Re: Lua Workshop 2011

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@...>]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Marc Balmer <marc@msys.ch> wrote:
> If anyone suggests holding a workshop in a country that is led by a
> dicator, like Cuba, or, e.g. Belarussia, I will raise my voice.  This
> has nothing to do with political BS, but these are countries that
> suppress, torture, and kill, their people.  Their political systems are
> contradictory to the spirit of freedom of anything.

Please, please, please, dear people with pink glasses who think that
the Law and the Reality are the same thing!... people can also be
suppressed, tortured, and killed, in democracies like Brazil, and
democratic countries, like the US, may suppress, torture, and kill
relatively few people in their homeland, yet do that widely abroad!
What is happening here? Some variant of Godwin's law, in which when
someone mentions the word "Democracy" everyone goes berzerk? 8-(

Anyway: I'd prefer either Europe (including even Swiss and Canada 8-p)
because:

  1) it's usually very civilized (I work in the Brazilian countryside
     and I am tired of the rudeness and the mess - sorry to confess),

  2) Brazil is a very expensive place at the moment,

  3) obtaining a visa to the a US and going through airport security,
     customs, etc, is a nightmare for lots of people,

but I am probably not going to be able to attend this time.

Fact: there are some people who would love to go to Cuba and hate to
go to the US, and there are some people who are exactly the opposite -
and this is _not going to change_. Also, a workshop in Cuba would have
far fewer US citizens in it - and thus would probably be more relaxed
and more academic, with very few arguments on the lines of "your
proposal is useless for my enterprise application, and so is utter
crap"...

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    eduardoochs@gmail.com
    http://angg.twu.net/