> it's cultural and people intent on killing will do so with whatever weapons are available. At least other weapons don't kill innocent bystanders. Which make up a HUGE percentage of American gun deaths, the vast majority of whom never even KNEW about the event that led to their shooting and overwhelmingly kills women and children.
>Guns are readily available in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, China and most of Europe, just not legally
That actually MATTERS. You know why ? Because the kind of nutt who goes out and shoots somebody in a bar, or wakes up one day and shoots up everybody in a school - those kinds of nutjobs are NOT career criminals. They have no underground connections, they have no trust network. The kind of people who deal in illegal goods won't sell to them because they have no way of distinguishing the nutjob from an undercover cop. You can't just go down to the docks in Australia and walk up to the nearest person and say "Hey, I wanna buy an UZZI please" - you need to know who is selling, and HE needs to know YOU - or at least know somebody who will vouch for you.
Result is that these insane, and worst, gun crimes basically do not happen anymore. And the numbers speak for themselves. In the last 20 years the US had more than TWICE as many mass-shootings as the next 20 countries COMBINED. All of the next 20 countries combined had 22 mass shootings in two decades -just barely over one a year - or one each. In the same 20 years the US had 48 mass shootings, and that's by the previous FBI definition of "four or more" victims, the FBI has ammended their definition to "3 or more" in 2016 - if you use THAT definition the US number jumps to over 70. But you can't just take that one at face value since the FBI differentiates between mass shootings and things like "armed robbery gone wrong" - which if you just take "more than three shot" by itself will include some of those. It's still somewhere between 49 and 70 though.
Almost all cases where somebody is killed by a single punch it's an alcoholic who got hit in the stomach and burst his liver. That said a gut punch can be fatal if you are unlucky - that's what killed Harry Houdini and he was an expert at taking punches to the gut.
But this is still an extraordinarily rare outcome from a fist-fight, almost as rare as SURVIVING a gun shot.
Yeah yeah, we'll care about THAT hypocrisy when pro-lifers all accept that they are morally binding themselves to also oppose the death penalty AND support a comprehensive welfare state. If you demand the birth of a kid to a person ill equipped to care for one, but won't assist in the feeding, clothing, shelering and schooling of that kid - then you're not pro-life you are pro-birth. And that's morally repugnant.
>Please try to keep in mind that you, or your culture, don't get the privilege of defining what is "rational" for the whole world, or specifically in someone else's culture. "Rational" is defined by the culture it is being considered within.
Errr no. Rationality, be definition, is not determined by culture, religion or anything other than two things: facts and numbers. The things you cite are such perfect examples of irrational arguments that they are recognized as a fallacyh ("appeal to tradition"). They are not valid rational arguments.
More importantly - there isn't a single situation in the USA. There is a world of difference in what gun ownership even MEANS depending on where you live. In the country-side, a gun is a way to feed your family, in the worst-case (rare) scenario of a crime it may actually be an effective defense - but even if it's a bad defense it's better than nothing, which is the alternative, and the risk FROM the guns are low because you're isolated - if you miss your target you hit a tree. Big deal. In a city - the facts are entirely different. Here - guns are used PRIMARILY to blow heads off, and hardly ever for things like hunting. Here - their extremely inefficient nature as a defense tool has much more serious consequences than "I missed and the bad guy got me" - here when you miss, you kill an innocent bystander. There isn't any empty space around you for the bullet to go. There aren't any trees to hit - your backstop is innocent people.
And never over-estimate the effectiveness of guns as a self-defense device, in all human history we have not invented a LESS effective tool for that job (with the possible exception of the bow and arrow). Guns only fire straight if your breathing is right, and your hands are steady. When your life is at risk - staying calm is very hard, and when your not calm your hands get sweaty and shaky, and your breathing becomes rapid - that makes it virtually impossible to hit what you intend to shoot at - and, in a city, that almost guarantees hitting somebody who has nothing to do with the event. I love guns, I grew up with them in a rural area - and I'm an excellent shot. But I refuse ot own one, I refuse ot have one in my house - because this is a city I live in now, and a gun is a terrible idea. The risk of my toddler getting her hands on it is BIGGER than the risk of us being attacked. The odds of it helping if we ARE attacked is so low that it's now worth the risks. There's a reason why the number one performance enhancing drug for Olympic shots is Prozac... what good is a self-defense device that only WORKS if you are perfectly calm ? A good self defense device should work well even if you are panicking. Guns are terrible at the job. Hell a bat gives you better odds - you can swing accurately enough to hit your target even if you're panicking (and the adrenaline rush would probably make you swing HARDER than you otherwise could) - and if you DO miss the odds of killing your own kid or the neighbor's kids are practically zero. You can just swing again.
It's a LOT easier to defend yourself against any of those than against a gun. A gun-wielder doesn't have to get close.
Besides which -this 'perfectly logical' argument is disputed by the fact that deadly hate crimes are among the biggest reductions in the immediate aftermath of gun bans everywhere. Guns give people a major ego-boost - exactly because they are hard to defend against. Take that away, and a helluva lot of hate-filled people are too scared to actually ACT on their hate.
>I have yet to see a study that shows that (legal) gun ownership is a significant factor in homicide rates
Well it's interesting how conveniently Americans go from "all gun ownership is legal" to "only illegal guns are used for crime"... how can there BE illegal guns if all gun ownership is legal ? Even then - 100% of all illegal guns no matter WHAT law system makes them illegal were once legal. Illegal guns all START OUT as legally owned guns. The only possible exception are home-made fire-arms, which are a tiny minority of them - and only 'illegal' in the sense that their manufacture did not pass through the usual regulatory channels (in the US - there are so little of such that it's quite possible that in most states those are quite possibly entirely legal).
But guns don't start out illegal -they get made, legally, in a factory and sold, legally to somebody. Somewhere along the line this status changes - usually as a result of them being stolen from legal owners, but contra your beliefs -that's not an argument for increasing the supply of guns to steal.
You're rural life requires the cities just as much as vice versa, always has - that's why there have always been cities - indeed no society in at least 8000 years failed to build cities, they are not optional.
> Libertarian isn't just economic freedom I know it's not supposed to be. But the reality is -that this is what it is. I've never seen a libertarian willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of economic freedom to secure greater civil liberties. If libertarianism was really about more than economics - then that trade-off would be an absolute no-brainer.
>Pinochet was a military dictator who ruled with an iron fist But it was limited government - the government basically consisted of defense and police - the only things that libertarians think it should be.
> Learn your political science. Learn to distinguish theory from practice. It's impossible to GET libertarian economics WITHOUT a dictator. That's exactly what Thatcher told Hayek, it's what libertarians constantly discover. Because if you give people power over the government - they always end up demanding the government help the homeless because they are sick and tired of all the people down-on-their-luck crapping on their porch. There is a reason rural people tend to be conservative and urban people tend to be liberal. It's because urban people deal with problems that only happen when you have millions of people in the same city - problems that can really only be solved by liberal ideas because thats the only set of ideals that even considers them. Libertarianism - as the far end of conservative thought keeps running into the problem that the vast majority of people are urban -to get them to accept a politics that ignores most of the day-to-day things they have to deal with - you have to force it on them, because they'll never voluntarily do so. When you're rural living, the government has neither much need nor ability to affect your life. The nearest government services are usually so far away that relying on them is insane. But when you live in a city, with so many people close together - that kind of self-reliance is utterly impossible. You HAVE to be interdependent to make the whole damn thing have any chance of working. Government is merely the means by which you, as a group, deal with those things that cannot be efficiently done by private individuals. Government becomes a vital aspect of your very ability to survive. If government wasn't running the sewage system - every cholera infection would be an outbreak that kills millions of people. You can't trust private industry to do it either because private industry wants to make a profit but your OWN safety depends on EVERYBODY - even those with NO money who CANNOT buy the service having ACCESS to the service. Libertarianism and conservative thought simply doesn't WORK in a city. http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-...
Indeed, he is flagrantly biassed. He was the head of the New Horizon's project - which just sent us a huge amount of data to study on Pluto. Studies which cost money, and having Pluto not deemed a planet anymore has, he says, made it harder to drum up funding for that research.
The answer of course is: because everything in our solar system should be studied - not just planets. One of the greatest achievements in recent astronomy has been landing a probe on a comet, because it taught us a great deal about comets (things we couldn't learn from the remnants that sometimes fall on earth). Studying mars is cool - but we SHOULD be putting probes on Eris as well.
Good probes to Titan, Europa and Ganymede are important studies to undertake in the near future - they are among the highest likelihood cases for life elsewhere in the solar system. Europan bacteria would be a fantastic discovery - Europan 'fish' an unlikely but amazing bonus - but we will never know if we don't go look.
If anything looking at planets is near the bottom of the priority list. Most of the planets are gas giants - there's only so much you can learn from something you can't land on.
You're not an egghead, you're a testicle head. And frankly for somebody who seems to think the primary purpose of science is building instruments of death (as opposed to the reality where that is a major perversion of science) - that's the kindest and most euphemistically polite term I can think of.
The numbers come from a 2006 article about the 1970's protests against Friedman at his own University - which I had used as a reference to prove the no-platforming is decidedly NOT an millennial invention - the boomers started it (and while I defend no-platforming as BEING rather than attacking free speech, the boomers probably didn't qualify in the same way because they crossed a line millennials have generally refused to go near in protesting to demand the firing of a tenured professor - there's a huge difference between being selective of what outside speakers you want to welcome on campus outside of class, and protesting which TEACHERS are allowed to teach there).
Either way, the numbers on Chile were largely mentioned in passing, as the article was mostly focussed on the role of Friedman and Hayek - and their subsequent influence on the Reagan and Thatcher administrations (it was so funny to see a libertarian declare Reagan an evil that libertarians fought against... when the REASON they fought him was not being libertarian enough after missing my original point: it's impossible for any non-dictator to actually DO all the libertarians want, it cannot be done because in a democracy you can never convince THAT MANY people to sacrifice themselves on the altars of the moneyed gods). Reagan got protested by libertarians because of what checks and balances PREVENTED him from doing.
Anyway, it's quite possible I misread a number, or just remembered one wrong, or the article could have had a typo. As I said my reading of it was for a different purpose and the focus of the article itself was on a different aspect of that history. So I'm happy to concede I may have had that number wrong. That the Chilean economic 'miracle' never happened however is beyond dispute. It looked great on paper but it never represented any actual growth. You can contrast that with the Argentinian miracle - arguably the greatest vindication of anarcho-socialist philosophy since the Andalusia. The economy collapsed and the capitalists fled with their cash. Then the workers just showed up and kept running the abandoned businesses as democratic coops... and in the same economic conditions where the capitalists had given up and fled while they still had money... these coops thrived, their profit-sharing meant everybody was also earning more - so they could buy things, which meant the success of every coop guaranteed the success of the others by providing a steady supply of customers who could afford to buy the goods they made. Today these coops provide over 80% of Argentinian employment with the remainder being mostly civil servants and a small number working for overseas companies that have since returned. On paper, Argentina's economy is in dire straits - in PRACTICE it's one of the most successful in the world. The elites aren't making money, the usual measurements are showing terrible declines as a result - but the PEOPLE are living the highest quality of life in their history and funding it with genuine productivity. The exact opposite of how Chile ended up. And thus, very unlikely to experience a similar crash (it's been going on ten years now and no dangerous crash-like signs are showing). What's interesting is that this form of workers-own-the-means-of-production socialism happened with no statism, no state involvement in fact, and no violence or revolution either. Which probably explains why the outcome has been so positive -since the things that destroyed Soviet-style communism (the authoritarian all-powerful state) was absent from the equation and it retained the best aspects of the free market. These independent businesses still compete with each other in an open market, it's just that in the successful ones the profit actually goes to the people who created it.
Mostly it would be the libertarians Friedman and Hayek.And even the libertarian Pinochet - he was libertarian through and through on everything libertarians ever actually talk about: inflation, taxes and regulations. Learn your history.
You don't get to conflate democratic socialists with statists. Their track records have literally NOTHING in common, so to conflate them is blatantly dishonest.
It's amazing how people who claim their philosophy is about freedom - seem so comfortable with giving the state, and the rich, near absolute power. They say they want government small - but they don't mean "staying out of people's personal lives" (hence their comfortable alliance with social conservatives), they just mean "not charging much tax". As if that's the only measure of of a government. As if how the tax is used doesn't count at all. They say they care about freedom - but it doesn't involve freedom from losing everything you built up in a mortgage scam by a bank. It doesn't involve the freedom from bankruptcy just because your daughter got cancer - meaning you are now both childless and pennyless. Those are freedoms they don't care about- because it affects situations they never anticipate experiencing. The automatic consequence of freedom of association and freedom of contract - which is unionization they deplore as a "distortion of the market". But apparently pooling your resources to negotiate better deals is ONLY a "distortion" if ordinary people do it, companies can do it all they want - up to and including colluding across entire industries and building monopoly cartells - since they argue companies should have "Freedom" from antitrust laws.
They always say that "fraud" should be illegal but I have no idea what the fuck they define as "fraud" except it isn't the definition everybody else uses - since the things they don't consider "fraud" (and actively defend) includes flagrantly lying to your customers about what your product can and cannot do, deceptive practices in contracts, deliberately hiding information from consumers. I've seen libertarian journalists writing articles denouncing the lies of homeopathy and calling homeopaths 'scam-artists' yet never making the logical leap that this implies they OUGHT to be liable for prosecution for fraud. Instead they defend these businesses from such scrutiny by law.
And undermining democratically elected governments to put a business friendly dictator in place is, somehow, never morally unacceptable to them. A long history in which Brazil right now is just the latest chapter (and indeed, they've done it to that country twice before. Each time - after decades of suffering and hardship the Brazilians win back their freedom in the end, and then choose liberal leaders because they are a liberal people - and each time within a few years... these champions of 'freedom' goes full out to destroy their choice).
It seems flagrantly obvious that the one thing libertarians have NEVER given a flying fuck about is liberty. But it does sound better than saying "I want other people to pay my taxes for me and when I rob them I don't want to be punished".
There is another factor from which America gained huge benefit: German and Japanese industry had been decimated. Without funding from the US they likely could not have recovered at all - but for many decades US manufacturing had effectively no competition. Toyota and BMW were slowly rebuilding from nothing - a process that took decades. It's easy for your factories to get rich, and pay people well, when the only competition is from other companies in your own country with the exact same legal and economic situation as you have.
Then in the 1970s... something very bad happened. With a lot of help from the CIA one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century came to power - his name was Pinochet. Pinochet was heavily influenced by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friederich Hayek who sold him on their (entirely devoid of evidence theory - that actually rejects the idea that theories need evidence) of how to create a successful economy. And he followed their advice. It was a dark time - tens of thousands of people were brutally murdered, and twice that many starved to death as he implemented Milton's "shock therapy". By 1978 though - the economy had gotten over the worst of the harm (if only because the poor people were mostly dead now) and suddenly the so-called Pinochet miracle happened. The economy grew at an astounding rate, for a while it had the highest GDP in the world ! Pinochet actually considered decoupling his currency from the dollar (something he had originally done to try and forceably destroy inflation) just because it was clearly worth so much more. And while these figure were coming from Chile - that's when Friendman and Hayek started seeing western heads of state - at the height of the Chile boom in 1980 they sold their ideas very successfully to Thatcher and Reagan.
Neither implemented them fully - Thatcher told Hayek why: because it's not possible in a free country. The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time - took a dictator to do, because it's impossible to get it all done WITHOUT one. Libertarians don't like to talk about that - but they know it's true. That's the real reason Peter Thiel funded Trump: he wanted America to get a dictator who would do what Pinochet did.
That was the beginning of the world we live in now - of the gradual destruction of wages and the working class, the ever growing gap - not just in wealth but in POWER between a small elite and the rest of society - and a world where nobody gets to raise their family with a modicum of financial security anymore.
And the worst part: the Chilean miracle was a lie. It never happened. Chile's amazing GDP ? It consisted ENTIRELY of currency trading, there was no actual productivity on the ground driving it. It was mathematical fiction which made a few Chilean elites very rich but had nothing real to back it up... by 1982 the lie was exposed, the Chilean economy collapsed entirely. Friedman and Hayek's disastrous grand experiment - having already killed tens of thousands of people, came to it's final, crashing failure. But it was too - late the conservative politicians of the west had picked up the ball and started running with it, and they were not going to change course. They still haven't changed course - even after these same policies caused the biggest global recession since the great depression itself. Among the very first things they started doing when they got back into power last november was to dismantle the (meager) protections that was put in place after the crash in order to prevent another one. Because preventing such crashes doesn't suit them - not when the means to prevent them means bankers TODAY make ever so slightly less obscene profits.
As for evolutionary biology: merely mentioning it as a possibility proves three things:
1) you do not understand it all as it cannot lead to such outcomes. When biology says women are on average more X than men 60 percent of women will be less X than 40 percent if men. Because thats how bell curves work.
2) that the problem of sexist biases makimg these tracks unattractive to women is very real
3) that you are, as I previously posited, part of the problem.
Heh, sometimes you can (briefly) find things that are quite hard to find elsewhere.
A couple of years ago I really wanted to rewatch the short-lived Flash series from the 1990s. It was a single season series but I had loved it as a kid - and it had been cancelled for being too expensive to make, not for lack of quality (it was actually quite good and it's normal criminals mostly approach was an early precursor to the hit superhero shows we have now). Only trouble is - I couldn't find it. No torrents anywhere. I couldn't even find legal DVD copies (since it aired before DVD existed).
Eventually I randomly searched youtube - and got to watch the entire series there. It seems to have been removed at some point since then though.
Slashdot Mirror
> it's cultural and people intent on killing will do so with whatever weapons are available.
At least other weapons don't kill innocent bystanders. Which make up a HUGE percentage of American gun deaths, the vast majority of whom never even KNEW about the event that led to their shooting and overwhelmingly kills women and children.
>It's important not to forget the people who would have died if they didn't have a gun to defend themselves,
Which we can mathematically proof is outnumbered AT LEAST a thousand to one by the others.
>Guns are readily available in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, China and most of Europe, just not legally
That actually MATTERS. You know why ? Because the kind of nutt who goes out and shoots somebody in a bar, or wakes up one day and shoots up everybody in a school - those kinds of nutjobs are NOT career criminals. They have no underground connections, they have no trust network. The kind of people who deal in illegal goods won't sell to them because they have no way of distinguishing the nutjob from an undercover cop. You can't just go down to the docks in Australia and walk up to the nearest person and say "Hey, I wanna buy an UZZI please" - you need to know who is selling, and HE needs to know YOU - or at least know somebody who will vouch for you.
Result is that these insane, and worst, gun crimes basically do not happen anymore. And the numbers speak for themselves. In the last 20 years the US had more than TWICE as many mass-shootings as the next 20 countries COMBINED. All of the next 20 countries combined had 22 mass shootings in two decades -just barely over one a year - or one each.
In the same 20 years the US had 48 mass shootings, and that's by the previous FBI definition of "four or more" victims, the FBI has ammended their definition to "3 or more" in 2016 - if you use THAT definition the US number jumps to over 70. But you can't just take that one at face value since the FBI differentiates between mass shootings and things like "armed robbery gone wrong" - which if you just take "more than three shot" by itself will include some of those. It's still somewhere between 49 and 70 though.
Almost all cases where somebody is killed by a single punch it's an alcoholic who got hit in the stomach and burst his liver. That said a gut punch can be fatal if you are unlucky - that's what killed Harry Houdini and he was an expert at taking punches to the gut.
But this is still an extraordinarily rare outcome from a fist-fight, almost as rare as SURVIVING a gun shot.
Your number is off by a bout 3000 times.
The fatal shootings last year in the US were well over 12-thousand.
Yeah yeah, we'll care about THAT hypocrisy when pro-lifers all accept that they are morally binding themselves to also oppose the death penalty AND support a comprehensive welfare state.
If you demand the birth of a kid to a person ill equipped to care for one, but won't assist in the feeding, clothing, shelering and schooling of that kid - then you're not pro-life you are pro-birth. And that's morally repugnant.
>Please try to keep in mind that you, or your culture, don't get the privilege of defining what is "rational" for the whole world, or specifically in someone else's culture. "Rational" is defined by the culture it is being considered within.
Errr no. Rationality, be definition, is not determined by culture, religion or anything other than two things: facts and numbers. The things you cite are such perfect examples of irrational arguments that they are recognized as a fallacyh ("appeal to tradition"). They are not valid rational arguments.
More importantly - there isn't a single situation in the USA. There is a world of difference in what gun ownership even MEANS depending on where you live. In the country-side, a gun is a way to feed your family, in the worst-case (rare) scenario of a crime it may actually be an effective defense - but even if it's a bad defense it's better than nothing, which is the alternative, and the risk FROM the guns are low because you're isolated - if you miss your target you hit a tree. Big deal.
In a city - the facts are entirely different. Here - guns are used PRIMARILY to blow heads off, and hardly ever for things like hunting. Here - their extremely inefficient nature as a defense tool has much more serious consequences than "I missed and the bad guy got me" - here when you miss, you kill an innocent bystander. There isn't any empty space around you for the bullet to go. There aren't any trees to hit - your backstop is innocent people.
And never over-estimate the effectiveness of guns as a self-defense device, in all human history we have not invented a LESS effective tool for that job (with the possible exception of the bow and arrow). Guns only fire straight if your breathing is right, and your hands are steady. When your life is at risk - staying calm is very hard, and when your not calm your hands get sweaty and shaky, and your breathing becomes rapid - that makes it virtually impossible to hit what you intend to shoot at - and, in a city, that almost guarantees hitting somebody who has nothing to do with the event. I love guns, I grew up with them in a rural area - and I'm an excellent shot. But I refuse ot own one, I refuse ot have one in my house - because this is a city I live in now, and a gun is a terrible idea. The risk of my toddler getting her hands on it is BIGGER than the risk of us being attacked. The odds of it helping if we ARE attacked is so low that it's now worth the risks. There's a reason why the number one performance enhancing drug for Olympic shots is Prozac... what good is a self-defense device that only WORKS if you are perfectly calm ? A good self defense device should work well even if you are panicking. Guns are terrible at the job. Hell a bat gives you better odds - you can swing accurately enough to hit your target even if you're panicking (and the adrenaline rush would probably make you swing HARDER than you otherwise could) - and if you DO miss the odds of killing your own kid or the neighbor's kids are practically zero. You can just swing again.
It's a LOT easier to defend yourself against any of those than against a gun. A gun-wielder doesn't have to get close.
Besides which -this 'perfectly logical' argument is disputed by the fact that deadly hate crimes are among the biggest reductions in the immediate aftermath of gun bans everywhere. Guns give people a major ego-boost - exactly because they are hard to defend against. Take that away, and a helluva lot of hate-filled people are too scared to actually ACT on their hate.
>I have yet to see a study that shows that (legal) gun ownership is a significant factor in homicide rates
Well it's interesting how conveniently Americans go from "all gun ownership is legal" to "only illegal guns are used for crime"... how can there BE illegal guns if all gun ownership is legal ? Even then - 100% of all illegal guns no matter WHAT law system makes them illegal were once legal. Illegal guns all START OUT as legally owned guns.
The only possible exception are home-made fire-arms, which are a tiny minority of them - and only 'illegal' in the sense that their manufacture did not pass through the usual regulatory channels (in the US - there are so little of such that it's quite possible that in most states those are quite possibly entirely legal).
But guns don't start out illegal -they get made, legally, in a factory and sold, legally to somebody. Somewhere along the line this status changes - usually as a result of them being stolen from legal owners, but contra your beliefs -that's not an argument for increasing the supply of guns to steal.
Now consider this - that ammendment also says this has to be 'well regulated'.
Yet that part is apparently always ignored.
It's supposed to be well regulated. That means - with good regulations around it. Sane gun control laws = well regulated.
Do you know what ELSE could meet that requirement ? Nothing.
You're rural life requires the cities just as much as vice versa, always has - that's why there have always been cities - indeed no society in at least 8000 years failed to build cities, they are not optional.
New Horizons is also the name of the satellite that sent those pretty pix of Pluto last year.
> Libertarian isn't just economic freedom
I know it's not supposed to be. But the reality is -that this is what it is. I've never seen a libertarian willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of economic freedom to secure greater civil liberties. If libertarianism was really about more than economics - then that trade-off would be an absolute no-brainer.
>Pinochet was a military dictator who ruled with an iron fist
But it was limited government - the government basically consisted of defense and police - the only things that libertarians think it should be.
> Learn your political science.
Learn to distinguish theory from practice. It's impossible to GET libertarian economics WITHOUT a dictator. That's exactly what Thatcher told Hayek, it's what libertarians constantly discover. Because if you give people power over the government - they always end up demanding the government help the homeless because they are sick and tired of all the people down-on-their-luck crapping on their porch. There is a reason rural people tend to be conservative and urban people tend to be liberal. It's because urban people deal with problems that only happen when you have millions of people in the same city - problems that can really only be solved by liberal ideas because thats the only set of ideals that even considers them. Libertarianism - as the far end of conservative thought keeps running into the problem that the vast majority of people are urban -to get them to accept a politics that ignores most of the day-to-day things they have to deal with - you have to force it on them, because they'll never voluntarily do so. When you're rural living, the government has neither much need nor ability to affect your life. The nearest government services are usually so far away that relying on them is insane. But when you live in a city, with so many people close together - that kind of self-reliance is utterly impossible. You HAVE to be interdependent to make the whole damn thing have any chance of working. Government is merely the means by which you, as a group, deal with those things that cannot be efficiently done by private individuals. Government becomes a vital aspect of your very ability to survive. If government wasn't running the sewage system - every cholera infection would be an outbreak that kills millions of people. You can't trust private industry to do it either because private industry wants to make a profit but your OWN safety depends on EVERYBODY - even those with NO money who CANNOT buy the service having ACCESS to the service. Libertarianism and conservative thought simply doesn't WORK in a city. http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-...
Indeed, he is flagrantly biassed. He was the head of the New Horizon's project - which just sent us a huge amount of data to study on Pluto. Studies which cost money, and having Pluto not deemed a planet anymore has, he says, made it harder to drum up funding for that research.
The answer of course is: because everything in our solar system should be studied - not just planets. One of the greatest achievements in recent astronomy has been landing a probe on a comet, because it taught us a great deal about comets (things we couldn't learn from the remnants that sometimes fall on earth). Studying mars is cool - but we SHOULD be putting probes on Eris as well.
Good probes to Titan, Europa and Ganymede are important studies to undertake in the near future - they are among the highest likelihood cases for life elsewhere in the solar system. Europan bacteria would be a fantastic discovery - Europan 'fish' an unlikely but amazing bonus - but we will never know if we don't go look.
If anything looking at planets is near the bottom of the priority list. Most of the planets are gas giants - there's only so much you can learn from something you can't land on.
That's no egg... it's a testicle !
You're not an egghead, you're a testicle head. And frankly for somebody who seems to think the primary purpose of science is building instruments of death (as opposed to the reality where that is a major perversion of science) - that's the kindest and most euphemistically polite term I can think of.
Actually New Horizons was mostly funded by Clinton, since it was launched in 1997 and all...
The numbers come from a 2006 article about the 1970's protests against Friedman at his own University - which I had used as a reference to prove the no-platforming is decidedly NOT an millennial invention - the boomers started it (and while I defend no-platforming as BEING rather than attacking free speech, the boomers probably didn't qualify in the same way because they crossed a line millennials have generally refused to go near in protesting to demand the firing of a tenured professor - there's a huge difference between being selective of what outside speakers you want to welcome on campus outside of class, and protesting which TEACHERS are allowed to teach there).
Either way, the numbers on Chile were largely mentioned in passing, as the article was mostly focussed on the role of Friedman and Hayek - and their subsequent influence on the Reagan and Thatcher administrations (it was so funny to see a libertarian declare Reagan an evil that libertarians fought against... when the REASON they fought him was not being libertarian enough after missing my original point: it's impossible for any non-dictator to actually DO all the libertarians want, it cannot be done because in a democracy you can never convince THAT MANY people to sacrifice themselves on the altars of the moneyed gods). Reagan got protested by libertarians because of what checks and balances PREVENTED him from doing.
Anyway, it's quite possible I misread a number, or just remembered one wrong, or the article could have had a typo. As I said my reading of it was for a different purpose and the focus of the article itself was on a different aspect of that history. So I'm happy to concede I may have had that number wrong.
That the Chilean economic 'miracle' never happened however is beyond dispute. It looked great on paper but it never represented any actual growth.
You can contrast that with the Argentinian miracle - arguably the greatest vindication of anarcho-socialist philosophy since the Andalusia. The economy collapsed and the capitalists fled with their cash. Then the workers just showed up and kept running the abandoned businesses as democratic coops... and in the same economic conditions where the capitalists had given up and fled while they still had money... these coops thrived, their profit-sharing meant everybody was also earning more - so they could buy things, which meant the success of every coop guaranteed the success of the others by providing a steady supply of customers who could afford to buy the goods they made. Today these coops provide over 80% of Argentinian employment with the remainder being mostly civil servants and a small number working for overseas companies that have since returned. On paper, Argentina's economy is in dire straits - in PRACTICE it's one of the most successful in the world. The elites aren't making money, the usual measurements are showing terrible declines as a result - but the PEOPLE are living the highest quality of life in their history and funding it with genuine productivity. The exact opposite of how Chile ended up. And thus, very unlikely to experience a similar crash (it's been going on ten years now and no dangerous crash-like signs are showing).
What's interesting is that this form of workers-own-the-means-of-production socialism happened with no statism, no state involvement in fact, and no violence or revolution either. Which probably explains why the outcome has been so positive -since the things that destroyed Soviet-style communism (the authoritarian all-powerful state) was absent from the equation and it retained the best aspects of the free market. These independent businesses still compete with each other in an open market, it's just that in the successful ones the profit actually goes to the people who created it.
Mostly it would be the libertarians Friedman and Hayek.And even the libertarian Pinochet - he was libertarian through and through on everything libertarians ever actually talk about: inflation, taxes and regulations. Learn your history.
You don't get to conflate democratic socialists with statists. Their track records have literally NOTHING in common, so to conflate them is blatantly dishonest.
That would be be insightful if it hadn't killed about 20-thousand Chilean's parents...
It's amazing how people who claim their philosophy is about freedom - seem so comfortable with giving the state, and the rich, near absolute power. They say they want government small - but they don't mean "staying out of people's personal lives" (hence their comfortable alliance with social conservatives), they just mean "not charging much tax". As if that's the only measure of of a government. As if how the tax is used doesn't count at all.
They say they care about freedom - but it doesn't involve freedom from losing everything you built up in a mortgage scam by a bank. It doesn't involve the freedom from bankruptcy just because your daughter got cancer - meaning you are now both childless and pennyless. Those are freedoms they don't care about- because it affects situations they never anticipate experiencing.
The automatic consequence of freedom of association and freedom of contract - which is unionization they deplore as a "distortion of the market". But apparently pooling your resources to negotiate better deals is ONLY a "distortion" if ordinary people do it, companies can do it all they want - up to and including colluding across entire industries and building monopoly cartells - since they argue companies should have "Freedom" from antitrust laws.
They always say that "fraud" should be illegal but I have no idea what the fuck they define as "fraud" except it isn't the definition everybody else uses - since the things they don't consider "fraud" (and actively defend) includes flagrantly lying to your customers about what your product can and cannot do, deceptive practices in contracts, deliberately hiding information from consumers. I've seen libertarian journalists writing articles denouncing the lies of homeopathy and calling homeopaths 'scam-artists' yet never making the logical leap that this implies they OUGHT to be liable for prosecution for fraud. Instead they defend these businesses from such scrutiny by law.
And undermining democratically elected governments to put a business friendly dictator in place is, somehow, never morally unacceptable to them. A long history in which Brazil right now is just the latest chapter (and indeed, they've done it to that country twice before. Each time - after decades of suffering and hardship the Brazilians win back their freedom in the end, and then choose liberal leaders because they are a liberal people - and each time within a few years... these champions of 'freedom' goes full out to destroy their choice).
It seems flagrantly obvious that the one thing libertarians have NEVER given a flying fuck about is liberty. But it does sound better than saying "I want other people to pay my taxes for me and when I rob them I don't want to be punished".
There is another factor from which America gained huge benefit: German and Japanese industry had been decimated. Without funding from the US they likely could not have recovered at all - but for many decades US manufacturing had effectively no competition. Toyota and BMW were slowly rebuilding from nothing - a process that took decades. It's easy for your factories to get rich, and pay people well, when the only competition is from other companies in your own country with the exact same legal and economic situation as you have.
Then in the 1970s... something very bad happened. With a lot of help from the CIA one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century came to power - his name was Pinochet. Pinochet was heavily influenced by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friederich Hayek who sold him on their (entirely devoid of evidence theory - that actually rejects the idea that theories need evidence) of how to create a successful economy.
And he followed their advice. It was a dark time - tens of thousands of people were brutally murdered, and twice that many starved to death as he implemented Milton's "shock therapy".
By 1978 though - the economy had gotten over the worst of the harm (if only because the poor people were mostly dead now) and suddenly the so-called Pinochet miracle happened. The economy grew at an astounding rate, for a while it had the highest GDP in the world ! Pinochet actually considered decoupling his currency from the dollar (something he had originally done to try and forceably destroy inflation) just because it was clearly worth so much more.
And while these figure were coming from Chile - that's when Friendman and Hayek started seeing western heads of state - at the height of the Chile boom in 1980 they sold their ideas very successfully to Thatcher and Reagan.
Neither implemented them fully - Thatcher told Hayek why: because it's not possible in a free country. The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time - took a dictator to do, because it's impossible to get it all done WITHOUT one. Libertarians don't like to talk about that - but they know it's true. That's the real reason Peter Thiel funded Trump: he wanted America to get a dictator who would do what Pinochet did.
That was the beginning of the world we live in now - of the gradual destruction of wages and the working class, the ever growing gap - not just in wealth but in POWER between a small elite and the rest of society - and a world where nobody gets to raise their family with a modicum of financial security anymore.
And the worst part: the Chilean miracle was a lie. It never happened. Chile's amazing GDP ? It consisted ENTIRELY of currency trading, there was no actual productivity on the ground driving it. It was mathematical fiction which made a few Chilean elites very rich but had nothing real to back it up... by 1982 the lie was exposed, the Chilean economy collapsed entirely. Friedman and Hayek's disastrous grand experiment - having already killed tens of thousands of people, came to it's final, crashing failure.
But it was too - late the conservative politicians of the west had picked up the ball and started running with it, and they were not going to change course. They still haven't changed course - even after these same policies caused the biggest global recession since the great depression itself. Among the very first things they started doing when they got back into power last november was to dismantle the (meager) protections that was put in place after the crash in order to prevent another one. Because preventing such crashes doesn't suit them - not when the means to prevent them means bankers TODAY make ever so slightly less obscene profits.
As for evolutionary biology: merely mentioning it as a possibility proves three things:
1) you do not understand it all as it cannot lead to such outcomes. When biology says women are on average more X than men 60 percent of women will be less X than 40 percent if men. Because thats how bell curves work.
2) that the problem of sexist biases makimg these tracks unattractive to women is very real
3) that you are, as I previously posited, part of the problem.
You already conceded the evidence. Very few women choose STEM careers.
Heh, sometimes you can (briefly) find things that are quite hard to find elsewhere.
A couple of years ago I really wanted to rewatch the short-lived Flash series from the 1990s. It was a single season series but I had loved it as a kid - and it had been cancelled for being too expensive to make, not for lack of quality (it was actually quite good and it's normal criminals mostly approach was an early precursor to the hit superhero shows we have now).
Only trouble is - I couldn't find it. No torrents anywhere. I couldn't even find legal DVD copies (since it aired before DVD existed).
Eventually I randomly searched youtube - and got to watch the entire series there. It seems to have been removed at some point since then though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...