The Union fought a devastating and horrific war to avoid dissolution. That history coupled with its unsavory moral context drastically inflates the barriers around considering a dissolution. For icing on the cake there is the propaganda which paints anyone who questions anything about the US as "anti-American" (as if that means anything), and at this point there's also quite a lot of inertia.
The US as a union will almost certainly collapse eventually, but it may be an even uglier chapter of history than the US Civil War.
Who would that be? We've almost all contributed (in the form of taxes and withholding) to the growth of Apple (and other huge corporations) by funding the government which gives them a favorable environment in which to profit. While it would certainly be better to just end corporate welfare, in the meantime we are definitely entitled to a portion of the gains we helped promote.
No one's assets belong to the state, but entities which thrive because of state policy absolutely morally owe compensation to the society which helped them thrive, and other state programs are often the mechanism in our society for that sort of compensation. Are there better ways? Absolutely. But crying "taxation is theft!" rings hollow when the state is creating policies in your favor.
many companies pick up and move all their people to a cheaper part of the US or worse, move all operations overseas, bringing only the best and brightest and outsourcing the rest.
If you seriously think Apple could do this without sacrificing their success, you're mistaken. Apple operates in California because it makes good business sense, not because they're somehow "better" than their competitors. Good talent has a lot of leverage in a labor market, and Apple employs a lot of good talent. To think the talent they depend on will just follow them wherever they set up a cubicle sweatshop is really naive.
It's not to say that good talent doesn't come from poorer places in the US or overseas, but that given the opportunity good talent will choose a better standard of living than that offered in the depressed labor markets you're talking about.
Where do you git off blamming Apple or any other corporation for the disgusting acts of congress and the senate?
They (not just Apple, all of them) own Congress. That's like asking where we get off blaming the mob when someone takes a bribe from the mob and then does what the mob bribed them to do.
Look in the mirror, then start voting like the future matters.
Until the campaigns aren't run (or run into the ground) by corporate America, this is a pointless demand. I can vote for candidates that represent my values until I'm blue in the face, but they still won't be on the ballot.
I looked all all of the comments you linked to. How many engaged in the overarching, 1:1 comparisons you seem to be objecting to?
Zero.
This is ridiculous. Each one of them is explicitly making a comparison to Syrian repression. The Syrian repression is the context and the object of the accusation of hypocrisy. Is it "1:1"? No comparison is "1:1".
"Now if only they'd use that on the TSA" How is the TSA engaged in repression like Syria, to warrant this comparison? Yes, TSA does engage in repression, but it's fundamentally different from that of Syria.
'I'd say "repressive regime" that "monitors dissidents" applies directly to the US, no?' How is the repression and monitoring of dissidents in the US comparable to that of Syria?
"Homeland Security" Same question as the last two.
"The NSA is currently building a huge data center to capture email, phone, sms, etc. data." How is a data center to store and retrieve domestic surveillance records like Syrian repression?
And the one to which I actually responded: "retroactive immunity [wikipedia.org] to telcos and other companies violating the civil rights of American citizens" How is retroactive immunity for domestic spying like Syrian repression?
Syrian repression is the object of the criticism in all of these cases. The comparison to Syrian repression is the basis of each accusation of hypocrisy. None of the examples of hypocrisy used comes close to rising to the level of comparable.
No, they're all pretty much variations of "those who live in glass houses should not throw stones".
Exactly! And that's a weak argument, if we're talking about "stones" that are really pebbles and "throwing" that is really an underhanded toss.
You can (and clearly do) disagree that the argument is weak, but what you can't do is say that I'm cheerleading for the US. I said all along, there are far worse US offenses to expose.
Nobody is saying the U.S. military is shelling American cities
I didn't say anyone is. I'm objecting to drawing parallels between US repression like domestic wiretapping (and other violations of civil liberties) with Syrian repression which is much more severe than the examples of US repression used by the posters I responded to. Here are the comments I was responding to:
Then I'd suggest getting less hung up on 1:1 comparisons that people aren't actually making. It is certainly possible to compare America's police state tactics to Syria, just as it's possible to compare the OWS crackdowns with the protests in Tahiri Square. That doesn't mean we're accusing Homeland Security of using rape as a weapon the way Mubarak's intelligence services did.
My point is that it's harmful to make comparisons that aren't valid. Yes, the US and Syria both surveil their populations extensively. But the consequences on either side are starkly different. You'll note that when a better comparison was made, I've acknowledged it.
I'm hung up on people being intellectually lazy about issues I care about—issues where thousands of lives are on the line. I'm sick of civil libertarians giving the fascists a persuasive advantage by failing to recognize that the way the US engages in repression is substantially more clever and advanced than that of brutal dictatorships. And I'm sick of the defensiveness of those advancing these lazy arguments (and those letting them slide) who revert to "with us or against us" braying when prompted to sharpen the critique. It's astonishing that people think I'm cheerleading for the US government because I'm pointing out that "retroactive immunity" for telecom companies isn't remotely equivalent to "monitor Twitter posts to prepare for ground assault". You do realize that's what the Syrian snoops are using their surveillance for, right?
There is a laundry list of US activities that do rise to the level of the ongoing atrocities in Syria. I'm grateful that some of this discussion has highlighted those.
Maybe because you're being overly literal. The point of making analogies other comparisons isn't to say two things are identical, but to, you know, compare them where they are comparable.
You think distinguishing between shelling cities and listening to phone calls is "overly literal"? They're not fucking comparable. They're certainly two repressive acts, but they are fundamentally different in terms of brutality.
In other words, you are sounding the like sort of person who hears a comparison between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam and proceed to spend your time complaining that there is no draft, jungle, or communist army to deal with and little time talking about spending blood and treasure to prop up an unpopular, extremely corrupt [nytimes.com] government with no clear mission or way out of the occupation.
Well, I don't know how you've drawn that conclusion. My argument is more akin to saying that the argument that the war in Afghanistan is like the war in Vietnam would be better served if we discuss real similarities—"spending blood and treasure to prop up an unpopular, extremely corrupt government with no clear mission or way out of the occupation"—rather than discussing extremely dissimilar things—an example might be comparing the use of drones to say the use of napalm. Both are awful and reprehensible and should be opposed—just as shelling cities and domestic wiretapping are both awful and reprehensible and should be opposed—but they're just fundamentally different, and by implying equivalence we undermine our intellectual and moral authority and lose the argument.
I want to win the argument against US malfeasance, not to defend the US government.
And yeah, having people kidnapped and tortured [salon.com] or assasinated by executive fiat [salon.com] are exactly the sort of activities that corrupt dictatorships like Syria engage in. We should know - the victim in the above "kidnapped and torture" link was flown to.....Syria to be tortured.
And this is a much better argument! You honestly don't see the difference between the argument you're making and the ones I responded to? You honestly believe that domestic wiretapping is as powerful an argument demonstrating US hypocrisy regarding Syria?
All I want is for people who are ostensibly on my side to stop squandering their moral and intellectual advantage.
I don't understand why the replies I'm getting seem to treat me like I think the US gov't is all sunshine and daisies. Yes, it is brutal. It is far, far more brutal than any odd dictatorship. All the more reason for us to sharpen our arguments.
Waco is a good example of what happens when the state perceives a genuine threat, even just out of pure paranoia. That is an example of "it always reserves the opportunity to drop the other boot". But it's also an outlier in terms of typical internal US behavior.
I can't stress this enough: my point isn't that the US is "better" in some way than Syria, but rather that it is better at repression, especially in that it tends to be better able to rationalize repression as it occurs. The US knows better than to shell its cities (and wealth is certainly one of the reasons, but public perception is another).
I want civil libertarians and humanitarians and everyone else motivated to criticize the US hypocrisy here to be intellectually thorough. Failure to do so only accomplishes a mental circle jerk—no one else is going to listen.
Do we know the difference between shelling cities and domestic wiretapping, or don't we?
You'll note that until I raised objections to the reasoning that domestic wiretapping is equivalent to Syrian repression, that reasoning was the only one on offer. The discussion of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Union's brutality in the US Civil War, and Waco... those are much more convincing.
What would the US government's response be if a small (or a significant) portion of the population resisted/rebelled against the government?
Depends what form the resistance takes. There's a fairly large portion of the population actively resisting US policy of one kind or another, and there's a small bug significant portion of the population preparing for revolution of one kind or another. Since these are mostly impotent threats to the status quo, they're largely ignored, but with some repression to remind the resisters what the state is capable of.
Well, the Whiskey Rebellion [wikipedia.org] was put down with violence. If you say that that doesn't count because the US is democratic, well, especially early on, the US was not very democratic, and that was a feature, not a bug. [snip]
Second, take the Civil War, put down with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and then probable war crimes [wikipedia.org].
You'll note that in neither of these cases was the US a "modern megastate" which employed "technocratic repression". The US is a different beast today than it was then. I'm not saying that the US isn't capable of the kind of brutality that was employed in its history (and it certainly engages in that sort of behavior abroad), but that it's not actively engaged in that sort of brutality today. It does a disservice to the argument against hypocrisy to blur these lines.
Finally, take the Occupy Wall Street movement, also put down violently.
In some cases yes. And while a lot of that repression was awful, I still don't think it rises to the level of shelling cities which house resistance.
If Egypt had cleared out Tahrir Square claiming "health code violations", most international media would have laughed. But, in New York, it was done with a straight face.
Right. This is what I'm talking about. We have to form a better argument, because the argument that the US is like Syria isn't going to pass the laugh test. The US is certainly hypocritical here, and brutal in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean we can be lazy with our arguments.
The message just seems to it's OK if we do it, bad if they do it.
No. My point is that if we want to undermine the spirit of hypocrisy in US foreign policy, we need to be really fucking clear about the connections we draw.
We have a much more powerful argument in saying that:
1. While the US is internally much less brutal today than it has been in the past, and than Syria is today, it always reserves the opportunity to drop the other boot, and it will if rebellion rises to the level it has in any segment of the Arab Spring.
2. While the US has often championed human rights when convenient, it has ignored them at best and fostered brutal regimes at worst, also when convenient. We should be asking questions about, for instance, Bahrain right now.
3. We know the difference between shelling cities and domestic wiretapping.
One more point of correction...
Is Syria's war not a war between two factions in the same country, i.e., a civil war?
I don't think any of the parties have described it as such. The Syrian state describes the rebellion as outside meddling in internal affairs—essentially an attempted coup. The rebels largely describe themselves as seeking regime change and democratic reform. It isn't a war at all. It's a revolution. They have some similar characteristics, but it's dangerous to say that they're the same thing.
I get what you (and a bunch of ACs or one really bored AC apparently) are saying, but I think the argument is going to be a hard sell when you're forced to recognize the categorical difference between the technocratic repression of a modern megastate and the repression of shelling cities where resistance is detected.
That said, there's another powerful argument as to our hypocrisy, which is the double standard we hold our allies to versus these states we sanction.
Expressing relative figures compared to current is always problematic. "100% power reduction" is even more problematic. "100% power reduction" also means no power.
And while Little Snitch is a great tool for paranoid nerds, it's hardly something I'd propose to secure the Macs of most of the people I know, and I doubt Apple would either.
You know, TimeMachine let's you choose not to delete old backups automatically
If that's true, it's not a user-facing option (it may be a defaults write hack?). There is no such option under "Options", and this language is hard-coded into the prefpane:
Time Machine keeps local snapshots as space permits, and:
Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
Daily backups for the past month
Weekly backups for all previous months The oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full.
None of these destructive limitations are user-configurable.
For example, in the case of the bottle cap "not wanting" to come off, you're not anthropomorphising the bottle at all.
Of course you are. It's textbook anthropomorphizing. There's a difference between employing such obviously irrational cognition as a lever to reason with a complex world, on the one hand, and believing it on the other. That's the whole point. We can benefit from using thoughts that we know are untrue, flawed or incomplete. We do it a lot, and if we really dig deep we'll find that this mental tool is one of the foundations of our ability to reason at all.
What I think has the sphincters of the advocates of "rationality" quivering is the fear that suspension of disbelief is the same thing as belief, when it clearly isn't.
I'm on board with the spirit of your comment, but I can't help but pick nits anyway. In a way I want to sharpen the argument you're trying to make, but I guess it can also serve as a caricature of the purely rational.
Anyone who uses the sentence "It is raining.", when asked about the weather is accepting the existence of some nebulous magical "it" that creates the rain. If somebody was really, consistently avoiding all magical thinking acts, they would carefully correct themselves and say "There is rain." instead.
A lot of the figures of speech used as examples in the comments here can fairly be considered "magical thinking", but I think this one misses the mark. "It" is always shorthand; in this case "it" is shorthand for "the weather", which in turn is shorthand for "the observable climactic events in my vicinity" (or the vicinity being discussed). "There is rain" plainly doesn't mean the same thing—it just means "rain exists". Or, since we're going to absurd lengths in analyzing figures of speech, "rain is there", wherever "there" is. And this sort of absurdity can recurse through each rephrasing as all language is abstraction.
On learning that the days of the week or months are named after supernatural beings, they would consistantly attempt to correct that fact.
I'm not sure why this would be the case. Weeks are entirely arbitrary in the first place, and apart from their social utility there's no rational basis for having them or naming their days at all. Given their utility, I suppose "oneday" and "twoday" and so on might be more appropriate in a vacuum, but I doubt anyone considers the original meaning of the weekdays' names, in which case any naming scheme would be arbitrary; I'd argue that rationality would favor familiarity over a renaming with no benefit. And a purely rational redesign of the week might tend toward a ten-day week (to align with our most familiar number system), but the social harm that might do is probably not rational either.
Months are similarly arbitrary. Their basis in the lunar cycle has been undermined by aligning them to an unrelated solar cycle, and ultimately their only purpose is also social utility. And again I doubt anyone considers their names' meaning in regular use. And again it's conceivable that we could implement a lunar month system with a numbered naming scheme, but again I think it would cause social harm (especially as it encourages cognitive dissonance when squaring it with the solar year; in which season is Oneuary this year?) and again undermine its own rationality.
So if it were determined that one racial group is disproportionately affected by laws against violent crime and/or murder, then we could conclude that laws against violent crime are racist and should not be instituted?
Let's explore this, because I think an example like this underscores the way racism can be hidden but still used. So, in a scenario where a law "against violent crime", which mentions no racial bias, effects racially biased punishment, there's a few possibilities:
1. The over-represented population is predisposed to violent crime. 2. Enforcement is selective. 3. Other conditions promote violent crime in the over-represented population.
If we can't agree that the first hypothesis is racist, you can stop reading here and we can stop wasting our time. Likewise the second. In the third case, while it may be that the law itself has a valid goal, clearly there's a broader racial problem that needs to be addressed; it might not be the scope of that law to address it, depends on the law. If the law's purpose is valid and addressing the racial bias is outside the scope of that law, then racism lies at a different level, but there's still racism.
Since you completely side-stepped the question of drug laws, however, I will bring it back into the discussion. Crack cocaine sentencing is much more severe than powder cocaine sentencing.
Simple possession of 28 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. (Source)
This quite obviously doesn't specify race, but the fact is that crack use is more likely among blacks than whites, and vice verse for powder. Do you think the authors of the laws didn't know that? The effect, of course, has been predictable: substantial over-representation of black people in prison for drug offenses. The law is racist in its effects; its authors are either dangerously stupid or racist (or both).
you are not contributing to intelligent discourse on this subject
It's possible to disagree and engage in intelligent discourse.
Accusing people of racism where there is none
Your position has shifted from "I don't know" to a definite negative? I think you're further revealing your biases on the subject.
and behaving paternalistically toward minorities is not productive.
I am honestly baffled. What is paternalistic about identifying innuendo? If it were explicit rather than code, would it still be paternalistic to call out? Your reasoning is simply unsound.
That the law of the land should be color blind
So should society. Until we can have both, we can have neither. Choosing to ignore racism isn't color-blindness it's willful blindness.
and that social critiques such as the OP made should also be color blind as much as possible, and just leave race out of the discussion.
Finally, you're being more forthcoming with your motivation. Your problem isn't that an accusation of racism was (you think) misplaced, your problem is that race is even a topic in the discussion in the first place. Well, it's relevant. Racism is alive and well, and one of the major forces in our culture's evolution. Like I said, you can't just choose not to see it and expect it to go away. The consequence of promoting this kind of ignorance is that racism will have a calmer sea in which to swim. And, I have bad news: as that sea becomes more inviting, you can bet your ass the topic will be a lot more prominent.
We know the intent in the case of the Jim Crow laws, because we know who wrote them and why they were written.
I'd argue that we don't need to know those things to understand the racism of the laws. Even if it were a law that came from on high, if the consequences were predictably racially biased, the law is racist, whether it mentions race or not. I don't know, for example, much about the people behind US drug law, but the effects are quite clearly racially biased; the laws are racist.
Am I a racist for expressing this view?
In a vacuum, as you've articulated it, I couldn't really say (but I'd probably guess yes). But in the context of your promotion of ignorance about obvious racially charged innuendo, I'm inclined to believe that you are clearly exhibiting prejudice. Perhaps it's prejudice you don't understand, but it's still there.
Is the very phrase "gangsta thug culture" somehow a racially black concept? I'm still bewildered that you seem to think so, given the antics of Eminem and a host of disaffected, youthful Caucasian wannabes.
It's a completely meaningless concept, except the cultural implications it carries. On a Venn diagram, the overlap between dominant culture perception of "gangsta thug culture" and "urban black culture" would be almost total, whether it's true or not. That there are people who aren't a part of "urban black culture" who identify with "gangsta thug culture" doesn't change this dominant culture association. This is how innuendo works: you don't have to spell out exactly what you mean if your audience already shares your particular biases.
As an aside, while it's been a long time since I actively listened to Eminem, I am straining to recall anything particularly "gangsta thug" about his lyrics. At least in his early work (with which I'm more familiar), his voice seemed to be pretty unique in the rap/hip-hop milieu at the time. Yes, there was some subject overlap, presumably because he shares a lot of experiences with what black rappers/hip-hop artists were discussing, but there were a lot of themes that were more in line with a caricature of "poor white culture". What was so fascinating was that he was able to walk a fine line by attracting audiences from many cultures, without alienating a lot of the rap/hip-hop community by appearing to make a mockery of the genre the way so many other white rappers have.
Hey, I have a novel idea. Let's say you're right. Let's say everything I said was wrong. Those reversed facts would *still* make the case important, and it would *still* warrant a trial.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just spent more effort and time typing a response to somebody you don't agree with than it would have took you to...
But... what if he likes replying to people? Perhaps it's more enjoyable than...
This is easily the best exchange I've ever read on Slashdot.
The Union fought a devastating and horrific war to avoid dissolution. That history coupled with its unsavory moral context drastically inflates the barriers around considering a dissolution. For icing on the cake there is the propaganda which paints anyone who questions anything about the US as "anti-American" (as if that means anything), and at this point there's also quite a lot of inertia.
The US as a union will almost certainly collapse eventually, but it may be an even uglier chapter of history than the US Civil War.
Who would that be? We've almost all contributed (in the form of taxes and withholding) to the growth of Apple (and other huge corporations) by funding the government which gives them a favorable environment in which to profit. While it would certainly be better to just end corporate welfare, in the meantime we are definitely entitled to a portion of the gains we helped promote.
No one's assets belong to the state, but entities which thrive because of state policy absolutely morally owe compensation to the society which helped them thrive, and other state programs are often the mechanism in our society for that sort of compensation. Are there better ways? Absolutely. But crying "taxation is theft!" rings hollow when the state is creating policies in your favor.
many companies pick up and move all their people to a cheaper part of the US or worse, move all operations overseas, bringing only the best and brightest and outsourcing the rest.
If you seriously think Apple could do this without sacrificing their success, you're mistaken. Apple operates in California because it makes good business sense, not because they're somehow "better" than their competitors. Good talent has a lot of leverage in a labor market, and Apple employs a lot of good talent. To think the talent they depend on will just follow them wherever they set up a cubicle sweatshop is really naive.
It's not to say that good talent doesn't come from poorer places in the US or overseas, but that given the opportunity good talent will choose a better standard of living than that offered in the depressed labor markets you're talking about.
Where do you git off blamming Apple or any other corporation for the disgusting acts of congress and the senate?
They (not just Apple, all of them) own Congress. That's like asking where we get off blaming the mob when someone takes a bribe from the mob and then does what the mob bribed them to do.
Look in the mirror, then start voting like the future matters.
Until the campaigns aren't run (or run into the ground) by corporate America, this is a pointless demand. I can vote for candidates that represent my values until I'm blue in the face, but they still won't be on the ballot.
Backeword?
too many politicians with a preexisting anti-civilization (Western industrial captialism based ccivilization that is...)
Who are they?
I looked all all of the comments you linked to. How many engaged in the overarching, 1:1 comparisons you seem to be objecting to?
Zero.
This is ridiculous. Each one of them is explicitly making a comparison to Syrian repression. The Syrian repression is the context and the object of the accusation of hypocrisy. Is it "1:1"? No comparison is "1:1".
"Now if only they'd use that on the TSA"
How is the TSA engaged in repression like Syria, to warrant this comparison? Yes, TSA does engage in repression, but it's fundamentally different from that of Syria.
'I'd say "repressive regime" that "monitors dissidents" applies directly to the US, no?'
How is the repression and monitoring of dissidents in the US comparable to that of Syria?
"Homeland Security"
Same question as the last two.
"The NSA is currently building a huge data center to capture email, phone, sms, etc. data."
How is a data center to store and retrieve domestic surveillance records like Syrian repression?
And the one to which I actually responded:
"retroactive immunity [wikipedia.org] to telcos and other companies violating the civil rights of American citizens"
How is retroactive immunity for domestic spying like Syrian repression?
Syrian repression is the object of the criticism in all of these cases. The comparison to Syrian repression is the basis of each accusation of hypocrisy. None of the examples of hypocrisy used comes close to rising to the level of comparable.
No, they're all pretty much variations of "those who live in glass houses should not throw stones".
Exactly! And that's a weak argument, if we're talking about "stones" that are really pebbles and "throwing" that is really an underhanded toss.
You can (and clearly do) disagree that the argument is weak, but what you can't do is say that I'm cheerleading for the US. I said all along, there are far worse US offenses to expose.
Nobody is saying the U.S. military is shelling American cities
I didn't say anyone is. I'm objecting to drawing parallels between US repression like domestic wiretapping (and other violations of civil liberties) with Syrian repression which is much more severe than the examples of US repression used by the posters I responded to . Here are the comments I was responding to:
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2805177&cid=39771745
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2805177&cid=39771781
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2805177&cid=39771803
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2805177&cid=39771811
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2805177&cid=39771965
Then I'd suggest getting less hung up on 1:1 comparisons that people aren't actually making. It is certainly possible to compare America's police state tactics to Syria, just as it's possible to compare the OWS crackdowns with the protests in Tahiri Square. That doesn't mean we're accusing Homeland Security of using rape as a weapon the way Mubarak's intelligence services did.
My point is that it's harmful to make comparisons that aren't valid. Yes, the US and Syria both surveil their populations extensively. But the consequences on either side are starkly different. You'll note that when a better comparison was made, I've acknowledged it.
I'm hung up on people being intellectually lazy about issues I care about—issues where thousands of lives are on the line. I'm sick of civil libertarians giving the fascists a persuasive advantage by failing to recognize that the way the US engages in repression is substantially more clever and advanced than that of brutal dictatorships. And I'm sick of the defensiveness of those advancing these lazy arguments (and those letting them slide) who revert to "with us or against us" braying when prompted to sharpen the critique. It's astonishing that people think I'm cheerleading for the US government because I'm pointing out that "retroactive immunity" for telecom companies isn't remotely equivalent to "monitor Twitter posts to prepare for ground assault". You do realize that's what the Syrian snoops are using their surveillance for, right?
There is a laundry list of US activities that do rise to the level of the ongoing atrocities in Syria. I'm grateful that some of this discussion has highlighted those.
Maybe because you're being overly literal. The point of making analogies other comparisons isn't to say two things are identical, but to, you know, compare them where they are comparable.
You think distinguishing between shelling cities and listening to phone calls is "overly literal"? They're not fucking comparable. They're certainly two repressive acts, but they are fundamentally different in terms of brutality.
In other words, you are sounding the like sort of person who hears a comparison between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam and proceed to spend your time complaining that there is no draft, jungle, or communist army to deal with and little time talking about spending blood and treasure to prop up an unpopular, extremely corrupt [nytimes.com] government with no clear mission or way out of the occupation.
Well, I don't know how you've drawn that conclusion. My argument is more akin to saying that the argument that the war in Afghanistan is like the war in Vietnam would be better served if we discuss real similarities—"spending blood and treasure to prop up an unpopular, extremely corrupt government with no clear mission or way out of the occupation"—rather than discussing extremely dissimilar things—an example might be comparing the use of drones to say the use of napalm. Both are awful and reprehensible and should be opposed—just as shelling cities and domestic wiretapping are both awful and reprehensible and should be opposed—but they're just fundamentally different, and by implying equivalence we undermine our intellectual and moral authority and lose the argument.
I want to win the argument against US malfeasance, not to defend the US government.
And yeah, having people kidnapped and tortured [salon.com] or assasinated by executive fiat [salon.com] are exactly the sort of activities that corrupt dictatorships like Syria engage in. We should know - the victim in the above "kidnapped and torture" link was flown to.....Syria to be tortured.
And this is a much better argument! You honestly don't see the difference between the argument you're making and the ones I responded to? You honestly believe that domestic wiretapping is as powerful an argument demonstrating US hypocrisy regarding Syria?
All I want is for people who are ostensibly on my side to stop squandering their moral and intellectual advantage.
I don't understand why the replies I'm getting seem to treat me like I think the US gov't is all sunshine and daisies. Yes, it is brutal. It is far, far more brutal than any odd dictatorship. All the more reason for us to sharpen our arguments.
Waco is a good example of what happens when the state perceives a genuine threat, even just out of pure paranoia. That is an example of "it always reserves the opportunity to drop the other boot". But it's also an outlier in terms of typical internal US behavior.
I can't stress this enough: my point isn't that the US is "better" in some way than Syria, but rather that it is better at repression, especially in that it tends to be better able to rationalize repression as it occurs. The US knows better than to shell its cities (and wealth is certainly one of the reasons, but public perception is another).
I want civil libertarians and humanitarians and everyone else motivated to criticize the US hypocrisy here to be intellectually thorough. Failure to do so only accomplishes a mental circle jerk—no one else is going to listen.
Do we know the difference between shelling cities and domestic wiretapping, or don't we?
You'll note that until I raised objections to the reasoning that domestic wiretapping is equivalent to Syrian repression, that reasoning was the only one on offer. The discussion of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Union's brutality in the US Civil War, and Waco... those are much more convincing.
What would the US government's response be if a small (or a significant) portion of the population resisted/rebelled against the government?
Depends what form the resistance takes. There's a fairly large portion of the population actively resisting US policy of one kind or another, and there's a small bug significant portion of the population preparing for revolution of one kind or another. Since these are mostly impotent threats to the status quo, they're largely ignored, but with some repression to remind the resisters what the state is capable of.
Well, the Whiskey Rebellion [wikipedia.org] was put down with violence. If you say that that doesn't count because the US is democratic, well, especially early on, the US was not very democratic, and that was a feature, not a bug. [snip]
Second, take the Civil War, put down with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and then probable war crimes [wikipedia.org].
You'll note that in neither of these cases was the US a "modern megastate" which employed "technocratic repression". The US is a different beast today than it was then. I'm not saying that the US isn't capable of the kind of brutality that was employed in its history (and it certainly engages in that sort of behavior abroad), but that it's not actively engaged in that sort of brutality today. It does a disservice to the argument against hypocrisy to blur these lines.
Finally, take the Occupy Wall Street movement, also put down violently.
In some cases yes. And while a lot of that repression was awful, I still don't think it rises to the level of shelling cities which house resistance.
If Egypt had cleared out Tahrir Square claiming "health code violations", most international media would have laughed. But, in New York, it was done with a straight face.
Right. This is what I'm talking about. We have to form a better argument, because the argument that the US is like Syria isn't going to pass the laugh test. The US is certainly hypocritical here, and brutal in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean we can be lazy with our arguments.
The message just seems to it's OK if we do it, bad if they do it.
No. My point is that if we want to undermine the spirit of hypocrisy in US foreign policy, we need to be really fucking clear about the connections we draw.
We have a much more powerful argument in saying that:
1. While the US is internally much less brutal today than it has been in the past, and than Syria is today, it always reserves the opportunity to drop the other boot, and it will if rebellion rises to the level it has in any segment of the Arab Spring.
2. While the US has often championed human rights when convenient, it has ignored them at best and fostered brutal regimes at worst, also when convenient. We should be asking questions about, for instance, Bahrain right now.
3. We know the difference between shelling cities and domestic wiretapping.
One more point of correction...
Is Syria's war not a war between two factions in the same country, i.e., a civil war?
I don't think any of the parties have described it as such. The Syrian state describes the rebellion as outside meddling in internal affairs—essentially an attempted coup. The rebels largely describe themselves as seeking regime change and democratic reform. It isn't a war at all. It's a revolution. They have some similar characteristics, but it's dangerous to say that they're the same thing.
I get what you (and a bunch of ACs or one really bored AC apparently) are saying, but I think the argument is going to be a hard sell when you're forced to recognize the categorical difference between the technocratic repression of a modern megastate and the repression of shelling cities where resistance is detected.
That said, there's another powerful argument as to our hypocrisy, which is the double standard we hold our allies to versus these states we sanction.
Expressing relative figures compared to current is always problematic. "100% power reduction" is even more problematic. "100% power reduction" also means no power.
This comment is 350% more efficient.
it hasn't been called Mac OS for a decade now, maybe if you'd get up to speed...
It's called Mac OS X in the current bloody release, you condescending asshole. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S-5N0lndtfM/TyBBKqVHULI/AAAAAAAAAq0/DrQkcTSgcys/s1600/1073.png
And while Little Snitch is a great tool for paranoid nerds, it's hardly something I'd propose to secure the Macs of most of the people I know, and I doubt Apple would either.
Also don't enter your password at every dialog that pops up especially if you are not in the middle of an install.
Fat lot of good that does when there's no dialog.
You know, TimeMachine let's you choose not to delete old backups automatically
If that's true, it's not a user-facing option (it may be a defaults write hack?). There is no such option under "Options", and this language is hard-coded into the prefpane:
Time Machine keeps local snapshots as space permits, and:
Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
Daily backups for the past month
Weekly backups for all previous months
The oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full.
None of these destructive limitations are user-configurable.
For example, in the case of the bottle cap "not wanting" to come off, you're not anthropomorphising the bottle at all.
Of course you are. It's textbook anthropomorphizing. There's a difference between employing such obviously irrational cognition as a lever to reason with a complex world, on the one hand, and believing it on the other. That's the whole point. We can benefit from using thoughts that we know are untrue, flawed or incomplete. We do it a lot, and if we really dig deep we'll find that this mental tool is one of the foundations of our ability to reason at all.
What I think has the sphincters of the advocates of "rationality" quivering is the fear that suspension of disbelief is the same thing as belief, when it clearly isn't.
I'm on board with the spirit of your comment, but I can't help but pick nits anyway. In a way I want to sharpen the argument you're trying to make, but I guess it can also serve as a caricature of the purely rational.
Anyone who uses the sentence "It is raining.", when asked about the weather is accepting the existence of some nebulous magical "it" that creates the rain. If somebody was really, consistently avoiding all magical thinking acts, they would carefully correct themselves and say "There is rain." instead.
A lot of the figures of speech used as examples in the comments here can fairly be considered "magical thinking", but I think this one misses the mark. "It" is always shorthand; in this case "it" is shorthand for "the weather", which in turn is shorthand for "the observable climactic events in my vicinity" (or the vicinity being discussed). "There is rain" plainly doesn't mean the same thing—it just means "rain exists". Or, since we're going to absurd lengths in analyzing figures of speech, "rain is there", wherever "there" is. And this sort of absurdity can recurse through each rephrasing as all language is abstraction.
On learning that the days of the week or months are named after supernatural beings, they would consistantly attempt to correct that fact.
I'm not sure why this would be the case. Weeks are entirely arbitrary in the first place, and apart from their social utility there's no rational basis for having them or naming their days at all. Given their utility, I suppose "oneday" and "twoday" and so on might be more appropriate in a vacuum, but I doubt anyone considers the original meaning of the weekdays' names, in which case any naming scheme would be arbitrary; I'd argue that rationality would favor familiarity over a renaming with no benefit. And a purely rational redesign of the week might tend toward a ten-day week (to align with our most familiar number system), but the social harm that might do is probably not rational either.
Months are similarly arbitrary. Their basis in the lunar cycle has been undermined by aligning them to an unrelated solar cycle, and ultimately their only purpose is also social utility. And again I doubt anyone considers their names' meaning in regular use. And again it's conceivable that we could implement a lunar month system with a numbered naming scheme, but again I think it would cause social harm (especially as it encourages cognitive dissonance when squaring it with the solar year; in which season is Oneuary this year?) and again undermine its own rationality.
So if it were determined that one racial group is disproportionately affected by laws against violent crime and/or murder, then we could conclude that laws against violent crime are racist and should not be instituted?
Let's explore this, because I think an example like this underscores the way racism can be hidden but still used. So, in a scenario where a law "against violent crime", which mentions no racial bias, effects racially biased punishment, there's a few possibilities:
1. The over-represented population is predisposed to violent crime.
2. Enforcement is selective.
3. Other conditions promote violent crime in the over-represented population.
If we can't agree that the first hypothesis is racist, you can stop reading here and we can stop wasting our time. Likewise the second. In the third case, while it may be that the law itself has a valid goal, clearly there's a broader racial problem that needs to be addressed; it might not be the scope of that law to address it, depends on the law. If the law's purpose is valid and addressing the racial bias is outside the scope of that law, then racism lies at a different level, but there's still racism.
Since you completely side-stepped the question of drug laws, however, I will bring it back into the discussion. Crack cocaine sentencing is much more severe than powder cocaine sentencing.
Simple possession of 28 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. (Source)
This quite obviously doesn't specify race, but the fact is that crack use is more likely among blacks than whites, and vice verse for powder. Do you think the authors of the laws didn't know that? The effect, of course, has been predictable: substantial over-representation of black people in prison for drug offenses. The law is racist in its effects; its authors are either dangerously stupid or racist (or both).
you are not contributing to intelligent discourse on this subject
It's possible to disagree and engage in intelligent discourse.
Accusing people of racism where there is none
Your position has shifted from "I don't know" to a definite negative? I think you're further revealing your biases on the subject.
and behaving paternalistically toward minorities is not productive.
I am honestly baffled. What is paternalistic about identifying innuendo? If it were explicit rather than code, would it still be paternalistic to call out? Your reasoning is simply unsound.
That the law of the land should be color blind
So should society. Until we can have both, we can have neither. Choosing to ignore racism isn't color-blindness it's willful blindness.
and that social critiques such as the OP made should also be color blind as much as possible, and just leave race out of the discussion.
Finally, you're being more forthcoming with your motivation. Your problem isn't that an accusation of racism was (you think) misplaced, your problem is that race is even a topic in the discussion in the first place. Well, it's relevant. Racism is alive and well, and one of the major forces in our culture's evolution. Like I said, you can't just choose not to see it and expect it to go away. The consequence of promoting this kind of ignorance is that racism will have a calmer sea in which to swim. And, I have bad news: as that sea becomes more inviting, you can bet your ass the topic will be a lot more prominent.
We know the intent in the case of the Jim Crow laws, because we know who wrote them and why they were written.
I'd argue that we don't need to know those things to understand the racism of the laws. Even if it were a law that came from on high, if the consequences were predictably racially biased, the law is racist, whether it mentions race or not. I don't know, for example, much about the people behind US drug law, but the effects are quite clearly racially biased; the laws are racist.
Am I a racist for expressing this view?
In a vacuum, as you've articulated it, I couldn't really say (but I'd probably guess yes). But in the context of your promotion of ignorance about obvious racially charged innuendo, I'm inclined to believe that you are clearly exhibiting prejudice. Perhaps it's prejudice you don't understand, but it's still there.
Is the very phrase "gangsta thug culture" somehow a racially black concept? I'm still bewildered that you seem to think so, given the antics of Eminem and a host of disaffected, youthful Caucasian wannabes.
It's a completely meaningless concept, except the cultural implications it carries. On a Venn diagram, the overlap between dominant culture perception of "gangsta thug culture" and "urban black culture" would be almost total, whether it's true or not. That there are people who aren't a part of "urban black culture" who identify with "gangsta thug culture" doesn't change this dominant culture association. This is how innuendo works: you don't have to spell out exactly what you mean if your audience already shares your particular biases.
As an aside, while it's been a long time since I actively listened to Eminem, I am straining to recall anything particularly "gangsta thug" about his lyrics. At least in his early work (with which I'm more familiar), his voice seemed to be pretty unique in the rap/hip-hop milieu at the time. Yes, there was some subject overlap, presumably because he shares a lot of experiences with what black rappers/hip-hop artists were discussing, but there were a lot of themes that were more in line with a caricature of "poor white culture". What was so fascinating was that he was able to walk a fine line by attracting audiences from many cultures, without alienating a lot of the rap/hip-hop community by appearing to make a mockery of the genre the way so many other white rappers have.
Hey, I have a novel idea. Let's say you're right. Let's say everything I said was wrong. Those reversed facts would *still* make the case important, and it would *still* warrant a trial.
So to follow up, is it also your opinion that Jim Crow laws which didn't mention race were not, in fact, racist?