That's not quite what he said. He said that wars - gunfire sanctioned by governments - is still politics, even though we call it something else. There's nothing in there about whether it should or should not be that way.
Still down. Also possible they took it down preemptively, or that people wanted to post about how that's not what true conservatism is about. Hard to tell, but... I wouldn't hold my breath about what it will say.
Mostly the same, really? I read the last three posted pages of comments at Fox News, and had to turn away. Gems like "It's Obama's fault for agitating" made me nauseous. I read about 40 comments on the HuffPo, and it was mostly updates on what was going on. The few partisan comments that were there were merely pointing to the history of violence that Giffords had been subjected to in the past.
There's only extreme wing of a political movement that is going as far as shooting representatives of a party.
Uh, did you read the Wikipedia link you posted? "Cone cells are densely packed in the fovea, but gradually become sparser towards the periphery of the retina." They aren't located only in the fovea, but all across the retina. They're merely more densely packed in the fovea than towards the edge. What most likely happened to your classmate is cone bleaching: the longer you stare at a particular image, the more the particular cones bleach their photoreceptors, and the harder it is to figure out the correct color. Depending on what color the chalkboard was, it's quite possible he simply had stared at it for too long.
The retina still perceives color at the edges, it just does so less effectively than if you focus on the center.
Spot on. For anyone not from the Bay Area, Marin is where rich people go to save their Karma from being polluted by the average peons in the rest of the world. It's got a working class as well, and some regular folks just trying to live there, but it is certainly the strong hold of the upper-class hippy.
Even for California, Marin is pretty far out there. This kind of nutjob ordinance is a pretty standard stunt for them, and has nothing to do with any real concerns that reasonable people might have.
Are you worried about IR lenses? Here's a very simple thing you can do to keep IR irrelevant: properly insulate your house. And with proper overhangs and tree coverage of your property, HD cameras won't be nearly as useful as well. Who knew that the tinfoil hatters and treehuggers would be on the same side one day?
Uh, I agree with your conclusion, but I think you display symptoms of the exact problem you're decrying. Here, let me help you....
Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece.
That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.
Our people developed an entire branch of music known as Jazz.
Only if you define "our people" as also consisting of the black people in the 1920s and 1930s - which no one in polite society would admit to at that time. Not to mention that Jazz music was pretty much frowned upon in the US when it got started.
Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here.
The primary interaction that Americans had with the locals was killing them. The blending, reproducing and learning from was a small subset thereof.
From them, we learned to place a vast amount of importance on the individual and independence.
Nice story, but individualism, self-reliance and independence is already found in the religion of the original settlers: hard-core protestants who believed that success in life was a sign of closeness to god, and hard work a god-approved way of getting there.
We learned an appreciation for nature, and the resources it provides (who, before us, had a national forest preservation system?)
That would be the Germans in the 19th century. You can go back even earlier if you look into more exotic places.
Our culture includes the blending of numerous ethnic communities into a veritable melting pot of ideas and values.
It's understood that a better analogy is that of a salad bowl. Blending of ethnic communities is rare, and takes a very long time. Just look at the various "-towns" in major cities.
We have had dark times in our short history, and we will continue to have dark times as time marches on. We had eras dominated by racism. We had eras dominated by sexism. Currently we are trying to end an era dominated by sexual preference intolerance. We have had wars. We have had depressions. We have had Civil Wars where brothers killed brothers and fathers fought their sons. Yeah, we've had some dark times. We ran the Native American population into the ground. But you know what? We learned from those times.
You sure about that? Because all I see is that we're just making the same stupid mistakes again. Racial profiling a la Japanese Internment act is one large scale gun assault away from happening. A lot of people are clamoring to redo the same mistakes that lead to the Great Depression. I could go on for a while.
I'd argue that the Golden Ages where never really that golden - maybe gilded for some, but it's been a pretty brutal slog for a lot of people. Again, I agree with your conclusion. I just think you might want to update your data points a bit.
And this is the #1 reason why Tibet will never be free from Chinese rule. Supporters of Tibetan independence have... some goodwill through human rights on their side. China has the need to control the main water sources in Asia on its side.
Hmmm, I guess we should start taking Chinese espionage seriously?
No, we should be taking the Chinese seriously. Every time one of these articles come out, there's a large contingent of people who dismiss it as "They're just copying", "It's still not a challenge to what we have" and, my favorite "These commies will never catch up to us."
Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime? And that their plans include putting China back into the center of the world, where they believe it rightfully belongs? Maybe the F-35 will be enough to counter any threat from the Chinese for the next 20 years. But after that, we better make sure we have the technology edge, because we sure as hell won't have the manpower or economy edge.
Completely wrong. What is required is the installation of a specific USB driver that allows for a device to draw more than a trickle charge via the USB port. This module comes with the Blackberry suite you have to install if you want to do things like backups. The cable does not matter at all. How do I know? I had a Blackberry pearl until recently, and I charged just fine from both OSX and windows with about the half-dozen no-name mini-USB cables I have floating around. The only necessary thing was the updated USB driver.
Wrong. I'd ask you for a citation that supports your statement, but it's pointless, because there isn't a source for it. You made it up out of thin air. And failed to mention that the only "news" organization that actively lies about party affiliation is Fox news.
Frankly, I just have one (math) question for CAGW proponents: since when can you predict a chaotic, tightly-coupled, nonlinear system more than one iteration into the future within one sigma of reality?
You understand neither statistics nor chaos theory.
Ask me whether the coin I'm flipping will be heads or tails. My prediction rate will be pretty lousy. Ask me whether the coin I'm going to flip 1000 times is going to be 800 times heads, 800 times tails or something in between, and my prediction will be pretty accurate.
A chaotic system is one that doesn't exhibit a linear pattern over long iterations and where starting conditions strongly influence end states. This means that it is entirely possible to model (and therefore predict) chaotic systems far into the future. You just can't do it without going through all the intermediary steps.
Or, it could just be that 70% of democratic candidates are generally positive characters, and 70% of republican candidates are negative. Sadly, the statistics you mention do not allow us to distinguish the two.
Learn to read before responding. Nowhere did I mention the impact of the Reichstag burning on the passing of the Enabling Act. This is about coalitions voting for people they don't like in order to exert control, as well as just some basic historical facts the original poster seemed to have wrong.
in 1933 the German Conservatives decided to support Hitler as chancellor to destroy the Nazi movement by confronting its ludicrous proposals with the cold reality of real life government.
What the hell are you talking about? The closest thing that I can think is that Centrists supported the Nazis and DNVP in voting for the Enabling Act, which essentially gave Hitler dictatorial powers. But even before that, Hitler controlled over 40% of the German Reichstag. If you're talking about the deal that made Hitler Chancellor, that wasn't Conservatives supporting him, that was industrialists and von Papen thinking that the Nazis were not as powerful as before, and that Hitler could be controlled.
All in all, Hitler's rise to power was based on a bit of luck, a huge popularity and some miscalculations by some key politicians about what Hitler would be like.
That aside, yes, this proposal is playing with fire. Too many things can happen. For one, it is entirely possible that Obama cannot or does not want to run for re-election. Then what?
It's already been done successfully in South Carolina by the Republicans, and I suspect that this type of voting will just escalate. Hopefully this means that primaries will soon be replaced by a general free for all. Added bonus: it will reduce the value of being in the party structure when running for political positions.
I don't care if they stop selling titles because they don't sell well. I do care if they stop carrying titles because the corporation objects to them on moral grounds, for two reasons: 1) A corporation doesn't have morals. The morals it objects to are therefore the morals of a particular group of customers, which can be anything. I'd rather a corporation have exactly no morals in all situations, rather than espouse them on a case by case basis. 2) When corporations become large enough, their censorship is just as insidious in its effects as government censorship. It might not carry the the threat of violence, but its behavior-changing impact is very similar.
You aren't that dumb, are you? That's not the point.
I'm glad you agree that the analogies that ABCD brought up are idiotic.
The point is that Assange has provided Mugabe with now-public information from another source that he can use as a bludgeon.
Good point. However, what would have happened in the absence of Wikileaks? The exact same thing. Hard to argue then that Wikileaks was responsible for anything.
It's no different than his recent ID-ing of an ex-pat Iranian, sympathetic to the opposition in Iran, who was providing information on Iran's foreign industrial sources.
Much better point. There is potential harm here that is possible. I would say though that ID-ing is overstating what happened. It's more that through the information in the cables, it is possible to get a short list of candidates together that fit the profile. Not good, but somewhat falls short of ID-ing the guy.
Same sort of collateral damage as done in the Tsangvirai case.
No. Not even close.
The Iranian industrialist is so far the only case where there's even potential for identifiable collateral damage that's a direct result from a Wikileaks leak.
The point is that in this case, Wikileaks did zero to the state of democracy in Zimbabwe. Exactly zero. Zimbabwe is a real dictatorship, with democratic institutions that exist only for show. In other words, there is no democracy there. You can argue that Wikileaks might have made it marginally harder for Tsangvirai to operate. But if you knew what he is operating under right now, that's like arguing that the iron maiden makes it slightly harder to operate than a hot poker under the finger nails. Technically true, but the situation was shit before.
You might want to figure out who "the people" in your argument is before you start going down that road. Otherwise, you just come across as ignorant.
And no, Mugabe hasn't invaded another country or instituted gas chambers. Congratulations, he is merely ass-fucking a large amount of people in a place far away from you.
The only difference is that Mugabe has yet to invade another country. Congratulations, he hasn't exported violence, torture, graft, incompetence and paranoia. He is only inflicting it on some poor schmucks a continent away.
And you might want to figure out who "the people" is in your argument. A large enough chunk of the population is fed up enough with the situation that they risk beatings and death to protest and support an opposition movement. So when do you start to look into what's going in a country? Only when a vote takes place? What if the vote is rigged?
Do we blame the best friend who tells the stalker where their victim is living? Yes.
So Mugabe didn't know where Tsangvirai lives?
Do we blame the reporter for telling the mafia where the witness under protection is? Absolutely.
So Mugabe didn't know who the opposition leader was?
Wikileaks hasn't done squat that wasn't already known. Even to Zimbabweans. Anyone who considers Tsangvirai a traitor based on the Wikileaks cables already believed that he is a traitor, and the non-existence of Wikileaks wouldn't have changed squat.
For someone who throws around terms like "moron" and "bad analogies", you sure haven't made sure you aren't living in a glass house.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite what he said. He said that wars - gunfire sanctioned by governments - is still politics, even though we call it something else. There's nothing in there about whether it should or should not be that way.
Still down. Also possible they took it down preemptively, or that people wanted to post about how that's not what true conservatism is about. Hard to tell, but... I wouldn't hold my breath about what it will say.
Careful with those stones. The US has one massive genocide on its hands as well, one which it has never properly acknowledged either.
Mostly the same, really? I read the last three posted pages of comments at Fox News, and had to turn away. Gems like "It's Obama's fault for agitating" made me nauseous. I read about 40 comments on the HuffPo, and it was mostly updates on what was going on. The few partisan comments that were there were merely pointing to the history of violence that Giffords had been subjected to in the past.
There's only extreme wing of a political movement that is going as far as shooting representatives of a party.
Uh, did you read the Wikipedia link you posted? "Cone cells are densely packed in the fovea, but gradually become sparser towards the periphery of the retina." They aren't located only in the fovea, but all across the retina. They're merely more densely packed in the fovea than towards the edge. What most likely happened to your classmate is cone bleaching: the longer you stare at a particular image, the more the particular cones bleach their photoreceptors, and the harder it is to figure out the correct color. Depending on what color the chalkboard was, it's quite possible he simply had stared at it for too long.
The retina still perceives color at the edges, it just does so less effectively than if you focus on the center.
Spot on. For anyone not from the Bay Area, Marin is where rich people go to save their Karma from being polluted by the average peons in the rest of the world. It's got a working class as well, and some regular folks just trying to live there, but it is certainly the strong hold of the upper-class hippy.
Even for California, Marin is pretty far out there. This kind of nutjob ordinance is a pretty standard stunt for them, and has nothing to do with any real concerns that reasonable people might have.
Are you worried about IR lenses? Here's a very simple thing you can do to keep IR irrelevant: properly insulate your house. And with proper overhangs and tree coverage of your property, HD cameras won't be nearly as useful as well. Who knew that the tinfoil hatters and treehuggers would be on the same side one day?
Uh, I agree with your conclusion, but I think you display symptoms of the exact problem you're decrying. Here, let me help you....
Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece.
That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.
Our people developed an entire branch of music known as Jazz.
Only if you define "our people" as also consisting of the black people in the 1920s and 1930s - which no one in polite society would admit to at that time. Not to mention that Jazz music was pretty much frowned upon in the US when it got started.
Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here.
The primary interaction that Americans had with the locals was killing them. The blending, reproducing and learning from was a small subset thereof.
From them, we learned to place a vast amount of importance on the individual and independence.
Nice story, but individualism, self-reliance and independence is already found in the religion of the original settlers: hard-core protestants who believed that success in life was a sign of closeness to god, and hard work a god-approved way of getting there.
We learned an appreciation for nature, and the resources it provides (who, before us, had a national forest preservation system?)
That would be the Germans in the 19th century. You can go back even earlier if you look into more exotic places.
Our culture includes the blending of numerous ethnic communities into a veritable melting pot of ideas and values.
It's understood that a better analogy is that of a salad bowl. Blending of ethnic communities is rare, and takes a very long time. Just look at the various "-towns" in major cities.
We have had dark times in our short history, and we will continue to have dark times as time marches on. We had eras dominated by racism. We had eras dominated by sexism. Currently we are trying to end an era dominated by sexual preference intolerance. We have had wars. We have had depressions. We have had Civil Wars where brothers killed brothers and fathers fought their sons. Yeah, we've had some dark times. We ran the Native American population into the ground. But you know what? We learned from those times.
You sure about that? Because all I see is that we're just making the same stupid mistakes again. Racial profiling a la Japanese Internment act is one large scale gun assault away from happening. A lot of people are clamoring to redo the same mistakes that lead to the Great Depression. I could go on for a while.
I'd argue that the Golden Ages where never really that golden - maybe gilded for some, but it's been a pretty brutal slog for a lot of people. Again, I agree with your conclusion. I just think you might want to update your data points a bit.
And this is the #1 reason why Tibet will never be free from Chinese rule. Supporters of Tibetan independence have... some goodwill through human rights on their side. China has the need to control the main water sources in Asia on its side.
Hmmm, I guess we should start taking Chinese espionage seriously?
No, we should be taking the Chinese seriously. Every time one of these articles come out, there's a large contingent of people who dismiss it as "They're just copying", "It's still not a challenge to what we have" and, my favorite "These commies will never catch up to us."
Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime? And that their plans include putting China back into the center of the world, where they believe it rightfully belongs? Maybe the F-35 will be enough to counter any threat from the Chinese for the next 20 years. But after that, we better make sure we have the technology edge, because we sure as hell won't have the manpower or economy edge.
Completely wrong. What is required is the installation of a specific USB driver that allows for a device to draw more than a trickle charge via the USB port. This module comes with the Blackberry suite you have to install if you want to do things like backups. The cable does not matter at all. How do I know? I had a Blackberry pearl until recently, and I charged just fine from both OSX and windows with about the half-dozen no-name mini-USB cables I have floating around. The only necessary thing was the updated USB driver.
You overestimate the Italian people's need for Youtube, and underestimate Berlusconi's need to keep a media monopoly going.
Wrong. I'd ask you for a citation that supports your statement, but it's pointless, because there isn't a source for it. You made it up out of thin air. And failed to mention that the only "news" organization that actively lies about party affiliation is Fox news.
Frankly, I just have one (math) question for CAGW proponents: since when can you predict a chaotic, tightly-coupled, nonlinear system more than one iteration into the future within one sigma of reality?
You understand neither statistics nor chaos theory.
Ask me whether the coin I'm flipping will be heads or tails. My prediction rate will be pretty lousy. Ask me whether the coin I'm going to flip 1000 times is going to be 800 times heads, 800 times tails or something in between, and my prediction will be pretty accurate.
A chaotic system is one that doesn't exhibit a linear pattern over long iterations and where starting conditions strongly influence end states. This means that it is entirely possible to model (and therefore predict) chaotic systems far into the future. You just can't do it without going through all the intermediary steps.
Or, it could just be that 70% of democratic candidates are generally positive characters, and 70% of republican candidates are negative. Sadly, the statistics you mention do not allow us to distinguish the two.
Learn to read before responding. Nowhere did I mention the impact of the Reichstag burning on the passing of the Enabling Act. This is about coalitions voting for people they don't like in order to exert control, as well as just some basic historical facts the original poster seemed to have wrong.
in 1933 the German Conservatives decided to support Hitler as chancellor to destroy the Nazi movement by confronting its ludicrous proposals with the cold reality of real life government.
What the hell are you talking about? The closest thing that I can think is that Centrists supported the Nazis and DNVP in voting for the Enabling Act, which essentially gave Hitler dictatorial powers. But even before that, Hitler controlled over 40% of the German Reichstag. If you're talking about the deal that made Hitler Chancellor, that wasn't Conservatives supporting him, that was industrialists and von Papen thinking that the Nazis were not as powerful as before, and that Hitler could be controlled.
All in all, Hitler's rise to power was based on a bit of luck, a huge popularity and some miscalculations by some key politicians about what Hitler would be like.
That aside, yes, this proposal is playing with fire. Too many things can happen. For one, it is entirely possible that Obama cannot or does not want to run for re-election. Then what?
Not against Obama, but the SC democratic primary was almost certainly the result of Republicans voting for the least appealing candidate. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/former-sc-dem-chair-claims-alvin-greenes-income-more-suspicious-than-vote-numbers/
It's already been done successfully in South Carolina by the Republicans, and I suspect that this type of voting will just escalate. Hopefully this means that primaries will soon be replaced by a general free for all. Added bonus: it will reduce the value of being in the party structure when running for political positions.
I don't care if they stop selling titles because they don't sell well. I do care if they stop carrying titles because the corporation objects to them on moral grounds, for two reasons:
1) A corporation doesn't have morals. The morals it objects to are therefore the morals of a particular group of customers, which can be anything. I'd rather a corporation have exactly no morals in all situations, rather than espouse them on a case by case basis.
2) When corporations become large enough, their censorship is just as insidious in its effects as government censorship. It might not carry the the threat of violence, but its behavior-changing impact is very similar.
You aren't that dumb, are you? That's not the point.
I'm glad you agree that the analogies that ABCD brought up are idiotic.
The point is that Assange has provided Mugabe with now-public information from another source that he can use as a bludgeon.
Good point. However, what would have happened in the absence of Wikileaks? The exact same thing. Hard to argue then that Wikileaks was responsible for anything.
It's no different than his recent ID-ing of an ex-pat Iranian, sympathetic to the opposition in Iran, who was providing information on Iran's foreign industrial sources.
Much better point. There is potential harm here that is possible. I would say though that ID-ing is overstating what happened. It's more that through the information in the cables, it is possible to get a short list of candidates together that fit the profile. Not good, but somewhat falls short of ID-ing the guy.
Same sort of collateral damage as done in the Tsangvirai case.
No. Not even close.
The Iranian industrialist is so far the only case where there's even potential for identifiable collateral damage that's a direct result from a Wikileaks leak.
Not too shabby for what Wikileaks is doing.
The point is that in this case, Wikileaks did zero to the state of democracy in Zimbabwe. Exactly zero. Zimbabwe is a real dictatorship, with democratic institutions that exist only for show. In other words, there is no democracy there. You can argue that Wikileaks might have made it marginally harder for Tsangvirai to operate. But if you knew what he is operating under right now, that's like arguing that the iron maiden makes it slightly harder to operate than a hot poker under the finger nails. Technically true, but the situation was shit before.
You might want to figure out who "the people" in your argument is before you start going down that road. Otherwise, you just come across as ignorant.
And no, Mugabe hasn't invaded another country or instituted gas chambers. Congratulations, he is merely ass-fucking a large amount of people in a place far away from you.
The only difference is that Mugabe has yet to invade another country. Congratulations, he hasn't exported violence, torture, graft, incompetence and paranoia. He is only inflicting it on some poor schmucks a continent away.
And you might want to figure out who "the people" is in your argument. A large enough chunk of the population is fed up enough with the situation that they risk beatings and death to protest and support an opposition movement. So when do you start to look into what's going in a country? Only when a vote takes place? What if the vote is rigged?
Do we blame the best friend who tells the stalker where their victim is living? Yes.
So Mugabe didn't know where Tsangvirai lives?
Do we blame the reporter for telling the mafia where the witness under protection is? Absolutely.
So Mugabe didn't know who the opposition leader was?
Wikileaks hasn't done squat that wasn't already known. Even to Zimbabweans. Anyone who considers Tsangvirai a traitor based on the Wikileaks cables already believed that he is a traitor, and the non-existence of Wikileaks wouldn't have changed squat.
For someone who throws around terms like "moron" and "bad analogies", you sure haven't made sure you aren't living in a glass house.