This strikes me as patently false-- it is perfectly possible to discuss the relative merits of those who conducted genocide versus their victims without justifying the act.
The problem with attributing these kind of motives to those with whom you disagree is that all discussion then shift away from the logical merits of various positions and into the decidedly illogical territory of whose voice you think this the most "authentic". In short, instead of asserting that your opponents have different positions then they actually do, perhaps its worth asking whether or not that is their position.
Doesn't this misconstrue DanielBMarkham's argument, though? There's no attempt to justify the act of genocide, merely to point out that Monbiot's response to it ignores substantive differences between the relative merits of Western culture versus Native American culture, and what's more, does so willfully in service of a particular political agenda.
>What about the Droid's software keyboards are different that makes them more usable?
You know, I hate to say it, but I don't actually know. I don't have large fingers, but I've always had trouble with software keyboards, from the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm family. Just today I was getting a Blackberry activated and found the experience of addressing a PIN message absolutely excruciating.
The Droid just seems to know what letter I'm going for, and almost always picks the right one. I'm not sure if this is a byproduct of better resolution on the touchscreen, more intelligent software in the background, or some quirk of my fingers and the Droid's particular implementation, but I simply don't experience trouble hitting keys anymore.
I suppose its possible that the change is me, not the Droid, but to this day I find most other platforms difficult to use, and pine for my Droid's keyboard whenever I'm on another software device.
Have a Droid, and I'd suggest that the difference between the keys is subtle, but not non-existent. Best idea is to get your hands on one and try it. I love it and have had almost no problems typing on it, but it seems to be a love it/hate it sort of thing. That being said, I hated software keyboards... until the Droid. I actually find myself using the software keyboards (one for each orientation of the phone) more often than the hardware keyboard.
It would probably be fairly simple to do this to most Western tonal music (at least now that someone else has done the hard part and written a tool that automates the process!), as the biggest factor I see in keeping the sound coherent is the timbre and texture of the sound, not necessarily the actual music.
Most pop/rock/etc music has (at most) a single key change, which means that 75-80% of the song uses the same 8 pitches over and over again. Add to that the rather homogeneous sound of modern pop/rock/etc instruments (not to mention the limited range of vocal styles usually applied within a single song) and I'd guess this would work with most "popular" music written over the past 50 or so years.
There would certainly be exceptions (Bjork, for example, probably has enough textural vocal changes within a single song to make this much more difficult), but by and large, I'm guessing the output of this experiment is more a commentary on modern pop music theory than it is the specific stylings of Nickleback.
The problem with attributing these kind of motives to those with whom you disagree is that all discussion then shift away from the logical merits of various positions and into the decidedly illogical territory of whose voice you think this the most "authentic". In short, instead of asserting that your opponents have different positions then they actually do, perhaps its worth asking whether or not that is their position.