BugBrother

TL;DR: I read two points. One is contradicted by multiple sources at Wikipedia, the other argues that everything pipy dislikes from USA can be ignored. I quit the discussion in disgust over wasted time. :-(

>>Yes, what I argue is that the current insurgency is supported by population of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and I've provided sources for that statement

(I don't bother to look up your references, since it certainly won't be from mainstream media or similar.)

You are contradicted by Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donetsk_People%27s_Republic#Pub...

In a poll [..] in the first half of February 2014, 33.2% of polled in Donetsk Oblast believed "Ukraine and Russia must unite into a single state".[27]

According to a poll [...] 66% of Donetsk residents view their future in a united Ukraine

A second poll conducted 26–29 March showed that 77% of residents condemned the takeover of administrative buildings, while 16% support such actions. Furthermore, 40.8% of Donetsk citizens support rallies for Ukraine's unity, while 26.5% support rallies which are pro-Russia

And so on.

>> Money quote from the BBC article: "the US says it has evidence that Russia has fired artillery across the border targeting Ukrainian military positions". [Etc.]

The first thing I check is contradicted by Wikipedia (that and its sources is a conspiracy too?).

The second "argument" I read is "We can ignore that, USA just lies". (It is hardly just USA that claimed Assad used nerve gas. Any proofs against? Never mind, you read it in Putin's media so it must be true.)

Seriously? That is what you have?

I have spent too much time on this. :-(

(Karma 34 account.)

I can only see that comment as this argument:

You REALLY think that dead civilians are on the heads of those countries defending themselves from military takeovers by non-democratic juntas, like Putin's.

Ah wait!

You also claim that this about large Russian military support of the rebels is just another Western conspiracy.

After the Krim takeover, Putin thanked the responsible Russian army units for good work and handed out medals. Before the Krim takeover, Putin claimed that there were no Russian military involvement. An obvious lie.

It is ridiculous to even consider that there are "just volunteers" again. The similarities makes it look like excerpts out of some internal Russian play book of how to do military takeovers.

Especially since there are contradicting satellite pictures, recorded conversations, etc. From USA and Ukraine.

Edit: Mainstream news references, not "therealnews", of moved tanks. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/14/us-ukraine-crisis-...

Edit 2: There are similar articles about the BUK anti air system (with varying explanations out of Moscow and interviews (/social media) with rebels). There have also been articles about satellite pictures showing Russian artillery firing on Ukraine military units. Google yourself. Then you have recorded discussions of Russian and rebel discussions, etc, etc. Again, this is mainstream over the last few weeks -- let me know if you really need me to Google for you. Here is the BBC with voice recordings etc. Denied (with demands not to lay blame!!) from Putin. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28357880

Edit 3: Russia shot artillery at Ukraine (just more lies, of course): http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28476153

Edit 4: Anything else I should Google for you?

Edit 5: Is this your position? You seem to not argue against that Putin lied about military involvement before the Krim takeover. You claim that there aren't enough proofs (and/or that all Western media lies) that his junta is doing exactly the same thing now, just because it looks so similar in action/time? (I am sorry if this makes you sound stupid/dishonest, but...)

>>Why don't you ask questions such as: who started this mess?

You mean Ukraine when it militarily destabilized and took over Krim?

Oh, wait... :-)

Thanks for a reasoned and informed opinion on this subject.

How do you think about this:

You should not help dictators based on natural resources economically. Countries built on industry will have to democratize when they reach a certain economic level. Countries who get their money from natural resources will just generate more money in Swiss banks if the prices increase.

Edit: pcj50, I doubt even the Saudi A king describes his country as democratic. The West is enough dependent on them that they get a free card. Realpolitik in a democracy means being nice when it isn't too expensive (or the voters back home cares). Dictators are even worse. In sum, there are only varying levels of grey, no black/white. But, well, you knew all this.

You are arguing -- hey all these cats are grey, so all are the same. All are grey, but there is a very large difference in how dark some are.

Let me discuss your examples:

Israel handled neutral in Europe?!

With all due respect, you have just a clue about English media? I can talk about Swedish media. There, Pallywood was never mentioned in the major news outlets. Torture between Palestinians was straight out censored, even when it was front page news on BBC/NY Times. Negative news for Israel was/are consistently front page.

(I can go check my bookmarks, there are lots of cases.)

There were lots of criticism in Swedish of the Iraq invasion. And especially after the occupation was so incredibly mismanaged.

Whichever, this was my point -- the Western media is heterogenous.

Was the Guardian article the most pro Putin on Ukraine you could find [in major English language media]? :-) It basically said: We can't get rid of Putin, let's try "Peace in our time" and be careful with sanctions, Russia is a smaller problem now than 1989.

That article specifically didn't discuss how nice Putin's regime is. What is the Guardian's position there? No link?

Do you think it is a western conspiracy that Russia is classified as authocratic these days by democracy indexes?

And so on.

As I wrote on another comment of yours -- Russia and China pay people to write comments [astroturf/50 cent army]. It was obvious in Swedish.

Edit: The astroturf was obvious in the Swedish language. Very shortly: People with very bad Swedish started posting pro Putin comments, some obviously using G Translate. They were unable to discuss certain things -- like that international democracy indexes class Russia as autocratic. (They'd probably be fired.) There were systematic down votes (10-100 down votes in a minute probably going through a bot net, so web admins couldn't automatically detect it). This spamming with very, very unusual opinions were systematically half of all comments on those web sites I read. (After a few months the Swedish of the posts got better, some halfway to idiomatic.)

Edit 2: Sprint, maybe. But not in the same volume in Swedish and not with that amount of fake votes.

Note that the democratic world's media are very heterogeneous. It isn't often they agree on much (see the Viernam war, Israel, Iraq war, etc in European media).

On this subject, most everyone do agree. Again note -- that is unusual. Maybe unique. And you claim that is a conspiracy, based on that there are lots of spin used on every subject by everyone with a finger in a pie?

That is exactly what Putin's media writes -- the whole [non dictatorial] world is in a conspiracy against Russia. Because they hate Russia!

(I can tell you how unanimous this is in Sweden: Most of the left wing extremists don't support Putin re Ukraine. These people in Sweden are USA haters which have never supported a democracy in a conflict with a democracy...)

True -- when the subject is Russia today, there are lots of paid people too.

(And if you think it is bad in English, be happy that you don't have to swim through the mangled comments in Swedish. But in the last 2-3 months they have gotten a bunch of people with better Swedish.)

Edit: Answer to the Edit. Of course I know that. I ALSO know that few well read people sincerely believe in that the whole world's [democratic] media are in a conspiracy against just Russia and the only truth is in Putin's controlled media. But yes, people do believe in conspiracy theories.

So if a junta is brutal enough and keep the quality of the opposition down (Siberia, assassinations, etc) then you think it is wrong to try to overthrow the dictator?!

From 1984 "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

How can things change, then? An invasion is not better than a revolution. Economic pressures work for most countries today (not e.g. North Korea) but not for oil countries -- note that most problem states do live on resource exports (see resource curse).

The really funny part is that they use the same type of argument in other languages in other part of the world.

Not "Your country also did something almost similar in other circumstances".

But "A third party did something almost similar in other circumstances".

As I've written multiple times in Swedish -- you must update your argument templates for the local environment!

At least on this web site they need to work to have an old account, so your comment won't be at -10 quickly.

Edit: Here is a business idea to get round the voting problem by paying money from China, Russia, Microsoft (they stopped after the court cases?) and other astroturfers. A browser plugin you install where you configure the bank account and web sites you have accounts on. The plugin votes for you and a bit of money is put into your bank account. You could instead work on detectors and honey pot comments (to detect these users), before HN et al are destroyed.

Edit 2: It should be possible to hide the voting plugins better by voting up comments on sham accounts, which then are used for down voting. I see a whole new application for data mining to detect this. :-(

I think 'bane' is perfectly aware of your point, that Perl 5/6 are very different languages and even Perl 5's incredibly backwards compatibility.

Iirc, he has trolled in Perl discussions before.

Grumble, don't talk about e.g. JavaScript regexps. :-(

>>which is a seriously uncool armchair quarterback thing to say

Imho, you read too much into the discussion. Everyone knows that Booking.com must be doing a lot of things right for their particular problem set and situation. It is a high profile place that attract good talent. (I am hardly alone in assuming they aren't too stupid to listen to Ovid et al.) Their situation is unusual and the resulting specific differences in methods will be questioned, because of their high profile.

I don't disagree.

My point was, to take a simple example, at places like Booking.com [new] people will typically find out about the used CPAN Date classes from the code or their table neighbour. Not by rolling their own or crawling all of the CPAN before finding DateTime.

But sure, the internal code will be a bigger issue.

I don't really get what is different with Perl and the other scripting languages for types, but check Moose.

E.g. http://search.cpan.org/~ether/Moose-2.1210/lib/Moose/Cookboo...

Quite OK for one of the scripting languages, imho.

  has 'employees' => (
      is      => 'rw',
      isa     => 'ArrayRef[Employee]'
      default => sub { [] },
   );

Booking.com is a big place where newbies will be sitting with lots of experienced people they can ask and discuss with over lunch/coffee.

I doubt that smaller places will see so fast ramp up that they don't bother to hire people that know the language environment. The language in itself is quite irrelevant, but building a taste and learning the standard libs (here -- CPAN) takes time. That goes for every environment.

Edit: It would be interesting to hear the experience on this at other big shops? Maybe material for an academic article, someone?

Edit 2: I might add -- the differences between the scripting languages seems a bit overblown in the article. The languages (Perl, Ruby et al) aren't that different. Here I argued about the environment and standard libraries, which takes many, many hours for at least Python and Perl. And for taste -- to not have anonymous functions in Python needs changes in how you code. And so on.

I can agree that the US health care systems seems to be uniquely f-cked up. (No other term seems possible to apply.)

But centrally planned European health care systems are far from perfect.

I am familiar with the Swedish system and it is unable to diagnose problems because of administration. Afaik, international benchmarking comparisons supports this. The doctors at the "sharp end" don't have enough minutes per patient to find problems that aren't obvious.

People have to try to go to multiple doctors, until they find someone that isn't just too traumatized by the system to do their job.

I would guess somewhere between 0.5 and 5 percent (this has not been examined) of the Swedish population walks around with some simple to cure problem which lowers their life quality for years and decades. From myself and people I know -- knees, food allergies, lack of some vitamin/mineral, bacterial infections, thyroid problems, etc.

I have quite often heard the expression about someone with problems -- "too sick to get well". That is, that person is too ill to make enough noise that the medics have to take the energy and diagnose, just to get rid of him/her.

Thanks!

Those are elegant, I'll watch them as if they were new Seinfeld episodes. :-)

I didn't have a "slightly off impression", rather I didn't see a large reason to go Mojo.* instead of Catalyst (without a need for real time support.)

'sigil' referenced Python with "uselessness of lambdas", not Perl.

(If you still wonder -- from your comment history you shouldn't -- try Google: python lambda broken)

I liked the Catalyst tutorials and general documentation. But Catalyst is not Dancer, which is like chewing air to learn. :-)

When I read up a little on Mojolicious to have an opinion a couple of years ago, it seemed more complex than Catalyst?

I'll put my JavaScript hobby aside and look at it again. Any good links? [Except the one posted by walterbell at http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/mojolicious/ Grumble, that was already on my reading list.]

What collyw said. And most people prefer to use their own installation of Perl (see perlbrew) instead of the system Perl for development. The same seems to go for other scripting environments.

Was that irony?

People have been arguing since the 1980s (if you count the original claims of the spaces shuttle, since the 1970s) that lower launch costs are possible.

But only Musk delivered.

You really think the established launch companies would have done that, as long as they earned lots of money doing business as usual? (Now their business model is dead, so they use their influence to get long time contracts with the US military just before SpaceX's rockets are verified...)

It would be interesting to see what you base your claims on?

>>active WMD program hoax

I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any?

(I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)

>> Am I wrong to think that Sweden is as wonderfully progressive as it seems?

There are advantages/disadvantages with everything.

A consensus culture where the boss goes around and talks to people before setting goals is very different for Americans. Like all other cultures it works better for some areas, worse in others.

Think politically correct, group oriented. (Have you seen that anywhere else?)

Edit: Let me paraphrase it like this: "The worst of worlds, the best of worlds". Let me give an example. It isn't good for someone to have the "wrong" opinions on some sensitive point in a consensus culture; a low roof. [The Swedish term is "the opinion corridor", i.e. that only a small bandwidth of opinions are tolerated.]

Edit 2: I think that was the first time in my life I've seen the Stockholm people described as "friendly". :-)

You write as if it doesn't matter that ISIS have been kicked out of AlQ?

(The last I read, ISIS was fighting with all the other rebel groups in Syria? I thought that included AlQ? Also, is that really Saudi policy?! [Saudi A do send weapons to other rebels!] )

(sam88 is a three hours old account.)

The best test of an organization isn't when they win an election, it is if they step down when they lose one.

If they "can't" lose elections (because of military control, media control, just not holding any more elections and/or election cheating), they aren't better than... well, Putin or Hamas.

In this case, we also have all that about celebrating the murdering of civilians and organised official antisemitism copied from both religious sources and the Nazis(!).

Edit: I might add that Austria got sanctioned in the EU over Jörg Haider's political party and its democratic result. Hamas must be at least a factor of hundred worse.

Even I can say you're totally wrong already in the first claims.

Al Qaida has/had quite a bit of popular support in Saudi Arabia -- AND the explicit goal to overthrow the Saudi royal family. If you check history, that is what makes you top-of-the-list to most any dictatorial junta!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda_in_Saudi_Arabia#Ideolo...

"Like al-Qaeda, it opposes the Al Saud monarchy.[8] AQAP was formed in January 2009 from a merger of al Qaeda's Yemeni and Saudi branches.[1] The Saudi group had been effectively suppressed by the Saudi government, forcing its members to seek sanctuary in Yemen."

I write this because I want to point out:

It is disgustingly dishonest to blame a country for what a dozen individuals do, like you do with the 9/11 terrorists. If we allow that "reasoning", how should the world judge all Muslims considering the millions of murders/rapes/etc in Sudan? (At least those Muslims from the large part of the Muslim world where the criticism about [Sudan's violations of] human rights is ignored or claimed to be a western conspiracy.)

>>Summertime in Norway is holiday time. People can take up to the whole month off.

As a fellow Scandinavian I should clarify this:

Despite all the jokes about spending an afternoon in bed sleeping off a hangover and missing the summer, the summer is longer than one month.

I should also say I loved Bergen, the little I've been there. Despite the weather. I see a suitable job there, I'm going to apply for it.

But if you're not doing anything fancy, wouldn't a JavaScript variant be better? [E.g. potentially X-platform.]

Much too late, but my explicit point was:

It sounded like culture to me too, until I replaced the word "white" with "black" in my head.

If I should say anything more: There is a limit of different standards for different groups (somewhere between a factor two and five), when it becomes disgusting hypocrisy.