Once again, the range between estimates is greater than the smaller estimate.
That's hardly a basis to dismiss them. And you'll notice that even the smallest estimate is considerably greater than "0", which is the "estimate" that global warming deniers are giving.
So, our best, most refined estimates give us a guess off a 13% to 38% increase in temperature. a 25% margin of error is scientifically acceptable as precise?
Indeed, it often is. Science in the real world often has to proceed from much less certainty than you're probably familiar with as a mechanic.
I didn't read the full report
That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? You're much more interested in shooting your mouth off than correcting your ignorance.
You mean like creating a documentary, featuring a prominent politician that failed geology, which focused on one particular variable?
No, I mean like publishing research in peer-reviewed journals. I've asked you several times, but let me repeat - what research have GW deniers published in peer-reviewed journals? Making a movie isn't the debate. Writing a book isn't the debate.
The debate is research in peer-reviewed journals, just like it is for any other field. Why don't GW deniers engage in that debate? (Because they have nothing to debate with.)
This hypothetical model that was run in 1997 that predicted our climate within a 5% margin of error for each year of 1997.
That's not what you asked for. You've been asking for models that predict the next ten years, not the past ten years. Somebody stop those goalposts!
I don't have a conclusion here... I think there are idiots on both sides and I'm waiting for verifiable proof to be shown from either side.
Weren't you saying something about ad hominem attacks? Does calling someone an "idiot", in your opinion, constitute an "ad hominem attack?"
Excuse me for not believing people who result to ad hominems rather than admit there are problems with their theory instead of just proving the theory once and for all.
"Proving the theory once and for all." Is that your impression of how science works? That theories are "proven once and for all?" It's not surprising, then, that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
As for baseball, the magic switch, laboratory testing vs the real world, etc, it all ties into how the theories proposed by the AGW group are flawed because of how little we actually know and can prove.
Ah. We don't know everything; thus, we know nothing. Is that your contention, now? That all of science is a sham because science doesn't produce perfect knowledge right away? Where have I heard that before? Oh, right - that's the position of the creationists, too. It's amazing how the opponents of science all start to blend together. Where are you getting this stuff? The Discovery Institute?
You mean like taking money from the Sierra Club to produce a study with a predetermined outcome?
I have no idea what you think you're talking about. Which study are you referring to? In which peer-reviewed journal did it appear?
The term is skeptic unless you're continuing to try to ad hominem and link anyone who is skeptical about global warming to the holocaust.
Nobody's mentioned the holocaust but you, and I'll use the term "skeptic" when you begin using some skepticism. The proper term for what you're doing - ignoring evidence and refusing to provide any of your own - is "denial."
I also notice you again to back to curve fitting as proof that it works...
Again, nobody's mentioned curve fitting but you, and curve fitting isn't what I'm talking about. You curve fit data, you don't curve fit models. And you have yet to offer any meaningful response to the models I've mentioned. Did you look up the IPCC AR4 yet? Why not?
Science is about debate.
Nobody's said that it isn't, but the most salient characteristic of the whole GW denial movement is its stubborn refusal to take part in the debate. Instead, like creationists, they go to laymen and the media - two areas completely irrelevant to genuine scientific debate. Scientific debate happens in the peer-reviewed arenas. That GW deniers refuse to step foot in those arenas is indicative of the fact that they have no supportive research and their criticisms of the climate science aren't made on scientific grounds, but on specious ones.
Getting back to global warming, the only way we can know if we're actually right is to test what we think we know at the full scale... and that is why the onus is on being able to produce a model which accurately predicts the future.
A number of models have, like the ones I mentioned previously. The fact that you don't even mention them to rebut them indicates how disinterested you are in the evidence. Skeptic is not the word for what you are - a skeptic is someone who refrains from reaching a conclusion until after he's sought out the data that would speak to it. But the fact that you'd rather waste my time talking about baseball, and mythical stories of computer switches, and Mormonism, and Pop Tarts, makes it clear that denial is what you're interested in, which is why I continue to use that term.
However, the AGW proponents tend to stick their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes or outright attack the character of someone rather than actually deal with what they've brought to the table.
What have they brought to the table? I keep asking you but you don't answer. Why is that?
Funny - why do I get the exact same feeling about you?
Anyone who calls them on it is automatically a shill and had their credentials stripped, right?
Do they? It's pretty easy to toss around charges of a grand conspiracy acting with no specified interest, and again, cranks always accuse the scientific "establishment" of unfairly muzzling "alternative viewpoints", but a simple look at the historical record shows that when scientists impeach their objectivity, the consequences are usually swift and severe.
Who is going to publish it? Not the media that hypes up disaster left and right for ratings, right?
Which is another criticism that doesn't make any sense; it's clearly the media that's most susceptible to narratives of false balance. The problem with GW deniers isn't getting their message out to the media; the media, in fact, is responsible for tarting up the controversy to a much greater degree than supported by the evidence GW deniers have supplied - usually none at all.
No the problem is that, again, GW deniers aren't producing peer-reviewed research. They're producing popular press books and potboiler novels and opinion pieces in the Washington Post. That's not how legitimate science is done. That's a lot more like how creationism is done.
Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years.
Then look at the IPCC reports where they do exactly that. If you're just looking for predictions, they're out there. If you're looking for predictions that were made 100 years ago that you can test against what happened, that's impossible. What we do have are models run in reverse that match 2000 years of climate data. If you want to see them run 10 years in the future, that stuff is out there. But you have to step out behind your bulwark of ignorance to see it.
What you don't see is that I'm flicking a switch on the other side of the room at the same time you flipped yours.
Great - but if you were to propose your "alternate theory of switching", it would be incumbent on you to provide evidence for your view and explain why we should accept your theory, which is much less parsimonious than the single-switch theory.
GW deniers haven't done that. They haven't explained where anthropogenic CO2 gases go, and why they don't cause an increase in the radiative-convective effect. They're just asking us to accept that it doesn't, and that all the models are wrong, on the basis of... what? Magic?
I noticed you pretty much ignored about the correlation pointing the other way... that it is the increased temperature which increases CO2.
In fact, I agreed that it's initially the increased temperatures that release sequestered CO2, causing a feedback effect. Maybe you're not reading closely enough? That wouldn't surprise me.
But you're still under an obligation to explain how, in your less parsimonious view, the additional CO2 "disappears" from the atmosphere without increasing the greenhouse effect. And you haven't explained how global temperatures, in the absence of a variable greenhouse effect, are fluctuating so wildly - well beyond the changes in the Earth's insolation.
Also, just because something works the way you expect it to in a laboratory doesn't mean that is how it works in the real world when you have unknown factors at play and a massively larger scale.
Unknown factors aren't an explanation. Arguing from ignorance is a pretty poor way to defend an argument.
Now, give me one scientist who can tell us what the climate will be like in 10 years based on the knowledge he has today.
Let's start with IPCC AR4. Familiarize yourself with that material, and those predictions, and get back to me.
However, as a prospectus will tell you, "past performance is not an indication of future results."
A prospectus, as you may be aware, is a document abou
Who says the peer-reviewed journals don't have a bias themselves?
They have nothing to gain from such a bias, and everything to lose.
Water vapor is a more important gas than CO2 but everyone wants to focus on CO2 instead.
Water vapor's contribution to global warming isn't ignored; to the contrary, it's taken into account. But water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. So I can't see what purpose you have in bringing it up, except that it's a vehicle for you to promulgate more GW myths.
I don't know of a single model that has accurately predicted that far out, much less 50 or 100 years from now.
Well, 100 years ago, we didn't have computers to run the models. So are you really so surprised?
What we can do is "predict" the past; that is, determine if the models, run in reverse, develop historically accurate climate data. We have (I think) something like 9 slightly different models that each, to varying degrees of success, accurately predict the last 2000 years of climate.
Remember, 2006 was supposed to be a year of extreme hurricanes.
I don't remember reading that in the peer-reviewed research. A fair bit of what you consider to be the refuted claims of climate scientists are actually strawman inventions by climate science deniers, and I expect that this is more of the same.
Repeat after me... correlation is not equal to causation.
You walk into a room and flip a switch. The lights come on. Once, it's maybe a coincidence. How many times do you have to see the lights go on and off when you flip the switch before you're willing to admit that they're connected? Or do you always have to tear open the walls and see the wiring before you allow yourself to come to a conclusion?
The ice core data is like flipping the switch for 650,000 years. And it's not so surprising that the temperature increases predate the CO2 increases - the temp increases (probably due to solar cycles and changes in the Earth's inclination) stimulate the release of CO2 gas, which drives the warming higher, beyond the forcing from the insolation. Like in a candle, the way the heat of the flame is needed to melt the wax for combustion.
Ok... so me the full climate model that accurately predicts the climate 10 years from now and I'll believe you.
It's not exactly clear to me how you expect me to show you accurate predictions of the future before the future has happened. But an argument that's based on the absence of impossible evidence isn't science, it's a bulwark of invincible evidence./sigh don't they teach debate anymore?
Why would the rules of debate be applicable to science? And, indeed, the credibility of the speaker is relevant to judging the veracity of the claims.
The extremists are pushing an agenda rather than the science and the science is losing out because of it...
The science is losing out because of a concentrated, coordinated effort to discredit it on non-scientific grounds. And you fell for it, apparently.
And that's the problem right there... anyone who is sponsored by an energy company (who don't care if they make their money off selling you oil or wind power), their results are immediately impugned.
Why shouldn't they be? Private research isn't under the same strictures of transparent methodology that public science usually is. How many times do we have to see pharma companies concealing the "bad" data and cherry-picking the good - with the consumer paying the price - to conclude that science used to promote corporate interest isn't any science at all?
I mean, what are you saying, exactly? That it's all just a coincidence that the oil companies have all this "research", which has never appeared in any peer-reviewed journal, proving that we can burn all the carbon fuels we want with no negative consequences?
As a matter of fact, the energy companies do care if they're selling wind power or fossil fuel power; it's a hell of a lot cheaper on their end to pump free calories out of the ground than to run a network of wind farms. Cheaper for them, anyway, because their business model passes the costs of cleanup onto the rest of us.
Only science which points toward anthropogenic global warming is above dispute.
Reverse it. The science which is above reproach points, exclusivly, to anthropogenic climate change. Your conspiracy theory is that there's actually no effect from pumping 100 Pinatubos-worth of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that the scientific consensus on the matter is actually the result of a secret agreement among climatologists to... what, exactly?
It's not clear to me what part of the climate science you find controversial. We know that the greenhouse effect exists; otherwise the surface of the Earth would be like the surface of the Moon. We know that CO2 gas is a part of that effect; we've been studying the properties of that gas since it's discovery more than 100 years ago. We know the chemistry of combustion; burning fossil fuels produce CO2. Basic chemistry tells us how much CO2 a given reaction produces, and basic geometry tells us the total volume of the atmosphere. It's easy to measure the gaseous components of our atmosphere, and we observe that CO2 concentrations are on the rise. If that wasn't enough to conclude that we should expect a warming effect just from increasing CO2, it's sufficient to look at ice core data from 650,000 of CO2 cycles to see the corellation between CO2 concentration and global mean temperatures - as dramatic as flipping a switch and seeing the lights go on.
These measurements have been verified, so our instruments aren't to blame. If it's a "natural cycle", then what happens to all the human-produced CO2? Where does it go that it doesn't result in warming? If global warming "skeptics" had some reply to the data, we'd see it in the peer-reviewed arenas. But it seems like all they have is the same stuff you've got - conspiracy theories about hippy scientists, feigned outrage on behalf of the poor, poor maligned oil companies, and bizzare complaints that the fact that people take global warming very seriously indeed is proof that there's no global warming at all (?).
If your only reply is that "climate is really complicated so we shouldn't make conclusions", well, I can only inform you that, just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean nobody does.
As for your "Senate report" - LOL! I'm sure a Republican Senate collecting billions in campaign contributions is a completely unbiased source in regards to assessing the climatological community. Like big oil checks, and unlike research grants, campaign contributions are another source of income where you can generally spend it on whatever the hell you want, the FEC notwithstanding.
The Sierra Club and their ilk have just as much of an agenda, if not even more of one, than the energy companies.
Fair enough. Quick question: Between the oil companies and the Sierra Club, which one posted profits last year larger, by far, than any other corporation in the history of Western Civilization?
The fact of the matter is that those that support the notion that global warming is predominantly caused by human activities are so self-righteous about the fact that one has to question the objectivity of their research.
One also has to question the intelligence of someone who, like you, didn't seem to notice that the predominantly self-righteous figures aren't the ones personally responsible for any of the research.
Al Gore makes a movie about global warming. Setting aside the scientific accuracy of his movie (it's pretty accurate according to climatologists), how does his enthusiasm for the topic, in your opinion, diminish the "objectivity" of the research of, say, the IPCC?
Only in the topsy-turvy world of those opposed to climate science does someone's enthusiasm for a topic mean that other people's work is "less objective." You guys really will try anything, won't you?
Nevermind the readily observeable information that while not only Earth's climate is getting warmer, so is Mar's - due to the rotational temperature changes in the Sun.
You must not be aware that solar output has been decreasing since the mid-90's, but during the same period, the rate of the Earth's warming has increased. How do you explain this discrepancy in your "only insolation theory?"
Also I'm curious as to how you think we're able to measure global temperatures on Mars. From a handful of probes? And, again, how do you explain Martian warming in the face of a cooling sun? I'll tell you how the scientists explain it. It's the same reason it's happening on Earth - increases in greenhouse gases.
Now, you might be asking - where are those gases coming from, and if it's natural on Mars, why isn't it natural on Earth? Well, Mars is, as you know, a different planet, and it has polar regions covered in frozen CO2 - which is now sublimating due to changes in Mars' inclination.
If you can find vast fields of sublimating dry ice here on Earth, then I'll accept that the warming on Earth has a natural cause. But until then climate change skeptics have a considerable problem on their hands explaining where the increasing atmospheric carbon is coming from, if not human industy; and where all the carbon that is coming from human industry is going, if not into the atmosphere.
Anyone who manipulates their science, ignores contrary evidence or exaggerates the conclusions of the science in order to scare the government and/or people into more grant money.
I think maybe you've got no fucking idea what "grant money" is and how it's spending is controlled.
When the oil companies write you a massive fucking paycheck for your earnest efforts in global warming misinformation, you can go down and spend that on a Lexus, no problem. The oil companies don't care what you do with it.
When you get a research grant from the government, or from any other public institution, it's not like they cut you a big check and turn their backs. Your expenditures are strictly controlled and every purchase has to be defended in supporting the research. Researchers aren't even allowed to pay themselves from that money - only their subordinates, in so far as they've assisted with that specific research. The project leader's salary comes from other sources that have nothing to do, usually, with grant expenditures.
So the idea that "grant money" represents some lucrative money bucket that climatologists are drumming up a controversy to dip into is just ridiculous. Nobody ever got rich writing grants for the government. But plenty of people are very, very rich as a result of the efforts of entrenched energy companies to place obstacles in the path of government regulation.
If you haven't been happy with the quality of fiction writing that meets your particular political agenda (I loathe to call anything you've written here something as high and mighty as "moral"), sit your lazy ass down and get to writing something that portrays your grand vision of the future.
I don't have a grand vision of the future; I suspect it's bullshit in the first place to assume we can perfectly anticipate moral situations in advance of the conditions that allow them. The fact that this has never been successfully done, in my opinion, bolsters my view. And the fact that you can't seem to raise anything in you defense but laughable attempts to guess at my biography - combined with some good, old-fashioned, Coulter-style gay-baiting - further confirms what I've suspected.
In the meantime, you're just another whining college student who is pissed the rest of the world refused to recognize your desire to penetrate other men's anuses as a legitimate social institution.
Project much? I mean, why else would you be so obsessed with anal intercourse, to the point of injecting it into debates that have nothing to do with it?
You talk about wanting a morality for the future
Do I? Where?
Your on a fanatical fringe, whose vision for the future is repugnant to the vast majority of the world's people.
Whose vision, exactly? I think you have me confused with someone else.
What does your rant have to do with the value of fiction?
I'm sorry that it was, apparently, too subtle for you to see it. The point is that our fiction is very, very rarely about anything but validating the same traditional moral power structures that privilege some and disadvantage others. Science fiction, in general, isn't about developing "the morality of the future", it's generally about promoting the morality of the past.
Good luck trying to convince them that egalitarianism is true and anal penetration is normal behavior.
I don't remember saying anything about "anal penetration." Obsess much?
We have to explore or ethics as a culture very carefully before making leaps such as these, and fiction lets us do that.
Oh, bullshit. Most of the ethical exploration you're referring to, particularly in Star Trek, consists of nothing more than reinforcing 19th-century moral structures applied to 20th-century situations (though allegory of 24th-century technologies.)
Homosexuals are pushing for equality in society, including rights of marriage? The message of Star trek is "cram those assholes back in the closet, where they belong. No gay people in our version of the future." People of different races want equal treatment before the law, and to be seen as individuals, not weirdos? The message of Star Trek is "You're your race. You're just a Klingon; we expect you to be violent. You're just a Ferengi, you'll never be anything but avaricious. You're just a Jew or a nigger. Only white people are normal and non-ethnic." Even the Prime Directive presents a viewpoint on developing cultures right out of 19th-century colonialism - "savages will be savages, and there's nothing we can do to help them."
Honestly it's always astounded me when people put things like Star Trek out there as some kind of ideal future of equality. What, just because every single series had one token black person on the bridge? When you really pay attention to the series you find that the attitudes are remarkably parochial and conservative. Nearly everyone in the five different series is a racist, and good luck trying to find a single gay character.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to make truthful, but pointed comments, about others?
What, like "You live at 1234 Such-and-such Avenue, and I want to hunt you down and rape you"? Does the fact that that statement may be factual - you really do live at that address - mean that it should be allowed?
Truth or falsity isn't the only issue here. Another issue is that this speech represents a conspiracy to commit violent acts and serves to disseminate information that puts third-parties at physical risk. When one of these women winds up in a culvert, and these assholes essentially provided the killer with a "how-to", what culpability are they going to have?
If the speech does not libel or slander then who should care what is said?
Because some speech isn't just speech, it's assault. We're not just talking about hurt feelings here, we're talking about women who are watching packs of men describe plans to hunt them down and rape them, and are posting "surveillance" pictures of them at the gym, and in class, and coming to and from their homes.
Imagine you found a website where a bunch of people described plans to hunt you down and murder you - you, specifically, by name, just for fun - and they shared your full name, addresses of your home and work, contact information for gun stores in the area, best places to dump a body, and pictures of you, covertly taken by people who had used that information to document your day-to-day activities.
Are you sure you would consider that "free speech"? Should we just dismiss your concerns as "hurt feelings" and tell you to sack up and get over it? Or is it just that you've proven, once again, that there's nothing that can happen to a woman that's so bad that some loser won't find a way to blame her for it?
Nietzsche coined the term "Übermensch", which translates to "Overman" not "Superman".
Not... exactly. It would be more accurate to say that both the words "Over" and "Super" translate as "Über" in German. After all, super means over, under one definition. "Superimposed", etc. "Superman" is an entirely legitimate, and possibly even superior (oops, there's that prefix "super" again) translation of Nietzsche's term.
This guy should be thanking Blizzard for saving him 300 Euros a year.
That's idiotic. He doesn't want to save the money; he wants to play the game.
If my landlord kicks me out of my apartment because he's a racist and I'm black, should I thank him for saving me 500 bucks a month? Or sue his ass off for an illegal denial of legitimately-offered services?
Because there is no in-game sex in WoW. There is not even an in-game concept of sex.
The fuck are you talking about?
You can buy flowers and gift wrap to send romantic things to other players. You can buy engagement and wedding rings in Booty Bay. All sorts of NPC's will give you quests about their wives and husbands and the like.
And maybe you noticed all the children running around in Azeroth? Where did you think they were supposed to come from? Storks?
Of course there's no command that turns a fantasy hack-and-slash into late-night Cinimax. But to suggest that sex is not an implicit construct in the game is baffling. Certainly they approach it circumspectly, like an old-time movie, but to say it doesn't even exist? Nonsense.
Guilds are for gaming concepts
Not necessarily. For instance you can only belong to my guild if you were a member of my college fraternity. That has nothing to do with the game. I once started a guild in another game where members couldn't be single IRL; the assumption being that if you could get another human being to repeatedly have sex with you, you probably weren't a completely wretched waste of skin.
Playing a video game doesn't mean you leave yourself behind. Not everybody tries hard to step into a role. Personally I play WoW like I'm playing two games at once - controlling a badass of my own design who looks neat but isn't really something I think of as a "character", and talking as myself on a chat system. I play alts, after all, and it's important that my guildies remember that it's still me behind the controls.
I think a GLBT guild is a great idea. It's too bad their in-game advertising got shut out. Unconscionable, really. But it seems like the guild itself was allowed to persist?
Re:Metroid Makes the Gender Arbitrary
on
The Samus Mystique
·
· Score: 1
I look forward for the day that females in games are representated as people and not simply as women.
You mean, perhaps in a game that makes a female character's gender completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the plot?
It seems to me that you've just asked for exactly what you criticized Metroid for delivering.
Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen.
Now, it's been a while since I read Darwin, but I don't recall in either of his books that he made a prediction that we would find species that weren't species; only that we would find species that were transitions between two other species.
And we have found those. Many, many times over. Being "between species" doesn't mean that the organism isn't itself within a species; only that the organism's species is a transitional species between two others. Looked at it that way, almost every species is transitional (the only species that aren't are the ones that went extinct with no decendants), which is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution.
Like the world changed by Ghandi and King: I never said they abolished violence, which is the strawman you're arguing with. They merely changed the world, in two giant civil revolutions a world and a generation apart.
And they were aided by those who did violence on their behalves. If you're under the impression that their civil revolutions were nonviolent, even mostly nonviolent, you're looking at the world through rose-tinted goggles.
The only armed people I mentioned was the 2nd Amendment fetishists, who've got guns but no organization.
Huh? Maybe you've heard of their largest, most prominent organization - the National Rifle Association? You know, with Charlton Heston? "No organization"? It's difficult to take a claim like that seriously.
History and logic show the compelling power of nonviolent resistance, both in overcoming armed adversaries and achieving all the other constructive benefits I mentioned.
It's hilarious, though, that you've been completely unable to actually give any examples of a truly "nonviolent" resistance. At least of any successful ones.
In fact, that's exactly what you claimed. Remember when you wrote this?
In other words, the guns don't make the resistance, the organization and ideological differences do. It's important to note that nonviolent resistance is based on that, as well. The guns aren't the determining factor: the organization is.
You've set organization as both a necessary and sufficient condition for a successful resistance of any kind.
It is the combination of organization of organization + arms that makes the military powerful.
Certainly. The question is, of course, whether or not the military has the advantage in organization. Like you I used to believe that it did. Now, from the example of an as-yet-uneradicated worldwide terrorist network that can, apparently, strike nearly anywhere at will, cause drastic changes in any nation's foreign and domestic policy, and evade capture even in the face of multilateral opposition, it's clear that private citizens with the aid of portable, concealable, and anonymizing technology, have a far superior capability to organize effectively and flexibly compared to any nation's regular army.
As I said, ask Ghandi, King, Jesus.
Ask them what? Contrary to your idealized version of history, none of these figures were able to avoid violence. King was shot by an assassin. The independance of India left 200,000 dead. And Jesus? The Jesus who said "do not think that I have come to bring peace to the Earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword"? Those guys are your idealized, nonviolent leaders?
But the reality wins: disorganized armed resistance is crushed by an organized military, and organized nonviolence beats it.
Fallacy of the false dichotomy; the third alternative, which you did not mention - organized armed resistance - beats the other two.
Your arguments fail to make your case, and the reality is obvious - an armed insurgency can succeed. It has succeeded, is succeeding, at various times in history and around the world.
Because Afghan culture is bred from thousands of years of resisting invaders, with or without domestic arms.
And American culture is bred from 200 years of recognizing the validity of the armed overthrow of oppression.
But they are effective because of their organization
All the organization in the world doesn't fire a bullet. Weapons are a neccesarry, but admittedly not sufficient, condition for a successful armed resistance.
It's important to note that nonviolent resistance is based on that, as well.
It's also based on the idea that your opponent will operate constrained by ethical precepts. A quick study of human nature shows us that this will not always be the case; that, in fact, its fairly easy to manipulate a mass of people into abandoning ethical considerations against a group they consider to be outsiders.
Those facts are among the stark facts that make the "we need private guns so we can inhibit the police state" line of propaganda so clearly invalid. The police and army, armed forces of the state, are going to destroy any armed resistance.
Yeah. That explains why our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were so short and successful.
Oh, wait. Despite the committment of the full force of our military against an alien society; armed resistance is alive, well, and shows no signs of going anywhere. It's probably going to succeed in driving us out of Iraq before a unified Iraqi government can defend itself.
I used to believe as you did - that armed revolution was impossible given technological developments in arms. Perversly the actions of the insurgency, and of Islamic, jihadist terrorists, have demonstrated that armed resistance to an overpowering force of arms can still be successful. I used to think that there was no way a private citizen could match the technology and tactics of the military. Thanks to Bush we've seen that the opposite is true - our hidebound military can never match the flexibility and technological creativity of small cells devoted to a cause.
We can't deal with the armed resistance of a people in a third-world country. How effective is military opposition going to be within our own borders, against our own citizens?
You might make the case that time pressure reduces the available learning time for cementing these basics, but I've also found that building on these foundations likewise helps deepen the understanding of them.
That's only if you understood the fundamentals in the first place. If you didn't, and the teacher - like most public school math teachers - wasn't able to effectively teach the fundamentals because he didn't understand them either, then you simply became hopelessly confused, and you struggled to complete assignments and tests without actually learning anything.
Sure, the fundamentals of trig can be very useful. Even more useful is the explicit explanation of how to employ those principles to do the things that were specified. The ridiculous insistence that students be forced to do useless math - math that they're going to be taking again if they go to college anyway - doesn't help.
You want math that's going to be useful for literally every single student? Stick with statistics.
Even kids who go into trades like carpentry would benefit from a knowledge of the fundamentals of trig. Laying out angles for roof rafters, staircase stringers, etc....
The problem is that you only need very fundamental trig to solve those problems, but by the time you finish a high school trig class those fundamentals have been crowded out by all the rest of the bullshit.
You're much more likely to be able to figure out how to lay a roof angle from a formula written on a post-it or etched into the side of your roofing square than from a semester's trig class. Besides, who the fuck lays roofing angles anymore? That's what those premade roofing joists are for.
Dinosaurs are not reptiles; they are dinosaurs. Unless you're willing to classify birds as reptiles as well, there's really no reason to classify dinosaurs as reptiles.
"Reptile" isn't really a classification that taxonomists really use, these days - it's not monophyletic.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, the range between estimates is greater than the smaller estimate.
That's hardly a basis to dismiss them. And you'll notice that even the smallest estimate is considerably greater than "0", which is the "estimate" that global warming deniers are giving.
So, our best, most refined estimates give us a guess off a 13% to 38% increase in temperature. a 25% margin of error is scientifically acceptable as precise?
Indeed, it often is. Science in the real world often has to proceed from much less certainty than you're probably familiar with as a mechanic.
I didn't read the full report
That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? You're much more interested in shooting your mouth off than correcting your ignorance.
You mean like creating a documentary, featuring a prominent politician that failed geology, which focused on one particular variable?
No, I mean like publishing research in peer-reviewed journals. I've asked you several times, but let me repeat - what research have GW deniers published in peer-reviewed journals? Making a movie isn't the debate. Writing a book isn't the debate.
The debate is research in peer-reviewed journals, just like it is for any other field. Why don't GW deniers engage in that debate? (Because they have nothing to debate with.)
This hypothetical model that was run in 1997 that predicted our climate within a 5% margin of error for each year of 1997.
That's not what you asked for. You've been asking for models that predict the next ten years, not the past ten years. Somebody stop those goalposts!
I don't have a conclusion here... I think there are idiots on both sides and I'm waiting for verifiable proof to be shown from either side.
Weren't you saying something about ad hominem attacks? Does calling someone an "idiot", in your opinion, constitute an "ad hominem attack?"
Excuse me for not believing people who result to ad hominems rather than admit there are problems with their theory instead of just proving the theory once and for all.
"Proving the theory once and for all." Is that your impression of how science works? That theories are "proven once and for all?" It's not surprising, then, that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
As for baseball, the magic switch, laboratory testing vs the real world, etc, it all ties into how the theories proposed by the AGW group are flawed because of how little we actually know and can prove.
Ah. We don't know everything; thus, we know nothing. Is that your contention, now? That all of science is a sham because science doesn't produce perfect knowledge right away? Where have I heard that before? Oh, right - that's the position of the creationists, too. It's amazing how the opponents of science all start to blend together. Where are you getting this stuff? The Discovery Institute?
You mean like taking money from the Sierra Club to produce a study with a predetermined outcome?
I have no idea what you think you're talking about. Which study are you referring to? In which peer-reviewed journal did it appear?
The term is skeptic unless you're continuing to try to ad hominem and link anyone who is skeptical about global warming to the holocaust.
Nobody's mentioned the holocaust but you, and I'll use the term "skeptic" when you begin using some skepticism. The proper term for what you're doing - ignoring evidence and refusing to provide any of your own - is "denial."
I also notice you again to back to curve fitting as proof that it works...
Again, nobody's mentioned curve fitting but you, and curve fitting isn't what I'm talking about. You curve fit data, you don't curve fit models. And you have yet to offer any meaningful response to the models I've mentioned. Did you look up the IPCC AR4 yet? Why not?
Science is about debate.
Nobody's said that it isn't, but the most salient characteristic of the whole GW denial movement is its stubborn refusal to take part in the debate. Instead, like creationists, they go to laymen and the media - two areas completely irrelevant to genuine scientific debate. Scientific debate happens in the peer-reviewed arenas. That GW deniers refuse to step foot in those arenas is indicative of the fact that they have no supportive research and their criticisms of the climate science aren't made on scientific grounds, but on specious ones.
Getting back to global warming, the only way we can know if we're actually right is to test what we think we know at the full scale... and that is why the onus is on being able to produce a model which accurately predicts the future.
A number of models have, like the ones I mentioned previously. The fact that you don't even mention them to rebut them indicates how disinterested you are in the evidence. Skeptic is not the word for what you are - a skeptic is someone who refrains from reaching a conclusion until after he's sought out the data that would speak to it. But the fact that you'd rather waste my time talking about baseball, and mythical stories of computer switches, and Mormonism, and Pop Tarts, makes it clear that denial is what you're interested in, which is why I continue to use that term.
However, the AGW proponents tend to stick their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes or outright attack the character of someone rather than actually deal with what they've brought to the table.
What have they brought to the table? I keep asking you but you don't answer. Why is that?
I have a feeling I'm just being trolled but...
Funny - why do I get the exact same feeling about you?
Anyone who calls them on it is automatically a shill and had their credentials stripped, right?
Do they? It's pretty easy to toss around charges of a grand conspiracy acting with no specified interest, and again, cranks always accuse the scientific "establishment" of unfairly muzzling "alternative viewpoints", but a simple look at the historical record shows that when scientists impeach their objectivity, the consequences are usually swift and severe.
Who is going to publish it? Not the media that hypes up disaster left and right for ratings, right?
Which is another criticism that doesn't make any sense; it's clearly the media that's most susceptible to narratives of false balance. The problem with GW deniers isn't getting their message out to the media; the media, in fact, is responsible for tarting up the controversy to a much greater degree than supported by the evidence GW deniers have supplied - usually none at all.
No the problem is that, again, GW deniers aren't producing peer-reviewed research. They're producing popular press books and potboiler novels and opinion pieces in the Washington Post. That's not how legitimate science is done. That's a lot more like how creationism is done.
Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years.
Then look at the IPCC reports where they do exactly that. If you're just looking for predictions, they're out there. If you're looking for predictions that were made 100 years ago that you can test against what happened, that's impossible. What we do have are models run in reverse that match 2000 years of climate data. If you want to see them run 10 years in the future, that stuff is out there. But you have to step out behind your bulwark of ignorance to see it.
What you don't see is that I'm flicking a switch on the other side of the room at the same time you flipped yours.
Great - but if you were to propose your "alternate theory of switching", it would be incumbent on you to provide evidence for your view and explain why we should accept your theory, which is much less parsimonious than the single-switch theory.
GW deniers haven't done that. They haven't explained where anthropogenic CO2 gases go, and why they don't cause an increase in the radiative-convective effect. They're just asking us to accept that it doesn't, and that all the models are wrong, on the basis of... what? Magic?
I noticed you pretty much ignored about the correlation pointing the other way... that it is the increased temperature which increases CO2.
In fact, I agreed that it's initially the increased temperatures that release sequestered CO2, causing a feedback effect. Maybe you're not reading closely enough? That wouldn't surprise me.
But you're still under an obligation to explain how, in your less parsimonious view, the additional CO2 "disappears" from the atmosphere without increasing the greenhouse effect. And you haven't explained how global temperatures, in the absence of a variable greenhouse effect, are fluctuating so wildly - well beyond the changes in the Earth's insolation.
Also, just because something works the way you expect it to in a laboratory doesn't mean that is how it works in the real world when you have unknown factors at play and a massively larger scale.
Unknown factors aren't an explanation. Arguing from ignorance is a pretty poor way to defend an argument.
Now, give me one scientist who can tell us what the climate will be like in 10 years based on the knowledge he has today.
Let's start with IPCC AR4. Familiarize yourself with that material, and those predictions, and get back to me.
However, as a prospectus will tell you, "past performance is not an indication of future results."
A prospectus, as you may be aware, is a document abou
Who says the peer-reviewed journals don't have a bias themselves?
/sigh don't they teach debate anymore?
They have nothing to gain from such a bias, and everything to lose.
Water vapor is a more important gas than CO2 but everyone wants to focus on CO2 instead.
Water vapor's contribution to global warming isn't ignored; to the contrary, it's taken into account. But water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. So I can't see what purpose you have in bringing it up, except that it's a vehicle for you to promulgate more GW myths.
I don't know of a single model that has accurately predicted that far out, much less 50 or 100 years from now.
Well, 100 years ago, we didn't have computers to run the models. So are you really so surprised?
What we can do is "predict" the past; that is, determine if the models, run in reverse, develop historically accurate climate data. We have (I think) something like 9 slightly different models that each, to varying degrees of success, accurately predict the last 2000 years of climate.
Remember, 2006 was supposed to be a year of extreme hurricanes.
I don't remember reading that in the peer-reviewed research. A fair bit of what you consider to be the refuted claims of climate scientists are actually strawman inventions by climate science deniers, and I expect that this is more of the same.
Repeat after me... correlation is not equal to causation.
You walk into a room and flip a switch. The lights come on. Once, it's maybe a coincidence. How many times do you have to see the lights go on and off when you flip the switch before you're willing to admit that they're connected? Or do you always have to tear open the walls and see the wiring before you allow yourself to come to a conclusion?
The ice core data is like flipping the switch for 650,000 years. And it's not so surprising that the temperature increases predate the CO2 increases - the temp increases (probably due to solar cycles and changes in the Earth's inclination) stimulate the release of CO2 gas, which drives the warming higher, beyond the forcing from the insolation. Like in a candle, the way the heat of the flame is needed to melt the wax for combustion.
Ok... so me the full climate model that accurately predicts the climate 10 years from now and I'll believe you.
It's not exactly clear to me how you expect me to show you accurate predictions of the future before the future has happened. But an argument that's based on the absence of impossible evidence isn't science, it's a bulwark of invincible evidence.
Why would the rules of debate be applicable to science? And, indeed, the credibility of the speaker is relevant to judging the veracity of the claims.
The extremists are pushing an agenda rather than the science and the science is losing out because of it...
The science is losing out because of a concentrated, coordinated effort to discredit it on non-scientific grounds. And you fell for it, apparently.
And that's the problem right there... anyone who is sponsored by an energy company (who don't care if they make their money off selling you oil or wind power), their results are immediately impugned.
Why shouldn't they be? Private research isn't under the same strictures of transparent methodology that public science usually is. How many times do we have to see pharma companies concealing the "bad" data and cherry-picking the good - with the consumer paying the price - to conclude that science used to promote corporate interest isn't any science at all?
I mean, what are you saying, exactly? That it's all just a coincidence that the oil companies have all this "research", which has never appeared in any peer-reviewed journal, proving that we can burn all the carbon fuels we want with no negative consequences?
As a matter of fact, the energy companies do care if they're selling wind power or fossil fuel power; it's a hell of a lot cheaper on their end to pump free calories out of the ground than to run a network of wind farms. Cheaper for them, anyway, because their business model passes the costs of cleanup onto the rest of us.
Only science which points toward anthropogenic global warming is above dispute.
Reverse it. The science which is above reproach points, exclusivly, to anthropogenic climate change. Your conspiracy theory is that there's actually no effect from pumping 100 Pinatubos-worth of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that the scientific consensus on the matter is actually the result of a secret agreement among climatologists to... what, exactly?
It's not clear to me what part of the climate science you find controversial. We know that the greenhouse effect exists; otherwise the surface of the Earth would be like the surface of the Moon. We know that CO2 gas is a part of that effect; we've been studying the properties of that gas since it's discovery more than 100 years ago. We know the chemistry of combustion; burning fossil fuels produce CO2. Basic chemistry tells us how much CO2 a given reaction produces, and basic geometry tells us the total volume of the atmosphere. It's easy to measure the gaseous components of our atmosphere, and we observe that CO2 concentrations are on the rise. If that wasn't enough to conclude that we should expect a warming effect just from increasing CO2, it's sufficient to look at ice core data from 650,000 of CO2 cycles to see the corellation between CO2 concentration and global mean temperatures - as dramatic as flipping a switch and seeing the lights go on.
These measurements have been verified, so our instruments aren't to blame. If it's a "natural cycle", then what happens to all the human-produced CO2? Where does it go that it doesn't result in warming? If global warming "skeptics" had some reply to the data, we'd see it in the peer-reviewed arenas. But it seems like all they have is the same stuff you've got - conspiracy theories about hippy scientists, feigned outrage on behalf of the poor, poor maligned oil companies, and bizzare complaints that the fact that people take global warming very seriously indeed is proof that there's no global warming at all (?).
If your only reply is that "climate is really complicated so we shouldn't make conclusions", well, I can only inform you that, just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean nobody does.
As for your "Senate report" - LOL! I'm sure a Republican Senate collecting billions in campaign contributions is a completely unbiased source in regards to assessing the climatological community. Like big oil checks, and unlike research grants, campaign contributions are another source of income where you can generally spend it on whatever the hell you want, the FEC notwithstanding.
The Sierra Club and their ilk have just as much of an agenda, if not even more of one, than the energy companies.
Fair enough. Quick question: Between the oil companies and the Sierra Club, which one posted profits last year larger, by far, than any other corporation in the history of Western Civilization?
The fact of the matter is that those that support the notion that global warming is predominantly caused by human activities are so self-righteous about the fact that one has to question the objectivity of their research.
One also has to question the intelligence of someone who, like you, didn't seem to notice that the predominantly self-righteous figures aren't the ones personally responsible for any of the research.
Al Gore makes a movie about global warming. Setting aside the scientific accuracy of his movie (it's pretty accurate according to climatologists), how does his enthusiasm for the topic, in your opinion, diminish the "objectivity" of the research of, say, the IPCC?
Only in the topsy-turvy world of those opposed to climate science does someone's enthusiasm for a topic mean that other people's work is "less objective." You guys really will try anything, won't you?
Nevermind the readily observeable information that while not only Earth's climate is getting warmer, so is Mar's - due to the rotational temperature changes in the Sun.
You must not be aware that solar output has been decreasing since the mid-90's, but during the same period, the rate of the Earth's warming has increased. How do you explain this discrepancy in your "only insolation theory?"
Also I'm curious as to how you think we're able to measure global temperatures on Mars. From a handful of probes? And, again, how do you explain Martian warming in the face of a cooling sun? I'll tell you how the scientists explain it. It's the same reason it's happening on Earth - increases in greenhouse gases.
Now, you might be asking - where are those gases coming from, and if it's natural on Mars, why isn't it natural on Earth? Well, Mars is, as you know, a different planet, and it has polar regions covered in frozen CO2 - which is now sublimating due to changes in Mars' inclination.
If you can find vast fields of sublimating dry ice here on Earth, then I'll accept that the warming on Earth has a natural cause. But until then climate change skeptics have a considerable problem on their hands explaining where the increasing atmospheric carbon is coming from, if not human industy; and where all the carbon that is coming from human industry is going, if not into the atmosphere.
Anyone who manipulates their science, ignores contrary evidence or exaggerates the conclusions of the science in order to scare the government and/or people into more grant money.
I think maybe you've got no fucking idea what "grant money" is and how it's spending is controlled.
When the oil companies write you a massive fucking paycheck for your earnest efforts in global warming misinformation, you can go down and spend that on a Lexus, no problem. The oil companies don't care what you do with it.
When you get a research grant from the government, or from any other public institution, it's not like they cut you a big check and turn their backs. Your expenditures are strictly controlled and every purchase has to be defended in supporting the research. Researchers aren't even allowed to pay themselves from that money - only their subordinates, in so far as they've assisted with that specific research. The project leader's salary comes from other sources that have nothing to do, usually, with grant expenditures.
So the idea that "grant money" represents some lucrative money bucket that climatologists are drumming up a controversy to dip into is just ridiculous. Nobody ever got rich writing grants for the government. But plenty of people are very, very rich as a result of the efforts of entrenched energy companies to place obstacles in the path of government regulation.
If you haven't been happy with the quality of fiction writing that meets your particular political agenda (I loathe to call anything you've written here something as high and mighty as "moral"), sit your lazy ass down and get to writing something that portrays your grand vision of the future.
I don't have a grand vision of the future; I suspect it's bullshit in the first place to assume we can perfectly anticipate moral situations in advance of the conditions that allow them. The fact that this has never been successfully done, in my opinion, bolsters my view. And the fact that you can't seem to raise anything in you defense but laughable attempts to guess at my biography - combined with some good, old-fashioned, Coulter-style gay-baiting - further confirms what I've suspected.
In the meantime, you're just another whining college student who is pissed the rest of the world refused to recognize your desire to penetrate other men's anuses as a legitimate social institution.
Project much? I mean, why else would you be so obsessed with anal intercourse, to the point of injecting it into debates that have nothing to do with it?
You talk about wanting a morality for the future
Do I? Where?
Your on a fanatical fringe, whose vision for the future is repugnant to the vast majority of the world's people.
Whose vision, exactly? I think you have me confused with someone else.
Hell, you might even be a lesbian.
What the fuck?
What does your rant have to do with the value of fiction?
I'm sorry that it was, apparently, too subtle for you to see it. The point is that our fiction is very, very rarely about anything but validating the same traditional moral power structures that privilege some and disadvantage others. Science fiction, in general, isn't about developing "the morality of the future", it's generally about promoting the morality of the past.
Good luck trying to convince them that egalitarianism is true and anal penetration is normal behavior.
I don't remember saying anything about "anal penetration." Obsess much?
We have to explore or ethics as a culture very carefully before making leaps such as these, and fiction lets us do that.
Oh, bullshit. Most of the ethical exploration you're referring to, particularly in Star Trek, consists of nothing more than reinforcing 19th-century moral structures applied to 20th-century situations (though allegory of 24th-century technologies.)
Homosexuals are pushing for equality in society, including rights of marriage? The message of Star trek is "cram those assholes back in the closet, where they belong. No gay people in our version of the future." People of different races want equal treatment before the law, and to be seen as individuals, not weirdos? The message of Star Trek is "You're your race. You're just a Klingon; we expect you to be violent. You're just a Ferengi, you'll never be anything but avaricious. You're just a Jew or a nigger. Only white people are normal and non-ethnic." Even the Prime Directive presents a viewpoint on developing cultures right out of 19th-century colonialism - "savages will be savages, and there's nothing we can do to help them."
Honestly it's always astounded me when people put things like Star Trek out there as some kind of ideal future of equality. What, just because every single series had one token black person on the bridge? When you really pay attention to the series you find that the attitudes are remarkably parochial and conservative. Nearly everyone in the five different series is a racist, and good luck trying to find a single gay character.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to make truthful, but pointed comments, about others?
What, like "You live at 1234 Such-and-such Avenue, and I want to hunt you down and rape you"? Does the fact that that statement may be factual - you really do live at that address - mean that it should be allowed?
Truth or falsity isn't the only issue here. Another issue is that this speech represents a conspiracy to commit violent acts and serves to disseminate information that puts third-parties at physical risk. When one of these women winds up in a culvert, and these assholes essentially provided the killer with a "how-to", what culpability are they going to have?
If the speech does not libel or slander then who should care what is said?
Because some speech isn't just speech, it's assault. We're not just talking about hurt feelings here, we're talking about women who are watching packs of men describe plans to hunt them down and rape them, and are posting "surveillance" pictures of them at the gym, and in class, and coming to and from their homes.
Imagine you found a website where a bunch of people described plans to hunt you down and murder you - you, specifically, by name, just for fun - and they shared your full name, addresses of your home and work, contact information for gun stores in the area, best places to dump a body, and pictures of you, covertly taken by people who had used that information to document your day-to-day activities.
Are you sure you would consider that "free speech"? Should we just dismiss your concerns as "hurt feelings" and tell you to sack up and get over it? Or is it just that you've proven, once again, that there's nothing that can happen to a woman that's so bad that some loser won't find a way to blame her for it?
Nietzsche coined the term "Übermensch", which translates to "Overman" not "Superman".
Not... exactly. It would be more accurate to say that both the words "Over" and "Super" translate as "Über" in German. After all, super means over, under one definition. "Superimposed", etc. "Superman" is an entirely legitimate, and possibly even superior (oops, there's that prefix "super" again) translation of Nietzsche's term.
This guy should be thanking Blizzard for saving him 300 Euros a year.
That's idiotic. He doesn't want to save the money; he wants to play the game.
If my landlord kicks me out of my apartment because he's a racist and I'm black, should I thank him for saving me 500 bucks a month? Or sue his ass off for an illegal denial of legitimately-offered services?
Because there is no in-game sex in WoW. There is not even an in-game concept of sex.
The fuck are you talking about?
You can buy flowers and gift wrap to send romantic things to other players. You can buy engagement and wedding rings in Booty Bay. All sorts of NPC's will give you quests about their wives and husbands and the like.
And maybe you noticed all the children running around in Azeroth? Where did you think they were supposed to come from? Storks?
Of course there's no command that turns a fantasy hack-and-slash into late-night Cinimax. But to suggest that sex is not an implicit construct in the game is baffling. Certainly they approach it circumspectly, like an old-time movie, but to say it doesn't even exist? Nonsense.
Guilds are for gaming concepts
Not necessarily. For instance you can only belong to my guild if you were a member of my college fraternity. That has nothing to do with the game. I once started a guild in another game where members couldn't be single IRL; the assumption being that if you could get another human being to repeatedly have sex with you, you probably weren't a completely wretched waste of skin.
Playing a video game doesn't mean you leave yourself behind. Not everybody tries hard to step into a role. Personally I play WoW like I'm playing two games at once - controlling a badass of my own design who looks neat but isn't really something I think of as a "character", and talking as myself on a chat system. I play alts, after all, and it's important that my guildies remember that it's still me behind the controls.
I think a GLBT guild is a great idea. It's too bad their in-game advertising got shut out. Unconscionable, really. But it seems like the guild itself was allowed to persist?
I look forward for the day that females in games are representated as people and not simply as women.
You mean, perhaps in a game that makes a female character's gender completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the plot?
It seems to me that you've just asked for exactly what you criticized Metroid for delivering.
Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen.
Now, it's been a while since I read Darwin, but I don't recall in either of his books that he made a prediction that we would find species that weren't species; only that we would find species that were transitions between two other species.
And we have found those. Many, many times over. Being "between species" doesn't mean that the organism isn't itself within a species; only that the organism's species is a transitional species between two others. Looked at it that way, almost every species is transitional (the only species that aren't are the ones that went extinct with no decendants), which is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution.
Like the world changed by Ghandi and King: I never said they abolished violence, which is the strawman you're arguing with. They merely changed the world, in two giant civil revolutions a world and a generation apart.
And they were aided by those who did violence on their behalves. If you're under the impression that their civil revolutions were nonviolent, even mostly nonviolent, you're looking at the world through rose-tinted goggles.
The only armed people I mentioned was the 2nd Amendment fetishists, who've got guns but no organization.
Huh? Maybe you've heard of their largest, most prominent organization - the National Rifle Association? You know, with Charlton Heston? "No organization"? It's difficult to take a claim like that seriously.
History and logic show the compelling power of nonviolent resistance, both in overcoming armed adversaries and achieving all the other constructive benefits I mentioned.
It's hilarious, though, that you've been completely unable to actually give any examples of a truly "nonviolent" resistance. At least of any successful ones.
I never claimed organization alone does anything.
In fact, that's exactly what you claimed. Remember when you wrote this?
In other words, the guns don't make the resistance, the organization and ideological differences do. It's important to note that nonviolent resistance is based on that, as well. The guns aren't the determining factor: the organization is.
You've set organization as both a necessary and sufficient condition for a successful resistance of any kind.
It is the combination of organization of organization + arms that makes the military powerful.
Certainly. The question is, of course, whether or not the military has the advantage in organization. Like you I used to believe that it did. Now, from the example of an as-yet-uneradicated worldwide terrorist network that can, apparently, strike nearly anywhere at will, cause drastic changes in any nation's foreign and domestic policy, and evade capture even in the face of multilateral opposition, it's clear that private citizens with the aid of portable, concealable, and anonymizing technology, have a far superior capability to organize effectively and flexibly compared to any nation's regular army.
As I said, ask Ghandi, King, Jesus.
Ask them what? Contrary to your idealized version of history, none of these figures were able to avoid violence. King was shot by an assassin. The independance of India left 200,000 dead. And Jesus? The Jesus who said "do not think that I have come to bring peace to the Earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword"? Those guys are your idealized, nonviolent leaders?
But the reality wins: disorganized armed resistance is crushed by an organized military, and organized nonviolence beats it.
Fallacy of the false dichotomy; the third alternative, which you did not mention - organized armed resistance - beats the other two.
Your arguments fail to make your case, and the reality is obvious - an armed insurgency can succeed. It has succeeded, is succeeding, at various times in history and around the world.
Because Afghan culture is bred from thousands of years of resisting invaders, with or without domestic arms.
And American culture is bred from 200 years of recognizing the validity of the armed overthrow of oppression.
But they are effective because of their organization
All the organization in the world doesn't fire a bullet. Weapons are a neccesarry, but admittedly not sufficient, condition for a successful armed resistance.
It's important to note that nonviolent resistance is based on that, as well.
It's also based on the idea that your opponent will operate constrained by ethical precepts. A quick study of human nature shows us that this will not always be the case; that, in fact, its fairly easy to manipulate a mass of people into abandoning ethical considerations against a group they consider to be outsiders.
Those facts are among the stark facts that make the "we need private guns so we can inhibit the police state" line of propaganda so clearly invalid. The police and army, armed forces of the state, are going to destroy any armed resistance.
Yeah. That explains why our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were so short and successful.
Oh, wait. Despite the committment of the full force of our military against an alien society; armed resistance is alive, well, and shows no signs of going anywhere. It's probably going to succeed in driving us out of Iraq before a unified Iraqi government can defend itself.
I used to believe as you did - that armed revolution was impossible given technological developments in arms. Perversly the actions of the insurgency, and of Islamic, jihadist terrorists, have demonstrated that armed resistance to an overpowering force of arms can still be successful. I used to think that there was no way a private citizen could match the technology and tactics of the military. Thanks to Bush we've seen that the opposite is true - our hidebound military can never match the flexibility and technological creativity of small cells devoted to a cause.
We can't deal with the armed resistance of a people in a third-world country. How effective is military opposition going to be within our own borders, against our own citizens?
You might make the case that time pressure reduces the available learning time for cementing these basics, but I've also found that building on these foundations likewise helps deepen the understanding of them.
That's only if you understood the fundamentals in the first place. If you didn't, and the teacher - like most public school math teachers - wasn't able to effectively teach the fundamentals because he didn't understand them either, then you simply became hopelessly confused, and you struggled to complete assignments and tests without actually learning anything.
Sure, the fundamentals of trig can be very useful. Even more useful is the explicit explanation of how to employ those principles to do the things that were specified. The ridiculous insistence that students be forced to do useless math - math that they're going to be taking again if they go to college anyway - doesn't help.
You want math that's going to be useful for literally every single student? Stick with statistics.
Even kids who go into trades like carpentry would benefit from a knowledge of the fundamentals of trig. Laying out angles for roof rafters, staircase stringers, etc....
The problem is that you only need very fundamental trig to solve those problems, but by the time you finish a high school trig class those fundamentals have been crowded out by all the rest of the bullshit.
You're much more likely to be able to figure out how to lay a roof angle from a formula written on a post-it or etched into the side of your roofing square than from a semester's trig class. Besides, who the fuck lays roofing angles anymore? That's what those premade roofing joists are for.
Dinosaurs are not reptiles; they are dinosaurs. Unless you're willing to classify birds as reptiles as well, there's really no reason to classify dinosaurs as reptiles.
"Reptile" isn't really a classification that taxonomists really use, these days - it's not monophyletic.