padren

I'm curious if this general approach would be viable for UDP management: Overview of current technology: Long story short, it's pretty easy to open TCP connections (such as HTTP for web viewing) and have routers automatically ensure each system behind it can send and then receive data all properly addressed. All this is pretty much automatically handled between the browser, client systems, router, firewall, and the ultimate destination server without causing problems very often at all. Being able to have multiple clients send UDP data through a router to a server is a configuration nightmare most of the time: they don't operate in streams, so they don't maintain connections, and you usually have to set specific ports to forward to specific client systems within the local network just to get any traffic to work at all. Proposed solution: If an industry standard could be established, I want to know if it is possible to setup a "standardized handshake exchange" over TCP in which a client requests a "clear UDP route" to the server, and the server responds with it's own parameters, and then they agree to the mutual set of data. Basically the client sends "Hey server, I want you to send me UDP data here on port [x]" and the server says "sure, they'll come from this range of IPs, on this range of ports, and if no traffic comes through in [x] amount we'll both agree the route has expired" The handshake only exists to exchange any dynamic parameters (like port numbers, etc) between the client/server, but mostly so the firewall/router layers within the network can eavesdrop (which is how they route data with TCP/HTTP now, iirc) and create a temporary "port forwarding entry" and actually know how to route UDP data, and how long to maintain the exception. The key difficulty I see is that firewall and router producers would have to implement the standard, and the only way to test if a route is successful is to "try" and send data via UDP. One firewall admin may have a different idea of what is an acceptable range of remote IPs to accept UDP data from or how long it can last idle before expiration. While these can be rejected and logged in some capacity, it makes determining the reason for rejecting the "port forwarding entry" at the firewall level somewhat difficult. Lastly, there's the issue that whatever server you are connecting to and wanting UDP data from.... has to be designed to handle both TCP and UDP data, and ensure each remote client's total handshake data is managed. Some layer has to talk via TCP to get the port info of the client for instance, so the UDP layer can use it to communicate. Is this a viable idea? Did I miss solutions that already exist? Did I use entirely too many words? Btw - nice to be back on the forums, hopefully I'll be around more

I think the nature of the society could have a huge impact on how socially awkward intelligent people feel; in some cases enough to skew any correlative data towards a noticeable deviation. In some societies, it may present a greater challenge to overcome social awkwardness initially - a deviation towards higher social awkwardness amongst intelligent people may (theoretically) be highly visible in young age categories and almost non-existent in older ones. In others, it may be expected that people accept certain social behavioral limitations; daughters may be expected to get married off with dowries and no say, regardless of intellectual interests. It would be easy to see how someone could find themselves socially stunted if they are told that everything that makes sense to them is incorrect, or even amoral and that everyone else "can see that" except them. It strikes me as a very difficult topic to analyze.

Considering that the majority of ancestors in our genealogical lineage are bound to have partaken in cultural consumption of alcohol, combined with it's known effects on inhibitions... it may very well be that the majority of us owe our every existence to alcohol. I wish society well with whatever it deems is good for it, but personally I like existing and would rather prefer a world where alcohol was there when I needed it. Side question: Would Churchill have been as much fun/effective sober? What about Vincent Van Gogh?

While I may be a little late considering, I can't help but to jump in. I think it's safe to boil down the OP's statement effectively as: "A finite quantity of materials can only support positive exponential re-arrangement of said materials for a finite amount of time before said materials are exhausted*." so I'll go with that for the moment. Does the fact that "A finite quantity of materials can only support positive exponential re-arrangement of said materials for a finite amount of time before said materials are exhausted." really have anything to do with the challenges faced by humans? Even if all the logic in the OP was 100% consistent, it provides zero relevant metrics to the actual situations we face - it says nothing of when this becomes a factor, or if it is a factor impacting our lives to some degree already, or even if it would become a factor before/after the sun ultimately dies out. The OP really seems to be trying to provide an axiomatic truth, and then derive a philosophy of approach based on that without any regard for the actual measurable landscape of data. What's worse - where the landscape does support (at least in correlation ) the OP's general point of view, it's grasped rather blindly as if that supported the overall approach of adhering to the axiomatic philosophy. The sad thing is that a great many scientists (and posters here) actually are concerned about population growth, resource scarcity, etc, but are concerned because of data suggesting reason for concern, not philisophical axioms. It is always fun to try and identify what sort of philisophical implications may be derived from percieved axiomatic truths that appear most consistent with observed data, but to elevate those to the status of guiding principles for policy is at best incredibly dogmatic, and at it's worst creates an inherent social bias in the collection and vetting of data. I think most people here were rejecting the appeal to the dogmatic approach, more than contesting whether population growth is a genuine contemporary concern. *without cannibalizing said arranged structures to make new ones.

When Democrats have even a "virtual" filibuster proof Congress they still disagree and take forever to agree on anything - with the long winded airing and discussions of a variety of options, plans etc. Sadly, a body of just Democrats with a super-majority does this better than any body of Republicans at 51%+... because for the life of me I can't understand why Republicans have to do everything in lock-step, and if they break ranks, it always seems to be towards some crazier, less reality-based radical agenda on immigration, taxes, abortion, religion, or social safety nets. Our two-party system seems to act more and more like a completely bipolar single-party system. Compromise should mean "discarding or revamping that which fails to withstand scrutiny in the face of a well informed opposition" and instead compromise never even touches the topic at hand most of the time - only the "meta-factors" such as the number of votes per isle and pop-polls, that everyone knows before ever going in. The only signs of an evolving argument these days come from what "three sentences or less" emotional knee-jerk quips are echoed in the 24 hr news cycle. I have a lot of blame for the Democrats over the last four years, but in the same way I would blame firefighters if they dragged their feet putting out fires by arsonists. For a Republican candidate to actually distinguish themselves from the general body of arsonists, I'd have to be absolutely sure of a few things: If a Republican wanted my support, they'd have to guarantee: 1) Taxes can be raised. It's nice to know someone doesn't want to raise taxes and thinks taxes are bad. I support that. I hope they also think sticking knives in people is generally bad. However, I will never support a surgeon that has signed a "pledge" to never break the skin of a patient for any reason for any medical condition. Could a politician that signed such a pledge about taxes be any more in touch with reality than such a surgeon? I can't see how, so that's an issue. 2) I don't ever want to hear about recreational abortions, sacred stem-cells, creationist "alternatives" for science in public schools, prayer in public schools, "protecting" marriage, or abstinence-only education from sitting president until we have a BALANCED budget, and perhaps some sort of plan to pay off the debt. NPR is not breaking the bank, the National Endowment for the Arts isn't forcing us to go light on body armor for soldiers, and Planned Parenthood does not spend 90% of it's money on aborting young future Einsteins. Nothing in the "values war" has any real impact on any of our real issues, and I don't trust Republicans to remember that when they are dealing with the noise-makers in their own base. If a genuine real issue came up on one of these topics - that's fine... it's not like I'm looking for a "pledge" either, I just don't want a politician that takes that as an easy distraction from the real issues. 3) Support the radical idea that the Congress/Senate are places where legislation is discussed, debated, and refined - not merely voted on in lock-step accordance with party lines. Hell I'd even entertain supporting a Republican that was a throwback to the William F Buckley style of conservationism. As much as I always detested Buckley, and found his arguments generally flawed - he at least was a genuine conservative intellectual who would rip liberal views apart not because they were liberal, but because they were logically unsound. He was the sort of conservative that helped liberals either learn to be better liberals, or pack up and go home in humiliation. I would want to support such a candidate not because I thought they were best candidate, but because such a candidate taking the White House on a GOP ticket would revitalize the intellectual conservative movement, which would go a very long way to balancing our political theater in ways that Obama couldn't help to achieve, whether he wanted to or not.

I see what you are trying to say, and that does make sense - it is a fair way to assess if a country fits the term. It could be argued that a number of those countries never even really had those aims, but just used them to manipulate the population. It's fair to say Stalin never had any interest in a classless society where he would be treated equally to everyone else. As such, you can't really say the stated goals reflected the actual aims of the country.

(If this was in the "speculations" section you'd probably have a lot of posters taking issue with that comment. ) I made that statement based on these two definitions of communism: Both definitions reference a system or structure that aims to abolish wage labor, private property, etc. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the weakness of this style of system - you can't drive 30 miles in the US without finding even gas station prices fluctuating wildly. Some of this is the result of greedy capitalistic price gouging, but the majority is caused by the simple fluctuations in the circumstances between those 30 miles, including the availability of labor, local community issues, etc. Any system conceived on the premise that the system itself can micromanage those fluctuations better than the individuals who actually live with those variant conditions raises the very real prospect that it is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps a better example would be the specific PMM involving Maxwell's Demon, where the demon represents the "abstract component that could maybe work if we found a way" system/structure that simply makes the entropy go away.

So in short, its pretty much like the question "Why do SO many Engineers hate perpetual-motion based power sources?" IE: The proponents who claim to have achieved it, haven't... and the proponents that haven't claimed to achieve it claim it just gets a bad reputation because only con-artists (or the mechanically challenged) have ever claimed to have achieve it yet. Personally, I think it's a mix of both the history of bad experiences, as well as the fact that the theory is too fundamentally flawed to be useful to anyone but con-artists.

Just as a caveat, the data shows a strong correlation but does it imply causation, as in did people move up in terms of wealth as a result of getting married? I don't doubt there is some level of causation, but the magnitude is probably a lot lower when you factor out initial wealth and other beneficial inherited resources. Aside from that, I suspect that married couples probably choose to have children earlier/more often which can greatly skew net income. Perhaps men in their thirties tend to meet more women who are actively interested in starting families - a proposition many men may find off putting if they aren't financially confident. I have no idea if statistics reflect this, it's just a suspicion that it may be a factor. I think the issue is that people see singleness as safely stable, and relationships as risky gambles that can either be hugely beneficial, or cripplingly disastrous (usually first one, then the other) and over the last decade or so it's gotten really hard to invite more potential risk and instability. People see the truth behind the utility of interacting and desire the mutual support through life struggles - in the same way they see the truth that it's good to carry no credit card debt and beneficial to have a disciplined financial budget. They see it, they generally even desire it - they just don't feel confident that they can get there from where they are.

Honestly though, to say that communism "hasn't been tried properly" because no one has done it right is a lot like saying "The theory that you can fly by throwing yourself at the ground and missing is still viable, it's just that all the popular failed attempts resulted from people not really trying to miss the ground, and since that is integral to the theory we can say the theory hasn't been properly tested yet." Barring some huge trans-humanesque technology advancement, I think communism will always fail when attempted. The issue isn't authoritarian people mucking it up - it's that when a society has life and death pressures to get things done, only authoritarian pressures tend to net results under the model. Having any centralized metric for labor (a requirement, for abolishing wage labor) requires a social consensus on those metrics - and since we all know any reasonably large group is not going to agree completely it necessitates an authoritarian enforcement of those metrics. I understand that people like Stalin and Mao have gone a long way in "poisoning the well" but the theory itself has fundamental weaknesses, and unless those are addressed I don't think it can really be considered viable even in pure theory.

According to who, and accountable to who? Different people have different demands on them from their artistic endeavors. Some people can barely find time to eat when they are creative. Which artists like that should be encouraged to continue with their art, and which ones should be told to "face reality" and give up on their no-talent asses? The only system I am aware of that can cope with that situation (without micromanaging or being intrusive) is the free market via supply and demand. It may not be perfect, it may need regulating, but ultimately either people decide with their own resources what to support (capitalism) or some imposing system tries to identify successful artists and reward them out of the resources of the collective. Outside of capitalism, how do "they" support all of his needs, let alone identify what his needs are?

I am really curious where the underlined statistic comes from - it seems strangely high. As for your friend who expects women 20 yrs his younger to be interested in him when he's 55.... it sounds to me like he's expecting to greatly improve his "marketability" over the next 25 years. Whether this is based on a sound examination of case precedent or a simple "comforting delusion" it does suggest that he doesn't feel capable of a relationship now - which he could blame on either "excessive expectations" of women, or "difficulty getting his own affairs in order" to a degree necessary for the level of self-confidence required to feel dating is worthwhile. I can't speak for men in general, but I personally have not sought out dating aside from a few "happy accidents" that came up on their own for the last several years. Since my seven year marriage ended badly eight years ago, I've had maybe one romantic involvement that was very intense/problematic and a huge line of (fully disclosed) NSA relationships, and honestly the last few years I've pretty much dropped those too. Aside from when I spend time with friends/personal time, my life is pretty much 100% devoted to work and getting to the financial place where I can do the things I really care about before I worry about finding a partner. I definitely fall into the "Doesn't feel capable of a relationship now" category and as much as I would love to have a partner, I really can't imagine meeting someone who would both be in a similar relateable place to the one I am in now and be interested in getting to the same place I am trying to get to. Frankly, the "crap" a woman would have to put up with being with me would either be unfair, or (if fair) involve an equal amount of her crap for me to put up which is honestly more than I'd want to for the sake of a relationship. So I'm in my mid thirties and would rather focus on reducing my own crap so when I do meet an appealing partner I can actually offer her something on par with what I am looking for. The end result is I just can't imagine putting time and energy in trying to meet someone when I have enough of a time/energy sink in just trying to get my life setup in the way I want it to be, which really seems to be the better way for me to approach the issue. Granted, I could be deluding myself to avoid my own realistic limitations, but I do wonder if that general mentality leads to people putting off dating. We live in pretty uncertain times and the standards we use to weigh our own positions and capabilities can't help but to feel a little outdated. I wouldn't be surprised if people had some of the lowest confidence levels in "knowing what they are looking for" compared to other times in recent history, and equally low confidence regarding "what they themselves have achieved" in terms of feeling confident and in (some degree) of control of their lives.

This is an interesting topic, and seems a little bit difficult to jump into but I'll try: First, I think there are some situations where a person may be "better off dead" and offering suicide as an option is the best thing we can do for them if we only look at "their experience of living" and avoid the whole theistic side of the discussion. As for the "preempting the experience of potential suffering through suicide" concept, I really have to disagree. We could nuke the planet up one side and down the other, and for all we know the dust will blow around and the mud will sit in the sun, and those damned amino acids will get all uppity again and - before you know it - there's some new sod looking at the night sky wondering where it all went wrong. The course of events unfolding naturally in this Universe led to our current predicament of consciousness and returning to an non-conscious state only sets the stage for that to happen all over again. While it's not a definitive safeguard (nothing can be, considering how brutal this planet really is) I am a proponent of the Buddhist adage about not "suffering over your suffering" and try to keep perspective that a lot of what is painful is necessary to refine myself. One of my favorite examples goes along the lines of friends who are so self-critical they make themselves miserable and feel worthless at times. Yet, it's always the best people who do that - precisely because it is critical introspection with strong emotional catalysts that makes a person better than they were before. People who don't care about whether they are "good or not" never feel the negative stimulus that forces introspection and refinement, and thus never better themselves in those ways. Of course, there are much worse forms of suffering than that, and it's basically the luck of the draw if we'll ever face them but to avoid the risk by dying seems to at best put the issue off for a few billion years. Maybe it's not "us" but someone will get stuck with the problem, even all life on the planet was erased right now. Personally, when I think about where we were 200,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago, 100 years go, and 50 years go - I have to say this whole "being conscious animals thing" has worked out very well in reducing the amount of suffering we experience as a species. Despite the fact that the general approach puts our own individual consciousness at risk of potentially horrific suffering, the fact we all do it instead of just "opting out early" does help mitigate the total risk of extreme suffering. We also can't really predict what will happen in the next 50 years, or 100 years... or 200,000 years - maybe a technological singularity will end up generating solutions we cannot even currently imagine. As far as I know, the only thing I can do is what little I can to help us get there faster, and help mitigate the suffering we all experience along the way.

Why is it selfish to not want to directly contribute to the society in which you were born? There are a lot of reasons - maybe someone would rather do without 95% of what society believes "they need" so they have the time and freedom to write a book, or otherwise pursue goals that do not fit with the priorities of the society they were born in. If anything, it's selfish for the rest of that collectivist society to tell the individual "Hey, we need you to farm/build/dig/etc because you have the ability and we all are providing for your needs." when that individual likely never even opted in. Overall it's not an issue of selfish/selfless but an issue of the conceptual hegemony breaking down when it actually gets to the personal level. Is it selfish to pursue art when you could be a brilliant doctor helping people? Does the individual define what "art" is to them, or do they have to reconcile their idea of art with that of the society so their artistic labors are "approved" and not just written off as avoiding real labor? In non-communist models, it's up to the individual to decide how much work (that is of value to others) they want to do, so they can afford to live however humbly they want to live, so they can pursue their own artistic/idiosyncratic goals to their heart's content. If that art turns out to be of value to individual members that society, then they'll benefit from that appreciation. If not, (or at least if not in their lifetime, as often happens with art) then they can either continue to pursue it for their own reasons or "get a real job" to increase their quality of living. I personally cannot imagine how any communist model could hope to address issues such as that without being heavily intrusive. Such a society has to micromanage how labor is valued, including artistic labors. If I am wrong, and there's some clear and effective way that a communist system could do this non-intrusively, without micromanaging I'd be interesting in hearing that approach, but it seems to me that the flaw is fundamental, derived from the basic approach and goals of such a system.

What Fox is means different things to different people, so whether those properties that define Fox survive depends on what you think those are. Barring some major revelations, I suspect Fox News will probably survive largely unchanged. As a nation the US rarely demands any serious accountability from corporations - we expect to hear about them committing crimes, and about underlings taking the heat for what everyone believes are "from the top" crimes (when justified, and when not) but our expectations are so low we're just happy when someone reports that "we're right" to be pissed about it, even if it's reported by a fake news on a comedy network. The closest we come to that is threatening to defund organizations that receive taxpayer money, but even then the charge is always led by those who are always trying to defund those organizations - just with some added momentary populism.

What would you say is the most basic definition of Communism then? Every society contains "people working out for themselves what society needs and [if they care to] how they can help to provide that." so it doesn't say anything about how people do that, or how fair, equal, and non-intrusive that society is towards it's citizens. I don't understand how any Communist society could be called such, without it making some basic assumptions about what citizens need to contribute to/get from that society. Considering that a lot of people have no interest at all in contributing to their society (if voter turnouts are any indication), it seems pretty intrusive to me.

Communism is inherently intrusive and micromanages people's affairs. If there is one thing that liberals, libertarians, progressives, and conservatives can agree on in the US, it's that "we're not owned by any government" to be used as a cog in some great political apparatus. Our lives are for us to waste on our own pointless experiments of our choosing, not some bureaucrat's pipe-dream. Once a government tries to manage people's "means and abilities" they are effectively treating those people as "resources" and not as individuals. Even when nearly every American has a different idea of what this government should be doing, it's pretty safe to say communism is antithetical to 95% of those ideas. Even "perfect idealistic communism" is antithetical.

Those factors need to be addressed certainly - but I don't know how you could do this without capitalism. Every social safety net involves capitalism, as market based values for "goods and services" (including labor) forms the basis of all capital transactions that provide those safety nets. As far as the "small scale lives" thing goes, those people do want stability, but they want as much as they can get while maintaining stability. They do happily invite risk in order to increase their resources so they can focus on family better. Every time you purchase something on credit you are increasing your risk, lowering your stability, and (hopefully) you'll have it paid off while benefiting from whatever the credit was used for without that risk threatening your stability. However, as far as job security goes - while I would believe that the majority of factors that threaten job security are "top down created" so the top can profit more, there are also a lot of real-world factors that make security impossible. We do need to do a better job at ensuring labor has the capacity to negotiate fair and equitable contracts, but that still falls within the capitalist model. Also, managing resources in general is a difficult job, and capitalists with lots of capital (resources) who do a bad job do tend to loose it in a hurry. Pushing numbers around so that you don't loose billions of dollars (or billions in food, or any other resource if under any non-capitalistic model) is actually very stressful and difficult labor. Not everyone who moves money around is providing productive valuable labor - but we would be screwed without those who move money around so that labor can be productive, and no economic model can change that reality.

If capitalists didn't provide those mortgages in the first place how many people would be sinking endless earnings into rent instead of home equity? Self interest is a powerful influence for some people, and I would certainly say that more regulation is required to prevent "too big to fail" catastrophic failures; but blaming some ominously homogenous class of "capitalists" doesn't do any good. About 90% of the "little guys" who start small businesses tend to fail within the first three years - usually with a huge percent of the invested capital lost. The thing is: the only way someone can try to succeed in starting a business is by arranging agreements with others - and that requires capital. If I want to start a farm and promise "when we harvest, you can have a share of the crops" to get help with the labor, I need to convince those people I am not one of the 90% that will fail. However, if I offer them money for time labored then they know they'll be compensated, and if I run out of capital I know I need to lay them off. There are too many ideas, too many possible ventures, and far too many risks to arrange labor by anything other than capital on any large scale. Whether you start a business, build a house, or want to pay professors to teach your kids in a college the only effective scalable option is capitalism.

Bailouts "can" work, but examples of successful bailouts does not necessarily provide a clear blueprint for successful bailout strategies. First - while it sounds like the terms of the bailout were well thought out (and sound terms are a requirement for success) we don't know how many variables of the success are tied to the circumstances of Aegon. Everyone seeking that much capital will have a very sound proposal for how to pay it back: it's only hindsight that makes a specific instance seem brilliant or doomed from the start. Second - bailouts become susceptible to same market forces (including bubbles and blind-spots) that all investments are when bailouts are treated as investments. Even if the terms are only beneficial to a company when the alternative is bankruptcy the mentality of the "we loan you this, then we BOTH do better" makes it really easy to become biased to the variables in play. They are the same sort of psychological factors that cause bubbles to run as long as they do. I do think that bailouts have to be considered as a tool in our arsenal for dealing with economic crashes, but I think it's equally important that we equally feel dirty and disgusted by their use. No matter how brilliantly the strategy, terms and due diligence are executed, there is risk, there are market impacts, and there are citizens on the hook for the bill whether they believe in the investment or not. Granted, there are always people who have outright childish ideas about their taxes (cut planned parenthood - so we can save my medicare!) and people who simply disagree (was the Iraq war a good investment?) but just because it's a necessary evil doesn't mean the practice should be conducted without regard for the necessary impacts on citizens. When done right: It's an exercise in increasing temporary risk to mitigate the damage that would ensue otherwise; success means you managed to "not lose" but it shouldn't be considered "winning" as the entire venture would never be undertaken if not for the leverage caused by the duress to third parties to begin with.

Bruce was legend before being cool ironically was cool. Chuck Norris may have a relatively high coolness factor, but a lot of that has arisen out of the whole ironically-cool thing that the kids do on the internets these days. Bruce was legendary just for being Bruce.

It's easier to think of it in terms of the unemployed and job openings. A job-surplus means there are more jobs open than people looking for jobs, and it isn't a precise enough metric to describe the range of reasons that can cause it. First, you can have high unemployment and high job openings to the point that the effects of a job-surplus are felt, even if there isn't one: you can have a huge number of unemployed people who cannot perform the jobs there are openings for. The important factors are: 1) When job openings are created it means there is economic potential to grow that is unrealized... as growth is the main motivator for private companies to hire more staff. 2) For as long as that job goes unfilled, that growth is under-realized and can lead to classic "oh no job surplus" growth-stagnation when companies want to grow but can't find people to hire. Not all jobs should be filled because a lot of potential jobs may be nonviable - for instance a lot of people try to hire on commission for products/services that an applicant feels are unsellable. 3) More job openings invariably increases the choices available to people, allowing them to upgrade from a jobs they are less suited for, and allow more options for unemployed people to find work they can do. The "army of unemployed" referenced by Marx is a very black and white way of describing the elastic relationship between the number of unemployed as a percent of the population that generally indicates job openings can be filled in a reasonable span of time. While it is true capitalism cannot effectively function with 100% employment I'd challenge Marx to find any mechanism to employ the bottom 5% of people (rating by hireability) in a Jerry Springer studio audience.

I think even if new leadership is completely accepted and there is no power vacuum, we'll probably see a combination of desertion and more attempted high profile attacks. Osama was trying to "hit and hide" and never got comfortable enough with his "hiding" in the last ten years to commit to another serious state-side "hit" beyond the (relatively) small scale scares which probably had little to do with Osama anyway. That strategy isn't going to look that good again anytime soon, and that will force them to try new approaches. I'm not sure how many people Al Qaeda has now that go as far back as the Soviet invasion, and even more how many of those who do actually have the attention for detail and patience that Osama had. I suspect that Al Qaeda will get more aggressive while loosing a number of members to desertion, but the heightened aggression will arise from a lack of experience, patience, fear of appearing weak, and because it's now known fact that hiding is not safe, just safer than active aggressive operations. Once they expose themselves further they'll probably get cut down even worse, and only a small fraction will remain to reattempt Osama's "hide and hit" policy with most of their resources going into hiding. tl;dr: Al Qaeda will have a short period of dramatically heightened but equally ineffective activity, followed by near-disintegration into irrelevancy. Side note: Obama may let the "deathers" stew for a while, then clear the soldiers who conducted the op for news circuit interviews - personally I'd love to see some talking heads preaching "But all we have is Obama's word he's dead!" quibble with a US special forces soldier who was there and was effectively just called a liar. I haven't been following too closely so I am not sure if any of the main birther players have gone full "deather" or not yet, but if they do, I do hope those interviews happen.

I was genuinely raised (culturally, not specifically as a result of my parents) that "If a woman decides to exercise her right to sleep with who she wants, she's unfairly labeled a slut, whereas men can act like shallow misogynist pricks and sleep with a lot of women, and are labeled as studs despite being worthless creeps." Basically, it was the status quo that women were treated like sluts unfairly - until the status quo became the observation that the status quo treats women like sluts unfairly. When I was young took me quite a while just to not feel ashamed while expressing any kind of attraction because just admitting any kind of physical attraction was tantamount to saying I was a shallow misogynist objectifying the poor girl. Meanwhile women who were forward were elevated divas who "Knew what they wanted and got it" while being celebrated as courageous proof of the advancement of gender equality and you just had to be in a kinda respectful awe of that sort of self confident woman. Of course, there is a huge difference when it comes to the attractiveness of the individual and those they are sleeping around with - whether you are a man or women, you don't get any "notch points" for sleeping with a lot of hobos. If you are a total rockstar (either gender) people would look at you like your crazy, and try to understand why the hell you decided to work the hobo circuit, and if you are "low to moderately" attractive you'd be looked down on, regardless of gender. Lastly, there's the issue of "when people get ugly" and 99% of the time, people will say what they think hurt's the other person than what they actually believe: Chances are if you call a women a slut, she will believe you mean it and it will cut her very deeply - men don't have that issue so much. By the same token, you could call a lot of women "a fat cow" and they'll believe you mean it, whether you really do or if you just want them to think you do so as to hurt them. It's childish and ugly but there is a completely separate tier there. While I don't condone the practice there are a lot of people who would never act homophobic/racist/misc bigot/sexist in the sense of believing those things impact the real qualities of other people's worth, but still bring them out in dirty arguments just to be as hurtful as they can. It's a bad practice, but doesn't reflect the actual status quo as well as other social indicators.

He turned me into a newt! I got better... but now he has to prove he's not a witch, because "I don't like him" and what's more, I don't understand him or why intelligent, rational people would like him so there has to be something fishy. Oddities like him don't "just happen" in any world I understand. It's just a matter of going through his entire life with a fine tooth comb again like we did when he was a candidate, and question the legitimacy of every item and action until we find out what kind of conniving duplicitous fraud actually explains how this person actually came to exist, since a legitimate basis is clearly a ludicrous notion. It's just a game of "Prove you could exist without having to resort to fraud or witchcraft" and it's dumb. What was gained from all the speculation about Bush being a draft dodger, or Clinton on the same charge for that matter? It's just part of the natural inclination to say "Someone like that couldn't have gotten this far and not stink" when that person's popularity and success doesn't make sense. Sometimes it is fraud and something does stink, but once critics start barking about proving negatives it's the detractors that end up sounding like idiots. Even when you do get evidence of misdeeds if you don't vet it appropriately you get "Dan Ratherred" and understandably so. I never felt satisfied that Bush was "proven not to be a draft dodger" but I never liked the guy, I never understood how he had the wherewithal to win a sandwich from Quiznos so naturally as a President he made no sense to me. However, there was never any sort of positive proof that he was so frankly it was a non-issue politically and all you could do is give the guy the benefit of the doubt on the topic in good faith and readdress it should positive proof genuinely surface. If we don't take that approach with people on both sides of the spectrum, we'll never get past the tossing around of accusations.