burgerbrain
I only wish I could convey such attitude through text intentionally.
EDIT (posted after jacobolus' reply):
When I first came here, I was annoyed at the entire HN attitude of "a better discussion board". Good clean discussion is great, but at the time it seemed too dismissive of the great conversation that happens elsewhere on the web; too arrogant if you will. Furthermore, I saw that attitude as a sort of challenge: could I game the system and be just helpful enough some of the time to allow myself to be an utter asshole the rest of the time without getting banned?
You see, somebody who is an asshole some of the time and useful the rest of the time is not a valuable community member. Even if most of the time is spent being useful that is still not a person that you want in your community; in short, the karma system is broken. Of course HN isn't quite as broken as a pure karma system would be, hellbanning still kicks in for people with positive karma, but it is broken nevertheless. It's pretty easy to keep individual comments at positive or at least neutral karma by picking your topic correctly, which gets you around (to my knowledge) all but manual banning. (I suspect an improved banning system would involve flagging people for manual inspection after they have too many comments with large amounts of up and down voting. I can't speak for the false positive rate of such a system except to say that my honest productive comments rarely seemed to swing)
But I'm done now. tptacek does a better job of what I wanted to do than I think I ever could.
I think I'm past due on closing this account anyway. I'm out; apologies for any grief I've caused. I probably owe a good number of you a beer.
What could possibly make somebody want to do that? Are there any examples around of people doing that?
An interview of the 9 year old children in 6 years that you could compare to the interviews of the currently 15 year old children would be very interesting.
I'll let you know if I get arrested.
[2] I assert they do nothing of the sort.
[3] Call it what you like, telling people that they should be more respectful of the military when they express concern about being, by proxy, responsible for a loss of life, is... I don't even know how to describe it. Lets say "insensitive of the humanity of others".
[4] Cheerio
Do you recognize the problem here?
Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have billions of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks?
No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.
Why didn't it?
There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.
If you don't want to use it, I don't see how that is any of my business. I was just trying to help out somebody who does, so there's hardly any reason to be an ass.
bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backwardhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
If there are factual inaccuracies there, please point them out. However just going by the "whiff" of something seems like you're opening yourself up to rejecting parts of reality that do not fit your worldview.
Edit: better source: http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html and here is an interview of the man by CNN: http://www.postroad.com/news/2000/20000912-new-london-police...
Who would do such a thing? Cops.