You know, now I truly appreciate those people who post lengthy excerpts from gay child-porn novels as first posts. Most people mod them down and ignore them, but it's actually a scathing commentary on how crappy the discussion on this site has become.
These gay child-rape porn first AC's that post that stuff are, in essence saying, "You know what? I pay enough attention to/. to be a first poster. But instead of trying to say something good, I'm going to post graphic text describing gay child-rape porn because, no matter what, I bet that the crap that follows will at least equal or exceed the suck of gay child-rape porn. It won't be because it's as offensive, but it'll suck just as hard because nobody bothers to actually comment on the substantial technical aspects of the article in question, and within three posts, you'll be blaming the Neocon-Libertarian Conspiracy and Microsoft for stealing babies and grinding them up for taco meat."
Now, to answer your question it comes to define what means as "good" as Western countries? If by this we mean the culture, then Muslim countries can defend their culture and say that it's not that bad. If we mean by as "good" as, anything measurable like the are production, number of libraries, free press etc. Well, my conclusion is that there is no Muslim country I know of which can say they are doing as well as any Western Europe/North American country.
You know, I've realized something about this discussion: There's a pink elephant in the room here.
All cultures, wherever they are practiced, however they arose, and whatever the overall outcomes of societies practicing those cultures, are truly fascinating. There truly *is* something we can learn from just about every cultural paradigm that exists today, or has existed throughout history.
But the *real* question, is why we are talking about the merits of one culture versus another. As long as a nation governs itself and does not exhibit aggressive or threatening behaviors towards other sovereign nations, there would be no reason to try to objectively evaluate the merits of the outcomes produced by their culture. Given that most people recognize some form of basic human rights, as long as the practice of a given culture did not result in egregious affronts to those commonly held basic rights, there would be no reason to evaluate a culture's relative merit.
My point is this: If Islamic cultures didn't produce so many overtly "bad" outcomes, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
We would be free to simply explore and learn from them, and they from us. Too bad that's not the case, and now, we're actually questioning the absolute value of an undoubtedly rich and intriguing culture. It would be nice if we, the people living on this planet, didn't have to live with, and die for, the sometimes unpleasant and violent consequences of the different cultural systems throughout the world. I wish the whole world could be like one of the "Diversity Fairs" I attended at college, where rich college students of all races and religions came together and played games and performed traditional dance routines and overall had a nice, pleasant evening. (Then went to the frat party and got drunk).
But the reality is that certain cultures practiced today tend to result in death, suffering and poverty, more so than others. Ask a woman whose genitals have been mutilated by Muslims in Africa if she cares that rich, nineteen-year-old black students at USC believe that the same African "culture" is really just a part of the "rich tapestry of human experience," that must be preserved and valued (unlike her genitals). Ask survivors of 9/11 in New York if they care that, despite the fact that their families and friends were murdered by Islamic terrorists, that Islamic culture has "sooo much to teach us!"
We're focusing on the wrong things here. Worrying about the "rich tapestry" of Muslim culture and evaluating its merit is comparable to saying that we should think twice about imprisoning a convicted child rapist because he writes great poetry. Or like defending a habitually absent employee because she does great work when she manages to show up.
You gotta get the big things right (like not blowing up people and things, and torturing and beheading and mutilating) before we can really look at that "rich tapestry of human experience."
All that to say, that I agree with you that Western Europe/North America are more socially advanced than Middle East. But, I don't believe that the violence and ignorance are inherent to Muslim countries.
Good points - I stand corrected on my very one-sided rant. Like you said, Muslims do *not* have a monopoly on religious-based violence in the modern world. But you've indirectly brought up an interesting question:
If some (not you, of course) claim that Islamic nations are just as "good" as Western ones, where are the shining examples of Islamic societies in the world today that are the peers of the leading Western nations?
A belief system might be helpful at one point in social evolution, but unhelpful, even harmful, at a later state
This is an interesting point. Nearly every nation in the world at one point in its history or another has been some sort of theocracy to some degree where religion was used as a tool to govern, a source of law, and even as a source of ruling authority. However, most all of those nations nowadays have largely secular governments, and more (in Europe) even have largely secular populations.
The belief systems in most modern nations have evolved to maintain themselves, more or less, in their optimal form, for what that society needs at that particular time in their history. Religions change through splintering into smaller sects, each representing a more modern interpretation of that religion, and even the largest sects do some evolution on their own - look at Roman Catholicism as a perfect example of this. Overall, in Western nations, the influence of religion has diminished in politics as those nations have progressed from their theocratic (or theocrat-ish) periods. That's just a part of nations "growing up," I guess you could say.
So, why is it that Islamic nations are the only ones who are still struggling with the concept of "secular, national government, with relgion subordinate to the rule of law?" Both Islamic and Christian nations have an analogous belief system. So why, then was one able to evolve into a successful group of nations, and the other to this day, generally live in relative squalor, and are the world's hotspots for violence, genocide, and human rights violations?
My point is, Christianity and Islam are both "belief systems." Christians have just managed to get past running their countries with religion. I'd say that's a pretty huge gap in cultural advancement.
or one society might just be luckier in terms of access to natural resources
This is even more interesting. And which of the two groups of nations is sitting on top of the bulk of the world's readily usable petroleum? I can't think of anything "luckier." Yet, what did most of those nations do? Nationalize their oil industries, allowing those in power alone to profit exclusively from that luck while the rest of their people languished and starved. In addition, they colluded on a national scale through OPEC, further denying access of hydrocarbons they "lucked into" living on top of into the global market in a truly economic manner.
Point is, they *did* have an astounding advantage in natural resources. And they have done a pretty good job of *not* using that to develop "more quickly" than other nations that lack such readily available, vast natural resources (like, I don't know, America). That is suggestive, at least, of their relative inferiority.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales
This sounds like relativistic crap to me. So you believe that there is no way for us to objectively compare outcomes between two societies, ever. Well, I've got to give you credit there; that's one way to defend the clearly inferior society.
You realize, of course, that Krugman is widely considered to be a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Economics?
Argument from Authority. Nice one. Still didn't answer anything I said. NEXT!
Yeah, let the UN take over one piece of internet regulation, and one day you'll wake up to find that Google, Mapquest and Amazon have been redirected to the Secretary General's son's myspace page.
Whoops. Yeah, you're right (about the election part). My bad. But the deal with Brown is that, yeah I know he's the freaking Labour poster-child, but his modern political leanings are really hard to pigeonhole. Based on what I've managed to dig up (when compared to the rest of Europe), he acts like someone who's economically conservative sometimes...
I don't know. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part that the UK can reverse its course down Hayek's famous road...
If you are being arrested/detained, don't you have the absolute, irrefutable right to be told what's going on?
Think about what you said for a second, except put it in the context of a different kind of criminal instead of a clueless naive college student. Let's say a suspected violent rapist is in the middle of being arrested, and he's fiercely resisting. Should the police stop what they're doing until they can explain to rapist why he's being arrested to the rapist's satisfaction? What, do you expect the rapist might, once his suspected crimes have been explained to him, stop and scratch his chin and say, "OMG!! I guess that if you think I've done that, I can totally understand why you'd want to arrest me!"
I can guess that the general direction of this conversation on Slashdot will be mostly about how police are probably evil and how this kid's and our own right are trampled every second, etc., etc. But let me offer a really simple explanation of why he got zapped:
From this article:
"Stop resisting," a female officer demands. "If you let me go, I'll walk out of here," Meyer replies
Once a police officer has his or her hands on you and they're trying to get you to do something or go somewhere, you've managed to do something stupid that's gotten you pretty much past the point of verbally reasoning with them. The simple truth is that he's an idiot for letting it get to that point. I guarantee you there were plenty of points in this situation where he could have changed his behavior that would have prevented him from getting tasered. For example, let's go back to the quote. Why didn't he "I'll walk out of here" BEFORE the police felt the need to physically remove him?
Ding, dong, he's a dumbass. That's why. He acted like the cops were his mommy and daddy and that, no matter how close he got to actually getting spanked, he could whine his way out of it.
What I forgot was to add, "by those who know something about economics."
Your argument-by-condescension deftly proves your point. </sarcasm> (see? I even closed your open tag for you!)
The fatal flaw in economists who support socialist policies like Krugman is that anyone who's taken Econ 101 (and actually understood it) can show them where they're wrong. Krugman is an illogical ideologue who has abandoned actual economic commentary for politically motivated blather and dubious fame.
Want to read real economic commentary from actual economists who actually understand economics and write honestly? Try Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell.
OK, glib pointless answer. Thanks for that. There are people you have to pay to implement this (like the workers who install the foil), and there are actual things you have to purchase or create that are a non-trivial amount of resources.
Your, "Take a fraction of the defense budget!" answer is B.S. If it were that simple, we could simply pay for everything by taking a fraction of the defense budget! Plus, you ignored the real answer. Whatever small percentage of the budget you take, you're taking stuff away from defense. So what do we take? A few thousand pieces of body armor? New uniforms? Cut back on combat pay?
See, you still don't get it. Every penny you use to pay for somebody's pet cause comes from somewhere else, and requires that we *don't* do, or buy, or provide something else. You think that by comparing a relatively small amount to a relatively huge amount that we won't notice that there's a tradeoff.
There is a tradeoff. You chose to ignore it and say that we'd have to give up, "nothing." Bullshit.
Germany is soon becoming a screwed up democracy like the USA.
Sorry, but Germany (and most of Europe for that matter) has been far more screwed up than the US for a long time now. Europe has long been on the socialist pathway to economic ruin and irrelevance.
What's interesting is that there seems to be a reversal of that trend with the elections of Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and Gordon Brown in the UK. Those three are the major ones. In addition, consider all the ex-Soviet nations who are running their nations Reganomically (and having great success so far).
If the western governments continue to assault their people like this, terrorism will only grow in scope and severity. Their war on terror will obviously only generate more of what they are fighting.
This is absurd. If Western governments continue to espouse leftist policy and dogma, people will eventually get sick of them and vote somebody else into office. It's the so-called "governments" of the Middle East that sustain and support global terror. But, hey. If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, right? So, good luck with that, I guess.
Sure, a scanning tunneling EM might be able to read the sides of sectors and get an idea of the charge state of the material, but you have to do it bit by bit
Yeah, if I can remember correctly from a forensic computing presentation we gave to a bunch of high school kids (I obviously didn't give the physical media recovery part), the way it theoretically works is that when the charge of a magnetic domains on a hard disk platter is changed, it's not changed uniformly throughout the entire domain. If you were able to identify a domain that was consistently left unchanged by the drive head (in our example, we used the outermost portion of the domain - say the drive head was aligned so that it acted on the inner portion of each individual track), you could potentially figure out what the last bit written was by looking at it through an EM.
I think that maybe you could also theoretically look at the Bloch walls or something like that. But the real bottom line is that:
1) Is it even possible? I can't find a single example of anyone actually doing this.
2) If possible, who in the world would be able to do it?
3) And, do you really think your secret stash of shemale porno and The Anarchist's Cookbook are that important to them?
4) It's not, so just delete it and move on with your life.
This seems so obvious that it's amazing this is controversial at all.
It's not that it's controversial. All I see is a bunch of arguing about the relative goodness or badness of it. Hey, I think it's a great idea - I like seeing stars, and if you can alter lighting in such a way that I'm not made more susceptible to crime while walking, and that I can actually see better when I'm driving, then I'm all for it!
But nobody is asking the "grownup questions" that are at the core of every good idea, social program, and good intention. Too frequently, they never get asked. Anyway, here they are:
1) How much will it cost?
2) Who's going to pay for it?
3) What will we have to give up in order to get this?
4) Is the tradeoff worth it?
5) What are the higher-order effects, and can we live with them?
The WWII generation is the "greatest generation"... not so much because of doing anything great, but just happening to be alive during a period that certain events happened in the world.
By your own reasoning, everything good you've ever done in your life is just a result of you randomly being in a certain place at a certain time, and acting in ways that you were already predisposed to act. Just like everyone else.
Therefore, nobody is actually capable of doing anything "good," and neither is anyone actually capable of doing true "bad."
Way to distill the experiences of a generation who, as a whole, sacrificed greatly to accomplish much good down to fit into your little bottle of retarded.
Besides, this is not a movie; most military systems (and all if they felt the need) are on a private intranet. While this can be hacked into in theory, if that becomes an issue, we can simply take the stuff offline. Tanks don't need Wi-Fi uplinks to kill people.
Totally agree. Anything essential the military does uses its own private network infrastructure. Chinese script kiddies just can't get to it without some sort of physical intervention that would constitute, oh I don't know, espionage, treason, or act of war. Tanks can definitely use network connectivity to kill people more effectively and in a more coordinated fashion, however.
And besides, this is moot. China does not have to resort to high-tech fantasy tricks to beat us. China has a GDP of 7 trillion dollars, while the US has one of 12 trillion. Their economy is growing at 10% per year, ours grows at 3%. Do the math, in a decade or so, even if Chinese have one 5th the per capita income of the US, they will have a larger GDP.
Totally disagree - what do you think that all that money just goes into a giant pot for the government to use? Even in Communist China, Money does not earn You! (Plus, their per capita GDP (2006) is like $6,000. Ours is like $44,000.) Plus, that's a big assumption you made there, that China's GDP growth will continue for ten years! (And what part of that growth rate is artificially inflated by misreporting? Certainly not zero...)
The problem isn't that China will somehow become some sort of threat - Chinese economic growth helps the world in general, and I'm rooting for them. It's just that as they try to transition into a more-Capitalist global economic player, those old-school USSR-style, "Rutabaga production is up 500,000%, well ahead of target, Comrade!" total bullshit reports will just end up hurting foreign investors and their own people in very real ways.
But I guess, when you compare "having a slow economic year," or "market takes a big hit" to "dragged out back and shot" or "run over by tank," it's not so bad. (Or, I guess that stuff probably still happens...)
These submarines exist for one reason: They exist to kill every human being on earth.
OMG! Somebody should tell the Pentagon about this! It's like Sauron, but... UNDERWATER SAURON!
[8.88, -1.54] My dot was where Milton Friedman's dot was. Woohoo! But I agree with the poster who complained that there wasn't an "I don't give a shit" button, because there were a few questions that I had a few issues with. However, I suspect that's intentional on the part of the test designers to force you to express a preference. Anyway.
Anecdotally speaking, I have a few friends (computer nerds) who claim Libertarianism, but who in reality are safely in the Communism/Anarchism quadrant. The main aspect of their political philosophy, at least for the past few years, has been anti-Republican, not really asserting anything positive. Don't get me wrong. I think the conservatives have been doing stupid things, and I'm as disappointed with them... well, maybe not *that* disappointed, as the next liberal, just for different reasons (you say they don't spend enough on social programs, I think they spend too much, etc.).
A lot of interesting political thought gets buried underneath the avalanche of noise that is our national polarization right now. I've made the mistake of trying to pigeonhole someone based on a few posts into "left" or "right," and have been wrong about it. I've done a lot of, "Well, hs believes X, so he must believe Y," assuming as well, and while that sort of thinking is a little more finely grained than the left/right thing, it *still* isn't 100% correct.
There are a lot of assumptions that go into a political discussion, and I sometimes end up parroting some convenient "party-line" responses about a person and their beliefs, and I've had it happen to me too. Point is, I've found that pigeonholing someone, rather than actually discussing a given issue with them while minimizing your assumptions, generally leads to partisan name-calling and sound-byte regurgitation instead of actual discussion.
Fact. Absolute, 100% uncontrovertible fact.
Actually, I think what you were aiming for is that the only logically defensible belief is that we cannot know if God exists - not that he certainly does, or does not.
By definition, the existence of supernatural beings/forces/whatevers lies outside the realm of things we can prove or disprove using our natural senses and instruments.
Any affirmative claim that God absolutely does *not* exist is just as absurd as claims that God *does* exist.
By the way, it's "incontrovertible," not uncontrovertible.
It seems to me that if you want to crack down on people driving drunk, you're going to need to make sure they have other options readily available
There are plenty of options that don't involve legislation, taxation, or additional government bureaucracy. These can all be done by the individuals who like to go out and drink.
1) Don't drive your car to the club.
2) Have a designated driver.
3) Identify, and use, the closest possible public parking facility and leave your car overnight.
4) Take a cab.
5) Use public transportation (to the club, and probably a cab on the way back).
6) Walk.
7) Get a hotel room nearby.
In addition, without any legal requirement, bars and clubs can provide solutions as an incentive for customers:
1) Offer 2-way cab service (for free!) - one ride home, and another ride back to your car in the morning.
2) Hire a shuttle
3) Work out a deal with a nearby hotel for discount rooms for drunk-folk.
4) Provide said overnight parking.
All of these things are actually being done right now, without big-gubmint telling people what to do. I can probably come up with a lot more alternatives that are economically beneficial that would allow more people to come to my bar/club without the risk of driving drunk.
It's kind of like when someone complains but can't offer a reasonable alternative to whatever it is they're complaining about.
I think that all the things I proposed above are quite reasonable. They just, as you wisely put it in your first post, require a little planning. In addition, there are market-driven solutions that exist today, that provide exactly the sort of solution you propose.
What's not reasonable is to force business owners, taxpayers, and all citizens in general to provide those who choose to go out to the club without properly thinking ahead with ready-made solutions for their irresponsible behavior. More Government is usually the worst of all possible solutions for a given problem.
OK. You sent me the summary for policymakers from the latest IPCC? Hey, where's that nifty hockey-stick graph? I noticed they took that out.
The IPCC Summary for Policymakers is written by government representatives, many representing Kyoto signatories. In other words, they've already signed on to the global economic progress suicide pact, and they sure would like some more company!
The real problem with the environmental-alarmism movement is that their glorious revolution depends on something for which there really just isn't any evidence. I'm not talking about the fact that the world is getting warmer. I'm not talking about the fact that humans are probably causing some of that warming.
I'm talking about the consequences versus the cost of minimizing our impact. The best we've got is An Inconvenient Truth - a pack of lies designed to scare people into action. Some might say that's OK, except for the fact that if nobody knows what will really happen if the earth heats up on average by about 2-3 degrees in the next century, how can we justify intentionally causing millions to starve, freeze, die of preventable disease, and willingly condemn others to abject poverty in the name of preventing some unprovable (but oh-so most very likely, in the language of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers), unknowable potential calamity of unknown magnitude that may or may not happen at some point in the near or perhaps very distant future?
The real question is, if the consequences of global warming are unknown, or at least uncertain, why is this agenda being ram-rodded down our throats as if it's our only hope? This whole debate stinks of politics.
Yes, because land-surface stations are the only source of data.
Of *course* they're not!
We don't have ocean buoys, ... that support your claims:
"Temperature data from scientific buoys scattered across the Pacific Ocean are raising doubts about the validity of one of the most important tools used by scientists to track global climate change. The "lock step" link between sea water temperatures and air temperatures may be less rigid than presently thought, according to data analyzed by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the Hadley Center of the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office. Results of their research are reported in the Jan. 1, 2001, edition of the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters. The supposed link between sea and air temperatures let climate scientists use sea surface temperatures as a "proxy" for air temperature data over large ocean areas for which air temperature data are not available, said Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of UAH's Earth System Science Center."
satellites,
That, according to NASA, support your claims:
"Unlike the surface-based temperatures, global temperature measurements of the Earth's lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño. So the programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth's lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity."
or proxies.
That support your claims:
"Clearly, therefore, it is temperature that is the robust leader in this tightly-coupled relationship, while CO2 is but the humble follower, providing only a fraction (which could well be miniscule) - of the total glacial-to-interglacial temperature change.
This observation does little to inspire confidence in climate-alarmist claims that the CO2 produced by the burning of fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic temperature increases, which predicted warmings, in some of their scenarios, rival those experienced in glacial-to-interglacial transitions. Nevertheless, Siegenthaler et al. stubbornly state that the new findings "do not cast doubt... on the importance of CO2 as a key amplification factor [our italics] of the large observed temperature variations of glacial cycles."
Or maybe you want me to throw out the story about butter, sun sports and the fallacy of correlating two data sets during arbitrary time periods? If you want to be convincing, please quote someone other than McKitrick. He's abused data more than anybody he complains about.
Throw whatever things and stories will make you feel better. You've managed to abuse links (one didn't work, the other two don't support your claims) more than your complaints about my particular abuse of... I don't know. Your tender sensibilities, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, now I truly appreciate those people who post lengthy excerpts from gay child-porn novels as first posts. Most people mod them down and ignore them, but it's actually a scathing commentary on how crappy the discussion on this site has become.
/. to be a first poster. But instead of trying to say something good, I'm going to post graphic text describing gay child-rape porn because, no matter what, I bet that the crap that follows will at least equal or exceed the suck of gay child-rape porn. It won't be because it's as offensive, but it'll suck just as hard because nobody bothers to actually comment on the substantial technical aspects of the article in question, and within three posts, you'll be blaming the Neocon-Libertarian Conspiracy and Microsoft for stealing babies and grinding them up for taco meat."
These gay child-rape porn first AC's that post that stuff are, in essence saying, "You know what? I pay enough attention to
You know, I've realized something about this discussion: There's a pink elephant in the room here.
All cultures, wherever they are practiced, however they arose, and whatever the overall outcomes of societies practicing those cultures, are truly fascinating. There truly *is* something we can learn from just about every cultural paradigm that exists today, or has existed throughout history.
But the *real* question, is why we are talking about the merits of one culture versus another. As long as a nation governs itself and does not exhibit aggressive or threatening behaviors towards other sovereign nations, there would be no reason to try to objectively evaluate the merits of the outcomes produced by their culture. Given that most people recognize some form of basic human rights, as long as the practice of a given culture did not result in egregious affronts to those commonly held basic rights, there would be no reason to evaluate a culture's relative merit.
My point is this: If Islamic cultures didn't produce so many overtly "bad" outcomes, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
We would be free to simply explore and learn from them, and they from us. Too bad that's not the case, and now, we're actually questioning the absolute value of an undoubtedly rich and intriguing culture. It would be nice if we, the people living on this planet, didn't have to live with, and die for, the sometimes unpleasant and violent consequences of the different cultural systems throughout the world. I wish the whole world could be like one of the "Diversity Fairs" I attended at college, where rich college students of all races and religions came together and played games and performed traditional dance routines and overall had a nice, pleasant evening. (Then went to the frat party and got drunk).
But the reality is that certain cultures practiced today tend to result in death, suffering and poverty, more so than others. Ask a woman whose genitals have been mutilated by Muslims in Africa if she cares that rich, nineteen-year-old black students at USC believe that the same African "culture" is really just a part of the "rich tapestry of human experience," that must be preserved and valued (unlike her genitals). Ask survivors of 9/11 in New York if they care that, despite the fact that their families and friends were murdered by Islamic terrorists, that Islamic culture has "sooo much to teach us!"
We're focusing on the wrong things here. Worrying about the "rich tapestry" of Muslim culture and evaluating its merit is comparable to saying that we should think twice about imprisoning a convicted child rapist because he writes great poetry. Or like defending a habitually absent employee because she does great work when she manages to show up.
You gotta get the big things right (like not blowing up people and things, and torturing and beheading and mutilating) before we can really look at that "rich tapestry of human experience."
Good points - I stand corrected on my very one-sided rant. Like you said, Muslims do *not* have a monopoly on religious-based violence in the modern world. But you've indirectly brought up an interesting question:
If some (not you, of course) claim that Islamic nations are just as "good" as Western ones, where are the shining examples of Islamic societies in the world today that are the peers of the leading Western nations?
This is an interesting point. Nearly every nation in the world at one point in its history or another has been some sort of theocracy to some degree where religion was used as a tool to govern, a source of law, and even as a source of ruling authority. However, most all of those nations nowadays have largely secular governments, and more (in Europe) even have largely secular populations. The belief systems in most modern nations have evolved to maintain themselves, more or less, in their optimal form, for what that society needs at that particular time in their history. Religions change through splintering into smaller sects, each representing a more modern interpretation of that religion, and even the largest sects do some evolution on their own - look at Roman Catholicism as a perfect example of this. Overall, in Western nations, the influence of religion has diminished in politics as those nations have progressed from their theocratic (or theocrat-ish) periods. That's just a part of nations "growing up," I guess you could say.
So, why is it that Islamic nations are the only ones who are still struggling with the concept of "secular, national government, with relgion subordinate to the rule of law?" Both Islamic and Christian nations have an analogous belief system. So why, then was one able to evolve into a successful group of nations, and the other to this day, generally live in relative squalor, and are the world's hotspots for violence, genocide, and human rights violations?
My point is, Christianity and Islam are both "belief systems." Christians have just managed to get past running their countries with religion. I'd say that's a pretty huge gap in cultural advancement.
or one society might just be luckier in terms of access to natural resources
This is even more interesting. And which of the two groups of nations is sitting on top of the bulk of the world's readily usable petroleum? I can't think of anything "luckier." Yet, what did most of those nations do? Nationalize their oil industries, allowing those in power alone to profit exclusively from that luck while the rest of their people languished and starved. In addition, they colluded on a national scale through OPEC, further denying access of hydrocarbons they "lucked into" living on top of into the global market in a truly economic manner.
Point is, they *did* have an astounding advantage in natural resources. And they have done a pretty good job of *not* using that to develop "more quickly" than other nations that lack such readily available, vast natural resources (like, I don't know, America). That is suggestive, at least, of their relative inferiority.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales
This sounds like relativistic crap to me. So you believe that there is no way for us to objectively compare outcomes between two societies, ever. Well, I've got to give you credit there; that's one way to defend the clearly inferior society.
Argument from Authority. Nice one. Still didn't answer anything I said. NEXT!
... don't buy AT&T? That sounds like a good solution for those who disagree with their TOS.
Yeah, let the UN take over one piece of internet regulation, and one day you'll wake up to find that Google, Mapquest and Amazon have been redirected to the Secretary General's son's myspace page.
*ducks*
Whoops. Yeah, you're right (about the election part). My bad. But the deal with Brown is that, yeah I know he's the freaking Labour poster-child, but his modern political leanings are really hard to pigeonhole. Based on what I've managed to dig up (when compared to the rest of Europe), he acts like someone who's economically conservative sometimes...
I don't know. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part that the UK can reverse its course down Hayek's famous road...
Think about what you said for a second, except put it in the context of a different kind of criminal instead of a clueless naive college student. Let's say a suspected violent rapist is in the middle of being arrested, and he's fiercely resisting. Should the police stop what they're doing until they can explain to rapist why he's being arrested to the rapist's satisfaction? What, do you expect the rapist might, once his suspected crimes have been explained to him, stop and scratch his chin and say, "OMG!! I guess that if you think I've done that, I can totally understand why you'd want to arrest me!"
I can guess that the general direction of this conversation on Slashdot will be mostly about how police are probably evil and how this kid's and our own right are trampled every second, etc., etc. But let me offer a really simple explanation of why he got zapped:
From this article: "Stop resisting," a female officer demands. "If you let me go, I'll walk out of here," Meyer replies
Once a police officer has his or her hands on you and they're trying to get you to do something or go somewhere, you've managed to do something stupid that's gotten you pretty much past the point of verbally reasoning with them. The simple truth is that he's an idiot for letting it get to that point. I guarantee you there were plenty of points in this situation where he could have changed his behavior that would have prevented him from getting tasered. For example, let's go back to the quote. Why didn't he "I'll walk out of here" BEFORE the police felt the need to physically remove him?
Ding, dong, he's a dumbass. That's why. He acted like the cops were his mommy and daddy and that, no matter how close he got to actually getting spanked, he could whine his way out of it.
Your argument-by-condescension deftly proves your point. </sarcasm> (see? I even closed your open tag for you!)
The fatal flaw in economists who support socialist policies like Krugman is that anyone who's taken Econ 101 (and actually understood it) can show them where they're wrong. Krugman is an illogical ideologue who has abandoned actual economic commentary for politically motivated blather and dubious fame.
Want to read real economic commentary from actual economists who actually understand economics and write honestly? Try Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell.
OK, glib pointless answer. Thanks for that. There are people you have to pay to implement this (like the workers who install the foil), and there are actual things you have to purchase or create that are a non-trivial amount of resources.
Your, "Take a fraction of the defense budget!" answer is B.S. If it were that simple, we could simply pay for everything by taking a fraction of the defense budget! Plus, you ignored the real answer. Whatever small percentage of the budget you take, you're taking stuff away from defense. So what do we take? A few thousand pieces of body armor? New uniforms? Cut back on combat pay?
See, you still don't get it. Every penny you use to pay for somebody's pet cause comes from somewhere else, and requires that we *don't* do, or buy, or provide something else. You think that by comparing a relatively small amount to a relatively huge amount that we won't notice that there's a tradeoff.
There is a tradeoff. You chose to ignore it and say that we'd have to give up, "nothing." Bullshit.
Sorry, but Germany (and most of Europe for that matter) has been far more screwed up than the US for a long time now. Europe has long been on the socialist pathway to economic ruin and irrelevance.
What's interesting is that there seems to be a reversal of that trend with the elections of Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and Gordon Brown in the UK. Those three are the major ones. In addition, consider all the ex-Soviet nations who are running their nations Reganomically (and having great success so far).
If the western governments continue to assault their people like this, terrorism will only grow in scope and severity. Their war on terror will obviously only generate more of what they are fighting.
This is absurd. If Western governments continue to espouse leftist policy and dogma, people will eventually get sick of them and vote somebody else into office. It's the so-called "governments" of the Middle East that sustain and support global terror. But, hey. If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, right? So, good luck with that, I guess.
Yeah, if I can remember correctly from a forensic computing presentation we gave to a bunch of high school kids (I obviously didn't give the physical media recovery part), the way it theoretically works is that when the charge of a magnetic domains on a hard disk platter is changed, it's not changed uniformly throughout the entire domain. If you were able to identify a domain that was consistently left unchanged by the drive head (in our example, we used the outermost portion of the domain - say the drive head was aligned so that it acted on the inner portion of each individual track), you could potentially figure out what the last bit written was by looking at it through an EM.
I think that maybe you could also theoretically look at the Bloch walls or something like that. But the real bottom line is that:
1) Is it even possible? I can't find a single example of anyone actually doing this.
2) If possible, who in the world would be able to do it?
3) And, do you really think your secret stash of shemale porno and The Anarchist's Cookbook are that important to them?
4) It's not, so just delete it and move on with your life.
The DoD standard varies depending on the medium, but I can't find anything that says seven times.
It's not that it's controversial. All I see is a bunch of arguing about the relative goodness or badness of it. Hey, I think it's a great idea - I like seeing stars, and if you can alter lighting in such a way that I'm not made more susceptible to crime while walking, and that I can actually see better when I'm driving, then I'm all for it!
But nobody is asking the "grownup questions" that are at the core of every good idea, social program, and good intention. Too frequently, they never get asked. Anyway, here they are:
1) How much will it cost?
2) Who's going to pay for it?
3) What will we have to give up in order to get this?
4) Is the tradeoff worth it?
5) What are the higher-order effects, and can we live with them?
By your own reasoning, everything good you've ever done in your life is just a result of you randomly being in a certain place at a certain time, and acting in ways that you were already predisposed to act. Just like everyone else.
Therefore, nobody is actually capable of doing anything "good," and neither is anyone actually capable of doing true "bad."
Way to distill the experiences of a generation who, as a whole, sacrificed greatly to accomplish much good down to fit into your little bottle of retarded.
Totally agree. Anything essential the military does uses its own private network infrastructure. Chinese script kiddies just can't get to it without some sort of physical intervention that would constitute, oh I don't know, espionage, treason, or act of war. Tanks can definitely use network connectivity to kill people more effectively and in a more coordinated fashion, however. And besides, this is moot. China does not have to resort to high-tech fantasy tricks to beat us. China has a GDP of 7 trillion dollars, while the US has one of 12 trillion. Their economy is growing at 10% per year, ours grows at 3%. Do the math, in a decade or so, even if Chinese have one 5th the per capita income of the US, they will have a larger GDP.
Totally disagree - what do you think that all that money just goes into a giant pot for the government to use? Even in Communist China, Money does not earn You! (Plus, their per capita GDP (2006) is like $6,000. Ours is like $44,000.) Plus, that's a big assumption you made there, that China's GDP growth will continue for ten years! (And what part of that growth rate is artificially inflated by misreporting? Certainly not zero...)
The problem isn't that China will somehow become some sort of threat - Chinese economic growth helps the world in general, and I'm rooting for them. It's just that as they try to transition into a more-Capitalist global economic player, those old-school USSR-style, "Rutabaga production is up 500,000%, well ahead of target, Comrade!" total bullshit reports will just end up hurting foreign investors and their own people in very real ways.
But I guess, when you compare "having a slow economic year," or "market takes a big hit" to "dragged out back and shot" or "run over by tank," it's not so bad. (Or, I guess that stuff probably still happens...)
OMG! Somebody should tell the Pentagon about this! It's like Sauron, but... UNDERWATER SAURON!
Go cuddle your Bertrand Russell books some more.
[8.88, -1.54] My dot was where Milton Friedman's dot was. Woohoo! But I agree with the poster who complained that there wasn't an "I don't give a shit" button, because there were a few questions that I had a few issues with. However, I suspect that's intentional on the part of the test designers to force you to express a preference. Anyway.
Anecdotally speaking, I have a few friends (computer nerds) who claim Libertarianism, but who in reality are safely in the Communism/Anarchism quadrant. The main aspect of their political philosophy, at least for the past few years, has been anti-Republican, not really asserting anything positive. Don't get me wrong. I think the conservatives have been doing stupid things, and I'm as disappointed with them... well, maybe not *that* disappointed, as the next liberal, just for different reasons (you say they don't spend enough on social programs, I think they spend too much, etc.).
A lot of interesting political thought gets buried underneath the avalanche of noise that is our national polarization right now. I've made the mistake of trying to pigeonhole someone based on a few posts into "left" or "right," and have been wrong about it. I've done a lot of, "Well, hs believes X, so he must believe Y," assuming as well, and while that sort of thinking is a little more finely grained than the left/right thing, it *still* isn't 100% correct.
There are a lot of assumptions that go into a political discussion, and I sometimes end up parroting some convenient "party-line" responses about a person and their beliefs, and I've had it happen to me too. Point is, I've found that pigeonholing someone, rather than actually discussing a given issue with them while minimizing your assumptions, generally leads to partisan name-calling and sound-byte regurgitation instead of actual discussion.
... I would have modded you funny.
Actually, I think what you were aiming for is that the only logically defensible belief is that we cannot know if God exists - not that he certainly does, or does not.
By definition, the existence of supernatural beings/forces/whatevers lies outside the realm of things we can prove or disprove using our natural senses and instruments.
Any affirmative claim that God absolutely does *not* exist is just as absurd as claims that God *does* exist.
By the way, it's "incontrovertible," not uncontrovertible.
So, then if I turn Anonymous Coward in, do I get $6,000, too?
There are plenty of options that don't involve legislation, taxation, or additional government bureaucracy. These can all be done by the individuals who like to go out and drink.
1) Don't drive your car to the club.
2) Have a designated driver.
3) Identify, and use, the closest possible public parking facility and leave your car overnight.
4) Take a cab.
5) Use public transportation (to the club, and probably a cab on the way back).
6) Walk.
7) Get a hotel room nearby.
In addition, without any legal requirement, bars and clubs can provide solutions as an incentive for customers:
1) Offer 2-way cab service (for free!) - one ride home, and another ride back to your car in the morning.
2) Hire a shuttle
3) Work out a deal with a nearby hotel for discount rooms for drunk-folk.
4) Provide said overnight parking.
All of these things are actually being done right now, without big-gubmint telling people what to do. I can probably come up with a lot more alternatives that are economically beneficial that would allow more people to come to my bar/club without the risk of driving drunk.
It's kind of like when someone complains but can't offer a reasonable alternative to whatever it is they're complaining about.
I think that all the things I proposed above are quite reasonable. They just, as you wisely put it in your first post, require a little planning. In addition, there are market-driven solutions that exist today, that provide exactly the sort of solution you propose.
What's not reasonable is to force business owners, taxpayers, and all citizens in general to provide those who choose to go out to the club without properly thinking ahead with ready-made solutions for their irresponsible behavior. More Government is usually the worst of all possible solutions for a given problem.
OK. You sent me the summary for policymakers from the latest IPCC? Hey, where's that nifty hockey-stick graph? I noticed they took that out.
The IPCC Summary for Policymakers is written by government representatives, many representing Kyoto signatories. In other words, they've already signed on to the global economic progress suicide pact, and they sure would like some more company!
The real problem with the environmental-alarmism movement is that their glorious revolution depends on something for which there really just isn't any evidence. I'm not talking about the fact that the world is getting warmer. I'm not talking about the fact that humans are probably causing some of that warming.
I'm talking about the consequences versus the cost of minimizing our impact. The best we've got is An Inconvenient Truth - a pack of lies designed to scare people into action. Some might say that's OK, except for the fact that if nobody knows what will really happen if the earth heats up on average by about 2-3 degrees in the next century, how can we justify intentionally causing millions to starve, freeze, die of preventable disease, and willingly condemn others to abject poverty in the name of preventing some unprovable (but oh-so most very likely, in the language of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers), unknowable potential calamity of unknown magnitude that may or may not happen at some point in the near or perhaps very distant future?
The real question is, if the consequences of global warming are unknown, or at least uncertain, why is this agenda being ram-rodded down our throats as if it's our only hope? This whole debate stinks of politics.
Of *course* they're not!
We don't have ocean buoys,
"Temperature data from scientific buoys scattered across the Pacific Ocean are raising doubts about the validity of one of the most important tools used by scientists to track global climate change. The "lock step" link between sea water temperatures and air temperatures may be less rigid than presently thought, according to data analyzed by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the Hadley Center of the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office. Results of their research are reported in the Jan. 1, 2001, edition of the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters. The supposed link between sea and air temperatures let climate scientists use sea surface temperatures as a "proxy" for air temperature data over large ocean areas for which air temperature data are not available, said Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of UAH's Earth System Science Center."
satellites,
That, according to NASA, support your claims:
"Unlike the surface-based temperatures, global temperature measurements of the Earth's lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño. So the programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth's lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity."
or proxies.
That support your claims:
"Clearly, therefore, it is temperature that is the robust leader in this tightly-coupled relationship, while CO2 is but the humble follower, providing only a fraction (which could well be miniscule) - of the total glacial-to-interglacial temperature change.
This observation does little to inspire confidence in climate-alarmist claims that the CO2 produced by the burning of fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic temperature increases, which predicted warmings, in some of their scenarios, rival those experienced in glacial-to-interglacial transitions. Nevertheless, Siegenthaler et al. stubbornly state that the new findings "do not cast doubt
Or maybe you want me to throw out the story about butter, sun sports and the fallacy of correlating two data sets during arbitrary time periods? If you want to be convincing, please quote someone other than McKitrick. He's abused data more than anybody he complains about.
Throw whatever things and stories will make you feel better. You've managed to abuse links (one didn't work, the other two don't support your claims) more than your complaints about my particular abuse of... I don't know. Your tender sensibilities, or something.