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"When you justify how you treat others by what your enemies do, doesn't that.."

 
Greenhorn
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Tim Holloway's signature:

When you justify how you treat others by what your enemies do, doesn't that simply make you a puppet of your enemies?


Got me thinking.. Yeah.. Al Quaeda actually won. Terrorism seeks to influence the state of mind of the individual. Anyone who's stood in an airport security queue for 45 minutes while the 2000 people in front of them take off their shoes, belts, hats, scarves, coats, laptops out of bags, are ticked off for carrying a 150ml bottle of water and have their aftershave confiscated unde the watchful eye of ten armed marines is feeling the effects. The government uses their actions to justify these measures to ensure we remain "free" and "uninfluenced" by those terrorist actions.. Hmm. There's a hypocrisy in there. AQ got their name known, their agenda known, and now cause tens of thousands of travellers extra angst. The UK plans to introduce a 53 question questionnaire of every pertinent personal info possible for a traveller to answer. Who are they, where are they staying, passport number, credit card numbers, the number plate of the car you used to get to the airport..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=493912&in_page_id=1770

"Freedom"
 
Ranch Hand
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I agree dude but any alternative solution?If there is no security in airport and no checking,will you allow yourself and your family to board the plane?Imagine your cotraveller tells you that he got RDX explosives in his checkin bag.
 
Rancher
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Both Bruce Schneier and Bob Cringely -people well-known in the IT community- have published thoughts on how terrorism might succeed (or is succeeding) even if outwardly it might appear that it's not. Those are articles worthwhile reading.
 
lowercase baba
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this thread is skating on thin ice. it is dangerously close to being trashed. Nothing posted yet is quite over the line, but it could easily go that way. please think very carefully about anything you post here if you want the thread to remain. and don't be surprised if it does indeed vanish at some point.

just a friendly reminder.
 
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When you have thousands of people willing to die just to do us grave harm, and tens of millions cheering them on, it is naive to imagine that _any_ defense is going to leave us completely unscathed.

Yes, terrorism (and our defense against it) has left us worse off than had there been no terrorism. But some of these complaints sound to me like someone whining, "If I have to wear long pants and shirt sleeves whenever I walk in deer country, then the Lyme disease will have won."
 
Marshal
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Originally posted by Sandip Sankeshwar:
I agree dude but any alternative solution?If there is no security in airport and no checking...

False dichotomy.
 
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I'd love to participate in this thread - but have never yet been able to discuss international relations without a thread being erased....
 
ranger
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Personally I would remove this thread. Even if it is tame at this point, it that won't last long.

Mark
 
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Originally posted by Mark Spritzler:
Personally I would remove this thread. Even if it is tame at this point, it that won't last long.

Mark



... which ironically is a point of this thread! Posters who haven't used this thread as an opportunity to incite a flame war have already won -- without raising a single finger.

<< How's that for perverse logic? >>
 
Wanderer
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Depends how how you define winning and losing I suppose. Our main goal for this site is to have a place where people can come to learn about Java and discuss it. MD is intended to support that by being a place that people can hang out and have a bit of fun. It can even attract people to the site, if it's interesting, and that's good. But what we don't want is for it to be a forum that either (a) makes many users unhappy because they're getting involved in arguments or don't like the way they're being treated, or (b)makes our staff unhappy because they spend way to much time arguing over how to deal with problems in MD. Because those both interfere with our main mission, which is to be a place for Java discussion. We tried for a long time to find ways to allow more political discussion in MD, but ultimately it always caused too much work and strife. So now we tend to keep a lid on politics here. That's unfortunate, but sorry, that's the decision we came to after years of problems. Things work out much better now.

Put another way, if someone thinks they've "won" by getting politics shut down in MD, well whatever - their goals must be pretty shallow. There are plenty of other sites for political discussion, try to shut them down. Our goal of facilitating Java discussion is more important than our goal of facilitating political discussion (to the extent it's not really a goal at all here), so I think we can live with ourselves.
 
Caius Jard
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Originally posted by Sandip Sankeshwar:
I agree dude but any alternative solution?If there is no security in airport and no checking,will you allow yourself and your family to board the plane?Imagine your cotraveller tells you that he got RDX explosives in his checkin bag.



Yeah, but you get on a bus, subway train, go to the theatre.. What do we do? Secure everywhere? Supermarkets? Malls?
Why airports? Trains carry just as many people; after the Sarin gas attacks/attempts on the London Underground in 2002, did they install scanners and check that noone was going to poison half of london going to work on a monday morning? Hmm..

Incidentally, I recently heard from a friend who knows a security official at Heathrow (London) who said around 50 handguns and an undisclosable number of bombs are recovered every week from hand luggage.. So yeah, if the security wasnt there then maybe more planes would get blown up.. I just wonder why they are so popular. The cross-borderness of it all?
 
Caius Jard
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Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
But what we don't want is for it to be a forum that either (a) makes many users unhappy because they're getting involved in arguments or don't like the way they're being treated,



Surely involvement in an argument is very much a personal choice; do you really get users complaining that they became embroiled in an argument? I'd have thought that the Internet would be old enough now for everyone to get on with the notion that all opinions effectively become public domain..
I dont mind my opinion herein getting trashed.. I'd be interested to see in this particular case, just how much this thread would degenerate before it was locked (because that would at least give me chance to review some similarities I wonder about regarding the net and real life

Is there a correlation (as others have outlined) between a government's response of some individuals terrorising others with bombs, and some indivisuals terrorising other netizens with flames? Is a lockdown response appropriate? ("if you cant play nice, youre not going to be allowed to take bottles onto a plane/participate in the discussion?")
Is it the only option? Do real life regulations and their models, work when applied to the internet? The flamers want this thread trashed.. What better way than get a moderator to delete it, justifying the action in that it's causing angst for some users. Did the moderators become the flamers' puppets? Do we get to the dsituation that anyone doing anyhting and justifying it as seeking to preserve something that they hold valuable, become subservient to the whim of those who seek to destroy that valuable thing?

I think the outline difference is that whether the thread persists or not, no-one actually dies from it (though this too is attaching some of that universal significance/worth of life to the argument; is it tangibly more than loss of words/effort, really?)
[ March 03, 2008: Message edited by: Caius Jard ]
 
Jim Yingst
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Well, in the past we've users avoiding MD because so much of the discussion became unpleasant. They usually didn't complain about it, they just avoided it. Which in turn made it harder to have lighthearted conversations, because there were few people around who were interested in that. Meanwhile if the moderators put any limits, I mean any limits at all, on what people can post (e.g. "don't call other posters idiots") then you get a certain number of posters who want to test those limits, and other posters who can see how those limits should apply to other people but don't see how they apply to them,and other people who want to spend all our time talking about what the rules should be, and it basically becomes one big ongoing headache to try to keep everyone happy.

[Caius]: I think the outline difference is that whether the thread persists or not, no-one actually dies from it (though this too is attaching some of that universal significance/worth of life to the argument; is it tangibly more than loss of words/effort, really?)

Note too that the forum is deliberately titled "Meaningless Drivel" to try to keep people from taking it too seriously. The idea is that if you have a serious topic you want to discuss, there are better places on the net to do so. And if serious topics do get posted here, they may be deleted at any time, depending on the current moods of the moderators. But how great can the loss be, if it was posted in a forum titled "Meaningless Drivel" to begin with?
 
Anand Hariharan
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(...)


Is there a correlation (as others have outlined) between a
government's response of some individuals terrorising others with
bombs, and some indivisuals terrorising other netizens with flames?

No. None whatsoever. To suggest so is almost approaching
limits of Godwin's law. Also, "indivisuals terrorising other
netizens with flames
" is arguably an unfair characterisation /
paraphrasing of what I said. Most people don't flame a thread in MD
by design; it degenerates into a flame because people react
impetously. (IMHO, Politics should certainly be treated as drivel,
but most people would disagree).

Yes, I am guilty of suggesting it (the only one in this thread, I
think). To my defence, I was honestly trying to lighten this
thread -- I was just done reading two very interesting links - one
given in this thread (Ulf's reference to Schneier), the other listed
at the top of the MD page(on fallacies).


Is a lockdown response appropriate? ("if you cant play nice, youre
not going to be allowed to take bottles onto a plane/participate in
the discussion?") Is it the only option? Do real life regulations
and their models, work when applied to the internet?

Perhaps not. But the people who maintain the infrastructure to keep
this forum going and moderate discussions are unpaid volunteers.
They do what they deem appropriate.


The flamers want this thread trashed..

That is incorrect. Flamers want to be heard.

- Anand
 
Mark Spritzler
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But mostly this thread wants to be closed.

Sorry guys, but I am closing this.

Mark
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