Even though I'm in no way a libertarian (I feel their beliefs would end up with a return to feudalism)
Exactly.
Pure Classical Liberalism is pretty much summed up by, We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal (under the law).
Left and right are best defined by the ways in which they oppose this ideal. The left says, "I agree, but the power of the state must be used to promote this equality." *Extreme* leftism has problems such as:
Everyone is equally poor. Some pigs are more equal than others.
The right in any way shape or form has problems such as:
I was born better than you and therefore you should serve me.
The canonical example of the right and why right and left are defined as they are is the pre-revolutionary French Assembly. The representatives of the church, crown and aristocracy sat on the right. The representatives of the people sat on the left.
When Liberalism ( the principle upon which modern western society is premised) was proposed it was, literally, revolutionary.
"Conservative" as a political term was coined to mean "Anti-Liberal" in that sense of Liberal.
It has never changed in meaning.
Pure Liberalism is an unstable equilibrium. It's in a sense like trying to balance a pencil on its point. Maybe you can do it for a moment, but it will fall over given the slightest push.
The difference between Liberalism and a pencil on its point is that pure Liberalism will always fall to the right.
This is the fundamental flaw in Libertarianism/Randroidism and other such childish ideas.
Right wing / conservative politics are by definition driven toward the goal of creating a society where the elite are kept in place by the design of the system and the rest of the people exist for their purposes.
We're not serfs laboring on farms, so *neo*-feudalism is a better term in my opinion. Close enough though and it's why what you're saying isn't just a "feeling", it's the way things naturally will always be without active intervention to prevent it from happening.
All you have to do is look at how things have always been and how they've always gone if they ever moved away from that position.
Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes.
This ^
Learning mathematics will absolutely develop abstract thinking and critical thinking. It really goes into overdrive at the college level...especially studying mathematics as opposed to taking college level mathematics courses. Even the "real" calculus courses...that the physicists and engineers and such take alongside people studying math are mostly how to do calculations rather than how to do abstract reasoning. Note, this is in no way intended as a slight against physicists and engineers. They learn how to work with more advanced mathematics that most mathematicians don't even learn about until later in their education. I'm just talking the basic undergrad calc series excluding business calc because that's even more dumbed down.
Programming develops those muscles but with a built in reward system which is much more visceral and more easily achievable at earlier stages.
Proving that sqrt(2) is irrational requires abstract reasoning, but it's easy to do with high school level mathematics, however while I thought it was totally bitchin' I understand most people would probably slog through it without giving a shit. Seeing things displayed in vivid color on the magic box due to one's own actions and growing understanding, I believe, would induce a wow factor in a much wider range of people and is achievable with much less "boring" prep work.
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
So you'd prefer insurance company death panels doing it for a profit?
That's why we pay so much more per capita for less health care.
Well, there's always the holocaust. That was Christians killing 10 million in the name of Christianity plus the casualties of war and that was only 65 years ago.
The creationists and extremists are all Protestant sects
Well, plus that whole Nazi thing they had a while back with that holocaust thing they did following Marten Luther's plan laid out in his lovely treatise.
Plus, you know, Kristallnacht kicking off on his birthday and all.
an honest supporter of free markets will note that the very existence of corporations is a government intervention in the market.
An *honest* supporter of free markets will note that free markets are hypothetical abstractions which can never exist in this reality and can only be approximated with government regulation. This goes all the way back to Adam Smith although you have to read rather than cherry pick in order to understand that...you know, like being honest about it.
Where's the explanation on how the free market is going to fix this problem without the need for burdensome regulation? Anyone? Anyone?
It's impossible for there to be one since *by definition* only regulation can *regulate* a market allowing it to flow freely. A free market and an unregulated market are completely different things.
That they are the same is the big lie that the Repugnicunt/Libertardarian/Teabagging Koch suckers have sold to the useful idiots.
XBOX is the largest console gaming brand there. It's not about a version of the console, it's about the brand. XBOX means entertainment, and its the brand that youth identify with. All their investment in the brand between XBOX and XBOX 360 will make XBOX 720 the market leader. Nintendo has become a niche. and Sony is struggling to keep their house in order.
You're full of shit, shill. Xbox is not the leader it's in third place...out of three. That makes it last, not first.
When it covers up violations and worse, lets the violators go unpunished, this damages their credibility in a significant way.
Which sickeningly enough is exactly the reason Ratzo the kiddie fucking nazi pope gave for why they had to cover up the violations and move perverts around to fresh pools of victims.
That disgusting monster actually said they had to do it because if they didn't the truth of their actions would make them look bad.
but again they can't share what you don't give them
But again as has been pointed out time and time again they absolutely can and absolutely do.
I don't have an account and have never visited the site. My brother does and has told me all the things he's found about me going all the way back to high school and that was a damn long time ago.
Your failure to grasp the simple basic fact which has been presented over and over that *other people* share things about you and facebook uses that is pretty stunning.
Other people including some I haven't seen in 20+ years and would never have any interest in seeing again have allowed them to compile a profile on me in spite of the fact that I've never agreed to their terms of service, never received any value from their unauthorized use of my personal information and would never agree to such.
Feel however you do about whether that is good, bad or indifferent, but for the love of anything decent, pull your head out of your ass and understand the basic concepts under discussion.
I'm not quite clear on how the scam was uncovered, either my father-in-law noticed something or one of his friends thought it odd that there were two of him.
Not to probe too deeply into his personal affairs, but his friend didn't think it was odd that he was asking his friends for money?
In a completely free market, the big fish will eat the small, and the player with the deepest pockets can own it and become a monopoly. With a monopoly, the market forces cease to have meaning.
No no no no no!
What you're describing is an *unregulated market*. An unregulated market is nothing at all like a free market. A true free market is absolutely impossible to exist in this universe. It's something which can be more or less closely approximated depending upon the rules in place to *regulate* the market. This is similar to how a ferris wheel spins freely. It's only capable of doing so due to the support structure *regulating* its motion.
Failing to regulate the market does inevitably lead to one player owning the market and everyone in the world.
It's a very simple, very obvious truth, and it's why the scum at the top have spent so much time spreading propaganda via all of the mainstream media and their ownership of both the Libertarian and the Teabagger parties.
If you are so out of touch with reality that you don't understand this basic obvious fact, then consider this simple example of what can and therefore absolutely will happen in an unregulated market:
I am an established player in the widget market with a great deal of money which is power. You are an upstart with good ideas allowing you to produce better widgets than I make cheaper than I can make them. In a *properly regulated* free market a number of possible scenarios could play out, but you would generally be rewarded for your innovation.
In an *unregulated* market, I would send my goon squad to murder you, your entire family and burn your home and factory to the ground. It's completely irrelevant whether or not the currently existing laws against my actions were put there for the purpose of regulating the market. They serve non-market purposes as well, but they do serve to provide regulation to the market making it a closer approximation of a free market than a completely unregulated market could ever be under any set of circumstances.
This simple example proves absolutely that so called "free market" supporters who claim that we need to remove all market regulations are completely full of shit, that they always have been full of shit and always will be full of shit.
This is not to say that all regulations are necessarily good. It does establish absolutely that anyone arguing for no government regulation is either a fool or trying to own you lock stock and barrel.
Just that if you dare to suggest a small way in which the world could be made a better place, you better be holier then the pope and then you will be slammed for being to holy.
The pope is an ex Nazi who got his job through his aiding and abetting of child rapists, both helping them avoid prosecution and moving them around to give them fresh pools of victims. He also lies bald facedly about condoms for the purpose of increasing poverty and AIDS infection rates.
You would be hard pressed to find a less "holy" person in the world than that monster. That was a *really* bad example.
Nevermind that it regularly backfires (contras, and, oh hey, taliban, to name just a few); moving on, what else?
What else? Well, I'm wondering why you left Iran out of your examples since that's the article topic and we created the situation there by toppling their old government and installing a brutal right wing thug who was then overthrown by the current religious extremists with a totally justified hatred of America.
Great - you've fixed it at the OS level and now you're saving a 64-bit integer into a DB-table that is expecting a 32-bit integer. Your app still explodes.
Not necessarily. MySQL will insert it truncated and return a warning. If you don't check warnings then your app will likely exhibit increasingly erratic behavior for however long it takes you to track down the problem which might not even come to your attention until long after you've made the change.
I much prefer explosions when changes break things.
but I can still see religious organizations doing a lot of good things for a lot of people. For instance, Matthew 25 Ministries. Check out the free food banks in your area. I bet most of them are run by churches.
And how many of those poor people are poor due to Christianity's barbaric policies on birth control and abortion? How much of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is due to the Catholic Church's murderous attitude and bald-faced lies about condoms?
Sorry, sparky, but you don't get to shoot somebody in the face with a shotgun and then claim to be doing good when you toss them a band aid. Christianity promotes poverty and desperation as a business tactic in order to increase the number of poor and desperate so they have something to point to as a need for their "help".
"Science" has been wrong about every single idea it has forwarded, going by the entirety of its history, a track record much worse than religion, if
It is less wrong now than it ever was. That is the design goal and achieved beautifully.
Religion has never been right about anything.
The track records are exactly the opposite of what you claim.
Science helps us little to none in the domains of, say, politics, or the arts
Science doesn't make a better painter, but it does make better paints (up to computers even). Science doesn't make a better guitarist, but it does make better guitars and strings.
You clearly understand little about the world.
The "big three", Christianity, Judaism, and Islam share much of the same defining concepts as "people of the book".
No, they do not. Their gods have little in common apart from claiming to be the same but "better" than the other ones.
The old testament version of the cosmic bully is explicitly *only* the god of racial hebrews. He is jealous of the other gods that he states exist and are the gods of other races. Pretending that it's the same god is idiotic.
However, I would point out that the separation of church and state, which you elegantly and passionately summarize here, is itself not based on "cold hard facts." It's ideology.
It is based entirely on cold hard facts. There has never been and can never be a free society ruled by religion. That is a cold hard fact well known to the person who instituted the wall between church and state in America and his reason for doing so.
Not all ideology is bad. True but as demonstrated clearly irrelevant. The separation of church and state isn't an ideology. It's how irrational ideology was to be kept out of government.
Reminds me of how I saved the day at work one time. Backups were taking forever and killing I/O intensive processes. I redirected those puppies to/dev/null and user complaints stopped. I got a new job not long after. Heard the old place went out of business soon after I left...something about failed DR incident. Rubes.
However, we keep electing right wing socialists who believe the government's job is to ensure that corporations earn the profits they are 'entitled' to.
Wow. Socialism is by definition left wing. Fascism is by definition right wing. Right wing socialism isn't a thing. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else is fascism. The US got dragged hard to the right and into fascism post WW2 by the Republicans who were avid Nazi supporters prior to and often during WW2.
That has nothing to do with socialism. Please at least learn the basic definitions before discussing politics. You'll look a lot less like a fool if you know something about the topic instead of spouting the fascist propaganda the right wing media (which is all mainstream media in the US) has fed you.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I'm in no way a libertarian (I feel their beliefs would end up with a return to feudalism)
Exactly.
Pure Classical Liberalism is pretty much summed up by, We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal (under the law).
Left and right are best defined by the ways in which they oppose this ideal.
The left says, "I agree, but the power of the state must be used to promote this equality."
*Extreme* leftism has problems such as:
Everyone is equally poor.
Some pigs are more equal than others.
The right in any way shape or form has problems such as:
I was born better than you and therefore you should serve me.
The canonical example of the right and why right and left are defined as they are is the pre-revolutionary French Assembly.
The representatives of the church, crown and aristocracy sat on the right. The representatives of the people sat on the left.
When Liberalism ( the principle upon which modern western society is premised) was proposed it was, literally, revolutionary.
"Conservative" as a political term was coined to mean "Anti-Liberal" in that sense of Liberal.
It has never changed in meaning.
Pure Liberalism is an unstable equilibrium. It's in a sense like trying to balance a pencil on its point. Maybe you can do it for a moment, but it will fall over given the slightest push.
The difference between Liberalism and a pencil on its point is that pure Liberalism will always fall to the right.
This is the fundamental flaw in Libertarianism/Randroidism and other such childish ideas.
Right wing / conservative politics are by definition driven toward the goal of creating a society where the elite are kept in place by the design of the system and the rest of the people exist for their purposes.
We're not serfs laboring on farms, so *neo*-feudalism is a better term in my opinion. Close enough though and it's why what you're saying isn't just a "feeling", it's the way things naturally will always be without active intervention to prevent it from happening.
All you have to do is look at how things have always been and how they've always gone if they ever moved away from that position.
Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes.
This ^
Learning mathematics will absolutely develop abstract thinking and critical thinking. It really goes into overdrive at the college level...especially studying mathematics as opposed to taking college level mathematics courses. Even the "real" calculus courses...that the physicists and engineers and such take alongside people studying math are mostly how to do calculations rather than how to do abstract reasoning. Note, this is in no way intended as a slight against physicists and engineers. They learn how to work with more advanced mathematics that most mathematicians don't even learn about until later in their education. I'm just talking the basic undergrad calc series excluding business calc because that's even more dumbed down.
Programming develops those muscles but with a built in reward system which is much more visceral and more easily achievable at earlier stages.
Proving that sqrt(2) is irrational requires abstract reasoning, but it's easy to do with high school level mathematics, however while I thought it was totally bitchin' I understand most people would probably slog through it without giving a shit.
Seeing things displayed in vivid color on the magic box due to one's own actions and growing understanding, I believe, would induce a wow factor in a much wider range of people and is achievable with much less "boring" prep work.
I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of TSA workers end up with cancer that were operating these machines.
At least it's not all bad.
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
So you'd prefer insurance company death panels doing it for a profit?
That's why we pay so much more per capita for less health care.
And I want ZOMG PONIEEEESSS!!!!! the video game. But not some silly kids game. Make it a fully brutal gore soaked slasher.
Well, there's always the holocaust. That was Christians killing 10 million in the name of Christianity plus the casualties of war and that was only 65 years ago.
The creationists and extremists are all Protestant sects
Well, plus that whole Nazi thing they had a while back with that holocaust thing they did following Marten Luther's plan laid out in his lovely treatise.
Plus, you know, Kristallnacht kicking off on his birthday and all.
an honest supporter of free markets will note that the very existence of corporations is a government intervention in the market.
An *honest* supporter of free markets will note that free markets are hypothetical abstractions which can never exist in this reality and can only be approximated with government regulation. This goes all the way back to Adam Smith although you have to read rather than cherry pick in order to understand that...you know, like being honest about it.
Where's the explanation on how the free market is going to fix this problem without the need for burdensome regulation? Anyone? Anyone?
It's impossible for there to be one since *by definition* only regulation can *regulate* a market allowing it to flow freely.
A free market and an unregulated market are completely different things.
That they are the same is the big lie that the Repugnicunt/Libertardarian/Teabagging Koch suckers have sold to the useful idiots.
XBOX is the largest console gaming brand there. It's not about a version of the console, it's about the brand. XBOX means entertainment, and its the brand that youth identify with. All their investment in the brand between XBOX and XBOX 360 will make XBOX 720 the market leader. Nintendo has become a niche. and Sony is struggling to keep their house in order.
You're full of shit, shill.
Xbox is not the leader it's in third place...out of three. That makes it last, not first.
Duh, the one with the goatee is the evil one.
When it covers up violations and worse, lets the violators go unpunished, this damages their credibility in a significant way.
Which sickeningly enough is exactly the reason Ratzo the kiddie fucking nazi pope gave for why they had to cover up the violations and move perverts around to fresh pools of victims.
That disgusting monster actually said they had to do it because if they didn't the truth of their actions would make them look bad.
but again they can't share what you don't give them
But again as has been pointed out time and time again they absolutely can and absolutely do.
I don't have an account and have never visited the site. My brother does and has told me all the things he's found about me going all the way back to high school and that was a damn long time ago.
Your failure to grasp the simple basic fact which has been presented over and over that *other people* share things about you and facebook uses that is pretty stunning.
Other people including some I haven't seen in 20+ years and would never have any interest in seeing again have allowed them to compile a profile on me in spite of the fact that I've never agreed to their terms of service, never received any value from their unauthorized use of my personal information and would never agree to such.
Feel however you do about whether that is good, bad or indifferent, but for the love of anything decent, pull your head out of your ass and understand the basic concepts under discussion.
I'm not quite clear on how the scam was uncovered, either my father-in-law noticed something or one of his friends thought it odd that there were two of him.
Not to probe too deeply into his personal affairs, but his friend didn't think it was odd that he was asking his friends for money?
In a completely free market, the big fish will eat the small, and the player with the deepest pockets can own it and become a monopoly.
With a monopoly, the market forces cease to have meaning.
No no no no no!
What you're describing is an *unregulated market*. An unregulated market is nothing at all like a free market. A true free market is absolutely impossible to exist in this universe. It's something which can be more or less closely approximated depending upon the rules in place to *regulate* the market.
This is similar to how a ferris wheel spins freely. It's only capable of doing so due to the support structure *regulating* its motion.
Failing to regulate the market does inevitably lead to one player owning the market and everyone in the world.
It's a very simple, very obvious truth, and it's why the scum at the top have spent so much time spreading propaganda via all of the mainstream media and their ownership of both the Libertarian and the Teabagger parties.
If you are so out of touch with reality that you don't understand this basic obvious fact, then consider this simple example of what can and therefore absolutely will happen in an unregulated market:
I am an established player in the widget market with a great deal of money which is power.
You are an upstart with good ideas allowing you to produce better widgets than I make cheaper than I can make them.
In a *properly regulated* free market a number of possible scenarios could play out, but you would generally be rewarded for your innovation.
In an *unregulated* market, I would send my goon squad to murder you, your entire family and burn your home and factory to the ground.
It's completely irrelevant whether or not the currently existing laws against my actions were put there for the purpose of regulating the market. They serve non-market purposes as well, but they do serve to provide regulation to the market making it a closer approximation of a free market than a completely unregulated market could ever be under any set of circumstances.
This simple example proves absolutely that so called "free market" supporters who claim that we need to remove all market regulations are completely full of shit, that they always have been full of shit and always will be full of shit.
This is not to say that all regulations are necessarily good.
It does establish absolutely that anyone arguing for no government regulation is either a fool or trying to own you lock stock and barrel.
which included *three* titans lost before it was all over, all on the side the guy who misjumped
Let me guess, he jumped into the battle screaming "LEEROY JENKINS!!!"
Just that if you dare to suggest a small way in which the world could be made a better place, you better be holier then the pope and then you will be slammed for being to holy.
The pope is an ex Nazi who got his job through his aiding and abetting of child rapists, both helping them avoid prosecution and moving them around to give them fresh pools of victims. He also lies bald facedly about condoms for the purpose of increasing poverty and AIDS infection rates.
You would be hard pressed to find a less "holy" person in the world than that monster.
That was a *really* bad example.
Hydras reproduce through both sexual and asexual means, granted it uses the asexual ones far more frequently.
Me too brother, me too. That's why you have two hands and one woman.
Nevermind that it regularly backfires (contras, and, oh hey, taliban, to name just a few); moving on, what else?
What else? Well, I'm wondering why you left Iran out of your examples since that's the article topic and we created the situation there by toppling their old government and installing a brutal right wing thug who was then overthrown by the current religious extremists with a totally justified hatred of America.
Great - you've fixed it at the OS level and now you're saving a 64-bit integer into a DB-table that is expecting a 32-bit integer. Your app still explodes.
Not necessarily. MySQL will insert it truncated and return a warning. If you don't check warnings then your app will likely exhibit increasingly erratic behavior for however long it takes you to track down the problem which might not even come to your attention until long after you've made the change.
I much prefer explosions when changes break things.
Your post is just plain bigoted.
His post is reality based unlike yours.
but I can still see religious organizations doing a lot of good things for a lot of people. For instance, Matthew 25 Ministries. Check out the free food banks in your area. I bet most of them are run by churches.
And how many of those poor people are poor due to Christianity's barbaric policies on birth control and abortion?
How much of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is due to the Catholic Church's murderous attitude and bald-faced lies about condoms?
Sorry, sparky, but you don't get to shoot somebody in the face with a shotgun and then claim to be doing good when you toss them a band aid.
Christianity promotes poverty and desperation as a business tactic in order to increase the number of poor and desperate so they have something to point to as a need for their "help".
Utterly morally bankrupt and disgusting.
"Science" has been wrong about every single idea it has forwarded, going by the entirety of its history, a track record much worse than religion, if
It is less wrong now than it ever was. That is the design goal and achieved beautifully.
Religion has never been right about anything.
The track records are exactly the opposite of what you claim.
Science helps us little to none in the domains of, say, politics, or the arts
Science doesn't make a better painter, but it does make better paints (up to computers even).
Science doesn't make a better guitarist, but it does make better guitars and strings.
You clearly understand little about the world.
The "big three", Christianity, Judaism, and Islam share much of the same defining concepts as "people of the book".
No, they do not. Their gods have little in common apart from claiming to be the same but "better" than the other ones.
The old testament version of the cosmic bully is explicitly *only* the god of racial hebrews. He is jealous of the other gods that he states exist and are the gods of other races.
Pretending that it's the same god is idiotic.
However, I would point out that the separation of church and state, which you elegantly and passionately summarize here, is itself not based on "cold hard facts." It's ideology.
It is based entirely on cold hard facts. There has never been and can never be a free society ruled by religion. That is a cold hard fact well known to the person who instituted the wall between church and state in America and his reason for doing so.
Not all ideology is bad.
True but as demonstrated clearly irrelevant. The separation of church and state isn't an ideology. It's how irrational ideology was to be kept out of government.
But it shut up!
Reminds me of how I saved the day at work one time. Backups were taking forever and killing I/O intensive processes. I redirected those puppies to /dev/null and user complaints stopped.
I got a new job not long after. Heard the old place went out of business soon after I left...something about failed DR incident. Rubes.
However, we keep electing right wing socialists who believe the government's job is to ensure that corporations earn the profits they are 'entitled' to.
Wow.
Socialism is by definition left wing. Fascism is by definition right wing. Right wing socialism isn't a thing.
Socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else is fascism. The US got dragged hard to the right and into fascism post WW2 by the Republicans who were avid Nazi supporters prior to and often during WW2.
That has nothing to do with socialism.
Please at least learn the basic definitions before discussing politics. You'll look a lot less like a fool if you know something about the topic instead of spouting the fascist propaganda the right wing media (which is all mainstream media in the US) has fed you.