Essentially, the US Govt declared OJ not guilty in one court, and then guilty in the second.
Well, actually the government didn't make any such declaration - if you recall, the government was arguing very strenuously that he was, in fact, guilty. In the criminal case, a jury of his peers determined that he was not guilty according to the standards used to decide guilt in criminal cases, and the government - and the rest of us, for that matter - are bound to respect. Now, in murder cases, the government brings charges on behalf of the dead person - it has to be that way, since they're not around to press charges any more. But that doesn't mean the victims were the only ones harmed by the murder - others who have been harmed, but not criminally victimized, can sue in civil court to recover the damages they have suffered. So the state prosecutes criminally on behalf of the victims, and the families sue on their own behalf, based on the idea that they have been harmed by the actions of the accused - specifically, they were deprived of family members. And double jeopardy doesn't apply the way you might think in such cases - you can be sued for as many times as there are people to bring claims of damage against you, although each person who has been harmed may only sue you once. But if you murder twenty people, you can expect dozens and dozens of lawsuits from their family members, each one claiming you've harmed them.
As well, you can be tried more than once for the same act, if that same act encompasses more than one offense. Suppose I intend to kidnap you and hold you for ransom, but as I grab you off the street, I handle you too roughly, and you die. Even though there's but a single act that I performed, I can be charged with any or all of several offenses - murder, attempted kidnapping, assault and battery, and so forth. And charging me with all of those things, and even trying me seperately for them, doesn't violate double jeopardy. Finally, concurrent or subsequent state and federal prosecutions don't violate double jeopardy - so sez the Supreme Court - on the theory that the federal government and state government are both sovereigns, and both have an interest in prosecution. This is how the federal government was able to prosecute the police in the Rodney King affair, despite the fact that they had been acquitted in state court - A) dual sovereignty, and; B) they were charged in federal court with a different offense arising from the same act, namely depriving King of his civil rights, which is a crime under federal law.
Indeed laws have been passed to define this act that deprives no one of property* as "theft", but in the rational world this is no more "theft of service" than "intellectual property" is property.
Suppose I fly into your town and take a ten mile taxi ride from the airport into downtown wherever, but instead of paying the taxi driver, I jump out and run for it when we arrive. I have deprived him of no physical property, nor do I possess anything of his. Have I done anything wrong? Did I commit a crime? What crime? Make sure you exclude any mention of potential lost revenue in your explanation, and be sure to detail exactly how something of his has had its value diminished.
As someone pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that's simply a result of the differing standards of legal proof in civil versus criminal courts. In terms of the burden of proof, it's much easier to sue someone that it is to prosecute them. If the OJ example offends you, I'm sure you can think of analogues to illustrate the point some other way, though;)
Theft of service? I am not being supplied a service!
Sure you are. Entertaining you and giving you information is a service - you're being entertained and informed by watching pirated television. Really, now - if you weren't being provided with anything of value, why would you bother decoding it?
If you or anyone else doesn't want me to have the signal, DON'T BEAM IT AT ME.
Something makes me doubt you're so cavalier about your own cordless phone conversations.
What a crock of shit that law is.
To borrow your phraseology for a moment, nobody gives a fuck if "ratboy" likes the law or not - that's the law, the law says it's theft, and you're expected to obey that law or face the penalty for disobeying it, your choice. But you don't get to "opt out" merely because it offends your sensibilities about who properly owns the EM spectrum. If you prefer the law should be some other way, you can always try persuading your fellow citizens that you have a better solution - rotsa ruck with that.
The law says it is, regardless of how vociferously you object. Legally speaking it is theft, or to be more specific, theft of services, and is a felony in many states, usually depending on the dollar value of the services that have been stolen. New Jersey law. Pennsylvania law. Kentucky law. And so forth.
Except if I do something illegal, it's between the government and myself, not between a third party and myself...
Not at all - if your illegal act has the effect of harming some third party, you may very well face civil damage claims from those third parties, as well as the ususal criminal penalties. Ron Goldman's parents did successfully sue OJ Simpson, after all.
Give them info, and teach them to USE it. Having one without the other will just lead to a duplication of the situation we have here.
Or, to rephrase what you said, "People who disagree with me do so because they're ignorant, uninformed, and/or stupid." And a comment like that is what passes for insightful these days.
I'm just about ready to dump this place and come back after the election is over, when the mods - both left and right - will hopefully stop feeling compelled to ratchet up posts they happen to agree with, with no regard whatsoever for their actual quality.
Just put your swap on another partition and zero it every so often (any way to do this automatically during shutdown, after VM is suspended?)
You can zero out the swapfile at shutdown in Windows 2000 and XP (both versions) - fire up regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contro l/Session Manager/Memory Management and set (or create) the DWORD key ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 1. Alternately, in windows 2000 and XP Pro, you can open up the local security settings console, go to Local Policies -> Security Options, and enable the setting labeled "Clear virtual memory pagefile when system shuts down". Either way, this will, of course, add noticeably to how long it takes your computer to shut down, depending on how large the swap file is.
Oh, gee, you know, trivial things like roads and schools, stuff the Gov't doesn't really fund.
Riiiight. And if you pull the other one, it plays a little tune for you. Funny how they could afford $3 million for new slot machines all by themselves. Or how they can afford a $15 million hotel expansion all by themselves.
Or how they could afford a $32 million casino expansion to add a sporting arena and 18-hole golf course all by themselves.
No, I think it's tolerably obvious that they can also afford to pay for their own wireless network all by themselves. I think it's also tolerably obvious where their spending priorities lie - why buy wireless for yourself when Uncle Sucker will step up to the plate? Who needs wireless when we've got empty floor space where we can squeeze in more slots?
Funny that Jovial is still used in so many avionics systems, especially new ones, according to that Air Force web page, eh?
It seems that way, doesn't it? But it's really not so - keep in mind that military procurement is an extremely lengthy and drawn-out process. We think of the F-22 Raptor - one of the systems listed on the Jovial page - as being "new" because it's only now entering active-duty service this year, here in 2004. But the first concept definition studies for the Advanced Tactical Fighter - the genesis of the F-22 - were done in 1983, and the Air Force issued a formal request for proposals on ATF in 1985, which were then delivered by mid-1986. In the military world, there's a very, very long lead time between when some guy starts scribbling ideas on a drafting table and when the finished product actually becomes available to use for blowing shit up - all that Jovial support from the Air Force is for what the commercial world would consider "legacy" systems.
It's true that by the mid-80's, Jovial's decline would have been underway, but back in 1985 - yours truly was in the eighth grade, BTW;) - Jovial would have still been seen as a tried-and-true solution. What else was there, especially since Ada was still relatively new, having only been officially standardized in 1983? On the other hand, somewhere deep in the bowels of Lockheed or wherever, some guys are sitting around a drafting table right now, and plotting out a plane that might be deployed in 2025 or so - that plane is "new" in a way that makes somewhat more sense to us, and it probably won't carry any Jovial code with it - it'll probably be Ada, for better or for worse. And in 2025, Ada will have been supplanted by some new generation DoD standard language, relatively few people will still be using Ada, but look - here comes this brand-"new" plane loaded with Ada code. See how it works?;)
...Written in some weird language called Jovial...
Muahaha. Languages from the stone-age. Jovial is an ancient semi-descendant of Algol, originally written especially for avionics systems. I'm not nearly old enough to have worked with it myself - Jovial's heyday was the mid-'70's or so - but I used to work with a couple of DoD greybeards who had done so, although even they hadn't touched the thing in years, as it's mostly been supplanted by Ada these days. The USAF can tell you a bit more about Jovial if you're having a slow day today;)
And in windows, when I've had mozilla minimized for a long time while doing something else it takes damn FOREVER to reopen. I don't hear a lot of disk activity, it just takes a really long time for windows to switch back to the task (I don't use the tooltray "always on" feature because this makes my desktop more likely to crash).
Copy and paste this URL if you'd like to read several hundred other people complaining about that behavior (can't click through 'cause bugzilla doesn't do links from/.).
Anyway, as many of those complainers (rightly, IMO) note, that's hardly a Windows problem when Moz (and Firefox, for that matter) is just about the ONLY app to exhibit that little annoyance. SOMEONE PLEASE FUCKING FIX THIS - IT'S DRIVING MANY PEOPLE, INCLUDING YOURS TRULY, RIGHT UP THE FUCKING WALL.
I don't think the free market, specially normal consumers, will like subscription based goods. They want to pay once and then own the thing they paid for, not pay all the time they use it.
I'm constantly amazed by how popular auto leasing is in this country, and how many people are thereby effectively carrying car payments in perpetuity. With that in mind, I think your prognosis is iffy at best.
Or, his income is fairly low, and he spends more than he earns, so that his consumption based taxes end up taking a very high percentage of his income.
Either way, he's an outlier, and not a representative case.
once again, you're not factoring in social security, medicare, sales tax, and all of the other bullshit seemingly innocuos ways the government takes our money.
False. That chart takes all of those into account - this chart breaks it all down by source, and you can add it up for yourself.
Then on top of that we have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for health care.
That's not a tax, since you're not paying the government for it, and therefore it doesn't add to your total tax burden.
I bet if you factor in the cost of health care for a family of four along with the cost of a college education for two children we as Americans come out behind.
Well, sure, if you define things that aren't taxes to be taxes, you're going to "discover" all sorts of ways you're getting "screwed". Of course, you can define the moon to be made of green cheese if you like, but that doesn't actually make it so.
So tell me, once again, how we're better off here?
If that's the argument you wanted to make, you should have made that argument. As it is, you started off with the claim that taxation in the US was roughly the same as taxation elsewhere, which is provably false.
So your silly graph indicates that Sweden has a low GPD compared to the US.
I assume you mean "GDP", as I have no idea what "GPD" might mean. In any case, no, that's not what it indicates - you're completely wrong. Even if the total Swedish GDP is lower than the US, which it surely is, the Swedes pay out a higher percentage of that smaller pie in taxes. If you compare per capita GDP, the disparity becomes even more apparent - the Swedes have a per capita GDP of about $26,000 per year (PPP adjusted), of which they lose more than 50% to taxes, or more than $13,000 per year per person. The United States has a per capita GDP of about $36,000 per year, of which they lose about 28% to taxes, or about $10,000 per year per person.
How you got modded insightful, I'll never know.
In the US, around 50% of my income goes to taxes.
I doubt it. In the state with the highest total tax burden, Connecticut, the average tax burden when combining federal, local, and state taxes is about 33% of income. Either your income is much higher than average to hit 50% taxation, or, more likely, you're just plain wrong. Of course, if you want to lower taxes, I'm listening, but the plain and simple fact is that total taxation in the US is already among the lowest in the developed world.
There is a very large and crucial civilian infrastructure that relies heavily on GPS, way above and beyond Joe schmuck in his SUV w/ GPS capabilities.
Doesn't matter, unless those civilian applications also have military value during wartime. There is a very large civilian infrastructure that relies heavily on the interstate highway system as well, but if push comes to shove during a serious shooting war, you will be staying off the roads so the tanks can roll through if necessary. Not that they would do such a thing lightly or recklessly, I'm sure, but when you get right down to it, civilians are going to be inconvenienced during a war no matter what, and avoiding such things is of somewhat lesser importance to the military than their primary mission of insuring the physical security and territorial integrity of the United States. As it should be.
Differences of scale can still be significant differences. For example, even though both are examples of and therefore 'similar', the difference of scale between failure to show full journalistic ethics and purposefully misleading persons on a grand scale about a mass-murdering fascist regime is so great as to make the comparison absurd.
"Scale" has nothing to do with it. Riefenstahl (famously - far more famously than anyone else) distorted the truth in pursuit of a political agenda. Moore is alleged to have done the same. The comparison begins and ends there, because nobody is alleging that the actual agendas of Riefenstahl and Moore are in any way, shape, or form similar - nobody is seriously suggesting that Michael Moore is a fascist, for starters. Riefenstahl didn't personally kill anyone - she made films, and as a filmmaker, comparing her work to other filmmakers is hardly beyond the pale.
Riefenstahl didn't tell the whole truth, Moore is alleged to have done the same, and anything else that comes into play is purely the baggage of the readers, who ought to take responsibility for themselves not to read things that aren't there.
Because most people know who she is, and therefore most people understand the point the poster is trying to make. I could say that Moore's work is as hamfisted and transparent as the propaganda of Chen Boda, but nobody knows who Chen Boda is. Nor would, I suspect, anyone object as strenuously to that comparison, despite the fact that the propaganda of Chen Boda played an integral role in a campaign leading to the deaths of somewhere around twenty or thirty million people or so - nobody really knows for sure how many. Go figure.
Like it or not, Riefenstahl is probably the most famous propagandist of the twentieth century - if you're accusing Moore of propagandizing, that fact alone makes Riefenstahl the most effective comparison for communicating that point to the lister. Every person reading this and then going off to google up Chen Boda is only reinforcing the efficacy of the original comparison, because I'll bet the majority of them didn't have to google up Leni.
As much as we'd all like, here on the interweb thingy, to pretend that the Nazis never happened by ruling their mere mention out of bounds, they did happen, and the comparison is a simple and effective one - how agreeable the comparison is for the reader probably depends on his or her predisposition towards Moore in the first place.
And Moore isn't a German woman either. I'm sure the point was to draw a comparison between the methods and motives behind the filmmaking, in this case to suggest that truth is of less concern than the pursuit of some political agenda. One may find that analogy more or less convincing, but it's hardly invalidated by the fact that Leni Riefenstahl and Michael "Lumpy Riefenstahl" Moore are not exactly identical to each other in every aspect of their lives, persons, or work. Moore does not have to be an apologist for mass-murderers to employ the same propaganda techniques as those who do.
Interesting how the whole report seems to be one big straw-man argument.
On the other hand, if I had Infinite Moderator Power, and I went through and modded down all the ad hominem "rebuttals" on this thread, there'd be nothing left to read. Except perhaps your comment;)
If I recall correctly, in order to be certified as airworthy, the 747 must be able to sustain an engine failure at or after V1 - i.e., even at its maximum weight, it must be able to take off, climb safely, and fly on only three engines.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually the government didn't make any such declaration - if you recall, the government was arguing very strenuously that he was, in fact, guilty. In the criminal case, a jury of his peers determined that he was not guilty according to the standards used to decide guilt in criminal cases, and the government - and the rest of us, for that matter - are bound to respect. Now, in murder cases, the government brings charges on behalf of the dead person - it has to be that way, since they're not around to press charges any more. But that doesn't mean the victims were the only ones harmed by the murder - others who have been harmed, but not criminally victimized, can sue in civil court to recover the damages they have suffered. So the state prosecutes criminally on behalf of the victims, and the families sue on their own behalf, based on the idea that they have been harmed by the actions of the accused - specifically, they were deprived of family members. And double jeopardy doesn't apply the way you might think in such cases - you can be sued for as many times as there are people to bring claims of damage against you, although each person who has been harmed may only sue you once. But if you murder twenty people, you can expect dozens and dozens of lawsuits from their family members, each one claiming you've harmed them.
As well, you can be tried more than once for the same act, if that same act encompasses more than one offense. Suppose I intend to kidnap you and hold you for ransom, but as I grab you off the street, I handle you too roughly, and you die. Even though there's but a single act that I performed, I can be charged with any or all of several offenses - murder, attempted kidnapping, assault and battery, and so forth. And charging me with all of those things, and even trying me seperately for them, doesn't violate double jeopardy. Finally, concurrent or subsequent state and federal prosecutions don't violate double jeopardy - so sez the Supreme Court - on the theory that the federal government and state government are both sovereigns, and both have an interest in prosecution. This is how the federal government was able to prosecute the police in the Rodney King affair, despite the fact that they had been acquitted in state court - A) dual sovereignty, and; B) they were charged in federal court with a different offense arising from the same act, namely depriving King of his civil rights, which is a crime under federal law.
Suppose I fly into your town and take a ten mile taxi ride from the airport into downtown wherever, but instead of paying the taxi driver, I jump out and run for it when we arrive. I have deprived him of no physical property, nor do I possess anything of his. Have I done anything wrong? Did I commit a crime? What crime? Make sure you exclude any mention of potential lost revenue in your explanation, and be sure to detail exactly how something of his has had its value diminished.
As someone pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that's simply a result of the differing standards of legal proof in civil versus criminal courts. In terms of the burden of proof, it's much easier to sue someone that it is to prosecute them. If the OJ example offends you, I'm sure you can think of analogues to illustrate the point some other way, though ;)
Sure you are. Entertaining you and giving you information is a service - you're being entertained and informed by watching pirated television. Really, now - if you weren't being provided with anything of value, why would you bother decoding it?
If you or anyone else doesn't want me to have the signal, DON'T BEAM IT AT ME.
Something makes me doubt you're so cavalier about your own cordless phone conversations.
What a crock of shit that law is.
To borrow your phraseology for a moment, nobody gives a fuck if "ratboy" likes the law or not - that's the law, the law says it's theft, and you're expected to obey that law or face the penalty for disobeying it, your choice. But you don't get to "opt out" merely because it offends your sensibilities about who properly owns the EM spectrum. If you prefer the law should be some other way, you can always try persuading your fellow citizens that you have a better solution - rotsa ruck with that.
The law says it is, regardless of how vociferously you object. Legally speaking it is theft, or to be more specific, theft of services, and is a felony in many states, usually depending on the dollar value of the services that have been stolen. New Jersey law. Pennsylvania law. Kentucky law. And so forth.
Not at all - if your illegal act has the effect of harming some third party, you may very well face civil damage claims from those third parties, as well as the ususal criminal penalties. Ron Goldman's parents did successfully sue OJ Simpson, after all.
Or, to rephrase what you said, "People who disagree with me do so because they're ignorant, uninformed, and/or stupid." And a comment like that is what passes for insightful these days.
I'm just about ready to dump this place and come back after the election is over, when the mods - both left and right - will hopefully stop feeling compelled to ratchet up posts they happen to agree with, with no regard whatsoever for their actual quality.
You can zero out the swapfile at shutdown in Windows 2000 and XP (both versions) - fire up regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contro l/Session Manager/Memory Management and set (or create) the DWORD key ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 1. Alternately, in windows 2000 and XP Pro, you can open up the local security settings console, go to Local Policies -> Security Options, and enable the setting labeled "Clear virtual memory pagefile when system shuts down". Either way, this will, of course, add noticeably to how long it takes your computer to shut down, depending on how large the swap file is.
Riiiight. And if you pull the other one, it plays a little tune for you. Funny how they could afford $3 million for new slot machines all by themselves. Or how they can afford a $15 million hotel expansion all by themselves. Or how they could afford a $32 million casino expansion to add a sporting arena and 18-hole golf course all by themselves.
No, I think it's tolerably obvious that they can also afford to pay for their own wireless network all by themselves. I think it's also tolerably obvious where their spending priorities lie - why buy wireless for yourself when Uncle Sucker will step up to the plate? Who needs wireless when we've got empty floor space where we can squeeze in more slots?
Trust me - once the kids come, you can forget about scoring for a while....
It seems that way, doesn't it? But it's really not so - keep in mind that military procurement is an extremely lengthy and drawn-out process. We think of the F-22 Raptor - one of the systems listed on the Jovial page - as being "new" because it's only now entering active-duty service this year, here in 2004. But the first concept definition studies for the Advanced Tactical Fighter - the genesis of the F-22 - were done in 1983, and the Air Force issued a formal request for proposals on ATF in 1985, which were then delivered by mid-1986. In the military world, there's a very, very long lead time between when some guy starts scribbling ideas on a drafting table and when the finished product actually becomes available to use for blowing shit up - all that Jovial support from the Air Force is for what the commercial world would consider "legacy" systems.
It's true that by the mid-80's, Jovial's decline would have been underway, but back in 1985 - yours truly was in the eighth grade, BTW ;) - Jovial would have still been seen as a tried-and-true solution. What else was there, especially since Ada was still relatively new, having only been officially standardized in 1983? On the other hand, somewhere deep in the bowels of Lockheed or wherever, some guys are sitting around a drafting table right now, and plotting out a plane that might be deployed in 2025 or so - that plane is "new" in a way that makes somewhat more sense to us, and it probably won't carry any Jovial code with it - it'll probably be Ada, for better or for worse. And in 2025, Ada will have been supplanted by some new generation DoD standard language, relatively few people will still be using Ada, but look - here comes this brand-"new" plane loaded with Ada code. See how it works? ;)
Muahaha. Languages from the stone-age. Jovial is an ancient semi-descendant of Algol, originally written especially for avionics systems. I'm not nearly old enough to have worked with it myself - Jovial's heyday was the mid-'70's or so - but I used to work with a couple of DoD greybeards who had done so, although even they hadn't touched the thing in years, as it's mostly been supplanted by Ada these days. The USAF can tell you a bit more about Jovial if you're having a slow day today ;)
Copy and paste this URL if you'd like to read several hundred other people complaining about that behavior (can't click through 'cause bugzilla doesn't do links from /.).
Anyway, as many of those complainers (rightly, IMO) note, that's hardly a Windows problem when Moz (and Firefox, for that matter) is just about the ONLY app to exhibit that little annoyance. SOMEONE PLEASE FUCKING FIX THIS - IT'S DRIVING MANY PEOPLE, INCLUDING YOURS TRULY, RIGHT UP THE FUCKING WALL.
Sorry ;)
I'm constantly amazed by how popular auto leasing is in this country, and how many people are thereby effectively carrying car payments in perpetuity. With that in mind, I think your prognosis is iffy at best.
They're all Satan. Try to think of it as a sort of unholy trinity - The Bastard, The Scum, and The Holy Shit. You can figure out which is which. ;)
Either way, he's an outlier, and not a representative case.
False. That chart takes all of those into account - this chart breaks it all down by source, and you can add it up for yourself.
Then on top of that we have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for health care.
That's not a tax, since you're not paying the government for it, and therefore it doesn't add to your total tax burden.
I bet if you factor in the cost of health care for a family of four along with the cost of a college education for two children we as Americans come out behind.
Well, sure, if you define things that aren't taxes to be taxes, you're going to "discover" all sorts of ways you're getting "screwed". Of course, you can define the moon to be made of green cheese if you like, but that doesn't actually make it so.
So tell me, once again, how we're better off here?
If that's the argument you wanted to make, you should have made that argument. As it is, you started off with the claim that taxation in the US was roughly the same as taxation elsewhere, which is provably false.
I assume you mean "GDP", as I have no idea what "GPD" might mean. In any case, no, that's not what it indicates - you're completely wrong. Even if the total Swedish GDP is lower than the US, which it surely is, the Swedes pay out a higher percentage of that smaller pie in taxes. If you compare per capita GDP, the disparity becomes even more apparent - the Swedes have a per capita GDP of about $26,000 per year (PPP adjusted), of which they lose more than 50% to taxes, or more than $13,000 per year per person. The United States has a per capita GDP of about $36,000 per year, of which they lose about 28% to taxes, or about $10,000 per year per person.
How you got modded insightful, I'll never know.
In the US, around 50% of my income goes to taxes.
I doubt it. In the state with the highest total tax burden, Connecticut, the average tax burden when combining federal, local, and state taxes is about 33% of income. Either your income is much higher than average to hit 50% taxation, or, more likely, you're just plain wrong. Of course, if you want to lower taxes, I'm listening, but the plain and simple fact is that total taxation in the US is already among the lowest in the developed world.
You lose.
Doesn't matter, unless those civilian applications also have military value during wartime. There is a very large civilian infrastructure that relies heavily on the interstate highway system as well, but if push comes to shove during a serious shooting war, you will be staying off the roads so the tanks can roll through if necessary. Not that they would do such a thing lightly or recklessly, I'm sure, but when you get right down to it, civilians are going to be inconvenienced during a war no matter what, and avoiding such things is of somewhat lesser importance to the military than their primary mission of insuring the physical security and territorial integrity of the United States. As it should be.
"Scale" has nothing to do with it. Riefenstahl (famously - far more famously than anyone else) distorted the truth in pursuit of a political agenda. Moore is alleged to have done the same. The comparison begins and ends there, because nobody is alleging that the actual agendas of Riefenstahl and Moore are in any way, shape, or form similar - nobody is seriously suggesting that Michael Moore is a fascist, for starters. Riefenstahl didn't personally kill anyone - she made films, and as a filmmaker, comparing her work to other filmmakers is hardly beyond the pale.
Riefenstahl didn't tell the whole truth, Moore is alleged to have done the same, and anything else that comes into play is purely the baggage of the readers, who ought to take responsibility for themselves not to read things that aren't there.
Because most people know who she is, and therefore most people understand the point the poster is trying to make. I could say that Moore's work is as hamfisted and transparent as the propaganda of Chen Boda, but nobody knows who Chen Boda is. Nor would, I suspect, anyone object as strenuously to that comparison, despite the fact that the propaganda of Chen Boda played an integral role in a campaign leading to the deaths of somewhere around twenty or thirty million people or so - nobody really knows for sure how many. Go figure.
Like it or not, Riefenstahl is probably the most famous propagandist of the twentieth century - if you're accusing Moore of propagandizing, that fact alone makes Riefenstahl the most effective comparison for communicating that point to the lister. Every person reading this and then going off to google up Chen Boda is only reinforcing the efficacy of the original comparison, because I'll bet the majority of them didn't have to google up Leni.
As much as we'd all like, here on the interweb thingy, to pretend that the Nazis never happened by ruling their mere mention out of bounds, they did happen, and the comparison is a simple and effective one - how agreeable the comparison is for the reader probably depends on his or her predisposition towards Moore in the first place.
And Moore isn't a German woman either. I'm sure the point was to draw a comparison between the methods and motives behind the filmmaking, in this case to suggest that truth is of less concern than the pursuit of some political agenda. One may find that analogy more or less convincing, but it's hardly invalidated by the fact that Leni Riefenstahl and Michael "Lumpy Riefenstahl" Moore are not exactly identical to each other in every aspect of their lives, persons, or work. Moore does not have to be an apologist for mass-murderers to employ the same propaganda techniques as those who do.
On the other hand, if I had Infinite Moderator Power, and I went through and modded down all the ad hominem "rebuttals" on this thread, there'd be nothing left to read. Except perhaps your comment ;)
If I recall correctly, in order to be certified as airworthy, the 747 must be able to sustain an engine failure at or after V1 - i.e., even at its maximum weight, it must be able to take off, climb safely, and fly on only three engines.