I think you misunderstand addiction. Someone who is addicted to something is unable to control how often they do it, how much time they invest in it.
There's a difference between someone who is addicted to WoW and someone who plays too much. And while your suggestion may work for those who simply spend more time than they should playing Wow, this discussion was focusing on those who are addicted to it.
Or that they develop enough willingness to make an attempt to step back into reality. With any kind of addiction, people do not quit until they are willing to attempt to change their behavior patterns.
Not saying that they would have to log off WoW and go see an IRL therapist. See my suggestion that therapists be made available through in-game methods.
I think that you are referring to a personality disorder rather than the addiction though. While it's true that addiction and isolationist personalities go together in most cases the isolation is a result of the addiction and must be treated as a part of the recovery process.
Alcoholics for instance are often extreme isolationists at least as bad as WoW addicts, perhaps more so since they often don't even have human contact through the medium of the game. They cannot recover however until they develop at least enough willingness to step just far enough outside of their comfort zone to ask for help.
I'm not an expert on addiction and the particulars with MMO addiction may be such that you are correct or that the method employed by the aforementioned therapists will actually be of use. I don't think that enough is known about this specific sub-type of addictive personality at this time to say for sure. However, with what has been discovered with all other types of addictive behavior in the past, the likelihood is high that the same treatment methods and protocol will hold true for this addiction as well. For instance, all recovery programs, for over-eaters, sex addicts, drug addicts, etc. are all based on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The specifics may be different but the framework of the recovery process and the necessary "steps" that one must take to recover from those addictions is the same. And it's been the case thus far, until a better method is found, that this same process is the most successful for all of the various forms of addiction.
I will gladly eat my words if I am proven to be wrong. Anything that helps people overcome addiction is great in my book, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. At least they're trying to do something. At the very least their presence in-game may plant the seed of "I might be an addict" into someone's head that will later grow into the willingness to ask for help.
I have to say that any addiction counselor with even a modicum of knowledge in their chosen field would know going into this that it's bollocks.
The fact is that you don't approach people who have a problem while they are in active addiction. Doing this is the equivalent of going to a bar to have a chat with an alcoholic. Beyond even that, no amount of pestering someone with an addiction is going to make them quit or even HELP them to quit. They simply have to come to the point that they personally are ready to take action and then you just have to make sure that the information on where they can go to get help is widely disseminated in order to ease that transition for them.
One thing that I'm not totally clear on here: Are these counselors responding to actual requests for aid or are they just hanging out and yelling to everyone that they're selling their wares? "I'll give you 10k to talk to me about your addiction...or at least be in my raid."
If they're just hanging out unsolicited and looking for people who want to talk about their problem...well it's good for them to BE there if someone wants to talk about it, sort of the way that you can pick up the phone and call an AA central office in your area when you feel that you may need help with THAT addiction, but I still don't feel that this is the best use of their time.
Maybe it would have been better for them to pressure Blizzard into including some kind of service for this. Where if someone feels that they need help with their addiction they can link to it through the Blizzard website or maybe even contact a counselor in-game. A bunch of counselors walking around unsolicited asking people if they'd like to talk about addiction though? That's a little too much like the Jehovah Witnesses for my tastes.
with this article is that it was kind of minimalist. Cory has been talking about this exact thing for a long time--so I'm not totally sure why it's news now, but I feel like he's done it better in the past. For those who disagree with his assessment based on this article; I advise you to read "Content", a collection of speeches that he's given where he talks about just this type of thing (it's free to download just like all of his other work).
The one thing that I think puts traditional print newspapers in danger of going under that I did not see mentioned in this specific article is that the internet puts them further behind the curve. Television news made "Breaking News" stories possible. The internet made "Breaking News" universal. Where television news can't afford to interrupt their programming every time a new story breaks it's on the internet immediately. Where traditional print media had an advantage over television news (which allowed them to co-exist) is that it allowed for more information, a five-page story in the times contains more data that is relevant to the story than a 5 minute television spot (which would actually be a pretty long spot--not that I've ever seen a five-page story in the times). The ease with which stories can be found on the internet actually allows for even more information than is available in print media. With the internet, I have the option to drill-down on the story, I can read stories about: the author of the story; the city that it took place in; the culture of that city; historic events that may have lead to this; etc.
So internet news does everything that print AND television news media does -- only better. I can get my information faster, on my own time, with more depth and the freedom to research and discover the story in the ways that I think are relevant. It's not like those traditional companies are going away -- there will still be a "New York Times" 20yrs from now--hell there'll probably still be a printed version of it--but most of the content will be online and since it'll still be coming from the "New York Times" you'll still have the same amount of trust (or dis-trust) for that information as you had before.
Cory's article was not about telling everyone that he has the answers; that he is culturally relevant and they are not. It was a warning to traditional media outlets about possible pitfalls in a future economy. As a science-fiction writer, one of Cory's job titles is "futurist", and just like Robert Heinlein before him, it's not a question of whether or not he's one-hundred percent accurate. What's more important is that he speaks with the voice of the present day. I'm sure that he won't be totally correct in his assumptions--because who ever is(?)--and I don't believe that he expects to be completely accurate either (and I say this as an admitted fan of his) but at least he said his piece.
p.s. Just before I wrote this, a representative of Amazon.com was on the today show talking about their e-book reader and how it's one of the main reasons that they're not slowing down in the weak economy. (print media what?)
I don't understand why people get so hung up grammatical errors that don't affect the message that the writer was trying to get across. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the problem isn't that he didn't capitalize, but is instead the fact that you judged his intelligence based on his lack of capitalization rather than the content of his message? A rose by any other name after all...
i'm sorry...i guess i shouldn't have been so reasonable about this situation. let me point out that the representative in question was NOT being an asshole...in fact he never said one word that was out of the way, secondly if you MUST know...i no longer work for any of these companies because i felt morally disgusted by the way that they did business. BUT that being said. ANYONE who feels that they can just not work at all simply because they don't like the policies that the places they work project onto them is a drain on society and that excuse won't work with me. It's a COP OUT plain and simple. Lastly even though i absolutely HATE it when people do this normally because it tends to be just for the sake of getting a rise out of someone and not in order to benefit the discussion. I'm afraid that i'm gonna have to invoke godwin on you. Comparing someone working in a call center who trys to take up a few extra minutes of your time to find out why you want to do something that may be stupid to a nazi is not only incorrect...it's LUDICROUS! In fact. A better comparrison for this person would be a police officer in the united states (okay i know some people think that they're nazis too). My point being though that a police officer may take up someones time to try and get them to do something that it is in their best interest to do (like wear a seatbelt for instance). Now while i personally don't like the fact that i'm being told by someone who does not own my body (which in this analogy equates to your account at aol, etc.) that doesn't mean that i think that them doing so is morally irresponsible.
However, i digress...YOU SIR(or madam...although i don't know any females named pete) are a troll. You are simply trying to get a rise out of me by turning what was a very relevant posting about the situation involved into something evil and twisted. For that...i hope you rot in hell. But FIRST...i hope that when you turn 13 or so you start to realize that you were wrong to act the way that you did. Hell i know when i was younger i was a script-kiddie and i'm sure as hell glad that i can look back on it now and realize that it was stupid and childish. When you get out into the real world you will realize that sometimes things aren't black and white. Just because you don't like someone or their opinion does not make them a nazi. Just because you feel that doing something may not be the most moral way to make money does not mean that you have the right to take money from other hard-working individuals by doing nothing. Not only THAT, but if you TAKE money from those individuals simply because you didn't like the policies that you were made to follow at McDonalds then your claim of being morally superior to anyone who is WILLING to follow those policies in order to get by on their own is INSULTING to those who are paying YOUR FUCKING WAY. Sometimes in order to stay alive we have to compromise our morals a bit. It's a fact of life that any adult who was not at one point a drain on their parents or society in general will agree with. Life is not always peaches and goddamn cream. And your idea that anyone who is not morally perfect is therefore morally repugnant is that of a disillusioned child. Things aren't always cut and dry little one and guess what else SANTA DOESN'T EXIST EITHER.
*FINALLY* I wasn't taking up for this AOL rep because he was following orders. I was taking up for him because he was simply trying to do what he felt was right by doing his job to the best of his ability. Regardless of what you may think. Doing your job to the best of your ability does NOT always mean blindly following a customers requests. You call me up at a cell phone company and tell me that you want to switch to a certain plan, if i were to switch you to that plan without telling you what the plan entails and making sure that, once fully informed, you felt that it was in your best interest to switch to it, then I was being irresponsible and i was NOT doing the best job that i can do. On THAT note...i'm going to stop giving you the attention that you so obviously are crying out for and go back to enjoying my life. Thanks for the distraction...douche.
oh i agree with you totally. situations just like the one that you described are actually the reason that i no longer work in the cell phone industry (i worked for varying periods of time for Cingular, Sprint, and Nextel).
You absolutely shouldn't have to threaten to cancel your contract or deal with the repercussions of doing so simply because you wanted to receive the services that you originally agreed to. However the companies are justified in causing you to make these choices (sometimes legally justified and sometimes the legality of their self-prescribed justification are questionable at best).
As another example that typically draws a little less ire though, think of it like your car insurance. If at some point during your policy period something occurs (whether it's your fault or simply the fault of a lot of accidents w/in your state recently) that makes them feel that they are justified in raising your rates, you have no recourse except to cancel the policy or pay the rates. Now this may not be exactly the same situation because you don't have to pay to get out of your contract with the insurance companies, but it gives another example of companies being allowed to change the rules of the game.
I actually mentioned in another recent post regarding cell phone companies the reasoning behind the contract termination fees. It turns out that because the companies have to spend such a large amount of money on advertising in order to get your business not to mention the fact that the cell phone itself is almost always given to the customer at a discounted rate (even the companies themselves pay 3-500$ for new model cell phones), then depending on the amount of money that a customer spends every month it can take as long as 2 years before the cell phone company begins to turn a profitt on that customer. Now i'm not saying that this excuses their actions but if you look at it from a business standpoint it does make sense. The problem arises when the companies feel that for their own convenience they are justified in changing the terms of the contract. Sometimes simply by arbitrarily assigning new 1 or 2 year agreements to accounts because they are not under contract. This type of fraud on cell companies parts is very difficult to prove as a contract can be renewed or extended simply by a verbal agreement over the phone or simply because a customer accepted a special offer which (whether they signed or verbally agreed to a contract or not) is only available if they extend their contract. In the latter case a customer is legally responsible to uphold their end of a contract because agreeing to receive service that requires a contract is an implicit agreement to the terms of that service.
The only recommendation that i can really make to you in your particular case though is to call customer service and raise as much hell as possible. Chances are that they still have the software codes for the old text messaging feature which was free in their system and with proper manager approval (which will undoubtedly be given if a manager feels that it is more worth their time to comply with your requests than to argue) that code can still be applied to your account. The companies simply realize that most customers will not follow-through to the point to be a bother out of either apathy or lack of concern.
I wish there was another way around this but...it's the only option that you really have. You have no legal recourse because attempting to prove that they have wronged you (or rather since it would be a civil suit: attempting to make them prove that they have NOT) would simply result in endless litigation due to the vague way that the contracts are drawn up. Not only that but financially it wouldn't be worth the effort. Also changing companies isn't really a valid solution since all companies have their own way of screwing you out of your money (although if you want my opinion from the companies that i've worked for Sprint is by far the worst and should be av
Well i dunno if it was done as a legal way of covering their asses but...
When i worked for cingular the rates of any service that you use are locked into the plan that you originally agreed to. As long as you PERSONALLY don't do anything to change said plan or the conditions under which your agreement originally applied (ie: get a new phone, change to a newer better plan, etc.) then they are not allowed to change it, they have to make every REASONABLE effort to accomodate you, so until the plan is so old that you're the only one on it and it no longer works with the technology that they use for some reason or another they will keep you on it. Now of course if something does occur that you were to lose the plan due to this change in technology, etc. then they would compensate you in some way if you complained and it meant doing so in order to keep your business.
To be more specific about the rates. Let's say that you had originally signed up for a certain amount of minutes and later added on a special text messaging feature that allowed you to send 100 messages a month for 5.95, since this was a seperate feature from that of your plan, assuming that it is compatible or will work (due to software and hardware issues) with said plan then you have not yet changed your contract. If later down the road they raise the rate of the 100 text message feature from 5.95 to 6.95 then unless you had requested some change that would make the old 5.95 feature incompatible with the other features on your account, or had otherwise requested to change to the new 6.95 feature due to new options offered, etc. then you would continue getting billed only 5.95 a month.
as far as the contracts go. If something happens on your account that sufficiently angers you and you want to cancel w/o the contract termination fees then this is something that they are capable of doing if you speak to someone high enough on the totem pole and bitch and complain enough. They do this for 2 reasons. 1 of them is to get you off of their back because in the end, when you are brining in tens of millions of dollars a year, that extra 250$ isn't worth the effort. The other one is because most of the time the people that you speak with aren't familiar enough with contract law to know if what they did was technically legal either (since these companies skirt the lines of legality pretty often anyway) and once again they realize that just in case it WAS a breech of contract...you guessed it...it's just not worth the fucking effort.
...there are a few things that i feel obligated to point out.
#1: People blaming the rep on this should cool out. When you're working an 8$ an hr. job where you spend all day getting bitched at for things that you can't change, you tend to develop a pretty non-confrontational attitude or you don't last long. It seems to me that this rep was pretty non-confrontational but the guy on the phone didn't want to be patient enough to deal with the bullshit that AOL makes their retention reps go through before cancelling an account. As a customer service representative you always have an obligation to the company for which you work to find out EXACTLY why someone wants to cancel their account and see if you can resolve the problem instead of just blindly granting their request. Now there are many reasons for this. One of those is because if you don't and you happen to have been recorded by your quality assurance department then you can be reprimanded for it. Another reason is that customers tend to overreact because people in general are stupid and like to pretend that they are victims. When a customer calls in and says "i want to cancel my account" 9 times out of 10 they don't want to cancel their account, and it's not in their best interest to cancel their account, they're just upset about something that they feel is not working to their satisfaction and wish to have it resolved, that's why probing questions like the ones that this rep was asking are necessary if AOL wishes to remain a large thriving corporation (and we all know that they do).
#2: Singling out AOL on this is rediculous. Ever try to cancel service with a cell phone company? How about your cable service? Anything that you pay for month to month? They will ALWAYS do whatever they can to keep your business because it costs them so much money in advertising and promotions to GET a customer that they usually don't start turning a profit on those customers until a year or more later. If they lose a customer that they are already making money on then not only does that customer have to be replaced in order to keep their proffit margins from shrinking, but said margins shrink automatically because they have to pay advertising costs, lose money on special free give-aways, etc. in order to find that replacement customer. I mean i personally worked for at least one company that there was one particular month the reps were informed "you are not ALLOWED to cancel any accounts this month." If an account had to be cancelled that month and there was absolutely no way around it then we had to first of all: do everything in our power (including REFUSING to comply until the customer agreed to work with us) to make sure that we could not save the account, secondly: find a supervisor and CONVINCE them that there was nothing further that we could do so that they could take the call, and finally: IF the supervisor couldn't save the account after employing every tactic known to man then THEY had to cancel it, and then each party involved (excluding the customer of course) would have to fill out about 10 pages of paperwork explaining exactly what happened and why said account could not possibly be saved, which THEN went on their record in the "bad" file.
#3: It does appear from the customers tone on this call that he is a child trying to get away with something. I didn't see any verification on the account at all other than the person giving their "name" and to the people saying that the rep didn't mention that he believed that the customer was trying to fraudulently cancel the account: OF COURSE NOT! Do YOU want to tell the guy who pays your salary that you won't do what he asks because you think he's a fraud? Do YOU want to listen to him bitch, complain, scream, curse and threaten you for doing so, all the while running up your Talk Time, ruining your Quality Score and utterly destroying everything about your statistics (which are a direct reflection of the quality of work that you do in a call center) that you have worked s
once again this seems like it should be obvious. public opinion about these two figures differs.
this would work in any situation, the formula is: do a search on X where X = someone who has recently been portrayed negatively in the news, and compare it with a search for Y where Y = someone who has only been portrayed positively and the answer Z will always = "the media is biased." Where this formula fails though is that the answer is always the same and since the answer is always the same rather than showing that this is always true it shows that this is a loaded experiment.
regardless of how seemingly off-topic my last comment was (although i assumed you were using this experiment to argue that google was in the wrong in regard to the article that is the all-parent hence my last comment) i do understand what you are trying to get at it's just that your experiment is fundamentally flawed and by proposing said experiment you have invalidated your own argument. If you have another more realistic experiment to offer that may back up your claims then i will be more than happy to give it a whirl.
I'll give you an example of a more accurate version of this experiment: search for Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and compare the results, since there is no MAJOR amount of negative public opinion remaining about these two political figures you're more likely to get an accurate sampling of data.
how in the hell do you even draw the conclusion that it's democratically biased? They simply removed a site whose content included a statement calling muslims (among other things) dirty rag-towel wearing 'War Lords '. Think about it like this, if the op-ed piece in the New Media Journal had been about a rise in violent crime in urban america and the writer had attributed the problem to "dirty niggers", wouldn't you consider that to be unacceptable? It's not that these people were being critical of a group of people that got their editorials labeled as hate-speech, it's the fact that they used racial slurs which go beyond the bounds of edgy "straight-talk" news and into the realm of bigotry and intolerance. I'm tired of people taking up for these douche-bags. Now a lot of the content on their sites is completely legitimate news stories without even a hint of racisim, and if these comments had been included in a letter to the editor or something like that then i could let it slide but it was by their writers and the fact that they allowed the "news story" to be published when they could just as easily have said "no" and made the journalist (or whatever) write it over again makes them just as guilty as the writer and thereby invalidates the rest of their site. Complain about censorship all you want, not many people have a lot of sympathy for nazis crying that they're being oppressed.
that's not an accurate description of what i said.
If someone agrees to 80% of the views of a Nazi but disagrees w/ 20% then labeling them a Nazi is NOT hyperbole because no one fits any descriptive phrase 100% there are too many specifics that figure into that phrase. By your line of logic everything that is ever said is Hyperbole, the question is if a reasonable person can see how two things could be likened to one-another then doing so is not hyperbole. If i were to make the statement that Kittens are Satan then THAT would be Hyperbole because it's an obvious exaggeration which is the definition of Hyperbole, if it's not an obvious exaggeration then it's not hyperbole. The fact that we are arguing over whether or not the comparison is accurate means that it is by definition...NOT.....waaait for iiiiit.....HYPERBOLE! YAAAAAAAY!
here are a few links to check out before you use that term again i've added multiple in the spirit of variety in case you don't trust one or the other:
and before you even TRY to point out that one of the sites mentions the use of Hyperbole to make a story sound more important than it is look at the example which equates a boxing matches decision to the "crime of the century"
oh yah and lastly. Hyperbole doesn't exist in percentages to say that something is "20% Hyperbole" is only accurate if 20% of the words in a statement exist within the Hyperbole as Hyperbole itself is a literary term describing a specific statement, NOT describing an authors intent or accuracy. word to the wise kids. don't use big words that you don't really understand in order to seem cool we can deal with you using your native language of leetspeak if it will make your word choice less shaky.
You can't really prove much with this analogy. It's a bad comparisson, if this wasn't what you intended to show with this example then accept my apology in advance but if it was then i hope you have a better example that you were savin' back...some kinda trump card.
true, but we are not arrested for wearing cloths those people don't agree with. Nor are we stoned to death or beheaded for not beliving the religion they push.
true, and the reason that we are not is because we have a government in place that protects us from that type of action not because our religious fanatics wouldn't be happy to do so if they were able to grab up as much power as the middle-eastern fanatics have, keep in mind that christians used to do this same type of thing when they held more power over the government (ever heard of the inquisition?)
invoking an 80% correct term for someone does not equal hyperbole. Just because a more accurate description may have been used instead doesn't mean that when i call someone a Nazi who fits most of the descriptions doesn't mean that i'm using hyperbole. Hyperbole suggests exaggeration, in calling someone a nazi many times people are not exaggerating anything because a nazi may be no worse than any of the other terms that you may have used but it IS more recognizable to the lay-person which makes it a more effective term to use.
in summary: calling someone a nazi while it may be misleading, is not hyperbole and isn't even misleading to people who don't know the difference.
As a sanity check on how a people under similar circumstances as Iraq today should behave: the USA invaded Germany and Japan in 1945, after reducing both countries to rubble by air bombing. How did the Japanese and Germans react? They said, OK, we had some horrible dictators, now that we got rid of them let's work to reconstruct our countries. Suicide bombing ended when Japan surrendered.
This doesn't really apply to the current situation. Those were cohesive countries who had working governments. Iraq is a country that has been ruled by whichever despot initiated the last coup for many years meaning that the entire nation is divided, none of them are willing to work with the other groups to surrender or make it better because they cannot imagine working with the other groups, they have been fighting and their lives have been on the line for so long that it no longer frightens them. Whereas the Germans and Japanese had seen peace in their country before world war II. Now granted some of the germans were alive during and after WWI as well and there have been occasional attacks on liberty by people who fancy themselves nazi's even up to this day which explains this small part of it. For the most part however the countries gave up and began to rebuild because they were a cohesive country who realized that they had been defeated and wanted to see things get back to normal. For the Iraqi's this IS normal, no one has been able to help them to have peace or make life better in the past so why should they trust us to be able to do so now, especially when we ravaged their country and then pulled out and left them to their own devices only about 15 years ago?
Oh yah, and HOW are you going to invoke Godwin and then go on to talk about the Germans in a way that REQUIRES someone to compare a current group of people to nazis in order to counter your argument. There was a really good rant about a week ago on/. about Godwin and i wish i had the link to it. Needless to say it's a whimps way of getting out of an argument that makes them uncomfortable.
to the grandparent: not that i am a christian and not that i don't think that there are some seriously fucked up beliefs and suggestions for how to live your life in the bible but this is completely false and it's this type of comment that make those of us who try to have intelligent discussions about the faults of organized religion look like we have no idea what we are talking about.
let me guess...one of your high-school buddies who's "such an uber-l33+ pagan" who "roxorrz" told you that christianity promotes offering your daughters up for gang-banging?
anyway. I can only assume that what you refer to is Genesis Chapter 19 verse 8 which says:
Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.
The person in question here is Lot who lived in the city of Sodom. Two angels of the lord came to his house where he was giving them shelter so that they would not sleep in the street where harm may have come to them and while they were in his house a mob came to the house and threatened to rape them, so in order to keep something holy from being soiled he offered his virgin daughters as a sacrifice.
While this could possibly be confused by some to say "God requires that you offer up your family to be raped." It is actually just a statement about the power of faith, that Lot had such faith in God that he would protect his holy angels by offering his daughters as a substitute, not because God required it of him but because he knew that his God would protect himself and his daughters.
If you read on in fact you will see that the Angels then blinded the mob for their actions and this is a main turning point in the story of Sodom and Gammorah that would eventually bring about the destruction of those citys because "God" could not allow a place where something like this should have need to occur to continue to exist in the world that he created.
The type of speech that you displayed above is equivalent to that of the hate speech displayed in the articles in question in this discussion. You are about *THIS CLOSE* to using the term "rag-head."
I mean...i agree with the statement that you were trying to make and yes gender relations were a lot different in the time of Muhammad/Moses/Noah/Buddah, etc. then they are today and just because a statement is not entirely inaccurate doesn't mean that it should be considered news. "Jesus was a terrorist" is no more news than "Muhammad was a pedophile" or "Buddah was a fatass" or "Adam and Eve's children were inbreeders." These statements may be technically true by todays standards and they may even be a suitable topic of discussion in the right context and with a tolerant group of people, but that does NOT make them newsworthy.
I'm not trying to give you too much hell here i understand that you were making a valid point with your statement, and i realize that you actually mentioned that it's rediculous to make a statement about Muhammad being a pedophile, but just because you denounce one possibly true but inappropriate statement does not make it okay to justify your reason for denouncing it by making a different one. All i ask is that next time you choose your words a little more carefully, else you run the risk of becoming the thing that you speak out against. This is something that we would ALL do well to keep in mind when posting...even me.
no we shouldn't. Although ideas definitely need to be flexible, they only need to be flexible in that they can grow, a shrinking idea has nothing to base it's decisions on but a growing one is building and becoming something better. This includes the idea that we have certain inalienable rights. The only time to reconsider how many rights you have is when you start to receive them.
you see it works like this...i am on the side of the people and the government is on the side of the government. MY role as a free-speaking politically minded member of society is to try and grab up as many rights (power) as i can and THEIR job is to try and take away as many of my rights (power) as they can.
you see the two are in conflict constantly they are diametrically opposed to one another so as long as you are a member of the people you fight and kick and scream until they give you everything you need until you have nothing more that you wish to gain and if you don't do it then you're helping THEM gain more power by your inaction.
you see it's a two party system just like any other. and since i'm on THIS side...this will be my answer until the world view changes to the point that my idea grows into being on their side, it's really the nature of man...it's what we do.
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I would suggest that you read up on the MEDICAL condition known as addiction.
I think you misunderstand addiction. Someone who is addicted to something is unable to control how often they do it, how much time they invest in it.
There's a difference between someone who is addicted to WoW and someone who plays too much. And while your suggestion may work for those who simply spend more time than they should playing Wow, this discussion was focusing on those who are addicted to it.
Or that they develop enough willingness to make an attempt to step back into reality. With any kind of addiction, people do not quit until they are willing to attempt to change their behavior patterns.
Not saying that they would have to log off WoW and go see an IRL therapist. See my suggestion that therapists be made available through in-game methods.
I think that you are referring to a personality disorder rather than the addiction though. While it's true that addiction and isolationist personalities go together in most cases the isolation is a result of the addiction and must be treated as a part of the recovery process.
Alcoholics for instance are often extreme isolationists at least as bad as WoW addicts, perhaps more so since they often don't even have human contact through the medium of the game. They cannot recover however until they develop at least enough willingness to step just far enough outside of their comfort zone to ask for help.
I'm not an expert on addiction and the particulars with MMO addiction may be such that you are correct or that the method employed by the aforementioned therapists will actually be of use. I don't think that enough is known about this specific sub-type of addictive personality at this time to say for sure. However, with what has been discovered with all other types of addictive behavior in the past, the likelihood is high that the same treatment methods and protocol will hold true for this addiction as well. For instance, all recovery programs, for over-eaters, sex addicts, drug addicts, etc. are all based on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The specifics may be different but the framework of the recovery process and the necessary "steps" that one must take to recover from those addictions is the same. And it's been the case thus far, until a better method is found, that this same process is the most successful for all of the various forms of addiction.
I will gladly eat my words if I am proven to be wrong. Anything that helps people overcome addiction is great in my book, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. At least they're trying to do something. At the very least their presence in-game may plant the seed of "I might be an addict" into someone's head that will later grow into the willingness to ask for help.
I have to say that any addiction counselor with even a modicum of knowledge in their chosen field would know going into this that it's bollocks.
The fact is that you don't approach people who have a problem while they are in active addiction. Doing this is the equivalent of going to a bar to have a chat with an alcoholic. Beyond even that, no amount of pestering someone with an addiction is going to make them quit or even HELP them to quit. They simply have to come to the point that they personally are ready to take action and then you just have to make sure that the information on where they can go to get help is widely disseminated in order to ease that transition for them.
One thing that I'm not totally clear on here: Are these counselors responding to actual requests for aid or are they just hanging out and yelling to everyone that they're selling their wares? "I'll give you 10k to talk to me about your addiction...or at least be in my raid."
If they're just hanging out unsolicited and looking for people who want to talk about their problem...well it's good for them to BE there if someone wants to talk about it, sort of the way that you can pick up the phone and call an AA central office in your area when you feel that you may need help with THAT addiction, but I still don't feel that this is the best use of their time.
Maybe it would have been better for them to pressure Blizzard into including some kind of service for this. Where if someone feels that they need help with their addiction they can link to it through the Blizzard website or maybe even contact a counselor in-game. A bunch of counselors walking around unsolicited asking people if they'd like to talk about addiction though? That's a little too much like the Jehovah Witnesses for my tastes.
with this article is that it was kind of minimalist. Cory has been talking about this exact thing for a long time--so I'm not totally sure why it's news now, but I feel like he's done it better in the past. For those who disagree with his assessment based on this article; I advise you to read "Content", a collection of speeches that he's given where he talks about just this type of thing (it's free to download just like all of his other work).
The one thing that I think puts traditional print newspapers in danger of going under that I did not see mentioned in this specific article is that the internet puts them further behind the curve. Television news made "Breaking News" stories possible. The internet made "Breaking News" universal. Where television news can't afford to interrupt their programming every time a new story breaks it's on the internet immediately. Where traditional print media had an advantage over television news (which allowed them to co-exist) is that it allowed for more information, a five-page story in the times contains more data that is relevant to the story than a 5 minute television spot (which would actually be a pretty long spot--not that I've ever seen a five-page story in the times). The ease with which stories can be found on the internet actually allows for even more information than is available in print media. With the internet, I have the option to drill-down on the story, I can read stories about: the author of the story; the city that it took place in; the culture of that city; historic events that may have lead to this; etc.
So internet news does everything that print AND television news media does -- only better. I can get my information faster, on my own time, with more depth and the freedom to research and discover the story in the ways that I think are relevant. It's not like those traditional companies are going away -- there will still be a "New York Times" 20yrs from now--hell there'll probably still be a printed version of it--but most of the content will be online and since it'll still be coming from the "New York Times" you'll still have the same amount of trust (or dis-trust) for that information as you had before.
Cory's article was not about telling everyone that he has the answers; that he is culturally relevant and they are not. It was a warning to traditional media outlets about possible pitfalls in a future economy. As a science-fiction writer, one of Cory's job titles is "futurist", and just like Robert Heinlein before him, it's not a question of whether or not he's one-hundred percent accurate. What's more important is that he speaks with the voice of the present day. I'm sure that he won't be totally correct in his assumptions--because who ever is(?)--and I don't believe that he expects to be completely accurate either (and I say this as an admitted fan of his) but at least he said his piece.
p.s. Just before I wrote this, a representative of Amazon.com was on the today show talking about their e-book reader and how it's one of the main reasons that they're not slowing down in the weak economy. (print media what?)
off topic*
I don't understand why people get so hung up grammatical errors that don't affect the message that the writer was trying to get across. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the problem isn't that he didn't capitalize, but is instead the fact that you judged his intelligence based on his lack of capitalization rather than the content of his message? A rose by any other name after all...
i'm sorry...i guess i shouldn't have been so reasonable about this situation. let me point out that the representative in question was NOT being an asshole...in fact he never said one word that was out of the way, secondly if you MUST know...i no longer work for any of these companies because i felt morally disgusted by the way that they did business. BUT that being said. ANYONE who feels that they can just not work at all simply because they don't like the policies that the places they work project onto them is a drain on society and that excuse won't work with me. It's a COP OUT plain and simple. Lastly even though i absolutely HATE it when people do this normally because it tends to be just for the sake of getting a rise out of someone and not in order to benefit the discussion. I'm afraid that i'm gonna have to invoke godwin on you. Comparing someone working in a call center who trys to take up a few extra minutes of your time to find out why you want to do something that may be stupid to a nazi is not only incorrect...it's LUDICROUS! In fact. A better comparrison for this person would be a police officer in the united states (okay i know some people think that they're nazis too). My point being though that a police officer may take up someones time to try and get them to do something that it is in their best interest to do (like wear a seatbelt for instance). Now while i personally don't like the fact that i'm being told by someone who does not own my body (which in this analogy equates to your account at aol, etc.) that doesn't mean that i think that them doing so is morally irresponsible.
However, i digress...YOU SIR(or madam...although i don't know any females named pete) are a troll. You are simply trying to get a rise out of me by turning what was a very relevant posting about the situation involved into something evil and twisted. For that...i hope you rot in hell. But FIRST...i hope that when you turn 13 or so you start to realize that you were wrong to act the way that you did. Hell i know when i was younger i was a script-kiddie and i'm sure as hell glad that i can look back on it now and realize that it was stupid and childish. When you get out into the real world you will realize that sometimes things aren't black and white. Just because you don't like someone or their opinion does not make them a nazi. Just because you feel that doing something may not be the most moral way to make money does not mean that you have the right to take money from other hard-working individuals by doing nothing. Not only THAT, but if you TAKE money from those individuals simply because you didn't like the policies that you were made to follow at McDonalds then your claim of being morally superior to anyone who is WILLING to follow those policies in order to get by on their own is INSULTING to those who are paying YOUR FUCKING WAY. Sometimes in order to stay alive we have to compromise our morals a bit. It's a fact of life that any adult who was not at one point a drain on their parents or society in general will agree with. Life is not always peaches and goddamn cream. And your idea that anyone who is not morally perfect is therefore morally repugnant is that of a disillusioned child. Things aren't always cut and dry little one and guess what else SANTA DOESN'T EXIST EITHER.
*FINALLY* I wasn't taking up for this AOL rep because he was following orders. I was taking up for him because he was simply trying to do what he felt was right by doing his job to the best of his ability. Regardless of what you may think. Doing your job to the best of your ability does NOT always mean blindly following a customers requests. You call me up at a cell phone company and tell me that you want to switch to a certain plan, if i were to switch you to that plan without telling you what the plan entails and making sure that, once fully informed, you felt that it was in your best interest to switch to it, then I was being irresponsible and i was NOT doing the best job that i can do. On THAT note...i'm going to stop giving you the attention that you so obviously are crying out for and go back to enjoying my life. Thanks for the distraction...douche.
oh i agree with you totally. situations just like the one that you described are actually the reason that i no longer work in the cell phone industry (i worked for varying periods of time for Cingular, Sprint, and Nextel).
You absolutely shouldn't have to threaten to cancel your contract or deal with the repercussions of doing so simply because you wanted to receive the services that you originally agreed to. However the companies are justified in causing you to make these choices (sometimes legally justified and sometimes the legality of their self-prescribed justification are questionable at best).
As another example that typically draws a little less ire though, think of it like your car insurance. If at some point during your policy period something occurs (whether it's your fault or simply the fault of a lot of accidents w/in your state recently) that makes them feel that they are justified in raising your rates, you have no recourse except to cancel the policy or pay the rates. Now this may not be exactly the same situation because you don't have to pay to get out of your contract with the insurance companies, but it gives another example of companies being allowed to change the rules of the game.
I actually mentioned in another recent post regarding cell phone companies the reasoning behind the contract termination fees. It turns out that because the companies have to spend such a large amount of money on advertising in order to get your business not to mention the fact that the cell phone itself is almost always given to the customer at a discounted rate (even the companies themselves pay 3-500$ for new model cell phones), then depending on the amount of money that a customer spends every month it can take as long as 2 years before the cell phone company begins to turn a profitt on that customer. Now i'm not saying that this excuses their actions but if you look at it from a business standpoint it does make sense. The problem arises when the companies feel that for their own convenience they are justified in changing the terms of the contract. Sometimes simply by arbitrarily assigning new 1 or 2 year agreements to accounts because they are not under contract. This type of fraud on cell companies parts is very difficult to prove as a contract can be renewed or extended simply by a verbal agreement over the phone or simply because a customer accepted a special offer which (whether they signed or verbally agreed to a contract or not) is only available if they extend their contract. In the latter case a customer is legally responsible to uphold their end of a contract because agreeing to receive service that requires a contract is an implicit agreement to the terms of that service.
The only recommendation that i can really make to you in your particular case though is to call customer service and raise as much hell as possible. Chances are that they still have the software codes for the old text messaging feature which was free in their system and with proper manager approval (which will undoubtedly be given if a manager feels that it is more worth their time to comply with your requests than to argue) that code can still be applied to your account. The companies simply realize that most customers will not follow-through to the point to be a bother out of either apathy or lack of concern.
I wish there was another way around this but...it's the only option that you really have. You have no legal recourse because attempting to prove that they have wronged you (or rather since it would be a civil suit: attempting to make them prove that they have NOT) would simply result in endless litigation due to the vague way that the contracts are drawn up. Not only that but financially it wouldn't be worth the effort. Also changing companies isn't really a valid solution since all companies have their own way of screwing you out of your money (although if you want my opinion from the companies that i've worked for Sprint is by far the worst and should be av
Well i dunno if it was done as a legal way of covering their asses but...
When i worked for cingular the rates of any service that you use are locked into the plan that you originally agreed to. As long as you PERSONALLY don't do anything to change said plan or the conditions under which your agreement originally applied (ie: get a new phone, change to a newer better plan, etc.) then they are not allowed to change it, they have to make every REASONABLE effort to accomodate you, so until the plan is so old that you're the only one on it and it no longer works with the technology that they use for some reason or another they will keep you on it. Now of course if something does occur that you were to lose the plan due to this change in technology, etc. then they would compensate you in some way if you complained and it meant doing so in order to keep your business.
To be more specific about the rates. Let's say that you had originally signed up for a certain amount of minutes and later added on a special text messaging feature that allowed you to send 100 messages a month for 5.95, since this was a seperate feature from that of your plan, assuming that it is compatible or will work (due to software and hardware issues) with said plan then you have not yet changed your contract. If later down the road they raise the rate of the 100 text message feature from 5.95 to 6.95 then unless you had requested some change that would make the old 5.95 feature incompatible with the other features on your account, or had otherwise requested to change to the new 6.95 feature due to new options offered, etc. then you would continue getting billed only 5.95 a month.
as far as the contracts go. If something happens on your account that sufficiently angers you and you want to cancel w/o the contract termination fees then this is something that they are capable of doing if you speak to someone high enough on the totem pole and bitch and complain enough. They do this for 2 reasons. 1 of them is to get you off of their back because in the end, when you are brining in tens of millions of dollars a year, that extra 250$ isn't worth the effort. The other one is because most of the time the people that you speak with aren't familiar enough with contract law to know if what they did was technically legal either (since these companies skirt the lines of legality pretty often anyway) and once again they realize that just in case it WAS a breech of contract...you guessed it...it's just not worth the fucking effort.
...there are a few things that i feel obligated to point out.
#1: People blaming the rep on this should cool out. When you're working an 8$ an hr. job where you spend all day getting bitched at for things that you can't change, you tend to develop a pretty non-confrontational attitude or you don't last long. It seems to me that this rep was pretty non-confrontational but the guy on the phone didn't want to be patient enough to deal with the bullshit that AOL makes their retention reps go through before cancelling an account. As a customer service representative you always have an obligation to the company for which you work to find out EXACTLY why someone wants to cancel their account and see if you can resolve the problem instead of just blindly granting their request. Now there are many reasons for this. One of those is because if you don't and you happen to have been recorded by your quality assurance department then you can be reprimanded for it. Another reason is that customers tend to overreact because people in general are stupid and like to pretend that they are victims. When a customer calls in and says "i want to cancel my account" 9 times out of 10 they don't want to cancel their account, and it's not in their best interest to cancel their account, they're just upset about something that they feel is not working to their satisfaction and wish to have it resolved, that's why probing questions like the ones that this rep was asking are necessary if AOL wishes to remain a large thriving corporation (and we all know that they do).
#2: Singling out AOL on this is rediculous. Ever try to cancel service with a cell phone company? How about your cable service? Anything that you pay for month to month? They will ALWAYS do whatever they can to keep your business because it costs them so much money in advertising and promotions to GET a customer that they usually don't start turning a profit on those customers until a year or more later. If they lose a customer that they are already making money on then not only does that customer have to be replaced in order to keep their proffit margins from shrinking, but said margins shrink automatically because they have to pay advertising costs, lose money on special free give-aways, etc. in order to find that replacement customer. I mean i personally worked for at least one company that there was one particular month the reps were informed "you are not ALLOWED to cancel any accounts this month." If an account had to be cancelled that month and there was absolutely no way around it then we had to first of all: do everything in our power (including REFUSING to comply until the customer agreed to work with us) to make sure that we could not save the account, secondly: find a supervisor and CONVINCE them that there was nothing further that we could do so that they could take the call, and finally: IF the supervisor couldn't save the account after employing every tactic known to man then THEY had to cancel it, and then each party involved (excluding the customer of course) would have to fill out about 10 pages of paperwork explaining exactly what happened and why said account could not possibly be saved, which THEN went on their record in the "bad" file.
#3: It does appear from the customers tone on this call that he is a child trying to get away with something. I didn't see any verification on the account at all other than the person giving their "name" and to the people saying that the rep didn't mention that he believed that the customer was trying to fraudulently cancel the account: OF COURSE NOT! Do YOU want to tell the guy who pays your salary that you won't do what he asks because you think he's a fraud? Do YOU want to listen to him bitch, complain, scream, curse and threaten you for doing so, all the while running up your Talk Time, ruining your Quality Score and utterly destroying everything about your statistics (which are a direct reflection of the quality of work that you do in a call center) that you have worked s
read parent comment out loud imitating the Dubya voice.....the best laugh i've had in a week
once again this seems like it should be obvious. public opinion about these two figures differs.
this would work in any situation, the formula is: do a search on X where X = someone who has recently been portrayed negatively in the news, and compare it with a search for Y where Y = someone who has only been portrayed positively and the answer Z will always = "the media is biased." Where this formula fails though is that the answer is always the same and since the answer is always the same rather than showing that this is always true it shows that this is a loaded experiment.
regardless of how seemingly off-topic my last comment was (although i assumed you were using this experiment to argue that google was in the wrong in regard to the article that is the all-parent hence my last comment) i do understand what you are trying to get at it's just that your experiment is fundamentally flawed and by proposing said experiment you have invalidated your own argument. If you have another more realistic experiment to offer that may back up your claims then i will be more than happy to give it a whirl.
I'll give you an example of a more accurate version of this experiment: search for Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and compare the results, since there is no MAJOR amount of negative public opinion remaining about these two political figures you're more likely to get an accurate sampling of data.
how in the hell do you even draw the conclusion that it's democratically biased? They simply removed a site whose content included a statement calling muslims (among other things) dirty rag-towel wearing 'War Lords '. Think about it like this, if the op-ed piece in the New Media Journal had been about a rise in violent crime in urban america and the writer had attributed the problem to "dirty niggers", wouldn't you consider that to be unacceptable? It's not that these people were being critical of a group of people that got their editorials labeled as hate-speech, it's the fact that they used racial slurs which go beyond the bounds of edgy "straight-talk" news and into the realm of bigotry and intolerance. I'm tired of people taking up for these douche-bags. Now a lot of the content on their sites is completely legitimate news stories without even a hint of racisim, and if these comments had been included in a letter to the editor or something like that then i could let it slide but it was by their writers and the fact that they allowed the "news story" to be published when they could just as easily have said "no" and made the journalist (or whatever) write it over again makes them just as guilty as the writer and thereby invalidates the rest of their site. Complain about censorship all you want, not many people have a lot of sympathy for nazis crying that they're being oppressed.
goddamn composition nazis...did the grandparent get their point accross? THEN IT DOESN"T MATTER...anonymous nazi...
yeah i have to say though...it was hard to tell...there are some jackasses on here who probably seriously believe stuff like that.
but maybe you're not a reasonable person...that would make your opinion of whether or not these statements are accurate null and void :)
okay sorry...now i'm just fuckin' with you
that's not an accurate description of what i said.
m l
n try/hyperbole
If someone agrees to 80% of the views of a Nazi but disagrees w/ 20% then labeling them a Nazi is NOT hyperbole because no one fits any descriptive phrase 100% there are too many specifics that figure into that phrase. By your line of logic everything that is ever said is Hyperbole, the question is if a reasonable person can see how two things could be likened to one-another then doing so is not hyperbole. If i were to make the statement that Kittens are Satan then THAT would be Hyperbole because it's an obvious exaggeration which is the definition of Hyperbole, if it's not an obvious exaggeration then it's not hyperbole. The fact that we are arguing over whether or not the comparison is accurate means that it is by definition...NOT.....waaait for iiiiit.....HYPERBOLE! YAAAAAAAY!
here are a few links to check out before you use that term again i've added multiple in the spirit of variety in case you don't trust one or the other:
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/hyperbole.ht
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
and before you even TRY to point out that one of the sites mentions the use of Hyperbole to make a story sound more important than it is look at the example which equates a boxing matches decision to the "crime of the century"
oh yah and lastly. Hyperbole doesn't exist in percentages to say that something is "20% Hyperbole" is only accurate if 20% of the words in a statement exist within the Hyperbole as Hyperbole itself is a literary term describing a specific statement, NOT describing an authors intent or accuracy. word to the wise kids. don't use big words that you don't really understand in order to seem cool we can deal with you using your native language of leetspeak if it will make your word choice less shaky.
i'm confused...what are you trying to show with this experiment? that you will find more negative news articles on delay than hilary? I could be wrong but that's probably because of the fact that delay is in a little bit of a legal pickle right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_DeLay#Accusations _of_misconduct_in_Texas_fundraising_and_indictment s
You can't really prove much with this analogy. It's a bad comparisson, if this wasn't what you intended to show with this example then accept my apology in advance but if it was then i hope you have a better example that you were savin' back...some kinda trump card.
that was sarcasm right?
true, but we are not arrested for wearing cloths those people don't agree with. Nor are we stoned to death or beheaded for not beliving the religion they push.
true, and the reason that we are not is because we have a government in place that protects us from that type of action not because our religious fanatics wouldn't be happy to do so if they were able to grab up as much power as the middle-eastern fanatics have, keep in mind that christians used to do this same type of thing when they held more power over the government (ever heard of the inquisition?)
just for the record we have restaurants exactly like this in the U.S.
invoking an 80% correct term for someone does not equal hyperbole. Just because a more accurate description may have been used instead doesn't mean that when i call someone a Nazi who fits most of the descriptions doesn't mean that i'm using hyperbole. Hyperbole suggests exaggeration, in calling someone a nazi many times people are not exaggerating anything because a nazi may be no worse than any of the other terms that you may have used but it IS more recognizable to the lay-person which makes it a more effective term to use.
in summary: calling someone a nazi while it may be misleading, is not hyperbole and isn't even misleading to people who don't know the difference.
As a sanity check on how a people under similar circumstances as Iraq today should behave: the USA invaded Germany and Japan in 1945, after reducing both countries to rubble by air bombing. How did the Japanese and Germans react? They said, OK, we had some horrible dictators, now that we got rid of them let's work to reconstruct our countries. Suicide bombing ended when Japan surrendered.
/. about Godwin and i wish i had the link to it. Needless to say it's a whimps way of getting out of an argument that makes them uncomfortable.
This doesn't really apply to the current situation. Those were cohesive countries who had working governments. Iraq is a country that has been ruled by whichever despot initiated the last coup for many years meaning that the entire nation is divided, none of them are willing to work with the other groups to surrender or make it better because they cannot imagine working with the other groups, they have been fighting and their lives have been on the line for so long that it no longer frightens them. Whereas the Germans and Japanese had seen peace in their country before world war II. Now granted some of the germans were alive during and after WWI as well and there have been occasional attacks on liberty by people who fancy themselves nazi's even up to this day which explains this small part of it. For the most part however the countries gave up and began to rebuild because they were a cohesive country who realized that they had been defeated and wanted to see things get back to normal. For the Iraqi's this IS normal, no one has been able to help them to have peace or make life better in the past so why should they trust us to be able to do so now, especially when we ravaged their country and then pulled out and left them to their own devices only about 15 years ago?
Oh yah, and HOW are you going to invoke Godwin and then go on to talk about the Germans in a way that REQUIRES someone to compare a current group of people to nazis in order to counter your argument. There was a really good rant about a week ago on
to the parent: thank you for pointing that out.
to the grandparent: not that i am a christian and not that i don't think that there are some seriously fucked up beliefs and suggestions for how to live your life in the bible but this is completely false and it's this type of comment that make those of us who try to have intelligent discussions about the faults of organized religion look like we have no idea what we are talking about.
let me guess...one of your high-school buddies who's "such an uber-l33+ pagan" who "roxorrz" told you that christianity promotes offering your daughters up for gang-banging?
anyway. I can only assume that what you refer to is Genesis Chapter 19 verse 8 which says:
Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.
The person in question here is Lot who lived in the city of Sodom. Two angels of the lord came to his house where he was giving them shelter so that they would not sleep in the street where harm may have come to them and while they were in his house a mob came to the house and threatened to rape them, so in order to keep something holy from being soiled he offered his virgin daughters as a sacrifice.
While this could possibly be confused by some to say "God requires that you offer up your family to be raped." It is actually just a statement about the power of faith, that Lot had such faith in God that he would protect his holy angels by offering his daughters as a substitute, not because God required it of him but because he knew that his God would protect himself and his daughters.
If you read on in fact you will see that the Angels then blinded the mob for their actions and this is a main turning point in the story of Sodom and Gammorah that would eventually bring about the destruction of those citys because "God" could not allow a place where something like this should have need to occur to continue to exist in the world that he created.
The type of speech that you displayed above is equivalent to that of the hate speech displayed in the articles in question in this discussion. You are about *THIS CLOSE* to using the term "rag-head."
I mean...i agree with the statement that you were trying to make and yes gender relations were a lot different in the time of Muhammad/Moses/Noah/Buddah, etc. then they are today and just because a statement is not entirely inaccurate doesn't mean that it should be considered news. "Jesus was a terrorist" is no more news than "Muhammad was a pedophile" or "Buddah was a fatass" or "Adam and Eve's children were inbreeders." These statements may be technically true by todays standards and they may even be a suitable topic of discussion in the right context and with a tolerant group of people, but that does NOT make them newsworthy.
I'm not trying to give you too much hell here i understand that you were making a valid point with your statement, and i realize that you actually mentioned that it's rediculous to make a statement about Muhammad being a pedophile, but just because you denounce one possibly true but inappropriate statement does not make it okay to justify your reason for denouncing it by making a different one. All i ask is that next time you choose your words a little more carefully, else you run the risk of becoming the thing that you speak out against. This is something that we would ALL do well to keep in mind when posting...even me.
i think you may be leading me into a trap.
no we shouldn't. Although ideas definitely need to be flexible, they only need to be flexible in that they can grow, a shrinking idea has nothing to base it's decisions on but a growing one is building and becoming something better. This includes the idea that we have certain inalienable rights. The only time to reconsider how many rights you have is when you start to receive them.
you see it works like this...i am on the side of the people and the government is on the side of the government. MY role as a free-speaking politically minded member of society is to try and grab up as many rights (power) as i can and THEIR job is to try and take away as many of my rights (power) as they can.
you see the two are in conflict constantly they are diametrically opposed to one another so as long as you are a member of the people you fight and kick and scream until they give you everything you need until you have nothing more that you wish to gain and if you don't do it then you're helping THEM gain more power by your inaction.
you see it's a two party system just like any other. and since i'm on THIS side...this will be my answer until the world view changes to the point that my idea grows into being on their side, it's really the nature of man...it's what we do.