User talk:Cadr

Response left for you on Talk:Begging_the_question. (feel free to) Delete this entry when you have read it. Catskul 17:27, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Hi Cadr, the external link on Harmony toolkit was not really broken. I just used the wrong syntax for the external link which unfortunately added an extra "," to the URL, which caused the problem. I reverted the change and corrected the link, hope everything works now :-) best regards from Hannover, Germany. -- mkrohn 23:11 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)

Cool :) Sorry, I should've noticed that...

Over at VfD User:Mintguy mentioned that you had grown frustrated by some controversial edits to some computing articles. In response, there's now a new Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing and Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing/Controversial articles to help form consensus on computing topics. Please consider watching the talk pages there and using them to let others know of issues you believe merit peer review. JamesDay 15:49, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Cadr, why do you revert mav's and eloq's moves of the featured article notice in the C programming language article? Please understand that those notices are nowhere as important as the actual content of the articles. Also, those notices are of most interest to editors, not simply readers, thus the notice fits well on the talk page. — Sverdrup 17:31, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No matter. — Sverdrup 17:34, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

CIA edit - You "agree with it, but it wasnt NPOV?" Huh? I would'nt imagine that anyone would want to have an opinion that wouldnt be considered logical, and therefore neutral. "POV" is a euphemism we use to characterise people who appear not to know that their "NPOV" is contradictory to logic, reason, or the facts. Sincerely -SV(talk) 21:03, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, that's not what POV is. A POV is a subjective opinion. I can agree with a subjective opinion while still regarding it as non-NPOV. — Cadr

Hello Cadr, I am Javier Carro. A wikipedist from the Spanish wikipedia. Congratulations for your contributions, specially in the field of linguistics. I am translating your article on Transformational grammar and there is a sentence I hardly understand (specially what is in darker letters):

Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur when absolutely necessary, where the relavent notion of necessity is the need to check uninterpretable features Could you, please explain me what you mean and write it down at the next website?: [[1] (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario_Discusi%F3n:Javier_Carro)] (that is my discussion board) Thanks a lot. Javier Carro 12:57, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[I've now made a comment on Javier's talk page on the Spanish Wikipedia.] Cadr

I have create a poll at talk:Augusto Pinochet on how to describe the CIA's role in the coup against Allende. Please vote and/or comment. --Uncle Ed 14:20, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Contents

5 Pointers are not an innovation

6 Chomsky sources and such

7 Article Licensing

8 Begging the question

9 Universal grammar

10 Copyright

11 Gerund

hey

look buddy, I'm enjoying the heck outta this convo, but I think we are getting a bit broader than the purpose of that talk page. I'd be glad to continue to discuss politics or whatever on our personal talk pages, however. Cheers, Sam Spade 18:59, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Chile

You said:

If we're not allowed to call Allende's government democratic, why are we allowed to call it socialist? Let's just call it "elected"

That would imply that he "won" an "election", but there were irregularities. According to the Chilean constitution at the time, the winner required a MAJORITY, not the plurality that Allende actually got. So the Congress made a special agreement with Allende. A better phrase than "elected" would therefore be "congressionally-mandated".

The context is the oft-repeated claim by leftists that a "democratically-elected government was overthrown by America". I would like to avoid having the article provide fuel for this claim. On the other hand, of course, I don't want the Wikipedia to REPUDIATE this claim. When readers come to our articles on Chile, Allende, or Pinochet, they should find enough information to make up their own mind. --Uncle Ed 16:09, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Fair point, although since it is rather subtle, we may as well just avoid saying anything about the method by which the government came to power (as we avoided saying anything about US support for the coup). Still, I think your (implied) political argument is very weak. Whatever the ins and outs of Allende's rise to power, he clearly had more of a mandate than Pinochet, and the US support for the coup was illegal and immoral. If the US had any concern for democracy in Chile before the coup, they certainly didn't afterwards. Cadr

I appreciate your straightforward reply. I hope that we can make the article so that either of us, reading it from our varying perspectives, can say that the article is accurate and well-balanced. I don't think the article needs to AVOID any mention of reports that the US "supported" the coup. I think all parties agree that the US was "in favor of it" anyway.

We should include every assertion, whether widely agreed upon or hotly debated (with its source, of course) -- that:

the US provided "illegal" support for the coup, e.g., broke a US or Chilean law; or,
that the coup itself was immoral and/or that anyone who "supported" it, even by making favorable comments about it, has done an immoral thing

Fair enough? --Uncle Ed 17:15, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't make it clear that when I said "avoid saying anything about X" I meant "avoid saying anything about X in the intro". I totally agree that all these assertions should be in the article, but (I think) we both agree that it's better to leave them out of the intro if it helps to avoid edit wars. On the other hand, my little Pinochet/coup polemic was not necessarily meant to suggest any content for the article, it was just an expression of my view on the matter. Cadr

Cadr, while I understand your desire to keep the C article simple, I'd prefer that the article on C be accessible to all, but also comprehensive and correct. Having gone to the trouble to write the explication of the "hello world" program, that's why I added the comment on atexit, but relegated it a parenthetical sentence.

You're correct that the closing brace is the end of function main, and atexit is invoked after main ends; but you're incorrect in saying that atexit is not mentioned in C books (what books are you reading?), atexit is certainly mentioned in any comprehensive C book, as atexit is defined by the C Standard (at 7.20.4.2 in ISO/IEC 9899:1999). I'd be willing to see you move the discussion of atexit and hosted implementations to a separate paragraph in the explication of the sample program, but I'm not willing to see it arbitrarily removed just because Cadr feels it's too complicated.

I'll hold off a little while on reverting your removal in order to give you time to suggest a compromise. orthogonal 18:45, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

This isn't worth having an argument over really, so I'll just make my case one last time ;) Of course, atexit would be mentioned in any comprehensive C book, but it wouldn't be mentioned in the explanation of a Hello World program. Encyclopaedia articles shouldn't be comprehensive IMHO — otherwise this article would have to be as long as a good book on C. Cadr

Pinochet

Unfortunately, the problem is not to make you happy, (or any of us, for that matter) but 172, that started his own "sandbox" than only he has touched, and who has not bothered to make any edit in the working intro...I expect that as soon as we try to put this intro he will get back reverting to his own...Cheers, AstroNomer 21:04, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Do I espy a fellow Scheme programmer? --Smack 22:49, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Are we ready to put the edit war on Talk:Augusto Pinochet behind us now? Won't it be great if we can archive that dreadful talk page and start off on a clean slate? Before my version is posted, I'd like it if you can rewrite and/or expand the footnote section. 172 11:50, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't like the footnote, sorry. Cadr

Well, sooner or later my version's going to be posted (I'll take this to arbitration, which tends to side with overwhelming consensus over a couple of intransigent users, if you chose to continue stalling), and I guess this means that there won't even be a footnote. Is that better for you? 172 12:29, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm confident a footnote would not be popular in arbitration, since it has not been popular anywhere else. You poll question is beside the point (as I have made clear on the discussion page). No-one disputes that the intro is not especially misleading when it has the footnote, but many people just don't like the footnote. My own vote in the poll referred to your earlier, and much better question (you know, that change which you tried to censor). Cadr

Coy Mistress

I have no problem with your edits, but I do wonder exactly how far one might go in translating the poem's thesis into modern colloquial language and what the result might be. :-) Dpbsmith 00:29, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Pointers are not an innovation

Re your "pointers are not an innovation" edit: To my knowledge pointer types did not exist prior to C. Is this incorrect? I realise machine addresses were used extensively before this time, but pointers are not just machine addresses. Derrick Coetzee 21:20, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Chomsky sources and such

Hey, Cadr -- I've finally got a little time to respond to your question about my opinion of Noam Chomsky as a frequent user of Big-Lie propaganda techniques.

First, I'm not particularly opposed to the causes that Chomsky supports, though I haven't been a fan of many of them since 2001. In particular, I'd like US foreign policy to be motivated less by realpolitik and more by idealism, and think that many of the actions the US has taken which Chomsky criticises (support for Indonesia in East Timor, unconditional support for Israel, various thuggery in Latin America) are entirely worthy of criticism.

But just because I agree with Chomsky on these positions, doesn't mean he's not a thoroughly dishonest rhetoritician. In particular, I find that he seems to be relying on his readers ignorance of history or unwillingness to look up the documents he cites in order to make his points.

For example, in What Uncle Sam Really Wants (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-1-1.html), he cites the ominous-sounding NSC-68 to warn that American Cold War planners were enthusiastically recommending policies that sound like converting the US into a fascist state:

The policies recommended by NSC 68 would require "sacrifice and discipline" in the United States -- in other words, huge military expenditures and cutbacks on social services. It would also be necessary to overcome the "excess of tolerance" that allows too much domestic dissent.

Well, I went ahead and read NSC-68 (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm), and found that while it does lay down a plan for the Cold War (specifically the arms race), it is far, far from a blueprint for a police state:

The democratic way is harder than the authoritarian way because, in seeking to protect and fulfill the individual, it demands of him understanding, judgment, and positive participation in the increasingly complex and exacting problems of the modern world. It demands that he exercise discrimination: that while pursuing through free inquiry the search for truth he knows when he should commit an act of faith; that he distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression. A free society is vulnerable in that it is easy for people to lapse into excesses--the excesses of a permanently open mind wishfully waiting for evidence that evil design may become noble purpose, the excess of faith becoming prejudice, the excess of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracy and the excess of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only more appropriate but more effective.

The above paragraph is the source of Chomsky's ominous-sounding quotation of "excesses of tolerance" -- someone cherry-picking as much as Chomsky could recharacterize the document as a clarion call against McCarthyism, with its warnings of "the excess of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only more appropriate but more effective" -- or perhaps a secularist manifesto warning about "the excess of faith becoming prejudice". But NSC-68 is neither of those things, and any characterization of it as those would be as dishonest as Chomsky's.

I posted something about Chomsky's distortions of history a while back here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ccbfb77e.0203251121.2983d09b%40posting.google.com

and here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ccbfb77e.0203251649.508fd7b9%40posting.google.com

Perhaps I only have a handful of data points, but it seems like every time Chomsky's made a statement buttressed by a piece of history that I actually knew something about, he's omitted significant information, cherry picked, or simply distorted what actually happened. From this, I have drawn the conclusion that he's an odious propagandist who shouldn't be trusted more than -- say -- Rush Limbaugh, Ted Rall, or Ann Coulter. Why should I bother listening to these liars? Knowing what I do about them, they won't persuade me when I disagree with their positions, and I'll only wince when I find them on the same side of an issue as me. It's just unfortunate that the wield the kind of influence that they do in our society.

- Ben 16:00, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

NSC68 is precisely not a blueprint for a police state, and as such supports the point Chomsky is making. Remember that this is an internal document addressing the dangers of democracy for an elite. It is saying that there is a danger that elites, because they live in a democracy, may become excessively tolerant of dissent, but on the other hand they may become excessively intolerant of it, resorting to the crude methods of a police state (i.e. "suppression"). One consistent theme of Chomsky's writings is that the current method of control favoured by elites in democratic socieities is control of public opinion rather than control by force or other coercive methods. Your NSC68 quote backs this annalysis up: it is saying that, on the one hand, elites must be dilligent in controlling public opinion (presumably through propaganda), but on the other hand, they must at least maintain the illusion of democracy, and not resort to violent suppression. Chomsky could indeed have emphasised the less ominous sounding bits of the document, but he is not accusing US elites of trying to gain control through violent means and would agree that they do not generally try to do this; he is trying to show the elite obsession with controlling public opinion.

Look -- read NSC-68. I read it -- the whole thing. In my estimation, using my own judgement, NSC-68 is in no sense whatsoever "an internal document addressing the dangers of democracy for an elite". It's a document put together by people whose job it is to figure out how to defend the country. They look at then-recent aggression by the USSR in Eastern and Central Europe and conclude that the USSR will continue to try to expand. They conclude that the USSR may continue break agreements, and that treaties and such are of limited value. They compare strengths and weaknesses of American democracy and the Soviet system, which is the section the quotation is lifted from. They evaluate possible US responses: isolationism, war, the status quo, or an arms race. They conclude that an arms race -- with its attendant military spending at the cost of postponing spending on other desirable programs -- is the best of these options.

Maybe you disagree with these conclusions. You wouldn't be alone in concluding that the arms race was a less than moral choice, or that it was entirely too cynical to assume that a negotiated settlement with the USSR was impossible. However, in my opinion, anyone who actually puts in the effort to read NSC-68 will find that it bears little resemblance at all to what Chomsky insinuates it is. He's betting that his readers are too lazy to do this, though, and will simply assume that the document backs up his point because he's citing it.

Chomsky doesn't deny in WUSRW that NSC68 is "a document put together by people whose job it is to figure out how to defend the country"; he says:

It called for a "roll-back strategy" that would "foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system," so that we could then negotiate a settlement on our terms "with the Soviet Union (or a successor state or states)."

So Chomsky apparently agrees that (some of) the main aims of the document were to do with defense policy (incidentally WUSRW is quite deliberately one of Chomsky's most polemic and least scholarly books, so it's rather unfair to keep pulling him up on details when he's often written about the same things far more carefully elsewhere). I wouldn't challenge your summary of the document's contents, but Chomsky seems correct that some sections of it support his analysis of the control of popular opinion in western democracies. I was wrong to say that the entire document was "an internal document addressing the dangers of democracy for an elite", but don't confuse my ignorance with Chomsky's.

As to Chomsky's notion about elites trying to control public opinion, this is a tautology he tries to sound sinister. Hell, I'm trying to control one little bit of public opinion here, in trying to convince you that Chomsky can't be trusted.

Chomsky agrees that it's a tautology, in fact this is his usual response to people who criticise him as a conspiracy theorist — it's only to be expected that people who have power will try to consolidate and extend it, putting their own interests in front of the interests of the population at large. From an anarchist point of view, all power is open to question, and it is the duty of citizens in a democracy to question the motives of and justification for powerful groups (i.e. elities).

There wasn't anything much of substance in your first usenet posting (at least, no citations and no quotes of Chomsky longer than a few words).

Did you read the bit about the Punitive Expedition? If not, I'll reiterate:

In Chomsky's 9/12 statement, he asserted that 9/11 was the first attack on the American mainlaind since 1812. He even went through a few verbal contortions to ignore Japanese attacks on Hawaii or Attu Island.

I happened to be reading about Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1916. Obviously, it was a response to a direct attack on the lower 48 by Pancho Villa, putting lie to Chomsky's claims about no attacks since 1812. Perhaps more important is asking why Chomsky would ignore it? The parallels to Afghanistan were obvious, so why not mention it? The only reason I can come up with is that he's either ignorant of US intervention in Mexico (unlikely), or intentional misrepresentation of history for rhetorical

purposes.

So why ignore the Punitive Expidition, and Pancho Villa's raid on New Mexico? I have trouble believing that anyone as well-versed in American intervention in Latin America as he is wouldn't know about it. I conclude that Chomsky assumes his readers are too ignorant of US history to call him on it.

Either he doesn't know about it, or he thought it wasn't worth mentioning. I can't say I'm bothered either way; this is utterly silly and pedantic. It's not as if the fact that there had been no attacks since 1812 was a pillar of Chomsky's argument, it was at most a throwaway rhetorical flourish. As you say, it is not as if there would have been any significant advantage for Chomsky in pretending that the events you describe didn't happen. Cadr 19:31, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Pancho Villa killing 17 people in New Mexico is your big discovery? Don't you think you could find better examples for your pedantic arguments, such as the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people? Or the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed 6 people, which Chomsky mentions just about every time he talks about terrorism [2] (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3732345.stm) ?

The second seems to be based on a misunderstanding. Chomsky didn't suggest that the terrorists were deliberately targetting working people, he just pointed out that most of the victims were such people (I don't have the statistics to hand to say whether or not he is correct in saying this). I agree that it seems to be somewhat irrelavent and (unusually for Chomsky) rather dogmatically Marxist to pick over the social class of innocent victims, but there is no lie to be found here. As for the Palestinians, etc., I presume Chomsky is saying they will suffer as a consequence of US/international responses to 9/11, not as an intentional consequence of the terror attacks. Cadr 18:02, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You're welcome to give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt here, since you (accurately) point out that I'm looking at the terrorists intent, and Chomsky's a bit ambiguous here. I wouldn't, though -- I simply don't trust the guy farther than I could spit him, and I think that anyone who does the work to read history written people outside of the Z-Mag coterie (even just primary sources) would probably come to the same conclusion.

You're making a circular argument. You say you don't trust him because he says things which aren't true, and then you refuse to believe that he might be saying something which is true because you don't trust him. I'm not asking you to give Chomsky very much of the benefit of the doubt, only to assume that if there are two possible interpretations of what he is saying, where one is blatantly false and the other is not, that we should prefer the second. Especially when the blatantly false interpretation would be inconsistent with most of the other stuff he has written, and indeed the facts (e.g. he was correct to say that the Palestinians suffered as a result of 9/11, since it gave Israeli a great excuse to intensify milatary operations; I'm fairly sure he's stated this explicitly elsewhere).

Did you not find the "example that is remote enough so that we should be able to look at it with some dispassion: World War I" to be shockingly selective, and obviously unrepresentative? Doesn't that clash with everything you know about the run-up to WW2 in the US, the UK, and France?

Not sure which example you're referring to.

What's your impression of his "millions dead in Afghanistan due to Pakistan closing the borders" rant? Ben 18:37, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Again, which rant? I haven't read everything he's has written or remembered everything I've read ;)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ram-Man&action=edit&section=new)| talk)

Begging the question

Cadr, your recent edits to Begging the question are excellent - well done. Banno 06:40, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

Universal grammar

Thanks for making my edits to Universal grammar more NPOV. I figured I was probably going to say something too POV in editing them, because it is something I'm opinionated about, but I felt that my edits would at least be better than the contrary viewpoint not being mentioned at all. RSpeer 22:55, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

Copyright

Coypright violations (ex. Hansung Airlines) should be listed on Wikipedia:Copyright problems not WP:VFD. I tagged and listed it at copyright problems. This link is Broken 16:24, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Gerund

Hi Cadr. Are you the primary author of the "Gerund" article? If so I would like you to read my comment "Mistake in section 1?" and tell me if you agree. Thanks very much, Zac.

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