It sounds like you are supporting the War on Terror over the (needed) War on Car Deaths.
I'm not supporting the war on terror over anything. I'm not supporting it at all. I'm responding to really, really bad logic. You wrote:
Even if the articles stated quite simply what the statistics are...people would still be afraid of the 'others'.
Here's the problem with what you wrote: you're ignoring cost. Whenever you make a decision you always need to take into account cost and benefit. ALWAYS. You are implying that given statistics on deaths due to cars that's enough to know a war on cars is needed. It's not. And the problem is not something specific to car accidents, it's a fundamental flaw in your methodology. That people die in car accidents is bad, that we should do something about that is not necessarily a given.
The reason for that is simple: every iota of effort we put into stopping car deaths is an iota of effort we aren't putting into something else. I'll make this example really simple. You're a charity with $100,000 to give to a research program. Someone says "Every year 200 young children die from disease x! With $100,000 we could save them!" Do you give it to them? Only if you're an idiot. What you have an obligation to do is say "where else could we put this $100,000?". What if disease y kills 2,000 children per year? Then putting the money into stopping disease x was wrong wasn't it? This is opportunity cost.
The initial logic was this Terrorism isn't likely to kill anyone. Driving to work is a greater threat
More people die from d (driving) than from t (terrorism) so we should stop d, right? Wrong! How much does it cost to fight t vs. d? What if you can stop 3 terrorist attacks for every 1 car accident. Which would give more bang for the buck? I'm not saying this is actually the case, I'm just saying people that policy decisions from people like you and the OP may as well be directives written by drunken monkeys.
I'm not advocating a simple policy because I don't think there is one. Resource allocation decisions are complicated. People that don't see that piss me off, and they should be kept as far away from power as possible.
It wasn't the holocaust that finally justified us going to war, it was the intercepted memo sent to Mexico offering them Texas and the attack on Pearl Harbor
Irrelevant. See above.
When there's a threat towards the nation, THAT is the justification for war.
And you don't think a pan-Eurasiac dictatorship would have been a threat? You're right about why America entered the war, but so what?
1 - The fundamental principle remains: refusal to engage in violence in order to stop violence makes you complicit in that violence.
2 - WW2 presented a long-term security threat to the US that did validate our entry into the war even under the restriction of "national interest".
And the fact that you quote that little speil to me in a thread about pacifism is just ironic. So Sam Clemens says it's bad for country A to attack country B for no good reason. Fair enough. But what about country B that is attacked? Do they have no right to defend themselves? This quote is simply NOT an indictment of all military action, it's incoherent to quote it in defense of pacifism.
Be careful of the phrase "Does it pass the WW2 test", because WW2 started as a war over oil.
This is what happens when politics get in the way of common sense. You're the second person to respond to my WW2 post with some variant of "are you trying to justify what we did in ww2?"
No, I'm not. The Final Solution may have been completely and totally irrelevant to our entrance into WW2. In fact, if we'd entered the war with 0 knowledge about it, it would not change my WW2 test even one iota. The question is just this: if a nation is systematially massaacring people because of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political view, etc, would you oppose military invention on the grounds that "killing is bad?" WW2 just provides the convenient real-life example. Darfur would work just as well, and I'm pissed that we haven't done more there.
Maybe if a war worth fighting comes along again, they'll modify their license.
If that was the statement they wanted to make, they could have made it. They didn't say "this war is bad". They said "war is bad". So I'm responding to what they actually wrote.
Don't make me laugh. The law of the excluded middle has nothing to do with this. Go back to your logic class.
The proposition of pacifism is to NEVER use force. My response is "would you have used NO force in WW2?". I didn't ask "would you have firebombed Dresden". You can have a significant and interesting debate about Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima (to name a few), but none of this has to do with the question at hand - which is not "how much" violence, but "violence at all?"
Not only is this an argument against pacifism, but it's an argument against "fighting fair". The US military's doctrine of overwhelming force isn't just about preservering American lives (and thus political capital). The doctrine is the exact opposite of pacifism: it's the rational result of understanding that once you use violence, the more thoroughly you overwhelm your adversary the less harm will be done in the long run.
Soft-pacifists are the type of people that want America to fight wars nicely. And killing non-combatants is always to be avoided. But once America goes to war, America needs to go to war 100% for the sake not only of America, but those whom America fights. War is not a fight, war is combat. There's a difference. Fighting is consensual. It's what 2 siblings do when they're really pissed off. The results of fighting are submission/dominance. The results of war are life and death. It's the same with home defense. You should never draw a weapon to intimidate or threaten someone. You should draw a weapon to kill someone. If you're not willing to kill, you shoudln't have a gun. If you're not willing to go to war to kill, you shouldn't go to war at all.
There was a great sci-fi short story about this topic, I really wish I could remember the title to reference it here.
The simple fact is that in this world there are certain questions which can only be answered with violence.
I don't know man, I think it's kind of mean to answer a question with violence. I'm not just nit-picking. I agree with your post, but I think it's worth pointing out the reason that pacifism doesn't work: it only takes 1 party to engage in violence. It's hard to have an argument with one person. It's hard to have a "fight" in the ongoing sense of a cycle of retaliations with one person.
But it only takes one person to pick up a gun, and kill another person. Because of the fundamentally unilateral nature of violence, pacifism is inherently flawed. The only way to coerce someone to not engage in violence or to stop engaging in violene is, regrettably, with more violence. This is just a fact. Pacifists don't like that fact (and, in their defense, it's certainly not a nice fact) but no matter how they try not to see the fact, it's still there.
What kind of crazy Americo-Fascist are you? Are you stupid? Insane!? Of course they would. Only evil, white, imperialist men know how to lie. Iranians and North Koreans are gentle, noble savages. They, like Democrats, never lie. They just need love, understanding, and respect. If Americans would stop bombing 1/2 the world's population and coercing the other 1/2 into servitude to their vast capitalist war machine, the world would return to the natural state of idyllic tranquility that existed before the white man came.
"As a pacifist, I sympathize with their goals," says Russ Nelson, president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "People who feel strongly about war will sometimes take actions which they realize are ineffectual, but make it clear that they are not willing to take action which directly supports war."
That pretty much sums it up. A pacifist may ask politely that the Nazis stop roasting Jews, but they would never go so far as to take effectual action.
Just the type of person I want to have my back if it's ever popular to rape and pillage Mormons again. I'm sure they'll be very sorry about the whole thing, though. I'm sure that would be great comfort.
Whenever I hear about some kind of "do no harm" attitude I always want to ask "does it pass the WW2 test?" What I mean is, would you really have preferred to have sat by and watched the Holocaust happen rather than fight? If so, then I consider the concept morally bankrupt.
Some things and some people make sense to "do no harm". Doctors, in general, are supposed to do no harm. And I appreciate that in their capacity as doctors they never should. Still, if a doctor was at home and someone broke into their house to try and rape their daughter, I'd hope the doctor would have no moral compunctions against shooting the intruder first (in their capacity as father) and then offering CPR as appropriate second (in their capacity as doctor).
The point is that pacifism can lead to just as much evil as violence. People who don't see that annoy me to no end. I don't like people doing bad things, and I don't like people who let other people do bad things.
'The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.' - Edmund Burke
That's the real key. Blowing up a store is not as big a deal. They have store everywhere. Put airplanes are part of the symbol of western technological power. We think very little of getting into a big steel container, then soaring through the sky for a few hundred miles, then landing and complaining about leg room. The shock of having that modern invention reduced to rubble (with a few hundred people inside) is what they are going for.
Although I've always wondered why they didn't go for more of a solo sniping attack. The panic and fear created by Malvo during his sniping spree on the I-95 corridor between Richmond and D.C. was unbelievable if you lived in that area (I live in Richmond). Two guys, one rifle, one car. You could keep that going for weeks or months at a time, never knowing when it's going to happen, have a few operating in different cities... that would really shake things up.
I really just don't get how the terrorists operate.
The worst failure to understand statistics is the failure of getting the math but not the context. If you think the goal is "prevent people from dying" you're as stupid as people who want to "eliminate poverty". Neither one is even coherent in a practical sense, let alone a suitable basis for policy decisions.
But hey, it sure sounds good to "fight poverty", and that's what really matters. Logic never stopped Bono! It also sounds good to say "more people die from x than from y, so we should fight x!", but it's equally stupid. How much does it cost - in terms of time, money, and other resources - to prevent x vs. to prevent y, and what are the other costs if we don't? As long as you continue to show a complete and total inability to see the wider decision-making process any knowledge of statistics you may have just makes you dangerous, not informed.
Take a good hard look at what foreign "aid" does to Africa one day, and maybe you'll start to question whether or not it's such a great idea to do chant whatever slogan makes your heart the warmest and fuzziest ( http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spie gel/0,1518,363663,00.html ). The "fight poverty" crowd are all the same. They think that simple solutions like giving money away fix everything, and they can't understand why everyone isn't just "nice" all the time, so they concoct theses theories about vicious and evil capitalist pigs who are so inhuman as to want everyone else to live in abject poverty (which makes no sense, since a capitalist can only be as wealthy as the people he sells too). This is just another example of people who see the world in black and white completely missing the point. If it's not the Christian evangelicals, it's the affirmative-action, PC, "don't hurt anyone's feelings crowd".
God save us from hypocrites and insincere idealists.
Then again, the government should have better priorities than chasing down "terrorists".
You're absolutely right. The leading cause of death in America is dying. Millions of Americans die every year due to being dead. If the government eradicated dying, there would be no more death. We wouldn't have to waste time on "terrorists" or "diseases" either.
If the government really cared about it's citizens (and few governments do), they would work on issues like health care, road safety, and the other dangerous issues that actually kill large numbers of people,
Exactly. And this is why the USA has the worst highway transportation system in the world, the worst health care in the world, no government bodies dedicated to health care (the CDC, NIH, etc. are all front organizations for the CIA). It is also why we all have a constitutionally-protected right to drive without seat belts and ride motorcycles without helmets.
I, for one, think the government should abandon any and all cost/benefit ratio analysis, not to mention any other form of rational decision making, and just find the biggest, baddest, meanest, scariest thing and refuse to address any all issues but that one thing (whatever it may be). While we're at it, civil rights be damned! The government should eradicate all sources of death in its continued fight against dying.
God bless America. That sounds like good government to me. I hope you run for office.
They're kidding, right? $99 to develop a game that only a handful of people might play, and as a student having no income.
Are you retarded? If the student can't afford $99 how the Hell do they have an Xbox360? Let alone a PC? Practically NO student is that poor.
You could get a job though to pay the fee, but when would you have time to code?
What are you smoking? Get a job and not have time to code? At $5/hour you have $100 in 20 hours. That's a week of part-time work. Then quit. Seriously - have you ever been to an American college? In the last 20 years?
I'm no MS fan, but $99 is a trivial amount of money for someone to get a dev kit AND a chance to release the game. If your game is any good at all, you're friends at the very least will like it. They will tell their friends. And guess what? They all have xbox 360s already and your code "just works" on their consoles (assuming it works originally).
I really don't know what your issue is. You have to work really hard to find a downside to this announcement. If MS were going ot steal people's rights to the games, that would be an issue, but it seems that's not the case. So I say: congrats for indie gamers. I want to know where I can download the dev kit and get started.
I don't think I don't get satire. I just like satire to be intelligent. There's noting incisive, wiity, or revealing about taking pot-shots at retards. Take Ann Coulter, for example. I think it would be hard to do a parody of Ann that was actually more than the intellectual equivalent of slaptstick. She's just too ridiculous to make ridiculing her an issue of talent or creativity.
Not that I have anything against good slaptsick, by the way. Physical comedy can be great. But it's not generally trying to be intellectual. Take the intellect out of satire and you have Scary Movie (1-4).
I understand that Colbert is trying to do satire, but we're a long way from "A Modest Proposal" now aren't we?
I agree that anyone who shows up on the Colbert show should know what they're in for. The interviews that made me uncomfortable were the ones Colbert conducted while working for the Daily Show. I feel like Colbert took that same style to his new show.
I may not have seen any O'Reilly, but I've read 2 Ann Coulter books (I read a few pages of her most recent book, and I just couldn't force myself to go on) and I've listedn to hours of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity (because sometimes I just have a craving for talk radio and that's all I can get where I work.) I hate all three of them - to the point where I just listen to nothing rather than deal with them anymore. If O'Reilly is anything like them, then Colbert's just not doing a great job of parodying. I'll check O'Reilly out sometime and then give Colbert another shot though. That seems fair if I'm going to keep criticizing his show.
I'm certainly not fluent in Hungarian, but by the end of my stay I could carry on conversations about anything. If I missed a word I could ask for explanation in Hungarian. I love the language. (Nagyon szeretem a nyelvet. Csak azert nem beszelek/irok magyarul, mert az udvaritlannak tunik.) It's so incredibly different from English, German, and the little I know of Romance Languages.
Thanks for the tips. I knew Vasarhely was familiar. I'm sure I heard of the city while I was in Hungary. I lived in Debrecen, Eger, Szeged (Szoged!), Gyor, Buda, and Sopron. I also visited several other cities while I was there.
As for the Istvan/Steven connection, Esteban doesn't make much sense to me, but some of the other posters have done a good job of explaining the connection.
I do listen to talk radio. Or, I did for a while. I've listened to Sean Hanity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Glen Beck. Of the four, Glen Beck is the only one I can stand to listen to for more than 1 minute without my ears bleeding. And yes, I'm very familiar with the old "turn their mike off and keep talking as though they are awed by my brilliance trick". It's best when Rush cuts people off, and then asks rhetorical questions that you know they would love to answer.
Why would I want to see a "parody" of this? That's like seeing a parody of bad acting. It's bad acting, there's nothing to parody.
Why would I say like Jon Stewart if I didn't watch either show? I haven't seen the Daily Show in a couple of months, but that's because I don't watch much TV at all. I think it's a great TV show. I've only seen Colbert's show once or twice, but he really annoyed me on the Daily Show so seeing his own show once or twice was enough to confirm to me that yes - he's still annoying.
I can't believe I forgot to mention Turo Rudi! What was I thinking? Of course I loved Turo Rudi, but I actually didn't like the plain ones. I liked the ones with lots of nuts in the chocolate shell. I think the flavor was called "natural" or something.
Wow, yeah, thanks. Now I have something else to crave that I can't actually get my hands on!
Man, what is it with reactionaries like you? Do you honestly think the world is divided into "people who like Colbert" and "people who like Bill O'Reilly"? I don't like Colbert's style. End of story. This isn't about his politics. Maybe you only listen to comics you agree with, only listen to lyrics you agree with, etc, only watch films by directors who tell you you're right, and with actors who join the same activist causes you do but that doesn't mean that everybody else is like you. Some people are able to respect and even enjoy people with whom they disagree.
I hear a lot of bad things about Bill O'Reilly, but I don't like him or dislike him for the simple fact that I've never seen his show, I've never read anything he wrote, I have no idea what he says other than that he's on the "conservative" team. Again, you seem to be the one who sees life as "my team vs. their team" or whatever, but I don't. I'm more or less a libertarian, so I agree with a lot of conservatives, but a lot of them (e.g. Ann Coulter) are clearly bat-shit loco. Just because someone is conservative doesn't mean I'll like/respect them, and just because someone is liberal doesn't mean I won't. So calling O'Reilly my hero is ludicrous. I get the opinion I would think he's bat shit loco too, but the fundamental difference between you and I is that A - my respect for people as entertainers/artists has nothing to do with their politics and B - I don't mindlessly support people who are on the same "side" as me.
I've seen Colbert on the Daily Show probably twenty or thirty times. He acts like an ass. You think that's funny. I think it's obnoxious. Of course it's an act, anyone can see he's playing a character, but I don't like the character. So you do. You should have just left it as a matter of taste or personal preference. If the people he's interviewing are all aware that they're about to have whatever it is they are interviewed about mocked and scorned, then I guess they're in for it. But I don't get that impression. Some of them seem to know ahead of time. Most of the rest figure it out when Colbert starts asking his asinine questions, but you can see that some of them obviously thought they were really going to be interviewed about something they care about. I don't think that's funny.
So it comes to this: you cheer on Colbert because he "skewers" people with whom you disagree. You see the entire world in terms of your own damn politics. I feel bad for you. I don't see the world that way. I disagree with John Stewart's politics a lot, but I think he's a genius and he seems to be a pretty honest guy too. You can sit in your self-created dungeon of positive reinforcement and cheer for the guys on your team as long as you want, but don't expect everyone to see the world a single layout of black and white just because you do.
Thanks. If he's a more modern hero that would explain why I never heard of him. I learned mostly (older) historical stuff. Except for 1956. I learned as much as I could about that. Visited the Terror House museum not long after it opened (61. Andrassi Ut) with an old bacsi who remembered the history personally, he gave us the tour. It was very sobering, but I'm glad I could see it through the eyes of someone to whom it was not history.
I really miss it. Especially the kakaos csiga. What I wouldn't give for a fresh, hot kakaos csiga. Or the toltott paprika - that was good too. Or rakott krumpli or paprikas krumpli. Those were my favorite meals, and since you can't get decent kolbasz in the US (that I know of) you can't really make most of the Hungarian food here. Which makes me very sad.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not supporting the war on terror over anything. I'm not supporting it at all. I'm responding to really, really bad logic. You wrote:
Here's the problem with what you wrote: you're ignoring cost. Whenever you make a decision you always need to take into account cost and benefit. ALWAYS. You are implying that given statistics on deaths due to cars that's enough to know a war on cars is needed. It's not. And the problem is not something specific to car accidents, it's a fundamental flaw in your methodology. That people die in car accidents is bad, that we should do something about that is not necessarily a given.
The reason for that is simple: every iota of effort we put into stopping car deaths is an iota of effort we aren't putting into something else. I'll make this example really simple. You're a charity with $100,000 to give to a research program. Someone says "Every year 200 young children die from disease x! With $100,000 we could save them!" Do you give it to them? Only if you're an idiot. What you have an obligation to do is say "where else could we put this $100,000?". What if disease y kills 2,000 children per year? Then putting the money into stopping disease x was wrong wasn't it? This is opportunity cost.
The initial logic was this Terrorism isn't likely to kill anyone. Driving to work is a greater threat
More people die from d (driving) than from t (terrorism) so we should stop d, right? Wrong! How much does it cost to fight t vs. d? What if you can stop 3 terrorist attacks for every 1 car accident. Which would give more bang for the buck? I'm not saying this is actually the case, I'm just saying people that policy decisions from people like you and the OP may as well be directives written by drunken monkeys.
I'm not advocating a simple policy because I don't think there is one. Resource allocation decisions are complicated. People that don't see that piss me off, and they should be kept as far away from power as possible.
-stormin
It wasn't the holocaust that finally justified us going to war, it was the intercepted memo sent to Mexico offering them Texas and the attack on Pearl Harbor
Irrelevant. See above.
When there's a threat towards the nation, THAT is the justification for war.
And you don't think a pan-Eurasiac dictatorship would have been a threat? You're right about why America entered the war, but so what?
1 - The fundamental principle remains: refusal to engage in violence in order to stop violence makes you complicit in that violence.
2 - WW2 presented a long-term security threat to the US that did validate our entry into the war even under the restriction of "national interest".
And the fact that you quote that little speil to me in a thread about pacifism is just ironic. So Sam Clemens says it's bad for country A to attack country B for no good reason. Fair enough. But what about country B that is attacked? Do they have no right to defend themselves? This quote is simply NOT an indictment of all military action, it's incoherent to quote it in defense of pacifism.
-stormin
Be careful of the phrase "Does it pass the WW2 test", because WW2 started as a war over oil.
This is what happens when politics get in the way of common sense. You're the second person to respond to my WW2 post with some variant of "are you trying to justify what we did in ww2?"
No, I'm not. The Final Solution may have been completely and totally irrelevant to our entrance into WW2. In fact, if we'd entered the war with 0 knowledge about it, it would not change my WW2 test even one iota. The question is just this: if a nation is systematially massaacring people because of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political view, etc, would you oppose military invention on the grounds that "killing is bad?" WW2 just provides the convenient real-life example. Darfur would work just as well, and I'm pissed that we haven't done more there.
The fact that WW2 was about oil is irrelevant.
-stormin
Maybe if a war worth fighting comes along again, they'll modify their license.
If that was the statement they wanted to make, they could have made it. They didn't say "this war is bad". They said "war is bad". So I'm responding to what they actually wrote.
-stormin
Ahh, the good old excluded middle.
Don't make me laugh. The law of the excluded middle has nothing to do with this. Go back to your logic class.
The proposition of pacifism is to NEVER use force. My response is "would you have used NO force in WW2?". I didn't ask "would you have firebombed Dresden". You can have a significant and interesting debate about Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima (to name a few), but none of this has to do with the question at hand - which is not "how much" violence, but "violence at all?"
-stormin
Not only is this an argument against pacifism, but it's an argument against "fighting fair". The US military's doctrine of overwhelming force isn't just about preservering American lives (and thus political capital). The doctrine is the exact opposite of pacifism: it's the rational result of understanding that once you use violence, the more thoroughly you overwhelm your adversary the less harm will be done in the long run.
Soft-pacifists are the type of people that want America to fight wars nicely. And killing non-combatants is always to be avoided. But once America goes to war, America needs to go to war 100% for the sake not only of America, but those whom America fights. War is not a fight, war is combat. There's a difference. Fighting is consensual. It's what 2 siblings do when they're really pissed off. The results of fighting are submission/dominance. The results of war are life and death. It's the same with home defense. You should never draw a weapon to intimidate or threaten someone. You should draw a weapon to kill someone. If you're not willing to kill, you shoudln't have a gun. If you're not willing to go to war to kill, you shouldn't go to war at all.
There was a great sci-fi short story about this topic, I really wish I could remember the title to reference it here.
-stormin
The simple fact is that in this world there are certain questions which can only be answered with violence.
I don't know man, I think it's kind of mean to answer a question with violence. I'm not just nit-picking. I agree with your post, but I think it's worth pointing out the reason that pacifism doesn't work: it only takes 1 party to engage in violence. It's hard to have an argument with one person. It's hard to have a "fight" in the ongoing sense of a cycle of retaliations with one person.
But it only takes one person to pick up a gun, and kill another person. Because of the fundamentally unilateral nature of violence, pacifism is inherently flawed. The only way to coerce someone to not engage in violence or to stop engaging in violene is, regrettably, with more violence. This is just a fact. Pacifists don't like that fact (and, in their defense, it's certainly not a nice fact) but no matter how they try not to see the fact, it's still there.
-stormin
Yeah, but it's a stupid political statement. Just because you know it will never be put into practice doesn't make it smart.
"I hereby dictate that this program be only used to make the happy monkeys flying out of my butt distribute cash to all the downtrodden of the world."
How's that for a political statement?
-stormin
What kind of crazy Americo-Fascist are you? Are you stupid? Insane!? Of course they would. Only evil, white, imperialist men know how to lie. Iranians and North Koreans are gentle, noble savages. They, like Democrats, never lie. They just need love, understanding, and respect. If Americans would stop bombing 1/2 the world's population and coercing the other 1/2 into servitude to their vast capitalist war machine, the world would return to the natural state of idyllic tranquility that existed before the white man came.
Everyone knows that.
-stormin
"As a pacifist, I sympathize with their goals," says Russ Nelson, president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "People who feel strongly about war will sometimes take actions which they realize are ineffectual, but make it clear that they are not willing to take action which directly supports war."
That pretty much sums it up. A pacifist may ask politely that the Nazis stop roasting Jews, but they would never go so far as to take effectual action.
Just the type of person I want to have my back if it's ever popular to rape and pillage Mormons again. I'm sure they'll be very sorry about the whole thing, though. I'm sure that would be great comfort.
-stormin
I agree, though for slightly different reasons.
Whenever I hear about some kind of "do no harm" attitude I always want to ask "does it pass the WW2 test?" What I mean is, would you really have preferred to have sat by and watched the Holocaust happen rather than fight? If so, then I consider the concept morally bankrupt.
Some things and some people make sense to "do no harm". Doctors, in general, are supposed to do no harm. And I appreciate that in their capacity as doctors they never should. Still, if a doctor was at home and someone broke into their house to try and rape their daughter, I'd hope the doctor would have no moral compunctions against shooting the intruder first (in their capacity as father) and then offering CPR as appropriate second (in their capacity as doctor).
The point is that pacifism can lead to just as much evil as violence. People who don't see that annoy me to no end. I don't like people doing bad things, and I don't like people who let other people do bad things.
'The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.' - Edmund Burke
-stormin
also more dramatic
That's the real key. Blowing up a store is not as big a deal. They have store everywhere. Put airplanes are part of the symbol of western technological power. We think very little of getting into a big steel container, then soaring through the sky for a few hundred miles, then landing and complaining about leg room. The shock of having that modern invention reduced to rubble (with a few hundred people inside) is what they are going for.
Although I've always wondered why they didn't go for more of a solo sniping attack. The panic and fear created by Malvo during his sniping spree on the I-95 corridor between Richmond and D.C. was unbelievable if you lived in that area (I live in Richmond). Two guys, one rifle, one car. You could keep that going for weeks or months at a time, never knowing when it's going to happen, have a few operating in different cities... that would really shake things up.
I really just don't get how the terrorists operate.
-stormin
Seriously.
The worst failure to understand statistics is the failure of getting the math but not the context. If you think the goal is "prevent people from dying" you're as stupid as people who want to "eliminate poverty". Neither one is even coherent in a practical sense, let alone a suitable basis for policy decisions.
e gel/0,1518,363663,00.html ). The "fight poverty" crowd are all the same. They think that simple solutions like giving money away fix everything, and they can't understand why everyone isn't just "nice" all the time, so they concoct theses theories about vicious and evil capitalist pigs who are so inhuman as to want everyone else to live in abject poverty (which makes no sense, since a capitalist can only be as wealthy as the people he sells too). This is just another example of people who see the world in black and white completely missing the point. If it's not the Christian evangelicals, it's the affirmative-action, PC, "don't hurt anyone's feelings crowd".
But hey, it sure sounds good to "fight poverty", and that's what really matters. Logic never stopped Bono! It also sounds good to say "more people die from x than from y, so we should fight x!", but it's equally stupid. How much does it cost - in terms of time, money, and other resources - to prevent x vs. to prevent y, and what are the other costs if we don't? As long as you continue to show a complete and total inability to see the wider decision-making process any knowledge of statistics you may have just makes you dangerous, not informed.
Take a good hard look at what foreign "aid" does to Africa one day, and maybe you'll start to question whether or not it's such a great idea to do chant whatever slogan makes your heart the warmest and fuzziest ( http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spi
God save us from hypocrites and insincere idealists.
-stormin
Then again, the government should have better priorities than chasing down "terrorists".
You're absolutely right. The leading cause of death in America is dying. Millions of Americans die every year due to being dead. If the government eradicated dying, there would be no more death. We wouldn't have to waste time on "terrorists" or "diseases" either.
If the government really cared about it's citizens (and few governments do), they would work on issues like health care, road safety, and the other dangerous issues that actually kill large numbers of people,
Exactly. And this is why the USA has the worst highway transportation system in the world, the worst health care in the world, no government bodies dedicated to health care (the CDC, NIH, etc. are all front organizations for the CIA). It is also why we all have a constitutionally-protected right to drive without seat belts and ride motorcycles without helmets.
I, for one, think the government should abandon any and all cost/benefit ratio analysis, not to mention any other form of rational decision making, and just find the biggest, baddest, meanest, scariest thing and refuse to address any all issues but that one thing (whatever it may be). While we're at it, civil rights be damned! The government should eradicate all sources of death in its continued fight against dying.
God bless America. That sounds like good government to me. I hope you run for office.
-stormin
They're kidding, right? $99 to develop a game that only a handful of people might play, and as a student having no income.
Are you retarded? If the student can't afford $99 how the Hell do they have an Xbox360? Let alone a PC? Practically NO student is that poor.
You could get a job though to pay the fee, but when would you have time to code?
What are you smoking? Get a job and not have time to code? At $5/hour you have $100 in 20 hours. That's a week of part-time work. Then quit. Seriously - have you ever been to an American college? In the last 20 years?
I'm no MS fan, but $99 is a trivial amount of money for someone to get a dev kit AND a chance to release the game. If your game is any good at all, you're friends at the very least will like it. They will tell their friends. And guess what? They all have xbox 360s already and your code "just works" on their consoles (assuming it works originally).
I really don't know what your issue is. You have to work really hard to find a downside to this announcement. If MS were going ot steal people's rights to the games, that would be an issue, but it seems that's not the case. So I say: congrats for indie gamers. I want to know where I can download the dev kit and get started.
-stormin
I don't think I don't get satire. I just like satire to be intelligent. There's noting incisive, wiity, or revealing about taking pot-shots at retards. Take Ann Coulter, for example. I think it would be hard to do a parody of Ann that was actually more than the intellectual equivalent of slaptstick. She's just too ridiculous to make ridiculing her an issue of talent or creativity.
Not that I have anything against good slaptsick, by the way. Physical comedy can be great. But it's not generally trying to be intellectual. Take the intellect out of satire and you have Scary Movie (1-4).
I understand that Colbert is trying to do satire, but we're a long way from "A Modest Proposal" now aren't we?
-stormin
I agree that anyone who shows up on the Colbert show should know what they're in for. The interviews that made me uncomfortable were the ones Colbert conducted while working for the Daily Show. I feel like Colbert took that same style to his new show.
I may not have seen any O'Reilly, but I've read 2 Ann Coulter books (I read a few pages of her most recent book, and I just couldn't force myself to go on) and I've listedn to hours of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity (because sometimes I just have a craving for talk radio and that's all I can get where I work.) I hate all three of them - to the point where I just listen to nothing rather than deal with them anymore. If O'Reilly is anything like them, then Colbert's just not doing a great job of parodying. I'll check O'Reilly out sometime and then give Colbert another shot though. That seems fair if I'm going to keep criticizing his show.
-stormin
I'm certainly not fluent in Hungarian, but by the end of my stay I could carry on conversations about anything. If I missed a word I could ask for explanation in Hungarian. I love the language. (Nagyon szeretem a nyelvet. Csak azert nem beszelek/irok magyarul, mert az udvaritlannak tunik.) It's so incredibly different from English, German, and the little I know of Romance Languages.
Thanks for the tips. I knew Vasarhely was familiar. I'm sure I heard of the city while I was in Hungary. I lived in Debrecen, Eger, Szeged (Szoged!), Gyor, Buda, and Sopron. I also visited several other cities while I was there.
As for the Istvan/Steven connection, Esteban doesn't make much sense to me, but some of the other posters have done a good job of explaining the connection.
Szia!
-stormin
I do listen to talk radio. Or, I did for a while. I've listened to Sean Hanity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Glen Beck. Of the four, Glen Beck is the only one I can stand to listen to for more than 1 minute without my ears bleeding. And yes, I'm very familiar with the old "turn their mike off and keep talking as though they are awed by my brilliance trick". It's best when Rush cuts people off, and then asks rhetorical questions that you know they would love to answer.
Why would I want to see a "parody" of this? That's like seeing a parody of bad acting. It's bad acting, there's nothing to parody.
-stormin
Why would I say like Jon Stewart if I didn't watch either show? I haven't seen the Daily Show in a couple of months, but that's because I don't watch much TV at all. I think it's a great TV show. I've only seen Colbert's show once or twice, but he really annoyed me on the Daily Show so seeing his own show once or twice was enough to confirm to me that yes - he's still annoying.
-stormin
I can't believe I forgot to mention Turo Rudi! What was I thinking? Of course I loved Turo Rudi, but I actually didn't like the plain ones. I liked the ones with lots of nuts in the chocolate shell. I think the flavor was called "natural" or something.
Wow, yeah, thanks. Now I have something else to crave that I can't actually get my hands on!
-stormin
Man, what is it with reactionaries like you? Do you honestly think the world is divided into "people who like Colbert" and "people who like Bill O'Reilly"? I don't like Colbert's style. End of story. This isn't about his politics. Maybe you only listen to comics you agree with, only listen to lyrics you agree with, etc, only watch films by directors who tell you you're right, and with actors who join the same activist causes you do but that doesn't mean that everybody else is like you. Some people are able to respect and even enjoy people with whom they disagree.
I hear a lot of bad things about Bill O'Reilly, but I don't like him or dislike him for the simple fact that I've never seen his show, I've never read anything he wrote, I have no idea what he says other than that he's on the "conservative" team. Again, you seem to be the one who sees life as "my team vs. their team" or whatever, but I don't. I'm more or less a libertarian, so I agree with a lot of conservatives, but a lot of them (e.g. Ann Coulter) are clearly bat-shit loco. Just because someone is conservative doesn't mean I'll like/respect them, and just because someone is liberal doesn't mean I won't. So calling O'Reilly my hero is ludicrous. I get the opinion I would think he's bat shit loco too, but the fundamental difference between you and I is that A - my respect for people as entertainers/artists has nothing to do with their politics and B - I don't mindlessly support people who are on the same "side" as me.
I've seen Colbert on the Daily Show probably twenty or thirty times. He acts like an ass. You think that's funny. I think it's obnoxious. Of course it's an act, anyone can see he's playing a character, but I don't like the character. So you do. You should have just left it as a matter of taste or personal preference. If the people he's interviewing are all aware that they're about to have whatever it is they are interviewed about mocked and scorned, then I guess they're in for it. But I don't get that impression. Some of them seem to know ahead of time. Most of the rest figure it out when Colbert starts asking his asinine questions, but you can see that some of them obviously thought they were really going to be interviewed about something they care about. I don't think that's funny.
So it comes to this: you cheer on Colbert because he "skewers" people with whom you disagree. You see the entire world in terms of your own damn politics. I feel bad for you. I don't see the world that way. I disagree with John Stewart's politics a lot, but I think he's a genius and he seems to be a pretty honest guy too. You can sit in your self-created dungeon of positive reinforcement and cheer for the guys on your team as long as you want, but don't expect everyone to see the world a single layout of black and white just because you do.
-stormin
Instead you bring politics into it,
Thanks. If he's a more modern hero that would explain why I never heard of him. I learned mostly (older) historical stuff. Except for 1956. I learned as much as I could about that. Visited the Terror House museum not long after it opened (61. Andrassi Ut) with an old bacsi who remembered the history personally, he gave us the tour. It was very sobering, but I'm glad I could see it through the eyes of someone to whom it was not history.
-stormin
I'm not in Hungary. Haven't been since 2002.
I really miss it. Especially the kakaos csiga. What I wouldn't give for a fresh, hot kakaos csiga. Or the toltott paprika - that was good too. Or rakott krumpli or paprikas krumpli. Those were my favorite meals, and since you can't get decent kolbasz in the US (that I know of) you can't really make most of the Hungarian food here. Which makes me very sad.
-stormin