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Shocking...

Posted by Michael on 31 Aug 2008 at 00:37

And people wonder why I have no desire to visit the US any more : http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/index.html

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Two comments posted decided to say "well, the UK & Europe aren't any better". One just used text, and quite frankly misses the point completely, and seems to think it's OK for the police to crack down on anyone who has a political viewpoint that differs with them. I'm not interested in publishing that comment, so I'm not. The second one decided to hotlink to someone else's website, something I think is pretty dumb, so I'm not publishing that comment either.

-- Michael, 31 Aug 2008 at 22:26, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

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Looks like both comments came from the following person:

61.60.58.71.in-addr.arpa        name = c-71-58-60-61.hsd1.pa.comcast.net.

Doing a traceroute back to them it looks like the person who said that people with opposing views to him/her should be rounded up by the police is based in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, maybe. hsd == huntingdon school district ? (given http://www.huntsd.org/ exists ), and given this end to the traceroute:

 1  www.routerlogin.com (192.168.2.1)  1.766 ms  0.62 ms  0.534 ms
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
 4  * * *
 5  * * *
 6  * * *
 7  * * *
 8  68.86.89.177 (68.86.89.177)  92.047 ms  90.493 ms  91.595 ms
 9  pos-0-2-0-0-crs01.plainfield.nj.panjde.comcast.net (68.85.192.201)  92.38 ms  94.633 ms  92.663 ms
10  be-60-crs01.ivyland.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.208.46)  107.094 ms  94.747 ms  98.27 ms
11  po-90-ar01.lowerpaxton.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.208.45)  102.469 ms  99.21 ms  98.65 ms
12  te-1-1-ur01.newport.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.158.34)  99.302 ms  100.118 ms  99.479 ms
13  te-1-1-ur01.lewistown.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.158.38)  100.049 ms  102.295 ms  100.453 ms
14  te-1-1-ur01.huntingdon.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.158.94)  102.51 ms  101.681 ms  101.135 ms
15  te-1-1-ur01.statecollege.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.158.42)  106.174 ms  105.022 ms  101.726 ms
16  * * *
17  c-71-58-60-61.hsd1.pa.comcast.net (71.58.60.61)  111.543 ms  111.244 ms  111.561 ms
I wonder if that is the case if the people who run (what is presumably a school network) would be happy with the intolerance of other political viewpoints and the advocacy of police action against people for simply having different views - especially given the banner on huntsd.org above. Now I don't know if the above IP is related to that college, but I am half tempted to find out.

Mind you, given the description of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntingdon_Area_School_District it's probably just some high school kid who just thinks I'm being nasty about his/her country - which I'm not. Crappy police action like this sort of thing is due to politicians ignoring the rights of their own people. The irony about using police action like this against anarchists is particularly strange because if the politicians start ignoring the law, then whilst the anarchists are promoting ignoring law, the politicians are actively practising anarchy (at best).

It's exactly due to this sort of stupidity (among other things) that US declared independence in the first place, and enshrined the rights it did in it's constitution. After all, the right to disagree and peaceful assembly are pretty important in any democracy. If you can't and don't have peaceful opposition and differences of viewpoints, then whilst you may be able to vote for someone, you don't have democracy.
-- Michael, 31 Aug 2008 at 22:54, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

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Looks like this tracking back has upset the same kid (convinced it's just some stupid high school kid now) - and again has decided to post some vitriol, which again completely misses the point. Same person doesn't seem to realise that them posting vitriol as a comment on my blog doesn't make me required to republish their words.

-- Michael, 1 Sep 2008 at 15:56, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

Anecdotal brains aren #

So you are going to base your life on incidents that might or might not be representative of reality?

Here's a heuristic to ponder:
(1) if something is interesting enough for the press to report on, that might be because it is very unusual, and thus you shouldn't overemphasize its importance in your understanding of the world.
(2) because the press loves violence of all sorts ("if it bleeds, it leads"), violent events will be reported on far too often.

Add these two together and you'll realize that the press is probably a useless indicator of where and how often violence takes place. A useful corrective would be statistics gathered by someone with no monetary stake in entertaining the masses, but common sense also helps. For those interesting in further reading, I'd recommend Wikipedia's page on the availability heuristic, and a then deeper examination of the delightfully long list of cognitive biases.

-- guest, 28 Oct 2008 at 00:07, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

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You jump to some interesting conclusions that say more about yourself than they say about me.

-- Michael, 28 Oct 2008 at 01:29, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

"Anecdotal brains"? #

Quite the cheap shot, that.

You know nothing about me other than the short comment I've left on your site -- admittedly snarky, but at least showing some evidence of thinking about what you've said about yourself.

And you response is only an insulting insinuation?

Perhaps you are writing "random musings on random stuff" only to gather fawning comments and make fun of anything less else?

What a bore.

-- guest, 6 Nov 2008 at 02:37, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

#

Again, your comment says more about you, than it does about me.

-- Michael, 6 Nov 2008 at 18:27, Rating: 0 (Reply) (Moderated by: anon)

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