Why? How do you know it's morally superior to be educated?
You know how to be a dick.
Who defines what a "dick" is? How do you know that definition is correct? Nietzsche was an atheist; he also denied that it was possible to be a "dick" at all. Does your education extend to studying and refuting the moral theories of Nietzsche?
Try not to be the dick you know you can be.
What's wrong with being a "dick"? How do you know it's wrong? Do you ever wonder if what you think of as being a "dick" is just social conditioning, based on unspoken cultural assumptions about the nature of a god whose existence you deny?
Simple but opens a lot up to personal interpretation.
That's exactly where you lose me. I'm not so much interested in your personal interpretation of right and wrong. I'm more curious as to why you think morality is universal, applicable to everybody. It sounds more like an arbitrary set of rules that you decided to live your life by, for personal reasons, rather than a sober analysis of any true measure of morality.
You cant make a valid argument when you are a shill.
Sure you can, if the arguments are valid.
Besides, you can't run a successful oil company without a strong grounding in the applied sciences. There's plenty of scientists and engineers working for Exxon, who get the science right every day, not because they're shills, but because Exxon loses billions of dollars if the science is wrong.
So where's your evidence that this guy is a shill, and not a competent scientist? (Hint: Motive is not evidence.)
These are marginal regions, on the very edge of viability. They're regions that generally get badly hurt any time there's even a slight change in the environment. Hell, "submerged" is already the natural state of the Netherlands. Just because some clever monkeys figured out how to live on dry land below sea level for a few hundred years, that in now way means they're entitled to a global climate that makes it permanently possible. Nor are they entitled to expect the rest of us to tailor our civilizations to accomodate their clever living arrangement.
And I just thought I'd point out that the massive ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are sitting on top of continental crust, i.e. not displacing their equivalent mass in seawater. If those ice sheets melt, sea level will rise.
And in the second paragraph of the very post you replied to, the author points out that the Antarctic ice cap, far from melting, has grown in recent times.
Google didn't provide the information. The OP used Google to find sites that provided the information.
You could use Google to find the same or similar sites, and decide for yourself how trustworthy they are.
Remember, Google can help you find sites that tell you facts like: Man landed on the moon. Bigfoot is fake. Man landed on the moon and found no evidence of invisible buildings. Etc.
First, I never said that the U.S. is more trustworthy than France.
Rather, I said that France and the U.S. are in the same category of nuclear trustworthiness, and that Iran is not.
Second, my basis for categorizing the three nations this way was that while the U.S. did use dire weapons in a dire time, the U.S. promptly never used such weapons again; and that while France maintains a nuclear arsenal, and even recently tested a nuclear weapon (more recently than any nuclear weapon tests carried out by the U.S.), even France hasn't used such a weapon in anger. Likewise several other nations, etc.
Third, most of the existing nuclear arsenals have a right and proper place in the theory of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent to major conflict. During the Cold War, the world's nuclear arsenals were controlled by committees of powerful old men with a vested interest in the status quo. Thus, they were never used, nor were they ever meant to be used. Instead of a violent conflict between the superpowers, we had proxy wars in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. And the "space race". All in all, not a bad outcome, considering the alternatives.
But the consensus seems to be no confidence that the Iranian regime will adhere to the doctrine of MAD-as-deterrent, and that the regime will refrain from reselling its nuclear arsenal to terrorists.
The question is not "why does the U.S. get to have nukes but Iran doesn't?"
Rather, the question is "why doesn't anybody complain when France gets nukes, but everybody complains when Iran gets nukes?" (Hint: No hypocrisy or double standards are involved.)
No. They just don't want us to turn them into a bunch of Devout Christians
Which makes them totally paranoid and delusional, on account of America not even being able to turn Americans into Devout Christians.
Oh, and insecure, too, if they think their creed can't even stand up to something as corrupt and uninspiring as American Christianity.
or, worse yet, a bunch of dead Muslims.
From the daily bombing report on Iraq, that I get from NPR, I've formed the impression that they're doing an excellent job of this themselves, with little help from American forces.
On a slightly different note, if the U.S. wanted to kill off a ton of Iranians, Iran would be a rather large collection of craters right now. The fact is, nobody was talking seriously about killing a bunch of Iranians until they started talking seriously about building nuclear weapons. It's like they're trying to win the consolation prize in the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Sweepstakes.
I don't think it's a question of "fairness" as it is a question of "trust".
The U.S. has had a nuclear arsenal for over fifty years, and it's been about that long since the U.S. has detonated a nuclear weapon in anger.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for quite some time, and has never detonated one in anger.
France has recently tested a nuclear weapon, but has never used one against an enemy. Nor has Britain, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan.
And if we thought for a minute that North Korea and Iran would follow in this tradition of having nuclear weapons but not using them...
But apparently some believe it would be really neat if Iran acquired the real ultimate power in its region, free from outside influences and coercion. Personally, I can't really think of any scenario where Iranians, Arabs in general, or the world as a whole would be better off if Iran had nukes. They might be better off if the U.S. butted out of the Middle East, but the two things aren't necessarily related. And in fact, I think the two things together would be disastrous... Of course, if Iran had nukes and the U.S. didn't butt out, that would be disastrous, too.
Which leads me back to the conclusion that Iran just shouldn't have nukes, as a matter of cold pragmatism, free of any romantic notions of "fair".
I think the two main reasons that we often don't understand ancient technology is because the records of the technology were probably pretty sparse to begin with, and we just don't do things that way any more.
Since ancient times, however, our record-keeping has become astoundingly prolific. Instead of just one library, that burned down, there are hundreds of thousands of libraries around the world, any one of which is likely to have all the references you need to understand the basis of all our current technology (not to mention the basis for most of the technological and historical points of interest over the past several hundred years). So finding explanations for our present technology shouldn't be nearly as hard for furture archaeologists as finding explanations for past technology is hard for present archaeologists.
And unless future archaeologists have stopped transmitting electrical energy through metal wires to do work, the purpose of our microcircuitry should be intuitively obvious, even without the much stronger chain of historical records connecting their world to ours.
Now, the future post-apocalyptic cavemen, several generations removed from the first survivors of the machine-zombie-space alien conquest, will probably think of our microcircuitry as jewelry, but whether that's because they don't understand the original purpose or because they simply cannot use it for its original purpose, remains to be seen.
You got me thinking about how much more complex and nuanced the American psyche is: the whole thing goes way deeper than "Americans hate Bush". In fact, they go way deeper than my own description, which is only slightly less simplistic than yours.
Others, however, think that French material support has been weak and inconsequential (a kind of passive-aggressive ploy, perhaps, to undermine American policy while providing a convenient PR smokescreen), and that French official rhetoric and policy has consistently been at odds with American official rhetoric and policy.
Personally, I think that whatever the merits of their case, I doubt the French government is making that case out of true friendship, but rather out of French self-interest (whatever that may be). I also happen to think the same about British support for American policy. I think this is the basis of the American perception of "friendship" with the British, but not with the French: The perception that British self-interests tend to line up favorably with American self-interest, whereas French self interest... not so much.
Spelling flames, grammar flames, condescending parsing of unmeaningless phrases just wastes everyones time.
Just your time is being wasted, I think. The rest of us probably consider discovering the delicious irony of your bothering to reply as time well spent.
As a European myself I have to say that's only because the American public hates Bush.
As an American myself, I have to say you have no idea. Just for starters, roughly half of all Americans hate Bush because he's too conservative, and the other half hate him because he's not conservative enough.
Thus, Tony Blair can trivially have more influence over roughly half of all Americans than Bush does, simply by supporting or opposing Bush on alternate days of the month.
And I got a little carried away in my response. I agree that it's good to take lots of factors into account. I guess I just believe that for the Revolutionary War period, Americans are giving both the British and French policies exactly the weight they deserve today.
You do realize that the French system of government has changed several times since they gave us help during the Revolutionary War, right?
In fact, the France of that time period was ruled by a king, who gave us help during the Revolutionary war. Considering that the help didn't even come from a democracy representing the people of France of that time, exactly how much credit should we give their descendents today for that help?
I mean, let's take a slightly broader view of history, for just a moment.
During the Revolutionary War, England was ruled by a king, and its government oppressed Americans. Since then, its regime has changed. Now it's ruled by a democratic parliament, and its government and people are generally friendly towards Americans. Americans generally give the British people credit for their friendship.
During the Revolutionary War, France was ruled by a king, and its government helped Americans. Since then, its regime has changed. Now it's ruled by a democratic parliament, and its government and people are generally unfriendly to Americans. Americans generally give the French people credit for their unfriendship.
It's not that we've forgotten what the French did for us during the Revolutionary War. It's that we've also remembered what they've done for us lately.
By your logic, we should always hate the British for what they did during the Revolutionary war. And we should never forgive the Germans for Nazism and the Holocaust. And of course the Swedes will always be nothing more than big jerks, on account of the whole Viking thing.
You should read the histories of the Apollo and Gemini projects.
There's never been a manned space flight that didn't have all kinds of problems, from minor glitches to major catastrophes.
There's always a fuse blowing, a cable not wired correctly, a setting reversed, etc.
Sometimes it's really minor stuff, like having a switch break and toggling it with the tip of a pen.
Sometimes it's a major catastrophe, like losing all your fuel, power, and life support consumables in a fuel tank explosion.
Sometimes it's something in between, like having your spacecraft struck by lightning--twice!--immediately after launch, shutting down all of your electronics until you can find the controls to reset all your systems.
Sometimes the entire spacecraft goes up in flames. Other times, the launch gets delayed a few hours.
But there's never been a mission that didn't have problems all along the way.
Once you realize this, and understand why, I guarantee NASA will once again rise in your esteem, higher than it ever was before.
I think that the private companies who do contract work to NASA's specifications do so because they like being paid to do cutting-edge research, rather than having to raise the funding themselves.
Working for NASA, they can get a huge R&D budget for some new technological advance that may or may not pay off.
If it does pay off, the private companies take what they've learned from the NASA project and apply it to their own commericial endeavors.
And if it doesn't pay off, hey, at least it wasn't their shareholder's money being spent.
In this way, NASA promotes technological innovation in fields where there's not much profit motive to start with. And quite often, the results turn out to be profitable and beneficial after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? How do you know it's morally superior to be educated?
Who defines what a "dick" is? How do you know that definition is correct? Nietzsche was an atheist; he also denied that it was possible to be a "dick" at all. Does your education extend to studying and refuting the moral theories of Nietzsche?
What's wrong with being a "dick"? How do you know it's wrong? Do you ever wonder if what you think of as being a "dick" is just social conditioning, based on unspoken cultural assumptions about the nature of a god whose existence you deny?
That's exactly where you lose me. I'm not so much interested in your personal interpretation of right and wrong. I'm more curious as to why you think morality is universal, applicable to everybody. It sounds more like an arbitrary set of rules that you decided to live your life by, for personal reasons, rather than a sober analysis of any true measure of morality.
How do you know the sum is unreasonable?
And can we safely assume that your professional opinions in the service of your employer are not only wrong, but lying by choice?
That's good to hear. Which models are these?
Sure you can, if the arguments are valid.
Besides, you can't run a successful oil company without a strong grounding in the applied sciences. There's plenty of scientists and engineers working for Exxon, who get the science right every day, not because they're shills, but because Exxon loses billions of dollars if the science is wrong.
So where's your evidence that this guy is a shill, and not a competent scientist? (Hint: Motive is not evidence.)
If you're an atheist, where does your moral obligation come from?
These are marginal regions, on the very edge of viability. They're regions that generally get badly hurt any time there's even a slight change in the environment. Hell, "submerged" is already the natural state of the Netherlands. Just because some clever monkeys figured out how to live on dry land below sea level for a few hundred years, that in now way means they're entitled to a global climate that makes it permanently possible. Nor are they entitled to expect the rest of us to tailor our civilizations to accomodate their clever living arrangement.
And in the second paragraph of the very post you replied to, the author points out that the Antarctic ice cap, far from melting, has grown in recent times.
Google didn't provide the information. The OP used Google to find sites that provided the information.
You could use Google to find the same or similar sites, and decide for yourself how trustworthy they are.
Remember, Google can help you find sites that tell you facts like:
Man landed on the moon.
Bigfoot is fake.
Man landed on the moon and found no evidence of invisible buildings.
Etc.
Nah, she just has it set to "vibrate".
First, I never said that the U.S. is more trustworthy than France.
Rather, I said that France and the U.S. are in the same category of nuclear trustworthiness, and that Iran is not.
Second, my basis for categorizing the three nations this way was that while the U.S. did use dire weapons in a dire time, the U.S. promptly never used such weapons again; and that while France maintains a nuclear arsenal, and even recently tested a nuclear weapon (more recently than any nuclear weapon tests carried out by the U.S.), even France hasn't used such a weapon in anger. Likewise several other nations, etc.
Third, most of the existing nuclear arsenals have a right and proper place in the theory of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent to major conflict. During the Cold War, the world's nuclear arsenals were controlled by committees of powerful old men with a vested interest in the status quo. Thus, they were never used, nor were they ever meant to be used. Instead of a violent conflict between the superpowers, we had proxy wars in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. And the "space race". All in all, not a bad outcome, considering the alternatives.
But the consensus seems to be no confidence that the Iranian regime will adhere to the doctrine of MAD-as-deterrent, and that the regime will refrain from reselling its nuclear arsenal to terrorists.
The question is not "why does the U.S. get to have nukes but Iran doesn't?"
Rather, the question is "why doesn't anybody complain when France gets nukes, but everybody complains when Iran gets nukes?" (Hint: No hypocrisy or double standards are involved.)
Which makes them totally paranoid and delusional, on account of America not even being able to turn Americans into Devout Christians.
Oh, and insecure, too, if they think their creed can't even stand up to something as corrupt and uninspiring as American Christianity.
From the daily bombing report on Iraq, that I get from NPR, I've formed the impression that they're doing an excellent job of this themselves, with little help from American forces.
On a slightly different note, if the U.S. wanted to kill off a ton of Iranians, Iran would be a rather large collection of craters right now. The fact is, nobody was talking seriously about killing a bunch of Iranians until they started talking seriously about building nuclear weapons. It's like they're trying to win the consolation prize in the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Sweepstakes.
I don't think it's a question of "fairness" as it is a question of "trust".
The U.S. has had a nuclear arsenal for over fifty years, and it's been about that long since the U.S. has detonated a nuclear weapon in anger.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for quite some time, and has never detonated one in anger.
France has recently tested a nuclear weapon, but has never used one against an enemy. Nor has Britain, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan.
And if we thought for a minute that North Korea and Iran would follow in this tradition of having nuclear weapons but not using them...
But apparently some believe it would be really neat if Iran acquired the real ultimate power in its region, free from outside influences and coercion. Personally, I can't really think of any scenario where Iranians, Arabs in general, or the world as a whole would be better off if Iran had nukes. They might be better off if the U.S. butted out of the Middle East, but the two things aren't necessarily related. And in fact, I think the two things together would be disastrous... Of course, if Iran had nukes and the U.S. didn't butt out, that would be disastrous, too.
Which leads me back to the conclusion that Iran just shouldn't have nukes, as a matter of cold pragmatism, free of any romantic notions of "fair".
Or a police force.
Sooner or later, everyone wakes up dead.
The question is, do you wake up from a dream of sitting around posting banalities on Slashdot, or do you wake up from a dream of exploring the moon?
Obviously I'm one of the former types, but I have no objections to anybody waking up dead from the latter dream.
I think the two main reasons that we often don't understand ancient technology is because the records of the technology were probably pretty sparse to begin with, and we just don't do things that way any more.
Since ancient times, however, our record-keeping has become astoundingly prolific. Instead of just one library, that burned down, there are hundreds of thousands of libraries around the world, any one of which is likely to have all the references you need to understand the basis of all our current technology (not to mention the basis for most of the technological and historical points of interest over the past several hundred years). So finding explanations for our present technology shouldn't be nearly as hard for furture archaeologists as finding explanations for past technology is hard for present archaeologists.
And unless future archaeologists have stopped transmitting electrical energy through metal wires to do work, the purpose of our microcircuitry should be intuitively obvious, even without the much stronger chain of historical records connecting their world to ours.
Now, the future post-apocalyptic cavemen, several generations removed from the first survivors of the machine-zombie-space alien conquest, will probably think of our microcircuitry as jewelry, but whether that's because they don't understand the original purpose or because they simply cannot use it for its original purpose, remains to be seen.
Heh.
You got me thinking about how much more complex and nuanced the American psyche is: the whole thing goes way deeper than "Americans hate Bush". In fact, they go way deeper than my own description, which is only slightly less simplistic than yours.
You make some excellent points.
Others, however, think that French material support has been weak and inconsequential (a kind of passive-aggressive ploy, perhaps, to undermine American policy while providing a convenient PR smokescreen), and that French official rhetoric and policy has consistently been at odds with American official rhetoric and policy.
Personally, I think that whatever the merits of their case, I doubt the French government is making that case out of true friendship, but rather out of French self-interest (whatever that may be). I also happen to think the same about British support for American policy. I think this is the basis of the American perception of "friendship" with the British, but not with the French: The perception that British self-interests tend to line up favorably with American self-interest, whereas French self interest... not so much.
Just your time is being wasted, I think. The rest of us probably consider discovering the delicious irony of your bothering to reply as time well spent.
Actually, I think this describes pretty much every human organization ever.
Key fact: whenever humans attempt something, they do a less than ideal job of it.
As an American myself, I have to say you have no idea. Just for starters, roughly half of all Americans hate Bush because he's too conservative, and the other half hate him because he's not conservative enough.
Thus, Tony Blair can trivially have more influence over roughly half of all Americans than Bush does, simply by supporting or opposing Bush on alternate days of the month.
Deliciously ironic, in fact.
And I got a little carried away in my response. I agree that it's good to take lots of factors into account. I guess I just believe that for the Revolutionary War period, Americans are giving both the British and French policies exactly the weight they deserve today.
Working for the people is serious business. The office should damn well get some respect.
Otherwise, what message are you sending? "We citizens don't take the office seriously."
You do realize that the French system of government has changed several times since they gave us help during the Revolutionary War, right?
In fact, the France of that time period was ruled by a king, who gave us help during the Revolutionary war. Considering that the help didn't even come from a democracy representing the people of France of that time, exactly how much credit should we give their descendents today for that help?
I mean, let's take a slightly broader view of history, for just a moment.
During the Revolutionary War, England was ruled by a king, and its government oppressed Americans. Since then, its regime has changed. Now it's ruled by a democratic parliament, and its government and people are generally friendly towards Americans. Americans generally give the British people credit for their friendship.
During the Revolutionary War, France was ruled by a king, and its government helped Americans. Since then, its regime has changed. Now it's ruled by a democratic parliament, and its government and people are generally unfriendly to Americans. Americans generally give the French people credit for their unfriendship.
It's not that we've forgotten what the French did for us during the Revolutionary War. It's that we've also remembered what they've done for us lately.
By your logic, we should always hate the British for what they did during the Revolutionary war. And we should never forgive the Germans for Nazism and the Holocaust. And of course the Swedes will always be nothing more than big jerks, on account of the whole Viking thing.
You should read the histories of the Apollo and Gemini projects.
There's never been a manned space flight that didn't have all kinds of problems, from minor glitches to major catastrophes.
There's always a fuse blowing, a cable not wired correctly, a setting reversed, etc.
Sometimes it's really minor stuff, like having a switch break and toggling it with the tip of a pen.
Sometimes it's a major catastrophe, like losing all your fuel, power, and life support consumables in a fuel tank explosion.
Sometimes it's something in between, like having your spacecraft struck by lightning--twice!--immediately after launch, shutting down all of your electronics until you can find the controls to reset all your systems.
Sometimes the entire spacecraft goes up in flames. Other times, the launch gets delayed a few hours.
But there's never been a mission that didn't have problems all along the way.
Once you realize this, and understand why, I guarantee NASA will once again rise in your esteem, higher than it ever was before.
I think that the private companies who do contract work to NASA's specifications do so because they like being paid to do cutting-edge research, rather than having to raise the funding themselves.
Working for NASA, they can get a huge R&D budget for some new technological advance that may or may not pay off.
If it does pay off, the private companies take what they've learned from the NASA project and apply it to their own commericial endeavors.
And if it doesn't pay off, hey, at least it wasn't their shareholder's money being spent.
In this way, NASA promotes technological innovation in fields where there's not much profit motive to start with. And quite often, the results turn out to be profitable and beneficial after all.