first, awareness. 'tolerance' wont work with islam. second, politics. middle eastern countries should be pressurized to modernize islam and crack down on extremism. third, worldwide vigilance. there are already numerous islamist organizations which have grown more powerful than small countries and settled in numerous countries of the world.
and he is right to be afraid. even egyptian reformers were killed, just because they proposed the possibility of maaaybe reinterpreting koran with today's principles.
If any of you have actually read koran, you will know - it is not only a religious text, intending to govern inner space of an individual. It is a fully laden constitution, complete with civil and criminal law. Everything, ranging from how to distribute inheritance to what 'rights' minorities can have in an islamic society, is tied to concrete rules there. Curiously, most of the rules contained therein are similar with hedjaz tribal customs and laws (particularly quraish tribe) from pro mohammad times.
However, because koran is the 'unchanged' word of god (so says islam), it is unobjectionable. Add to that the fact that islam based on koran is put forth as the only way to live for muslims in koran, it makes islam impossible to coexist with any other social system or law. This is the cause of the friction in countries that are not from middle east, have modern legislations, and muslim minorities.
Egyptian reformers tried to deal with these, tried to 'modernize' islam, and 'reinterpret' koran in the light of modern principles. Results were disastrous. Some of them were killed, some of them had to flee the country, and some of them had to shut up. The struggle continues even to this day. Because koran is put forth as unchanged word of god, it is impossible to find any excuse to reinterpret it. And because you cant reinterpret it, you cant make it compatible with modern principles and views.
And this creates the basis of power for islamism, ie the noticeable segment of muslim organizations that intend to create a one world sharia government. It is impossible to argue against them, because of the above issues.
Ironically, muslims also suffer oppression from this, because the direct interpretation of koran, well, comes up medieval. If you attempt to fully adhere to islam, numerous civil oppressions become inevitable, due to the rulings set in koran. However, mild muslims, a noticeable percentage of muslim population around the world, also cant argue against this, because it is set in koran, and koran is unchanged word of god.
Until these issues are solved, islam will be creating problems and not be able to fit in.
(any muslim slashdotters, please spare me the 'you dont know real islam' shit, i was a muslim once and i studied koran at length, with cross references to mohammad's hadith, unless many of so called muslims which use that bullshit excuse despite not having ever read koran once. so save it).
yes a new blight. when you advance enough in dao story, you start to see that you are being delivered information in the form of 'another blight has come', 'blight of last time this that', 'until next time' etc.
this piece is quite in line with what i has been complaining of in my little rant about mass effect 2 last night in the journal item i posted to slashdot :
Mass effect, Me2 , Dragon Age : Origins are SO good in implementation, details and polish but SO weak in the MAIN story that, they really leave a sour taste for the buck in your mouth. Dragon age is, basically 'Hey ! A new blight has come. AGAIN. lets beat this blight and wait until the next time bioware needs to issue an expansion'. Whereas, all the side details, ie, background stories of characters, side quests, other events unrelated to main story are all good and galore.
Dragon Age also isnt helped at all by torturous, neverending, lengthy dungeons in which you kill enemy after enemy (Similar enemies) and then a brief respite until you get into the next dungeon sequence in which you will get bored.
"The private interests which use our companies as allies are annoyed with our incapability to subdue google, and therefore we are suing on behalf of them"
google was out of the traditional establishment and private interest parties. and on more than one occasion it pioneered the public awareness effort to thwart their plans to end that insolent freedoms on the internet. (the anti net neutrality bill proposal a few years back, warrantless private information request refusals, acta etc).
so basically, they werent able to subdue it. and now they are trying to do it through 'antitrust' bullshit. despite they have no complaints against at&t, comcast, microsoft, intel and so on.
considering how supreme court was staffed by private interest backed right wing judges by bush in his term, they may succeed.
or google may relocate to ireland or europe, totally fucking up everything for them.
you are the ceo of a manufacturing company. your job is to deliver products to your customers and allow THEM to choose what to do and what not to do on your product. you should provide the means for parents to block certain apps, but do not block the apps for the parents yourself, by your own self justification.
you are not the shepherd of apple flock to herd them like they were goats. you are the ceo of the company that produces products for them.
I'm not familiar with the case in Brazil, but if it's anything like what happened with black slaves in America after the abolition, then no, it wasn't slavery. I think the farmers who took advantage of the situation of their former-slaves were douchebags, but then again, if they hadn't been douchebags they wouldn't have had slaves in the first place.
you should be familiar with the post-slavery situation in brasil, and other countries who practiced slavery, in order to be able to this freely declare that something that is near slavery is ok, if there is a seeming 'choice'. seeming is the keyword here. i advise you to take up on some history research. you wont regret it.
The important thing is that while some (many?) farmers/plantation-owners decided to take advantage of the situation, that situation only persisted for the period which it took the freed slaves to create new options for themselves. And the difference between THAT and actual slavery is that slaves have ZERO chance of creating ANY new options for themselves. They have no rights. They can never leave. They can never chose to work for a better employer, or save enough money to buy a small piece of land. They have no right to refuse to be beaten or raped. All they can do is toil until they die.
there is the problem. if you move from ZERO chance to 1% chance of some opportunity, that doesnt make the new condition any different. back during slavery slaves also had the chance to run away and pretend as freemen, therefore passing as freemen in the north in united states, and maybe finding a job too. but, the chances were very slim to the point of nonexistent.
No matter what your opinion, though, you're making a false comparison. Microsoft never owned any slaves. These people voluntarily came to work at a business which offers them decent pay and relatively safe working conditions. No amount of blabbing about plantations and slaves is going to change that. Instead of going off on tangents, why not just admit you've lost the argument?
it is evident that you are no enthusiast of history. however i will humor you and establish what near slavery means, and how it is being perpetrated in current system, since you have established that you are not someone who is pro slavery. therefore i take it that your misconceptions and overly enthusiastic idealism about the current system we are living in, and its ramifications, are either due to you being rather young, or being too devoid of historical knowledge. so i will establish what modern slavery is and how it is perpetrated even in united states for you:
first, very little chance of happening for something and that thing actually being forbidden are no different. if there is very slim chance of something happening, you dont need to forbid it or enforce it anyway. this is a logical axiom. ie, since there is no chance that someone can actually topple empire state building by leaning on one of its walls, we do not see the need to forbid leaning against its walls. i doubt you would find this objectionable.
therefore, all you need to perpetuate some situation that you desire, is to lower chances of anything other than that situation happening.
now lets take a look at the income and wealth distribution in united states, from recent stats:
in this picture you will see wealth distribution in united states. 80% of population can command only 7% of financial wealth. whereas, top 5% commands 73% of country's total financial wealth. top 5% has 62% of country's total worth, whereas bottom 80% has only 15% of its net worth. the disparage between incomes of top wage earners (ceos) and factory workers are even larger and getting larger with time.
It does in this case, as the criticism amply demonstrates. The term "wage slavery" was invented precisely in order to draw a false equivalence between employment and slavery. It is utterly meaningless for anyone other than self-deluded ideologues.
that is precisely why i am avoiding a discussion on the technical definitions. its easy to make escape routes by theory.
I've already answered the general gist of that, and your attempt to couch it in hypotheticals just confuses the issue. Your phrasing would allow for absurd comparisons, such as a situation in which I force you to pick between the murder of your wife or the murder of your child. So no, I won't let you draw me in to that type of debate.
Stick to the facts. We're discussing a Chinese shop which pays minimum wage, has an 8 hour work day, and offers overtime. They employ people who seem to think that working there is better than any other alternative. The bitching quoted in the article is no different than what you'd hear from some zero-education drone working at a Dairy Queen. If you think that's slavery, then you're an idiot. Period, full stop. If you truly believe that, I see nothing left for us to discuss.
yes you have answered it. and basically your answer justifies near slavery if the people submit themselves to those conditions willingly. there isnt too much of a stretch to go from that point to total slavery, and all it prevents that hop is just the naming technicality.
that is why i have specifically given you an example from post-slavery brasil in which slaves were supposedly free. i had asked you, whether the conditions created by plantation holders, which emulated slavery in all aspects, but with a different storefront, was ok. you havent answered this one. im waiting for that answer.
not to mention how disturbingly stupid the criticism is:
Wage slavery is also in contradiction to the classical liberal and libertarian notion of self-ownership. Under this view, a person is not free unless he can sell himself, because if a person does not own themself, they must be owned by either another individual or a group of individuals. The ability for anyone to consent to an activity or action would then be placed in the hands of a third party. Further, the third-party's ownership would also be in the hands of yet another individual or group. This regression of ownership would transfer ad infinitum and leave no one with the ability to coordinate their own actions or those of anyone else. The conclusion is therefore that if under wage slavery, self-ownership is not legitimate, there is no right for anyone then to claim enslavement to wages in the first place.[111]
so as long as you are the one SELLING YOURSELF, it is ok.
there being 'criticism' about something does not negate the validity of that thing. there are 'revisionists' who want the public to accept that holocaust never happened, and it was a hoax too, and they bring a lot of 'criticism' against history.
i wont go debating about this deeper and deeper. it is enough if you answer the below question :
if, some humanely inacceptable condition/practice is just changed a little to be different in its former condition only with some measure, and then a seeming but impracticle 'choice' is put in to the equation, and the same thing is named just differently, does this make that thing acceptably humane.
some of you think that if there was choice, you could just choose the isp which respected net neutrality and problem would be solved.
it is anything but this. just check any sector in regard to products and services :
some corporations start some practice in their product/service. if they can get away, others start to imitate it. when the number of companies practicing it hits a noticeable level (and corresponding market share), the practice becomes de facto standard of the sector. in almost every field this is like that.
so, even if you had competition, 2-3 major isps (at&t filth etc) would start filtering their traffic, and after a while try to push it as de facto, logical nature of the industry. they can take huge losses, they have staying power, they can wait. you couldnt expect smaller isps to resist for long.
this is something like your free speech rights - you cant just skip enforcing them, and then just expect everythign to 'work out fine' by itself. some things need enforcement.
what about open ended, life simulation games. like Pirates! for example. or the games that are made in that open ended, immersion in life/period school. what if they represent potential real events, love, laugh, loss, hate etc quite well ?
doesnt it make such games interactive, different-each-time novels ?
no, the argument is over because despite you are making your living on working in i.t. related sectors, in a modern knowledge age, you dont have the brains to realize that it is the society to which you should be thanking for for your well being.
had you been born in 1450, you wouldnt be worth polishing the local lord's shoes with your current intellectual capacity. the people you are looking down now would be living a high life because their skill set would be worth more at that point in time than yours would be.
you are currently here, living an easier life, someone who wouldnt be worth shit a few centuries ago precisely because that society didnt talk and behave like you do, and instead moved on in a more civilized, society conscious direction. else, you would either be a slave, or a beggar in a very different world.
buuuuut, you come up blabbering about how you owe nothing back to society, this and that.
then go fucking live on a mountain top. for all the amenities and conditions you are living in has been created by the society which you are snarking back against.
it is the lack of mental capacity that makes you unable to realize this situation, or the immense ignorance of societal history that makes you not worth discussing. i cant keep wasting time teaching one badass survivalist wannabee self centrist after another how and why this civilization came to being like it is now. ill go survivalist with you : 'go fucking learn history'
notice the dates. he probably forgot all kinds of due dates due to the speed things were proceeding in france. by his books' due date, everyone in the world was aware that what was happening was a revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
first, awareness. 'tolerance' wont work with islam. second, politics. middle eastern countries should be pressurized to modernize islam and crack down on extremism. third, worldwide vigilance. there are already numerous islamist organizations which have grown more powerful than small countries and settled in numerous countries of the world.
and he is right to be afraid. even egyptian reformers were killed, just because they proposed the possibility of maaaybe reinterpreting koran with today's principles.
If any of you have actually read koran, you will know - it is not only a religious text, intending to govern inner space of an individual. It is a fully laden constitution, complete with civil and criminal law. Everything, ranging from how to distribute inheritance to what 'rights' minorities can have in an islamic society, is tied to concrete rules there. Curiously, most of the rules contained therein are similar with hedjaz tribal customs and laws (particularly quraish tribe) from pro mohammad times.
However, because koran is the 'unchanged' word of god (so says islam), it is unobjectionable. Add to that the fact that islam based on koran is put forth as the only way to live for muslims in koran, it makes islam impossible to coexist with any other social system or law. This is the cause of the friction in countries that are not from middle east, have modern legislations, and muslim minorities.
Egyptian reformers tried to deal with these, tried to 'modernize' islam, and 'reinterpret' koran in the light of modern principles. Results were disastrous. Some of them were killed, some of them had to flee the country, and some of them had to shut up. The struggle continues even to this day. Because koran is put forth as unchanged word of god, it is impossible to find any excuse to reinterpret it. And because you cant reinterpret it, you cant make it compatible with modern principles and views.
And this creates the basis of power for islamism, ie the noticeable segment of muslim organizations that intend to create a one world sharia government. It is impossible to argue against them, because of the above issues.
Ironically, muslims also suffer oppression from this, because the direct interpretation of koran, well, comes up medieval. If you attempt to fully adhere to islam, numerous civil oppressions become inevitable, due to the rulings set in koran. However, mild muslims, a noticeable percentage of muslim population around the world, also cant argue against this, because it is set in koran, and koran is unchanged word of god.
Until these issues are solved, islam will be creating problems and not be able to fit in.
(any muslim slashdotters, please spare me the 'you dont know real islam' shit, i was a muslim once and i studied koran at length, with cross references to mohammad's hadith, unless many of so called muslims which use that bullshit excuse despite not having ever read koran once. so save it).
yes a new blight. when you advance enough in dao story, you start to see that you are being delivered information in the form of 'another blight has come', 'blight of last time this that', 'until next time' etc.
this piece is quite in line with what i has been complaining of in my little rant about mass effect 2 last night in the journal item i posted to slashdot :
http://slashdot.org/journal/249254/Mass-Effect-2--Can-you-say-Eye-fck---Dumbed-down-?art_pos=1
Mass effect, Me2 , Dragon Age : Origins are SO good in implementation, details and polish but SO weak in the MAIN story that, they really leave a sour taste for the buck in your mouth. Dragon age is, basically 'Hey ! A new blight has come. AGAIN. lets beat this blight and wait until the next time bioware needs to issue an expansion'. Whereas, all the side details, ie, background stories of characters, side quests, other events unrelated to main story are all good and galore.
Dragon Age also isnt helped at all by torturous, neverending, lengthy dungeons in which you kill enemy after enemy (Similar enemies) and then a brief respite until you get into the next dungeon sequence in which you will get bored.
you have dumbfucked me with your capacity in combining seemingly irrelevant concepts all together in a mesh to troll another person successfully.
"The private interests which use our companies as allies are annoyed with our incapability to subdue google, and therefore we are suing on behalf of them"
google was out of the traditional establishment and private interest parties. and on more than one occasion it pioneered the public awareness effort to thwart their plans to end that insolent freedoms on the internet. (the anti net neutrality bill proposal a few years back, warrantless private information request refusals, acta etc).
so basically, they werent able to subdue it. and now they are trying to do it through 'antitrust' bullshit. despite they have no complaints against at&t, comcast, microsoft, intel and so on.
considering how supreme court was staffed by private interest backed right wing judges by bush in his term, they may succeed.
or google may relocate to ireland or europe, totally fucking up everything for them.
you are the ceo of a manufacturing company. your job is to deliver products to your customers and allow THEM to choose what to do and what not to do on your product. you should provide the means for parents to block certain apps, but do not block the apps for the parents yourself, by your own self justification.
you are not the shepherd of apple flock to herd them like they were goats. you are the ceo of the company that produces products for them.
you sounded like reasonable individual, only to come out as another right wing nutjob in the end. anyway. youll grow out of it with time.
I'm not familiar with the case in Brazil, but if it's anything like what happened with black slaves in America after the abolition, then no, it wasn't slavery. I think the farmers who took advantage of the situation of their former-slaves were douchebags, but then again, if they hadn't been douchebags they wouldn't have had slaves in the first place.
you should be familiar with the post-slavery situation in brasil, and other countries who practiced slavery, in order to be able to this freely declare that something that is near slavery is ok, if there is a seeming 'choice'. seeming is the keyword here. i advise you to take up on some history research. you wont regret it.
The important thing is that while some (many?) farmers/plantation-owners decided to take advantage of the situation, that situation only persisted for the period which it took the freed slaves to create new options for themselves. And the difference between THAT and actual slavery is that slaves have ZERO chance of creating ANY new options for themselves. They have no rights. They can never leave. They can never chose to work for a better employer, or save enough money to buy a small piece of land. They have no right to refuse to be beaten or raped. All they can do is toil until they die.
there is the problem. if you move from ZERO chance to 1% chance of some opportunity, that doesnt make the new condition any different. back during slavery slaves also had the chance to run away and pretend as freemen, therefore passing as freemen in the north in united states, and maybe finding a job too. but, the chances were very slim to the point of nonexistent.
No matter what your opinion, though, you're making a false comparison. Microsoft never owned any slaves. These people voluntarily came to work at a business which offers them decent pay and relatively safe working conditions. No amount of blabbing about plantations and slaves is going to change that. Instead of going off on tangents, why not just admit you've lost the argument?
it is evident that you are no enthusiast of history. however i will humor you and establish what near slavery means, and how it is being perpetrated in current system, since you have established that you are not someone who is pro slavery. therefore i take it that your misconceptions and overly enthusiastic idealism about the current system we are living in, and its ramifications, are either due to you being rather young, or being too devoid of historical knowledge. so i will establish what modern slavery is and how it is perpetrated even in united states for you :
first, very little chance of happening for something and that thing actually being forbidden are no different. if there is very slim chance of something happening, you dont need to forbid it or enforce it anyway. this is a logical axiom. ie, since there is no chance that someone can actually topple empire state building by leaning on one of its walls, we do not see the need to forbid leaning against its walls. i doubt you would find this objectionable.
therefore, all you need to perpetuate some situation that you desire, is to lower chances of anything other than that situation happening.
now lets take a look at the income and wealth distribution in united states, from recent stats :
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/images/wealth/Figure_1.gif
in this picture you will see wealth distribution in united states. 80% of population can command only 7% of financial wealth. whereas, top 5% commands 73% of country's total financial wealth. top 5% has 62% of country's total worth, whereas bottom 80% has only 15% of its net worth. the disparage between incomes of top wage earners (ceos) and factory workers are even larger and getting larger with time.
original source :
It does in this case, as the criticism amply demonstrates. The term "wage slavery" was invented precisely in order to draw a false equivalence between employment and slavery. It is utterly meaningless for anyone other than self-deluded ideologues.
that is precisely why i am avoiding a discussion on the technical definitions. its easy to make escape routes by theory.
I've already answered the general gist of that, and your attempt to couch it in hypotheticals just confuses the issue. Your phrasing would allow for absurd comparisons, such as a situation in which I force you to pick between the murder of your wife or the murder of your child. So no, I won't let you draw me in to that type of debate.
Stick to the facts. We're discussing a Chinese shop which pays minimum wage, has an 8 hour work day, and offers overtime. They employ people who seem to think that working there is better than any other alternative. The bitching quoted in the article is no different than what you'd hear from some zero-education drone working at a Dairy Queen. If you think that's slavery, then you're an idiot. Period, full stop. If you truly believe that, I see nothing left for us to discuss.
yes you have answered it. and basically your answer justifies near slavery if the people submit themselves to those conditions willingly. there isnt too much of a stretch to go from that point to total slavery, and all it prevents that hop is just the naming technicality.
that is why i have specifically given you an example from post-slavery brasil in which slaves were supposedly free. i had asked you, whether the conditions created by plantation holders, which emulated slavery in all aspects, but with a different storefront, was ok. you havent answered this one. im waiting for that answer.
as in ?
not to mention how disturbingly stupid the criticism is :
Wage slavery is also in contradiction to the classical liberal and libertarian notion of self-ownership. Under this view, a person is not free unless he can sell himself, because if a person does not own themself, they must be owned by either another individual or a group of individuals. The ability for anyone to consent to an activity or action would then be placed in the hands of a third party. Further, the third-party's ownership would also be in the hands of yet another individual or group. This regression of ownership would transfer ad infinitum and leave no one with the ability to coordinate their own actions or those of anyone else. The conclusion is therefore that if under wage slavery, self-ownership is not legitimate, there is no right for anyone then to claim enslavement to wages in the first place.[111]
so as long as you are the one SELLING YOURSELF, it is ok.
there being 'criticism' about something does not negate the validity of that thing. there are 'revisionists' who want the public to accept that holocaust never happened, and it was a hoax too, and they bring a lot of 'criticism' against history.
i wont go debating about this deeper and deeper. it is enough if you answer the below question :
if, some humanely inacceptable condition/practice is just changed a little to be different in its former condition only with some measure, and then a seeming but impracticle 'choice' is put in to the equation, and the same thing is named just differently, does this make that thing acceptably humane.
it doesnt help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
it is possible to create conditions for near slavery of free people, by manipulating the social environment.
this was the method brasilian slaveholder plantation owners used to continue the system as usual after slavery was abolished in brazil.
before i lash out on you, i am going to ask you whether you are being extremely sarcastic to the point of sounding serious, or, being serious.
Title should have been "Intel wants to sell you motherboards and shit, along with their new cpu line" ...
i really got tired of this old trick.
its ok for microsoft to employ a sweatshop, because the slaves in there consented to being exploited ...
some of you think that if there was choice, you could just choose the isp which respected net neutrality and problem would be solved.
it is anything but this. just check any sector in regard to products and services :
some corporations start some practice in their product/service. if they can get away, others start to imitate it. when the number of companies practicing it hits a noticeable level (and corresponding market share), the practice becomes de facto standard of the sector. in almost every field this is like that.
so, even if you had competition, 2-3 major isps (at&t filth etc) would start filtering their traffic, and after a while try to push it as de facto, logical nature of the industry. they can take huge losses, they have staying power, they can wait. you couldnt expect smaller isps to resist for long.
this is something like your free speech rights - you cant just skip enforcing them, and then just expect everythign to 'work out fine' by itself. some things need enforcement.
you have the choice of an illusion.
i dont work for any corporate overlordship, and i have never had worked for any corporate overlordship. and i disagree with you.
for, i was at liberty to choose how much i want and with how much i can do with. i didnt have anyone that i was obliged to provide for.
we dont even exist as a statistic among the population. masses are obliged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming
http://farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
what about open ended, life simulation games. like Pirates! for example. or the games that are made in that open ended, immersion in life/period school. what if they represent potential real events, love, laugh, loss, hate etc quite well ?
doesnt it make such games interactive, different-each-time novels ?
no, the argument is over because despite you are making your living on working in i.t. related sectors, in a modern knowledge age, you dont have the brains to realize that it is the society to which you should be thanking for for your well being.
had you been born in 1450, you wouldnt be worth polishing the local lord's shoes with your current intellectual capacity. the people you are looking down now would be living a high life because their skill set would be worth more at that point in time than yours would be.
you are currently here, living an easier life, someone who wouldnt be worth shit a few centuries ago precisely because that society didnt talk and behave like you do, and instead moved on in a more civilized, society conscious direction. else, you would either be a slave, or a beggar in a very different world.
buuuuut, you come up blabbering about how you owe nothing back to society, this and that.
then go fucking live on a mountain top. for all the amenities and conditions you are living in has been created by the society which you are snarking back against.
it is the lack of mental capacity that makes you unable to realize this situation, or the immense ignorance of societal history that makes you not worth discussing. i cant keep wasting time teaching one badass survivalist wannabee self centrist after another how and why this civilization came to being like it is now. ill go survivalist with you : 'go fucking learn history'
good day.
for it is, and i have posted in this discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
notice the dates. he probably forgot all kinds of due dates due to the speed things were proceeding in france. by his books' due date, everyone in the world was aware that what was happening was a revolution.