Fallout2man

I'm a libertarian, how I became that was a bit strange. Basically I've always believed in the right for a person to choose what they want for themselves as long as it does not cause direct physical harm to another within reason. So for instance, while I believe murder should be illegal, I don't believe smoking marijuana in your own home should be illegal. I'd found myself at odds with the policies of both the democrat and republican parties, and after reviewing both contemporary and historical examples, I was sure I didn't fit into either of those parties. My stance on intellectual property especially put me in that circumstance. However, a few years back on a forum I went to I met someone who told me about the libertarian party and what it stood for. I looked it up and did some research, I found myself in full agreement with almost all of its views. It was then that I decided the libertarian party was definitely the party that I wanted to be a part of.

Considering how many responses there are I'll just post a small something that I've been thinking over for a while. Why should the state be legislating marriage at all? Why can we not take these benefits bestowed and name them to something such as civil unions, in all cases, or some other PC term that describes such benefits? Then allow any couple to obtain these similarly to how one obtains a marriage license. From there they could simply let private institutions such as churches preform marriage ceremonies however they see fit. Marriage in itself is a word very mired in religion, so why can't we just let it stay that way and rename the government benefits to something other then a religious term? This way I think each side gets something they want. The gays and lesbians may obtain the same benefits, but the other side of the equation gets to keep their marriage term as applied only to ceremonies that their churches will practice, which most likely will only be between a man and a woman.

Honestly after looking over both of the major parties in more recent times, I've come to believe that the only major differences between Democrats and Republicans are that they disagree which of the people's rights they feel need to be removed first. Democrats would remove our right to protect our home, would create a giant welfare state where we're paying out the ass for everyone else. Democrats have a generalized sense of morality they feel should be legislated. Republicans on the other hand while less socialistic, in recent times seem to believe in a gargantuan expansion of state power in other areas. Republicans would allow corporations to become even more out of control then they are now. Republicans essentially seem to feel Christianity should be legislated. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are the better of the two, they're basically equal in terms of how much they want to take away. They just differ on the what.

quote:Originally posted by $iLk: quote:If we really wanted to stop the terrorists, we'd just pull our military out of foreign nations.So the crux of your argument is that we are somehow responsible for other people's actions and that they would all play nice in their sandbox countries if we'd just do as they ask and stick our head in the sand while they brutally force their view of Islam on the populaces of their countries? The Crux of my argument is that we shouldnÔÇÖt care how nations play together unless they start directly showing theyÔÇÖre going to attack us. These terrorists want us off of their soil. They wouldn't be attacking us if we weren't there in the first place. Right now it's sort of a catch-22, however if we could actually stop for once trying to shape the world like we wanted it, then perhaps these terrorists wouldn't want so badly to kill us? They seem to primarily hate us because we have a bad habit of installing puppet governments, forcing our way of life on other peoples, and installing brutal dictators in regions just because theyÔÇÖll be buddy-buddy with the US government. If we just pulled back and let them do whatever they wanted, theyÔÇÖd probably stop focusing on us and back to killing themselves. quote:Surely terrorist attacks are being prevented if we'd drop the whole 'threatening' Homeland Security and quit beain 'mean' by searching people's luggage at airports.I talked about pulling our military off of foreign soil. We obviously do need to keep the USA safe on our own soil. However thereÔÇÖs also an obvious limit we have to set. I donÔÇÖt mind luggage searches and metal detectors and the like. I do mind giving the president the power to, on just a single word, declare you an ÔÇ£enemy combatantÔÇØ despite being a citizen, and then hold you in inhumane conditions without a trial or even being formally charged with any crime, without even having to justify why they thought they should. quote: quote:but we'll signifigantly lower the number of people out to do such things.Right... just like quitting actively pursuing murder suspects will mean less murders overall. I donÔÇÖt mind pursuing terrorists in our country. I do mind a multi-national witch-hunt where itÔÇÖs us against most of the UN, when we have a much simpler solution right before us. Murder is a domestic issue that we settle domestically. quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: quote:Originally posted by Fallout2man: Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the party you chose uses a despicable tactic doesn't suddenly make it acceptable.What kind of dreamworld do you live in? I'm glad that you're not in charge, or we'd have at least 1 terrorist attack a day. The old "if we leave them alone, They'll leave us alone?" Yeah Right, what are you 14 or something? They won't leave us alone, if we had pulled every soldier out of every country, if we had left the Taliban alone, if we had left Saddam alone. Oh really, so you're saying that Bin Ladden doesn't want our government off of what he considers his soil? Last time I checked that's what he and a large number of these arab terrorists were all after. The military is for protecting us from attack, not "keeping foreign powers in check." If we got our government out and away from theirs, they'd have no reason to come after us. quote:If we had said, OK, we were bad, we're sorry we made you angry, we will just pull all our soldiers home. 1: Oil would be $5 a gallonSo we're supposed to dictate the world's oil prices? And most of what we get I do believe comes from Saudi Arabia because of the generous trade agreements we have with the ruling house of Saud (spelling?). quote:2: we would have had 10's of thousands of casualties from terrorist attacks.Really? Last time I checked I was proposing getting us off of our soil, not to stop keeping ours safe. I don't agree with a lot of the patriot act and other such draconian laws, however I do believe in keeping the actual USA secure, while still providing a reasonable right to privacy to its citizens. If anything terror attacks on us would decrease, since they'd have no more of a real reason to go after us. A lot of these groups just want us to get our government out of their country or "holy lands." quote:3: AlQuaeda would have gotten and probably used WMD, gotten from Saddam Housien.What WMD? While I too originally suspected Saddam to have some sort of secret weapons program, I've yet to see any real evidence of it at all. Even supposing he did, Al Quaeda wouldn't be using them against us, since if we weren't putting our soldiers and government on their lands, they'd have never cared about us at all. quote:4:The Terrorist organizations would be 100's of time larger then they are no.That's a rather broad claim. While one could suppose such a thing may happen, perhaps if the USA hadn't decided to play policeman over the world, the peoples of various nations might be content enough that these organizations wouldn't even have formed in the first place. Yes that's just as broad and something I can't really say would happen, however your claim seems to fall under the same light. In all honestly, as I said, even if they were, they wouldn't probably care about us at all. We've got a duty to protect our own soil from these things, but that's about it. quote:5: The middle east would now be totally the crazy terrorist Islam, instead of the moderately crazy Islam.Islam isn't in the least crazy, at least not any crazier then Christianity or any other religion. There are some very strict and I would call barbaric practices some countries do preform, however those practices usually arenÔÇÖt actually prescribed by the religion. Just like how the Bible didnÔÇÖt tell the Spanish to go torture/kill everyone who wouldnÔÇÖt convert when they had their inquisition. If we try to force our way of life on them, then that's exactly what's going to cause them to get angry and form these "terrorist organizations." Unless a nation, and that's a key thing, a nation, shows it's going to begin some sort of war that can reasonably be shown to be something that will spill the violence over to the USA, then maybe we should think about getting involved. quote:6: We wouldn't be safe ANYWHERE in the United States.So just because we aren't policing other nations we're suddenly not safe at home? I fail to see the logic in this, we should very much protect the United States, but do that within our borders, with a few small exceptions for times when we have enough proof to believe a nation will attack us (key word here is nation). quote:7: Israel would no longer existWhy should we care if Israel exists or not? If it can't take care of its own then I guess it wasn't a very good nation now was it? quote:They hate us because we are not Muslim, they hate us because we are the strongest country on earth.Really? Show me at least three actual terrorist groups saying that's why they said that. I imagine you couldn't even find one. So far all I've only heard people who are trying to rationalize this campaign of enforcing our culture onto others using that term. If you can honestly find me what can reasonably be considered unbiased proof to the contrary, then I will stand corrected, but as of yet I have seen no such thing. quote:They will do whatever is necassary to destroy us. The only way to insure our security is to destroy them FIRST, and that is what we have been doing and will continue to do.The way you make it sound, it seems we should just take a bunch of nukes and turn the entire middle-east into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot, because anything short of that and we won't have gotten them all. In fact even then we might not, but thatÔÇÖs about as close to absolute as I can imagine youÔÇÖd ever get. quote:If Clinton and his criminal cronies in the Democratic party had not destroyed our intelligence networks, had not gutted our military, had not made sorry with every tinpot dictator and Muslim crazy in the world, we would never have had a 911.I do agree with you about the gutting the military, I always believe in having a strong force to defend the nation. However honestly a lot of the dictators in various nations we were responsible for putting in place in the first place. To just blame Clinton for everything seems like you're being rather short sighted, these sorts of bad decisions go across many presidents both republican and democrat. The fact is ultimately no one man is responsible for this situation. quote:Pull your head out of the sand and come to reality. These are NOT normal people, these are not people you can make nice with, and give concessions to. Concessions=weakness, and therefore they will attack us. Look at Israel and the Palestinians for a clue about that.Last I checked Israel has been having problems with Palestine since it was formed. See there's this whole problem with the Jews and Muslims both claiming certain ground is Holy to their religions, and both of them refuse to stop at anything to reclaim it, due to their equal zealousy for their religions. Israel has through several wars tried to continually expand its land and now is faced with the "terrorists" that are causing its figurative walls to close in. Just look at that ridiculously giant fence they constructed, I doubt that's going to really do much to stop their problems. quote:The more you give them, the more they will attack. You need to figure out what reality is, because your little dreamland will get us all killed. So why are we going to get killed? First of all, supposing even if they did attack more, we'd have more resources to defend our own soil with. Generally speaking I think the evidence suggests they'll fight with themselves endlessly unless one group manages to kill all the others, then perhaps we'll see. What we're doing is just wasting resources. If we really MUST stop this, then why don't we just nuke the entire middle east back to the stone age? Since after all, if the only way to win is to kill them I guess we should just murder the entire region. I never disputed that it wouldn't stop terrorists entirely, however they'd probably be too busy focusing on other targets to care about us unless somehow something caused the balance of power to shift and one group managed to maintain control over the entire middle east. Why must we decide what is best for the rest of the world, what gives us the right? [ 03-08-2004, 06:52 AM: Message edited by: Fallout2man ]

quote:Originally posted by Steve Schacher: Propaganda aside, what about the "outrage" over the 9/11 ads that I posted is untrue? The clues were the similar talking points. The facts are that Democrats used their war leadership as campaign issues, so what is wrong with Bush doing so now? The facts are that the ONE group, repeated over and over by the media to make it seem wide-spread, is financed by Teresa Heinz-Kerry.Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the party you chose uses a despicable tactic doesn't suddenly make it acceptable. quote:As far as Iraq and connections to Al Qaeda: The problem, as I see it, is with trying to draw a straight-line connection when Bush declared a War on Terrorism in general. Bush named an Axis of Evil, but he also said that "you're either with us or with the terrorists." Iraq was a money spigot. By taking out Iraq, Bush dried up a major source of money that funded terrorist cells.Dried up what? All he did was remove Sadam from power. The people there seem to mostly hate us now that we aren't leaving. The suicide bombings and other such attacks will probably continue on some level until we finally leave, and when we do Iraq will either A) have a new dictator, or become a fundamentalist islamic state, which will now hate the USA for trying to control the nation under the pretense of "freeing" it. We've accomplished Zero in Iraq, the only way we'd ever control it is to kill the native populace and then send people from the USA over to colonize it. quote:Sure, we went after the Taliban in Afghanistan because they were directly responsible for the attacks on 9/11. But in the larger War On Terrorism, Iraq was involved, if only as a safe haven training ground for terrorists, at least as a funder of terrorism (perhaps only for suicide bombers in Israel, perhaps larger involvement). This is laughable, is the Taliban despicable, you bet ya, are they directly responsible for 9/11? That's a load of BS. The Taliban was attacked because we had reason to believe Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and that he was in Afghanistan. The Taliban supposedly refused to turn him over, however realistically I doubt they honestly knew where he was even if he was in the country at the time. They probably said they did to make themselves not look incompotent and/or make themselves look good by "standing up to the USA." A war on terror is not like some war on a nation. You can't just send your soldiers off in planes and boats and bomb X land and kill off so many uniformed soldiers and be done with it. Terrorists will always exist as long as there's someone discontent with things and stupid enough to believe resorting to violence is the best way to do things. If we really wanted to stop the terrorists, we'd just pull our military out of foreign nations. Honestly what business do we have putting our military anywhere outside of the US except for "protecting corporate interests?" Which I can bet Bush&Co are keen on doing. All they want is to not have the USA running their governments for them. There's no more "red mennace" we must somehow feel obligated to "protect the world from." We need to stop being policemen and focus on our own problems inside the nation for once. It's true it won't stop all terrorist attacks, as there'll always be nuts like McVeigh and Kazinsky(spelling?), but we'll signifigantly lower the number of people out to do such things.

Copy protection is going to ridiculous new heights, if companies insist on enforcing draconian copy protections that inconvenience the users they'll just draw more people to piracy, as pirate copies never suffer these problems. Really I think a better maneauver would be to just try and empathize with users and make them feel good about buying a product and supporting a quality development team and their future quality products. Positive reinforcement works much better then negative. But with the notion of maintaining total control over fair use, and requiring people to pay you more money or face legal charges, who wouldn't want to use copy protection schemes these days?

If you think the above is bad, you should hear the proposed intillectual property section of the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) treaty. This thing makes the existing america IP laws look leniant and if adopted would spread them across north and south America like a cancer. Here's a link to a paper outlining the IP section, it's a bit long but worth a read.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: Just as I suspected. The usual unrealistic requests. Even a 1 min movie at 800x600 (the lowest supported by UC), could be close to 500MB. Let alone one that shows all the game's capabilities and which could span an hour or more. Is this size with or without a form of video compression being applied?

quote:Originally posted by Commander Elio Jason: quote:Firstly, you have to remember, to get the full story, you need to have seen reloaded, all episodes of the Animatrix, and completed both Niobe and Ghost's paths in Enter the Matrix. Everything is explained if you watch carefully. yeah but i didn't see much difference between Niobe's path and Ghost's. anyway i'm going to see this one soon. since i think its a great trilogy. They did diverge occasionally. Like in the airport they took seperate paths, and they also did at the power plant. However each story revealed some nice little details, like exactly why the oracle's appearance changed. Overal the game was poor in comparison to other games of the time, but that's most likely due to having such a small window of time to make it, plus having to make a game for the PC, PS2, GameCube, and Xbox at once. And if you see it, make sure you get a matinee showing, it's not worth the 8-9 dollars for full price IMHO.

They already rolled out quantum signal encryption commercially, so it looks like they're keeping up The next big move will probably be away from binary. Since they're using light-based computers, I'd like to see a form of quaternary come into place. Red light is 1, blue light is 2, green light is 3, and any other light that doesn't match is 0.

Personally, I didn't entirely love revolutions but I did like it. It was something totally different then I expected. Firstly, you have to remember, to get the full story, you need to have seen reloaded, all episodes of the Animatrix, and completed both Niobe and Ghost's paths in Enter the Matrix. Everything is explained if you watch carefully. That said, the story is still left very open in the end. The entire Neo story arc is completed but the total conflict has not been resolved. I imagine this is what the MMO game will complete. Had I not seen the Animatrix or played the game, I'd probably be one of those people whom hated it, but since I did, I got much more of the story. And you can call it a dirty, sneaky and underhanded attempt to get you to pay more for the movie all you want, but the fact is you have to play the game fully and watch the Animatrix if you want to fully understand the story. I do however, believe that it could've been done a lot better in regards to Neo, I often felt he "lacked imagination" in the use of his ability to do absolutely anything within the matrix.