>They hated the commies because they competed for the same political space.
Political ? Maybe... but not the same economic space. And Marxism is an economic philosophy not a political one.
>Then nationalised/expropriated industries. There's nothing uniquely Marxist about that. It's a feature of more than a dozen economic systems outside of Marxism and it is, in fact, even accepted in capitalism under certain conditions. Rooseveldt nationalised practically all of Detroit for the duration of the war. There are only a very small number of capitalist subphilosophies that do not allow any form of nationalisation or eminent domain at all and NONE of them have EVER been official policy in any country EVER.
>In the 30s 'capitalist' was code for 'jewish bankers'. Who told you that ? The John Birch society was the most NAZI organisation to ever exist in America - and fervently anti-communist as well. Those people hated LBJ for being 'a socialist' for crying out loud ! They were basically the precursor of the modern day heartland foundation (and in fact, the Koch brother's father was a founding member, along with such notable anti-capitalists as Henry Ford). Seriously. Do actual FACTS ever influence the things you say ? Does reality ever enter the bubble in which you live ? No they blamed Jews for Bolshevism - and Jewish bankers for funding it. They did NOT EVER think Jewish Bankers were capitalists !
>You fell for the post WWII soviet propaganda. No, I actually studied history and philosophy and listen to no propaganda at all. If I fell for Soviet Propaganda I wouldn't call Bolshevism a massive failure. I wouldn't consider it a disaster. I however - do not believe their economic philosophy was the reason for the failure because in capitalist dictatorships the same failures occurred. Pinochet was no less brutal than Stalin and he was as hardcore a capitalist as ever ruled a country - hell his economic policy was basically written by Milton Friedman.
>All bolshevists are Marxists No. ZERO Bolshevists are Marxists. Marx repeatedly stated that "Socialism MUST be achieved democratically. A recolutionary approach would lead to dictatorship which cannot be condoned". Since Bolshevists chose revolution AND installed dictators - it therefore ignored a key tenet of Marxism and wasn't Marxist. In fact it mostly takes it's inspiration from earlier philosphers than Marx. Marx came fairly late in communist thought actually. Anarcho-communism was born in the French Revolution (a century before Marx) and the key tenets of Bolshevism was born around the same time among Italian communists. Marx was late to the party. He got the fame but he really didn't deserve it. Even so - the variant he supported was not the variant that the Bolshevists enacted. To pretend that all the various communist and socialist philosophies have the same problems is to ignore the fact that more than one variant have been tried and they had radically different resutlts. Bolshevism was an unmitigated disaster but Anarcho-communism was a resounding success. Andalusia, Catalonia and Aragon were successful industrial societies with anarchist everybody-votes-on-every law governance and complete socialism in the form of turning all businesses into worker-owned coops. No state at all. They eradicated all poverty and all inequality and achieved what is documented as by far the highest quality of life achieved in the world at that stage - for ALL their citizens. What destroyed them was economics - but the combined military forces of Bolshevists and Capitalists actually forming an alliance. Neither side could stand to let anarchists be so successful let other societies decided THEY didn't want governments anymore either.
>not all marxists are bolshevists, No Marxists are Bolshevists - they are different philosphies. It's like saying "Not all Christians are Satanists". It's not POSSIBLE to be both since they require believing entirely contradictory things.
>Obama a centrist? Don't make me laugh! I cited facts. You just denied it without a single shred of supporting evidence. Typical rightwinger seeing what he wants to see.
>As for pardoning Snowden, a President can't pardon someone who hasn't been charged. False. Presidents have frequently pardoned people who haven't been charged. Most famously - Ford pardoned Nixon who had not been charged with any crime.
> isn't on the same level as granting amnesty to 6 million illegal immigrants As I pointed out and you ignored - he did NOTHING in terms of immigration that wasn't done by EVERY president since Reagan. The immigration policy under Obama is unchanged from what Reagan did - he just continued the policy which has had ZERO changes in 30 years. Every president used the deferred action clause which a republican congress wrote into the law to give amnesty and the criteria for amnesty has not been changed by anybody - including Obama. Like I said - you see what you want to see and don't bother to check. Your chosen example of an excessive policy is one Reagan instituted based on a Republican law and where no president since has made any changes up to and including Obama. Not to mention that Obama has actually deported more immigrants than any president - ever (bet you didn't know that) and that net Mexican immigration under Obama is NEGATIVE - more people have left the US for Mexico than has entered the US from Mexico during Obama's administration. If you want to argue that immigration policy is too lenient - then you can have that debate, we may not agree but there is room to debate. What you do NOT get to do is pretend Obama has been more lenient than any president since the current immigration act was signed into law by Reagan since that is absolutely not true. Fox news has been lying to you.
Not really... sorry, no, I meant not at all. He RAN as a liberal, but he didn't rule as one. Center-right would be a more apt description of his actual policies. He didn't do single-payer health-care or even provide a public-option. He didn't submit a single bill to defend gay or trans rights and the only significant thing he did in this regard was to push for an education department policy about trans bathroom access, which came way too late. He hasn't pardoned Snowden. He hasn't rolled back the Patriot act. He didn't end either war. He didn't reduce the military spending. He didn't do anything to oppose the militarization of the police. He didn't speak out against atrociously oppressive laws by republican state legislatures. He didn't do anything concrete on climate change and the little he did came too late. He basically didn't change anything and offered no real hope. He didn't reduce US support for Israel or give any kind of balanced response to the events in the region. He was the perfect DINO.
Didn't he stretch the presidential powers to the best of his ability?
Again - not supported by the facts. He issued the lowest number of executive orders of any president in the past 70 years. His immigration policies didn't do anything that hasn't been done by every president since Reagan. His last supreme court nomination is a noted centrist whom republicans used to support. He didn't declare any wars and only engaged in one major military action - which had UN approval and involvement. He also didn't reduce them though. He didn't reclassify marijuana, end private prisons (at least federally), or act against mandatory minimum sentences. He didn't try to repeal PATRIOT and he didn't actively oppose NSA spying (which started well before him).
Truth be told. Obama's administration is basically a no-score win.
Because they were anonymous shell companies. Even the US cannot farm data that doesn't exist. Shell companies as such are no issue, there are lots of legitimate reasons to have one. What doesn't exist - and never has and never will - is a legitimate reason to have a shell company that doesn't have your name attached to it. Every possible use of an anonymous shell company is to hide a crime. Some are relatively more minor (like tax dodging) some are terrible atrocities like slavery, selling weapons to terrorists and worse.
There are two reasons the US government never pressured panama to fix the laws that allowed shell companies to be registered with no documentation identifying their owners. 1) The US has plenty of states with the same problem - getting an anonymous shell company in Delaware or Nevada is ridiculously easy (in Nevada it will cost you a $25 registration fee and no documentation whatsoever has to be provided), so their own major donors would fight any attempt to change this locally and so very few Americans use the service - it's cheaper to get one at home if you got something to hide. 2) They used it themselves. There is proof that the US used this same shell company provider to set up the shell company they used to smuggle the funds in the Iran/Contra scandal, later they used it to fund Noriega (when he was still a CIA puppet).
The US government would rather lose out on on some ability to track genuine evil people than lose out on the ability to do the same evils themselves. It's far more fun to spy on innocent people who aren't doing highly profitable but terribly evil things.
>From what I've seen, multiverse theory is not falsifiable YET.
FTFY. If multiverse theory is real - then it has predictable consequences - some of which are falsifiable predictions that can be tested. Currently the best known of these is the two-slit experiment and that does have other possible explanations (though those explanations do not accord well with quantum mechanics). What we don't yet have is an experiment where the behaviour predicted by a multiverse occurs and we can conclusively rule out other explanations - but then this is frequently the case in science and often for a very long time. As long as it remains that way - the results are tentative and unconfirmed, but still science and still falsifiable. Again look at gravity waves. For decades the best experiment we devised to test that prediction was the aluminum tube test. Unfortunately those results could be explained by other, confirmed, phenomena like seismic activity. As long as we could not rule out all other possible causes of the results - we could not confirm gravitational waves.
Eventually technology matured to the point where we COULD build an experiment that allowed us to rule out all other known explanations - and when we got the predicted measurements, we could confirm gravity waves. Unless we learn tomorrow of a different effect that could cause the same measurements and is more likely - that confirmation stands. It seems unlikely that such an effect could have evaded detection in all the previous attempts however.
So the multiverse theory will be much like gravitational waves - falsifiable but untested until we devise an experiment where we can conclusively rule out other possibilities. The clencher is this - in the case of gravitational waves the other explanations for those earlier measurements were *more* likely than the one being tested for. In the case of the multiverse the main other explanation for the experimental result is generally deemed to be less likely since it relies on an assumption contradicted by other strong and well tested theories.
Does that make it proven ? Far from it. It does, however, make it likely.
It's also worth considering that physics have many different types of potential alternate universes - all of which as possibilities have different impacts and require different types of testing. The multiverse explanation of quantum mechanics is the most testable of the lot. Now consider this one. There is an upper limit to the size of the universe according to relativity. Nothing can exceed the speed of light and so no part of the universe could be further from the big bang than it light could travel in the roughly 13.2 billion years since it happened. But what if there was another big bang 400 billion light years away ? There would be another universe as big as ours - and completely impossible to detect from here. There could be millions of such universes - created by their own big bangs, expanding since their creation - and all undetectable from each other. The only testable prediction is that if they all keep expanding sooner or later they must merge - and so sooner or later one of them will merge with ours and we should see the impact on the movements of the stars as the gravity of the stars in that universe starts to impact on those in ours. That could be trillions of years from now - and the very concept of light-cones means that there is no way to test if it will happen until it does. It could also be happening right now and our telescopes will only know about it in a few billion years. Or it could have happened a few billion years ago and we'll be seeing the proof for the first time in telescopic observations starting tomorrow around 3pm UCT. Testable and falsifiable doesn't always means practically doable. This is just as likely as it is unlikely and humanity may well go extinct without ever finding the answer. Then there is yet another kind predicted by string theory - a kind of sequence of universes, universes as energy states. An interesting result of that
>Consider two competing hypothesis: "there is an elephant in the corner of the room but it is undetectable" versus "there is no elephant in the room". Both predict the same outcome, but most would say the latter is the simpler explanation even though on a technical level this choice is arbitrary. Now replace the word elephant with parallel universe. Until we come up with an experiment that makes a testable prediction on the basis of there being multiple universes that does not have a simpler explanation *not* involving multiple universes it seems entirely reasonable to assert that there is only one universe.
There's a problem with your analogy. Let's correct it. The whole room is full of elephant footprints. We don't see an elephant - the door is too small for an elephant to have left through. What explanation is simpler ? That there is no elephant or that the elephant is simply hiding where we can't see it and if we keep looking we will eventually find it ?
>Beautiful results and no testable predictions are worthless.
It does actually have plenty of testable predictions - not many of them are UNIQUE to it, some could potentially have other explanations but this is not unusual in any sphere of science - you need lots of tests to rule out other explanations as part of testing any theory. But what we don't yet have is the technology to do most of the tests. That's not the same as being untestable - it's perfectly obvious what to test, just not how to actually DO the test. Something is untestable when it is stated in such a way that no evidence can confirm or deny it - not when the gathering of evidence is currently beyond our means. We've had lots of scientific predictions which were made long before the technology existed to test them but which were ultimately confirmed when technology developed far enough. A recent example is gravitational waves - which we only figured out how to build a valid test for this year. We always knew what to test - but how to build a sufficiently sensitive measuring device eluded us for a century. In the 1960s we tried to test it using long, hollow, hanging aluminium tubes and hoping to measure them moving as gravitational waves shook them about. Aluminium was a good choice - it's non-magnetic ruling out one source of motion beyond gravity. Ruling out wind was easy too -just hang them indoors. But ruling out seismic motion was not - we never could get a measurement on them that could be definitively shown NOT to be caused by the earth's own movements. To actually detect gravitational waves we needed something where even the tiniest motion could be measured, which was immune to magnetic AND seismic interference. Lasers had the immunity in themselves but to be measureable they would have to be very long - and to build a structure to house such a long beam which would nevertheless filter out any seismic waves was no mean feat. We didn't have that kind of engineering until quite recently. When we finally had the means to do the tests, and the money to fund building it, we could do the test - and not only did we get the confirmation - we got it resoundingly. The results of that test was massively more conclusive than anybody had dared to hope.
>The fact that the Biblical dimensions for that ark work and produce an impressive structure
Except those measurements are given in an extinct unit of measurement - and we have no idea how big that unit was. So this is more likely a case of working-back-from-the-answer-you-want. Ken Ham chose from among the many theories of how big that unit may be (and complete guesswork) the one that gave a 'boat' of a size that was suitably impressive.
Much the same way we don't know how long the Greek 'stadium' was - so we can't actually determine how accurate Erasthosthenes measurement of the earth's circumference was since he gave it in a unit of measurement that we don't know the length of. Scholars think it was just shy of a hundred yards. If that's true - then his answer is remarkably accurate. Except - the REASON they think it was just shy of a hundred yards is those scholars are assuming he did his experiment well and got a reasonably accurate measure of the earth's circumference - and calculated the length needed for a stadium to have.
There is a bit of supporting evidence in that he calculates that Alexandria is 1/50th of the way around the world from Syene and gives the distance between these cities as 5000 stadia. We know where the cities were - so we can say that based on the usual length assumed for a stadium it's pretty close to the same number. Except that there are records suggesting a different value for the stadium that STILL puts the cities at about that distance appart (we have no idea WHERE in the cities he measured from and the perfect round number suggests he rounded it anyway) - but on the scale of the planet it puts him off by more than 16% ! So is the 1% error based on the usual assumption correct ? Or the 16% error based on other values.
Considering how limited communications and technology was in his day - both are equally likely - and we don't have any physical evidence or even strong documentary evidence to confirm either number. We know his hypotheses was sound (the geometry needed was, after all, well established by then) - we don't actually know if his execution was sound.
Ham is working on numbers from a story written down some 7000 years ago - likely based on an earlier story first written down around 9000 years ago and probably told much earlier than that - there's at least some scientists who believe the garden of Eden story was a mythologized telling of a real event - the flooding of the persian gulf at the end of the last ice age (between 12 and 10 thousand years ago) which forced humanity to change from hunter gatherer to farmer in order to survive in a suddenly rather harsher climate. The flood story occurs is discussed in the epic of Gilgamesh which was almost certainly the inspiration behind Genesis (and there is no doubt Abraham KNEW the epic of Gilgamesh - he came from Ur, a mesopotamian city where Gilgamesh had, had his epic carved on damn near every wall - we know this because we've FOUND Ur and seen it - it was a great personal PR excercise).
Whether there is any truth to the 'eden in the gulf' theory (and there is some half decent evidence for the idea) or not - Gilgamesh wanted to live forever, the whole tale is about his efforts to achieve immortality. His attempt is based on seeking out earlier legends - which he recounts, and which are found almost unchanged in Genesis. He fails in the quest - but he does succeed in his next attempt: which is writing that epic. He achieves the only kind of immortality humans can achieve: an immortal name. He wrote the epic so his name would live on after his body died, and to secure that made sure everybody in his kingdom knew that story. It worked too - 8000 years later we still know his name, we still tell his story.
So where does that leave Ken Ham ? As is oh so common with biblical literalists - he chooses the evidence that suits him, and chooses the numbers that match his desires. Like choosing to have an 'el' be the length that makes sure his 'ark' is nice and impressive in size.
>So because you cannot have perfect knowledge of the future you can't plan at all?
When the knowledge in question is an emergent phenomenon - and the system has well over 100 trillion moving parts - you can't have ANY knowledge at all. That's a rather different thing.
> Does that stop you from putting gas in your car when the gauge reads near E Firstly - that isn't knowledge of the future, it's knowledge of the present. The car is low on fuel now. The car is also a super-simple thing and I can reliably predict that if the fuel runs out the car stops moving. I cannot reliably predict whether humans with two extra legs will be better or worse at surviving - because the humans are not the system - they are just one part in a system that includes every living thing on earth... and the sun... and just about everything else in the solar system and quite a few things outside it.
>Some traits are _clearly_ unequivocally maladaptive, Nope. You can only say that they would be so in the past and appear to be so in the present. The next major catastrophe could create a world where only pinheads survive.
> But we don't let government do anything about it because we can't trust the bastards with that much power. We don't let ANYBODY do anything about it because NOBODY can do a good job. It's impossible since we have no way of knowing what a 'good' job would even look like.
Now you mention it - black holes would be another great example. The fact that Einstein's math allowed them infuriated physicists. They were an embarrassment to the field - then the evidence for their existence became so strong that now it's the orthodox theory. A similar pattern happened with the Big Bang theory - as late as the 1960's cosmologists were mocked by other physicists for accepting that theory. The maths allowed it but the universe starting with a singularity smacked of creationism. Hawking recounts being mocked at university for accepting it. Then the evidence started piling up - and the big bang also became orthodoxy.
What's your point ? Obviously the specific timeframe should be reasonable for evaluating the specific thing, that determination would be part of setting up good experiments.
>Look how long it took the government of Flint to fuckup their water system About 5 years. The decisions that screwed it up were made by the current republican governor. Rick Snider - who was first elected in 2010 and inaugurated in 2011. You could argue there were preceeding issues that helped cause it, but they had nothing to do with the water system - if you're going to argue that you have to be honest about what they were. They were budget issues. If anything Flint is just yet another example of the horrors that invariably come from austerity policies.
>and how long countries like Peru had no water systems to speak of. While ignoring that everytime any place had privatized water supply it led to riots because private industry has consistently been terrible at it ? Governments have sometimes screwed up water supply. Private industry has NEVER DONE IT WELL AT ALL. Sure they go out of business, but the next company does it worse. It's simply not a case where market economics work because it's by definition a natural monopoly.
>You can't really run the experiment. You've given absolutely no evidence to support this statement.
>They self identified as commies Your use of that slur suggests that rational discussion is impossible. You are not interested in facts. I never said they were not communist - I said they were not MARXIST. Marx was not the only communist philosopher you know - and his communism is not the only communist philosophy. Hell Marx wasn't even the FIRST. And for the record 'self identification' is a terrible standard which no sane person would use. People ALWAYS self-identify as something noble - but you can't judge the something noble by what people who self-identify with it does in it's name - especially when what they do contradicts what they identify as. So ISIS self identifies as Islamic but aren't. The US self-identifies as democratic but aren't. White supremacists self-identify as defenders of freedom and morality. Louis XI!V self-identified as a benevolent ruler. The WBC self-identifies as Christian - despite the fact that Jesus would absolutely not approve of their methods.
>Guilt by association would be taking someone with a similar philosophy You mean like saying the Marxists are Bolshevists or vice versa ?
>say the NAZIs and call them commies instead of just socialists. Who had nothing that even remotely RESEMBLED communism anywhere in their philosophy. No similarity whatsoever - and hated the communists. No it was not 'similar'. That wouldn't be so much guilt-by-association as it would be flagrant stupidity. They were not remotely socialist either - and hated socialism. They were fascist - which is an entirely different philosphy. The economics of fascism has more in common with present-day Wall Street than with any form of socialism or communism. They got their economic philosophy from Musolini and made no real changes to it. Musolini took credit for, but wasn't the source of, the description of fascism as 'official corporatism'.
There are far more than 'capitalist' and 'socialist' philosophies in the world that have been actively implemented and tried. And even within those two there are dozens of variations that have existed. The failures of one variation does not reflect on all other variations. You can't point at Cuba and assume Andalusia had the same problems (it didn't).
You need to read up on the No True Scottsman fallacy - it means just about the exact opposite of what you think it means. You are making a guilt by association fallacy.
>Unhealthy concentration of power is a feature of all command economies.
A command economy however is not a feature of communism.
>Even marx knew they had to go through a command economy stage to get to 'perfect communism' Believed, not know, even in his own time that was greatly debated. A huge swath of communism in those days were anarchists - going the far opposite to the belief that only by also dismantling government and bringing democratic running to every level of society can comminism be achieved. That side never quite died out - and where it's been tried, it's been remarkably successfull. But even without that - the worker-co-op approach is a highly successful approach - and personally I favour getting to perfect communism gradually, by building worker coops everytime capitalism failed. Many of the ones in the US were created out of the ashes of failed capitalist companies -and succeeded where their capitalist forbears could not. In Argentina there is an even better example. The Argentinian economy completely collapsed in 2007. Thousands of businesses went under. In that wreckage - the workers decided to just show up the next day anyway. They showed up at the abandoned factories the capitalists had left behind as they fled the collapsing economy with their wealth- and started running them as democratically managed worker-owned coops. And they succeeded -where all those capitalist businesses had failed, they made them work. Partly because they paid themselves properly - and so all the businesses had actual customers who could actually afford to buy their goods. Today there are over 20-thousand such worker-owned businesses in the country, they produce more than 80% of it's GDP employ almost the entire workforce. They made an entire economy worked where capitalism had failed, in the same economic conditions, with the same government that all those businesses failed - they worked. It's the wisdom of crowds effect, a thousand workers deliberating about how to deal with a problem - one of them is bound to have a genius idea. Whoever said the many eyeballs effect can only work for software ?
>Hitler There was absolutely nothing Marxist about Hitler - on the contrary he despised socialism. On his ascent to power the first NAZI pogram Kristallnacht consisted of him murdering every socialist in parliament in cold blood - over 400 of them. His party may have been a socialist worker's party once -but that was long before he even joined it. By the time he ran it - it was absolutely anti-socialism and Hitler generally said 'jews and socialists' together - as, to him, they were the same scourge. People who are trying to turn a democracy into a dictatorship do not murder the people on THEIR side, they murder the people who would oppose them. And it's not like capitalism is immune to dictatorships - there have been more than enough of those. Pinochet ring a bell ?
> Stalin + Mao
Marxist only in name as they betrayed several of his most important criteria - democracy and peaceful protest (he was adamantly anti-revolution). So only in THEIR OWN WORDS even was it in name. They are more correctly called Bolshevist - and this whole thread began with me stating that I do not accept the fallacy of blaming Marx for the failures of Bolshevism. You've not offered any compelling evidence (or any evidence at all) for why that is an unreasonable position - you just ignored it. Since it's the entire point of the discussion - that's rather a stupid thing to do.
> Marxism's key and unfixable flaw is unhealthy concentration of power.
Except that this is not a feature of Marxism at all. It's a feature of Bolshevism - whose ills you are happy to blame on Marxism even though Marx himself would have been appalled by it. Marx was a devoted democrat and utterly opposed to concentrating power in the state. He also did not approve of the idea of the state owning the means of production. He wanted workers to own it, directly. The state-as-a-proxy is Bolshevism and while nobody will deny that it was a disaster - you can't use it's failures as evidence against a philosophy that outright rejected those very failures ! Worker-owned cooperations are far truer to Marx's vision than Russia ever was - and there are plenty of those in the United States right now. Doing quite well too. If anything it's the opposite - it reduces power centralisation by completely eradicating the power centralisation in employers over employees and democratising the running of business. It took us thousands of years to figure out that monarchy is a terrible way to run a country - it seems it will take us just as long to figure out it is JUST as terrible a way to run a business.
Why is it that Marx's most passionate critics have never actually READ Marx ?
Oh and your count is DEFINITELY WAY off. The most deadly philosophy in history is undoubtedly Christianity.
No. You cannot. You can ONLY study the past. You can say "Up until today - trait X was successful" and they were all equally successful since the ONLY objective measure of success for a genetic trait is "did it survive until now". If it exists - it's a good trait. But it could turn out to be a terrible trait by tomorrow.
Tomorrow morning a plane could land in New York with a passenger carrying a pathogen that kills highly intelligent people far easier than less intelligent people. Intelligence could go from being perceived as a highly desirable survival trait to an extinct trait by next Friday. You CAN'T KNOW.
Where knowledge does not exist, and cannot exist, rationality is a non-starter.
> but I'm only saying that it is a form of eugenics and so eugenics is not inherently bad. Only if you can predict which traits would be good or bad for survival - which you cannot. Since you can't, you can't claim that this is affecting reproduction at all - you can't KNOW who would have been more successfull without the intervention - it's an impossible thing to predict.
>Oh, and programs like affirmative actions are actually opposite to the principle of equality the under law. Only if you apply them to a society which is, already, equal. Even then it could only be true if it's done IN law, which in the US is extremely rare - affirmative action is mostly organisational policy rather than law. Even if the organisation in question happens to be government funded it's policies are NOT laws and unequal polices are not unequal laws. In a highly unequal society - affirmative action makes people MORE equal under the law than they otherwise would be. This is simply a mathematical fact - and the entire legal system is built around equalising unequal competitions. That's why you have principles like 'innocent until proven guilty' and 'right to an atorney' and 'the right not to incriminate yourself'. These rights give a huge advantage to the defendent in a case - but in doing so they make the court MORE equal. An individual against the full power of the state could NEVER get a fair trail if the court used YOUR idea of 'equal under the law'. Instead we tilt it hugely to the side of the weaker party in the hope of equalising the playing field.
Because you're suggesting that equality is achieved by allowing success for people who would otherwise fail - which implies that you think you can predict which traits would allow somebody to succeed or fail: an absolute impossibility.
The good physicists say "This fits the math - so it's possible, let's see if we can make useful predictions from it and see where it leads". The trouble with assuming absurd possibilities cannot be true is that they all too often end up being true. The most obvious example in physics is Galileo - whose idea of the sun being the center of the solar system was deemed quite absurd by the orthodoxy of his time - yet turned out to be true.
But even in the modern age we've seen that happen repeatedly - notably with your example of the ocean. We found ceolacanth fossils since the 19th century and were aware that some 230 million years ago a fish like this existed. It was always POSSIBLE they still survived and had just avoided detection all this time - but nobody really thought it was likely, and indeed if you stated that possibility to scientists you would have been laughed at... until we found some living specimens and suddenly it was true. Another example is the giant squid. We've had tales of them dating back at least 3000 years. And science rejected their existence as myths pretty much from the birth of naturalism as a field of science (the precursor to biology). Just another ridiculous myth of ancient people. Over the centuries evidence kept building up - which kept the conspiracy theories going, most notably whales caught with wounds that appeared to come from massive suckered-arms. But scientists wouldn't buy the possibility - and came up with any number of 'more plausible' explanations for the evidence before them.
They didn't get serious about the possibility of the giant squid until the 1850s when portions of one that had been stranded arrived in France. Today we know that not only does the giant squid exist - it's not even the largest squid around. The Colossal Squid is even bigger (we don't know which one Aristotle had written about - only that he didn't know there were two, since he specifically wrote about one gigantic squid much bigger than the common ones).
So we should at least consider the possibility that the Justin Bieber fish does in fact, exist. The biggest evidence for it's existence is that apparently they can breath air and one of them is currently a multi-platinum recording artist, based on the recordings from that specimen I would advance the conjecture that their air-breathing is limited and in an early stage of evolution (pre-booklung even) - more akin to a catfish crossing between ponds than a lungfish.
>one cannot morally run multiple experiments on society to determine the best policy.
Why not ? Lets take a practical question of governance. Water supply. Is it better to have it privatized ? Run by a private company but paid for in taxes or provided as a tax-funded utility operated by the municipality. You can find a billion claims written about the topic - all arguing quite persuasively for any particular solution. Some even argue that the reduction in the tax bills means everybody could afford to buy water at market rates if it was entirely supplied by businesses with no state involvement at all.
So why can't we test it ? Pick three towns with other factors being equal (so similar rainfall, river-locations, population-size etc. etc. etc.) and try one model in each for 10 years. Then compare things and make the best solution the preferred one. Even then - you don't make it the ONLY option. It's quite possible that what worked the best, even if it was massively better, may not work the best in a town where those other factors we equalized. If you can convincingly argue why another model is more appropriate and cite as much solid science as there is available to support your conclusion your town should be allowed to try a different model - but must be prepared to change that model if the results do not live up to expectation.
Government is constantly making predictions: "If we enact policy X then Y will happen" - so we can TEST the policies by seeing how often X really led to Y. Granted factors unknown could sometimes change an outcome so a single failure is not proof that the theory is wrong - but a consistent pattern of failure would preclude a policy from being attempted further. So for example austerity would be long gone since in nearly 200 years of attempting it, it has NEVER produced the predicted outcomes, has never had a single GOOD outcome and it's bad outcomes has ALWAYS included making the problems it was intended to fix WORSE (i.e. if you implement austerity to reduce government debt and deficits - austerity has constantly and without exception INCREASED the debt and the deficits instead - because austerity reduces the budgets income by orders of magnitude more than it reduces expenses).
There are plenty of ways we can apply at least a much MORE scientific approach to governance and get better results than we currently do.
Whatever else you may think of him... Marx was right about one thing, capitalism was and is hugely exploitative, fundamentally unjust and flies in the face of freedom. He repeatedly warned against achieving socialism through violent revolution because he correctly surmised that doing so would lead to abusive autocracies, he believe it MUST be achieved democratically if it was to have any chance at all of success. The proof that capitalism was all the evils he called it - is that revolutions DID happen, against his advice, and despite ending up exactly as he predicted. The blame for everybody ever killed by a communist dictator belongs squarely with capitalism. If capitalism had not been so entirely evil, the revolutions would never have happened and those dictators would never have come to power. Revolutions do not come easy. People will put up with a LOT before they are willing to risk personal life and limb to change a social order they are now unlikely to live to see. Revolutions come - when the majority of people have been so thoroughly exploited that they have absolutely nothing left to lose. If capitalism had not left the world with millions of people who had nothing left to lose - then Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao would never have been in power. Marx said the machines of capitalism are oiled by the blood of the workers and I would add -and fueled by the burning corpses of the colonized.
The end result of capitalism is severe inequality and the INEVITABLE result of severe inequality can only ever be violent revolution.
It isn't a valid or rational system - since it aims to achieve something that is entirely subjective in nature. You can't define good or bad traits objectively since it's absolutely impossible to know which traits will be needed for survival in future.
Slashdot Mirror
>They hated the commies because they competed for the same political space.
Political ? Maybe... but not the same economic space. And Marxism is an economic philosophy not a political one.
>Then nationalised/expropriated industries.
There's nothing uniquely Marxist about that. It's a feature of more than a dozen economic systems outside of Marxism and it is, in fact, even accepted in capitalism under certain conditions. Rooseveldt nationalised practically all of Detroit for the duration of the war. There are only a very small number of capitalist subphilosophies that do not allow any form of nationalisation or eminent domain at all and NONE of them have EVER been official policy in any country EVER.
>In the 30s 'capitalist' was code for 'jewish bankers'.
Who told you that ? The John Birch society was the most NAZI organisation to ever exist in America - and fervently anti-communist as well. Those people hated LBJ for being 'a socialist' for crying out loud ! They were basically the precursor of the modern day heartland foundation (and in fact, the Koch brother's father was a founding member, along with such notable anti-capitalists as Henry Ford). Seriously. Do actual FACTS ever influence the things you say ? Does reality ever enter the bubble in which you live ?
No they blamed Jews for Bolshevism - and Jewish bankers for funding it. They did NOT EVER think Jewish Bankers were capitalists !
>You fell for the post WWII soviet propaganda.
No, I actually studied history and philosophy and listen to no propaganda at all. If I fell for Soviet Propaganda I wouldn't call Bolshevism a massive failure. I wouldn't consider it a disaster. I however - do not believe their economic philosophy was the reason for the failure because in capitalist dictatorships the same failures occurred. Pinochet was no less brutal than Stalin and he was as hardcore a capitalist as ever ruled a country - hell his economic policy was basically written by Milton Friedman.
>All bolshevists are Marxists
No. ZERO Bolshevists are Marxists. Marx repeatedly stated that "Socialism MUST be achieved democratically. A recolutionary approach would lead to dictatorship which cannot be condoned". Since Bolshevists chose revolution AND installed dictators - it therefore ignored a key tenet of Marxism and wasn't Marxist. In fact it mostly takes it's inspiration from earlier philosphers than Marx. Marx came fairly late in communist thought actually. Anarcho-communism was born in the French Revolution (a century before Marx) and the key tenets of Bolshevism was born around the same time among Italian communists. Marx was late to the party. He got the fame but he really didn't deserve it. Even so - the variant he supported was not the variant that the Bolshevists enacted. To pretend that all the various communist and socialist philosophies have the same problems is to ignore the fact that more than one variant have been tried and they had radically different resutlts. Bolshevism was an unmitigated disaster but Anarcho-communism was a resounding success. Andalusia, Catalonia and Aragon were successful industrial societies with anarchist everybody-votes-on-every law governance and complete socialism in the form of turning all businesses into worker-owned coops. No state at all. They eradicated all poverty and all inequality and achieved what is documented as by far the highest quality of life achieved in the world at that stage - for ALL their citizens. What destroyed them was economics - but the combined military forces of Bolshevists and Capitalists actually forming an alliance. Neither side could stand to let anarchists be so successful let other societies decided THEY didn't want governments anymore either.
>not all marxists are bolshevists,
No Marxists are Bolshevists - they are different philosphies. It's like saying "Not all Christians are Satanists". It's not POSSIBLE to be both since they require believing entirely contradictory things.
>some were Nazis.
The NAZIS were neither.
>Obama a centrist? Don't make me laugh!
I cited facts. You just denied it without a single shred of supporting evidence. Typical rightwinger seeing what he wants to see.
>As for pardoning Snowden, a President can't pardon someone who hasn't been charged.
False. Presidents have frequently pardoned people who haven't been charged. Most famously - Ford pardoned Nixon who had not been charged with any crime.
> isn't on the same level as granting amnesty to 6 million illegal immigrants
As I pointed out and you ignored - he did NOTHING in terms of immigration that wasn't done by EVERY president since Reagan. The immigration policy under Obama is unchanged from what Reagan did - he just continued the policy which has had ZERO changes in 30 years. Every president used the deferred action clause which a republican congress wrote into the law to give amnesty and the criteria for amnesty has not been changed by anybody - including Obama. Like I said - you see what you want to see and don't bother to check. Your chosen example of an excessive policy is one Reagan instituted based on a Republican law and where no president since has made any changes up to and including Obama. Not to mention that Obama has actually deported more immigrants than any president - ever (bet you didn't know that) and that net Mexican immigration under Obama is NEGATIVE - more people have left the US for Mexico than has entered the US from Mexico during Obama's administration.
If you want to argue that immigration policy is too lenient - then you can have that debate, we may not agree but there is room to debate. What you do NOT get to do is pretend Obama has been more lenient than any president since the current immigration act was signed into law by Reagan since that is absolutely not true.
Fox news has been lying to you.
Didn't Obama count as a liberal?
Not really... sorry, no, I meant not at all. He RAN as a liberal, but he didn't rule as one. Center-right would be a more apt description of his actual policies. He didn't do single-payer health-care or even provide a public-option. He didn't submit a single bill to defend gay or trans rights and the only significant thing he did in this regard was to push for an education department policy about trans bathroom access, which came way too late. He hasn't pardoned Snowden. He hasn't rolled back the Patriot act. He didn't end either war. He didn't reduce the military spending. He didn't do anything to oppose the militarization of the police. He didn't speak out against atrociously oppressive laws by republican state legislatures. He didn't do anything concrete on climate change and the little he did came too late. He basically didn't change anything and offered no real hope. He didn't reduce US support for Israel or give any kind of balanced response to the events in the region. He was the perfect DINO.
Didn't he stretch the presidential powers to the best of his ability?
Again - not supported by the facts. He issued the lowest number of executive orders of any president in the past 70 years. His immigration policies didn't do anything that hasn't been done by every president since Reagan. His last supreme court nomination is a noted centrist whom republicans used to support. He didn't declare any wars and only engaged in one major military action - which had UN approval and involvement.
He also didn't reduce them though. He didn't reclassify marijuana, end private prisons (at least federally), or act against mandatory minimum sentences. He didn't try to repeal PATRIOT and he didn't actively oppose NSA spying (which started well before him).
Truth be told. Obama's administration is basically a no-score win.
It's not just politicians. It's citizens. The hardworking citizens are sick and tired of having to pay more taxes so you can avoid paying yours.
Because they were anonymous shell companies. Even the US cannot farm data that doesn't exist.
Shell companies as such are no issue, there are lots of legitimate reasons to have one. What doesn't exist - and never has and never will - is a legitimate reason to have a shell company that doesn't have your name attached to it. Every possible use of an anonymous shell company is to hide a crime. Some are relatively more minor (like tax dodging) some are terrible atrocities like slavery, selling weapons to terrorists and worse.
There are two reasons the US government never pressured panama to fix the laws that allowed shell companies to be registered with no documentation identifying their owners.
1) The US has plenty of states with the same problem - getting an anonymous shell company in Delaware or Nevada is ridiculously easy (in Nevada it will cost you a $25 registration fee and no documentation whatsoever has to be provided), so their own major donors would fight any attempt to change this locally and so very few Americans use the service - it's cheaper to get one at home if you got something to hide.
2) They used it themselves. There is proof that the US used this same shell company provider to set up the shell company they used to smuggle the funds in the Iran/Contra scandal, later they used it to fund Noriega (when he was still a CIA puppet).
The US government would rather lose out on on some ability to track genuine evil people than lose out on the ability to do the same evils themselves. It's far more fun to spy on innocent people who aren't doing highly profitable but terribly evil things.
>From what I've seen, multiverse theory is not falsifiable YET.
FTFY. If multiverse theory is real - then it has predictable consequences - some of which are falsifiable predictions that can be tested. Currently the best known of these is the two-slit experiment and that does have other possible explanations (though those explanations do not accord well with quantum mechanics).
What we don't yet have is an experiment where the behaviour predicted by a multiverse occurs and we can conclusively rule out other explanations - but then this is frequently the case in science and often for a very long time. As long as it remains that way - the results are tentative and unconfirmed, but still science and still falsifiable.
Again look at gravity waves. For decades the best experiment we devised to test that prediction was the aluminum tube test. Unfortunately those results could be explained by other, confirmed, phenomena like seismic activity. As long as we could not rule out all other possible causes of the results - we could not confirm gravitational waves.
Eventually technology matured to the point where we COULD build an experiment that allowed us to rule out all other known explanations - and when we got the predicted measurements, we could confirm gravity waves. Unless we learn tomorrow of a different effect that could cause the same measurements and is more likely - that confirmation stands. It seems unlikely that such an effect could have evaded detection in all the previous attempts however.
So the multiverse theory will be much like gravitational waves - falsifiable but untested until we devise an experiment where we can conclusively rule out other possibilities.
The clencher is this - in the case of gravitational waves the other explanations for those earlier measurements were *more* likely than the one being tested for. In the case of the multiverse the main other explanation for the experimental result is generally deemed to be less likely since it relies on an assumption contradicted by other strong and well tested theories.
Does that make it proven ? Far from it. It does, however, make it likely.
It's also worth considering that physics have many different types of potential alternate universes - all of which as possibilities have different impacts and require different types of testing. The multiverse explanation of quantum mechanics is the most testable of the lot. Now consider this one. There is an upper limit to the size of the universe according to relativity. Nothing can exceed the speed of light and so no part of the universe could be further from the big bang than it light could travel in the roughly 13.2 billion years since it happened.
But what if there was another big bang 400 billion light years away ? There would be another universe as big as ours - and completely impossible to detect from here. There could be millions of such universes - created by their own big bangs, expanding since their creation - and all undetectable from each other. The only testable prediction is that if they all keep expanding sooner or later they must merge - and so sooner or later one of them will merge with ours and we should see the impact on the movements of the stars as the gravity of the stars in that universe starts to impact on those in ours. That could be trillions of years from now - and the very concept of light-cones means that there is no way to test if it will happen until it does. It could also be happening right now and our telescopes will only know about it in a few billion years. Or it could have happened a few billion years ago and we'll be seeing the proof for the first time in telescopic observations starting tomorrow around 3pm UCT. Testable and falsifiable doesn't always means practically doable. This is just as likely as it is unlikely and humanity may well go extinct without ever finding the answer.
Then there is yet another kind predicted by string theory - a kind of sequence of universes, universes as energy states. An interesting result of that
>Consider two competing hypothesis: "there is an elephant in the corner of the room but it is undetectable" versus "there is no elephant in the room". Both predict the same outcome, but most would say the latter is the simpler explanation even though on a technical level this choice is arbitrary. Now replace the word elephant with parallel universe. Until we come up with an experiment that makes a testable prediction on the basis of there being multiple universes that does not have a simpler explanation *not* involving multiple universes it seems entirely reasonable to assert that there is only one universe.
There's a problem with your analogy. Let's correct it. The whole room is full of elephant footprints. We don't see an elephant - the door is too small for an elephant to have left through.
What explanation is simpler ? That there is no elephant or that the elephant is simply hiding where we can't see it and if we keep looking we will eventually find it ?
The voices in my head on the website I imagined in the universe I am dreaming are arguing about whether they are my only dream.
>Beautiful results and no testable predictions are worthless.
It does actually have plenty of testable predictions - not many of them are UNIQUE to it, some could potentially have other explanations but this is not unusual in any sphere of science - you need lots of tests to rule out other explanations as part of testing any theory. But what we don't yet have is the technology to do most of the tests.
That's not the same as being untestable - it's perfectly obvious what to test, just not how to actually DO the test. Something is untestable when it is stated in such a way that no evidence can confirm or deny it - not when the gathering of evidence is currently beyond our means. We've had lots of scientific predictions which were made long before the technology existed to test them but which were ultimately confirmed when technology developed far enough. A recent example is gravitational waves - which we only figured out how to build a valid test for this year.
We always knew what to test - but how to build a sufficiently sensitive measuring device eluded us for a century. In the 1960s we tried to test it using long, hollow, hanging aluminium tubes and hoping to measure them moving as gravitational waves shook them about. Aluminium was a good choice - it's non-magnetic ruling out one source of motion beyond gravity. Ruling out wind was easy too -just hang them indoors. But ruling out seismic motion was not - we never could get a measurement on them that could be definitively shown NOT to be caused by the earth's own movements. To actually detect gravitational waves we needed something where even the tiniest motion could be measured, which was immune to magnetic AND seismic interference. Lasers had the immunity in themselves but to be measureable they would have to be very long - and to build a structure to house such a long beam which would nevertheless filter out any seismic waves was no mean feat. We didn't have that kind of engineering until quite recently.
When we finally had the means to do the tests, and the money to fund building it, we could do the test - and not only did we get the confirmation - we got it resoundingly. The results of that test was massively more conclusive than anybody had dared to hope.
>The fact that the Biblical dimensions for that ark work and produce an impressive structure
Except those measurements are given in an extinct unit of measurement - and we have no idea how big that unit was. So this is more likely a case of working-back-from-the-answer-you-want. Ken Ham chose from among the many theories of how big that unit may be (and complete guesswork) the one that gave a 'boat' of a size that was suitably impressive.
Much the same way we don't know how long the Greek 'stadium' was - so we can't actually determine how accurate Erasthosthenes measurement of the earth's circumference was since he gave it in a unit of measurement that we don't know the length of. Scholars think it was just shy of a hundred yards. If that's true - then his answer is remarkably accurate.
Except - the REASON they think it was just shy of a hundred yards is those scholars are assuming he did his experiment well and got a reasonably accurate measure of the earth's circumference - and calculated the length needed for a stadium to have.
There is a bit of supporting evidence in that he calculates that Alexandria is 1/50th of the way around the world from Syene and gives the distance between these cities as 5000 stadia. We know where the cities were - so we can say that based on the usual length assumed for a stadium it's pretty close to the same number. Except that there are records suggesting a different value for the stadium that STILL puts the cities at about that distance appart (we have no idea WHERE in the cities he measured from and the perfect round number suggests he rounded it anyway) - but on the scale of the planet it puts him off by more than 16% ! So is the 1% error based on the usual assumption correct ? Or the 16% error based on other values.
Considering how limited communications and technology was in his day - both are equally likely - and we don't have any physical evidence or even strong documentary evidence to confirm either number. We know his hypotheses was sound (the geometry needed was, after all, well established by then) - we don't actually know if his execution was sound.
Ham is working on numbers from a story written down some 7000 years ago - likely based on an earlier story first written down around 9000 years ago and probably told much earlier than that - there's at least some scientists who believe the garden of Eden story was a mythologized telling of a real event - the flooding of the persian gulf at the end of the last ice age (between 12 and 10 thousand years ago) which forced humanity to change from hunter gatherer to farmer in order to survive in a suddenly rather harsher climate. The flood story occurs is discussed in the epic of Gilgamesh which was almost certainly the inspiration behind Genesis (and there is no doubt Abraham KNEW the epic of Gilgamesh - he came from Ur, a mesopotamian city where Gilgamesh had, had his epic carved on damn near every wall - we know this because we've FOUND Ur and seen it - it was a great personal PR excercise).
Whether there is any truth to the 'eden in the gulf' theory (and there is some half decent evidence for the idea) or not - Gilgamesh wanted to live forever, the whole tale is about his efforts to achieve immortality. His attempt is based on seeking out earlier legends - which he recounts, and which are found almost unchanged in Genesis. He fails in the quest - but he does succeed in his next attempt: which is writing that epic. He achieves the only kind of immortality humans can achieve: an immortal name. He wrote the epic so his name would live on after his body died, and to secure that made sure everybody in his kingdom knew that story. It worked too - 8000 years later we still know his name, we still tell his story.
So where does that leave Ken Ham ? As is oh so common with biblical literalists - he chooses the evidence that suits him, and chooses the numbers that match his desires. Like choosing to have an 'el' be the length that makes sure his 'ark' is nice and impressive in size.
If th
>So because you cannot have perfect knowledge of the future you can't plan at all?
When the knowledge in question is an emergent phenomenon - and the system has well over 100 trillion moving parts - you can't have ANY knowledge at all. That's a rather different thing.
> Does that stop you from putting gas in your car when the gauge reads near E
Firstly - that isn't knowledge of the future, it's knowledge of the present. The car is low on fuel now. The car is also a super-simple thing and I can reliably predict that if the fuel runs out the car stops moving. I cannot reliably predict whether humans with two extra legs will be better or worse at surviving - because the humans are not the system - they are just one part in a system that includes every living thing on earth... and the sun... and just about everything else in the solar system and quite a few things outside it.
>Some traits are _clearly_ unequivocally maladaptive,
Nope. You can only say that they would be so in the past and appear to be so in the present. The next major catastrophe could create a world where only pinheads survive.
> But we don't let government do anything about it because we can't trust the bastards with that much power.
We don't let ANYBODY do anything about it because NOBODY can do a good job. It's impossible since we have no way of knowing what a 'good' job would even look like.
Actually, that's a fantastic example. Thanks.
Now you mention it - black holes would be another great example. The fact that Einstein's math allowed them infuriated physicists. They were an embarrassment to the field - then the evidence for their existence became so strong that now it's the orthodox theory. A similar pattern happened with the Big Bang theory - as late as the 1960's cosmologists were mocked by other physicists for accepting that theory. The maths allowed it but the universe starting with a singularity smacked of creationism. Hawking recounts being mocked at university for accepting it. Then the evidence started piling up - and the big bang also became orthodoxy.
>10 years it too short for infrastructure.
What's your point ? Obviously the specific timeframe should be reasonable for evaluating the specific thing, that determination would be part of setting up good experiments.
>Look how long it took the government of Flint to fuckup their water system
About 5 years. The decisions that screwed it up were made by the current republican governor. Rick Snider - who was first elected in 2010 and inaugurated in 2011.
You could argue there were preceeding issues that helped cause it, but they had nothing to do with the water system - if you're going to argue that you have to be honest about what they were. They were budget issues. If anything Flint is just yet another example of the horrors that invariably come from austerity policies.
>and how long countries like Peru had no water systems to speak of.
While ignoring that everytime any place had privatized water supply it led to riots because private industry has consistently been terrible at it ? Governments have sometimes screwed up water supply. Private industry has NEVER DONE IT WELL AT ALL. Sure they go out of business, but the next company does it worse. It's simply not a case where market economics work because it's by definition a natural monopoly.
>You can't really run the experiment.
You've given absolutely no evidence to support this statement.
>They self identified as commies
Your use of that slur suggests that rational discussion is impossible. You are not interested in facts.
I never said they were not communist - I said they were not MARXIST. Marx was not the only communist philosopher you know - and his communism is not the only communist philosophy. Hell Marx wasn't even the FIRST.
And for the record 'self identification' is a terrible standard which no sane person would use. People ALWAYS self-identify as something noble - but you can't judge the something noble by what people who self-identify with it does in it's name - especially when what they do contradicts what they identify as. So ISIS self identifies as Islamic but aren't. The US self-identifies as democratic but aren't. White supremacists self-identify as defenders of freedom and morality. Louis XI!V self-identified as a benevolent ruler. The WBC self-identifies as Christian - despite the fact that Jesus would absolutely not approve of their methods.
>Guilt by association would be taking someone with a similar philosophy
You mean like saying the Marxists are Bolshevists or vice versa ?
>say the NAZIs and call them commies instead of just socialists.
Who had nothing that even remotely RESEMBLED communism anywhere in their philosophy. No similarity whatsoever - and hated the communists. No it was not 'similar'. That wouldn't be so much guilt-by-association as it would be flagrant stupidity. They were not remotely socialist either - and hated socialism. They were fascist - which is an entirely different philosphy. The economics of fascism has more in common with present-day Wall Street than with any form of socialism or communism. They got their economic philosophy from Musolini and made no real changes to it. Musolini took credit for, but wasn't the source of, the description of fascism as 'official corporatism'.
There are far more than 'capitalist' and 'socialist' philosophies in the world that have been actively implemented and tried. And even within those two there are dozens of variations that have existed. The failures of one variation does not reflect on all other variations. You can't point at Cuba and assume Andalusia had the same problems (it didn't).
Indeed - just like learned people have been writing about giant squid for thousands of years, Aristotle mentions it in his writings.
You need to read up on the No True Scottsman fallacy - it means just about the exact opposite of what you think it means.
You are making a guilt by association fallacy.
>Unhealthy concentration of power is a feature of all command economies.
A command economy however is not a feature of communism.
>Even marx knew they had to go through a command economy stage to get to 'perfect communism'
Believed, not know, even in his own time that was greatly debated. A huge swath of communism in those days were anarchists - going the far opposite to the belief that only by also dismantling government and bringing democratic running to every level of society can comminism be achieved. That side never quite died out - and where it's been tried, it's been remarkably successfull.
But even without that - the worker-co-op approach is a highly successful approach - and personally I favour getting to perfect communism gradually, by building worker coops everytime capitalism failed. Many of the ones in the US were created out of the ashes of failed capitalist companies -and succeeded where their capitalist forbears could not.
In Argentina there is an even better example. The Argentinian economy completely collapsed in 2007. Thousands of businesses went under. In that wreckage - the workers decided to just show up the next day anyway. They showed up at the abandoned factories the capitalists had left behind as they fled the collapsing economy with their wealth- and started running them as democratically managed worker-owned coops.
And they succeeded -where all those capitalist businesses had failed, they made them work. Partly because they paid themselves properly - and so all the businesses had actual customers who could actually afford to buy their goods. Today there are over 20-thousand such worker-owned businesses in the country, they produce more than 80% of it's GDP employ almost the entire workforce.
They made an entire economy worked where capitalism had failed, in the same economic conditions, with the same government that all those businesses failed - they worked.
It's the wisdom of crowds effect, a thousand workers deliberating about how to deal with a problem - one of them is bound to have a genius idea. Whoever said the many eyeballs effect can only work for software ?
>Hitler
There was absolutely nothing Marxist about Hitler - on the contrary he despised socialism. On his ascent to power the first NAZI pogram Kristallnacht consisted of him murdering every socialist in parliament in cold blood - over 400 of them. His party may have been a socialist worker's party once -but that was long before he even joined it. By the time he ran it - it was absolutely anti-socialism and Hitler generally said 'jews and socialists' together - as, to him, they were the same scourge.
People who are trying to turn a democracy into a dictatorship do not murder the people on THEIR side, they murder the people who would oppose them.
And it's not like capitalism is immune to dictatorships - there have been more than enough of those. Pinochet ring a bell ?
> Stalin + Mao
Marxist only in name as they betrayed several of his most important criteria - democracy and peaceful protest (he was adamantly anti-revolution). So only in THEIR OWN WORDS even was it in name. They are more correctly called Bolshevist - and this whole thread began with me stating that I do not accept the fallacy of blaming Marx for the failures of Bolshevism. You've not offered any compelling evidence (or any evidence at all) for why that is an unreasonable position - you just ignored it. Since it's the entire point of the discussion - that's rather a stupid thing to do.
> Marxism's key and unfixable flaw is unhealthy concentration of power.
Except that this is not a feature of Marxism at all. It's a feature of Bolshevism - whose ills you are happy to blame on Marxism even though Marx himself would have been appalled by it. Marx was a devoted democrat and utterly opposed to concentrating power in the state. He also did not approve of the idea of the state owning the means of production. He wanted workers to own it, directly. The state-as-a-proxy is Bolshevism and while nobody will deny that it was a disaster - you can't use it's failures as evidence against a philosophy that outright rejected those very failures ! Worker-owned cooperations are far truer to Marx's vision than Russia ever was - and there are plenty of those in the United States right now. Doing quite well too.
If anything it's the opposite - it reduces power centralisation by completely eradicating the power centralisation in employers over employees and democratising the running of business. It took us thousands of years to figure out that monarchy is a terrible way to run a country - it seems it will take us just as long to figure out it is JUST as terrible a way to run a business.
Why is it that Marx's most passionate critics have never actually READ Marx ?
Oh and your count is DEFINITELY WAY off. The most deadly philosophy in history is undoubtedly Christianity.
No. You cannot. You can ONLY study the past. You can say "Up until today - trait X was successful" and they were all equally successful since the ONLY objective measure of success for a genetic trait is "did it survive until now". If it exists - it's a good trait. But it could turn out to be a terrible trait by tomorrow.
Tomorrow morning a plane could land in New York with a passenger carrying a pathogen that kills highly intelligent people far easier than less intelligent people. Intelligence could go from being perceived as a highly desirable survival trait to an extinct trait by next Friday. You CAN'T KNOW.
Where knowledge does not exist, and cannot exist, rationality is a non-starter.
> but I'm only saying that it is a form of eugenics and so eugenics is not inherently bad.
Only if you can predict which traits would be good or bad for survival - which you cannot. Since you can't, you can't claim that this is affecting reproduction at all - you can't KNOW who would have been more successfull without the intervention - it's an impossible thing to predict.
>Oh, and programs like affirmative actions are actually opposite to the principle of equality the under law.
Only if you apply them to a society which is, already, equal. Even then it could only be true if it's done IN law, which in the US is extremely rare - affirmative action is mostly organisational policy rather than law. Even if the organisation in question happens to be government funded it's policies are NOT laws and unequal polices are not unequal laws.
In a highly unequal society - affirmative action makes people MORE equal under the law than they otherwise would be. This is simply a mathematical fact - and the entire legal system is built around equalising unequal competitions. That's why you have principles like 'innocent until proven guilty' and 'right to an atorney' and 'the right not to incriminate yourself'. These rights give a huge advantage to the defendent in a case - but in doing so they make the court MORE equal. An individual against the full power of the state could NEVER get a fair trail if the court used YOUR idea of 'equal under the law'. Instead we tilt it hugely to the side of the weaker party in the hope of equalising the playing field.
Because you're suggesting that equality is achieved by allowing success for people who would otherwise fail - which implies that you think you can predict which traits would allow somebody to succeed or fail: an absolute impossibility.
The good physicists say "This fits the math - so it's possible, let's see if we can make useful predictions from it and see where it leads". The trouble with assuming absurd possibilities cannot be true is that they all too often end up being true. The most obvious example in physics is Galileo - whose idea of the sun being the center of the solar system was deemed quite absurd by the orthodoxy of his time - yet turned out to be true.
But even in the modern age we've seen that happen repeatedly - notably with your example of the ocean. We found ceolacanth fossils since the 19th century and were aware that some 230 million years ago a fish like this existed. It was always POSSIBLE they still survived and had just avoided detection all this time - but nobody really thought it was likely, and indeed if you stated that possibility to scientists you would have been laughed at... until we found some living specimens and suddenly it was true.
Another example is the giant squid. We've had tales of them dating back at least 3000 years. And science rejected their existence as myths pretty much from the birth of naturalism as a field of science (the precursor to biology). Just another ridiculous myth of ancient people. Over the centuries evidence kept building up - which kept the conspiracy theories going, most notably whales caught with wounds that appeared to come from massive suckered-arms. But scientists wouldn't buy the possibility - and came up with any number of 'more plausible' explanations for the evidence before them.
They didn't get serious about the possibility of the giant squid until the 1850s when portions of one that had been stranded arrived in France. Today we know that not only does the giant squid exist - it's not even the largest squid around. The Colossal Squid is even bigger (we don't know which one Aristotle had written about - only that he didn't know there were two, since he specifically wrote about one gigantic squid much bigger than the common ones).
So we should at least consider the possibility that the Justin Bieber fish does in fact, exist. The biggest evidence for it's existence is that apparently they can breath air and one of them is currently a multi-platinum recording artist, based on the recordings from that specimen I would advance the conjecture that their air-breathing is limited and in an early stage of evolution (pre-booklung even) - more akin to a catfish crossing between ponds than a lungfish.
>one cannot morally run multiple experiments on society to determine the best policy.
Why not ? Lets take a practical question of governance. Water supply. Is it better to have it privatized ? Run by a private company but paid for in taxes or provided as a tax-funded utility operated by the municipality. You can find a billion claims written about the topic - all arguing quite persuasively for any particular solution. Some even argue that the reduction in the tax bills means everybody could afford to buy water at market rates if it was entirely supplied by businesses with no state involvement at all.
So why can't we test it ? Pick three towns with other factors being equal (so similar rainfall, river-locations, population-size etc. etc. etc.) and try one model in each for 10 years. Then compare things and make the best solution the preferred one.
Even then - you don't make it the ONLY option. It's quite possible that what worked the best, even if it was massively better, may not work the best in a town where those other factors we equalized. If you can convincingly argue why another model is more appropriate and cite as much solid science as there is available to support your conclusion your town should be allowed to try a different model - but must be prepared to change that model if the results do not live up to expectation.
Government is constantly making predictions: "If we enact policy X then Y will happen" - so we can TEST the policies by seeing how often X really led to Y. Granted factors unknown could sometimes change an outcome so a single failure is not proof that the theory is wrong - but a consistent pattern of failure would preclude a policy from being attempted further. So for example austerity would be long gone since in nearly 200 years of attempting it, it has NEVER produced the predicted outcomes, has never had a single GOOD outcome and it's bad outcomes has ALWAYS included making the problems it was intended to fix WORSE (i.e. if you implement austerity to reduce government debt and deficits - austerity has constantly and without exception INCREASED the debt and the deficits instead - because austerity reduces the budgets income by orders of magnitude more than it reduces expenses).
There are plenty of ways we can apply at least a much MORE scientific approach to governance and get better results than we currently do.
Whatever else you may think of him... Marx was right about one thing, capitalism was and is hugely exploitative, fundamentally unjust and flies in the face of freedom. He repeatedly warned against achieving socialism through violent revolution because he correctly surmised that doing so would lead to abusive autocracies, he believe it MUST be achieved democratically if it was to have any chance at all of success.
The proof that capitalism was all the evils he called it - is that revolutions DID happen, against his advice, and despite ending up exactly as he predicted. The blame for everybody ever killed by a communist dictator belongs squarely with capitalism. If capitalism had not been so entirely evil, the revolutions would never have happened and those dictators would never have come to power. Revolutions do not come easy. People will put up with a LOT before they are willing to risk personal life and limb to change a social order they are now unlikely to live to see. Revolutions come - when the majority of people have been so thoroughly exploited that they have absolutely nothing left to lose.
If capitalism had not left the world with millions of people who had nothing left to lose - then Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao would never have been in power. Marx said the machines of capitalism are oiled by the blood of the workers and I would add -and fueled by the burning corpses of the colonized.
The end result of capitalism is severe inequality and the INEVITABLE result of severe inequality can only ever be violent revolution.
It isn't a valid or rational system - since it aims to achieve something that is entirely subjective in nature. You can't define good or bad traits objectively since it's absolutely impossible to know which traits will be needed for survival in future.