Posts by Aaron Em 1548 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2009
What, a world in which things are what they are, no more and no less? Sign me up! Hell, I'll go back and strangle Wright, Pei, and Mies van der Rohe in infancy, just to make a start -- you just lend me a time machine, and I'll get started...
but I'm more likely to survive the giant balls-up with employment intact, because I understand there's a game and, distasteful as I find it, I know it's worth playing. It's that or sit on the sidelines, and being an unlettered hick with a big mouth means non-profit organizations find me unsuitable for employment, so I get to choose between "sit on the sidelines" and "miss my mortgage payment" -- and I guarantee you the bank is not going to inquire into the specifics of my high-minded sense of ethics as part of the foreclosure process.
He pretty much is, it seems like. I don't know how you get into that line of work, but I'm damn glad someone in it is taking the time to spill secrets to the hoi polloi in the trenches, so we'll at least be able to make it less likely that the bullet we catch comes from the side of the line we weren't even looking at...
You do realize our Mr. Page is in favor of nuclear, right? Disregarding ignorant notions about nuclear being made out of Satan, it doesn't get more sustainable for that. Nuclear for baseload, plenty of spare power to crack water for hydrogen fuel to use in cars, and we can keep our current lifestyle going approximately forever -- whether that's a good thing being, of course, a different question altogether, but not one which has any bearing on whether nuclear makes more sense than wind and hamsters.
Yeah, no kidding. "Are you sure you know how to read that thing?"
Now, granted, my in-laws are damned fine people; in fact I do their IT support because their other son can't be arsed to do it without yelling at them for how stupid they are -- this from the guy who really doesn't see a need for silly nonsense like putting a firewall between a cable modem and a Windows XP box. Next time he touches their equipment for any reason, I'm going over to his house with a crowbar...
Yeah, and I bet the helpstaff who have to rebuild your machine four times a year would say just the same thing, too.
Since when are IT management allowed in here? I thought this was the room for people with brains in their heads. Bloody neighborhood, I suppose.
Personal attacks again? No more than I should've expected; if you had any argument to make, I'm sure you'd be doing so. Clearly, though, in suspecting you'd have the wit to concede a clearly unsalvageable line of what I'll kindly describe as argumentation, I did you far too large a favor.
'Hope springs eternal', I suppose.
They don't need to; the American tool of power projection is the aircraft carrier. Moskits are awfully damn cheap by comparison, especially for the world's preeminent industrial powerhouse. How many seven-hundred-pound warheads does a Nimitz-class have to stop before it goes to the bottom? Probably not many. How many can the PLAN throw if they feel like it? Hard to say, but given the way our point defense sucks, I'm guessing plenty enough and then some.
Sure -- in the same sense that I might "pigeonhole" by seeing a duck and saying "Hey, that's a duck." Whether or not it looks like a duck to you is of little consequence to me; a sensible person might go along with a mob in order to avoid a lynching, were he at risk of such, but only an utter fool permits a mob to tell him what he does and does not see.
It really does enthrall me to see so many people hiding behind the Guy Fawkes affectation to defend the current hegemony, while I detail amazingly unpopular opinions under my own given name. You've already been out-argued by a degenerate neo-Confederate mutant, and I should imagine that's painful enough -- surely you're not going to let me outdo you in public courage as well!
(And, yes, I know -- you're not using a name, so nobody will know that you, specifically, lost an argument with someone who thinks the United States should never have seceded from England. But you know.)
It's nothing to do with skin color, if that's what you're thinking; just as red is the emblem of revolution, white is that of reaction, and has been since I believe the French Revolution. (And, hey, we still use "left-wing" and "right-wing", invented to describe where people sat in the National Assembly, so why not keep up the color code too?)
Thus, by 'rehabilitated White', what I'm saying is that I was a progressive atheist myself, just as Red as Red could be -- until I wised up and found out just how thoroughly I had been lied to; it does something to a man to discover, having believed himself to be not religious at all, that he is in fact an unchurched Methodist more or less.
(Hey, you don't have to take my word for it -- or, at least, not this word right here. I've been commenting on the Reg for about five years now; all you need do is compare my comments from five years ago, and my comments in this thread, to see that I'm not kidding when I say I used to be a damnfool Red.)
You poor confused man -- I wish there were something I could do for you...ah! Here we are: Dabney on conservatism.
Delightful coward! -- straight to character assassination, in the very best leveller tradition. Don't you ever change.
For the record, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' is dead, and even a Jacobite would scruple at the thought of restoring a corpse to the throne. And, in any case, it's really not your place or mine to be deciding on precisely this king or that king, is it? Parliament going into that business seems to me to be quite where the present trouble started, and the whole point of calling myself a Jacobite is to make clear that I'm in favor of restoring professional government, not just to the Emerald Isle herself but to her wayward colonies as well. Who am I to tell someone, whose profession I do not share, whom in his field would best do a given job? To have the kind of knowledge I'd need to even attempt to choose wisely, I'd need to be a professional in the same field myself.
I know, I know, some half-baked argument about appeal to authority is just rushing to your lips -- but hold off canting at me just a minute and give a little thought to what I'm saying, and you may just find it makes a lot more sense than you're comfortable giving it credit for.
For example: Many of us here are systems administrators. Of those who are -- I'll ask for a show of hands -- how many administer our servers and network equipment by popular vote? Make decisions on equipment upgrades by public acclamation? Anyone? I didn't think so. Hell, most of us won't even let the helpdesk into our server rooms, and for Goddamned good reason!
Why is this? Because we are professionals, trained and experienced in our field, and that training and experience gives us the ability to better understand how to give our users what they need than our users do themselves. That is our job -- it's why, professionally speaking, we exist; if administering a datacenter was simple enough that any ordinary slob could do it, any ordinary slob would do it, and there'd be no more need for us. But it isn't that simple, and so we persist.
Now, tell me truly: Do you really think that governing a polity of willful human beings is less complicated than keeping a room full of computers fed and cared for?
I knew I was leaving out something important. No, "amending laws to reflect changing times and people" isn't social engineering. Changing times and people is social engineering. Conspiracy theory, you say? Your homework assignment for today begins with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion -- a technician's service manual. This man was no fringe crackpot; on the contrary, he moved in the highest circles of the Progressive Era, and his entire career consisted in teaching movers and shakers how to move and shake the moved and shook. He also, possibly by accident, helped invent advertising, which as a good progressive you loathe -- or believe you do. Does the existence of, say, Yul Brynner's anti-smoking PSA, upset you by the very fact of it? No. You don't loathe advertising for its own sake; what you loathe is seeing it bent to such a coarse, crass, and sinful purpose as the mere making of money -- God gave thee those tools to spread the Inner Light, friend, not so thee might steal bread from the mouth of thy neighbor.
No, you're the one who's unwilling to say anything he can't walk away from, meanwhile claiming childishness on my part because, when you tried to define my argument out of existence, I refused to let you get away with it. Speaking of which, and as you mention confusion, in that first sentence there -- are you arguing the logic of metaphor, or the metaphor of logic? I confess I'm not entirely confident of my ability to follow.
I'm an American Jacobite. I'll wait until you've finished laughing -- actually, I get that reaction about two times in ten, the rest being roughly seven and a half blank stares and say two-thirds of a punch in the mouth, on average. It is an utterly ridiculous thing to say in any case, but I've got a great sense of humor so that's okay by me.
I would note, if it's necessary, that I don't use 'republican' here in the capital-R sense common in the States, notwithstanding its presence at the start of a title I wrote; I use it in the same sense as the Red to whom I responded, that is, one who considers the republic an ideal, or at least a highly desirable, form of government. For any other imprecise or erroneous usage I claim entire culpability.
Religion and politics defined as orthogonal to one another? I'm not sure which is more marvelous -- your foolishness or your arrogance.
Well, in any case, that tears it; I am arguing with an adolescent. Run along and play, and come back when you know something about history, should you ever bother to learn.
So, then, one section running roughshod over the other is perfectly OK when the section doing the trampling outsizes the one getting tromped. You have heard the phrase 'tyranny of the majority', I'm sure -- did you give it any thought when you did?
Actually, come to think about it, I don't need external references to show you're not making sense -- you yourself chose the verb legitimize, which means "to make something legitimate" -- in other words, taking the word back to its Latin root, to make something legal which never was before in millennia of common law and common practice. If that's not social engineering, what is?
To be clear, it is not the idea of gay marriage in particular with which I have a problem; it's just a handy, if controversial, example of the degree of social engineering I'm talking about. Another example, possibly less controversial than the one I've been using if that helps any, would be the replacement of charity with federal largesse under the general name of "universal health care" -- but I rather prefer to use the example I have been, because it leads very naturally into the question of whether ends justify means.
People don't routinely carry handguns in most of the US either, and you can choose to believe me, or what you see on television instead, just as you prefer on that point. (Don't talk to me about that goddamned Top Gear episode in Alabama, either, unless you think I could roll up on a bunch of chavs, tell them all "fuck you and everything you care about", and expect to get out without a beating. Rocks thrown at the car? A hug and a kiss by comparison.)
And -- and here's where I get my comment rejected and lose my privileged place outside the moderation queue -- in places where you can't walk around without getting shot at, it mostly isn't white people doing the shooting, yet when we get people talking about how this country sorely needs gun control, it's always white people that need the controlling.
Sure, call me a racist for that if you like. Until you live somewhere you can sit out on your back porch at night, three nights out of seven, and listen to small-arms fire being exchanged a mile or two further south in one of those areas every major American city has -- you know, the parts where smart white people don't go after dark -- then I don't guess I care all that much what you think of me, do I?
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