Yes, naturally anyone who's siding with Israel is a troll, as Slashdot users have shown time and time again.
When considering death tolls, there are some factors that need to be taken into account. Intent is an important one, as collateral damage and intentional damage are not the same thing. Then you have to consider the way Palestinians use human shields or otherwise expose civilians to danger, and then exploit the dead for propaganda purposes (Hezbollah did the same during last year's conflict). And who's really innocent? The area is crawling with terrorists wearing civilian clothes, and if the Palestinians, who are infamous for their lies and fabrications, claim that innocent people were killed by an Israeli attack, I'd take that claim with a grain of salt. Finally, the unbalanced reporting of the situation seems to downplay the persistent, blind rocket attacks againts Israel.
Another thing occurs to me: from a moral point of view it doesn't really matter who kills the most people, it only matters why those people were killed and who they were. This was completely ignored during the Lebanon conflict where people were concerned about the "disproportionate" death tolls, as if it's somehow unfair that Israel suffers less casualties in a war than its opponent.
Here's a poll according to which 66.8% of Palestinians support kidnappings, and 60% support rocket fire. The poll results seem consistent with "anecdotal" evidence.
Your post makes more sense if you swap Palestinians with Israel:
The Palestinians deserve the land? Because they kill more civilians than Israel does? Because their foundations are based on religious exclusion, unlike the constitution of Israel?
Using nukes is not inherently wrong, so the argument that the US is the only country to have used nukes is completely meaningless. Iran's government is off the deep end, that's why they can't be allowed to have nukes.
The land was stolen after WW2, declared a Jewish state and the Jews moved there. The babble has been proven wrong countless times, they have zero claim to the land and the Jews have more in common with Gypsies than they do any of the mid-east region.
Or so some people claim. The entire issue is so incredibly and mind-bogglingly convoluted that I've stopped caring. All I know is that Israel deserves the land, while the Palestinians do not.
if you have rational arguments most people will read your post and respond appropriately
You must be new here. If you deviate from the accepted groupthink, you run the risk of getting modded as a troll or flamebaiter.
Another thing to consider is that if you want to be taken seriously you should probably get an account; anytime an anonymous coward makes a claim which is not directly backed up with a link to a reputable source it is automatically assumed that it is a troll.
What about anonymous cowards who don't even reply to anything and just mod down opposing views?
There is no unfinished area near Ironforge. There's the Ironforge Airfield, but it's hardly unfinished... it's just not used in the game. Empty areas or areas under construction are not accessible by ordinary means, and with wallwalking almost eliminated they're even more inaccessible.
As far as I can tell you define an unfinished area as an area that you can't visit on foot. That doesn't make any sense.
Do you even play the game?
It's clear that you don't. Someone who plays the game wouldn't call Ironforge "the Dwarven starting town."
People should be compensated, but I just don't think we have any control over that any more. if someone wants to take your idea and run with it, its because you gave him the means to use it. If you don't want it used in ways you didn't instead, then don't release it to the public..
Or if you don't want to get robbed, don't keep valuables in your home. If you don't want to get mugged, beaten, murdered or raped, don't go outside. How simple it all is.
Personally I believe in peoples good will to compensate you when you did something worthy, there will always be people that take freely, and give freely.
You can't make games like Mass Effect and Gears of War with a couple of small donations from a few people, and if those games aren't made then there's nothing for people to take freely.
Maybe people are taking because they are in need, and maybe the people that don't need to take are giving because they have what the need.
I get illegal stuff from the Internet like anyone else, but I'm not going to pretend like I'm in some sort of dire need of the latest episode of 24, or some music album.
My comment implied that if everyone could simply alter their own lives as they see fit, few people in the world would be unhappy. People could simply fix all their problems. But as we all know or should know, human beings don't work that way. So, saying that "we all have the power to change our own lives" reeks of feel-good bullshit.
As for the rest of your post, you seem to think that I believe that genes dictate everything and that behavior is therefore pre-determined. I never said anything of the sort. I was just saying that freedom of will is limited. You also make amazing leaps to things like eugenics and treating people like animals. Frankly, I have no idea what you're talking about and how it relates to my post, which you may or may not have read.
You overestimate a human's ability to make choices, as I explained in my previous post. Life is still not an RPG.
Things which don't have evolutionary purposes tend to get diluted and obliterated.
I don't understand what kind of evolutionary purpose is filled by things like cancer, blindness or various syndromes, diseases, genetic defects and so forth.
A population's success is "cared about" implicitly, as a matter of definition; any population which does not succeed, perishes and is forgotten.
But you said that anti-social personality disorder may have surfaced as a means of destroying populations that were too succesful. What kind of natural mechanism determines that a population has become too succesful, and decides to obliterate it?
Try reading something about evolution that wasn't written by ID advocates, will you?
Uh... where the fuck did I say anything about intelligent design or religion?
Not everything has or had an evolutionary purpose (as far as I know), and evolution is not some sort of sentient force that knows or cares about things like a population's success (not that a few anti-social people are even enough to cause self-destruction).
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions. Saying someone is "born bad" is equivilant to saying that they have been possessed by Satan. It's not a valid argument.
Why would it be equal to saying that someone has been possessed by Satan (this, if anything, is an invalid argument)? There's nothing invalid about saying that some humans are born "bad" if it's true. Yes, people have free will, but that doesn't mean that they decide "yeah, I think I'll be a good person." Freedom of will is limited, and if you're biologically conditioned to be bad then no amount of free will is going to fix that.
I'll will admit that people can be born with violent temperaments. They can be born with harsh attitudes or a lack of empathy. However all but the most severely mentally disabled are born with free will and the ability to reason. People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
If people can be born with violent temperaments, harsh attitudes and lack of empathy, why couldn't they be born without the ability to understand what's acceptable and what's not?
Blaming society, or genetics, or your parents, or video games or anything else for decisions you yourself have made is an insult to everyone who does accept the consequences of their actions. It's an insult to your own dignity as you are claiming you have lost your own free will.
You seem to be running with the assumption that life is like a computer RPG where you can just click and choose your responses. One moment you kill the peasants for fun, but five minutes later you save the princess to get the magical sword as a quest reward. You seem to think that everyone can just choose exactly what they do in a completely logical and objective fashion. No, it doesn't work that way.
Your decisions are based on your perceptions about things (these perceptions can be influenced by many things, including drugs). For example, I would not daterape someone because I would decide that I don't want to do that, because it's againts my moral beliefs, and because I don't want to go to prison. Ok, I suppose I have complete freedom to do whatever I want, in theory, but my moral beliefs dictate what I want and don't want to do. So basically, I can't really choose to do anything I want to. Some other person might have different moral beliefs, and he'd decide differently. Or maybe he doesn't have moral beliefs at all, maybe he just does whatever makes him feel good.
Some people are "bad" because of the way they were raised or because of the things they experienced when growing up. Some of them are just insane, or something is wrong with their genes, chemical balance, or something (IANAD). Conversely, other people are good because of the way they were raised, and so on. Human beings don't inherently possess the moral standards of contemporary Western civilization, they're learned traits. That's why a terrorist who grew up in a fundamentalist Muslim society is radically different than someone who grew up in the Soviet Union or Japan or Norway (and from his own cultural vantage point, he's not a bad person).
A person who is blaming his upbringing is probably lucid enough to know what he's doing, and I don't advocate treating criminals with kid gloves because they had a bad childhood, but obviously batshit insane people are a different story. I guess they belong in a psychiatric prison.
We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
This is feel-good nonsense that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but is ultimately bullshit.
This can be seen clearly in the high number of Sociopathic and Narcissistic CEOs in the world as it shows that sociopathic, narcissistic and to a lesser extent anti-social behavior is favored by natural selection.
If they're favored by natural selection, why aren't they the norm? Why exactly would natural selection favor humans who don't get along with or care about the well-being of others? Seems highly counter-productive if you think about some sort of pre-historic environment where tribes have to survive againts wildlife and nature.
Even the list you mentioned contained very few things that people generalize perceive as unforgivably "bad".
You're not supposed to cherry pick them. A person is defined as a psychopath when enough conditions are met.
Perhaps the kid in this article wouldn't have been such an ass if he'd have been eating foods that weren't poisoned with artificial colors, flavors and preservatives while he was playing his "violent video games".
If certain foods and drinks caused people to become violent, we'd have an epidemic. Yes, perhaps some children become more aggressive, but there's no reason to think that the same happened to this person.
If they've committed a serious crime as a result of their genetic antisocial behavior and they seem to be beyond help, then I don't see why you couldn't cure them.
Yes. He was sent to Syria because he was brown. Meanwhile, the US continues to accept non-white immigrants, Keith Ellison became a congresman and Condoleezza Rice is Secretary of State.
I find it interesting that almost any comment on Slashdot, whether on topic or not (in this case the latter), gets modded positive if it's anti-American or critical of the US government or its policies. Meanwhile, I once got modded flamebait or troll for saying something in favor of Israel (I actually just stated the fact that Israel left Gaza, but even that was too much).
For a seemingly non-political site, Slashdot's extreme leftist slant is readily obvious, and fully supported by the moderating system which favors leftists by allowing them to anonymously mod someone troll or flamebait without any explanation or accountability. On traditional forums they're at least forced to say something, like "you fucking Nazi."
I didn't realize that a high budget video game produced by tens or hundreds of people using expensive software and hardware is now just an insubstantial "idea" that anyone can and should spread freely on the Internet.
"Rocking the boat" and "terrorism" are not necessarily quite the same. As far as I know Michael Moore hasn't yet been shipped off to Guantanamo for "rocking the boat."
Here we go again. Do you think you're "hardcore" because you complain about the entirely imaginary lack of gameplay and story in video games? There's nothing wrong with the gameplay of modern games, and I would say that Max Payne has a stronger storyline than Double Dragon.
To whomever modded this: I was referring to the parent post, I was not referring to my post which, at the time of the posting, was not modded anything. You fucking idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, naturally anyone who's siding with Israel is a troll, as Slashdot users have shown time and time again.
When considering death tolls, there are some factors that need to be taken into account. Intent is an important one, as collateral damage and intentional damage are not the same thing. Then you have to consider the way Palestinians use human shields or otherwise expose civilians to danger, and then exploit the dead for propaganda purposes (Hezbollah did the same during last year's conflict). And who's really innocent? The area is crawling with terrorists wearing civilian clothes, and if the Palestinians, who are infamous for their lies and fabrications, claim that innocent people were killed by an Israeli attack, I'd take that claim with a grain of salt. Finally, the unbalanced reporting of the situation seems to downplay the persistent, blind rocket attacks againts Israel.
Another thing occurs to me: from a moral point of view it doesn't really matter who kills the most people, it only matters why those people were killed and who they were. This was completely ignored during the Lebanon conflict where people were concerned about the "disproportionate" death tolls, as if it's somehow unfair that Israel suffers less casualties in a war than its opponent.
Here's a poll according to which 66.8% of Palestinians support kidnappings, and 60% support rocket fire. The poll results seem consistent with "anecdotal" evidence.
There. Now it's more in line with reality.
What about them? Is there reason to think that Israel would suddenly launch nukes into neighboring countries for no reason?
How fucking predictable that this got +1 Insightful.
Using nukes is not inherently wrong, so the argument that the US is the only country to have used nukes is completely meaningless. Iran's government is off the deep end, that's why they can't be allowed to have nukes.
Or so some people claim. The entire issue is so incredibly and mind-bogglingly convoluted that I've stopped caring. All I know is that Israel deserves the land, while the Palestinians do not.
You must be new here. If you deviate from the accepted groupthink, you run the risk of getting modded as a troll or flamebaiter.
What about anonymous cowards who don't even reply to anything and just mod down opposing views?
As far as I can tell you define an unfinished area as an area that you can't visit on foot. That doesn't make any sense.
It's clear that you don't. Someone who plays the game wouldn't call Ironforge "the Dwarven starting town."
No, you're clearly shifting responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim. No reason why it shouldn't also apply to murder or robbery.
Or if you don't want to get robbed, don't keep valuables in your home. If you don't want to get mugged, beaten, murdered or raped, don't go outside. How simple it all is.
You can't make games like Mass Effect and Gears of War with a couple of small donations from a few people, and if those games aren't made then there's nothing for people to take freely.
I get illegal stuff from the Internet like anyone else, but I'm not going to pretend like I'm in some sort of dire need of the latest episode of 24, or some music album.
My comment implied that if everyone could simply alter their own lives as they see fit, few people in the world would be unhappy. People could simply fix all their problems. But as we all know or should know, human beings don't work that way. So, saying that "we all have the power to change our own lives" reeks of feel-good bullshit.
As for the rest of your post, you seem to think that I believe that genes dictate everything and that behavior is therefore pre-determined. I never said anything of the sort. I was just saying that freedom of will is limited. You also make amazing leaps to things like eugenics and treating people like animals. Frankly, I have no idea what you're talking about and how it relates to my post, which you may or may not have read.
You overestimate a human's ability to make choices, as I explained in my previous post. Life is still not an RPG.
I don't understand what kind of evolutionary purpose is filled by things like cancer, blindness or various syndromes, diseases, genetic defects and so forth.
But you said that anti-social personality disorder may have surfaced as a means of destroying populations that were too succesful. What kind of natural mechanism determines that a population has become too succesful, and decides to obliterate it?
Uh... where the fuck did I say anything about intelligent design or religion?
Not everything has or had an evolutionary purpose (as far as I know), and evolution is not some sort of sentient force that knows or cares about things like a population's success (not that a few anti-social people are even enough to cause self-destruction).
I'm not American.
Why would it be equal to saying that someone has been possessed by Satan (this, if anything, is an invalid argument)? There's nothing invalid about saying that some humans are born "bad" if it's true. Yes, people have free will, but that doesn't mean that they decide "yeah, I think I'll be a good person." Freedom of will is limited, and if you're biologically conditioned to be bad then no amount of free will is going to fix that.
If people can be born with violent temperaments, harsh attitudes and lack of empathy, why couldn't they be born without the ability to understand what's acceptable and what's not?
You seem to be running with the assumption that life is like a computer RPG where you can just click and choose your responses. One moment you kill the peasants for fun, but five minutes later you save the princess to get the magical sword as a quest reward. You seem to think that everyone can just choose exactly what they do in a completely logical and objective fashion. No, it doesn't work that way.
Your decisions are based on your perceptions about things (these perceptions can be influenced by many things, including drugs). For example, I would not daterape someone because I would decide that I don't want to do that, because it's againts my moral beliefs, and because I don't want to go to prison. Ok, I suppose I have complete freedom to do whatever I want, in theory, but my moral beliefs dictate what I want and don't want to do. So basically, I can't really choose to do anything I want to. Some other person might have different moral beliefs, and he'd decide differently. Or maybe he doesn't have moral beliefs at all, maybe he just does whatever makes him feel good.
Some people are "bad" because of the way they were raised or because of the things they experienced when growing up. Some of them are just insane, or something is wrong with their genes, chemical balance, or something (IANAD). Conversely, other people are good because of the way they were raised, and so on. Human beings don't inherently possess the moral standards of contemporary Western civilization, they're learned traits. That's why a terrorist who grew up in a fundamentalist Muslim society is radically different than someone who grew up in the Soviet Union or Japan or Norway (and from his own cultural vantage point, he's not a bad person).
A person who is blaming his upbringing is probably lucid enough to know what he's doing, and I don't advocate treating criminals with kid gloves because they had a bad childhood, but obviously batshit insane people are a different story. I guess they belong in a psychiatric prison.
This is feel-good nonsense that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but is ultimately bullshit.
If they're favored by natural selection, why aren't they the norm? Why exactly would natural selection favor humans who don't get along with or care about the well-being of others? Seems highly counter-productive if you think about some sort of pre-historic environment where tribes have to survive againts wildlife and nature.
You're not supposed to cherry pick them. A person is defined as a psychopath when enough conditions are met.
Same. My father also killed himself, I was bullied throughout school and I had an upleasant stepfather for some time.
I think many people here just don't want to deal with the fact that sometimes there's just nothing you can do to fix someone.
If certain foods and drinks caused people to become violent, we'd have an epidemic. Yes, perhaps some children become more aggressive, but there's no reason to think that the same happened to this person.
If they've committed a serious crime as a result of their genetic antisocial behavior and they seem to be beyond help, then I don't see why you couldn't cure them.
Yes. He was sent to Syria because he was brown. Meanwhile, the US continues to accept non-white immigrants, Keith Ellison became a congresman and Condoleezza Rice is Secretary of State.
There's nothing unusual about police or military forces training together, or training each other. It does not violate national sovereigenty.
I find it interesting that almost any comment on Slashdot, whether on topic or not (in this case the latter), gets modded positive if it's anti-American or critical of the US government or its policies. Meanwhile, I once got modded flamebait or troll for saying something in favor of Israel (I actually just stated the fact that Israel left Gaza, but even that was too much).
For a seemingly non-political site, Slashdot's extreme leftist slant is readily obvious, and fully supported by the moderating system which favors leftists by allowing them to anonymously mod someone troll or flamebait without any explanation or accountability. On traditional forums they're at least forced to say something, like "you fucking Nazi."
I didn't realize that a high budget video game produced by tens or hundreds of people using expensive software and hardware is now just an insubstantial "idea" that anyone can and should spread freely on the Internet.
"Rocking the boat" and "terrorism" are not necessarily quite the same. As far as I know Michael Moore hasn't yet been shipped off to Guantanamo for "rocking the boat."
Here we go again. Do you think you're "hardcore" because you complain about the entirely imaginary lack of gameplay and story in video games? There's nothing wrong with the gameplay of modern games, and I would say that Max Payne has a stronger storyline than Double Dragon.
To whomever modded this: I was referring to the parent post, I was not referring to my post which, at the time of the posting, was not modded anything. You fucking idiot.