unSane, you're correct, he didn't clear the clips. I noticed that he was using one of Philip Greenspun's photographs of a New York pride parade, and Greenspun confirmed that Robinson didn't have permission to use the photo.
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 9:59 PM on March 10, 2006

influx: Firefox 1.5 on OS X most certainly can display those graphs. Are you perhaps using some sort of unofficial build (e.g., G4- or G5-optimized) that doesn't have SVG support enabled?
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 7:47 AM on January 27, 2006

StarForce5, a few hundred years ago you could have made the same argument about modern democracy. See "Past and present anarchist communities" on Wikipedia. There aren't any recent, long-lived (10+ years) examples of large (nation-sized) anarchist societies, but it does not follow that anarchism therefore does not and cannot work in practice.
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 5:20 PM on September 17, 2005

sultan, similarly, people with unpopular political or religious views could never choose such views, because they would face persecution for them. The members of Die Weiße Rose, to pick a random example, clearly had a genetic predisposition to anti-fascism, because they died for their beliefs and no rational human would ever, ever do that. Right? Oh, or maybe they're just total masochistic idiots.
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 9:24 PM on August 15, 2005

elgilito, while socialists in Europe may not consider themselves Marxists, it's interesting to note that the predominant socialist ideology in Europe, social democracy, is descended from Marxism. The original social democrats did consider themselves Marxists, but felt that capitalism could be ameliorated without violent proletarian revolution, and that reformism could gradually introduce the advantages of a Marxist-socialist society without abolishing the capitalist society first.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 6:15 AM on August 5, 2005

Could someone who is claiming that the blogger was posting about her employer's private life please provide a link to relevant posts? Note that the post cited by Olen isn't about Olen's family, and the NYT article didn't provide any other examples. If you accept the blogger's statistics, she's only written ~250 words in her blog about Olen and her family. I find it hard to believe that these 250 words are of such an intensely personal and private nature that the blogger... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 7:16 AM on July 18, 2005

I'm going against MeFi consensus here, but I'm not unsupportive of all deserters. I understand that they were not conscripted, but on the other hand, the U.S. military makes extreme efforts to recruit lower-class and minority soldiers, people it can more easily convince to join for supposed economic advantages (e.g., paying for college).

My point is that while some deserters are surely "wankers", they probably aren't all chicken-hawks, and a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 7:59 PM on April 25, 2005

Great, another way to weed out whackjobs from sensible radicals. I'm still seeing scrawled odes to Kaczynski in the back of 'zines.

Mickel isn't much of a revolutionary, he's just another nutjob who clearly knows nothing about the history of revolution. Propaganda by the Deed, anyone? It didn't work in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and it won't work now, either. At least the high-profile anarchist assassins back then generally picked worthwhile targets...
posted to MetaFilter by bpt at 4:12 PM on April 4, 2005