I looked repeatedly at the behavior of the guy with the camera/RPG thing in the film, including after they circled around the building again, right before they blasted him. It seems to me that the helicopter guy was justified in firing, even if it was actually a camera. Blasting the van seemed unjustified to me, but I don't have the same history of experience as those guys.
I'll try to explain what I mean by simple, though I'm not optimistic about my ability to communicate this, and it may be more than you're interested in....
Based on their comments afterwards, the people in the chopper enjoyed the killing. It wasn't just something they did because they had to. Of course, pretty much all men enjoy killing. To explain that we could spin arguments about natural selection, or whatever. And a person might argue that given that men have to kill, they might as well enjoy their work and be good at it. There's no point in being all emotionally conflicted about something that's unavoidable.
Some people pretend that they don't enjoy killing, and when confronted with that fact they twist away from it, changing the subject to the various other arguments about why its necessary or justified. Speaking for myself, a part of me derives pleasure from cruelty. Looking at other people's behavior, it seems inescapable that most other people do also, even if they don't want to see it.
Suppose a person looks at themselves and says, all justifications and rationalizations aside, am I who I want to be? Do I want to lust for blood, and enjoy squashing other people who I view as contemptible? Do I like being this, yes or no? This is the question that I'm saying is simple. If the answer is yes, then fine, the world will provide ample enough opportunity for that, and for whatever consequences may follow.
Suppose the answer is 'no', and its a stronger 'no' than it was previously for the individual asking the question. Looking out at the world again, all the reasons and explanations for why we must kill don't look entirely the same as they did previously. To some extent we were doing it because we wanted to, and many of the reasons were rationalizations, not entirely in proportion to what was really necessary. Furthermore, a lot of it wasn't really very effective at accomplishing the goals that we were ostensibly after.
Of course, if we're wrong about what is "really necessary", and more aggression really is necessary, then nature will correct our error by killing us off. But this is always the case no matter what our choice is.
Thanks. I can see why people aren't going to agree on that video. There was an RPG earlier, but there was no hint of a weapon or threat when they blasted the van that showed up. Whether a person thinks that destroying the van was justified or not is going to depend on their politics and personality.
That there is warming may be your position. But that is not the position of the people being discussed.
It is the position of the science I was defending when I made the post that started the discussion of global warming. I already agreed, very clearly and multiple times, that climate change study is corrupted by politics, in the manner and direction that you describe. But it is not corrupted so utterly that no scientific conclusions can be drawn at all. Read some scientific papers, ignoring everything that is compromised by incompetent or biased use of models and statistics, and see what is left. There is something left. My point was that the politically minded will use the existence of political bias in the field of climate change to dismiss any scientific results they find politically objectionable, irrespective of the scientific merits of those results. Your largely accurate characterization of your "Global Warming Theory" political foes does not alter what I was talking about.
I will stand by the claim that the Bush actions and lies are several orders of magnitude above the Clinton actions and lies in their effect and damage.
I don't have a quarrel with that. I voted for Clinton, and would have picked my words differently had I anticipated that they would come across as partisan.
I wasn't trying to draw a moral equivalency between the two lies, just trying to say that the motivation and form of the rationalization was in some regards similar. I didn't adequately explain what I meant by this though.
Many thousands of people are dead simply because a few people were trying to stay gainfully employed to support their families?
Not a few people, hundreds of thousands of people, and millions to a much lesser extent. The President and his cabinet make all their decisions based on information and advice passed up from the bureaucracies below them. Its not as if Bush and Cheney got together and cooked the whole conspiracy up by themselves. The CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and lots of supporting organizations below those were all culpable. The President obviously bears a lot of responsibility, since he has the last word, but his power is nothing like what most demonizers of Obama or Bush appear to think it is. Consider Obama as an example. How much has his approach to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really deviated from the direction Bush was heading? Afghanistan is not a bloody war as wars go, but in terms of ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, its bad. Had the US not gone to war in Iraq, there would still have been the problem of maintaining troops in the 'holy land' of Saudi Arabia, which was a motivation for the jihadis, and the never-ending Iraq no-flight-zone enforcement. The current situation is likely worse, but its not as if most critics of the war had a plan for addressing those other real issues. And Afghanistan would still be a mess.
The whole concept of 'weapons of mass destruction', which I'm sure Bush didn't invent, even though he approved it, was always bullshit. Chemical weapons just aren't at all in the same class as nuclear weapons, and its either stupid or dishonest to lump them together like they're the same. I supported the invasion of Iraq though, even though I was fully aware of this at the time and never cared about the WMD angle.
I am truly sorry if this comes off as offensive as I think it does but if you believe there would be mass suffering from unemployment if we did not bomb the shit out of Iraq and that was the basis for the lies that resulted in many thousands losing their lives then you are seriously deluded.
I'm not offended by your honest perception of me, based on the information you have. I'm offended by the thinking that produced the wars. But if you think I'm deluded, I think you might not realize how big the military-industrial complex is, or how much it drives policy. If you're an engineer living in Maryland, Virginia, and parts of Ohio, there isn't much to do for a living besides the fear business. Its a huge, huge industry. The cold war went away, but now we have the war on terror, or homeland security, or whatever its being called now. And yes, if Obama were to shut it down to what I would consider to be a reasonable size, it would affect the unemployment figures to a politically disasterous extent.
As a U.S. citizen I found Clinton's actions and lies embarrassing, but the lies from Bush transferred billions, if not trillions, of public funds into the hands of a few and resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people.
It has been argued that Clinton had Serbia bombed and blew up an aspirin factory in Africa largely for domestic political reasons, including diverting attention from the sex scandal. I'll happily grant you that Bush was worse than Clinton though, since its arguably true, and it wasn't the point I was trying to make. I also thought that Gringrich's conduct, trying to impeach Clinton while simultaneously being in an affair with an intern himself, was also worse than what Clinton did.
Comparing lies about a blow job to lies resulting in debt and death is absurdity on a grand scale.
Yes, I'm not arguing for government action to address global warming. I also see it as a power grab. I'm sorry I wasn't clear. It seems you're trying to have an argument with me as if I'm taking a position that I'm not taking. But political motivations aside, if you look at the science, there is warming. And the scientific arguments are often dismissed based on the political dimension, rather than on the grounds of scientific merit, which was my whole point.
Clarification: It looks like some of you took my reference to geocentrists and hollow earth believers to be a deliberate jab at people who believe in God or don't believe Al Gore. I didn't mean it that way. I really do know hollow earth believers, and have had arguments with them as recently as two weeks ago, so it was kind of on my radar. Their view appears crazy to most people, but it looks rational in their world, based on their assumptions about the untrustworthiness of mainstream science. And they really do make a lot of the same arguments as are made in those other categories.
Also I didn't mean to imply that people like Dawkins or Al Gore don't also engage in the same kind of behavior. They do.
With retrospect my comment was trollish, but it wasn't intentional.
Ha ha, its all about the contract. A Freudian slip for you too!
Yes, I agree there's a lot of that among climate scientists. My judgment is that its worse among their opponents. But that's kind of a hard call to make, because of the way the sensationalists on both sides tend to get amplified. In my experience, what most scientists really think is rarely quite what they are portrayed as thinking.
I agree. Though Bushes' lying was built out of a lot of smaller lies by people in the government and corporate organizations below him. At that level, its more about doing what they need to do 'for their families', i.e., staying gainfully employed, which is more akin to the Clinton kind of lie.
I agree. And yes, global warming alarmists and militant atheists are that way also, including a lot of anti-creationists. It wasn't meant to be a complete list.
Its true that global warming alarmism has more to do with politics and obtaining grant money than with science. I've said that elsewhere. If its only the 'catstrophe science' that you have a problem with, then we're in complete agreement.
That's not where most of the ostensibly anti-'catastrophe science' people are coming from though. They now admit warming as a tactical matter, but for a long time persisted in denying it completely. They shift their arguments around in whatever way seems to best justify their own behavior and goals. In that regard debating them is almost exactly like arguing with those other people I lumped them in with. (Who all agree that the earth is round by the way.) In particular they point to the fallibility of the scientific process, and twist that observation to imply something greater than the observation merits, which was my point.
If you're not one of those people, then I don't mean you, and I should have been clearer.
Yes, but of course its only a matter of time until global warming deniers, creationists, geocentrists, and/or hollow earth believers hijack this discussion and use it as grounds to dismiss every objectional fact that's ever been established.
I agree. Though its not lying with the Clintonesque definition of lying that most people use. Its more lying my omission, distorting the meaning of the results by not putting them in their complete context. At least that's how it is with the papers I've read and known enough about to have an educated opinion on. Although the misrepresentation is usually at least partially intentional, I don't think its all intentional.
Ha ha, enjoy the moment. 'That go guy' managed to get a scene inserted in the new TRON movie. What was the last cool movie you got into? Blade Runner? And a movie chess scene is always a display of raw intellectual strength, as opposed to a zen-like power to master nature.
In US, area codes and prefixes aren't even remotely random. A town may have one area code and only a handfull of prefixes, so if your contacts are local than the probability of an ambiguity would be very high. That's the significance of the number reversal.
In the part of ATK I worked for, all of our money came from the government, from taxes of course, and we squandered most of it. We were not keeping the country running, we were almost wholly parisitic.
Those are 'the rich' he was talking about, and those are the kind I've encountered in my life. If you've dealt with constructive, productive rich people, in your life as a non-American, then I'm happy for your experince. It doesn't make the other side of the picture unreal though.
Yes. People hide their own dishonesty from themselves though, pushing away and obscuring the results so that it looks like something else. Give almost anyone the opportunity, and they'll be a tyrant. On the other hand, maybe it's too much to expect for people to resist the temptation. Other countries that like to congratulate themselves for being less evil than America are sometimes mistaking virtue for differing circumstances I think.
I think probably some geeks make good teachers. Many do not, either because they're too egotistical to reach out to all personality types, or because they get bored out of their minds after a couple of years. Kids aren't just blank slates that get ruined by bad teachers. Its hard for a teacher not to get worn down by all the apathy. Also the pay is insanely bad for the first few years, until you climb the ladder. Even if you're not motivated at all by money, you still need enough to support your family. It doesn't really work unless you don't have kids, or you manage to stick with it for many years without the boredom and disillusionment getting to you.
My wife successfully sued a part of the DHS for failing to process her background check within the time period required by law. There was no discrimination or anything else like that, just a paperwork backlog. I agree that in the present circumstance a lawsuit would be unlikely to be successful, but I think "You can't sue the DHS....except in very limited circumstances" might be misleading as a generalization.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked repeatedly at the behavior of the guy with the camera/RPG thing in the film, including after they circled around the building again, right before they blasted him. It seems to me that the helicopter guy was justified in firing, even if it was actually a camera. Blasting the van seemed unjustified to me, but I don't have the same history of experience as those guys.
I'll try to explain what I mean by simple, though I'm not optimistic about my ability to communicate this, and it may be more than you're interested in....
Based on their comments afterwards, the people in the chopper enjoyed the killing. It wasn't just something they did because they had to. Of course, pretty much all men enjoy killing. To explain that we could spin arguments about natural selection, or whatever. And a person might argue that given that men have to kill, they might as well enjoy their work and be good at it. There's no point in being all emotionally conflicted about something that's unavoidable.
Some people pretend that they don't enjoy killing, and when confronted with that fact they twist away from it, changing the subject to the various other arguments about why its necessary or justified. Speaking for myself, a part of me derives pleasure from cruelty. Looking at other people's behavior, it seems inescapable that most other people do also, even if they don't want to see it.
Suppose a person looks at themselves and says, all justifications and rationalizations aside, am I who I want to be? Do I want to lust for blood, and enjoy squashing other people who I view as contemptible? Do I like being this, yes or no? This is the question that I'm saying is simple. If the answer is yes, then fine, the world will provide ample enough opportunity for that, and for whatever consequences may follow.
Suppose the answer is 'no', and its a stronger 'no' than it was previously for the individual asking the question. Looking out at the world again, all the reasons and explanations for why we must kill don't look entirely the same as they did previously. To some extent we were doing it because we wanted to, and many of the reasons were rationalizations, not entirely in proportion to what was really necessary. Furthermore, a lot of it wasn't really very effective at accomplishing the goals that we were ostensibly after.
Of course, if we're wrong about what is "really necessary", and more aggression really is necessary, then nature will correct our error by killing us off. But this is always the case no matter what our choice is.
My opinion is that the issue may be simpler than it seems, but I'm unlikely to change anyone's mind by arguing about it.
Thanks. I can see why people aren't going to agree on that video. There was an RPG earlier, but there was no hint of a weapon or threat when they blasted the van that showed up. Whether a person thinks that destroying the van was justified or not is going to depend on their politics and personality.
I'd be interested in seeing a link to that.
That there is warming may be your position. But that is not the position of the people being discussed.
It is the position of the science I was defending when I made the post that started the discussion of global warming. I already agreed, very clearly and multiple times, that climate change study is corrupted by politics, in the manner and direction that you describe. But it is not corrupted so utterly that no scientific conclusions can be drawn at all. Read some scientific papers, ignoring everything that is compromised by incompetent or biased use of models and statistics, and see what is left. There is something left. My point was that the politically minded will use the existence of political bias in the field of climate change to dismiss any scientific results they find politically objectionable, irrespective of the scientific merits of those results. Your largely accurate characterization of your "Global Warming Theory" political foes does not alter what I was talking about.
I will stand by the claim that the Bush actions and lies are several orders of magnitude above the Clinton actions and lies in their effect and damage.
I don't have a quarrel with that. I voted for Clinton, and would have picked my words differently had I anticipated that they would come across as partisan.
Are you serious?
I wasn't trying to draw a moral equivalency between the two lies, just trying to say that the motivation and form of the rationalization was in some regards similar. I didn't adequately explain what I meant by this though.
Many thousands of people are dead simply because a few people were trying to stay gainfully employed to support their families?
Not a few people, hundreds of thousands of people, and millions to a much lesser extent. The President and his cabinet make all their decisions based on information and advice passed up from the bureaucracies below them. Its not as if Bush and Cheney got together and cooked the whole conspiracy up by themselves. The CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and lots of supporting organizations below those were all culpable. The President obviously bears a lot of responsibility, since he has the last word, but his power is nothing like what most demonizers of Obama or Bush appear to think it is. Consider Obama as an example. How much has his approach to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really deviated from the direction Bush was heading? Afghanistan is not a bloody war as wars go, but in terms of ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, its bad. Had the US not gone to war in Iraq, there would still have been the problem of maintaining troops in the 'holy land' of Saudi Arabia, which was a motivation for the jihadis, and the never-ending Iraq no-flight-zone enforcement. The current situation is likely worse, but its not as if most critics of the war had a plan for addressing those other real issues. And Afghanistan would still be a mess.
The whole concept of 'weapons of mass destruction', which I'm sure Bush didn't invent, even though he approved it, was always bullshit. Chemical weapons just aren't at all in the same class as nuclear weapons, and its either stupid or dishonest to lump them together like they're the same. I supported the invasion of Iraq though, even though I was fully aware of this at the time and never cared about the WMD angle.
I am truly sorry if this comes off as
offensive as I think it does but if you believe there would be mass suffering from unemployment if we did not bomb the shit out of Iraq and that was the basis for the lies that resulted in many thousands losing their lives then you are seriously deluded.
I'm not offended by your honest perception of me, based on the information you have. I'm offended by the thinking that produced the wars. But if you think I'm deluded, I think you might not realize how big the military-industrial complex is, or how much it drives policy. If you're an engineer living in Maryland, Virginia, and parts of Ohio, there isn't much to do for a living besides the fear business. Its a huge, huge industry. The cold war went away, but now we have the war on terror, or homeland security, or whatever its being called now. And yes, if Obama were to shut it down to what I would consider to be a reasonable size, it would affect the unemployment figures to a politically disasterous extent.
As a U.S. citizen I found Clinton's actions and lies embarrassing, but the lies from Bush transferred billions, if not trillions, of public funds into the hands of a few and resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people.
It has been argued that Clinton had Serbia bombed and blew up an aspirin factory in Africa largely for domestic political reasons, including diverting attention from the sex scandal. I'll happily grant you that Bush was worse than Clinton though, since its arguably true, and it wasn't the point I was trying to make. I also thought that Gringrich's conduct, trying to impeach Clinton while simultaneously being in an affair with an intern himself, was also worse than what Clinton did.
Comparing lies about a blow job to lies resulting in debt and death is absurdity on a grand scale.
Yes, I'm not arguing for government action to address global warming. I also see it as a power grab. I'm sorry I wasn't clear. It seems you're trying to have an argument with me as if I'm taking a position that I'm not taking. But political motivations aside, if you look at the science, there is warming. And the scientific arguments are often dismissed based on the political dimension, rather than on the grounds of scientific merit, which was my whole point.
Yes, it looks like I failed basic reading comprehension. And counting to 7.
Funny, in a sad kind of way, that I got modded up for that, but just got modded a troll for making a perfectly reasonable comment on another thread.
Clarification: It looks like some of you took my reference to geocentrists and hollow earth believers to be a deliberate jab at people who believe in God or don't believe Al Gore. I didn't mean it that way. I really do know hollow earth believers, and have had arguments with them as recently as two weeks ago, so it was kind of on my radar. Their view appears crazy to most people, but it looks rational in their world, based on their assumptions about the untrustworthiness of mainstream science. And they really do make a lot of the same arguments as are made in those other categories.
Also I didn't mean to imply that people like Dawkins or Al Gore don't also engage in the same kind of behavior. They do.
With retrospect my comment was trollish, but it wasn't intentional.
Ha ha, its all about the contract. A Freudian slip for you too!
Yes, I agree there's a lot of that among climate scientists. My judgment is that its worse among their opponents. But that's kind of a hard call to make, because of the way the sensationalists on both sides tend to get amplified. In my experience, what most scientists really think is rarely quite what they are portrayed as thinking.
I agree. Though Bushes' lying was built out of a lot of smaller lies by people in the government and corporate organizations below him. At that level, its more about doing what they need to do 'for their families', i.e., staying gainfully employed, which is more akin to the Clinton kind of lie.
I agree. And yes, global warming alarmists and militant atheists are that way also, including a lot of anti-creationists. It wasn't meant to be a complete list.
Its true that global warming alarmism has more to do with politics and obtaining grant money than with science. I've said that elsewhere. If its only the 'catstrophe science' that you have a problem with, then we're in complete agreement.
That's not where most of the ostensibly anti-'catastrophe science' people are coming from though. They now admit warming as a tactical matter, but for a long time persisted in denying it completely. They shift their arguments around in whatever way seems to best justify their own behavior and goals. In that regard debating them is almost exactly like arguing with those other people I lumped them in with. (Who all agree that the earth is round by the way.) In particular they point to the fallibility of the scientific process, and twist that observation to imply something greater than the observation merits, which was my point.
If you're not one of those people, then I don't mean you, and I should have been clearer.
Yes, but of course its only a matter of time until global warming deniers, creationists, geocentrists, and/or hollow earth believers hijack this discussion and use it as grounds to dismiss every objectional fact that's ever been established.
my omission
^my^by
Freudian substitution there. I'll have to look at that :)
I agree. Though its not lying with the Clintonesque definition of lying that most people use. Its more lying my omission, distorting the meaning of the results by not putting them in their complete context. At least that's how it is with the papers I've read and known enough about to have an educated opinion on. Although the misrepresentation is usually at least partially intentional, I don't think its all intentional.
This is like saying that real numbers are political and not mathematical because of the funny way that infinities are defined and handled.
Ha ha, enjoy the moment. 'That go guy' managed to get a scene inserted in the new TRON movie. What was the last cool movie you got into? Blade Runner? And a movie chess scene is always a display of raw intellectual strength, as opposed to a zen-like power to master nature.
In US, area codes and prefixes aren't even remotely random. A town may have one area code and only a handfull of prefixes, so if your contacts are local than the probability of an ambiguity would be very high. That's the significance of the number reversal.
Being able to build words is important in my opinion. In English we're doing the same thing with vowel-less acronymns, and it's a mess.
In the part of ATK I worked for, all of our money came from the government, from taxes of course, and we squandered most of it. We were not keeping the country running, we were almost wholly parisitic.
Those are 'the rich' he was talking about, and those are the kind I've encountered in my life. If you've dealt with constructive, productive rich people, in your life as a non-American, then I'm happy for your experince. It doesn't make the other side of the picture unreal though.
Yes. People hide their own dishonesty from themselves though, pushing away and obscuring the results so that it looks like something else. Give almost anyone the opportunity, and they'll be a tyrant. On the other hand, maybe it's too much to expect for people to resist the temptation. Other countries that like to congratulate themselves for being less evil than America are sometimes mistaking virtue for differing circumstances I think.
I think probably some geeks make good teachers. Many do not, either because they're too egotistical to reach out to all personality types, or because they get bored out of their minds after a couple of years. Kids aren't just blank slates that get ruined by bad teachers. Its hard for a teacher not to get worn down by all the apathy. Also the pay is insanely bad for the first few years, until you climb the ladder. Even if you're not motivated at all by money, you still need enough to support your family. It doesn't really work unless you don't have kids, or you manage to stick with it for many years without the boredom and disillusionment getting to you.
My wife successfully sued a part of the DHS for failing to process her background check within the time period required by law. There was no discrimination or anything else like that, just a paperwork backlog. I agree that in the present circumstance a lawsuit would be unlikely to be successful, but I think "You can't sue the DHS....except in very limited circumstances" might be misleading as a generalization.