"She is but 14 years old" "And younger than her are happy mothers made"
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette.
That's Renaissance England - and it remained common until the early 20th century. The REAL reason it changed was World War 1- with most of the young men gone to war for several years, women had to take over the work-force and do so without many potential suitors around.
>And since when do two wrongs make a right? It doesn't - it was wrong when Christians did it, it was wrong when Pagans did it, it was wrong when Muslims did.
>Tu quoque is such a transparent line of reasoning...
It's only Tu quoque is you claim it excuses something - it's not Tu Quoque if you point out that this was the historical context - failing to view historical events through the lens of historical context is GUARANTEED to give you stupid answers.
>Also, check your history knowledge - in the 1st half of the 7th century, a large portion of Europe wasn't Christian in the first place
I was reffering specifically TO the parts that WERE - and also pointed out that these REMAINED Christians standards all the way up to the early 20th century !
>The majority, in fact, if I recall correctly.
I doubt this. The first Christian king of Poland was crowned in the 7th century.
>Uhm you might want to look at the causes of these incidents. Typical Muslim reaction - try to eradicate non muslims then complain that they fight back!
Funny how you ignored the Anders Breivik example - suffice to say I think that these - like ALL wars have no innocent parties, both sides have equal share in the atrocity. Why would I have a Muslim reaction ? I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a Christian either - I'm a completely neutral observer here, so accusing me of bias is rather silly.
That said - if Christians are "fighting back" that violates a tenet of their religion. Aren't they supposed to "love their enemy" and "turn the other cheek" ? Funny how throughout history and to this day they all seem to revert to "eye for an eye" whenever they have a way to claim an eye.
Point: there is no such thing as a non-violent religion. Islamophobia is not rational because a phobia, by definition, is not rational.
>The obvious problem (unless you are one of those Muslims who think that anything that has ever been done by a non-Muslim at any time in history should be permitted for Muslims today) is that Muslims are still carrying out brutal attacks, raping women, etc today. Just ask the Hindus in Pakistan about the 'religion of peace'.
Christians are still doing that today as well. Ask the non-Christians in Nigeria, Sudan and Algiers a little about the religion of universal-brotherly-love. Hell even in Europe you still see atrocities committed by people fueled by their Christian beliefs. Remember the Olso shootings a few years ago ? Man grabbed a gun and shot 12 kids because they were liberals and as a Christian he believed he ought to fight (literally) against liberalism !
You can't judge a religion on the actions of extremists. I live in a majority Muslim city - and I have never experienced any violence from a Muslim, indeed they are the most law-abiding demographic in this city.
>Before that a Vatican minion (and creationist) seeded the big bang theory,... and we believed him.
But for that one - he offered compelling scientific arguments. Even so it was largely discounted by science for several more decades (scientists hate singularities) and it wasn't until Hawking's work in the 1960's that the big bang started gaining serious credibility among scientists.
>but the pedophilia, brutal killings, etc. are all spot on.
Perhaps - but hardly unique - exactly the same things were happening as standard fair in Europe among Christians at the same time. Hell Christianity would keep it up for at least the next 400 years - average marriage age for women didn't go past 16 until the early 20th century and age-of-consent laws weren't passed anywhere until well after that.
So whether it's true or not- it says absolutely NOTHING about Islam. There is nothing in there about Muhammed that wasn't also true of Richard the Lionhearted.
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
I was responding to the statement:
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
>That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted. The other data-set is what happens to the 20% of cultures where there are survivors. These cultures are frequently destroyed, their mortality rate gets much worse and they live in poverty - pulled into a world where they have no money and no knowledge of how to acquire it and money (rather than the skills they spent ten thousand years perfecting) is the requisite tool for acquiring the means to live.
In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.
You're conflating the decline in those populations that survive with the over-all mortality rate - but the paper clearly differentiates these. That decline is among those tribes that do not all die out within months of first-contact, and they represent only 20% of tribes contacted. This actually correlates almost exactly with what epidemiology would predict. Introducing a new pathogen into a population group (most of these tribes would be the same genetic ethnicity - they differ culturally not biologically) we
>None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct
In the context of this research - and the discussion (I actually RTFA) it DOES not mean that, it means extinct as in dead. Every single member of those tribes - DEAD. Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
The research differentiates between cultural destruction (which you may or may not approve of) an extinction of the people and gives numbers for both -that 80% is the ones where EVERYBODY DIES.
>Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?
Wait, hold on a second - from that long list of reasons - which one exactly is *worse* than GOING COMPLETELY EXTINCT ?
>Any animations are a series of discrete steps, you *might* add blurring but they are damned well still discrete steps! And this being on a monitor we can even guarantee the minimum length of each discrete step. They CAN'T be less than the width of one pixel.
>You can will yourself to take a different worldview, but you don't have a choice in what direction you end up in:)
I wouldn't go *that* far. One man drives past a shanty town and thinks "This is terrible - how can we change the world so people wouldn't have to live like this" - another thinks "This is terrible, just how stupid and lazy to people have to be to choose to live like this rather than earn a better life ?"
Exactly the same experience - two completely different judgements, and two completely different lessons learned. All because one of them chose to be empathic and compassionate while the other was aloof and self-aggrandizing.
By analogy - we don't get to choose which classes we'll have to attend, but we get to choose *what* we learn from them.
>It is entirely possible for two intelligent, reasonable people to "learn" and come to different conclusions.
Yes. This does not contradict what I said. Somebody said it was difficult to impossible to change your worldview - I said it is an inevitable consequence of learning. I said nothing about which worldview you start off with or which one you adopt as you learn or where on the line you happen to be when you finally die - that can be pretty unique - I just said that worldviews change when people learn. Anybody whose worldview has NOT had some pretty rapid changes during the course of their life has not been learning anything. Me - I was a libertarian in my early 20's - today I would describe myself as an anarcho-socialist who, in the absence of a libertarian system of legislation to participate in vote liberal because I consider civil liberties far more important than economics and therefore I cannot vote for a party that panders to the religious right. I can't understand how libertarians can vote republican - they agree with neither party fully, but what they hate about the democrats is surely infinitely less important (economics) than what they dislike about the republicans (civil liberties erosion to please the religious right).
Today - I despise libertarians, 14 years ago I WAS one. A lot of people I know who were liberals then became conservatives later, a lot of conservatives became liberals.
The point stands: as people learn they change their world-views, often very radically. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, how it changes is determined by their experiences and what they personally value (I would rather be broke and starving than not be allowed to... well do ALL the things the religious right want banned - many people would apparently rather lose freedom of speech than risk a drop in the value of their portfolio). I never said they would conclude the same thing- you argued against it but I said nothing of the kind. All I said was: changing world views is easy, not hard.
>Using the IRS to target political speech they disagree with. I agree with all your other examples but on this one - the blame belongs with the reps -it was *they* who started and still continue to push for "profiling". Now the reps profile on race, religion and stuff like that - the dems were actually a notch less evil with their profiling. While the reps were profiling based on things which are either completely uncontrollable (like race) or specifically protected by the constitution (like religion) the dems merely profiled as "like to have cheated on taxes" people and organisations who have PUBLICLY declared their dislike for taxes and their support for ideologies that seeks the abolition of taxation (and frequently encourages tax-cheating to help bring that about).
That's akin to if the reps were arguing that when a rapper sings about his love for weed that's probably cause to get a search warrant (as opposed to "if you're black we get to search your car for weed and if you wear a hajib we get to assume you're a muslim and search you car for bombs because reasons". It's still evil - but it's a lot LESS evil than what the reps continue to do and support in the same vein.
>No, but the Center for Disease Control thinks that vaccination rates (with the notable exception of Hib3 (whatever that is)) have been constant or increasing for the last two decades (as long as they've been keeping records).
You don't need a percentile change to have a problem - you just need a small decrease in vaccination (much less than one percent) to send herd immunity down the well.
>If what is wanted to be done is kicking sick troops out of their beds for new blankets every day or two
And why would they do that? By this point Europeans had largely discovered concepts like quarantine and it was standard practice in hospitals that when somebody died from smallpox the bedding they had used while ill should be burned (the germ theory of disease may not have taken hold much yet but even the old miasma theory supported this practise). Basic quarantine developed during the black death years and were extensively improved by the time of American colonization.
All the military had to do was use the blankets that would otherwise have been burned *anyway*.
"There is nothing, no act of cruelty and torture and maiming ever contemplated by the worst sociopaths that can't be gleefully repeated by an average family man just doing his job and following orders. He who knows this, knows all he needs to know to rule the world" - Terry Pratchett "Small gods".
And we see the truth of this around us all the time - we see it in business and we see it in politics and in the military (just go look at the personality profiles of the Abu Ghraib soldiers - just average, friendly well-liked family minded people, a run-of-the-mill girl with a happy smile whose friends spoke of her incredible generosity - now remembered for all time as a torturer and near-rapist).
When the number a decade ago was near-zero - 175 is massive, because it predicts that this years number will be much higher, it's the beginning of the breakdown of herd immunity.
Are you actually suggesting the the antivaxer (sorry, that's not politically correct - I mean the "pro-disease") movement has had zero impact on vaccination rates ? This should be news to the medical fraternity - you better inform them !
So - simply separate legal liabilities (such as lawsuits or fines) from other liabilities. You can retain the (possibly legitimate) reason for limited liability without having to create a get-out-of-jail-free card for corporate criminality. Or -better yet - allow certain classes of civil disputes to be escalated to criminal trials of the offenders with jailtime as a real risk.
Of course, just why it would suddenly go up a the same time vaccination rates are at such a massive low that we're dealing with major outbreaks of formerly all but eradicated diseases I'm not sure but I'm certain that you could understand if you had her PHD (Pretty Hump of Distraction).
Are these mutually exclusive concepts in your book ?
>Well, you can think that all you want, but that's not how arguments or reasoning work. Actually, yes, that is exactly how they work. The burden of evidence is on the extraordinary claim - which is, in this case, that none of the massive changes in our society over the past decades could possibly cause the event to have a different outcome than it had before.
>Economics is quite clear: automation generally improves the standard of living and makes society better off, No it isn't. That's just not true. What would be a true statement is: "Economics is quite clear that up until now automation has generally improved the standard of living and made society better off and has not hitherto caused mass unemployment".
Anything beyond that is unproven, untestable and unscientific and no economist worthy of his degree would dare say it (so what does that tell you about those who might ?)
I gave you no less than two examples of aspects of the context which may very well cause the outcome this time to be different - your unwillingness to consider even the possibility that they may change the outcome is narrow-minded to say the least.
>If you want to convince people that a theory that has been empirically tested time and time again doesn't apply this time, You don't seem to know how economics work - this is not a theory and it hasn't been tested. Economics is not "science" in the classic sense of the word - to quote economist Stephen Levit - economics is more a form of a mathematical engineering that develops tools used to identify trends from large sets of data which can be used to draw useful conclusions. But these trends are contextual. Change the context - and the trend MUST change as well. Good economics must consider all the aspects of the historical context on the event - it cannot just assume that the trend will apply.
> you need to come up with some pretty good reasons and data. So far, you're only handwaving. No I don't actually since I am not questioning the theory at all - I'm telling you that you don't know what the theory actually says.
Its a bit like this - you perform an experiment in a lab, you get a certain result, but you cannot be assured that outside the lab in an uncontrolled setting the result would be replicated because there are so many factors which may interfere - even the cat knocking over the beaker could prevent the reaction you were expecting from happening. An experiment is considered repeatable if another lab under the same controlled circumstances can get the same result - there's no requirement for the result to happen in all circumstances, all the time. What you are doing is to ignore the "lab conditions" of the theory. The theory accounts for what was observed over the 19th and 20th centuries - in the industrial context of the time. It does not and cannot predict that the same thing will happen in all contexts all the time - not least because the "lab" here is the entire human race and everything that impacts them and their behaviour and responses - something which is most certainly not a constant.
As it happens the theory is limited to national observations not international ones (no such theory exists that speaks for internationally) so the ease of modern day international trade along with it's side effects like outsourcing massively changes the dynamic (in the Cartesian meaning of the term - what I have described using the layman's term "context") and may very well cause the outcome to change.
Slashdot Mirror
"She is but 14 years old"
"And younger than her are happy mothers made"
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette.
That's Renaissance England - and it remained common until the early 20th century. The REAL reason it changed was World War 1- with most of the young men gone to war for several years, women had to take over the work-force and do so without many potential suitors around.
>And since when do two wrongs make a right?
It doesn't - it was wrong when Christians did it, it was wrong when Pagans did it, it was wrong when Muslims did.
>Tu quoque is such a transparent line of reasoning...
It's only Tu quoque is you claim it excuses something - it's not Tu Quoque if you point out that this was the historical context - failing to view historical events through the lens of historical context is GUARANTEED to give you stupid answers.
>Also, check your history knowledge - in the 1st half of the 7th century, a large portion of Europe wasn't Christian in the first place
I was reffering specifically TO the parts that WERE - and also pointed out that these REMAINED Christians standards all the way up to the early 20th century !
>The majority, in fact, if I recall correctly.
I doubt this. The first Christian king of Poland was crowned in the 7th century.
>Uhm you might want to look at the causes of these incidents. Typical Muslim reaction - try to eradicate non muslims then complain that they fight back!
Funny how you ignored the Anders Breivik example - suffice to say I think that these - like ALL wars have no innocent parties, both sides have equal share in the atrocity.
Why would I have a Muslim reaction ? I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a Christian either - I'm a completely neutral observer here, so accusing me of bias is rather silly.
That said - if Christians are "fighting back" that violates a tenet of their religion. Aren't they supposed to "love their enemy" and "turn the other cheek" ?
Funny how throughout history and to this day they all seem to revert to "eye for an eye" whenever they have a way to claim an eye.
Point: there is no such thing as a non-violent religion. Islamophobia is not rational because a phobia, by definition, is not rational.
>The obvious problem (unless you are one of those Muslims who think that anything that has ever been done by a non-Muslim at any time in history should be permitted for Muslims today) is that Muslims are still carrying out brutal attacks, raping women, etc today. Just ask the Hindus in Pakistan about the 'religion of peace'.
Christians are still doing that today as well. Ask the non-Christians in Nigeria, Sudan and Algiers a little about the religion of universal-brotherly-love.
Hell even in Europe you still see atrocities committed by people fueled by their Christian beliefs. Remember the Olso shootings a few years ago ? Man grabbed a gun and shot 12 kids because they were liberals and as a Christian he believed he ought to fight (literally) against liberalism !
You can't judge a religion on the actions of extremists. I live in a majority Muslim city - and I have never experienced any violence from a Muslim, indeed they are the most law-abiding demographic in this city.
>Before that a Vatican minion (and creationist) seeded the big bang theory, ... and we believed him.
But for that one - he offered compelling scientific arguments. Even so it was largely discounted by science for several more decades (scientists hate singularities) and it wasn't until Hawking's work in the 1960's that the big bang started gaining serious credibility among scientists.
>but the pedophilia, brutal killings, etc. are all spot on.
Perhaps - but hardly unique - exactly the same things were happening as standard fair in Europe among Christians at the same time. Hell Christianity would keep it up for at least the next 400 years - average marriage age for women didn't go past 16 until the early 20th century and age-of-consent laws weren't passed anywhere until well after that.
So whether it's true or not- it says absolutely NOTHING about Islam. There is nothing in there about Muhammed that wasn't also true of Richard the Lionhearted.
I was responding to the statement:
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
I was responding to the statement:
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
>That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted.
The other data-set is what happens to the 20% of cultures where there are survivors. These cultures are frequently destroyed, their mortality rate gets much worse and they live in poverty - pulled into a world where they have no money and no knowledge of how to acquire it and money (rather than the skills they spent ten thousand years perfecting) is the requisite tool for acquiring the means to live.
In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.
You're conflating the decline in those populations that survive with the over-all mortality rate - but the paper clearly differentiates these. That decline is among those tribes that do not all die out within months of first-contact, and they represent only 20% of tribes contacted. This actually correlates almost exactly with what epidemiology would predict. Introducing a new pathogen into a population group (most of these tribes would be the same genetic ethnicity - they differ culturally not biologically) we
>None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct
In the context of this research - and the discussion (I actually RTFA) it DOES not mean that, it means extinct as in dead. Every single member of those tribes - DEAD.
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
The research differentiates between cultural destruction (which you may or may not approve of) an extinction of the people and gives numbers for both -that 80% is the ones where EVERYBODY DIES.
>Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?
Wait, hold on a second - from that long list of reasons - which one exactly is *worse* than GOING COMPLETELY EXTINCT ?
Because I can't find it.
>Any animations are a series of discrete steps, you *might* add blurring but they are damned well still discrete steps!
And this being on a monitor we can even guarantee the minimum length of each discrete step. They CAN'T be less than the width of one pixel.
>Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney
We found one ! You guys get the pitchforks - I'll light the flaming torches ! Burn the witch ! Burn the witch !
(Just kidding).
Aaah, he must be an American then.
>You can will yourself to take a different worldview, but you don't have a choice in what direction you end up in :)
I wouldn't go *that* far. One man drives past a shanty town and thinks "This is terrible - how can we change the world so people wouldn't have to live like this" - another thinks "This is terrible, just how stupid and lazy to people have to be to choose to live like this rather than earn a better life ?"
Exactly the same experience - two completely different judgements, and two completely different lessons learned.
All because one of them chose to be empathic and compassionate while the other was aloof and self-aggrandizing.
By analogy - we don't get to choose which classes we'll have to attend, but we get to choose *what* we learn from them.
>It is entirely possible for two intelligent, reasonable people to "learn" and come to different conclusions.
Yes. This does not contradict what I said. Somebody said it was difficult to impossible to change your worldview - I said it is an inevitable consequence of learning.
I said nothing about which worldview you start off with or which one you adopt as you learn or where on the line you happen to be when you finally die - that can be pretty unique - I just said that worldviews change when people learn. Anybody whose worldview has NOT had some pretty rapid changes during the course of their life has not been learning anything.
Me - I was a libertarian in my early 20's - today I would describe myself as an anarcho-socialist who, in the absence of a libertarian system of legislation to participate in vote liberal because I consider civil liberties far more important than economics and therefore I cannot vote for a party that panders to the religious right. I can't understand how libertarians can vote republican - they agree with neither party fully, but what they hate about the democrats is surely infinitely less important (economics) than what they dislike about the republicans (civil liberties erosion to please the religious right).
Today - I despise libertarians, 14 years ago I WAS one. A lot of people I know who were liberals then became conservatives later, a lot of conservatives became liberals.
The point stands: as people learn they change their world-views, often very radically. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, how it changes is determined by their experiences and what they personally value (I would rather be broke and starving than not be allowed to ... well do ALL the things the religious right want banned - many people would apparently rather lose freedom of speech than risk a drop in the value of their portfolio).
I never said they would conclude the same thing- you argued against it but I said nothing of the kind. All I said was: changing world views is easy, not hard.
>And love won't get you broadband.
Obviously you've been "loving" the wrong people...
>In some people's minds, lack of failure is a surer measure of success, than attempting success (and possibly failing, thereby).
The speaker of the house would agree with you - he pretty much said the same thing about congress passing laws not long ago...
>Using the IRS to target political speech they disagree with.
I agree with all your other examples but on this one - the blame belongs with the reps -it was *they* who started and still continue to push for "profiling".
Now the reps profile on race, religion and stuff like that - the dems were actually a notch less evil with their profiling. While the reps were profiling based on things which are either completely uncontrollable (like race) or specifically protected by the constitution (like religion) the dems merely profiled as "like to have cheated on taxes" people and organisations who have PUBLICLY declared their dislike for taxes and their support for ideologies that seeks the abolition of taxation (and frequently encourages tax-cheating to help bring that about).
That's akin to if the reps were arguing that when a rapper sings about his love for weed that's probably cause to get a search warrant (as opposed to "if you're black we get to search your car for weed and if you wear a hajib we get to assume you're a muslim and search you car for bombs because reasons".
It's still evil - but it's a lot LESS evil than what the reps continue to do and support in the same vein.
>I'm not sure being [insert political ideology] is a choice. It's not like you can simply will yourself to take a different worldview.
Of course you can ! The process is called "learning". You should try it sometime.
>No, but the Center for Disease Control thinks that vaccination rates (with the notable exception of Hib3 (whatever that is)) have been constant or increasing for the last two decades (as long as they've been keeping records).
You don't need a percentile change to have a problem - you just need a small decrease in vaccination (much less than one percent) to send herd immunity down the well.
>If what is wanted to be done is kicking sick troops out of their beds for new blankets every day or two
And why would they do that? By this point Europeans had largely discovered concepts like quarantine and it was standard practice in hospitals that when somebody died from smallpox the bedding they had used while ill should be burned (the germ theory of disease may not have taken hold much yet but even the old miasma theory supported this practise). Basic quarantine developed during the black death years and were extensively improved by the time of American colonization.
All the military had to do was use the blankets that would otherwise have been burned *anyway*.
"There is nothing, no act of cruelty and torture and maiming ever contemplated by the worst sociopaths that can't be gleefully repeated by an average family man just doing his job and following orders. He who knows this, knows all he needs to know to rule the world" - Terry Pratchett "Small gods".
And we see the truth of this around us all the time - we see it in business and we see it in politics and in the military (just go look at the personality profiles of the Abu Ghraib soldiers - just average, friendly well-liked family minded people, a run-of-the-mill girl with a happy smile whose friends spoke of her incredible generosity - now remembered for all time as a torturer and near-rapist).
When the number a decade ago was near-zero - 175 is massive, because it predicts that this years number will be much higher, it's the beginning of the breakdown of herd immunity.
Are you actually suggesting the the antivaxer (sorry, that's not politically correct - I mean the "pro-disease") movement has had zero impact on vaccination rates ? This should be news to the medical fraternity - you better inform them !
So - simply separate legal liabilities (such as lawsuits or fines) from other liabilities. You can retain the (possibly legitimate) reason for limited liability without having to create a get-out-of-jail-free card for corporate criminality.
Or -better yet - allow certain classes of civil disputes to be escalated to criminal trials of the offenders with jailtime as a real risk.
Of course, just why it would suddenly go up a the same time vaccination rates are at such a massive low that we're dealing with major outbreaks of formerly all but eradicated diseases I'm not sure but I'm certain that you could understand if you had her PHD (Pretty Hump of Distraction).
>It's not "logic", it's a question.
Are these mutually exclusive concepts in your book ?
>Well, you can think that all you want, but that's not how arguments or reasoning work.
Actually, yes, that is exactly how they work. The burden of evidence is on the extraordinary claim - which is, in this case, that none of the massive changes in our society over the past decades could possibly cause the event to have a different outcome than it had before.
>Economics is quite clear: automation generally improves the standard of living and makes society better off,
No it isn't. That's just not true. What would be a true statement is: "Economics is quite clear that up until now automation has generally improved the standard of living and made society better off and has not hitherto caused mass unemployment".
Anything beyond that is unproven, untestable and unscientific and no economist worthy of his degree would dare say it (so what does that tell you about those who might ?)
I gave you no less than two examples of aspects of the context which may very well cause the outcome this time to be different - your unwillingness to consider even the possibility that they may change the outcome is narrow-minded to say the least.
>If you want to convince people that a theory that has been empirically tested time and time again doesn't apply this time,
You don't seem to know how economics work - this is not a theory and it hasn't been tested. Economics is not "science" in the classic sense of the word - to quote economist Stephen Levit - economics is more a form of a mathematical engineering that develops tools used to identify trends from large sets of data which can be used to draw useful conclusions.
But these trends are contextual. Change the context - and the trend MUST change as well. Good economics must consider all the aspects of the historical context on the event - it cannot just assume that the trend will apply.
> you need to come up with some pretty good reasons and data. So far, you're only handwaving.
No I don't actually since I am not questioning the theory at all - I'm telling you that you don't know what the theory actually says.
Its a bit like this - you perform an experiment in a lab, you get a certain result, but you cannot be assured that outside the lab in an uncontrolled setting the result would be replicated because there are so many factors which may interfere - even the cat knocking over the beaker could prevent the reaction you were expecting from happening. An experiment is considered repeatable if another lab under the same controlled circumstances can get the same result - there's no requirement for the result to happen in all circumstances, all the time.
What you are doing is to ignore the "lab conditions" of the theory. The theory accounts for what was observed over the 19th and 20th centuries - in the industrial context of the time. It does not and cannot predict that the same thing will happen in all contexts all the time - not least because the "lab" here is the entire human race and everything that impacts them and their behaviour and responses - something which is most certainly not a constant.
As it happens the theory is limited to national observations not international ones (no such theory exists that speaks for internationally) so the ease of modern day international trade along with it's side effects like outsourcing massively changes the dynamic (in the Cartesian meaning of the term - what I have described using the layman's term "context") and may very well cause the outcome to change.