Yes, and the people who first broke such rules nearly went to prison. That was your parent poster's point. If you want to be safe, kowtow to the powers that be like the obseqious peon they want you to be.

Or, you know, fuck 'em with a rusty shiv.

So what you're saying is that the only negative feedback mechanism in communism is political intervention and the only negative feedback mechanism in capitalism is political intervention, therefore capitalism is better?

Color me unconvinced.

1 person per year has been caught. We also know that the analysts are nearly totally unsupervised. How many do you think were not caught? 100? 1000? It's certainly a lot more than have been caught.

On Slashdot? Yeah, actually...

Thanks for that image, asshole.

...no.

Was...was that a joke?

I would hope so since that's what he was referring to. What worries me is that it took this long in the comments for someone to reference "Trusting Trust." That should have been the obvious problem from the end of the first sentence of the summary.

That is the most absurd characterization of Civil War Missouri I've ever heard. Missouri was the scene of the most intense internecine violence of the entire war. The state didn't secede, true, but the neighbors were murdering each other in their beds over it. I would not call that "how that whole "representative democracy" thing is supposed to work."

Do you always taste test your tears?

You do realize that those young'uns you deride aren't old enough to have had a phone last 3 years, right?

Bwahahahaha! Ahhahahahahaha! Oh ahahahaha!

That was a good one. Tell another.

Someone was clearly brain damaged by high school. MOST literature contains sex. Certainly nearly all of the good stuff. This is because most humans have sex in their lives. It makes it important in narratives about humans. Joyce's Ulysses includes a guy masturbating in the bushes while perving on a cripple and a vivid description of a rimjob. Gravity's Rainbow is basically a 760 page dick joke. The Sound and the Fury is all about how women's liberation (promiscuity in Faulkner's mind) affected Southern men. McCarthy's Child of God has graphic descriptions of necrophilia. Very few major novels since the 1950s have been vague about sex. Even before then it was almost always there (what did you think the entire conflict of The Sun Also Rises was, or Dorian Gray, or Whitman's poetry?), it just wasn't as explicit or graphic.

Speaking of bad writing...

Swamp gas refracting the light from Venus? Definitely not a supernova though. Those last much longer than a second. One that flashed that brilliantly would have lasted a long while and would have been widely reported. For comparison, SN 1054, which formed the Crab Nebula, was visible to the eye for two years (according to Chinese records).