One, was to demoralize Japan as much as possible to force them to the table for unconditional surrender
Which brings up an interesting point -- why was "unconditional surrender" necessary? As I understand it, one of the biggest sticking points was that they were afraid we would prohibit them from having an emperor, maybe even try their current emperor as a war criminal and execute him. As you pointed out, they viewed him as a god, so this was absolutely unacceptable. Why was it necessary that we not allow conditions on the surrender, specifically allowing them to retain their emperor and promise not to try him as a war criminal? Furthermore, was it necessary to drop 2 nukes? Wouldn't a single city have made the point?
So please, put things in context. People need to understand, at that point in time in history, there wasn't anything lower, nothing more sub-human that a "Jap".
Why do I need to understand that? At risk of bringing Godwin's Law down in myself (we *are* talking about WWII already), the Nazis generally held a similar view of Jews at the time. That doesn't make anything they did acceptable, it just shows that the prevailing attitude was irrational and hateful, largely as a result of propaganda designed to achieve that end.
We had a new weapon...and a just cause. You do the math.
So the end justifies *any* means? We had a just cause, but we did unjust things to achieve it. Would our cause have justified bombing 3 cities? What about 4? What's so special about 2 -- would 1 have been sufficient? We did other horrible things in that war; those who think we had a just cause, so we were the "good guys" and could do no wrong are the ones who are ignorant on the subject (not to mention naive -- you have to be very naive indeed not to know that the winners write the history books). For an example of something else we did that is *very* difficult to defend as the best course without any doubts or qualifications, read about the bombing of Dresden.
The problem, fundamentally, is that there will be situations in which there won't be enough evidence in the context of the conventional criminal justice system to make an arrest and/or prosecute for a crime BEFORE a plot has been executed.
Of course we want to arrest people materially involved in a criminal plot before it is carried out -- that's why the very act of planning a criminal act (or at least one like a terrorist act, I don't pretend to know exactly what constitutes conspiracy) is also a prosecutable offense. On the other hand, if you don't even really have much evidence that someone was planning a terrorist attack, should you be able to imprison them and "interrogate" them? How long should you be able to imprison them without charging them with a specific crime (regardless of whether you are charging them in the criminal courts system or some other system)? Considering that the type of "interrogation" we're talking about is a worse punishment than mere imprisonment, should there be no more restriction of the interrogation tactics used on someone for whom we have scant evidence than those used on someone for whom we have overwhelming evidence, or someone who has already been tried and convicted?
To make my point more explicit -- yes there is more at stake when trying to prevent a terrorist attack than when trying to prevent auto theft, but there is also a lot more at stake for the person accused. Being convicted and sentenced to jail for life or even being sentenced to death is a possibility in the regular criminal court system, but here (in the worst case) we're talking about imprisonment and hard-core "interrogation" for the rest of their foreseeable life, without necessarily being convicted or even charged by anyone of anything. I would be OK with a loosening of the restrictions on law enforcement regarding suspected terrorists when it is believed immediate action is necessary to prevent a plot from taking place, but the Military Commissions Act allows far more than that. I just don't have enough faith in any government for that to be OK.
I agree with you that not everything need be a "slippery slope"; however, just because an inch is OK doesn't mean a mile is. In general, the smaller the steps we take, the safer we are from accidentally stepping too far without realizing it.
But literature or music or art - give me a million monkeys and enough time and I'll recreate ALL literature.
Give me a million monkeys and enough time and I'll recreate ALL patents that any country has ever granted.
I'm not sure what your point is -- you seem to be implying that an inventive patent has something that no literature or music or art can ever have. But it should take more monkey-years to recreate a long novel with an occasional picture than it would to recreate even a very long patent with a few diagrams.
"Balls in the air" was chosen because everyone has seen juggling; it supersedes "irons in the fire" because most people think that hamburgers grow on trees.
Am I the only one who has no idea what that hamburger reference means?
"Too many irons in the fire" refers to blacksmithing, and has nothing to do with hamburgers (unless I'm really missing something). The idea was that a blacksmith would pipeline his work by putting more than one iron in the fire at once, putting another in the fire as he pulled one out to work. Having a lot of irons in the fire would mean he had a lot of tasks prepped and ready to be worked on -- but without the implication that they needed his immediate attention.
In contrast, having lots of balls in the air would mean you have lots of things going on which all require some degree of attention; having too many balls in the air can easily put you in a situation where you've taken on more than you can handle, while having too many irons in the fire really isn't a problem because they're just sitting there waiting for when you're ready. Thus, "balls in the air" is a more appropriate expression.
I believe those are all health risks associated with *smoking* marijuana. However, there are other methods that I believe are not connected with those particular risks -- for example, brownies.
So, if smoking pot were illegal due to the health/economic factors you listed, where does that put ingestion?
So do you think that weapons should be registered to specific individuals, so that (should a crime be committed with that weapon) it is possible (at least in some cases, I don't know how reliable this is) to connect spent ammunition with the weapon that fired it? If so, then that is a good reason to prevent gun trafficking (which would prevent weapons from being properly traceable to their owners). If not, then suddenly it would seem much easier for a criminal to just toss a gun in a dumpster after killing 20 people without getting caught.
Just to make this explicit, what I am asking about is the paper trail associated with legitimate weapon sales, not restriction of ownership of weapons (the only part of gun regulation you've been making a case against).
Despite the fact that your nickname (NewYorkCountryLawyer) should make this clear (not to mention that you did that slashdot interview a while back), most posters around here probably won't realize you're actually a lawyer unless you include the acronym IAAL in your post. It stands for "I am a lawyer", in contrast to the more common disclaimer of IANAL ("I am not a lawyer").
I'm not promising you'll get more people to listen to you if you put "Yes, IAAL." in your posts, but you might.
Also, in case you didn't notice, slashdot automatically detects URLs and turns them into links, so you don't need to use HTML for the link unless you want it to look like this. (For reference, that was <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/html/">this</a> ).
And <br> makes a line break, but it seems you figured that one out. As someone else mentioned, if you use the "preview" button, you can notice mistakes before they get posted.
Or, if a machine taps your communications and takes a transcript, even if not "directed by a person" (didn't a person have to direct the general tapping?), weren't you still tapped?
That is debatable, and is the point of GP's post -- it is probably possible to find so many different shades of grey that, although you can make a decision about where to draw the line, doing so will almost certainly leave two very similar shades of grey on opposite sides of the line, and so in the neighborhood of those cases your line will seem arbitrary (if not ridiculous) if the law does not also allow for shades of crime and punishment so the justice system can serve punishment that -- forgive the geek lingo -- degrades gracefully to match the degree of "wrongness". Defining an operational legal definition of wiretapping is not trivial, especially if you try to make it totally black and white ("under these circumstances, it is wiretapping, anything else is not, period.").
Here's the setup: The FBI installs a wireless bug in a phone booth because someone they have been tailing seems to use that phone booth for making important calls. They have a warrant that allows them to wiretap this suspect. Unfortunately, you decide to use that phone booth to make a call. Consider the following different scenarios, as if you were trying to re-write the law to define under which sets of circumstances the FBI agents should be prosecutable.
The bug's microphone is off while you are in the booth, and can be turned on via some remote control. The FBI never turns it on while you are in the booth, because they are watching the booth for their suspect.
Same as #1, except that the bug was poorly designed, so the microphone is always on, but the wireless transmitter is what is turned on and off via remote. The bug never stores the information the microphone picks up, and it is never retransmitted.
Same tech as #1. An FBI agent accidentally bumps the remote control, which falls to the floor and causes the bug to begin transmitting while you are in the booth. The agent turns off the bug within 30 seconds of this mishap.
Same as #2, except that the bug was designed this way intentionally, and with a 1-minute audio buffer. It has a signal-processor that attempts to identify speech (versus other background noise), and then sends a signal to the nearby FBI surveillance team which causes something to beep. This allows the team to pay less attention to the booth (maybe so they can d paperwork, who knows), and then check when there is a beep to see if it is their suspect. If it is, they can use their remote control to tell the bug to start transmitting; because of the 1-minute buffer in the bug, they can do this without missing any of the conversation.
Same as #4, but rather than have a surveillance team and a someone tailing the suspect, they instead only have a tail. The bug automatically transmits anything it recognizes as speech to a computer in a nearby building (where the surveillance team would have been in the previous scenarios), which records everything transmitted. Since the tail knows when the suspect was in the phone booth, they enter the times the suspect was in the booth, and the computer gives them the appropriate recording snips while automatically deleting the rest.
Same as #5, but the bug always transmits. The computer does the signal processing to determine when there is enough human speech to save a clip, automatically discarding the rest.
Same as #6, except the computer has a voice-print of the suspect, and only saves clips which contain the suspect talking, rather than any human speech.
Same as #6, except the computer stores all human speech clips in a database, indexed by voice-print. If the FBI later made you a suspect and obtained authorization (like a write tapping warrant), they would listen to your clips, retrieving them by your voice-print. If they do not mark your clips to be saved
But compare the cost of 6 months no rent, several legal filings, repairing even if just repainting the rental, possible police charges and advertising/replacment renter cost to just loosing 12 to 24 months rent and droping the insurance coverage to a lower level because it is now empty. It probably won't be a complete wash and there is no guarentee that anything like that would happen but he may actualy only be loosing the difference of one to two months a year rent wich doesn't seem as much in the end.
I guess what I don't understand is why he feels there's no other (legal) way to figure out who is going to do this beyond looking at the fact that they're section 8. I understand that getting a bad tenant costs money, but what I'm suggesting is that there should be a way to avoid bad tenants without having to close up shop and refuse to rent to anyone -- that implies to me that he felt there was no (legal) justification for him to avoid the people he wanted to avoid. If these people he wants to avoid stop paying rent after 3 months every place they go, they will have absolutely horrid credit. Couldn't a credit check catch them?
Similarly, for the other types of bad tenants mentioned in the post I was responding to (prostitutes, muggers, drug dealers, etc), won't many of them have a criminal record?
My point was not that this landlord should have welcomed bad tenants with open arms, it was that it seems there should be a legal way to filter out (at least the vast majority of) the bad potential tenants, while still leaving the doors open for good potential tenants. Every good tenant he ddn't get because of this decision is a full 5-6 months of lost rent.
I think GP's explanation is a lot more likely than yours, given the loss of money involved and the other options available.
If credit checks, criminal record checks, and/or job references don't turn up a decent (read: "defensible in a court of law") reason not to rent to someone, but he still doesn't want to rent to them, maybe it's not just "drug dealers, drug users, thieves, muggers, robbers, murders, [and] hookers" he's trying to keep out -- most of them would have bad credit, have a criminal record and/or lack a positive and verifiable job reference, which AFAIK are legally defensible reasons to turn down a potential tenant.
Even if someone is in one of the groups you mentioned, if they have existing and good credit, a clean criminal record, and a good job reference, then they probably won't be causing any problems for their landlord. In the situation described by GP, the landlord chose to completely close down non-commercial rental properties for a year, which probably lost him a sizable chunk of income. I think it's reasonable to conclude that he might have had some other motivation that could get him in trouble, so maybe he prefered to lose out on that money for a year rather than to make obvious his renting pattern.
What counts as philosophy is itself debated and varies across philosophical traditions.
[ass]
From your quote, which you claim is from Wikipedia. I would like to point out that it contradicts your assertion that you are right and the other poster is wrong about what philosophy is. In fact, if we take the wikipedia entry you quoted to be authoritative, then I can authoritatively claim you are both wrong for claiming or implying that the definition of "what philosophy is" is an objective fact, rather than something subjective and debated (basically, subject to opinion).[/ass]
I see where you are coming from, and I can't say I'm up for trying to force people to vote. It would be nice if there were some reasonable and appropriate way to encourage voting, though. It would be even better if there were a none of the above option, so that people can express their "I don't like any of these losers" opinion by their vote, rather than by their lack of a vote.
That was what I was thinking exactly. A better analogy would be the RIAA suing someone for downloading mp3s, burning their own CDs of these mp3s, and then selling them. You won't find many slashdotters who would stick their neck out to support that situation.
Wasn't that what got Koresh's cult into trouble? Because he thought that he was God, and could do anything he wanted, including having sex with his own daughters?
No. Don't be ridiculous. Did you even read what GP said? (Seriously, am I just feeding a troll here?) It wasn't thinking he was God that got Koresh's cult into trouble. They could have thought he was God all they wanted. And Koresh could have thought he was God all he wanted, too. But if you break an incest law, you get in trouble, regardless of why you decided to break it.
The same would be true if I stood in the middle of a highway blocking traffic because I thought it would bring peace and happiness to the world:
Am I allowed to think that doing so will bring peace and happiness to the world? Yes.
Am I allowed to form a cult where my followers think that my standing in the middle of a highway blocking traffic will bring peace and happiness to the world? Yes.
Am I allowed to actually stand in the middle of a highway blocking traffic? No.
Is arresting me for doing it persecution of a religion? No.
Is arresting my followers for trying to prevent the police from arresting me persecution of a religion? No.
That only works if you are linking to webpages you create or can edit. If I'm linking to someone else's massive webpage with no anchor tags, it would be nice to be able to have the link automatically take them to the paragraph/sentence/image I want (just like an anchor tag allows, but without the anchor being explicitly coded). The alternative is to give the link, and say "scroll down to the 5th paragraph in the section on asshats, next-to-last sentence".
GP's suggestion wouldn't have to change the way named anchors work -- they're still a good thing. But it would be nice if there were also a way to link to arbitrary locations in a webpage.
> a bipartisan comittee who could then tally and report the vote in an official count
I think this is a great idea, because Republicans and Democrats would never agree to work together against anyone (*cough* third party candidates *cough*).
While you are correct that the problem began before that, you are not correct when you imply that it is a long-running and deep-seeded issue. (Emphasis mine in the below quote.)
"Before the 20th century, most Jews in Palestine belonged to old Yishuv, or community, that had settled more for religious than for political reasons. There was little if any conflict between them and the Arab population. Tensions began after the first Zionist settlers arrived in the 1880's...when [they] purchased land from absentee Arab owners, leading to dispossession of the peasants who had cultivated it." Don Peretz, "The Arab-Israeli Dispute."
It is not an Arab vs. Jew issue, or at least that's not how it began. It is an Arab vs. Zionist issue, and Zionism has only been active since the late 1800's. The above quote is from here, part of the book "The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict", Published by "Jews for Justice in the Middle East". It is a very interesting read, I suggest you take a look at it if you want to understand the history of the conflict.
Sovereign states may have whatever weapons they wish, but when their leadership pronounces that their goal is to wipe out a neighbor state (Israel), it no longer becomes acceptable to the international community to allow such weapons programs to go forth.
This is a very interesting issue. It seems that the prevailing belief that Iran's leader suggested active elimination of the country of Israel is actually the result of a mis-quote. You can read about the controversy here, here, or here. Or, if you'd prefer to investigate it yourself, google for the words "Iran Israel should be wiped off the map translation" (not the phrase -- remove the quotes).
To address a different issue: you said The difference is that Israel wasn't targeting those civilians. While that may be true, I don't think they were exactly making a responsible effort to minimize civilian casualties. Have you been reading about all the (U.S. paid-for) cluster bombs they used? You can find similar disregard for non-Israeli lives in how they act towards Palestinians. Last time I checked the casualty rates, Israel was killing about 10 times as many people as the casualties they took, and I think their terrrorist-to-civilian kill rate was lower than the military-to-civilian kill rate of their enemies. Sorry for the lack of citations on this part, but it's hard to track down these numbers. At worst, treat this as a "I won't take your word for it, but I'll look into it myself" situation.
The trick with roundup ready seed is that it doesn't convey any advantage over regular seed UNLESS under the special condition where you are applying roundup to the field. So when the farmer ended up with 95% of his plants being roundup ready, it became obvious that the farmer was collecting and specifically planting the round up ready seed intentionally [...]
I haven't read about this occurance, so maybe there was other evidence, but I don't think your conclusion follows from the evidence you state beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, all you need is for him to have a small amount of Round-up Ready crop, from passing trucks or whatever. Then, if he uses Round-up year after year, how much you want to bet that the Round-up Ready plants would take over in a relatively smalll number of years? He didn't need to be doing anything intentionally if he were merely putting his crops under selective pressures that would significantly favor the engineered plants. And if exposing the plants to Round-up doesn't significantly favor the engineered plants, then I have to question whether the engineering job on the plants was even that great.
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One, was to demoralize Japan as much as possible to force them to the table for unconditional surrender
Which brings up an interesting point -- why was "unconditional surrender" necessary? As I understand it, one of the biggest sticking points was that they were afraid we would prohibit them from having an emperor, maybe even try their current emperor as a war criminal and execute him. As you pointed out, they viewed him as a god, so this was absolutely unacceptable. Why was it necessary that we not allow conditions on the surrender, specifically allowing them to retain their emperor and promise not to try him as a war criminal? Furthermore, was it necessary to drop 2 nukes? Wouldn't a single city have made the point?
So please, put things in context. People need to understand, at that point in time in history, there wasn't anything lower, nothing more sub-human that a "Jap".
Why do I need to understand that? At risk of bringing Godwin's Law down in myself (we *are* talking about WWII already), the Nazis generally held a similar view of Jews at the time. That doesn't make anything they did acceptable, it just shows that the prevailing attitude was irrational and hateful, largely as a result of propaganda designed to achieve that end.
We had a new weapon...and a just cause. You do the math.
So the end justifies *any* means? We had a just cause, but we did unjust things to achieve it. Would our cause have justified bombing 3 cities? What about 4? What's so special about 2 -- would 1 have been sufficient? We did other horrible things in that war; those who think we had a just cause, so we were the "good guys" and could do no wrong are the ones who are ignorant on the subject (not to mention naive -- you have to be very naive indeed not to know that the winners write the history books). For an example of something else we did that is *very* difficult to defend as the best course without any doubts or qualifications, read about the bombing of Dresden.
Not everyone can read source code you elitist asshole.
This is slashdot. The correct term is "insensitive clod".
To make my point more explicit -- yes there is more at stake when trying to prevent a terrorist attack than when trying to prevent auto theft, but there is also a lot more at stake for the person accused. Being convicted and sentenced to jail for life or even being sentenced to death is a possibility in the regular criminal court system, but here (in the worst case) we're talking about imprisonment and hard-core "interrogation" for the rest of their foreseeable life, without necessarily being convicted or even charged by anyone of anything. I would be OK with a loosening of the restrictions on law enforcement regarding suspected terrorists when it is believed immediate action is necessary to prevent a plot from taking place, but the Military Commissions Act allows far more than that. I just don't have enough faith in any government for that to be OK.
I agree with you that not everything need be a "slippery slope"; however, just because an inch is OK doesn't mean a mile is. In general, the smaller the steps we take, the safer we are from accidentally stepping too far without realizing it.
But literature or music or art - give me a million monkeys and enough time and I'll recreate ALL literature.
Give me a million monkeys and enough time and I'll recreate ALL patents that any country has ever granted.
I'm not sure what your point is -- you seem to be implying that an inventive patent has something that no literature or music or art can ever have. But it should take more monkey-years to recreate a long novel with an occasional picture than it would to recreate even a very long patent with a few diagrams.
"Balls in the air" was chosen because everyone has seen juggling; it supersedes "irons in the fire" because most people think that hamburgers grow on trees.
Am I the only one who has no idea what that hamburger reference means?
"Too many irons in the fire" refers to blacksmithing, and has nothing to do with hamburgers (unless I'm really missing something). The idea was that a blacksmith would pipeline his work by putting more than one iron in the fire at once, putting another in the fire as he pulled one out to work. Having a lot of irons in the fire would mean he had a lot of tasks prepped and ready to be worked on -- but without the implication that they needed his immediate attention.
In contrast, having lots of balls in the air would mean you have lots of things going on which all require some degree of attention; having too many balls in the air can easily put you in a situation where you've taken on more than you can handle, while having too many irons in the fire really isn't a problem because they're just sitting there waiting for when you're ready. Thus, "balls in the air" is a more appropriate expression.
Cancer, emphazema [sic], heart disease, etc...
I believe those are all health risks associated with *smoking* marijuana. However, there are other methods that I believe are not connected with those particular risks -- for example, brownies.
So, if smoking pot were illegal due to the health/economic factors you listed, where does that put ingestion?
So do you think that weapons should be registered to specific individuals, so that (should a crime be committed with that weapon) it is possible (at least in some cases, I don't know how reliable this is) to connect spent ammunition with the weapon that fired it? If so, then that is a good reason to prevent gun trafficking (which would prevent weapons from being properly traceable to their owners). If not, then suddenly it would seem much easier for a criminal to just toss a gun in a dumpster after killing 20 people without getting caught.
Just to make this explicit, what I am asking about is the paper trail associated with legitimate weapon sales, not restriction of ownership of weapons (the only part of gun regulation you've been making a case against).
Despite the fact that your nickname (NewYorkCountryLawyer) should make this clear (not to mention that you did that slashdot interview a while back), most posters around here probably won't realize you're actually a lawyer unless you include the acronym IAAL in your post. It stands for "I am a lawyer", in contrast to the more common disclaimer of IANAL ("I am not a lawyer").
I'm not promising you'll get more people to listen to you if you put "Yes, IAAL." in your posts, but you might.
Stop posting all these stupid memes, you're going to clog the tubes! The Internet's not just a truck you can dump things on!
Try this: http://www.w3schools.com/html/
Also, in case you didn't notice, slashdot automatically detects URLs and turns them into links, so you don't need to use HTML for the link unless you want it to look like this. (For reference, that was <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/html/">this</a> ).
And <br> makes a line break, but it seems you figured that one out. As someone else mentioned, if you use the "preview" button, you can notice mistakes before they get posted.
Of course that's why I root for distros like Ubuntu
When I first read that, I thought you were saying you hack other machines for the benefit of Ubuntu.
That is debatable, and is the point of GP's post -- it is probably possible to find so many different shades of grey that, although you can make a decision about where to draw the line, doing so will almost certainly leave two very similar shades of grey on opposite sides of the line, and so in the neighborhood of those cases your line will seem arbitrary (if not ridiculous) if the law does not also allow for shades of crime and punishment so the justice system can serve punishment that -- forgive the geek lingo -- degrades gracefully to match the degree of "wrongness". Defining an operational legal definition of wiretapping is not trivial, especially if you try to make it totally black and white ("under these circumstances, it is wiretapping, anything else is not, period.").
Here's the setup: The FBI installs a wireless bug in a phone booth because someone they have been tailing seems to use that phone booth for making important calls. They have a warrant that allows them to wiretap this suspect. Unfortunately, you decide to use that phone booth to make a call. Consider the following different scenarios, as if you were trying to re-write the law to define under which sets of circumstances the FBI agents should be prosecutable.
Similarly, for the other types of bad tenants mentioned in the post I was responding to (prostitutes, muggers, drug dealers, etc), won't many of them have a criminal record?
My point was not that this landlord should have welcomed bad tenants with open arms, it was that it seems there should be a legal way to filter out (at least the vast majority of) the bad potential tenants, while still leaving the doors open for good potential tenants. Every good tenant he ddn't get because of this decision is a full 5-6 months of lost rent.
I think GP's explanation is a lot more likely than yours, given the loss of money involved and the other options available.
If credit checks, criminal record checks, and/or job references don't turn up a decent (read: "defensible in a court of law") reason not to rent to someone, but he still doesn't want to rent to them, maybe it's not just "drug dealers, drug users, thieves, muggers, robbers, murders, [and] hookers" he's trying to keep out -- most of them would have bad credit, have a criminal record and/or lack a positive and verifiable job reference, which AFAIK are legally defensible reasons to turn down a potential tenant.
Even if someone is in one of the groups you mentioned, if they have existing and good credit, a clean criminal record, and a good job reference, then they probably won't be causing any problems for their landlord. In the situation described by GP, the landlord chose to completely close down non-commercial rental properties for a year, which probably lost him a sizable chunk of income. I think it's reasonable to conclude that he might have had some other motivation that could get him in trouble, so maybe he prefered to lose out on that money for a year rather than to make obvious his renting pattern.
I see where you are coming from, and I can't say I'm up for trying to force people to vote. It would be nice if there were some reasonable and appropriate way to encourage voting, though. It would be even better if there were a none of the above option, so that people can express their "I don't like any of these losers" opinion by their vote, rather than by their lack of a vote.
I would say it's not a matter of "Best Available", but "Best Option the Two-Party System + Corporate Sponsorship is Willing to Offer".
That was what I was thinking exactly. A better analogy would be the RIAA suing someone for downloading mp3s, burning their own CDs of these mp3s, and then selling them. You won't find many slashdotters who would stick their neck out to support that situation.
The same would be true if I stood in the middle of a highway blocking traffic because I thought it would bring peace and happiness to the world:
- Am I allowed to think that doing so will bring peace and happiness to the world? Yes.
- Am I allowed to form a cult where my followers think that my standing in the middle of a highway blocking traffic will bring peace and happiness to the world? Yes.
- Am I allowed to actually stand in the middle of a highway blocking traffic? No.
- Is arresting me for doing it persecution of a religion? No.
- Is arresting my followers for trying to prevent the police from arresting me persecution of a religion? No.
What about this is hard to understand?That only works if you are linking to webpages you create or can edit. If I'm linking to someone else's massive webpage with no anchor tags, it would be nice to be able to have the link automatically take them to the paragraph/sentence/image I want (just like an anchor tag allows, but without the anchor being explicitly coded). The alternative is to give the link, and say "scroll down to the 5th paragraph in the section on asshats, next-to-last sentence".
GP's suggestion wouldn't have to change the way named anchors work -- they're still a good thing. But it would be nice if there were also a way to link to arbitrary locations in a webpage.
> a bipartisan comittee who could then tally and report the vote in an official count
I think this is a great idea, because Republicans and Democrats would never agree to work together against anyone (*cough* third party candidates *cough*).
It is not an Arab vs. Jew issue, or at least that's not how it began. It is an Arab vs. Zionist issue, and Zionism has only been active since the late 1800's. The above quote is from here, part of the book "The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict", Published by "Jews for Justice in the Middle East". It is a very interesting read, I suggest you take a look at it if you want to understand the history of the conflict.
I find your ideas interesting and think you should subscribe to my newsletter.
To address a different issue: you said The difference is that Israel wasn't targeting those civilians. While that may be true, I don't think they were exactly making a responsible effort to minimize civilian casualties. Have you been reading about all the (U.S. paid-for) cluster bombs they used? You can find similar disregard for non-Israeli lives in how they act towards Palestinians. Last time I checked the casualty rates, Israel was killing about 10 times as many people as the casualties they took, and I think their terrrorist-to-civilian kill rate was lower than the military-to-civilian kill rate of their enemies. Sorry for the lack of citations on this part, but it's hard to track down these numbers. At worst, treat this as a "I won't take your word for it, but I'll look into it myself" situation.