This is a part of capitalism I'm afraid. Power in any business goes towards those with charm, acumen and ruthlessness rather than any particular technical ability, so a clique of borderline sociopaths with decent accounting skills and winning smiles rises to the top of management, and has an unsurprising disdain for those people tinkering away competently but without the ability to use others as rungs on the ladder.
Wikipedia has definitely peaked. The community has become closed off into cliques and the content has become entrenched to the extent new contributers are actively chased off if they suggest any challenge to the status quo. Selling advertising would crush what is left of the community spirit of the project.
Its a shame, because fundamentally Wikipedia is an OK idea. What is needed is a viable, popular fork. I suppose this is as good as anything for speeding that up.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
From Dr. Strangelove. Whoever modded down parent wants slapping.
I'm not fooled by the whole 'its to fight off teh drug dealers' bullshit - this is about a guy finding a new and inventive way to bully the homeless. The hobby of the western world seems to be tormenting those too weak to fight back, and this is an example of that.
And the idea that the homeless need to be shuffled away from the nice genteel folk disgusts me as well. People want to live in a society of easily earned material comforts, and what the human detritus that results from this lifestyle to be swept away somewhere they can't see it. You want all of the good of capitalism, and none of the bad.
I wouldn't associate freedom of information with capitalism. Plenty of capitalist countries have censored and imprisoned dissenters more than Cuba has. I consider it unlikely that people passing around memory sticks in universities are saying they want the right to start a business and not have it taxed and regulated much. They are probably more concerned with being able to protest and communicate with the outside world freely.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the US allowed social democrats to gain power in Western Europe - it is more a case that Western European democracies were older, stronger, and lest corrupt than the generally fledgling ones that the US crushed in Latin America. It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
That said, the US has tried to use a lot of soft power over the years to drag Europe to the right. The Murdoch media in Britain, for example, was instrumental in keeping the Labour party out of power in the 1980s and also played a major roll in convincing the British public it was necessary to invade Iraq. 45 minutes my fucking arse.
America 'tinkers' a hell of a lot more, especially in Latin America, so rightfully America gets blamed more. It is the cost of an empire, live with it.
Pure Randroid gold. Basically, your fevered ranting tells me you consider anybody who favours universal 'socialised' healthcare to be an unthinking zombie, a member of the 'herd'. You are so deeply embedded in your ideology that you assume anyone who disagrees with your principles can't possibly have a mind of their own. They've all been brainwashed by Noam Chomsky and Hugo Chavez.
You see everything in black and white. You vs. the 'herd'. Freedom-loving objectivists on one side and lazy, stupid 'statists' on the other side. I imagine in real life you make a point of avoiding those who might challenge your belief system.
By the way, I'd love to hear your opinions on the fluoridation of water, you paranoid right-wing nutjob:)
The USA (and others, lets not just dump on America for this) financially and militarily support the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Your presidential family has a creepily close relationship with the Saudi royal family. So, yes, the US bears a measure of responsibility for what happens in Saudi Arabia, although of course not as much as it's leadership.
The problem with having such enormous military, economic and political power is that people are going to judge you by what you do with it. With such widespread influence, it isn't surprising that many situations in the world have reached their present state with US intervention, and you have to take responsibility for your part in that.
You should either develop a more complex understanding of our modern, interconnected world, or keep quiet on issues that are out of your depth.
Read what I said, not whatever easier-to-refute argument you cooked up in your head. I never excused the Cuban regime for anything. Please try to actually appreciate an opinion on a country that is more sophisticated that rating it out of 10. You might broaden your horizons a bit.
I put it to you that the Cuban government is no worse than the United States government, under similar circumstances. The Cuban government is subject to monthly threats of annihilation from its northern neighbour, who possess the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Faced with a far less potent threat from Imperial Japan, the United States started rounding up people based on their ethnicity and putting them into camps. Faced with a far less potent threat from the Soviet Union, the United States started investigating its own intellectuals, artists, dissidents and union leaders accusing them of treason.
This is not to condone the Cuban dictatorship (and I am calling it such directly seeing as you seem to have missed me calling it so indirectly in my original post...) - it is merely to explain its actions and its nature. Everyone, repeat EVERYONE, who has formed a government that works for the poor in Latin America has come under attack from the United States. In the same way that sharing an environment with dangerous predators has made Hippos extremely aggressive animals, sharing the Western Hemisphere with the U.S. made revolutionary movements there extremely aggressive.
I suppose you are going to continue to maintain that I'm an apologist for the regime. But hey, you are clearly a libertarian, so I don't expect you to grasp nuance.
If you think that was an apology for the Cuban regime, you have pathetic reading comprehension skills. Also, the fact you accuse people who disagree with you of having 'herd' mentality and your sig says people are panicky animals, suggests you are a frightful elitist.
Because there are no capitalist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba of course.
What always amuses me is that people decry the reactionary left-wing government of Cuba without seeing it in the wider context of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century, during which the US made a point of launching vicious attacks on every progressive left-wing government in the hemisphere by organising strikes, spreading propaganda, sponsoring coups and terrorists, and occasionally direct military force. The repression of the Cuban regime is a result of a Darwinian process that has weeded out every left-wing government in the region that didn't shoot or imprison anyone and everyone who even might be on the CIA payroll.
Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them - but thanks to the actions of America there is literally no way their social programmes could've been implemented if they were not prepared to run the country as a dictatorship. Western democracies such as Britain have reacted in a similar way when faced with extreme outside threats.
Spoken like someone too young to remember the Amiga demo scene. For some people, the challenge of seeing just how far you can push a piece of software/hardware is irresistible.
When people are given choices, they are often through their own free will kind to other human beings. There is no need for guns pointing at peoples heads to make us play nice and share - we will do it naturally if left alone.
It is old history for Americans (lets face it, yesterday is old history for you lot whenever it doesn't involve Americans getting killed) but I should imagine most Iranians are pretty pissed off about the support for the Shah and then Saddam Hussein.
And now, the US is indirectly supporting the theocratic regime by providing an immense outside threat to push the population to extremism. Iranians may not like their government, but having seen what your geno^H^H^Hliberation of Iraq was like they certainly prefer it to the alternative - and this empowers the religious conservatives who otherwise would be forced by their generally secular, progressive and young population to liberalise. In fact, prior to Dubyas rampage through two of its neighbouring countries, that was exactly what was happening in Iran, albeit slowly.
Iran has plenty of capacity for internal change, and homegrown democracy, even after everything we have done for them. All we have to do is leave the buggars alone long enough to let it blossom. Sadly, while they sit on resources we want to suck up for our decadent lifestyles, that won't happen.
Probably has something to do with it being built in France. The US government seems to have a big chip on it's shoulder about being top in science, gets pissy in international collaborations, and shoots itself in the foot by sabotaging its own science prospects and driving American scientists elsewhere.
I don't doubt your word at all, but an anecdote like that doesn't really say much.
The U.S. Military, like all modern militaries, must by default be in the business of brainwashing people. A fascinating programme I saw on Channel 4 in the UK said that in WW2 only 15-20% of soldiers fired in the direction of the enemy and only 2% of them shot at a specific person. Uncomfortable with this, the military then developed psychological techniques to get those percentages up and were very successful in this regard. Turning ordinary people into killers is a major change in their personality, so like it or not the military is brainwashing. The only thing that is open for debate is the long term outcome of that brainwashing.
http://www.fmft.net/archives/000201.html
(Bit of a dodgy website but the only source I could find with a synopsis of the programme)
Sorry, you misunderstood me. I don't claim this has been going on for 65 years, but that it is relatively new. And I don't mean to say the military has a poor relationship with academia, the government does, and they see the military as a tool to undermine dissent in universities.
Donald Rumsfeld himself spoke of 'putting starch in their collars' a few years back, which to me is a veiled reference to an intention to change the opinions of youth through military service.
I am annoyed at how pissy the Army got about this. To expect the local media to shut up about this is overstepping their authority, let alone expecting foreign media to do it. Governments are militaries need to have it drilled into them that the media does not exist to protect their secrets, rally their troops, or spread their propaganda. Unfortunately, enough of the media is willing to do just that, and it has emboldened those who think information is a weapon to be used by the state against its people.
Bear in mind I am not American, but from what I understand it is fairly costly to go to university there, and one of the easiest ways for people not born into money to finance themselves is to join the military for a bit before they go.
Now, centres of power have an uneasy relationship with academia. On the one hand, healthy universities are vital to maintaining a countries technological and scientific edge. On the other hand, putting lots of smart, young people with fresh ideas in one place and giving them free time often breeds 'disrespectful' thinking.
But the US government seems to have found a solution. Get the kids to join up so the military has first swing at their impressionable minds. Give them the states point of view and only the states point of view, and teach them that opposition to this point of view is treason. Create the us-and-them mentality cults use to make their victims hostile to information that might free them from the lies they have been told. Or, to save time, let Rupert Murdoch do it for you.
Now, this might be a bit tinfoil hat for you, but it doesn't require anything secret or anything that violates physics or the boundaries of current technology. It just requires that the people in charge of your country are totalitarian shits who will exploit any opportunity to control the environment and thus the minds of the people, especially young people.
FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce. That is the point of FOSS - we don't need to apply the old models of how to divide up resources to knowledge.
Titanium dioxide can produce free radicals when it is decomposed in UV light. They can't penetrate your epidermis, but if there is broken skin you could be in a spot of bother as free radicals have quite an unpleasant effect on DNA.
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This is a part of capitalism I'm afraid. Power in any business goes towards those with charm, acumen and ruthlessness rather than any particular technical ability, so a clique of borderline sociopaths with decent accounting skills and winning smiles rises to the top of management, and has an unsurprising disdain for those people tinkering away competently but without the ability to use others as rungs on the ladder.
Wikipedia has definitely peaked. The community has become closed off into cliques and the content has become entrenched to the extent new contributers are actively chased off if they suggest any challenge to the status quo. Selling advertising would crush what is left of the community spirit of the project.
Its a shame, because fundamentally Wikipedia is an OK idea. What is needed is a viable, popular fork. I suppose this is as good as anything for speeding that up.
From Dr. Strangelove. Whoever modded down parent wants slapping.
I'm not fooled by the whole 'its to fight off teh drug dealers' bullshit - this is about a guy finding a new and inventive way to bully the homeless. The hobby of the western world seems to be tormenting those too weak to fight back, and this is an example of that.
And the idea that the homeless need to be shuffled away from the nice genteel folk disgusts me as well. People want to live in a society of easily earned material comforts, and what the human detritus that results from this lifestyle to be swept away somewhere they can't see it. You want all of the good of capitalism, and none of the bad.
I wouldn't associate freedom of information with capitalism. Plenty of capitalist countries have censored and imprisoned dissenters more than Cuba has. I consider it unlikely that people passing around memory sticks in universities are saying they want the right to start a business and not have it taxed and regulated much. They are probably more concerned with being able to protest and communicate with the outside world freely.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the US allowed social democrats to gain power in Western Europe - it is more a case that Western European democracies were older, stronger, and lest corrupt than the generally fledgling ones that the US crushed in Latin America. It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
That said, the US has tried to use a lot of soft power over the years to drag Europe to the right. The Murdoch media in Britain, for example, was instrumental in keeping the Labour party out of power in the 1980s and also played a major roll in convincing the British public it was necessary to invade Iraq. 45 minutes my fucking arse.
America 'tinkers' a hell of a lot more, especially in Latin America, so rightfully America gets blamed more. It is the cost of an empire, live with it.
Here is a simple concept for you to mull over:
The United States does things in Latin America.
Mull it over for a while. Ask a friend for help.
Pure Randroid gold. Basically, your fevered ranting tells me you consider anybody who favours universal 'socialised' healthcare to be an unthinking zombie, a member of the 'herd'. You are so deeply embedded in your ideology that you assume anyone who disagrees with your principles can't possibly have a mind of their own. They've all been brainwashed by Noam Chomsky and Hugo Chavez.
You see everything in black and white. You vs. the 'herd'. Freedom-loving objectivists on one side and lazy, stupid 'statists' on the other side. I imagine in real life you make a point of avoiding those who might challenge your belief system.
By the way, I'd love to hear your opinions on the fluoridation of water, you paranoid right-wing nutjob :)
The USA (and others, lets not just dump on America for this) financially and militarily support the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Your presidential family has a creepily close relationship with the Saudi royal family. So, yes, the US bears a measure of responsibility for what happens in Saudi Arabia, although of course not as much as it's leadership.
The problem with having such enormous military, economic and political power is that people are going to judge you by what you do with it. With such widespread influence, it isn't surprising that many situations in the world have reached their present state with US intervention, and you have to take responsibility for your part in that.
You should either develop a more complex understanding of our modern, interconnected world, or keep quiet on issues that are out of your depth.
Read what I said, not whatever easier-to-refute argument you cooked up in your head. I never excused the Cuban regime for anything. Please try to actually appreciate an opinion on a country that is more sophisticated that rating it out of 10. You might broaden your horizons a bit.
I put it to you that the Cuban government is no worse than the United States government, under similar circumstances. The Cuban government is subject to monthly threats of annihilation from its northern neighbour, who possess the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Faced with a far less potent threat from Imperial Japan, the United States started rounding up people based on their ethnicity and putting them into camps. Faced with a far less potent threat from the Soviet Union, the United States started investigating its own intellectuals, artists, dissidents and union leaders accusing them of treason.
This is not to condone the Cuban dictatorship (and I am calling it such directly seeing as you seem to have missed me calling it so indirectly in my original post...) - it is merely to explain its actions and its nature. Everyone, repeat EVERYONE, who has formed a government that works for the poor in Latin America has come under attack from the United States. In the same way that sharing an environment with dangerous predators has made Hippos extremely aggressive animals, sharing the Western Hemisphere with the U.S. made revolutionary movements there extremely aggressive.
I suppose you are going to continue to maintain that I'm an apologist for the regime. But hey, you are clearly a libertarian, so I don't expect you to grasp nuance.
If you think that was an apology for the Cuban regime, you have pathetic reading comprehension skills. Also, the fact you accuse people who disagree with you of having 'herd' mentality and your sig says people are panicky animals, suggests you are a frightful elitist.
Because there are no capitalist counter-revolutionaries in Cuba of course.
What always amuses me is that people decry the reactionary left-wing government of Cuba without seeing it in the wider context of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century, during which the US made a point of launching vicious attacks on every progressive left-wing government in the hemisphere by organising strikes, spreading propaganda, sponsoring coups and terrorists, and occasionally direct military force. The repression of the Cuban regime is a result of a Darwinian process that has weeded out every left-wing government in the region that didn't shoot or imprison anyone and everyone who even might be on the CIA payroll.
Yeah, the Castro brothers aren't exactly nice to those who disagree with them - but thanks to the actions of America there is literally no way their social programmes could've been implemented if they were not prepared to run the country as a dictatorship. Western democracies such as Britain have reacted in a similar way when faced with extreme outside threats.
Spoken like someone too young to remember the Amiga demo scene. For some people, the challenge of seeing just how far you can push a piece of software/hardware is irresistible.
When people are given choices, they are often through their own free will kind to other human beings. There is no need for guns pointing at peoples heads to make us play nice and share - we will do it naturally if left alone.
It is old history for Americans (lets face it, yesterday is old history for you lot whenever it doesn't involve Americans getting killed) but I should imagine most Iranians are pretty pissed off about the support for the Shah and then Saddam Hussein.
And now, the US is indirectly supporting the theocratic regime by providing an immense outside threat to push the population to extremism. Iranians may not like their government, but having seen what your geno^H^H^Hliberation of Iraq was like they certainly prefer it to the alternative - and this empowers the religious conservatives who otherwise would be forced by their generally secular, progressive and young population to liberalise. In fact, prior to Dubyas rampage through two of its neighbouring countries, that was exactly what was happening in Iran, albeit slowly.
Iran has plenty of capacity for internal change, and homegrown democracy, even after everything we have done for them. All we have to do is leave the buggars alone long enough to let it blossom. Sadly, while they sit on resources we want to suck up for our decadent lifestyles, that won't happen.
70% of people who received a warning from the NKVD would stop talking shit about Stalin.
The fact that a law is capable of intimidating people is no argument in favour of its adoption.
Probably has something to do with it being built in France. The US government seems to have a big chip on it's shoulder about being top in science, gets pissy in international collaborations, and shoots itself in the foot by sabotaging its own science prospects and driving American scientists elsewhere.
I don't doubt your word at all, but an anecdote like that doesn't really say much.
The U.S. Military, like all modern militaries, must by default be in the business of brainwashing people. A fascinating programme I saw on Channel 4 in the UK said that in WW2 only 15-20% of soldiers fired in the direction of the enemy and only 2% of them shot at a specific person. Uncomfortable with this, the military then developed psychological techniques to get those percentages up and were very successful in this regard. Turning ordinary people into killers is a major change in their personality, so like it or not the military is brainwashing. The only thing that is open for debate is the long term outcome of that brainwashing.
http://www.fmft.net/archives/000201.html (Bit of a dodgy website but the only source I could find with a synopsis of the programme)
Sorry, you misunderstood me. I don't claim this has been going on for 65 years, but that it is relatively new. And I don't mean to say the military has a poor relationship with academia, the government does, and they see the military as a tool to undermine dissent in universities.
Donald Rumsfeld himself spoke of 'putting starch in their collars' a few years back, which to me is a veiled reference to an intention to change the opinions of youth through military service.
I am annoyed at how pissy the Army got about this. To expect the local media to shut up about this is overstepping their authority, let alone expecting foreign media to do it. Governments are militaries need to have it drilled into them that the media does not exist to protect their secrets, rally their troops, or spread their propaganda. Unfortunately, enough of the media is willing to do just that, and it has emboldened those who think information is a weapon to be used by the state against its people.
Bear in mind I am not American, but from what I understand it is fairly costly to go to university there, and one of the easiest ways for people not born into money to finance themselves is to join the military for a bit before they go.
Now, centres of power have an uneasy relationship with academia. On the one hand, healthy universities are vital to maintaining a countries technological and scientific edge. On the other hand, putting lots of smart, young people with fresh ideas in one place and giving them free time often breeds 'disrespectful' thinking.
But the US government seems to have found a solution. Get the kids to join up so the military has first swing at their impressionable minds. Give them the states point of view and only the states point of view, and teach them that opposition to this point of view is treason. Create the us-and-them mentality cults use to make their victims hostile to information that might free them from the lies they have been told. Or, to save time, let Rupert Murdoch do it for you.
Now, this might be a bit tinfoil hat for you, but it doesn't require anything secret or anything that violates physics or the boundaries of current technology. It just requires that the people in charge of your country are totalitarian shits who will exploit any opportunity to control the environment and thus the minds of the people, especially young people.
FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce. That is the point of FOSS - we don't need to apply the old models of how to divide up resources to knowledge.
Titanium dioxide can produce free radicals when it is decomposed in UV light. They can't penetrate your epidermis, but if there is broken skin you could be in a spot of bother as free radicals have quite an unpleasant effect on DNA.