Nobody deserves unnecessary suffering. People who recognize their mistakes will feel punished for that, and people who don't will feel vindicated.

America wants to execute people—more specifically, America wants to punish people—but few of us have the ability to distance ourselves from the process that you apparently do. America does not want to be present and aware of its brutality, it wants to be able to say justice is a balancing of scales and then to wash its hands of the whole affair. And nobody really believes you can balance the scales. Executing a monster doesn't undo their monstrous past.

Your position is grotesque, like the emotions in a lynch mob. It's a feeling that most people can't stomach, and that's why it's been mostly abandoned. Society can surely be manipulated to fervor, to become monstrous, but then the fervor dies down. People cannot be manipulated to face themselves as the monsters they want to destroy. They walk away from the whole thing with regret and trauma.

Restoring the worst forms of execution is the surest way to set execution up for abolition. Which would be commendable, except that the monstrous act still prevails.

They've industrialized the elimination of everyone they can find in a targeted people group?

This isn't really right. The concept of "white" we understand now wasn't what was understood then, and that wasn't what alarmed anyone who wasn't a victim at the time. What set the nazis apart (and may still do in times since) is the clean, industrial approach to destroying peoples and cultures that they employed. It terrified people not for the brutality, but for the complete divorce from human emotion.

Empires have grown and fallen by doing exactly, morally, what the nazis did. But never mechanically what they did. We've destroyed peoples, but not with the efficiency and clarity of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of nazism isn't morality, it's the emotional impact of encountering a distilled rendering of the faults of civilization.

The backwoods also-rans of America and Russia couldn't hope to rise to that level of clarity. Our inefficiencies and flaws are our cover. The same is true of all of the "great empires", which were basically just hicks with guns running the world. Yeah, mostly "white". But bear in mind they were at war with each other most of that time as well. And they employed the same sorts of tactics against each other as they did in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

If you want to be the face of evil, start an assembly line. Everything else is mere humanity.

Just like the nazis did!

Luddites weren't/aren't oriented around opposition to technology, but around a particular vision for the intersection between technology and people's lives.

Wisconsin.

Are you serious?

In Seattle, especially in the downtown/Belltown area in my experience, this is becoming less of a safe assumption. When I worked in Belltown, it was a rare day that I wasn't nearly hit by an impatient driver; now, working closer into the downtown core, the near-collisions are somewhat less but still far too frequent for comfort.

I do tend to assert my right of way where the vehicle's speed is not likely to do serious harm, because I'm not ready to give up safe pedestrian right of way that I've become accustomed to. But there are also times I have to actively dodge an oncoming vehicle to ensure my safety.

This premise is what lead to the evolution of higher-level programming languages in the first place. It turns out that the intersection of specification and correctness is still programming, at least for every iteration so far.

React isn't a standard, it's a GUI framework. They're proposing compatibility layers for other GUI frameworks on other platforms, with no intention of replacing those other frameworks. Of course it's possible, because other such compatibility frameworks are available and quite successful. What React offers that the others do not is that the development environment is familiar to web developers.

If you use a strict subset with a defined API, it can be close to native performance. This has been seen with asm.js already. It may be that specific domain logic suffers, because that will likely break the boundaries of "strict subset" for a framework like React, but that is going to be a smell in GUI code no matter what your environment.

Yeah, insofar as interpreted code may present a way to escape sandboxing, which in turn could lead to security problems, which in turn could lead to plummeting profits.

All code symbolizes the despair and longing of the programmer.

JS is not a functional programming language. It has a lot of functional attributes, but it is very heavily skewed toward imperative approaches to problems, and it's a stateful mess.

The syntax is far from JS's only problem.

Nothing you said makes my point nonsense. The only thing that is going to go head-to-head with JS is a properly functional language. The fact that JS adopts more functional concepts and encourages more functional approaches only underscores that.

This is fascinating, and I think it gets to a lot of the gripes I see in comments here. Basically, the longed-for slashdot of old was designed for rapid consumption of low-density news data at a fast pace. The slashdot we all experience now provides that, but the complaint is that the superficial browsing you describe yields less of a fix for data-hungry readers than it used to.

Frankly, I think the level of discussion has gone up as the level of satisfaction has gone down. I come here for the comments.

Thanks for at least giving me some interesting meta-discussion!