This is a very presumptuous comment. Believe it or not, there are technical people out there (programmers, engineers, etc.) who do not subscribe to the Slashdot libertarianism, who believe in patents, who support copyright protection, etc.
You know what? If China made modifications to GPLed code and didn't release the source for its modifications, it would be just desserts for a lot in the Linux community. For all those people who say it's ok to download pirated software and mp3s because "I wasn't going to buy this software anyway" or "it creates a standard which is good for the company in the end," we can just say in return - if you didn't let China keep its source closed, they just would have used another system anyway!
I think we've been over this already in other threads - buying an X-Box to screw over Microsoft is not a good idea. Reasons:
1) The amount of money Microsoft loses per machine is unknown right now, but the number has probably shrunk considerably from initial estimates made a year ago due to economy of scale. 2) Microsoft has a LOT of money in cash. They can afford to lose a few billion if they think it's in their long-term good. 3) In the long-term, Microsoft selling a lot of X-Boxes that nobody buys games for could screw them over...But in the short-term if X-Box hardware sales suddenly spiked, developers would assume that gamers were buying these X-Boxes. That would make more developers make X-Box games, which would make more actual gamers buy the X-Box, which would increase X-Box games sales, which would help Microsoft take over the video game console market long-term.
Re:MySQL is not really an RDBMS at the moment
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IBM, MS Critique MySQL
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree that MySQL is perfectly suitable for many tasks, but I am not sure I agree that it is "much easier to use than fully-grown RDBMSs." SQL Server has a very easy-to-understand interface for creating a database in Enterprise Manager.
I would prefer to live with an occassional terrorist act than 1984 too. Luckily for us, this is not 1984. Seriously, read the book again. As stupid as CAPPS II may be - and I suspect it's pretty stupid, and a huge waste of money and effort - I hardly think it's creating 1984.
Really, most of us are capable of distinguishing between police state and acts noxious to civil liberties. Believe it or not, I can tell the difference between the Soviet Union and the acts carried out by the current administration. I am aware of the differences between the Gulag and Camp X-Ray.
All these hyperbolic civil liberties arguments on Slashdot remind me of message boards I've read where conservatives are still breathlessly claiming that social security and medicare are unconstitutional and a terrible danger to the freedom of the United States. People need to get some perspective.
Yes, but everything is silly when it's brought to its extreme.
You're arguing that it's silly to reduce civil liberties in order to gain security, and to make your point, you say that trading civil liberties for security leads to a foolish extreme (I presume a polic state). But trading security and social rights for civil liberties can also lead to a foolish extreme (anarchy).
There's a reason why there are very few libertarians in the world - most people see that libertarianism is a foolish extreme. That doesn't mean that one can't be more or less supportive of libertarian ideas.
Similarly, there are very few pure civil liberties and pure social rights/security people in the world. Most people don't like police states, and most people think that nothing but civil liberties is ineffective social policy. Most people fall in the middle, because when it comes down to it they'd rather live than have freedom and they'd rather have freedom than have no crime. Arguing that one extreme is foolish doesn't really say where in the middle we should fall.
There were a number of Arabs in Afghanistan, in Al Qaeda. And besides that, the general point being made about it being sensible to treat young Arab/Muslim men as a greater threat than white American christians remains true, despite your objections. The fact is, the number of white Christian militiamen is very small. On the other hand, the percentage of the Arab street that is extremely angry at the US is pretty high.
Similarly, the militiamen have carried out one major terrorist act - the Oklahoma City bombing. Compare that to the first WTC bombing, 9/11, the embassy bombings a few years ago, the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, the airplane hijackings in the 1970s, suicide bombings, etc.
It's not illogical to come to the conclusion that the next terrorist act is far more likely to be carried out by an Arab or Muslim (who are mad at the US over Iraq, Israel, propping up bad regimes, etc.) than by a white Christian militiaman.
There is a balance that must be struck. Obviously, you don't want to make people feel that no matter what they do, they won't get rewarded, and therefore they'll do the minimal amount rather than the maximum they are capable of.
On the other hand, if the company can get the maximum amount (blue LEDs) from minimum compensation ($162) then by all means they should, and that makes sense in capitalism.
Obviously, it's a good short-term decision - why pay more when you can pay less? Long-term remains to be seen. But it's not clearcut. I mean, if you told this inventor in advance that he could have a job in which he would invent blue LEDs but not get paid a bonus at the end, or that he could not invent blue LEDs at all, he might still take the former.
Just because this happened in Japan doesn't mean that we have no right to apply our Western values to it. Fine, it happened in Japan. Fine, they have a different work culture there. Does that mean that I can't still make the judgment that, "The company funded you to do something that you couldn't have done otherwise, therefore they own the patent, tough luck"? I don't see why it should mean that.
And everyone blames corporate America and Bush
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Politicizing Science
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· Score: 0
But check out today's New York Times. Turns out the unbiased, left-leaning scientists at our elite universities are also biased:
Right, and where is the country that Kruschev led now?
The fact is that in the Cisco case, it's quite the opposite - the American capitalists are selling China rope to hang itself. Open societies are, in the long run, more successful than closed societies. If China wants to send money to America so that it can buy American products to prevent Chinese citizens from having freedom of information, believe me, it's China that's worse off for it long run, not America.
Saddened because we blatantly refuse to accept any responsibility for the attacks...
I accept that US government policies may have angered people across the world. That does not mean that I have to accept responsibility for the attacks, either personally or as an American. Just because Bin Laden does not like our army bases in Saudi Arabia does not mean that America was responsible for the attacks. Bin Laden was responsible.
It would be one thing if we had declared war on Al Qaeda and then he attacked our army bases in retaliation. It is another thing when he declares war on America for having army bases in Saudi Arabia and then attacks our civilians. I do not have to accept responsibility for that.
Apparently paranoia has been the #1 creation of 9/11. The right is excessively paranoid about the clash of civilizations and the Muslim world (I've seen this personally), and the left is excessively paranoid about the government.
The government is not going to send you away for helping to rebuild Palestinian homes. For the record, Bush just signed a bill sending an additional $50 million in aid to the Palestinians to help with humanitarian considerations.
On the other hand, the government is going to investigate organizations that claim to be giving humanitarian aid but which are in fact sending money to Islamic terrorists. But there is a line there - it's stupid to get paranoid about this.
The rest of the bozos just cowered in their homes (in view of the TV of course), and asked their respective governmental leaders to save them from the foreigners. Of course, does it matter that the US is a country of foreigners? No. Who cares about the melting pot anymore, someone knocked down a building!
Politics are a funny thing. The left spent a lot of energy over the past three decades or so knocking down the concept of the melting pot with the ideas of affirmative action and multiculturalism. People were encouraged to think of themselves as part of a group with its own culture, instead of being an individual who becomes part of the larger American culture. I'm not saying the Democrats did this for bad reasons, just that the weakening of the melting pot was one of the repercussions of those ideas and policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were opposed to this, and defended the melting pot idea.
Now, 9/11 happens, and the left complains that groups are being singled out and treated as if they were distinct from the rest of the US, and the right forgets about the melting pot to single out groups.
One of the reasons the Pentagon isn't mentioned is because of what is horrendous about 9/11 - the attack on civilians. Intentional attacks on civilians - attacks designed to perpetrate murder on civilians - is shocking to most people. Attacks on armed forces personnel is basically considered fair game in international law.
I am shocked when someone flies a plane into the WTC, because that is purposely targetting innocent civilians. I was not shocked or angered when a boat full of explosives was rammed into the USS Cole, because that was a legitimate military target.
It's the same reason why some people think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrible, but don't mind the US attacks on Japanese army bases. Army bases are legitimate to attack, civilians are not.
Well, the question is, what are the alternatives. As I see it, these are the options:
Continue the sanctions regime because it prevents Hussein from getting WMDs. It also leads to 5,000 deaths a month, not because it doesn't allow in enough money (conditions in the regions of Iraq where Hussein does not have control have actually improved greatly under the sanctions regime, and you can read that in an article The Nation had about a year ago, as well as many other sources) but because Hussein uses it in such a way as to get political capital instead of feeding his people.
Drop the sanctions, and allow Hussein to get WMDs.
Remove Hussein from power with an invasion, and then end the sanctions because you trust the next government more than you trust Hussein.
Isn't there a Nazi rule in Internet arguments? That whoever compares their opponent to the Nazis loses? We should have a Stalin rule too.
There are some similarities between actions done by the US government and by Stalin. There are some similarities between actions done by every government and by Stalin. There are similarities between actions taken by PR agencies and by Stalin.
I am not saying that it's illegitimate to learn lessons from what Stalin did, and try to avoid them happening elsewhere. But it's hardly a legitimate argument to say
"Very remeniscent of early Stalinist doctrine, if anyone remembers.. That is, unless they've already erased that out of the history books.."
And think that makes your case. First of all, I no one is erasing anything about Stalinism from the history books. The fact is, the people most likely to condemn Stalin and his tactics are the same conservatives running the war on terror. That does not mean that they might not use some of his tactics - you can use your own judgment there - but they certainly aren't erasing Richard Pipes' history books (a conservative Harvard professor, whose son is a conservative advocate for Israel) about the evils of Bolshevism. And until you show that the war on terrorism is leading to anything close to the 1930s KGB (I forget what its initials were in the 1930s), the purges, the show trials, the Gulag, etc., then your argument is very unfair. And I don't consider, "Well, the Republicans call anyone who doesn't support the war unpatriotic" to be at all comparable to Stalin's show trials and purges of all who opposed him. Last time I checked, Donahue was still on MSNBC, Wellstone was still in the Senate, Chomsky was still working at Harvard, etc.
It's like those NRA people who say that just because Hitler had gun laws and the Democrats support gun laws, it means that the Democrats are like the Nazis...
I wish people would apply Occam's Razor to politics. People of all sides always see the need to come up with these complex arguments, always involving the other side lying and hiding their true motives, to show that their opponents are evil. But frequently in politics, the obvious answer is correct.
I don't see why it makes more sense to believe that Bush always had the intent to create a Stalinist police state (which, by the way, the US is most certainly not - compare Camp X-Ray to the Gulag, and compare the tactics of the FBI to the 1930s version of the KGB and you will see the obvious differences) and simply used 9/11 as an excuse than to believe that terrorism wasn't viewed as as big a threat before 9/11 as it was after 9/11, and people are reacting because they now perceive terrorism as a bigger threat.
Of course, people will use pretexts to justify unrelated items. Right now, everyone in the world is trying to present their own conflicts as part of the war on terrorism - Columbia with FARC, China with separatism in its Muslim province, Israel with the Palestinians, India with Pakistan, etc. Maybe they're justified, maybe they're not. But it's a bit silly to start saying that Bush is only fighting terrorism because his allies profit from it and he can use it to support other aims. Because were that the case, then I, who did not vote for Bush, who has never voted Republican, who does not profit from the war, and who opposes many of Bush's policies, would not support the war on terrorism. Yet I do support much of the war on terrorism. And I am not some idiot been led around by the nose - I was a history major at the #1 liberal arts school in America, an extremely left-wing institution where Bush is considered a piece of shit.
If you had asked me before 9/11 would I support going after Bin Laden, I'm not sure if I would have. After 9/11 I would. And I say that because Bin Laden is not an "unseen entity," but a very real entity. And I say that with the knowledge that terrorism existed before 9/11 - but also with the knowledge that 9/11 raised terrorism against Americans to a new level, and suggested that we really had do to something about it this time.
Ask any chilean what they think of the US backing the dictatorship of pinochet...
Not all Chileans hate the US for this reason. Why? Because Chilean society was very split, and many Chileans supported Pinochet. I'm not arguing that supporting Pinochet was a good thing to do, or that many Chileans don't hate the US for this reason, just that not all do.
Or any spanish about franco...
That's funny, the Spanish civil war was fought by, you know, the Spanish. Foreign countries, mainly the Nazi Germans and the Soviets, took major part in it however. The Americans did not take official part. I believe there were groups of Americans who took part, the Abraham Lincoln brigade if I'm not mistaken. But they fought against Franco.
Or any afghan about the talibans...
America did not support the Taliban. Lots of people confuse this issue. America supported many Mujahadeen who fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Once the Soviets were gone, US support ended, and various Mujahadeen warlords fought for control over the country. The Taliban swept in in 1996 largely because of support from Pakistan's ISS and because the Afghan people were tired of the corruption and constant fighting of the Mujahadeen warlords, and thought the Taliban would create stability and relatively good governance. As they discovered, the Taliban weren't that great either. But the US never supported the Taliban regime, and in fact were on quite bad terms with the Taliban (the US never recognized the Taliban regime).
Secondly, you are right that hatred of our freedom has been harped upon too much. On the other hand, we should not simply discount cultural reasons altogether. The American empire since World War II has been trying to create a certain kind of world - one with open borders, liberal values, free trade, etc. I happen to believe that this is a basically good mission - turning the rest of the world into replicas of the US and Western Europe. Others may disagree. I am not going to argue about the methods used. But some extremists do hate this mission, and its representative, the US, because of the mission itself. People who reject gay rights, women's rights, secular government, etc., reject America's mission, and are willing to strike out at the US for it.
I am not saying this is the only reason why the Muslim world hates America. But at the same time, we should not discount the fact that Islamic fundamentalists hate many values associated with the West.
If HP is now the largest vendor of preinstalled MS OS's, then clearly MS needs HP more than HP needs MS.
It's a crazy company that lets a vendor dictate their policies rather than respond to client needs/wants.
That is not necessarily true. In the long run, maybe Microsoft needs HP more than HP needs Microsoft. Certainly in the long run, HP has power with Microsoft. But in the short run, if MS jacked up the prices HP had to pay for Windows, or stopped selling Windows to HP altogether, HP would be completely screwed. HP is already losing market share to Dell pretty quickly - imagine how much Dell would destroy HP if all of a sudden corporations and consumers couldn't buy Windows PCs from HP any more.
Of course, for Microsoft to do so would be illegal, but Microsoft is not above illegal things:)
This circumstance has nothing to do with price fixing, it has to do with simple supply and demand. The fact is, once the book is written, it doesn't cost much to publish and print in the UK or in the US. But the publishers have determined that they can charge Americans higher prices and thereby make more profits, because that's how they maximize profits. This works because most Americans don't think of ordering in Britain and having it shipped over the Atlantic, or because for many books that is cost prohibitive.
Price fixing is when firms get together and illegally determine the price of a good. That is not happening here. It's not like the publisher of this book got together with other publishers to determine that this book should be sold for more in the US. They all arrived at this decision independently, because it's a pretty easy one to make. This is a very transparent process.
Yes, Britain's health and rail systems have many problems. But the blame is not Thatcher. When Thatcher came in, Britain was heading towards defaulting on its debt, and thereby having to choose between cutting services (i.e., the health and rail systems would have to be cut anyway) or raising taxes, which would further decrease incentives for business creation and personal work.
Now, I am certainly no free-market zealot, but the fact is that when your tax rates keep rising in order to keep public servics available to all, at some point more and more people make the decision to stop working and to just live off the free public services. This of course, in the long run, means that government revenues are not as high as they need to be, and taxes have to be raised again, in a negative cycle.
On the whole, the British economy today is far better than the German or French economies - and quite the opposite was true when Thatcher came to power. I'd say Britain has done something right. Clearly the majority of voters feel so, as it's been Thatcher, Major (Tory), and Blair (Labour emulating Tory policies) since 1980.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very presumptuous comment. Believe it or not, there are technical people out there (programmers, engineers, etc.) who do not subscribe to the Slashdot libertarianism, who believe in patents, who support copyright protection, etc.
You know what? If China made modifications to GPLed code and didn't release the source for its modifications, it would be just desserts for a lot in the Linux community. For all those people who say it's ok to download pirated software and mp3s because "I wasn't going to buy this software anyway" or "it creates a standard which is good for the company in the end," we can just say in return - if you didn't let China keep its source closed, they just would have used another system anyway!
Since when did it become bad to be smart?
:)
Andrew Jackson. It's been 170 years now, you've missed the fight.
I swear to god, those things are just irc chatrooms with 3d avatars, and less intelligent conversation.
:)
:)
Says you, big gay fat homo!
j/k, of course. Read his post before you moderate me down, please!
I think we've been over this already in other threads - buying an X-Box to screw over Microsoft is not a good idea. Reasons:
1) The amount of money Microsoft loses per machine is unknown right now, but the number has probably shrunk considerably from initial estimates made a year ago due to economy of scale.
2) Microsoft has a LOT of money in cash. They can afford to lose a few billion if they think it's in their long-term good.
3) In the long-term, Microsoft selling a lot of X-Boxes that nobody buys games for could screw them over...But in the short-term if X-Box hardware sales suddenly spiked, developers would assume that gamers were buying these X-Boxes. That would make more developers make X-Box games, which would make more actual gamers buy the X-Box, which would increase X-Box games sales, which would help Microsoft take over the video game console market long-term.
I agree that MySQL is perfectly suitable for many tasks, but I am not sure I agree that it is "much easier to use than fully-grown RDBMSs." SQL Server has a very easy-to-understand interface for creating a database in Enterprise Manager.
I would prefer to live with an occassional terrorist act than 1984 too. Luckily for us, this is not 1984. Seriously, read the book again. As stupid as CAPPS II may be - and I suspect it's pretty stupid, and a huge waste of money and effort - I hardly think it's creating 1984.
Really, most of us are capable of distinguishing between police state and acts noxious to civil liberties. Believe it or not, I can tell the difference between the Soviet Union and the acts carried out by the current administration. I am aware of the differences between the Gulag and Camp X-Ray.
All these hyperbolic civil liberties arguments on Slashdot remind me of message boards I've read where conservatives are still breathlessly claiming that social security and medicare are unconstitutional and a terrible danger to the freedom of the United States. People need to get some perspective.
Yes, but everything is silly when it's brought to its extreme.
You're arguing that it's silly to reduce civil liberties in order to gain security, and to make your point, you say that trading civil liberties for security leads to a foolish extreme (I presume a polic state). But trading security and social rights for civil liberties can also lead to a foolish extreme (anarchy).
There's a reason why there are very few libertarians in the world - most people see that libertarianism is a foolish extreme. That doesn't mean that one can't be more or less supportive of libertarian ideas.
Similarly, there are very few pure civil liberties and pure social rights/security people in the world. Most people don't like police states, and most people think that nothing but civil liberties is ineffective social policy. Most people fall in the middle, because when it comes down to it they'd rather live than have freedom and they'd rather have freedom than have no crime. Arguing that one extreme is foolish doesn't really say where in the middle we should fall.
There were a number of Arabs in Afghanistan, in Al Qaeda. And besides that, the general point being made about it being sensible to treat young Arab/Muslim men as a greater threat than white American christians remains true, despite your objections. The fact is, the number of white Christian militiamen is very small. On the other hand, the percentage of the Arab street that is extremely angry at the US is pretty high.
Similarly, the militiamen have carried out one major terrorist act - the Oklahoma City bombing. Compare that to the first WTC bombing, 9/11, the embassy bombings a few years ago, the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, the airplane hijackings in the 1970s, suicide bombings, etc.
It's not illogical to come to the conclusion that the next terrorist act is far more likely to be carried out by an Arab or Muslim (who are mad at the US over Iraq, Israel, propping up bad regimes, etc.) than by a white Christian militiaman.
There is a balance that must be struck. Obviously, you don't want to make people feel that no matter what they do, they won't get rewarded, and therefore they'll do the minimal amount rather than the maximum they are capable of.
On the other hand, if the company can get the maximum amount (blue LEDs) from minimum compensation ($162) then by all means they should, and that makes sense in capitalism.
Obviously, it's a good short-term decision - why pay more when you can pay less? Long-term remains to be seen. But it's not clearcut. I mean, if you told this inventor in advance that he could have a job in which he would invent blue LEDs but not get paid a bonus at the end, or that he could not invent blue LEDs at all, he might still take the former.
Just because this happened in Japan doesn't mean that we have no right to apply our Western values to it. Fine, it happened in Japan. Fine, they have a different work culture there. Does that mean that I can't still make the judgment that, "The company funded you to do something that you couldn't have done otherwise, therefore they own the patent, tough luck"? I don't see why it should mean that.
But check out today's New York Times. Turns out the unbiased, left-leaning scientists at our elite universities are also biased:
l /1 7PINK.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/science/socia
Bias is everywhere. Let's not overreact, ok?
Right, and where is the country that Kruschev led now?
The fact is that in the Cisco case, it's quite the opposite - the American capitalists are selling China rope to hang itself. Open societies are, in the long run, more successful than closed societies. If China wants to send money to America so that it can buy American products to prevent Chinese citizens from having freedom of information, believe me, it's China that's worse off for it long run, not America.
Saddened because we blatantly refuse to accept any responsibility for the attacks...
I accept that US government policies may have angered people across the world. That does not mean that I have to accept responsibility for the attacks, either personally or as an American. Just because Bin Laden does not like our army bases in Saudi Arabia does not mean that America was responsible for the attacks. Bin Laden was responsible.
It would be one thing if we had declared war on Al Qaeda and then he attacked our army bases in retaliation. It is another thing when he declares war on America for having army bases in Saudi Arabia and then attacks our civilians. I do not have to accept responsibility for that.
Apparently paranoia has been the #1 creation of 9/11. The right is excessively paranoid about the clash of civilizations and the Muslim world (I've seen this personally), and the left is excessively paranoid about the government.
The government is not going to send you away for helping to rebuild Palestinian homes. For the record, Bush just signed a bill sending an additional $50 million in aid to the Palestinians to help with humanitarian considerations.
On the other hand, the government is going to investigate organizations that claim to be giving humanitarian aid but which are in fact sending money to Islamic terrorists. But there is a line there - it's stupid to get paranoid about this.
The rest of the bozos just cowered in their homes (in view of the TV of course), and asked their respective governmental leaders to save them from the foreigners. Of course, does it matter that the US is a country of foreigners? No. Who cares about the melting pot anymore, someone knocked down a building!
:)
Politics are a funny thing. The left spent a lot of energy over the past three decades or so knocking down the concept of the melting pot with the ideas of affirmative action and multiculturalism. People were encouraged to think of themselves as part of a group with its own culture, instead of being an individual who becomes part of the larger American culture. I'm not saying the Democrats did this for bad reasons, just that the weakening of the melting pot was one of the repercussions of those ideas and policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were opposed to this, and defended the melting pot idea.
Now, 9/11 happens, and the left complains that groups are being singled out and treated as if they were distinct from the rest of the US, and the right forgets about the melting pot to single out groups.
Hypocrisy is everywhere, and no one is pure.
One of the reasons the Pentagon isn't mentioned is because of what is horrendous about 9/11 - the attack on civilians. Intentional attacks on civilians - attacks designed to perpetrate murder on civilians - is shocking to most people. Attacks on armed forces personnel is basically considered fair game in international law.
I am shocked when someone flies a plane into the WTC, because that is purposely targetting innocent civilians. I was not shocked or angered when a boat full of explosives was rammed into the USS Cole, because that was a legitimate military target.
It's the same reason why some people think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrible, but don't mind the US attacks on Japanese army bases. Army bases are legitimate to attack, civilians are not.
Continue the sanctions regime because it prevents Hussein from getting WMDs. It also leads to 5,000 deaths a month, not because it doesn't allow in enough money (conditions in the regions of Iraq where Hussein does not have control have actually improved greatly under the sanctions regime, and you can read that in an article The Nation had about a year ago, as well as many other sources) but because Hussein uses it in such a way as to get political capital instead of feeding his people.
Drop the sanctions, and allow Hussein to get WMDs.
Remove Hussein from power with an invasion, and then end the sanctions because you trust the next government more than you trust Hussein.
So, which option do you support?
Isn't there a Nazi rule in Internet arguments? That whoever compares their opponent to the Nazis loses? We should have a Stalin rule too.
There are some similarities between actions done by the US government and by Stalin. There are some similarities between actions done by every government and by Stalin. There are similarities between actions taken by PR agencies and by Stalin.
I am not saying that it's illegitimate to learn lessons from what Stalin did, and try to avoid them happening elsewhere. But it's hardly a legitimate argument to say
"Very remeniscent of early Stalinist doctrine, if anyone remembers.. That is, unless they've already erased that out of the history books.."
And think that makes your case. First of all, I no one is erasing anything about Stalinism from the history books. The fact is, the people most likely to condemn Stalin and his tactics are the same conservatives running the war on terror. That does not mean that they might not use some of his tactics - you can use your own judgment there - but they certainly aren't erasing Richard Pipes' history books (a conservative Harvard professor, whose son is a conservative advocate for Israel) about the evils of Bolshevism. And until you show that the war on terrorism is leading to anything close to the 1930s KGB (I forget what its initials were in the 1930s), the purges, the show trials, the Gulag, etc., then your argument is very unfair. And I don't consider, "Well, the Republicans call anyone who doesn't support the war unpatriotic" to be at all comparable to Stalin's show trials and purges of all who opposed him. Last time I checked, Donahue was still on MSNBC, Wellstone was still in the Senate, Chomsky was still working at Harvard, etc.
It's like those NRA people who say that just because Hitler had gun laws and the Democrats support gun laws, it means that the Democrats are like the Nazis...
I wish people would apply Occam's Razor to politics. People of all sides always see the need to come up with these complex arguments, always involving the other side lying and hiding their true motives, to show that their opponents are evil. But frequently in politics, the obvious answer is correct.
I don't see why it makes more sense to believe that Bush always had the intent to create a Stalinist police state (which, by the way, the US is most certainly not - compare Camp X-Ray to the Gulag, and compare the tactics of the FBI to the 1930s version of the KGB and you will see the obvious differences) and simply used 9/11 as an excuse than to believe that terrorism wasn't viewed as as big a threat before 9/11 as it was after 9/11, and people are reacting because they now perceive terrorism as a bigger threat.
Of course, people will use pretexts to justify unrelated items. Right now, everyone in the world is trying to present their own conflicts as part of the war on terrorism - Columbia with FARC, China with separatism in its Muslim province, Israel with the Palestinians, India with Pakistan, etc. Maybe they're justified, maybe they're not. But it's a bit silly to start saying that Bush is only fighting terrorism because his allies profit from it and he can use it to support other aims. Because were that the case, then I, who did not vote for Bush, who has never voted Republican, who does not profit from the war, and who opposes many of Bush's policies, would not support the war on terrorism. Yet I do support much of the war on terrorism. And I am not some idiot been led around by the nose - I was a history major at the #1 liberal arts school in America, an extremely left-wing institution where Bush is considered a piece of shit.
If you had asked me before 9/11 would I support going after Bin Laden, I'm not sure if I would have. After 9/11 I would. And I say that because Bin Laden is not an "unseen entity," but a very real entity. And I say that with the knowledge that terrorism existed before 9/11 - but also with the knowledge that 9/11 raised terrorism against Americans to a new level, and suggested that we really had do to something about it this time.
Ask any chilean what they think of the US backing the dictatorship of pinochet...
Not all Chileans hate the US for this reason. Why? Because Chilean society was very split, and many Chileans supported Pinochet. I'm not arguing that supporting Pinochet was a good thing to do, or that many Chileans don't hate the US for this reason, just that not all do.
Or any spanish about franco...
That's funny, the Spanish civil war was fought by, you know, the Spanish. Foreign countries, mainly the Nazi Germans and the Soviets, took major part in it however. The Americans did not take official part. I believe there were groups of Americans who took part, the Abraham Lincoln brigade if I'm not mistaken. But they fought against Franco.
Or any afghan about the talibans...
America did not support the Taliban. Lots of people confuse this issue. America supported many Mujahadeen who fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Once the Soviets were gone, US support ended, and various Mujahadeen warlords fought for control over the country. The Taliban swept in in 1996 largely because of support from Pakistan's ISS and because the Afghan people were tired of the corruption and constant fighting of the Mujahadeen warlords, and thought the Taliban would create stability and relatively good governance. As they discovered, the Taliban weren't that great either. But the US never supported the Taliban regime, and in fact were on quite bad terms with the Taliban (the US never recognized the Taliban regime).
To begin with, the Iranians are not Arabs.
Secondly, you are right that hatred of our freedom has been harped upon too much. On the other hand, we should not simply discount cultural reasons altogether. The American empire since World War II has been trying to create a certain kind of world - one with open borders, liberal values, free trade, etc. I happen to believe that this is a basically good mission - turning the rest of the world into replicas of the US and Western Europe. Others may disagree. I am not going to argue about the methods used. But some extremists do hate this mission, and its representative, the US, because of the mission itself. People who reject gay rights, women's rights, secular government, etc., reject America's mission, and are willing to strike out at the US for it.
I am not saying this is the only reason why the Muslim world hates America. But at the same time, we should not discount the fact that Islamic fundamentalists hate many values associated with the West.
If HP is now the largest vendor of preinstalled MS OS's, then clearly MS needs HP more than HP needs MS.
:)
It's a crazy company that lets a vendor dictate their policies rather than respond to client needs/wants.
That is not necessarily true. In the long run, maybe Microsoft needs HP more than HP needs Microsoft. Certainly in the long run, HP has power with Microsoft. But in the short run, if MS jacked up the prices HP had to pay for Windows, or stopped selling Windows to HP altogether, HP would be completely screwed. HP is already losing market share to Dell pretty quickly - imagine how much Dell would destroy HP if all of a sudden corporations and consumers couldn't buy Windows PCs from HP any more.
Of course, for Microsoft to do so would be illegal, but Microsoft is not above illegal things
This circumstance has nothing to do with price fixing, it has to do with simple supply and demand. The fact is, once the book is written, it doesn't cost much to publish and print in the UK or in the US. But the publishers have determined that they can charge Americans higher prices and thereby make more profits, because that's how they maximize profits. This works because most Americans don't think of ordering in Britain and having it shipped over the Atlantic, or because for many books that is cost prohibitive.
Price fixing is when firms get together and illegally determine the price of a good. That is not happening here. It's not like the publisher of this book got together with other publishers to determine that this book should be sold for more in the US. They all arrived at this decision independently, because it's a pretty easy one to make. This is a very transparent process.
Yes, Britain's health and rail systems have many problems. But the blame is not Thatcher. When Thatcher came in, Britain was heading towards defaulting on its debt, and thereby having to choose between cutting services (i.e., the health and rail systems would have to be cut anyway) or raising taxes, which would further decrease incentives for business creation and personal work.
Now, I am certainly no free-market zealot, but the fact is that when your tax rates keep rising in order to keep public servics available to all, at some point more and more people make the decision to stop working and to just live off the free public services. This of course, in the long run, means that government revenues are not as high as they need to be, and taxes have to be raised again, in a negative cycle.
On the whole, the British economy today is far better than the German or French economies - and quite the opposite was true when Thatcher came to power. I'd say Britain has done something right. Clearly the majority of voters feel so, as it's been Thatcher, Major (Tory), and Blair (Labour emulating Tory policies) since 1980.