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We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study Subjects
Lasrick writes "This is just fascinating: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics, and explain why social science studies of Westerners — and Americans in particular — don't really tell us about the human condition: 'Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
Ummm... We certainly aren't primitive.
As far as gun loving rednecks, that's just a small, overly-vocal part of our community. Every community has the small group of overly vocal nut-jobs that makes them look bad. Hell, yours has you, doesn't it?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
"Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
Are they saying all the Americans are fat birds, unable to fly?
no shit sherlock
Well Duh, studying one of the richest and most powerful nation is stupid. You can only learn so much about a group studying it's extremes, not to mention powerful societies tend to do there own thing (because they don't see a need to copy things) and the longer in power the more noticeable it becomes.
The internet does as well. In fact it has made the minority seem like a majority for a long time. It is amazingly easy to create an echo chamber here.
Nuh-uh, I don't live in a community you stupid American. Dumb Americans always assuming stuff about other peoples.
why would you study a bunch of primitive, gun-loving hillbilly rednecks?
You seem to be thinking of southerners, not Americans...
Lord Bradley: Precisely. But, if our economy was threatened, then it would be our duty to protect our intrests.
Anna Leonowens: Our economy?! Our interests?!
Lady Bradley: The ways of America are the ways of the world, my dear.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
small? there are 300 million guns in this country.
Owned by 32% of the population.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes! I propose we issue some sort of edict calling for the decapitation of the person writing such offensive stuff.
Oh, wait. No, we don't do that. See, we aren't that bad...
Using it as a condom doesn't count.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If one was trying to scientifically "draw broad generalizations" about humans, why would you ever select samples from just one nation (regardless of which one)?
Use a dozen nations, some more developed than others. Heck, use one hundred nations. How else would you be abled to defend statistically valid results?
Leaving out any arbitrary set of 330 million humans would seem to lead you further away from meaningful conclusions. Are Americans not also human?
Singling out one country for inclusion or exclusion sounds like something other than impartial, apolitical science for drawing "broad generalizations".
If you don't like America (or wherever), that's fine and dandy... but please don't call your hand-picked findings the "human condition". Especially if you're going to choose the humans based upon any one individual's peculiar set of ideals.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
The instrumental goal underlying a lot of psychology and economics research is "what should we do in the U.S.?" It's all dressed up in basic-science, idealistic language, but ultimately what the penguin taxpayers funding the research most care about is penguin economics and penguin psychology, not so much the rest of the birds...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. "It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money," says Henrich.
"They just didn't understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game."
The big corporations were way ahead of the curve.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Now scientifically proven! ;)
It should be possible to mod an entire article as flamebait...
*grabs popcorn*
32% of the population, clearly a teeny-tiny minority.
Few of the studies have reproducible results and fewer are able to draw hard, unambiguous, numerical conclusions from their data. So it doesn't make much difference whether american students or penguins were used as test subjects - unless the study was on the motivational effect of raw fish.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Um, is it not a good idea in general to isolate studies to one select population, US or not is you want to look at the world?
From talking with dormmates, it seemed that they consist of long-winded, carefully documented presentations of the obvious. Like we couldn't have guessed that the "ultimatum game" (two participants must agree on how to split up $100, or they both leave empty handed) might not have the usual end result in a Stone Age tribe not used to handling money?
I always knew Americans were poor examples of human beings!
-AlPhAbEt
This is, however, a form of exceptionalism. So be happy!
Less than a third of the population. So, yes, a small minority.
Around half of your voting population continually chooses the GOP. Ignore the theoretical ideals you place on the GOP, listen to what the candidates say and how they try to obtain votes. Do it objectively and critically. I think that says it all.
I'm not saying the Dem's are any better, they're not, but they do make appeals to a more sophisticated electorate as well as pandering to the lowest common denominator.
It's all lies on both sides, but as an outsider, the GOP are certainly far more primitive than their counterparts in Europe for example.
----
I recently took a personally antithetical subjective look at some conservative blogs recently, allowing myself to be sucked into it, trying to believe it, and agree with it. It was a very scary experience, and that's what I ended up seeing that kind of culture does, instilling fear to manipulate people against their own interests and their own peers, because of different religion, social norms or the apparently abhorrent idea of peaceful resistance or a workforce strike.
The GOP ideology would appear to be, you either walk away (quit your unfair employment, leave the country or similar), or you kill or threaten with violence the people you disagree with. Having an informed, reasoned discussion where everyone can put their viewpoints across, and people can be called up on misinformation never seems to enter into it. It's always about about 'gut feelings' and just 'knowing whats right'.
Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
So what does their study say about "western" who have been raised rural?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Rednecks are a very small part of the gun culture. They happen to be the most vocal of us. Kind of like how the really weird and disgusting LGBTQ people seem to be the most vocal of those people.
Müller-Lyer illusion -- Put those images in an image editor and measure the lines -- they've presented unequal lines to exaggerate the illusion -- and make its application completely meaningless to the viewers. Pretty lame.
"We aren't the world! We aren't the children! We aren't the ones who make a better day..."
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Just a normal ecosystem, nothing to see here, move along.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The article isn't actually about the Western world, or how Americans are "bad study subjects". Rather, the research TFA talks about is indications that Western assumptions about cognition are based on Western culture, rather than biological design*. In essence, the researchers acknowledge that some of the basic fundamental ideas of perception may not be so fundamental.
It really has nothing to do with Americans being inherently bad study subjects. Rather, it accuses the field of anthropology of focusing too heavily on a single (though changing) culture throughout its history. In other words, sampling bias exists.
* "Design" In the "structure and function" sense, not the "somebody intentionally built this" sense.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations
Uh, that's because America is diverse as fuck. Hell, humanity is diverse as fuck.
Trying to draw accurate yet broad generalizations about humanity are impossible.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Small indeed. 4 million NRA members think differently.
300 million guns, that's about 90 per 100 people.
Sorry to bring facts up.
Roughly 30% of the population was all it took to throw the British out on their ear. It may be a minority in terms of simple math but in all reality having 30 percent of a people invested into any ideaology in a society of our nature is substantial at the same time.
This summary has almost nothing to do with the underlying article, and the headline draws a completely erroneous conclusion. It isn't about Americans being bad study subjects at all, but rather the idea that extrapolating between two cultural groups that have vastly different environments is much harder than previously thought.
Hmm, funny how the left is beginning the intellectual foundations of tyranny by dismantling "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill. Yes, the link does lead to a positive review by an elitist magazine. We shouldn't be free because we might make the wrong decisions. it's for our own good. Of course, the reactionaries (right) will be in for a full dose of this treatment.
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right."
-- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"
"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.
-- Mao Zedong
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
-- George Orwell, "Animal Farm"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"32%"
So almost half the adult population (children account for about 20% of the population)
It could also be almost one for every household, since the average household size is between 2 and 3. You may not own a gun, but you probably know someone who does. It might even be a close relative. It's no wonder how so many criminals and crazy people who don't "own" guns themselves managed to get access to one.
I also heard something about you only need about 1/3 of the population to have a revolution, because there's only 1/3 against you while the remaining 1/3 are indifferent
TLDR: 32% is a actually a high number
A sentence from the cited article might explain the different behaviour experienced when running the "Ultimatum" game with the Machiguenga
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
So if one offers a valuable and rare commodity to people living a life near sustenance, one gets other results than if one does the same experiment with people who have most of their needs (over)fulfilled and do not need the stakes of the game? That is IMHO not surprising but quite in line with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maybe social scientists (and economists) should start to evaluate the context of their experiments more carefully. Alas they are missing the 'laws of nature' whose violation leads to checking every plug.
Ugh, only a small minority of the population are women of child-bearing age. Why do we have to pay for their birth control or even allow abortions?
Nuh-uh, I don't live in a community you stupid American.
According to TFA, this makes you exceptionally close to the typical American, who have been shown to be the group of humans most likely to view themselves outside a culture or community.
The US is completely fractured ... To try to come to conclusions with that - and I haven't read the article, but I'll wager it's a very small sample size - is ludicrous.
You're simultaneously completely missing the point of TFA, and yet hitting it dead on. According to TFA, not only aren't Americans uniformly distributed, but the whole world isn't, in ways that haven't been considered before. Certain assumptions, like having a perception based on interpreting straight lines in a 3D context, turn out to only be valid among a Western population who, for example, grew up with straight walls. The researchers in TFA aren't saying that Americans are particularly bad study subjects, but rather that even basic perceptions long thought to be universal are really influenced by culture.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too.
Some of the differences they've found actually are interesting, though. Like this familiar illusion, which has tricked many Westerners, but Bushmen from the kalahari see them as obviously equal length. (Let's hope they didn't use those images for comparison in the actual tests, as this guy pointed out, the lines actually are different length!)
I've often thought that someone with a good set of scientific principles could go into the fields of sociology and do a lot of easy work and get famous.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The words "Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (A) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (B)." accompanies a drawing in which the "arrow tips" are labled "A" and the other line is labled "B"
Hopefully this was the journalist and his editor being morons. If the researcher himself made this mistake then the test results are worthless.
"small minority" No that would be intelligent socialists, very very small minority. Show me one!
Not sure any shaking is actually taking place here. I'm currently studying psychology and we've already come across examples of cultural affects on results in experimentation in the first year (and the experiments we've studied go back to the 60s/70s). Mind you, in ecomonics, doing some actual science would be ground breaking (you know your 'science' must be soft when psychologists think you're a bunch of light weights).
oops...
If I'm generous to your point and assume that the distribution of guns per owner is normal about the average of 3, then that leaves 50% of the guns in 16% of the people's hands. I suspect the distribution is skewed toward even fewer people owning most of the guns.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Must be French...
The line, "Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood", reminded me of much of my (admittedly anecdotal) experience with two vegetarians. I've had two friends that were lifelong vegetarians and decided to move out of the city and onto farms. One of them actually started a farm. The other one I met later in life and had moved back from an agricultural commune. Both had become meat-eaters; though not hard-core ones. It seems like spending time directly with nature changed them. Mother Nature, apparently, is perfectly fine with inter-specie killing for food.
Myself, I grew up on a farm. I've only understood vegetarianism (for moral reasons) in an intellectual sense. I've never felt the emotional problem with killing other animal types.
(This is only an observation. I have no problem with vegetarianism. To each his own.)
"the equivalent of studying GLORIOUS EAGLES." get your imagery straight.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
I think the real story is that sociologist were dumb enough to think that 'fairness' is evolutionary determined.
If I throw a ball at your face and you duck... that's biological; no one wants to get hit in the face.
But fairness? Seriously? No wonder no one they so dumped upon by the other 'real' sciences.
As a foreign language instructor for adult students I've certainly struggled with the American mindset. In every class there's always a few who I call anti-culturalist. They just can't comprehend that there's other ways of doing things that aren't wrong but simply different. The more a person has traveled the less they seem to struggle with this. Everyone should spend a year or two living somewhere really foreign, that would do a lot for human relations. Maybe the size of the United States just makes the rest of the world seem so far away, theoretical.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's clear that you do not know how to use toilet paper.
Things the British of 1776 didn't have that the current government does:
1. Destroyers
2. High-Tech Choppers
3. Fighter Jets
4. Battle Tanks
5. Flying Death Robots
The list goes on and on... Glad you think your little AR-15 is the sound of freedom, but good luck throwing off THAT government.
"look at some conservative blogs"
"you either walk away (quit your unfair employment, leave the country or similar), or you kill or threaten with violence the people you disagree with"
Dude can I get some of what you are smoking please? You are seriously deluded if you actually believe any of this shit.
First, you have to understand that Republican (GOP=Republican) does not equal republican, and neither of them equal conservative.
And none of the above would have anything to do with your assertion that the Republican, conservative of otherwise, would call for the death of those who disagree with them. Above all the conservative believes in individual liberty, natural rights and this includes that all men have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Whoever it is that is teaching you all this crap is deceiving you. Here is a question you need to think about; *why* would they do that to you, *what* is in it for them?
Aren't all you nerds supposed to be all about avoiding the groupthink, thinking out of the box and all that shit? Well when do you stand up and use your own brains for once, god gave you people brains, use them!
Good grief.
you kill or threaten with violence the people you disagree with
Is that not the core principle behind all government? After all, there's a reason why government needs (1) guns, and (2) a special right to employ them in offense, not merely in defense.
This is simply the reality of coercive authority. Those who disagree are threatened with violence, and if they attempt to defend themselves, they will eventually be killed.
Name one government on this planet that doesn't follow this principle. They have to, because it is exactly that principle (coercive authority) which defines government.
As usual in most "scientific" papers, this one talks about obviousness. All cultures have their own idiosyncrasies. To use subjects from one to predicted behavior on the other is a perfect path to failure. Actually even using groups inside a given culture to predict the behavior of the whole is due to failure most of the time.
Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Another AC made the same point. But do you really think that every one of those people owns exactly 3 guns? There are probably a fair number of people who have a single pistol, shotgun, or rifle, and a fail number of people who need to use one for work... I don't know if I'd call such people "gun loving".
We have 1.5 million active military personnel, and another 1.5 million reservists. That's a full 1% of our population. Another approximately million Americans work as sworn officers of some kind. I couldn't find statistics on armed guards, but I'd bet that comes in at a million as well.
The pool you are left with: people who own several weapons who could probably be called "gun loving".... that pool is probably under 10%.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"...they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. "
Well let's be sane here.
Any single population of any single country is probably a poor pick if you're looking to characterize all of humanity.
Someone else suggested modding the article flamebait, I agree.
Rednecks are a very small part of the gun culture. They happen to be the most vocal of us. Kind of like how the really weird and disgusting LGBTQ people seem to be the most vocal of those people.
I assume this is at -1 for Unpleasant Truth?
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the exact same hangups about unpleasant but true speech as all the folks they like to pretend they outsmart.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
why would you study a bunch of primitive, gun-loving hillbilly rednecks?
You seem to be thinking of southerners, not Americans...
... and a subset of a subset, at that.
So, to answer the original question: Because you don't really know the proper way to do research.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
In other words: the concept of ceteris paribus is utter bullshit.
Film at 11.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
This headline is the most hateful and prejudiced comment about Americans I have heard all day!
Wow, you must live a very sheltered existence. I would be flattered if someone said that about me. I don't want to represent the average.
Just to make your day even more interesting: I have noticed at least 3 posts from people living in the US who took offence at this article. This means that some >0 percentage of the US population who can both read and write, either don't know what "make bad study subjects" means, or they aspire for their nation to be totally average in every way.
There, what I just wrote is now the most hateful and prejudiced comment about 'Americans' you have heard all day.
Captain Obvious is telling us social studies are useless.
As if we didn't already know that!
Most of the Arab Spring countries had pretty decent militaries too. Didn't stop them from being overthrown.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Winning wars happens when the soldiers with the above decide they like the rebels better than the entrenched government. That's what happened in the US Revolution and many other successful revolutions.
If you really think a government run by the MAFIAA, banks, etc. is going to remain more popular than one that opposes them forever if they continue to turn the screws, you will be very surprised someday when the tides suddenly turn.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
In the last election cycle the Republicans tried to point out that what America calls poor would not be called poor in most other nations. But they got lots of flak and backed off. But there is some truth in noting that "there is no food in the fridge in my kitchen" sounds crazy to people who don't have homes, and those who do don't have kitchens, and those who do dont have fridges! It like the story about the poor written by a rich kid. "There was a poor man. His butler was poor, His chauffeur was poor, His cook was poor and so was his maid.
A household barely on the poverty line in USA is richer than 80% of the world! About 10% of the world, or 700 million people or twice the population of USA, lives in less than $365 a year! Again these dollar figures are not the foreign exchange rate based dollars. These are "purchase power parity" dollars. Which means the $365 buys in the poor country, what $365 would buy in the USA.
So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Try having a reasonable discussion with Americans (even many Democrats) as to WHY socialized medicine would be worse than what we have now. All you get is "Ugh, socialism." Yeah, I know that. Guess what? The roads and schools are socialized too. And they work pretty well.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.
Okay, this would make sense if they were applying human studies to all primates: monkeys, apes, gorillas, etc. But, they're applying the studies to the same species. It's still not good, but it's not as bad. It's like applying the studies of penguins in one geographic location to all penguins. Bad, but not as bad as suggested.
The G
We aren't the world, we aren't the children
We aren't the ones who make a brighter day
So lets stop giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
Ain't true we'll make a better day
Just you and me
why would you study a bunch of primitive, gun-loving hillbilly rednecks?
You seem to be thinking of southerners, not Americans...
You seem to not know what he fuck you are talking about. I've lived up and down the east coast most of my life. I can tell you that parts of northern Pennsylvania and, even more so, northern New York are every bit as "back woods" as anyplace you can find in the "south". Other than the accents I dare you to find a difference between someone from back woods upstate NY and someone from anywhere in the south.
Even so, they are both a subset of the American population.
Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (A) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (B). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length.
But they are not equal in length: http://imgur.com/24V6a81
Circumcision is child abuse.
Ummm... We certainly aren't primitive.
Especially when you consider the subjects for most of these tests are undergraduate university students, mostly from prestigious universities.
Anyway, if you don't want to read the article, here is are a few of the differences mentioned:
1. Americans are more likely than any other group to be "fair" to anonymous strangers, and expect those strangers to be "fair" to them.
2. Americans are more likely than any other group to ignore consensus, and make independent judgements.
3. Americans are more likely than any other group to perceive "unnatural" straight lines and right angles.
Line B is definitely longer than line A in that Muller Lyer Comparison.
Unless my copy of photoshop is showing its bias also.
Hmm a Conservative who has read Mill. Would you like to have a left v right debate some time? I have been looking for a good opponent. Please no more animal farm though.
I use the three shells where I live on the east coast of America.
Outstanding perspective on a sensitive subject.
I have long thought that focusing on an insistence on commonality between race because of guilt for colonial history for example was missing the point that there are cultural differences which do influence behavior.
Now we have a valid framework to examine how cultural differences can collide and through a proper examination of cultural difference to begin to resolve problems that we have not had any mental equipment to figure out solutions to. These are groundbreaking ideas with so much promise to help us understand our divided world better.
This isnt about how Americans, Hispanics, Blacks or Stone age tribes are wrong, its about why the error in thinking that they are all "the same underneath" has a rational explanation in cultural difference and how this is a sensible route for western analytical science to start addressing the problems that it brings.
Great!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Even the most conservative and picky counts of NRA membership puts that organization at 2+ million members. The NRA itself claims 4.25 million members. Plus the other groups such as the Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, American Silencer Association, and many others.
I wouldn't call ~1% of the US population voluntarily joining a group as overly-vocal. Gun owners speak with a loud voice because there are so many of us, not because we have some unfair advantage.
"Gun loving" is not an insult. It is what many Americans and citizens of other nations are. You may not like what we do to protect ourselves or in our spare time, but we choose to own firearms and we participate in the political process to ensure that our rights are not infringed.
All the way down.
The internet does as well. In fact it has made the minority seem like a majority for a long time. It is amazingly easy to create an echo chamber here.
I agree- good point!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's also not that hard to rack up a lot of guns without being crazy. The only things you can really do with a gun are sell, destroy, or keep. A number of gun owners are uncomfortable just selling them to other people at gun shows. As long as you have space in your safe, the cost of keeping the things is nil.
My uncle was a hunter and a game warden in a rural section of the state. He was neither a redneck nor a gun nut. He did hunt and teach other people to hunt. He also had service weapons from his job as a game warden. And one of his hobbies was hand-building archaic rifles. So, he ended up with more than 50 guns. That, to me, is a "crazy gun nut" size collection, but none of the steps to acquiring that many weapons were particularly crazy.
I assume this is at -1 for Unpleasant Truth?
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the exact same hangups about unpleasant but true speech as all the folks they like to pretend they outsmart.
You sure are reading a whole lot of context into nothing more than a couple of down-mods. What do you make of the fact that the original post about "gun-loving hill billy rednecks" was also down-modded to -1? How do you know it wasn't "self-proclaimed intellectuals" who did that too because they realize that neither stereotype is particularly accurate?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In the late eighties, I (like many other undergrads) were required to "volunteer" to be the subjects of psych and sociology studies when we were in intro psychology classes.
I talked a good bit with a particular political science prof whose specialty was survey research and the measurement of public opinion. I noted that no reasonable researcher would try to extrapolate such a biased sample to be representative of the world population. He pretty much agreed and lamented the situation.
Yet, that was exactly what was being done. Ignoring the myriad flaws in the research I could see with just the viewpoint of participating, none of the people doing the studies that I talked to saw any reason to control for the completely unrepresentative sample.
They were quite happy to make predictions equally about inner city youth, Appalachian rural elderly and middle aged residents of The Hamptons all from studies that were exclusively late teen early twenties college students.
I was appalled that this "goop" might end up being used as the basis for social policy decisions.
Way to entirely miss the point.
First of all, the American rebels started with just hunting rifles, with no cannon or other serious military gear of the time. The Revolutionary War got started because, against all odds, the rebels sucessfully captured armories.
But really, that's not the point. If you're fighting against actual military equipment, it will be a civil war, and both sides will have actual military equipment - that's not why you need an armed populace. Tyranny never starts with the Army being sent against civilians - that just defines the point at which tyranny has won.
Tyranny starts with Brownshirts. Unofficial (but government sponsored) death squads that pull people out of their houses in the middle of the night and disappear them, or just shoot them right there in the street. That beginning is where an armed populace can fight back. There are historically only a handful of people willing to be Brownshirts. If only 10% of that armed 30% are brave enough to actually fight back, then the Brownshirts lose, and tyranny falters.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The overall population seems primitive to keep swallow the poop shovelled by the corporations and government no matter how negatively it affects them. You know, the whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" mentality you got going on.
The list goes on and on... Glad you think your little AR-15 is the sound of freedom, but good luck throwing off THAT government.
Have you been paying attention to recent world events? You know, like the failed US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of billions of dollars of state-of-the-art military equipment and they still couldn't win a fight with people who had little more than small arms. And those people are strangers to us. Fighting other Americans would be even harder because of divided loyalties within the ranks of government troops.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As someone who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, I'll happily confirm this. A lot of the state is pure redneck territory.
The first two seem like positive things to me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You hear this nonsense a lot. First of all, there are about 100 million armed citizens in the US, but well under 1 million combat troops. Secondly, those combat troops would be more likely to join in overthrowing the government than they would be to shoot at American people. Widespread gun ownership is just is an important safeguard against potential tyrannical government today as it was in 1776. Freedoms of speech, association, religion and other rights are ultimately just words on paper that can be easily erased. But, as history shows, you don't fuck with an armed population.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
Henrich's approach to the ultimatum game seems flawed. He mentions that he offers the equivalent of a few days wages, which is probably too much. The game is usually played for significant, but smaller sums, such as the value of a free lunch. For a sufficiently large starting sum, even tiny portions are enough to be worth something. For example, if you were asked to decide on a split of $200 out of a total $2000, you would probably want to spite the splitter. But you would also probably be overruled by your desire to get a free $200. It's only when we start looking at a smaller total with similar proportions -- say, $2 out of $20 -- that we start to see small portions being worth sacrificing to spite the other guy.
Proportionality is a bad metric in this scenario, and he should probably use some thing like "hours of equivalent labor" instead. (And in that case, he better hope everyone is used to making equal amounts of money in such an hour, which is certainly not true in Western societies.) By sticking to proportionality as a metric long after it becomes meaningless, Henrich buries the signal in noise. He has made it too easy for the splitter to "buy off" the decider.
The Pacific Standard description of the game also misses the point when they say that (for Western subject) the game tends towards and average 50/50 split. The average isn't nearly as interesting as the highest refused split/lowest accepted split, which tells you exactly how much someone is willing to sacrifice to spite the other party/the minimum "fair" proportion. This figure tends to be down near 30%. (It is up for debate how the subjects are internalizing this number as fair... whether it is closer to, say, "half of an even share (25%)," or "half of what the splitter makes (33.33%)," or some other figure.)
He is correct in that it will be culturally influenced. That is a big part of the point. In fact, when the experiment was originally devised, it was considered surprising that people would refuse any split at all. It is, after all, free money split between anonymous parties in exchange for no work at all. The reason people behave in this "illogical" manner is because reputation has worth, and if you want to avoid being cheated in society, it pays to have a reputation for being spiteful and willing to take a small loss to inflict punishment on those who wrong you. No transaction happens in a vacuum. The point is that the social gaming conditioning "leaks through" into our behavior even though the experimenter has (usually) done his best to remove all social components that would reward such spiteful behavior.
Now, Henrich has spent a few years doing this sort of thing, and it's been looked over by plenty of competent people, so I'm presuming his team's understanding is really not so shallow as it is presented here. But still, it is a bit odd to look at this collection of anecdotes that seems to demonstrate "culture matters" and come away with the conclusion that Westerners, and especially Americans, are weird. This is especially true when so many experiments of the previous century were aimed at identifying cultural behaviors and disentangling them from basic human response... in essence, all experiments which prove both that humans are similar (because they respond similarly under highly controlled conditions) and that culture matters (because that what influences them to behave slightly differently under different conditions). An experimenter has to be keenly aware of the culture under test, because experiments can amplify subtle differences if it doesn't account for them.
The British of 1776 didn't need any of that stuff - they didn't really lose any major battles other than Yorktown, and they only had that because of the intervention of the French navy. If it weren't for the French that battle would not have been decisive, but the overall outcome of the war would probably not have changed much (though it might have been more drawn out, or diplomatic in resolution - which could have made the US look more like one of the Commonwealth nations).
The American Revolution is a classic example of how you can win almost every battle and yet lose a war. 30% of the population being armed means that anything an opposition army does results in LOTS of people dying on all sides. Sure, you can bomb cities into ruins, but you can't just march in and take over with any kind of continuity. Few really want to stomach that kind of mess, so there are limits on what any government can accomplish. The British might have won Lexington/Concord, but 300 casualties in a single day wasn't really anything the citizens back home really wanted to hear about, and it just set the tone for the entire war.
Just look at Iraq. It isn't exactly smooth sailing for the US over there despite a huge advantage in military power.
I'm sick and tired of people who believe that US governmental tyranny exists talking about it as though it is a Us vs Them argument.
In the real world, not some fantastical universe you have created, but in the REAL world, there exists an extremely large portion of the population who does, (or who will, in this universe you have created) agree with the government. They may agree that your guns should be taken away from you, or that you should no longer be able to ban gays from marrying, or that you should not be able to have tax-free churches any more...all of which are things, by the way, that many tea-tards have used as example of "tyranny" by the government.
In the REAL world, if you were to rise up against this government, you'd also be rising up against the (approximately) half of the US population that put that government in place.
This is not called "rising up against an oppressive government."
This is known as a CIVIL WAR, and we've already had one.
So think about that the next time you want to "rise up against the government." You'd actually be rising up against a whole lot of average americans who VOTED to put that government in place, and if you think they will take kindly to your attempts to "take your country back", you will have another thing coming.
For many of us Americans, The debate over health care is not about quality or availability, but rather it is about who has the power to control quality and availablility of our health care. Socialized health care gives the government the power (through cash flow) to prescribe what our health care should be like. Given our current negative cash flow in the federal budgets I am not very optimistic about what health care will be like if we were to socialize that part of our society.
Our roads and schools receive most of their funding from state and local taxes. To sugest that this is an example of what Federal socialized health care would be like is very misleading.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
From the experiment with the Machiguenga (follow link in summary) , the split between players matters less then it does in 'Western' (i.e. American) society. They are much more likely to share their wealth among the tribe after the game is over. So it doesn't matter who walks away with what amount during the game.
From a practical point of view, the giver in the game has more certainty of getting his share up front than he does in trusting the (outsider) sociologist to give the remainder to the other participant as agreed. So get the money now and split it with the village afterwords.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dream on, moron. 99 million 999 thousand 999 of those guys plus the 1 million with actual weapons are going to curb-stomp your idiotic "revolution". Or more likely, 12 SWAT guys.
As pointed out in the article, and in numerous studies, American Southerners experience a high rise in testosterone when they feel their honor has been violated. In other words, Southerners, especially men, place a higher emphasis on honor and have stronger reactions when insulted. Numerous studies have confirmed this.
Have you been paying attention to recent world events? You know, like the failed US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of billions of dollars of state-of-the-art military equipment and they still couldn't win a fight with people who had little more than small arms. And those people are strangers to us. Fighting other Americans would be even harder because of divided loyalties within the ranks of government troops.
Failed?
Those people we were fighting against were used to poor conditions, were quite resourceful compared to a typical "useless out there" U.S.-ian, and were physically way more fit, on average, then I'd image NRA members to be.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
For many of us Americans, The debate over health care is not about quality or availability, but rather it is about who has the power to control quality and availablility of our health care. Socialized health care gives the government the power (through cash flow) to prescribe what our health care should be like. Given our current negative cash flow in the federal budgets I am not very optimistic about what health care will be like if we were to socialize that part of our society.
Bzzt.. Wrong. In the Canadian system, at least, the therapeutic decision rests purely between the Doctor and the patient. The only thing the federal government does is dictate to the provinces that "thou shalt have a public healthcare system" and provide national regulatory tasks, similar to the FDA and so forth in the US. Hospitals themselves are operated by local health authorities, and Doctors are typically private businesses.
In effect, our system is a single payer insurance system. Doctors do not work for the government, rather as an organization they negotiate a fee schedule with the province, and are paid on a per fee basis. The government can't force doctors to work anywhere (witness the problem with attacting doctors to rural areas in the country), nor can they dictate what course of treatment the doctor must use.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
For example, study subjects who happen to be Ashkenazi Jews or African Americans are likely to give very different results on just about any metric.
The result of adding together multiple, discrete populations, each having their own normal distribution of attributes, is to create a lepto-kurtotic population - with fat tails and a tall peak at the average.
Most non-Western cultures (outside South America) are far more homogeneous, geneticly and culturally. The rest of the world really is more normal than the US.
No, you're missing my point. "Ownership" is not a prerequisite for one have access to and use a gun, or to support using one. The actual distribution should be HIGHER, not lower.
So even a number like 32 actually end up meaning a lot.
Not to mention, our roads are shit and are students do poorly compared to countries that spend less on education. I wouldn't hold those two things up as wins for American government.
The minorty which scare us the most are not your redneck, or whatever, but the 46% of people which believe the world is 11000 year old or so, and the politician pandering to them, or even believing into that apocalypse thingy. And you want to know why it scares us is the fact they have access to nuclear bombs.
Rather ironic, given that the right is way ahead on taking away rights with no cause and there is no left left at this stage. At least not in government anyways.
Our students. Our. Yes, I realize I will get flamed for that...
Almost a third of the entire population. That's a gigantic minority.
The Revolutionary War got started because, against all odds, the rebels sucessfully captured armories.
Well, that and massive military support from the French government. The hugely unpopular and undemocratic war debts from which campaign then led to the collapse of that government in the French Revolution. Which then led to the death of 40,000 in the Terror, the rise of the dictator Napoleon and another huge English-French world conflict. Yay freedom, I guess.
So basically, if you want to argue from history, if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Americans have fought other Americans several times in our history. The side currently in power will declare any resistance as terrorists, murders, and nut job radicals so our armed forces have little problem pulling the trigger on them.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I did not intend to say that the government directly tells the Dr what to do. Rather, by vertue of saying 'we only have so much money' they in effect dictate the quality of the health care that is available.
This is seen in the Patients to Dr ratio as compared between Canada and the US.
Canada - 470:1
US - 390:1
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
as opposed to the spineless, passive aggressive, censorious, welfare charity cases that make up an ever growing majority of americans these days? might as well include western europe too as there isnt much difference. see? i can stereotype too.
It is amazingly easy to create an echo chamber here.
It IS amazingly easy to create an echo chamber here.
sure. we value individual liberty more, here, than is usual for more socialist countries. culture is important, sure, but many of us dont like it when it attempts too much micro management.
Being English, I think they are saying your Fat, Loud and unable to even learn to speak one Language properly
I assume this is at -1 for Unpleasant Truth?
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the exact same hangups about unpleasant but true speech as all the folks they like to pretend they outsmart.
You sure are reading a whole lot of context into nothing more than a couple of down-mods.
Oblig. snarky retort:
Gee, thanks Captain Obvious, never would have known that's what I was doing if not for you!
K, I feel better now.
What do you make of the fact that the original post about "gun-loving hill billy rednecks" was also down-modded to -1?
That Obvious Troll was being obvious? What else is there to make of such blatant baiting?
How do you know it wasn't "self-proclaimed intellectuals" who did that too because they realize that neither stereotype is particularly accurate?
You're comparing apples to lug nuts.
The original post, "why would you study a bunch of primitive, gun-loving hillbilly rednecks?," is quite obviously flamebait, and thus is intended to be insulting by design. The post I responded to did not make such a blanket generalization - instead, DFurno2003 was quite obviously pointing out how the extremist, fringe groups of each sub-demographic who tend to stand out, and thus receive the most attention from the public at large (probably due in good part to the fact that they are so damn extreme).
This is why the only "pro-gun" arguments you see on the MSM usually come from Alex Jones and Wayne LaPierre types, whereas "anti-gun" arguments are posited by the likes of Sen. Feinstein and Illinois' Michael Madigan. Meanwhile, the vast majority of gun owners, who are reasonable, logical people, have to stand at the sidelines and watch with baited breath, silently praying that neither of those extremist groups get their way.
Side Note: replace mentions of "gun" with any other hot-button topic du jour, like abortion, and you'll start to notice a rather scary trend...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Secondly, those combat troops would be more likely to join in overthrowing the government than they would be to shoot at American people.
Ah, just like police riot squads would rather shoot tear gas grenades at their fellow officers than at unarmed street protesters?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
an echo chamber here.
people who have a single pistol, shotgun, or rifle, and a fail number of people who need to use one for work...
Hi Dr Freud!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
How much trouble have Iraqi and Afghan insurgents caused us with nothing more than guns, home-made IEDs, and some ancient Russian RPGs? And these are people our army wants to shoot. Imagine now that it's their neighbors and families. People who speak the same language as them and have much more similar believe systems. You're greatly underestimating the impact of an entrenched armed insurgency.
yet these supposedly 'sophisticated' people still use logical fallacy.
since americans prefer to shower daily as opposed to weekly, wiping actually works better for most.
for such 'sophistication' why doesnt every european shower daily? .. and what are they eating that requires them to blast sludge off their asses. eating properly would avoid this.
amber here.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
You're not trying then are you.
Your math's a little off there, buddy.
Try dividing 300 by 4 since there's 300 million guns and only 4 million NRA members.
That makes 75 guns per NRA member.
Sorry to bring math up.
People who own guns are more likely to be hunters/outdoorsman/eagle scouts than non-gun owners.
Oh yeah, cuz 'm betting the rest of the planet admires and is impressed with our fascination for steel underground zombie apocalypse shelters...
For foreigners visiting... avoid the third shell if you are male... it removed tampons automatically.
Who still think they're going to be able to win a war against their own government which is armed with binary nerve agents, chain guns, drones and tactical nukes... uh yeah.
sure. we value individual liberty more, here, than is usual for more socialist countries. culture is important, sure, but many of us dont like it when it attempts too much micro management.
You keep telling yourself that. How many "more socialist" countries have free pat-downs at every airport (please don't say China, as being less totalitarian than them is nothing to be proud of)? The freedom you believe you have is a lie sold to you every day by a very clever propaganda machine.
Those leaders were being informed that if they applied weapons of mass destruction on their own people they'd have the UN and the US climbing up their nethers... Who would threaten the US Guberment that way???
And one of the other articles today is about the folks of the world being a little antsy about the US building death-bots. Unless you know where they keep the off switch, fight Cylons is gonna suck.
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
Its even worse than that... you seen the armed camps in Wyoming and Montana? You think any one of them could play nice with another for more than a Fortnight? Sorry, once you start playing the "My way or the Highway" game you're gonna have 5,000 little pissed off fifedoms yanking in different directions. The larger organized system will swat you like a bunch of flies.
All of this presumes the government has any intention of doing anything to you at all. If it all went to hell tomorrow, what makes you think the government would just fold?
The first two seem like positive things to me.
The point of the article is not that they are good or bad, but that they are not normal. Americans are not just different on these issues, they are the most extreme. In no other society is "fairness" to strangers more given or expected. Americans are not only more likely to offer a "fair deal" to a stranger, but they are also more likely to pay a price to punish an unfair defector.
The researchers found that in some societies, not only is stinginess tolerated, but excessive generosity is punished. The reason given is that in these societies, accepting a gift incurs an obligation to reciprocate. So the generosity is rejected to avoid the future obligation.
Americans are often surprised when they travel abroad, and see foreigners walk unconcerned past someone in obvious need of assistance. We are also sometimes surprised at other societies' intolerance for dissent or non-conformity. Americans say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", but the Japanese equivalent is "the nail that sticks up will be hammered back down," which expresses the opposite sentiment.
Why would be want to study dirty, smelly foreigners? We already know their "human condition" is unbathed.
Iraq failed because Rumsfeld couldn't find his own rear end with arrows in his panties to guide the way.
We aren't currently winning Afghanistan because the country is a nasty mountainous, hell hole that's chewed the ass off every army that ever marched through it. Nobody has ever won a war against the locals, because it always degenerates to a guerrilla war with people who know the home field better than you and are willing to make it a war of attrition over decades to wear you down. Worse, if we'd have just spent a lousy $12,000,000 when the Afghan's kicked the Russian out, we would have precluded the Taliban, The World Trade Center, and the current conflict. So we just keep bringing stupid to the party and paying large for it a decade down the road.
Not everyone who merely owns a gun is a gun nut.
And a nuclear missile is a 1 million:1 force multiplier. Game set and match.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
here
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Well, this is a stretch. The debt from French support of the U.S. rebels was added to an already huge debt from the Seven Years' War. The Revolutionary War debt that France acquired was one of many catalysts leading to the Revolution; one could just as easily argue that had the French not been involved in the Seven Years War, they would not have been so inclined to ignite a revolution after supporting the U.S. revolutionaries.
Most of the Arab Spring countries had pretty decent militaries too. Didn't stop them from being overthrown.
Having some really cool bang-bang toys to play with doesn't help you much if the people using them have no training, no spare parts, no discipline, and rely on foreigners to maintain said toys because they find it too much like work.
However, the success of the revolts in the different countries depended almost entirely on whether the military intervened or not. So yeah, if those technologies are not used, they can be overthrown...
Did you vote? So the guys in Washington D.C. are people you and your neighbors put there, yes? The people manning the Government didn't fall out a parallel dimension. They weren't hatched. They are your neighbors and friends and got there because they were more popular (or better backed by heads of business, and we the mouth breathing public picked them because of their superior advertising campaign.)
If the nation is so far gone that the government is forced to turn on the people, you don't think there'll already be rioting in the streets and hundred or even thousands of small coalitions fighting one another? The government my friend is the least of your worries. Perhaps you might stop polishing that side arm for a few and invest that time in making this a more fit society for your children to live in. Rather than planning for the shit hitting the fan, let's get together, clean up the shit and turn off the fan.
As pointed out in the article, and in numerous studies, American Southerners experience a high rise in testosterone when they feel their honor has been violated. In other words, Southerners, especially men, place a higher emphasis on honor and have stronger reactions when insulted. Numerous studies have confirmed this.
I must have missed that statement in the article, as I didn't see it. Still, I'd be curious to know exactly where they spoke to people in both locations. Was it NYC vs. BFE Arkansas? or was it comparable sized cities? It would be interesting to know. Still, I'm not sure how being an honorable person is a bad thing.
Every distinction highlights something while obscuring another. For example, the very choice of presenting certain "games" to people from other cultures brings forth the differences in behavior, but obliterates the impact of introducing a certain interaction that is not familiar to another culture. While this make perfect sense for certain comparative studies, what is wrong here is the surprise factor. Assuming that a framework derived from the study of only one culture can be applied to all mankind is the mistake here, it isn't a problem of the US culture.
The basis of the biological and social aspects of the human species have been reseached before from other disciplines. If anybody wants to read more about it, I can recommend one approach that is well explained in two books: The Tree of Knowledge and Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Enjoy.
I'm not sure you could pick any single population of people (other than the human race as a whole) and call them an "average representation." I'm guessing that in some aspects, every culture will have some attributes in which it differs markedly from the average.
In the particular subset tested, Americans were different, but it seems to be drawing a bit of a broad brush to say that it follows that all sociological studies run on Americans will come out different, while implying that other study subjects would be superior.
So basically, if you want to argue from history, if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
But it does make for good TV news, e.g. Syria.
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
The problem in the USA is not the health care that you do have. The problem is the health care that so many people *don't* have.
Or 45% of households have at least one gun.
The left tends to view your freedom as the ability to do and be what you want, within reason, provided you put in the effort, where as the right tends to view freedom as being unrestricted, not being forbidden from doing things. Taken to extremes both of these are evil, there must be a balance between the two to ensure society is healthy. You have shown that you have a good understanding of what happens when the left leaning idea of "freedom" is taken without consideration for the other part but have you actually looked at it from the other perspective? A simple idea may indeed be seductive but have you considered what happens when you disregard people capacity to achieve happiness and focus only on removing restrictions regardless of the consequences?
Allowing people to do what they want without restriction, or even with the only restriction of "my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins" (which is favoured by many and embodied by your quote above) allows still much injustice and abusive practice on the part of those who have resources for a few examples see below.
- "Rent-seeking", while made easer by regulatory capture, comes from land ownership originally, regulations often exist and are maintained to prevent it. Such strategies can be applied without regulations in any case of a monopoly, or whenever you have leverage eg to loans made to the desperate or water or food provisions access to communication infrastructure(the internet) and access to roads or other transport ect.... just one strip of road in the right valley to toll for example.
- This restriction includes a restriction on taxes for assistance, following it to the letter will mean leaving without assistance even those who are both worthy of help and will be of use to society at large. No public education, no food for the starving and no help for the sick unless they have money, and no other help even getting work, no matter how much this might cost society in terms of lost efficiency or reduced entrepreneurial activity, impoverishing us all.
- Without restrictions on contracts or support for the poor life-indenture and other effective equivalents of serfdom and slavery are allowed and will be unavoidable for many. I have seen libertarian people arguing that these would be a good thing too, sign what ever contract you like if this gives you more capacity to take out loans or just to avoid starvation etc...... never mind what happens should you default or weather it is fair or just. Limiting people rights to sign things away in contracts will not make many of these jobs disappear but it does mean those that look for people to fill them have to tolerate those people leaving if they get a better offer.
As time goes on organisations such as corporations and religions as well as powerful individuals and minority social groups try to capture regulatory bodies, and we push back, government spending and regulations expand to cover new needs and we trim them where it is now unnecessary or where it is now less important. This does not mean that we should do away with any of these things. The effort of maintaining a government is not in pushing for a pure idealist goal but in achieving the most beneficial balance, to maximise both what we can do and and what we are allowed to do without interference, even as the nature of this balance shifts with new technology.
Rather than planning for the shit hitting the fan, let's get together, clean up the shit and turn off the fan.
But where am I supposed to direct my pent-up frustrations and aggression?
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
The Tunisians and Egyptians didn't need guns to overthrow their governments. The Libyan resistance however, despite having guns, were on the verge of being crushed before NATO stepped in. The Syrian resistance also have lots of weaponry and have so far failed to overthrow their government. Likewise the Palestinians also have plenty of guns and rockets and have so far failed to remove the Israelis from Palestine. The Chechnyans have guns but are still ruled by the Russians and so on and so forth. Ownership of projectile weapons doesn't guarantee you anything.
I agree with you, there are a lot of people in America who can not afford health care, and thus do not make use of the system. However, the problem with healthcare cost is directly perportonal to our governments involvment. Our social forms of insurance (medicaid and medicare) are right at the top of the list for reasons that our health care is not affordable. The Government set the "cost" of a procedure at a level were almost no profit can be made, and then only pay on average half of that "cost". The net result is that health care providers have to charge everyone else extreme prices just to stay in business. To sum it up our governments current involvment in our health care system IS the problem, and increaseing their involvement will only make things worse. Private insurance is just as bad as the governments insurance programs. Private insurance companies (at least in the US) exist to maximize their profits. That means that their primary function in our health care system is to be a leach that draws cash out of the patient care environment. It is therefore most ironic (moronic) that the latest batch of legislation aimed at fixing our healthcare system mandates that everyone must get insurance. They could have passed a law that mandated paying your medical bills and at least the health care provider would see the money, but instead Obama, in his great wisdom, mandated an increase to our problems.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
I use the three shells where I live on the east coast of America.
I figure that must be bash, ksh and what? csh? zsh? ash? Don't keep us in suspense here!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
its about why the error in thinking that they are all "the same underneath" has a rational explanation in cultural difference
But isn't culture one of those things underneath which we're supposedly all the same?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning what happened at Ruby Ridge or Wako, the government mishandled that grotesquely. That said, anyone who didn't think the Branch Davidians weren't a burger shy a happy meal, forgets the Jim Jones event that informed the Governments actions. You talk about Americans fighting Americans... we call that a feud. Its illegal for a reason, innocent bystanders get killed and the violence grows. It doesn't help if the folks armed to the teeth are in fact nut jobs, terrorist and murderers, anybody here remember the Oklahoma bombing? Or the white supremacists. Or the American Nazis? We could do this all day. there are more wing-nuts that there are bolts to fasten them to.
The government now watches them from a distance, to avoid stupid from happening. A good plan. As long as the Doodles play nice by themselves, aren't hurting anybody, and haven't marched on the local Higglety Pigglety, no need to send in the FBI. That said, the general populace is antsy. We can smell bad news on the wind and the folks making decisions keep making bad ones. It is perhaps time for us all to say enough is too much and take back what is ours to begin with. The government is here to serve us. Its not been doing that for a while now. Guns aren't the answer, at least not until you've tried and failed with every other option first.
I.e. "I'm a racist but I'd like scientific justification for that please!"
If you suggest cultural friction to be a serious problem of society which science ought to solve, you really overshoot the target of questioning the rationality and balance of political correctness.
Worse than cultural differences are individual differences. Ought science not be able to help us to understand and overcome the problems that they cause in our divided world? No idiot, this is your problem to deal with and not one for science.
I'm european and I shower every day. Every other european I know also showers everyday. I really don't know where that misconception that europeans don't shower, french women dont shave their armpits (have you ever been to France? the women are absolutely gorgeous! and in the summer they dress very skimpily, spaghetti string tops, they show their pits for all to see and I can assure you they're not hairy!) or that brits have bad teeth, but let me tell yout, that's a load of bollocks.
Must be the same kind of misconception about all americans being stupid fat hicks with a revolver on their belt.
Lol. Decent?
People in the army have families.
East to kill people - not so easy to keep others from killing everyone you care about.
Reconsider.
Psych courses have the reciprocal ratio as engineering courses. Also generally easy As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It doesn't seem like citizen ownership of small arms has been all that much of a factor in helping insurgencies to resist soldiers with body armor and military-grade weapons. IEDs and captured/smuggled military-grade weaponry like RPGs and Stinger missiles seem to have been far more of a problem for the military than citizens taking pot shots will small arms.
Americans are fat
Americans are people
Therefore, we can conclude all people are fat.
You sure are reading a whole lot of context into nothing more than a couple of down-mods.
Gee, thanks Captain Obvious, never would have known that's what I was doing if not for you!
So you knew you were making an unfounded claim of stereotyping and yet you did it anyway? You may think you are being snarky, all I see is someone admitting to poor judgment.
DFurno2003 was quite obviously pointing out how the extremist, fringe groups of each sub-demographic who tend to stand out, and thus receive the most attention from the public at large (probably due in good part to the fact that they are so damn extreme).
Well, I am having a hard time coming up with an "extremist" gay rights advocate that gets anywhere near the kind of attention the VP of the NRA has been getting. How he qualifies as a redneck, I dunno, but he was your example.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is a general challenge with free societies (democracies etc). A small vocal minority can control the framing of issues and you can end up with a choice between
1) Guns and freedom.
2) No guns and no freedom.
Or whatever combo of polarizing issues. This makes me want to go back to ancient Greece (Thebes?) where democracy didn't mean voting it meant participation. Leaders were drawn by lot you had to serve if chosen or forfeited your citizenship (which is a fair balance between rights and obligations to your country IMHO vs vote if you feel like it, and for whoever has the most "trustworthy" face we currently have). Not sure if it would be better or worse but would be worth a shot. The alternative that we've seemed to settle for is:
1) Those that want power can run
2) To get power you need lots of money so generally you are rich and have rich friends
3) You almost always have to be a part of a major party and toe the party line rather than have independent thought on each of the issues you face
4) Generally you have to be from a "respected" profession (doctor, lawyer, business owner)
These leads to a disproportionate representation of the monied, socially talented, and professional classes in government. Shy people: don't count, poor people, don't count, people with moderate opinions that aren't easily worded as "contrasting" sound bites to distinguish you from your competitor don't get elected etc.
With a large enough body of randomly chosen representatives you get a true cross section of the population, "parties" are represented proportionately, people don't owe favors to the people that got them into power, they aren't coming in necessarily with a "better idea" of how the money should be allocated (usually my business/industry or my special interest friends) and even if they do the chances of having say all the pro-choice guys coming in with the same favors owed to the same groups is much lower, people actually have to discuss issues and think rather than cling to the accepted opinion (even worse in Canada where I'm from where you have a party whip to make sure you vote the right way and can be expelled from your party for voting otherwise).
Ha, he doesn't know how to use the three shells!
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
So you'd prefer insurance company death panels doing it for a profit?
That's why we pay so much more per capita for less health care.
It seems almost all modern countries split up like this, especially ones with a two-party system, but likewise for multi-party systems. The governing coalition has an only marginal lead over those out of power. Roughly speaking, the electorate is split 50/50.
Thesis: all modern industrial democratic populations organize themselves this way, regardless of actual policies, when the potential marginal changes in lifestyle from the various policies are sufficiently small.
But by that definition there is no right either. It might be fair to say that there is no left or right in mainstream American politics anymore. The vast majority pretty much agrees that a police state is what we want, need, and deserve.
The only difference is in verbiage. The two sides flap their lips a bit differently either to appeal to CEOs of giant evil corporations or to jealous angry people who want to more or less get rid of anyone who makes more money than they do.
Democrats: blah, blah, blah, soak the rich, blah, blah, blah.
Republicans: blah, blah, blah, money talks bullshit walks, blah, blah, blah.
Both want life in America to be indistinguishable from that of a one huge prison. With true bipartisan support these efforts have made great strides in the past decade, fast approaching a total transformation into something resembling East Germany.
I can remember when the Democrats represented personal freedom, when they were usually in agreement with Libertarians on social issues. I can also remember when Republicans represented financial freedom and came close to agreeing with Libertarians on financial issues. Both parties have replaced Libertarian ideology with Fascist ideology for the stuff that really matters to them. Both sides have given up fighting for freedom of any kind and have embraced tyranny with open arms and puckered lips.
I suppose that the old Republicans have become Tea Party Republicans, but what happened to the old ACLU Democrats? They seem to have lost any voice in American politics. I sorely miss them. They were valuable allies in the fight for non-monetary individual rights, for civil liberties and personal freedoms. I never did understand why they believed in freedom in their personal lives but championed slavery in their work. Well so long as it isn't actually called 'slavery'. It would also be nice to know why the Republicans wanted to keep the government out of their bank accounts, but welcomed them into their homes, into their bedrooms, into every aspect of their lives not related to money. In any case both sides have finally come to their senses, seen their inconsistency and fixed it by embracing every aspect of government control in their lives.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
You need some work on the proper use of American (you're not your).
That's probably true - but I don't think that one gun constitutes "gun-loving" in the context of the original troll.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Every other european I know also showers everyday.
I could easily believe that every other European showers every day. Of course, that still leaves more than 350,000,000 smelly people.
Sorry. Sometimes it's fun to be a grammar nazi.
Yes, they think that handguns will be an effective weapon against an oppressive regime. If I were a dictatorial leader I could wipe out the handgun threat in a week. Checkpoints, random searches, and summary executions of people found with handguns should make quick work of it - at least in urban areas.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Or IOW you don't actually believe in anything, not in any ideals, at least not ones you are willing to explicitly mention. Or rather, you only believe in the idea that ideology and principles are useless in politics and that endless compromises on top of compromises based on nothing but infighting between special interest groups and poorly thought out knee jerk responses to complex problems are the solution.
I disagree. I think the now failed US experiment proved centuries ago that a society based on a philosophical ideal can grow and prosper for a time, until the corruption of government aggregates and becomes an unstoppable avalanche burying everything under its weight and crushing everything good and noble out of human life.
Where we, and many other societies, are headed feels inevitable, unstoppable. This is where putting one privileged group of people in charge of everyone else always leads. Power corrupts. This we know well. Government, at least one without any real external limits, is like a snowball rolling downhill. It will never limit itself. It exists only to grow and grow. The only way to stop it is to destroy it and start again.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
So basically, if you want to argue from history, if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
The Scots vs the English in the 14-15th centuries?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You'd actually be rising up against a whole lot of average americans who VOTED to put that government in place, and if you think they will take kindly to your attempts to "take your country back", you will have another thing coming.
Not entirely true.
Just start with a politician who says one thing and does another. Gee, that never happens, does it?
Yes, because tactical nukes are often used within a country in a civil war. Why it happened just the other day in "imadethisexampleupistan"
You mean, like the Chinese or Asian people can somehow showcase us the benefits of non-toxic vegetarian diet, since Westerners are not really representative in those areas, at all? Who'd thunk it?
The China Study
http://books.google.no/books?id=KgRR12F0RPAC&hl=no&source=gbs_book_other_versions
Because Asians do eat vegetarian.
I have a feeling you meant English.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As long as cable TV remains there won't be a revolution of "the masses".
Srsly? If the US government is launching nuclear missiles at its own cities, it's already lost. If the military isn't against the state already, it will be when their friends and families are killed by WMDs launched by their employer. OTOH, even if the freedom fighters get hold of a nuke of any decent size, there's not much they can do with it without turning everyone against them, except perhaps use it as a deterrent to attack (which makes for an interesting plot; ask Kenneth W. Royce, although it was just conventional missiles in his book). There is a reason why Rothbard viewed nukes as a separate class of weapon - not merely a different degree, but of kind, due to the indiscriminate damage they do.
As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
As Americans, this is what we have always believed. It is what we stand for. It is the essence of who we are.
Give a man a thought and you have only annoyed him into beating you to a pulp for being a smartass, but teach him how to achieve a perfectly blank mind without even a hint of a thought and to blindly obey authority and to regurgitate the most popular state-sponsored slogans and you have taught him to be an American for a lifetime. But he already knew how not to think and so beat you to a pulp for being an arrogant, know-it-all, smartass.
From a young age we are all taught that our true mission is to give the rest of the world a wedgie and then make loud armpit farting noises at it to demonstrate our inherent superiority. A superiority that only we will ever fully understand. It shall remain forever a mystery to the rest of the planet who just see a bunch of obese, spoiled, angry, retarded, religious fanatics with too many guns and too much time on our hands.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
To be more accurate, coercive power. "Authority" implies some sort of right, or consent, which does not exist.
I'm sure the Syrian rebels with they could agree.
Wish*
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals"...
Modded 5. Oh well /. it's been a good run over 10 years. See ya in another life...
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I have been to China. Never got patted down at the airport. The airport security was slow, inefficent and officious, but not invasive.
Soldiers are trained that they're protecting the people of their country. Police are trained that they're protecting the country from the people.
Which is why the militarization of the police will work out well when the government turns on its people. Police are trained that the "them" in their "us vs them" is any and every citizen. It will be their wet dream come true when they're asked to indiscriminately fire on citizens.
IOW, most soldiers wouldn't turn on citizens but more police would.
This reminds me of a book I read about prisoner's of war in south east Asia in world war 2. US, British and Australian prisoners were taken in large numbers in the early months of the pacific war, and often put in mixed camps. Several anecdotes described the differences between the nationalities of prisoner.
The British prisoners rigidly maintained their military command structure. (perhaps remnants of the class system?)
The American were individualists who were most likely to become the hero or the black marketeer.
The Australians were egalitarian and community orientated (the ill defined Australian value of mateship or helping your mates)
It intrigues me that 3 nations coming from pretty much the same genetic stock and culture can have quite different reactions to the same events. I expect that the 3 nations cultures have converged since WW2.
Interestingly, at least in the horrible conditions of a Japanese world war 2 prisoner of war camp, the Australians had the best rate of survival in mixed camps.
It depends on how you define liberty.
You really don't have much liberty if you're dying horribly because you have no healthcare, are dirt stupid because you suffered no real education, you have no government representation because your democracy is a wholly owned subsidiary of big money. etc.
Liberty is more than the right to own guns, and have Fox News blaring the word "socialism" at a bunch of people who don't have the vaguest idea of what the term means, but have been conditioned to believe it's a really bad thing.
No, I am not accusing the poster of being one of those, but the belief that socialism implies government micromanagement is absurd.
" If the military isn't against the state already, it will be when their friends and families are killed by WMDs launched by their employer."
The corps is mother, the corps is father. Train your soldiers right and all of their friends and family will BE military, and employed by the State.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Beer!
I for one don't get what you're trying to say. But there's a very simple, obvious explanation for this big cultural difference:
Leftism hasn't reached their society yet. Leftism teaches us that we should punish those who are lucky, even if it means we lose money. Obama's answer to one of Charles Gibson's questions in one of the 2008 debates is a perfect example. He said he would raise taxes on the rich even if it meant less revenue for the government, doing it out of fairness.
It would seem such values have to be taught, and this peoples just hasn't been.
The first time I went to England, and got on the Underground, the tube, I noticed a faint, but pervasive, smell of body odor. It was not overwhelming, mind you, but it was there.
Now, either
A: Those who manage the tube don't disinfect or cycle the air in the trains often, or
B: British people don't wash as much.
It wasn't a big deal, but it was certainly there. This was the case every time I rode the underground for the week I was there, and by the end I had just gotten used to it and didn't notice it as much.
I also noticed this when I went to nightclubs in England...a very faint smell of B.O. Dunno why. Not being judgmental...but it was certainly there.
Primitive? Not at all,we have the finest in modern guns. It is our appetite for weaponry that drives the bleeding edge.
Go back to your hut and quit whining.
The Austrian School of economics isn't affected by these results. It depends on a different epistemological foundation.
AKA: something they pulled out of their collective asses and labelled "ice cream".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's different when protesters are serious people than when they are a bunch of dumb kids demanding the "right" that somebody else pays for their college.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
You are either European or, if you are American, you have managed to go through life so far completely misunderstanding the political system you live in. The basic rights are not subject to popular vote. That's the whole point of the US constitution: to prevent the oppression of 49% by 51%.
Btw, I simply commented on the false assumption many people make that the government is so powerful that any notion that freedom to own guns is useless and might as well abandon it. We are still very far from doing what Europeans do on a regular basis due to their system of unlimited government elect a dictatorship for ourselves, and the reason for that is the US constitution, which limits the power of government, including, among other things, specifically denying the government the power to disarm the population.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Americans are often surprised when they travel abroad, and see foreigners walk unconcerned past someone in obvious need of assistance.
Speaking as an American, in my experience the not-my-problem asshole attitude is typical here too, unfortunately.
Americans say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", but the Japanese equivalent is "the nail that sticks up will be hammered back down," which expresses the opposite sentiment.
Individualism may not be particularly common within the entire human population, but it is hardly limited to America; rather is inherent to Western culture (including much of Europe and yes, America).
As someone who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, I'll happily confirm this. A lot of the state is pure redneck territory.
Was it James Carville who said of Pennsylvania "Pittsburgh in the west, Philly in the east, and Kentucky in the middle"?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Secondly, those combat troops would be more likely to join in overthrowing the government than they would be to shoot at American people.
Ah, just like police riot squads would rather shoot tear gas grenades at their fellow officers than at unarmed street protesters?
Soldiers are trained that they're protecting the people of their country. Police are trained that they're protecting the country from the people.
Which is why the militarization of the police will work out well when the government turns on its people. Police are trained that the "them" in their "us vs them" is any and every citizen. It will be their wet dream come true when they're asked to indiscriminately fire on citizens.
IOW, most soldiers wouldn't turn on citizens but more police would.
Ummm... We certainly aren't primitive.
How's that 1000 Gbps Internet working for you? The one that costs $10 a month and has wireless plans that cost less than that? ...
Yup, primitive.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm Australian and I know that the rebellion started with organised militias that were raised to fight the french and native Americans. They were equipped with military muskets and some light artillery. The British regular army forces were very similarly equipped.
I do like the theory that the US revolution was started by Wigs (free market liberals) who were more or less identical to the Wigs party in England, both of who had bases in manufacturing and trading. The Tories (protectionist conservatives at the time) had managed to get the upper hand due to he dynamics of the empire favoring their base, the landed gentry/military through the mid 18th century. Mishandling by the English crown sent most of the Tory US south and moderate centre across to the Revolutionary camp. It is still an relatively very clean and polite war when compared to any since. It looked to me more like a civil war that ended up splitting the British empire into a western and eastern half. Although both sides ended up still having similar mixes of Tories and Wigs in power.
Being English, I think they are saying your Fat
You need some work on the proper use of American (you're not your).
Erm, I believe if you're going to go correcting someone else's grammar, yours should probably be impeccable. Ergo, it should be "you're, not your". Heil.
Wow, you must live a very sheltered existence. I would be flattered if someone said that about me. I don't want to represent the average.
Are you American?
Disclaimer: I am, too. Also flattered about our independent nature. Also undeniably American because I'm flattered by that.
Yes, but what parts of the mind are different by culture, and which are different by genetics, and which are completely the same for all humans? This is the crucial "nature vs. nurture" debate, and nature's taking another blow.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Suppose the US government decides to use nuclear weapons against Americans - who are they going to get to operate the weapons? How many American soldiers would obey such an order?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
So the ragtag band of rebels finds a planet filled with cute little walking talking teddy bears called eWoks (isn't that a cooking device?), who overthrow the most technically sophisticated regime in the universe (complete with black magic and a mad emperor) by using hokum, cute teddy bear weapons. It is kind of like Neanderthals versus the US Army ... and the rock and spear toting Neanderthals win.
That's how Hollywood rebels win.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Wow! You got insightful for beating up strawmen by name-calling and using ALL CAPS! That's quite and accomplishment.
Now how about dealing with your REAL politcal opponents instead of your caricatures.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I figure that must be bash, ksh and what? csh? zsh? ash? Don't keep us in suspense here!
Monad/PowerShell.
For when you want to feel dirty again.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hopefully those sons and daughters of the the American civilian population who are, for the moment, employed as government soldiers.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The GOP leaders lie to us by claiming they'll be responsible by cutting taxes and spending. Sometimes they don't mention cutting spending.
The Democrats promise to raise taxes and give us free stuff or to force businesses to give us free stuff. Sometimes they don't mention raising taxes. Unfortunately the Democrats usually keep their promises, sometimes with Republican help.
So who do I vote for? The party that lies when promising to save the country or the party that honesty promises to destroy the country?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
The roads and schools are socialized too. And they work pretty well.
They do?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Still, I'm not sure how being an honorable person is a bad thing.
You missed the part about it being coincidental with being Southern. On slashdot being Southern is bad, so any trait associated with Southernness is bad too.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"the neoConfederate Tea Party Republicans"
Cool contradiction. It would be weird if they're really were such a thing. It would be like having gay-bashing Log Cabin Democrats!
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Yes, there are many unique things about American culture. But you could say the same thing about pretty much any culture (that's what makes travel so interesting.) What makes America inherently "less average" than any other arbitrary group of people? I could find an "outlier" in just about any population: culture is young/old, independent/ex-colony, western/eastern, rich/crushingly-poor, city-based/rural-based, agrarian/heavy-industry, landlocked/an island, peaceful/war-torn, democracy/despotism, capitalist/socialist/communist, nationalist/regioned, immagrant-heavy/isolationist, etc. How can we even guess if a particular society's "quirk" (vs. most of the rest of the world), and every society is going to have at least one, effects the results?
For example: I could say: "Results from China are going to be suspect because their culture is far older than norms, and the strange mix of Confucianism, Communism, and Capitalism is replicated nowhere else in the world." "Brazil is no good because their relatively recent colonial past has polluted the results vs. what we would expect from an older society, and there's too much variation between rural tribes and the denizens of Rio." You get the idea...
And what use is the "Global Mean" anyway? Even if such a population existed, how much predictive effect would it have for an individual situation?
lol American saying we arn't the world.. must be a crazy one, centric noob Americans.
Psychologists used to use a group of Minnesotans "the Minnesota Normals" to classify behavior as "normal" or not.
A hot woman licking her lips doesn't make you think of Ludevisk? - Pervert.
Well, they abandoned the "Minnesota Normals" years ago. (Come to think of it, the two words don't really go together well.)
But now they tell us that Americans aren't the most accurate global standard either? - How shocking! Who knew?!
I have been to many other coutries and most have free pat downs, but only for flights heading to the US.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Quick question: What was the former occupation of Washington? Logger or Soldier?
The Rebels successfully enlisted very large numbers of existing soldiers. It's easier to capture an armoury when you've got the key.
IMHO part of the problem is many Americans see themselves and the government as separate and opposing things while the government is supposed to be the will of the people. It's been ridiculous on many occasions, but one of the most stupid was both Reagan and Carter declaring they were complete outsiders to government that were going to pull the government into line. I think more recently Romney, once again more of an insider than just about anybody (just like Reagan he ran a State government for a while), pretended not to be part of government at times.
Seeing government as the "other" creates so many stupid "only in America" ridiculous X-Files conspiracy theories which means it's seen as easier to keep a dozen automatic weapons in the gun cupboard and dream of some sanitised bloodless revolution (instead of messy realities like Syria) than it is to talk to your local representative about what is pissing you off.
They're comparing the results of giving $100 to your average American, very few of whom, if any, are so poor that $100 is going to make the difference between life and death with offering several days wages to people who are, in all likelihood living much closer to the edge of survival. Of course the giver is going to be a lot less generous when that money can make a huge difference to his or her family and of course the receiver is going to be much less likely to punish their lack of generosity. For one thing they understand what's going through the other person's mind and for another, the cash they have to give up is of significantly higher value.
This isn't an issue of cultural values, it's an issue of scarcity. People are in general a lot less generous in times of scarcity and simultaneously a lot less likely to "prove a point" under the same circumstances.
Go to the same village and perform the same experiment with something they have a relative plenty of and see what results you get then.
It appears the US is getting it right when the healthcare is to the military and veterans. Why do you think they would fail in the case of delivering healthcare to others?
The problem is you are considering an insurance system with healthcare as a side benefit, which was as big a tweak to your existing insane private insurance run health system as Hillary (and others with a lot of insurance lobby money in their pockets) thought was possible and Obama caved in on after God knows how many months. Remember that Nixon wanted similar even more "socialist" improvements to health care without insurance leeches as well. What you ended up with is what you get when corruption means you can't upset well funded lobby groups a great deal and can't extend the type of health care the military gets to the general population - thus expensive with poor outcomes but putting some money into the right pockets even if it's a bit less than before.
Meanwhile in my country I went to see a doctor this morning and no money changed hands - it comes out of my taxes and the system costs less overall due to less involvement from insurance leeches.
NO, bro! It's sh in its pure form!
given the very low approval rates of both congress, and presidents lately I rather think you're overstating the case significantly
I thought all americans are raised up believing they are the special snowflake? Now some of them get mad when a study tells them they really are!
Someone who might hope to persuade those who operate them not to use them, or to switch sides, or to involve foreign governments. Wars are very political. And, of course, if you make like more dangerous for government servicemen who don't really believe in a cause you can alter the fight/desert/fight for the other side equation.
So think about that the next time you want to "rise up against the government." You'd actually be rising up against a whole lot of average americans who VOTED to put that government in place, and if you think they will take kindly to your attempts to "take your country back", you will have another thing coming.
I do not take too kindly to their attempts to tyrannize me. If they can not stop doing it, what choice do *I* have? Just take it? Am I supposed to die rather than be gay (Alan Turing)? Am I supposed to die rather than keep my guns (wacko from Waco)?
Seriously, unless I am doing something against them, they have no right to do anything against me... and yet they constantly are. If it has to turn nasty like the civil war, then: so. be. it. :(
Give me liberty or give me death (and I already know that you want to give me death rather than my liberty)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I use the three shells where I live on the east coast of America.
I could swear those were a west coast invention and used specifically in the San Angeles metro area... and they would be sorely needed since Taco Bell won the food wars. Are you a migrant? :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I think every one missed the point, Read the title. Its an English person taking the piss.
Uh...I'm only staying on Mars for two weeks, maybe I'll see Quaid at the party.
You should stay longer, I hear the atmosphere there is eye-poppingly refreshing. ;)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
"It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money," says Henrich. "They just didn't understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game."
Thus exposing Americans as spiteful arrogant morons which the are?
People from cultures more attuned to bribery (euphemistically referred to as "gift-giving" in the study) Or, as we call it, "tipping". Tipping (or "gift-giving") is a degrading and corrupting practice. It implies that the receiver is temporarily whoring himself to the tipper.
In business, the bottom line is profit, not some ethical or moral standard. Isn't a person who receives money in exchange for using their skills and talents (whether acquired through education and training or experience) already a whore by definition? How does accepting a tip or a bribe intensify the whorishness of what we are already doing? From the POV of the gifter, it is value given for value received, and I assure you there is more value in a transaction than just the ch-ching of a cash register. Bribery is a cost of doing business, like taxes and license fees, and it is a factor anywhere and everywhere business is conducted. I ostentatiously over-tip to motivate competition among the hired help to ensure I get preferential treatment. I offer "gifts" to people in a position to facilitate my negotiations with potential customers, and happily accept gifts from people who want me to be their customer. Seriously -- how can anything that greases the wheels of commerce be degrading or corrupting?
Actually, it should be "you're" not "your".
Historically, it only takes about 1% of a populace for a concerted civil war resistance. That's all that was involved in the US Civil War.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Nobody who has posted anything of a political nature to Facebook in the past year or so (and seen their 'friends' numbers fluctuate downwards as a result) believes anything otherwise.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
No, what you need is get intelligence agency to covertly orchestrate the overthrow of a democratically elected government (because of mainly oil), install a government that's friendly to yours and Westernization, wait for that country's people to get upset and protest, end up having some of your own citizens trapped in the country under turmoil, then ask your intelligence agency to come in again and secretly sneak your people out of the mess they created.
Now that's a movie you might even win an Oscar for!
Three scientists took the train northwards from England to attend a multi-disciplinary conference in Edinburgh.
Conversation flagged as the journey continued, until some time after crossing the border into Scotland when the social scientist, used to seeing Friesan herds in the south, pointed out some Highland cattle.
"Oh, look", he said, "the cows are brown in Scotland!"
The physicist put down the newspaper and looked out of the window.
"Yes, so I see, but your remark isn't scientific, you know. You can't know that all the cows are brown. What do you think, Bob?"
Bob the mathematician glanced up over his glasses at the grazing cattle.
"Observation shows that, through this window, at least one side of some bullocks in Scotland appears brown".
Moral: question your assumptions.
Yes, seriously. I've read an interview with a former Strategic Air Command B-52 crewman. He said, if they ever had the order to bomb New York, they would do that.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Could the difference be because the amount of money offered was different. The $100 in Peru was "roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages" and $100 in the US might be worth a half day work so in Peru if someone gives you $25 you can take the whole family out to a steak dinner and in the US it's a cheap meal for yourself. I wouldn't offer a stranger a trivial amount of money if I wanted them to accept it. The person giving out the money considers what a decent amount of money someone would be happy to receive is and gives them that amount.
The experiment is invalid because the control variable is not constant.
The revolutionary war was fought against an empire taxing it's citizens to move vast amounts of supplies far distances for no appreciable gain to said citizens. It would be more analogous to our Vietnam war then to any sort of modern "revolution".
Cheap storage VM.
I like your first point. People forget or were never taught the ways that the colonies were militarized due to the frequent Indian Wars. Most American's don't know that the war of 1812 was really fought against Indians to push them westward. They think that it was due to the British grabbing up some of our sailors.
Cheap storage VM.
And many were veterans of multiple Indian Wars. Not to mention our Indian Nation allies.
Cheap storage VM.
Easy access to firearms didn't help the Native American's overcome their lack of access to courts and the general rule of law.
Cheap storage VM.
Tyranny starts with Brownshirts
One kind of tyranny does (if you are defining tyranny as an aggregate gross reduction in the availability of positive and negative freedoms throughout a society). But here's the kink. Brownshirts came from Freikorps-like gangs made up mainly of disaffected, militarised men, many of them ex-army, often independently armed, organised on a local or neighbourhood level, and with a deep antipathy to what they perceived as "leftist" Statism.
Da Blog
Penguin: "Any article in which Americans and penguins are mentioned is an insult to penguins."
Of course, this doesn't mean the information is useless, we just need to tag data with area and time of collection and come up with a proper organization schema. For example, popular fashion is to some extent dictated by the dominant posture of the era, without taking into account causes you cannot compare across time and space.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Or there's me; I love firearms, been trained with many, but I don't currently possess any
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The Americans weren't capturing British armories, they were hiding and defending the armories of their own well organized and drilled militias, and those armories included cannon among their stores. The British regulars were forced back into Boston and then besieged there by regiments of part time soldiers, not a random collection of farmers with hunting rifles.
If you are referring to gun lovers that small is almost a third of the adult population. And that's the legal gun owners. Doesn't include all the gangbangers which would raise it by at least 5-10%. So not so SMALL a group.
Was in Manchester during the late 90's. The B&B we stayed at didn't come with washcloths for the shower. Towels, but no washcloths.
Officially by 32% of the population. But given general distrust of some asshole calling up and going "do you own any guns" you have to figure that number is low by at least 10%
Because given the nature of the US political system any socialized medicince scheme that passed would be as bad as the NHS if not worse.
I assume this is at -1 for Unpleasant Truth?
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the exact same hangups about unpleasant but true speech as all the folks they like to pretend they outsmart.
Tell it, brother!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Or high by 10%... I'd tell that asshole that I have lots of guns, so he'd better not come by.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Reading the replies to my post, I bet you can guess which ones are from the aforementioned, self-proclaimed 'intellectuals.'
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Perhaps people in Europe and the UK who do bathe everyday don't feel the need to wear chemical antiperspirants?
Hell, for that matter, I've ridden the subway and the Path train in NY/NJ many thousands of times, and I've noticed a *strong* smell of BO. And the Path train is noted for being the cleanest mass-transit system in the US!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
As far as gun loving rednecks, that's just a small, overly-vocal part of our community. Every community has the small group of overly vocal nut-jobs that makes them look bad. Hell, yours has you, doesn't it?
Don't forget the holier-than-thou progressives.
"Diverse society is bound to fail" --Putnam.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/
Casteism
This was news to anybody? "Shaking the foundations of psychology and economics"? I highly doubt it.
Doesn't make them much more fit, from what I've seen so far.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Where?
I've been looking for some nice amber to make a present for Mum's 75th. I did her a pendant in jet for her 70th.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The government is American people too!
The roads and schools are socialized too. And they work pretty well.
They do?
When road maintenance is funded instead of being gutted so legislators can give more "tax cuts," yes, the roads work pretty well. The schools are a whole mess of issues, only some of them related to actual education.
It never ceases to amaze me how self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the exact same hangups about unpleasant but true speech as all the folks they like to pretend they outsmart.
It never ceases to amaze me that people complain about the moderation of a post when only half an hour has passed. That's an incredibly small sample size.
Over time, the moderation seems to work decently well, but not instantly.