I mean why people who don't hate civilians, particularly marginalized civilians, may hate cops. I don't hate anyone.

Being a cop is a choice. And I've been tortured by cops, never by civilians. I think I can understand why people hate cops, without hating civilians.

This just shows that some people think they have some moral responsibility to discriminate against LGBT people. Which might be funny if you aren't LGB or T but can be scary if you are.

The Bicycle:

I'd have to say the [i]safety[/i] bicycle. Early bike designs led, step-by-step to the penny-farthing, which may not rival Maxim's inventions as killing machines, but which suffers obvious problems. The safety bicycle solved these problems. All bike designs for the past century have been safety bikes or reclining bikes, and the safety bike has remained the most practical for most purposes.

Paper Money:

Especially useful for those who control the printing rate. It strikes me as an incredibly opaque invention, compared to notes denominating hours, goods, futures, etc. It also depends on trust in the government.

Wouldn't government surveillance of protest groups, blacklisting of protesters, mass arrests of protesters to collect personal information w/o charges, etc. also violate NAACP vs. Alabama?

I wasn't pointing to hypocrisy on anyone's part.

I was stating a fact: copyright is extortion.

Copyright is extortion.

Um, yeah, McDonalds, but it's still extortion.

#37

You assume that the same laws apply to you as to them. That's not how our constitutional system works. The 14th Amendment only applies to legal persons. That currently includes corporations, congressmen, mercenaries, and other [i]honestiores[/i], not us [i]humiliores[/i].

@Chloramphenical -

I have to take offense at your misuse of the language.

Barbarian simply means non-urbanized and civilized simply means urbanized. There have been many civilized/urbanized cultures which perform either circumcision or FGM, and there have been many barbarian/non-urbanized cultures which have not.

Genital mutilation and circumcision may be performed because of people's gender roles, but it is performed on people's sexual organs. It's not being done to a gender, it's being done to a sex.

QSD -- I see nothing that suggests that Takuan believes that all Amarican and Canadian soldiers are "bloodthirsty maniacs." I see plenty of evidence that some American and Canadian soldiers kill civilians; we know it happens in war and occupation, and it seems that you're in denial.

P.S. Okay, in the above cases, the Western, usually USAF, personnel were not suicide bombing, they were dropping bombs from the air.

We all know that causes "collateral damage" (= dead civilians), particularly when attacking civilian targets like hospitals, or any targets in urban areas. But the USAF gets 1/3 of all military appropriations, and when your only tool is air bombardment, every problem looks like a bombing target.

Even in the 1990s, comics could still portray suicide bombings as heroic acts. Star Wars: River of Chaos, #4, from 1995 did so.

However, the news doesn't distinguish between suicide bombings by uniformed soldiers/militia against military targets and suicide bombings by non-uniformed personnel against civilian targets.

As long as its by Arabs, it gets called terrorism, even if it doesn't kill any civilians, and as long as it's by western troops, it's okay, even if it's bombing a hospital, a wedding, a group of journalists, etc. with no military targets ... and these have happened many times in the occupation of Iraq.

I've used orphan works. I used one frame from one movie, on one page, and released my own work for free.

If the original publisher no longer exists, and may not have ever legally existed, it can be hard to track these things down. I spent days trying to do this myself, writing letters to people involved, and so on.

If FM 3-19.15 is any clue, the section of crowd dynamics shows some corrections, but the sections on crowd types and crowd tactics stick with the discredited Le Bon model and are only suitable for fertilizer. I expect the same ideological filters which blinded the DoD to mainstream social science will blind the DoD to DARPA's research.

In my case, all the letter keys except Q, J, Z and X are worn clean, while I, O, and L have noticeable dents. The number keys are intact. the , and . are worn off, but the , is still there.

I don't use nail polish. I have extremely dry skin.

I type gently enough that I have to retype from time to time.

I learned the hunt-and-peck technique, which gets really frustrating when this happens. (Where is that B key again? I keep hitting C or V or N...)

(I posted a fuller version yesterday, but it doesn't seem to have made it through.)

I think that some of the so-called "progressive" commenters are misrepresenting the so-called "Luddite" commenters and/or misunderstanding the so-called "Luddite" arguments. I hope that we discover brain enhancements with fewer long-term risks, and with greater short-term advantages.

Now high-stakes short-term tests, interviews, etc. encourage people to take short-term enhancements that will work for that day even if they have long-term costs that would normally outweigh the enhancements.

This can create dynamics similar to arms races: where everybody has to spend more money on weapons than everybody else, even if they prefer to spend no money on weapons. They end up spending more and more on weapons and creating less and less security. Or similar to crowded rooms: where everybody needs to talk above the background noise from everybody else.

These are bad, m'kay? Now the test, or the interview, is supposed to measure something: perhaps knowledge, perhaps reasoning, perhaps personality factors, but always some aspect of long-term functioning.

If the drug gives a one-day advantage without a corresponding long-term advantage, or gives a test-taking advantage without a corresponding advantage in what the test was intended to measure, then the drug defeats the purpose of the test.

There are several ways around this problem. One is to make sure that nobody uses the drug during the test. Another is to spread the test over several days. Another is to use multiple tests. Another is to redesign the test. It may be that the cheapest solution is to make sure that nobody uses the drug during the test.

Otherwise, we can have everybody use the drug during the test. This gives nobody an advantage, and puts everybody at risk.

Or we can have some people use the drug during the test, and other people not use drugs. This means that those using the drug get an advantage in the test which does not match their performance outside of it, and those not using the drugs get a disadvantage in the test which doesn't match their performance either. in effect, if some people are using the drugs, everybody else does get punished for not using the drugs. That is an attack on everybody else's autonomy.