But I'm also disinterested in inaccurately demonizing conservatives, and I do know many conservatives also who did not vote for Bush, particularly in 2004. I am not a libertarian, but there are plenty of libertarians and paleo-conservatives who have taken a consistent line, and are often more intellectually consistent that a lot of the anti-war left.
(I actually do have some conservative traits in me: I'm anti-egalitarian, an unrepentant snob, and a skeptic about human nature - I don't think people are "essentially good" or even fixable. This makes me something of a conservative in the old mold in a lot of ways. But I tend to work from a leftist perspective most of the time - more of a Foucauldian attitude with bits of Alain de Benoist, Chantal delSol, and Edmund Burke.)
The legitimacy I meant was moral/ethical. Essentially, the revolutionary generation needed a basis for action that would absolve them of accusations of treason and petty rebellion, as much for their own consciences as anything else.
I do think that the teleological aspect is something of an Achilles heel, actually: I do not believe that we have God- or even nature-given rights. However, I also don't believe that we have God- or nature-given duties to crowns or states, either. We can see the rhetoric about the first claim as a kind of cancellation of the rhetoric of the second.
In terms of understanding the framer's intent, the fact that many of them signed onto a document that legitimized the creation of the nation for which the Constitution was created thought those truths to be "self-evident" is pretty damn significant.
You know, I've always condemned people who called conservatives "fascists." For one thing, historically, conservatism isn't fascism. There are a lot of varieties of conservatism - some more nationalistic, some more about cultural traditions, values and ways-of-life, some more libertarian or about the well-being of businesses.
But I think that there is a strain of thought in a large subset of the neo-conservative movement (or however they're going to try to rebrand themselves) that is very close to fascism:
1. An admiration and affection for things military and an instinctive respect for armed authority,
2. Xenophobia and hostility to foreign ideas and influences, especially non-assimilating immigrants,
3. Nationalism and flamboyant display of nationalist imagery,
4. A cynical deployment of religion (see Leo Strauss),
5. Accusations of betrayal and disloyalty against critics,
6. Gleeful expansion of the policing power of the state.
In the utterly ridiculous, almost impossible to actually happen case when:
1. you knew that an attack was coming, and
2. you knew that someone with information about it was in your custody, and
3. you knew from experience they would not give you reliable information without torture, and
4. you knew that torture would give you reliable information that would immediately save lives, then
the best I would say is you should torture, and then be willing to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law - that if those lives are worth the cost of torture, they are also worth the cost of your career and freedom. If anyone is willing to torture knowing that the consequences are their own punishment, but is morally compelled to do so to save innocent lives as you suggest, then I would let it happen. I want it to be that serious - that even if it works, it has consequences for the torturer.
Your example has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the situation, however, and more closely maps an episode of 24 Hours.
Water boarding is definitely torture. (More, I think, than being forced to eat your own shit, which is neither terror-inducing nor immediately threatening to your life.) No one except a handful of far-right talking heads believes otherwise. The UN considers it torture, the US Defense Intelligence Agency considers it torture, and the US has prosecuted Japanese military members who used waterboarding against US prisoners with the understanding that it was torture.
There are a lot of people who deserve suffering. Many throughout the world might hold the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as culpable for comparable losses to their loved ones - and then the people who pay for and support them. But law, national or international, isn't about the grudges of the wronged.
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed âoefighters for;â 30% considered âoemembers of;â a large majority â" 60% -- are detained merely because they are âoeassociated withâ a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.
Also from the report:
The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing; as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.
Perhaps you think that even a majority of the detainees in Guantanamo were picked up on the field of battle. Most were not, but were taken into US custody as a result of a bounty program for informers. The problems with such an approach should be obvious.
Replacing one's name with one's face doesn't change anything, really - it just changes the index from a text string to a graphic. If you wanted to get to the level of reliability that you have just suggested, then we're talking biometrics, which is more, rather than less invasive.
My point is that as soon as you make the "citizen" the important category for rights and privileges, you already have given the state the final word.
The policy is here. I am also an Amtrak commuter. They are less formal about this process than the airlines are, at this point, but the regulation now exists and I am regularly told that enforcement will get stricter.
Yes, they do. It's a new regulation. They aren't enforcing it very strictly yet - my (English) wife didn't bring her passport when we were traveling, and they let us go - but they made it clear that ID was now officially required, and that enforcement would get stricter. The difference with the airlines is that they ask for ID after you board, not before you board.
Because I'm a FUCKING AMERICAN CITIZEN, and I shouldn't have to prove who I am just to peacefully move around the country.
If your rights really derive from your citizenship, then logically you aren't entitled to them until you prove your citizenship (and, therefore, your identity.)
Otherwise, you should change that to "Because I'm a FUCK HUMAN BEING with HUMAN RIGHTS." Of course, so are the terrorists.
Conservatism has only been re-written as libertarianism in the past 30 years. Conservatism has often supported the enshrining of what they consider traditional cultural values in legislation, be it the protection of the aristocracy, the establishment of official religions, bans on obscenity or same-sex relations or the wrong drugs, etc. When it has been convenient for conservatives, they historically would invoke the idea of "small government" to forfend against anything that compromised the privileges of, erm, the privileged, but it is only in the past few decades that some people in the conservative movement have taken that idea to heart - and even now, they are in the minority of conservatism.
I'm with you in opposing the teleological fallacy - that there is a way that nature is "supposed" to be and that we are "meddling" with it. But I disagree with the assumption that this means we can do no harm.
I can imagine a day in which we decide, as a species, that we need to actively change the climate in order to thrive. Local market forces will not accomplish this. It will require "socialistic" forces. Whether climate change is anthrogenic or not is irrelevant: if the current, unregulated course of action creates huge human costs in the far term, then it is reasonable to take steps in the short term.
I do wish Apple would open up the iPhone, but I don't think there's a legal hammer involved if you put unauthorized software on your iPhone, is there? I thought it was just the voiding of the warranty (and non-distribution via iTunes.)
What makes you think that democrat bullshit is any better? Neither party serves the interests of the people in this country. "The people" don't have interests. People have interests. They are often contradictory. Parties are coalitions of interests, which is why the Rovian "50 percent plus one" strategy works.
Until I read the reports of the Clinton supporters in Appalachia, I would have said that anyone who would refuse to vote for a black man would have refused to vote for a Democrat, anyway. The primary campaign has been a learning experience: I now see how much of the Democratic base is actually populist, particularly the "white welfare" demographic that wants government handouts coupled with nationalist sentiments and conservative social values. Clinton and Huckabee are uncomfortably close to each other. The Clinton record on gay rights should have been a give-away.
The fact that jobs will go to where it is cheaper to do business is exactly why almost everything we buy is made in China. A "race to the bottom" is not necessarily an ideal economic system.
The answer may be inter-state tariffs. Yes, I know: constitution and all that.
More importantly, he's a symbol of Hindu national resistance to Mogul dominance - and is thus a charged symbol of the tensions between Muslims and Hindu practitioners in India.
It might be somewhat analogous to someone posting an image defacing Abraham Lincoln (or Robert E. Lee) in the US, with a religious element to that gesture. (Of course, it would be protected as free speech here, but it could trigger a fight.)
Slashdot Mirror
If there are evolutionary explanations for the different distributions between genders on the curve, don't you think, maybe, there's explanations for why men produce less communicative code than women do?
People are selective about their tolerance for difference. There's a saying now: modern conservatives accept genetic explanations for everything except sexual orientation, and modern liberals accept genetic explanations for nothing except sexual orientation. How many of the people horrified by this claim about a gendered basis for code-writing style were just as hostile to Larry Summer's claims about women in the sciences? Few, I suspect. When these explanations serve to naturalize advantages that they already enjoy, it's all fine and well: it's only when those explanations threaten their tenure in the catbird seat that they throw up a fuss and yell "sexism!"
They did the research because they were working on the case. The sources they used were publicly available and the accuracy uncontested. There has been no claim by informed people on the other side that their data was wrong.
What kind of monsters would use land mines?
What gets me: the current cost of the Iraq fiasco is, what, 3 trillion dollars?
We could have easily taken 1% of that, had a sit-down with Saddam Hussein and said, "look, you and your family and your core leadership take this money and transition quickly out of power and set up in a nice Caribbean resort for the rest of your life, and we won't wipe you out," then gradually shifted to a more representative government, and still had 2.7 trillion to throw around for little things like rebuilding after Katrina, widespread environmental projects, and lap dances for every adult male in America and Iraq put together.
I don't know if you're talking at me. I'm not a conservative: I'm quite solidly on the left, and I've never voted for Bush. But I'm also disinterested in inaccurately demonizing conservatives, and I do know many conservatives also who did not vote for Bush, particularly in 2004. I am not a libertarian, but there are plenty of libertarians and paleo-conservatives who have taken a consistent line, and are often more intellectually consistent that a lot of the anti-war left.
(I actually do have some conservative traits in me: I'm anti-egalitarian, an unrepentant snob, and a skeptic about human nature - I don't think people are "essentially good" or even fixable. This makes me something of a conservative in the old mold in a lot of ways. But I tend to work from a leftist perspective most of the time - more of a Foucauldian attitude with bits of Alain de Benoist, Chantal delSol, and Edmund Burke.)
The legitimacy I meant was moral/ethical. Essentially, the revolutionary generation needed a basis for action that would absolve them of accusations of treason and petty rebellion, as much for their own consciences as anything else.
I do think that the teleological aspect is something of an Achilles heel, actually: I do not believe that we have God- or even nature-given rights. However, I also don't believe that we have God- or nature-given duties to crowns or states, either. We can see the rhetoric about the first claim as a kind of cancellation of the rhetoric of the second.
In terms of understanding the framer's intent, the fact that many of them signed onto a document that legitimized the creation of the nation for which the Constitution was created thought those truths to be "self-evident" is pretty damn significant.
You know, I've always condemned people who called conservatives "fascists." For one thing, historically, conservatism isn't fascism. There are a lot of varieties of conservatism - some more nationalistic, some more about cultural traditions, values and ways-of-life, some more libertarian or about the well-being of businesses.
But I think that there is a strain of thought in a large subset of the neo-conservative movement (or however they're going to try to rebrand themselves) that is very close to fascism:
1. An admiration and affection for things military and an instinctive respect for armed authority,
2. Xenophobia and hostility to foreign ideas and influences, especially non-assimilating immigrants,
3. Nationalism and flamboyant display of nationalist imagery,
4. A cynical deployment of religion (see Leo Strauss),
5. Accusations of betrayal and disloyalty against critics,
6. Gleeful expansion of the policing power of the state.
In the utterly ridiculous, almost impossible to actually happen case when:
1. you knew that an attack was coming, and
2. you knew that someone with information about it was in your custody, and
3. you knew from experience they would not give you reliable information without torture, and
4. you knew that torture would give you reliable information that would immediately save lives, then
the best I would say is you should torture, and then be willing to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law - that if those lives are worth the cost of torture, they are also worth the cost of your career and freedom. If anyone is willing to torture knowing that the consequences are their own punishment, but is morally compelled to do so to save innocent lives as you suggest, then I would let it happen. I want it to be that serious - that even if it works, it has consequences for the torturer.
Your example has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the situation, however, and more closely maps an episode of 24 Hours.
Water boarding is definitely torture. (More, I think, than being forced to eat your own shit, which is neither terror-inducing nor immediately threatening to your life.) No one except a handful of far-right talking heads believes otherwise. The UN considers it torture, the US Defense Intelligence Agency considers it torture, and the US has prosecuted Japanese military members who used waterboarding against US prisoners with the understanding that it was torture.
There are a lot of people who deserve suffering. Many throughout the world might hold the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as culpable for comparable losses to their loved ones - and then the people who pay for and support them. But law, national or international, isn't about the grudges of the wronged.
Here.
Salient extract from the summary:
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed âoefighters for;â 30% considered âoemembers of;â a large majority â" 60% -- are detained merely because they are âoeassociated withâ a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.
Also from the report:
The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing; as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.
I think the report is fairly damning.
Perhaps you think that even a majority of the detainees in Guantanamo were picked up on the field of battle. Most were not, but were taken into US custody as a result of a bounty program for informers. The problems with such an approach should be obvious.
Replacing one's name with one's face doesn't change anything, really - it just changes the index from a text string to a graphic. If you wanted to get to the level of reliability that you have just suggested, then we're talking biometrics, which is more, rather than less invasive.
My point is that as soon as you make the "citizen" the important category for rights and privileges, you already have given the state the final word.
The policy is here. I am also an Amtrak commuter. They are less formal about this process than the airlines are, at this point, but the regulation now exists and I am regularly told that enforcement will get stricter.
Yes, they do. It's a new regulation. They aren't enforcing it very strictly yet - my (English) wife didn't bring her passport when we were traveling, and they let us go - but they made it clear that ID was now officially required, and that enforcement would get stricter. The difference with the airlines is that they ask for ID after you board, not before you board.
Because I'm a FUCKING AMERICAN CITIZEN, and I shouldn't have to prove who I am just to peacefully move around the country.
If your rights really derive from your citizenship, then logically you aren't entitled to them until you prove your citizenship (and, therefore, your identity.)Otherwise, you should change that to "Because I'm a FUCK HUMAN BEING with HUMAN RIGHTS." Of course, so are the terrorists.
Conservatism has only been re-written as libertarianism in the past 30 years. Conservatism has often supported the enshrining of what they consider traditional cultural values in legislation, be it the protection of the aristocracy, the establishment of official religions, bans on obscenity or same-sex relations or the wrong drugs, etc. When it has been convenient for conservatives, they historically would invoke the idea of "small government" to forfend against anything that compromised the privileges of, erm, the privileged, but it is only in the past few decades that some people in the conservative movement have taken that idea to heart - and even now, they are in the minority of conservatism.
I'm with you in opposing the teleological fallacy - that there is a way that nature is "supposed" to be and that we are "meddling" with it. But I disagree with the assumption that this means we can do no harm.
I can imagine a day in which we decide, as a species, that we need to actively change the climate in order to thrive. Local market forces will not accomplish this. It will require "socialistic" forces. Whether climate change is anthrogenic or not is irrelevant: if the current, unregulated course of action creates huge human costs in the far term, then it is reasonable to take steps in the short term.
I do wish Apple would open up the iPhone, but I don't think there's a legal hammer involved if you put unauthorized software on your iPhone, is there? I thought it was just the voiding of the warranty (and non-distribution via iTunes.)
Until I read the reports of the Clinton supporters in Appalachia, I would have said that anyone who would refuse to vote for a black man would have refused to vote for a Democrat, anyway. The primary campaign has been a learning experience: I now see how much of the Democratic base is actually populist, particularly the "white welfare" demographic that wants government handouts coupled with nationalist sentiments and conservative social values. Clinton and Huckabee are uncomfortably close to each other. The Clinton record on gay rights should have been a give-away.
The fact that jobs will go to where it is cheaper to do business is exactly why almost everything we buy is made in China. A "race to the bottom" is not necessarily an ideal economic system.
The answer may be inter-state tariffs. Yes, I know: constitution and all that.
More importantly, he's a symbol of Hindu national resistance to Mogul dominance - and is thus a charged symbol of the tensions between Muslims and Hindu practitioners in India.
It might be somewhat analogous to someone posting an image defacing Abraham Lincoln (or Robert E. Lee) in the US, with a religious element to that gesture. (Of course, it would be protected as free speech here, but it could trigger a fight.)