In various places around the world, there are groups of people that call themselves "polar bear." As far as I know, the tradition mainly goes back to Scandinavian immigrants to the United States; whether they brought the tradition over with them from their homelands or just made it up on the spot to mess with their new neighbors remains a mystery.
The mission of these "polar bear clubs" is to go swimming in icy rivers and lakes, usually on New Year's Day. For example, on New Year's Day 2004 some 600 members of the Boulder Polar Bear Club dove into Boulder Reservoir, the temperature of which was a life-threatening 34 degrees at the time.
Why? "Because it's fun."
The moral of this little parable is that some people are just fucking insane, and no amount of talking is going to cure them of it.
Maybe because it takes time and trouble to set up a sales channel, and there are fewer potential customers in Canada than there are in Florida?
No shit: There are blogs that get more readers in a month than the entire labor-force population of Canada. No kidding, honest-to-God blogs.
I've got nothing personal against Canada. It's just that it kinda makes me scratch my head when I hear somebody ask, "Why is X available in America but not available in Canada?" That's a big "duh," as far as I'm concerned. Itty bitty market.
You know, you're right. I didn't think about that when I posted, but yes, if buzz develops about an unannounced product and that buzz later turns out to be false, it's damaging. That's not really what I meant by "publicity," of course, but you're absolutely right.
To see this, you really need look any farther than the iPod mini price, or the "home on iPod" feature of Panther.
I wasn't trying to imply anything, as I specifically said. I just think that when people get news about something, they need to know a little bit about the source from which they got it. I had information, so I shared it so people could decide for themselves whether to trust the source to be truthful and unbiased.
There have been so many lies spread in the past 30 years under the banner of "I was there" that it should come as no surprise to you whatsoever that I don't believe a single word of this.
There are many reasons why I think you're lying, but I'm just going to pick one. You said that "Rumsfeld and Bush...need to be arrested...and sentenced to a couple of decades in Leavenworth Military Prison."
There is no such thing as "Leavenworth Military Prison." There is a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, but it's not a military prison. There is also the United States Disciplinary Barracks on the grounds of Fort Leavenworth, but it's not called "Leavenworth Military Prison."
Also, as civilians, neither the President or SECDEF would ever be sent to USDB under any circumstances.
A veteran, as you claim to be, would know these facts.
So I'm sorry to say that I think you're just lying. I understand why you're lying, and I know that you've got what you consider to be the best of intentions, but that doesn't make it okay for you to lie.
We want to share it with the world, on the (IMHO) small condition that the world is willing to share what additions they do to it with us. Is that really so bad?
Let me make this perfectly clear right up front: No, that's not bad at all. There's nothing bad about it.
What is, in my opinion, incredibly bad is the deceitful, misleading way that some people have chosen to go about "sharing" their work.
If you stood up and said, "I'm releasing this for the public to use, but not in any way they see fit. I'm releasing it only for use in very specific ways," that would be fine. That's honest and forthright.
But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that some people are standing up and saying, "Take this, it's free," when that's not true at all. They even go so far as to write lengthy manifestos describing lists of things they call "freedoms," when that word doesn't even begin to apply.
It's not the fact that some people choose to share their work in a very limited and narrow way that bothers me; it's a free country, so you can publish your work under any terms you like. What scares me is the Orwellian twisting of language that's happening where "free" means "draconially restricted" and "open" means "do what we say." Seriously, it's scary.
What could have possibly made you type that Seymour Hersch was just "blowing stuff out of proportion" about Abu Ghraib, a major scandal which has disgusted the entire world?
Well, you kinda hit the nail right on the head. Abu Ghraib wasn't a major scandal. It was a crime, definitely, and people needed to be punished for it. But it wasn't a major scandal. And the fact that the "entire world," to borrow your laughably inaccurate phrase, became fixated on it for a while is evidence that it was, indeed, blown out of proportion.
Now you're the one that's making stuff up
I'm sorry you feel the need to come to that conclusion. That's disappointing.
guys who get their hands dirty and their feet wet and don't boot lick whoever happens to be in authority
And who never let the inconvenient details of the truth stand in the way of advancing a political agenda. Bravo.
Hersch was sooo lying about My Lai.
A lie of omission, yes. He lied by reporting that a bad thing happened in My Lai without putting it in context. The result? Kids are learning about My Lai in history classes, but they're not learning about Hue. Only part of the story is widely known.
Fisk was sooo lying about how Iraq would turn into a quagmire.
Okay, let's go over the basics here. Statements can either be fact or opinion. When you state an opinion, especially one that makes a conjecture about future events, you can't be accused of lying. Lying means to say something you know not to be true, or in the case of lying by omission to willfully leave out relevant facts. See? Fact versus opinion.
So Robert Fisk's opinion that the Iraq invasion would turn into a quagmire was obviously not a lie. It was one of the biggest public humiliations of his career, but it was not a lie.
Saying that he found a piece of a US missile with a serial number on it, however, was just a lie. An embarrassing, shameful lie.
I suggest we speak again on this subject in a few years when all the horror stories come out about the Iraq occupation. They always do.
So...wait. Your anger comes entirely from your assumption that things are happening that you're not hearing about.
That explains a great deal, friend.
Or do you think Vietnam was all sweetness and light?
No, I think it was terrible. I also think that it was necessary. As many as a million Vietnamese civilians were murdered in cold blood in the purges following the fall of Saigon, and tens of millions lived and died under the most horrible oppression imaginable in the years that followed. Even now, ideas like personal liberty, civil rights or even property are simply unknown in Vietnam It's a shattered, desolate place filled with people who are, in all but name, slaves to their totalitarian regime.
Because we let it happen.
See, here's the thing: War, as it has been said, is a terrible thing. But it is not always the worst possible thing. Damning millions to a life without freedom or liberty is worse than waging war against those who wish to do the enslaving.
Now let me ask you: Which do you think is worse? What those four American reservists did at Abu Ghraib, or what the members of Saddam's Mukhabarat did there? What's that? You're not aware of what the Mukhabarat did there? Golly. Could that be because the people who have the responsibility for telling the stories -- the Hersches, the Fisks --have failed you?
Okay. When you put it that way, it does make sense. But it's dumb, in that case, to talk about it in terms of "freedoms." Freedoms can't be granted by one person to another. That's not how they work. Freedoms are inherent, or granted to us by our Creator, whichever you prefer to believe. It doesn't really matter which you pick, because they both amount to the same thing.
What would be better would be for the people making the argument to talk in terms of licenses granted. But then, when you put it in those terms, the whole discussion becomes redundant.
I just don't understand why the "we want to give away our work" people don't just stop intellectually masturbating and simply put their work into the public domain. If that's their goal, that's the right way to carry it out. But they don't choose to do that, which means one of two things: Either they're not as smart as they seem to be (no), or their goal is not to share their work. Their goal, it seems to me, has more to do with bringing down the tradition of property than it has with sharing their work. But they know that just standing up and saying "we want to abolish property" wouldn't fly, so they try to sugar-coat their message in words like "freedom" which are practically Orwellian in their applications.
He didn't take what wasn't his, they gave it to him.
No. First of all, he wasn't a member of the developer program, so he didn't receive a copy from Apple. Second, it wasn't his to give away, no matter how it got it, and he knew it. Third, saying that he's somehow totally innocent and that somebody else is to blame doesn't move the focal point of the discussion; it just expands it to include more wrongdoers.
Not realising that you can face charges for passing out for free software that Apple was also passing out for free.
Apple wasn't passing it out for free. In order to get it, you had to be a registered developer, which carries an annual fee. Saying that Apple was handing it out for free is like saying that Newsweek just hands out their magazines to people for free, ignoring the fact that the people who get them "for free" paid a subscription fee up front.
Hopefully, charges will be dropped now that he said he's sorry and won't do it again.
Not in any world I live in, friend. Hopefully this idiot will be stuck with a very, very painful fine that will be sufficient to dissuade him or anybody who hears his story from trafficking in stolen goods.
You say that as if you think that the identity and location of our representatives in the democratic process ought to be top secret.
No, I say it as if I think that distributing the home addresses of delegates with the intent that those people should be intimidated into giving up their seats at the convention is both illegal and probably not that great for our political process.
trying to put everyone who wanted their voices heard by the delegates behind barbed wire. (or was it razor wire? I forget)
It was neither; it was chain link, which is completely different. And why were barriers necessary? Because of the constant threats of violence against delegates, many of them originating on Indymedia Web sites. See? We've kinda come full circle.
Anyhow, it's worth noting that based on the news reports the worst that happened to any of the delegates was some hurt feelings, surprise at how much they were disliked by a vocal few.
Um. Actually, if you do a LexisNexis search you'll find that there were many instances of violence and intimidation against the homes of GOP delegates around the country. Most of it was low-grade stuff --spray paint on cars, that kind of thing --but there were also a number of death threats involved. So while it's true that we're lucky nobody got actually physically harmed, it's not correct to say that it was just hurt feelings.
How out of touch with reality should such delegates actually be?
I'm sorry, but "You suck, I hate you" is not reality. It's just vitriol. And the more of it we keep out of our politics, the better for everybody on both sides of the aisle.
If you make it extremely difficult for people to get their voices heard
Who what? I'm sorry, I thought for a second there that we were having a totally unmediated discussion on a freely accessible Internet forum that can be read or commented on by anybody anywhere in the country and in most of the world. (Stupid China and Iran.)
Friend, it's easier today to participate in the public debate than it's ever been in the history of the world. I think your problem -- if you'll excuse me for getting personal--is that you think waving a "Bush = Hitler" sign is a contribution, and you're dismayed by the sheer number of people don't want to pay attention to you when you do it.
Want to participate? Participate! Want to comment on the government? Go ahead. Want to comment to the government? Call 202-456-1414, any time day or night. Seriously. Try it sometime.
Want to yell and scream, be profane or obscene, or commit acts of violence? Go do it in the middle of the woods somewhere or something, because America isn't interested.
In other words, friend, use your inside voice if you want to be heard.
3 million vietnamese were killed in the war vs a mere 60000 US Troops
You do know that the Vietnam War was a civil war, right? Vietnamese communists were fighting Vietnamese nationalists, with, relatively speaking, a small commitment of US troops on the side. While we will never know exactly how many Vietnamese died in the war, best estimates say that about 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 1.5 million South Vietnamese civilians died. They were, politically speaking, "on our side." And of those Vietnamese deaths, fully half occurred between 1960 and 1965, before the United States even got involved.
So comparing the total number of Vietnamese, both communist and nationalist, who died to the total number of American soldiers who died is kind of meaningless.
Speaking of statistics, do you want a concrete example of how the story of My Lai was blown out of proportion? Nobody knows exactly how many civilians died at My Lai, but the number is universally agreed to be in the hundreds. Have you ever heard of an event called the Hue massacre? The NVA and VC occupied the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. During the occupation, some 2,500 civilians were systematically murdered, most of them Catholics who had taken sanctuary in local churches. In addition to the 2,500 confirmed murdered, another 3,000 or so vanished without a trace and are presumed to have been killed by the NVA.
US soldiers run amok and kill somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 civilians and the story is front-page news. (Rightly so; as I've said, it's a big story.) But the NVA wipes out more than 10 times that many at Hue, and the story is utterly ignored by the press.
And last time I checked -- granted, it's been many, many years --children are not taught by Sesame Street to take things that aren't theirs. I seem to recall that a fair bit of time was spent on the opposite lesson.
Maybe these kids' problem is that they didn't watch enough TV when they were little.
What can they gain? They can put a stop to the leak-like-a-sieve nature of the developer community, for starters. Of course, the community does not really leak like a sieve; the vast majority of developers stick to their NDAs. But because some done, and because really sophisticated technology has been developed to enable piracy on a vast scale, it looks like the developer community leaks like a sieve.
And as for this "bad publicity" thing of which you speak...friend, there is no such thing as bad publicity. As the old saying goes, the only way a company could be damaged in the press is if its CEO is found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
This story has gotten Apple on the front page of newspapers --well, their business sections, anyway --worldwide, and has generated public awareness of the upcoming "Tiger" release, all essentially for free. It's good news for Apple as far as PR is concerned.
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
I'm not really familiar with this whole neo-hippy, communalist, la-la-la, I see pretty colors thing, so maybe I'm missing something really well-understood here. Somebody can explain it to me, I hope.
Nobody has the freedom to run computer software for any purpose. There are lots of purposes that are patently against existing laws. For example, you couldn't run a computer program for the purpose of robbing a bank, or blowing up a 747. You don't have that freedom at all.
Given that this little manifesto seems to start with a fundamental contradiction of standing laws...isn't it kind of wrong-headed?
Again, I'm sure I'm just not down with the street lingo, as it were, so surely somebody will come along and explain why I'm misunderstanding the point. At which time my critique will shift from "these rules are fundamentally stupid" to "these rules are poorly written."
I don't want to get accused of shooting the messenger here, but it's worth noting that the author of "Drunken Blog" has, in the recent past, been caught posting lengthy tracts of stuff that just isn't true.
He wrote a lengthy rant about interface scalability in Mac OS X, bemoaning the fact that Tiger doesn't do Thing X that he thinks is really incredibly important, and explaining why everybody at Apple who disagrees with him is obviously an idiot.
Then along came the commenters who, probably by bending their NDAs, explained to him that Tiger does, in fact, do X, and that the author doesn't have the first idea what he's talking about.
Is this relevant to the subject at hand? Almost certainly not. But I'm a big believer in context, so I felt like maybe somebody would appreciate it if I shared what I knew of it.
If the political process has been subverted to take power away from the people and hand it to an oligarchy, isn't the process worth disrupting?
That kind of begs the question. The political process has obviously not been subverted. So the whole "if-then" thing is just so much noise.
If you want to talk about it in the subjunctive, go for it. "If the system had been subverted, would violence be justified?" That's a good question. I don't find it an interesting one, myself, because I'm more preoccupied with the indicative than the subjunctive, but that's just me.
How serious is it then to tell people to bring a brick?
Boy, that's a doozy. Are you seriously asking whether it's okay to incite violence against police officers who are there only to keep you doing violence?
Yes, police officers are empowered to defend themselves, property and the public good. They are empowered to use force to do that, even to the point of using deadly force when it's called for. That's how our society works. We make the laws, and then we license certain people to enforce those laws.
You, on the other hand, are not permitted, legally or morally, to throw a brick at a cop. It's just not okay.
The fact that you see these things as being somehow comparable troubles me deeply.
Especially given the pervasive stories
Why are those stories pervasive? Because people from group #2 (see above) use word-of-mouth and, increasingly, Web sites like Indymedia to perpetuate them in order to manipulate people from group #1 to do violence on their behalf.
When violence is used to take away your freedoms and your rights, is it then wrong to defend yourself violently?
Again with begging the question. That obviously has not happened, so a response to it isn't up for discussion at this time.
If something like that ever does happen, let's reconvene on the subject, okay?
These, IMO, are the hard questions worth asking.
If you wanted to talk about them in the abstract, in a classroom or a coffee shop, that'd be no problem at all. But the fact is that you're advocating here, not discussing. You're arguing that since X, therefore Y, when X is not, in fact, true. And what elevates it from just your being a dumbass to the level of actual harm is that Y involves a shitload of violence against innocent people and both public and private property.
we may as well hand over our freedom to the oligarchists right now
Do you even know what "oilgarchy" means? Hint: In a democratic system, it is not an accurate statement to refer to the people we elect as oligarchs, and it is not an accurate statement to refer to a system whereby 120 million people who show up on election day get to make the decisions as an oligarchy.
What is much more likely is that Hersch got the number wrong and pretty much everything else right
The "it was just a typo" argument doesn't hold water. To this day, Hersch insists that he got the number right, that the government has some super-secret stash of AC-130 gunships that they're keeping under wraps just to discredit him.
Get him talking about it sometime. You'll be surprised how quickly he spins off into tin-foil-hat land.
how many gook women and children
What could possibly make you type something like that?
getting serial numbers off fragments of cruise missiles
Actually, that's a perfect example of Fisk's just making stuff up. He famously (or rather infamously) went to press with a firsthand account of an American missile strike on an Iraqi suk. He published what he said was a serial number from a piece of the missile...only that serial number didn't correspond to any piece of American ordinance ever made. Not only was the number not right, it wasn't even in the right format. It had too many digits.
But that didn't stop Fisk from insisting that the Americans did it, and getting his moment in the sun.
A few days later, it was determined from actual weapon fragments that what struck the suk was an Iraqi al-Hussein surface-to-surface missile that went out of control and hit the wrong target.
Fisk's retraction, somehow, never made it into the paper.
I understand your desire to rush to the defense of people whom you admire, I really do. But you evidently don't have the whole story here. That's nothing to be ashamed of or anything; it's not like the papers have gone out of their way to make sure you're informed. If I didn't know so well how journalism works, I'd accuse reporters and editors of trying to cover up their own mistakes. But that's not it at all. It's just simple incompetence, that's all.
Well, except in cases like Fisk and Hersch, of course. Those guys are just plain liars.
You have an interesting understanding of the word "facts."
I've always said that the obvious slant found in most newspaper articles should be attributed not to any systematic imposition of bias but simply to the fact that most newspaper and wire service reporters couldn't write themselves out of a paper bag if you gave them a really sharp pencil.
If you're a lousy writer, but your job is to design jet engines or something, that's fine. But if your job is to write and you're a lousy writer, we have a problem.
But whichever it is, here's a friendly tip for you: Words like "claims" and "denounced" and "finally" and "repel" and "invaders" don't belong in a story that runs under the headline "nothing but the facts."
So your argument is that a name that sounds to most people like baby-talk is okay because that name comes from a language that, at last estimate, is spoken by fewer than 2,000 people?
I'm gonna call "bullshit" on you right there. Nothing personal. I just think you're a little bit full of crap.
I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that that stuff happens in every forum. It's certainly true that some fora are carefully constructed echo chambers. While Charles Johnson is a great guy, personally, the character of his Web site has turned it into a place that's very hostile to discussion. And Jeralyn Merritt actively seeks out and removes dissenting opinions from her site, saying with pride that she's only interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree with her.
So you've got some cases where sites sort of become echo chambers despite their operators' intent, and some cases where they are coldly and deliberately turned into echo chambers through judicious application of the delete key.
But it's not true that that's ubiquitous.
Ironically, you know where the best discussions are happening right now? Politically conservative sites. During the election cycle, politically liberal sites slowly devolved into a "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" mindset, ironically squeezing out anybody who even remotely disagreed with them. A lot of conservative sites, on the other hand, seem to have a "hey, let's talk this over" vibe. Which is exactly the opposite of what we're all told to expect.
That might be the original intent, but somewhere along the way it became a facility whereby troublemakers coordinate their efforts to disrupt the political process both in this country and abroad.
Surely we remember the little issue of GOP delegates' home addresses being disseminated via Indymedia Web sites?
Bottom line: There are basically two groups that have taken over Indymedia. On the one hand, you have the children who don't know right from wrong. On the other hand, you have the malicious ones who seek to manipulate the first group into doing their bidding. They're the ones who tell kids to bring a brick to a so-called "peace march."
Indymedia has become a powerful force for the incitement of violence, original intent or no.
(It kinda bothered me, incidentally, that you used the word "radical" more than once with a tone that suggested that you don't see anything at all wrong with it. It makes me wonder whether you're in one of those two groups I talked about. If I had to make a guess, I'd pick the first group, but what the heck do I know.)
Wow, fantastic link. I consider myself to be pretty well-informed --or maybe it's better to say that I try really hard to be --and I got a lot of these questions completely wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Your math is a little off, Wes. An uncompressed HDTV signal requires more than 1.6 GB/s to play back in real time.
A) Because its fun.
In various places around the world, there are groups of people that call themselves "polar bear." As far as I know, the tradition mainly goes back to Scandinavian immigrants to the United States; whether they brought the tradition over with them from their homelands or just made it up on the spot to mess with their new neighbors remains a mystery.
The mission of these "polar bear clubs" is to go swimming in icy rivers and lakes, usually on New Year's Day. For example, on New Year's Day 2004 some 600 members of the Boulder Polar Bear Club dove into Boulder Reservoir, the temperature of which was a life-threatening 34 degrees at the time.
Why? "Because it's fun."
The moral of this little parable is that some people are just fucking insane, and no amount of talking is going to cure them of it.
Maybe because it takes time and trouble to set up a sales channel, and there are fewer potential customers in Canada than there are in Florida?
No shit: There are blogs that get more readers in a month than the entire labor-force population of Canada. No kidding, honest-to-God blogs.
I've got nothing personal against Canada. It's just that it kinda makes me scratch my head when I hear somebody ask, "Why is X available in America but not available in Canada?" That's a big "duh," as far as I'm concerned. Itty bitty market.
this incident nevertheless serves to increase my distaste with for-profit information scarcity
Anybody who would string that hilarious sentence together is certainly not in Apple's target demographic.
I haven't paid for a mac in five years
See what I mean?
Net loss to Apple: zero.
You know, you're right. I didn't think about that when I posted, but yes, if buzz develops about an unannounced product and that buzz later turns out to be false, it's damaging. That's not really what I meant by "publicity," of course, but you're absolutely right.
To see this, you really need look any farther than the iPod mini price, or the "home on iPod" feature of Panther.
Good point.
I wasn't trying to imply anything, as I specifically said. I just think that when people get news about something, they need to know a little bit about the source from which they got it. I had information, so I shared it so people could decide for themselves whether to trust the source to be truthful and unbiased.
I was THERE! 1967 to 1968.
...need to be arrested ...and sentenced to a couple of decades in Leavenworth Military Prison."
There have been so many lies spread in the past 30 years under the banner of "I was there" that it should come as no surprise to you whatsoever that I don't believe a single word of this.
There are many reasons why I think you're lying, but I'm just going to pick one. You said that "Rumsfeld and Bush
There is no such thing as "Leavenworth Military Prison." There is a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, but it's not a military prison. There is also the United States Disciplinary Barracks on the grounds of Fort Leavenworth, but it's not called "Leavenworth Military Prison."
Also, as civilians, neither the President or SECDEF would ever be sent to USDB under any circumstances.
A veteran, as you claim to be, would know these facts.
So I'm sorry to say that I think you're just lying. I understand why you're lying, and I know that you've got what you consider to be the best of intentions, but that doesn't make it okay for you to lie.
We want to share it with the world, on the (IMHO) small condition that the world is willing to share what additions they do to it with us. Is that really so bad?
Let me make this perfectly clear right up front: No, that's not bad at all. There's nothing bad about it.
What is, in my opinion, incredibly bad is the deceitful, misleading way that some people have chosen to go about "sharing" their work.
If you stood up and said, "I'm releasing this for the public to use, but not in any way they see fit. I'm releasing it only for use in very specific ways," that would be fine. That's honest and forthright.
But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that some people are standing up and saying, "Take this, it's free," when that's not true at all. They even go so far as to write lengthy manifestos describing lists of things they call "freedoms," when that word doesn't even begin to apply.
It's not the fact that some people choose to share their work in a very limited and narrow way that bothers me; it's a free country, so you can publish your work under any terms you like. What scares me is the Orwellian twisting of language that's happening where "free" means "draconially restricted" and "open" means "do what we say." Seriously, it's scary.
What could have possibly made you type that Seymour Hersch was just "blowing stuff out of proportion" about Abu Ghraib, a major scandal which has disgusted the entire world?
...wait. Your anger comes entirely from your assumption that things are happening that you're not hearing about.
Well, you kinda hit the nail right on the head. Abu Ghraib wasn't a major scandal. It was a crime, definitely, and people needed to be punished for it. But it wasn't a major scandal. And the fact that the "entire world," to borrow your laughably inaccurate phrase, became fixated on it for a while is evidence that it was, indeed, blown out of proportion.
Now you're the one that's making stuff up
I'm sorry you feel the need to come to that conclusion. That's disappointing.
guys who get their hands dirty and their feet wet and don't boot lick whoever happens to be in authority
And who never let the inconvenient details of the truth stand in the way of advancing a political agenda. Bravo.
Hersch was sooo lying about My Lai.
A lie of omission, yes. He lied by reporting that a bad thing happened in My Lai without putting it in context. The result? Kids are learning about My Lai in history classes, but they're not learning about Hue. Only part of the story is widely known.
Fisk was sooo lying about how Iraq would turn into a quagmire.
Okay, let's go over the basics here. Statements can either be fact or opinion. When you state an opinion, especially one that makes a conjecture about future events, you can't be accused of lying. Lying means to say something you know not to be true, or in the case of lying by omission to willfully leave out relevant facts. See? Fact versus opinion.
So Robert Fisk's opinion that the Iraq invasion would turn into a quagmire was obviously not a lie. It was one of the biggest public humiliations of his career, but it was not a lie.
Saying that he found a piece of a US missile with a serial number on it, however, was just a lie. An embarrassing, shameful lie.
I suggest we speak again on this subject in a few years when all the horror stories come out about the Iraq occupation. They always do.
So
That explains a great deal, friend.
Or do you think Vietnam was all sweetness and light?
No, I think it was terrible. I also think that it was necessary. As many as a million Vietnamese civilians were murdered in cold blood in the purges following the fall of Saigon, and tens of millions lived and died under the most horrible oppression imaginable in the years that followed. Even now, ideas like personal liberty, civil rights or even property are simply unknown in Vietnam It's a shattered, desolate place filled with people who are, in all but name, slaves to their totalitarian regime.
Because we let it happen.
See, here's the thing: War, as it has been said, is a terrible thing. But it is not always the worst possible thing. Damning millions to a life without freedom or liberty is worse than waging war against those who wish to do the enslaving.
Now let me ask you: Which do you think is worse? What those four American reservists did at Abu Ghraib, or what the members of Saddam's Mukhabarat did there? What's that? You're not aware of what the Mukhabarat did there? Golly. Could that be because the people who have the responsibility for telling the stories -- the Hersches, the Fisks --have failed you?
Okay. When you put it that way, it does make sense. But it's dumb, in that case, to talk about it in terms of "freedoms." Freedoms can't be granted by one person to another. That's not how they work. Freedoms are inherent, or granted to us by our Creator, whichever you prefer to believe. It doesn't really matter which you pick, because they both amount to the same thing.
What would be better would be for the people making the argument to talk in terms of licenses granted. But then, when you put it in those terms, the whole discussion becomes redundant.
I just don't understand why the "we want to give away our work" people don't just stop intellectually masturbating and simply put their work into the public domain. If that's their goal, that's the right way to carry it out. But they don't choose to do that, which means one of two things: Either they're not as smart as they seem to be (no), or their goal is not to share their work. Their goal, it seems to me, has more to do with bringing down the tradition of property than it has with sharing their work. But they know that just standing up and saying "we want to abolish property" wouldn't fly, so they try to sugar-coat their message in words like "freedom" which are practically Orwellian in their applications.
Which is a damn, damn shame.
He didn't take what wasn't his, they gave it to him.
No. First of all, he wasn't a member of the developer program, so he didn't receive a copy from Apple. Second, it wasn't his to give away, no matter how it got it, and he knew it. Third, saying that he's somehow totally innocent and that somebody else is to blame doesn't move the focal point of the discussion; it just expands it to include more wrongdoers.
Not realising that you can face charges for passing out for free software that Apple was also passing out for free.
Apple wasn't passing it out for free. In order to get it, you had to be a registered developer, which carries an annual fee. Saying that Apple was handing it out for free is like saying that Newsweek just hands out their magazines to people for free, ignoring the fact that the people who get them "for free" paid a subscription fee up front.
Hopefully, charges will be dropped now that he said he's sorry and won't do it again.
Not in any world I live in, friend. Hopefully this idiot will be stuck with a very, very painful fine that will be sufficient to dissuade him or anybody who hears his story from trafficking in stolen goods.
Game, set and match to the user "glrotate." Thank you, "Sanity" for providing a live demonstration of his point.
You say that as if you think that the identity and location of our representatives in the democratic process ought to be top secret.
No, I say it as if I think that distributing the home addresses of delegates with the intent that those people should be intimidated into giving up their seats at the convention is both illegal and probably not that great for our political process.
trying to put everyone who wanted their voices heard by the delegates behind barbed wire. (or was it razor wire? I forget)
It was neither; it was chain link, which is completely different. And why were barriers necessary? Because of the constant threats of violence against delegates, many of them originating on Indymedia Web sites. See? We've kinda come full circle.
Anyhow, it's worth noting that based on the news reports the worst that happened to any of the delegates was some hurt feelings, surprise at how much they were disliked by a vocal few.
Um. Actually, if you do a LexisNexis search you'll find that there were many instances of violence and intimidation against the homes of GOP delegates around the country. Most of it was low-grade stuff --spray paint on cars, that kind of thing --but there were also a number of death threats involved. So while it's true that we're lucky nobody got actually physically harmed, it's not correct to say that it was just hurt feelings.
How out of touch with reality should such delegates actually be?
I'm sorry, but "You suck, I hate you" is not reality. It's just vitriol. And the more of it we keep out of our politics, the better for everybody on both sides of the aisle.
If you make it extremely difficult for people to get their voices heard
Who what? I'm sorry, I thought for a second there that we were having a totally unmediated discussion on a freely accessible Internet forum that can be read or commented on by anybody anywhere in the country and in most of the world. (Stupid China and Iran.)
Friend, it's easier today to participate in the public debate than it's ever been in the history of the world. I think your problem -- if you'll excuse me for getting personal--is that you think waving a "Bush = Hitler" sign is a contribution, and you're dismayed by the sheer number of people don't want to pay attention to you when you do it.
Want to participate? Participate! Want to comment on the government? Go ahead. Want to comment to the government? Call 202-456-1414, any time day or night. Seriously. Try it sometime.
Want to yell and scream, be profane or obscene, or commit acts of violence? Go do it in the middle of the woods somewhere or something, because America isn't interested.
In other words, friend, use your inside voice if you want to be heard.
3 million vietnamese were killed in the war vs a mere 60000 US Troops
...who's the troll here?
You do know that the Vietnam War was a civil war, right? Vietnamese communists were fighting Vietnamese nationalists, with, relatively speaking, a small commitment of US troops on the side. While we will never know exactly how many Vietnamese died in the war, best estimates say that about 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 1.5 million South Vietnamese civilians died. They were, politically speaking, "on our side." And of those Vietnamese deaths, fully half occurred between 1960 and 1965, before the United States even got involved.
So comparing the total number of Vietnamese, both communist and nationalist, who died to the total number of American soldiers who died is kind of meaningless.
Speaking of statistics, do you want a concrete example of how the story of My Lai was blown out of proportion? Nobody knows exactly how many civilians died at My Lai, but the number is universally agreed to be in the hundreds. Have you ever heard of an event called the Hue massacre? The NVA and VC occupied the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. During the occupation, some 2,500 civilians were systematically murdered, most of them Catholics who had taken sanctuary in local churches. In addition to the 2,500 confirmed murdered, another 3,000 or so vanished without a trace and are presumed to have been killed by the NVA.
US soldiers run amok and kill somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 civilians and the story is front-page news. (Rightly so; as I've said, it's a big story.) But the NVA wipes out more than 10 times that many at Hue, and the story is utterly ignored by the press.
Now tell me, friend
"To be receive?" Never comment angry.
And last time I checked -- granted, it's been many, many years --children are not taught by Sesame Street to take things that aren't theirs. I seem to recall that a fair bit of time was spent on the opposite lesson.
Maybe these kids' problem is that they didn't watch enough TV when they were little.
What can they gain? They can put a stop to the leak-like-a-sieve nature of the developer community, for starters. Of course, the community does not really leak like a sieve; the vast majority of developers stick to their NDAs. But because some done, and because really sophisticated technology has been developed to enable piracy on a vast scale, it looks like the developer community leaks like a sieve.
...friend, there is no such thing as bad publicity. As the old saying goes, the only way a company could be damaged in the press is if its CEO is found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
And as for this "bad publicity" thing of which you speak
This story has gotten Apple on the front page of newspapers --well, their business sections, anyway --worldwide, and has generated public awareness of the upcoming "Tiger" release, all essentially for free. It's good news for Apple as far as PR is concerned.
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
...isn't it kind of wrong-headed?
I'm not really familiar with this whole neo-hippy, communalist, la-la-la, I see pretty colors thing, so maybe I'm missing something really well-understood here. Somebody can explain it to me, I hope.
Nobody has the freedom to run computer software for any purpose. There are lots of purposes that are patently against existing laws. For example, you couldn't run a computer program for the purpose of robbing a bank, or blowing up a 747. You don't have that freedom at all.
Given that this little manifesto seems to start with a fundamental contradiction of standing laws
Again, I'm sure I'm just not down with the street lingo, as it were, so surely somebody will come along and explain why I'm misunderstanding the point. At which time my critique will shift from "these rules are fundamentally stupid" to "these rules are poorly written."
I don't want to get accused of shooting the messenger here, but it's worth noting that the author of "Drunken Blog" has, in the recent past, been caught posting lengthy tracts of stuff that just isn't true.
He wrote a lengthy rant about interface scalability in Mac OS X, bemoaning the fact that Tiger doesn't do Thing X that he thinks is really incredibly important, and explaining why everybody at Apple who disagrees with him is obviously an idiot.
Then along came the commenters who, probably by bending their NDAs, explained to him that Tiger does, in fact, do X, and that the author doesn't have the first idea what he's talking about.
Is this relevant to the subject at hand? Almost certainly not. But I'm a big believer in context, so I felt like maybe somebody would appreciate it if I shared what I knew of it.
If the political process has been subverted to take power away from the people and hand it to an oligarchy, isn't the process worth disrupting?
That kind of begs the question. The political process has obviously not been subverted. So the whole "if-then" thing is just so much noise.
If you want to talk about it in the subjunctive, go for it. "If the system had been subverted, would violence be justified?" That's a good question. I don't find it an interesting one, myself, because I'm more preoccupied with the indicative than the subjunctive, but that's just me.
How serious is it then to tell people to bring a brick?
Boy, that's a doozy. Are you seriously asking whether it's okay to incite violence against police officers who are there only to keep you doing violence?
Yes, police officers are empowered to defend themselves, property and the public good. They are empowered to use force to do that, even to the point of using deadly force when it's called for. That's how our society works. We make the laws, and then we license certain people to enforce those laws.
You, on the other hand, are not permitted, legally or morally, to throw a brick at a cop. It's just not okay.
The fact that you see these things as being somehow comparable troubles me deeply.
Especially given the pervasive stories
Why are those stories pervasive? Because people from group #2 (see above) use word-of-mouth and, increasingly, Web sites like Indymedia to perpetuate them in order to manipulate people from group #1 to do violence on their behalf.
When violence is used to take away your freedoms and your rights, is it then wrong to defend yourself violently?
Again with begging the question. That obviously has not happened, so a response to it isn't up for discussion at this time.
If something like that ever does happen, let's reconvene on the subject, okay?
These, IMO, are the hard questions worth asking.
If you wanted to talk about them in the abstract, in a classroom or a coffee shop, that'd be no problem at all. But the fact is that you're advocating here, not discussing. You're arguing that since X, therefore Y, when X is not, in fact, true. And what elevates it from just your being a dumbass to the level of actual harm is that Y involves a shitload of violence against innocent people and both public and private property.
we may as well hand over our freedom to the oligarchists right now
Do you even know what "oilgarchy" means? Hint: In a democratic system, it is not an accurate statement to refer to the people we elect as oligarchs, and it is not an accurate statement to refer to a system whereby 120 million people who show up on election day get to make the decisions as an oligarchy.
What is much more likely is that Hersch got the number wrong and pretty much everything else right
...only that serial number didn't correspond to any piece of American ordinance ever made. Not only was the number not right, it wasn't even in the right format. It had too many digits.
The "it was just a typo" argument doesn't hold water. To this day, Hersch insists that he got the number right, that the government has some super-secret stash of AC-130 gunships that they're keeping under wraps just to discredit him.
Get him talking about it sometime. You'll be surprised how quickly he spins off into tin-foil-hat land.
how many gook women and children
What could possibly make you type something like that?
getting serial numbers off fragments of cruise missiles
Actually, that's a perfect example of Fisk's just making stuff up. He famously (or rather infamously) went to press with a firsthand account of an American missile strike on an Iraqi suk. He published what he said was a serial number from a piece of the missile
But that didn't stop Fisk from insisting that the Americans did it, and getting his moment in the sun.
A few days later, it was determined from actual weapon fragments that what struck the suk was an Iraqi al-Hussein surface-to-surface missile that went out of control and hit the wrong target.
Fisk's retraction, somehow, never made it into the paper.
I understand your desire to rush to the defense of people whom you admire, I really do. But you evidently don't have the whole story here. That's nothing to be ashamed of or anything; it's not like the papers have gone out of their way to make sure you're informed. If I didn't know so well how journalism works, I'd accuse reporters and editors of trying to cover up their own mistakes. But that's not it at all. It's just simple incompetence, that's all.
Well, except in cases like Fisk and Hersch, of course. Those guys are just plain liars.
You have an interesting understanding of the word "facts."
I've always said that the obvious slant found in most newspaper articles should be attributed not to any systematic imposition of bias but simply to the fact that most newspaper and wire service reporters couldn't write themselves out of a paper bag if you gave them a really sharp pencil.
If you're a lousy writer, but your job is to design jet engines or something, that's fine. But if your job is to write and you're a lousy writer, we have a problem.
But whichever it is, here's a friendly tip for you: Words like "claims" and "denounced" and "finally" and "repel" and "invaders" don't belong in a story that runs under the headline "nothing but the facts."
So your argument is that a name that sounds to most people like baby-talk is okay because that name comes from a language that, at last estimate, is spoken by fewer than 2,000 people?
I'm gonna call "bullshit" on you right there. Nothing personal. I just think you're a little bit full of crap.
I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that that stuff happens in every forum. It's certainly true that some fora are carefully constructed echo chambers. While Charles Johnson is a great guy, personally, the character of his Web site has turned it into a place that's very hostile to discussion. And Jeralyn Merritt actively seeks out and removes dissenting opinions from her site, saying with pride that she's only interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree with her.
So you've got some cases where sites sort of become echo chambers despite their operators' intent, and some cases where they are coldly and deliberately turned into echo chambers through judicious application of the delete key.
But it's not true that that's ubiquitous.
Ironically, you know where the best discussions are happening right now? Politically conservative sites. During the election cycle, politically liberal sites slowly devolved into a "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" mindset, ironically squeezing out anybody who even remotely disagreed with them. A lot of conservative sites, on the other hand, seem to have a "hey, let's talk this over" vibe. Which is exactly the opposite of what we're all told to expect.
Funny old world, huh?
That might be the original intent, but somewhere along the way it became a facility whereby troublemakers coordinate their efforts to disrupt the political process both in this country and abroad.
Surely we remember the little issue of GOP delegates' home addresses being disseminated via Indymedia Web sites?
Bottom line: There are basically two groups that have taken over Indymedia. On the one hand, you have the children who don't know right from wrong. On the other hand, you have the malicious ones who seek to manipulate the first group into doing their bidding. They're the ones who tell kids to bring a brick to a so-called "peace march."
Indymedia has become a powerful force for the incitement of violence, original intent or no.
(It kinda bothered me, incidentally, that you used the word "radical" more than once with a tone that suggested that you don't see anything at all wrong with it. It makes me wonder whether you're in one of those two groups I talked about. If I had to make a guess, I'd pick the first group, but what the heck do I know.)
Wow, fantastic link. I consider myself to be pretty well-informed --or maybe it's better to say that I try really hard to be --and I got a lot of these questions completely wrong.
Fantastic link. Just great.