What the Patriot Act ought to do is act as a signal that something has gone dreadfully wrong in the American system--and therefore must be changed. For one thing, the fact that so many Americans did not oppose it, and were so easily led into accepting a complete contravention of the constitution through a manipulation of irrational fear (what if the terrorists attack my house??) shows us that there is a deeper problem in American culture. No kind of democracy can really work if people are that uncritical and deferential.
Removing the Patriot Act is going to be incredibly difficult. Any process that does so, whether it is gradual or sudden, is going to first require a change in the whole political and cultural atmosphere, because there are so many people who genuinely believe measures like the Patriot Act are rational. So anything that removes the Patriot Act is going to do more than just remove the Patriot Act (it's not going to just be scrapped by a Democratic administration)
Whether you do it gradually or suddenly, if the Patriot Act were to be removed by representatives with little cultural change happening, then the deeper causal problems would still be there. But I think we can just as effectively remove it suddenly as we can slowly, if that process is carried out by just that--'We'. Because you're right--until the underlying factors are addressed, there is always the danger of this happening again... and again.
But I'm not sure how much that has to do with the *speed* of removing it.
there were still IRA bombings up to the late 90s, no cold war then either. and the bombs did seem pretty bad because they killed and injured a lot of people.
the difference is that they were not exploited in order to create a climate of fear completely disproportional to the actual events. incidentally that is exactly the point of terrorist tactics--but we see today that those tactics can be effectively turned around and made more useful for the (supposed) target of the attacks than for the attackers...
the parent writes: 'Keep in mind this is the japanese we are talking about not the french, they will die before they surrender. They are still finding japanese soldiers who refused to surrender.'
to extrapolate from individual characteristics (even culturally shared ones) to political/military outcomes, or even aggregate behaviour, is a fallacy.
this is like the old story of people saying that we have wars because it's 'human nature', when in fact while 'human nature' may give us the capacity to be soldiers (as well as to not be), it is ultimately *politicians* who start wars, not average people--average people just participate in them (and can escalate them through their participation).
equally, while you may say that because of some shared cultural characteristic japanese soldiers were less likely to give up the fight once they were involved in it, this does not imply that the japanese political/military elite would have had incentives to continue fighting no matter what. you cannot treat all japanese as if they had the same incentive structure.
the average japanese soldier was motivated by a belief in the emperor, the japanese nation, following orders and carrying out his duty. but what was the emperor motivated by? what were the generals motivated by? and when you put them all together, what is the systematic behaviour? it's not the same thing.
japan did in fact realise that it was losing, and while it is true that the average soldier probably would have fought to the death (just as many people would fight to the death defending their country, or what they see as their country's right), this does not imply that people making decisions would have taken them on the basis of 'death before defeat'. clearly this was shown not to be the case by the japanese surrender. there is absolutely nothing in the history that indicates that they would not have surrendered had it not been for the atomic bomb being dropped. what makes the atomic bomb somehow override japanese people's supposed character of wanting to fight to the death, where other means do not?
I would imagine that the doctor was speaking of the embryo dying in the same way you might speak of someone's liver dying, their toe dying, or any other living tissue dying.
That is an entirely different kind of 'life' and 'death' to the kind you're talking about, which is to say, a kind of autonomous human life--a life of its own (which a toe does not have). At that point you are talking about a matter of definition--is the embryo a separate life form yet, or is it merely an extension of the mother, in the same way as any other body tissue?
The doctor you quoted is not addressing this question when she says that the embryo would die, she is merely stating a technical fact. The implication is that her definition of when living tissue takes on 'a life of its own' is different to yours--but that is not the same as having a disregard for human life; it is merely a different definition of what constitutes *a* human life.
there is an important difference between tools and infrastructure. true, much software is used as tools--for accomplishing discrete tasks that evolve as societies and technology evolves. but much software--databases, routers, control devices for physical infrastructure, etc--is used more as infrastructure; that is, as a resource expected to be reliable and predictable by many users and necessary for accomplishing other tasks that ride on top of it, including employing new tools.
infrastructure, because of its multi-user character and the fact that other things are designed to work on top of it, has to have lasting standards--if road lanes suddenly start to become half or double the width, then cars, trucks, traffic flows, etc will all be affected. even if some small technical reason might make it be reasonable to change them, their character as infrastructure means that the long term reliability of how they work is more important than short term technical considerations.
in other words, it would probably be silly at this point to try to design user interfaces, web browsers, etc. that last 200 years, because they are still rapidly evolving. however it makes a great deal of sense to start designing standards for data storage and interface, as well as actual 'infrastructure' software to last a long time because more users (including developers of more 'tool-like' software) benefit from its stability than from its instability.
Low intensity conflict, AKA guerrilla warfare/paramilitary warfare, is very different to terrorism.
Guerrilla warfare is a strategy, a way to conduct war in specific conditions within a defined theatre of operations and an organised military hierarchy just like any other war, but with disparate and weak bands of combatants, rather than with a large, well-equipped army.
Terrorism is not a strategy, it is a tactic. It can be used by guerrilla groups, but it can also be used by ordinary political criminal organisations. Examples of guerrilla groups using terrorist tactics are car bombings in Baghdad; examples of terrorist tactics being used by non-guerrilla groups are IRA bombing in London.
The difference is that one is a combat zone, a theatre of operations in which one is fighting an insurgency or (e.g. in the case of Nicaragua versus the Contras) a foreign incursion in the form of foreign-funded paramilitaries. The other however is just an isolated attack, yes it may be part of a longer string of attacks (like the Unabomber) but that does not make it 'war'. It doesn't even make it 'low intensity conflict'.
War implies combat; terrorism does not. Striking back at terrorists or their cells (like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or IRA) means finding noncombatant groups and arresting them, it doesn't mean engaging with them in protracted combat situations.
War is STILL the same concept as it always was. What you're doing is confounding an age-old tactic (terrorism) with something entirely different. The world has NOT changed. People have used terrorist tactics for at least centuries, and probably millennia. The Bush administration's 'war on terror' is more accurately described as a 'war on ex-mujahadeen', but even that is giving them too much credit, as it's actually more of an excuse for every country in the world who wants to crush its opposition to get US money to do it, by simply labelling them 'terrorists'.
What is a real terrorist? Someone who uses terrorist tactics. What is the Bush administration's definition of a terrorist? Anyone they decide they don't like. However neither one of these comes anywhere close to a conflict, or to combat, or to war.
Afghanistan was a war; Iraq is a war. It was incorrect to call the Taliban terrorists, and the insurgents in Iraq are combatants first, and only terrorists secondarily when they make use of terrorist tactics. But these two conflicts are completely distinct, in spite of the ludicrous propaganda, from e.g. the Madrid train bombings, which were not an act of war, combat, or conflict, but simply of criminal mass murder.
There is a reason why under the Geneva conventions, it is illegal for a soldier to operate dressed as a civilian. Because the laws and customs of war are based on the assumption that war is carried out by combatants who make themselves obvious in one way or another as combatants. In guerrilla war, people become obvious combatants when they attack, or when they are searched in a known war zone and found likely to be combatants based on having lots of grenades or whatever.
A 'terrorist' on the other hand, is defined as 'anyone who the State Department says is a terrorist'. If we were to use your logic and treat terrorists as 'enemy soldiers', then that would mean the ability of the authorities to shoot on sight anyone classified by the Department of State as a terrorist. But how do you identify a terrorist--unless he is packing weapons or you find out about his plans?
The fact is this is *not* a war. The USA is *not* a combat zone, any more than London was a combat zone when IRA attacks were frequent. Terrorism is political crime, but it is crime nonetheless--not carried out by a sovereign state subject to treaty law, not carried out by centralised organisations with clearly defined hierarchies, and most importantly it is damn near impossible to identify a terrorist 'combatant' until it is obvious that they are going to actually carry out an act of terrorism.
And the State Department has already decided that loads of people are terrorists who do not fit this criterion--for example anarchists, like a 14-year-old kid I knew who was arrested and interrogated by the FBI because he had an anti-war leaflet in his bag at the airport, and added to the 'terrorism list' before they let him off.
Who is an enemy soldier is a very clear question. Who is a 'terrorist' however is an extremely subjective judgement. And by your logic my 14-year-old friend should have been shot on sight, or at least taken to a POW camp for indefinite detention and military trial.
The world is not different to what it was before 2001, terrorism has existed for hundreds of years, the difference is that it's being used as an excuse for the biggest crackdown on opposition in the west and in fact in the larger world since the 1930s.
How about one day you're hanging out at a bar, and you meet a girl who seems really friendly, you get along, and you start to go out. You happen to be a writer, and one day your typewriter breaks, and guess what? she happens to have a typewriter she can give you! Then you find out a year from now that the typewriter is bugged and records everything you write...
This is what happened to Philip Agee, CIA defector, in Paris. A long and elaborate ruse involving gaining his trust and a series of 'accidental' occurrences seemingly unrelated. But that was done outside of the US, where warrants aren't necessary and it's basically just espionage.
Do you really want this kind of thing to be able to happen domestically? No constitution, no bill of rights, no need for warrants, no need for transparency--just all out domestic espionage operations.
The Plutonium Files is an account written by the journalist who uncovered and eventually forced the declassification of the story of about 60 years of secret radiation-exposure experiments by the US government on thousands of unknowing civilians and military personnel, including e.g. feeding pregnant women at a hospital a 'new infant formula' to test the effects of radiation on the foetus. These programmes have now actually been declassified and apologised for by the Department of Energy under Clinton, but few people actually know about them and they are definitely not written about in textbooks!
You could just as easily make the argument, 'Standard Oil was good for the world because it standardised the chemical mix of oil, so everyone can expect the same lead content etc'. But of course, in every industry which is not monopolistic (while it may be oligopolistic) the way to solve this problem is not through dictation from one company to everyone, but through consensus on industry standards.
That was the whole point of the Open Group and the (1 year too late) advent of CDE--you agree on a system of library interfaces, protocols, file formats that will form the basis of your open systems desktop, then you can have as many implementations by as many vendors (or open source people) as you want, and they're all compatible. What's more, they can all LOOK completely different if you want--but they all play the same way with the same software. So, you have competition and alternatives, but compatibility at the same time.
NEITHER Microsoft NOR open source people are doing this of course. It requires a commitment to following published standards, and a consensus around them in the industry. THAT is the way to achieve consistent desktops--not stifling competition and making everyone accept your particular implementation, but agreeing on ground rules for compatibility and following them.
No, Land Rovers are a British invention, and are made for actual outdoor utility purposes, particularly in the countryside. In Britain, you see them but not even that many because most people who own them own them for a purpose. SUVs in the US are bigger than (British) Land Rovers, being essentially made by taking a pickup truck and putting a permanent hardtop on it. The vast majority of people you see driving SUVs, at least in coastal areas, are not driving them because they need them for navigating mountain passes or carrying loads of construction equipment. They're driving them because they think it makes them look good, or because they like feeling powerful. 18-wheelers, on the other hand, serve a functional purpose.
There's a big difference between 18-wheelers and SUVs. 18-wheelers are essential for the functioning of the economy as currently structured and the society. Taking out 18-wheelers is taking out a crucial component of infrastructure that would destroy a lot of other things. SUVs, on the other hand, are a highly destructive, wasteful consumer good (not intermediate good) that are a pure artefact of American consumer culture, and as such completely arbitrary. The best thing to do in the long run is to change this culture--but in the short run, radical changes have to be made if we want to stand any chance of avoiding further ecological damage and in fact, the huge economic waste involved in such mindless goods as SUVs as well.
In the words of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, former chief economist at the World Bank, former head of Clinton's council of economic advisers:
'The reason why the invisible hand is invisible is that it doesn't exist'.
a) The automobile and oil lobbies in the US are too large and powerful to allow these kinds of externalities to be internalised
b) Even if you were to try, what makes you think people wouldn't simply sacrifice something else (say, hamburgers) just to keep their SUVs? If it's important enough in American culture, people will spend the money for it. Not just a question of higher or lower indifference curves, but of a cultural necessity for some people.
Why not just outlaw them altogether? In fact, why not threaten to cripple the automotive industry unless they radically reform their entire way of doing business?
Of course, the answer is that the US government at many levels is in the pocket of the automotive industry. As long as it continues like that, you won't see any real reform.
a) I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was really thinking that the Web would become anything like what it is today--more just another service alongside gopher etc. Among other things, who could have foreseen the massive increase in public internet usage that the Web arguably precipitated?
b) If he had made it more complex to begin with, it would have been harder to sell the idea, harder to implement, and therefore it's possible it wouldn't have taken off as quickly and easily as it did. Part of the reason why it's become so big is that from early on there has been such a proliferation of crappy pages and ideas for pages, and the ones that have lasted have been selected out of this mess in an almost Darwinian way.
c) There's no way anyone can foresee what's going to happen to their simple idea; especially with big ideas, it takes enough guts/faith just to put it out there in the first place and evangelise it--let alone if you make it even *bigger*.
It's always easier and more effective to start small, both in terms of achieving it, and in terms of convincing people (people tend to go out on only one or maybe 2 limbs at a time, but not more). Unfortunately that leads to messiness years or decades later--but that's what differentiates humans from machines: we are always going to develop in an organic way.
real capitalism (i.e. a free market), as opposed to the government-supplied corporate favoritism that today passes as capitalism
That's like saying 'real feudalism (i.e. a kingdom of God in which the Church and the monarchy are acting by divine rule), as opposed to the corrupt, rapine, impoverished system that passed for feudalism in the middle ages'. Perfect competition has never existed and will never exist. It is a model, for use in economic theory, that is intended to represent a theoretical tendency.
In REAL capitalism, i.e. the real, actual, existing economic system, since its birth several hundred years ago, (as Adam Smith repeatedly points out in Wealth of Nations incidentally) firms constantly attempt to influence and control goverment to pursue their own profit maximisation goals. This includes raising tariffs when they want them (i.e. against competitors) and lowering them when they are a problem (i.e. for export markets). Manipulation of politics for profit maximisation is and always has been a feature of REAL capitalism, and the inevitable result of this is non-free markets (although even without it, markets would not be 'perfect' as we do not have perfect information, 0 barriers to entry, etc).
John Maynard Keynes was an idiot. He convinced many governments that the way to create wealth was to print money
Keynesianism does not argue that the way to create wealth is to print money. It argues that the government should correct the cyclical fluctuations of the capitalist economy by creating countercyclical expansions and contractions--borrowing and spending in periods of contraction, paying off the debt in periods of expansion, not printing money, but trying to stabilise the economy through spending. Don't get the neoclassical synthesis (today's ISLM model) confused with original Keynesianism. There's a big difference.
And John Maynard Keynes was not an idiot; even if you disagree with him, he was ahead of his time.
the customer looking for, and receiving, the best value
That's a feature of perfect competition (a theoretical state which is in actuality impossible and never exists, as it rests on 0 bars to entry of an industry, perfect information, and various other impossible conditions), not of capitalism (a real economic system more often characterised by oligopoly or monopoly conditions, imperfect information, and intentional 'distortions' of markets by firms).
To be more precise, Marx made PROJECTIONS, not predictions (see Bertell Ollman). What has set the Marxist enterprise apart from the start is its attempt to base itself in social science, not dogma or predictions--'this MUST happen'. The Communist Manifesto is, on the other hand, a political document rather than a theoretical document, which is why it both seems so much more clearly written than anything else Marx wrote and so much more imperatively, categorically stated. It is, however, an exaggeration, and does not represent the bulk of the theory.
I assume what you're referring to with peasants overthrowing the aristocracy is feudal society in which peasants are rising up against their feudal landlords. The trouble is, *before* capitalism, peasant revolts were frequent, but could never take power because they basically had neither a viable alternative to the aristocracy nor the military or economic might. The bourgeoisie however, which were growing inside feudal society engaging in the capitalist mode of production, had already built up this mode so far by the time they openly revolted that they had the economic might and the alternative ready at hand. They were therefore able to overthrow the last vestiges of feudal power.
But historical materialism is not a stage based, unilineal framework to be just sloppily applied in the same way to every society on earth (as many in the 2nd International and later the Soviet Union would have had us believe). Societies engage in complex constellations of different modes of production, and the ones Marx traced out as the specific precursors of capitalism, which only developed once--in Europe--are the ones that are emphasised in his writing (with minimal mention of the so-called 'Asiatic Mode of Production' which was based on the extremely limited evidence to hand from 19th century anthropology).
Marx's point was that in the theoretical model of the capitalist mode of production, which of course never exists in pure form, the tendencies are toward the oppressed class--*for the first time in history*--to successfully be responsible for the bringing about of a new dominant mode of production. Every previous transition had been brought about by some other forces, some other oppressor class, etc.
But what we saw developing in the 20th century is the possibility of peasant revolution. Simultaneoulsy developed by Mariategui and Mao, although in two different forms obviously, is the idea that global, imperialist capitalism actually stifles social development in the colonies or neocolonies, preserving feudal, slave, or other modes of production where it is most expeditious. Furthermore, as Engels had pointed out long before, societies do not have to linearly develop through the same series of modes of production--they can 'skip stages', in the stadial wording, if there are other societies which have created preconditions (i.e. an example to follow). Thus most of the socialist revolutions in the 20th century had peasants as their motive force, both thanks to the development of guerrilla warfare tactics, and thanks to advent of socialist theory, which was an outgrowth of European capitalism.
Because Marx was a social scientist, and not a witch making predictions with a crystal ball, this does not invalidate the whole of Marx's theory. On the contrary, it augments it with a greater understanding of the situation once we see what happens when capitalism reaches a truly global scale and starts to interact in new ways with other modes of production as a result.
Do you know where he refers to this? I would be very surprised, unless you're just misinterpreting something. Because the whole point of the development of class consciousness, the consolidation of what Marx calls 'proletarian political economy' within the capitalist mode of production, the increasing organisation of the proletariat in trade unions and co-operatives, is that it is creating a proletariat that is ever more aware and able to govern itself. Of course there is also the group of intellectuals, like Marx, who come from other classes to join the proletariat and aid them. But as far as I am aware, Marx does not refer to any 'benevolent dictatorship'--after all, specifically who would constitute this dictatorship? This is not the role of the intellectuals according to Marx, and not the role of anyone outside the proletariat--so who is it? I would be surprised if this reference actually exists.
Furthermore, Marxist theory, which is much bigger and more important than just Karl Marx, and has come a long way since he died, has (among many others) 2 strands within it: the proletariat must govern for itself and leadership must arise spontaneously, and the proletariat must govern for itself but leadership must come from a vanguard, an 'advance detachment' of the proletariat. The second one is Leninism. Neither one however denies the necessity of proletarian democracy; the difference is that Leninism involves a Party that tries to lead the people and in practice, has ended up governing the people as they defer to it and it takes on too much responsibility. Not in every case however. But in any case, this is Leninism, only one specific branch of Marxist theory; and while it is influenced by older strains, for example Babouvinism from the period of the French Revolution, it is quite novel and must be distinguished from previous revolutionary theory.
So, I would be surprised if you could find that 'reference', but even if so, Marxist theory does not rest on Karl Marx alone, by a long shot. So it's pretty unimportant.
What Marxist theory advocates is a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. This does not mean a 'dictatorship' in the sense of a small group of people telling everyone what to do; it comes from Marxist theory of the state, and is counterposed to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and before that the dictatorship of the aristocracy (in feudalism) and before that the dictatorship of the slave-owners (in ancient society).
The point is that in Marxist theory the state itself is by its very nature a class dictatorship; it is the instrument of one class against another, or several others. In a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat, because the vast majority of the population will have become proletarians as a result of capitalism (peasants gradually becoming rural proletariat as well), the dictatorship of the proletariat represents almost the entire population, i.e. like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it is democratic *within* *itself*, representing the interests of those who run it. So a dictatorship of the proletariat would be a democracy representing everyone except the leftovers--the bourgeoisie, and possibly the peasantry, although in practice, an alliance with the peasantry was made out of necessity if nothing else.
This then leads to the withering away of the state as such; if we see the state as being a representative of class interests, and the state now represents the only class, and is a weapon of repression against the tiny minority (Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, etc.) who would like to restore the old system, then once the new society is consolidated the state as a class dictatorship is no longer necessary, and withers away. This doesn't mean government withers away, just class dictatorship.
Don't criticise something you don't know anything about.
Yes, this is exactly about the law being equal for everyone.
The value of money is not intrinsic, but comes from what it can be used for, its purchasing power. But the value of its purchasing power is directly related to the utility people can derive from it: if the only thing you could buy with money was a manure, it would have value only for farmers, everyone else would want nothing to do with it.
If the law takes the same quantity of money away from two groups of people who derive different use values from this quantity (e.g. the farmers and the non-farmers) then it is not acting equally, because the non-farmers couldn't care less and therefore while a meaningless quantity of money has been taken away from them, no actual value has. For the law to act equally, it must apply based on the real value of the money, not based on a simple quantitative measurement that is, by itself, meaningless.
This is not about me determining for you how much you value your dollars. This is about a realistic assessment of the economic function of money and an actual assessment based on real data and many decades of studies of consumer behaviour. The fact is, consumers do, time and time again, exhibit characteristics corresponding to diminishing marginal utility. Should we simply ignore this mountain of data and assume that people have unending appetites for everything they consume? This seems unreasonable and unscientific.
It is a plain and simple error to construe money as a measure of value that simply maintains the same marginal value no matter what the number. No economist would actually agree with it, and for good reason.
Basic concept from microeconomic theory: the more you have of something, say for example money, the less each additional unit is worth to you. The marginal utility a person who makes $1 a day gets from a $1 is absolutely massive (life changing experience) compared to the marginal utility a billionare gets (almost nothing).
Adjusting fines and taxes to higher income is not discrimination, it's recognition of the fact that not every dollar is equal.
Do you think the goal of medicine is to produce a more efficient, 'genetically good' human race? Actually I thought the whole point of medicine, and in fact most other economic activities (agriculture, etc) was to promote the well-being of humans as they exist, and their offspring, as they exist, not to engage in some kind of bizarre project in eugenics. Don't confuse means with ends; efficiency, economic activity, and even 'good' genes are all means to an end: the well-being of humanity. Letting people starve, even lazy people, is not an effective way to promote their well-being.
If you want an efficient system, try fascism. Yes, it's more 'efficient' than anything at increasing production numbers, getting rid of those pesky weak and sick people, etc. But there's a reason why the vast majority of people on the planet do not want it: because we're willing to put up with a few lazy people free riding on benefits and a little bit of slacking to have a generally better quality of, and respect for human life.
The statement that 'we know Japanese don't work nearly as hard as Americans' is presumably based on high output per worker, i.e. GDP per worker. This number is known to be huge in the United States, something like 16x that of China adjusted by purchasing power parity.
There are 2 factors going into this kind of gap:
The first is marginal productivity of effective labour, which is related to education and most importantly technology available to the worker. This is not about how hard the person works, but about how much output comes out of him or her (i.e. factors like burnout would decrease rather than increase this figure, even though they represent harder work). The largest advantage the US has over many other countries (though not necessarily Japan) is higher quality of capital stock, i.e. higher technology per worker. This is particularly true when you have many of your service sector workers doing things like IT, which produce a massive contribution to GDP, versus people in factories producing a fairly small contribution to GDP.
The 2nd and more important factor however comes from how GDP is measured. GDP works like a 'value-added' measure; every time something is sold for more than it was bought or produced for, that counts into GDP, as it is considered new value being produced. Now, trade only accounts for something like 10% of US GDP, fairly small right? So why is it that US companies have such extensive investments in 3rd world countries and US foreign policy is so directed to protecting them? Because when you import a pair of shoes at $1/pair and resell them at $100/pair, you've just created $99 of value domestically while only $1 of it goes to trade. The point being, the US economy depends on this, and what you're doing is creating value out of thin air (by actually ripping off people employed in maquiladoras in Mexico, sweatshops in Indonesia, etc) and then dividing it up between US workers as if they had produced it.
Japan also has lots of overseas investments, but not on the same scale.
The point being, don't assume that EITHER marginal productivity of effective labour, or especially (and even less) that GDP/worker actually represents how hard people are working; these are interesting statistics but they are not relevant to this.
pagan, adj: not acknowledging the God of Christianity and Judaism and Islam [syn: heathen, heathenish]. noun: a person who does not acknowledge your God [syn: heathen, gentile, infidel]
Can someone tell me *why* this group of Aleister Crowley worshippers call themselves "pagans" when that is in fact a vague and derrogatory word? Even if you don't take it to mean "heathen", it simply means a non-Judeo-Christian, so it could mean Hindu, Sikh, Apache... Frankly I find it both an insulting and bizarrely self-insulting use of the word "pagan".
Slashdot Mirror
What the Patriot Act ought to do is act as a signal that something has gone dreadfully wrong in the American system--and therefore must be changed. For one thing, the fact that so many Americans did not oppose it, and were so easily led into accepting a complete contravention of the constitution through a manipulation of irrational fear (what if the terrorists attack my house??) shows us that there is a deeper problem in American culture. No kind of democracy can really work if people are that uncritical and deferential.
... and again.
Removing the Patriot Act is going to be incredibly difficult. Any process that does so, whether it is gradual or sudden, is going to first require a change in the whole political and cultural atmosphere, because there are so many people who genuinely believe measures like the Patriot Act are rational. So anything that removes the Patriot Act is going to do more than just remove the Patriot Act (it's not going to just be scrapped by a Democratic administration)
Whether you do it gradually or suddenly, if the Patriot Act were to be removed by representatives with little cultural change happening, then the deeper causal problems would still be there. But I think we can just as effectively remove it suddenly as we can slowly, if that process is carried out by just that--'We'. Because you're right--until the underlying factors are addressed, there is always the danger of this happening again
But I'm not sure how much that has to do with the *speed* of removing it.
there were still IRA bombings up to the late 90s, no cold war then either. and the bombs did seem pretty bad because they killed and injured a lot of people.
the difference is that they were not exploited in order to create a climate of fear completely disproportional to the actual events. incidentally that is exactly the point of terrorist tactics--but we see today that those tactics can be effectively turned around and made more useful for the (supposed) target of the attacks than for the attackers...
the parent writes: 'Keep in mind this is the japanese we are talking about not the french, they will die before they surrender. They are still finding japanese soldiers who refused to surrender.'
to extrapolate from individual characteristics (even culturally shared ones) to political/military outcomes, or even aggregate behaviour, is a fallacy.
this is like the old story of people saying that we have wars because it's 'human nature', when in fact while 'human nature' may give us the capacity to be soldiers (as well as to not be), it is ultimately *politicians* who start wars, not average people--average people just participate in them (and can escalate them through their participation).
equally, while you may say that because of some shared cultural characteristic japanese soldiers were less likely to give up the fight once they were involved in it, this does not imply that the japanese political/military elite would have had incentives to continue fighting no matter what. you cannot treat all japanese as if they had the same incentive structure.
the average japanese soldier was motivated by a belief in the emperor, the japanese nation, following orders and carrying out his duty. but what was the emperor motivated by? what were the generals motivated by? and when you put them all together, what is the systematic behaviour? it's not the same thing.
japan did in fact realise that it was losing, and while it is true that the average soldier probably would have fought to the death (just as many people would fight to the death defending their country, or what they see as their country's right), this does not imply that people making decisions would have taken them on the basis of 'death before defeat'. clearly this was shown not to be the case by the japanese surrender. there is absolutely nothing in the history that indicates that they would not have surrendered had it not been for the atomic bomb being dropped. what makes the atomic bomb somehow override japanese people's supposed character of wanting to fight to the death, where other means do not?
I would imagine that the doctor was speaking of the embryo dying in the same way you might speak of someone's liver dying, their toe dying, or any other living tissue dying.
That is an entirely different kind of 'life' and 'death' to the kind you're talking about, which is to say, a kind of autonomous human life--a life of its own (which a toe does not have). At that point you are talking about a matter of definition--is the embryo a separate life form yet, or is it merely an extension of the mother, in the same way as any other body tissue?
The doctor you quoted is not addressing this question when she says that the embryo would die, she is merely stating a technical fact. The implication is that her definition of when living tissue takes on 'a life of its own' is different to yours--but that is not the same as having a disregard for human life; it is merely a different definition of what constitutes *a* human life.
there is an important difference between tools and infrastructure. true, much software is used as tools--for accomplishing discrete tasks that evolve as societies and technology evolves. but much software--databases, routers, control devices for physical infrastructure, etc--is used more as infrastructure; that is, as a resource expected to be reliable and predictable by many users and necessary for accomplishing other tasks that ride on top of it, including employing new tools.
infrastructure, because of its multi-user character and the fact that other things are designed to work on top of it, has to have lasting standards--if road lanes suddenly start to become half or double the width, then cars, trucks, traffic flows, etc will all be affected. even if some small technical reason might make it be reasonable to change them, their character as infrastructure means that the long term reliability of how they work is more important than short term technical considerations.
in other words, it would probably be silly at this point to try to design user interfaces, web browsers, etc. that last 200 years, because they are still rapidly evolving. however it makes a great deal of sense to start designing standards for data storage and interface, as well as actual 'infrastructure' software to last a long time because more users (including developers of more 'tool-like' software) benefit from its stability than from its instability.
Damn Aussies ... I did find it confusing when my rugby-playing Aussie housemate said for the first time 'let me just go get my thongs' ...
Low intensity conflict, AKA guerrilla warfare/paramilitary warfare, is very different to terrorism.
Guerrilla warfare is a strategy, a way to conduct war in specific conditions within a defined theatre of operations and an organised military hierarchy just like any other war, but with disparate and weak bands of combatants, rather than with a large, well-equipped army.
Terrorism is not a strategy, it is a tactic. It can be used by guerrilla groups, but it can also be used by ordinary political criminal organisations. Examples of guerrilla groups using terrorist tactics are car bombings in Baghdad; examples of terrorist tactics being used by non-guerrilla groups are IRA bombing in London.
The difference is that one is a combat zone, a theatre of operations in which one is fighting an insurgency or (e.g. in the case of Nicaragua versus the Contras) a foreign incursion in the form of foreign-funded paramilitaries. The other however is just an isolated attack, yes it may be part of a longer string of attacks (like the Unabomber) but that does not make it 'war'. It doesn't even make it 'low intensity conflict'.
War implies combat; terrorism does not. Striking back at terrorists or their cells (like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or IRA) means finding noncombatant groups and arresting them, it doesn't mean engaging with them in protracted combat situations.
War is STILL the same concept as it always was. What you're doing is confounding an age-old tactic (terrorism) with something entirely different. The world has NOT changed. People have used terrorist tactics for at least centuries, and probably millennia. The Bush administration's 'war on terror' is more accurately described as a 'war on ex-mujahadeen', but even that is giving them too much credit, as it's actually more of an excuse for every country in the world who wants to crush its opposition to get US money to do it, by simply labelling them 'terrorists'.
What is a real terrorist? Someone who uses terrorist tactics. What is the Bush administration's definition of a terrorist? Anyone they decide they don't like. However neither one of these comes anywhere close to a conflict, or to combat, or to war.
Afghanistan was a war; Iraq is a war. It was incorrect to call the Taliban terrorists, and the insurgents in Iraq are combatants first, and only terrorists secondarily when they make use of terrorist tactics. But these two conflicts are completely distinct, in spite of the ludicrous propaganda, from e.g. the Madrid train bombings, which were not an act of war, combat, or conflict, but simply of criminal mass murder.
There is a reason why under the Geneva conventions, it is illegal for a soldier to operate dressed as a civilian. Because the laws and customs of war are based on the assumption that war is carried out by combatants who make themselves obvious in one way or another as combatants. In guerrilla war, people become obvious combatants when they attack, or when they are searched in a known war zone and found likely to be combatants based on having lots of grenades or whatever.
A 'terrorist' on the other hand, is defined as 'anyone who the State Department says is a terrorist'. If we were to use your logic and treat terrorists as 'enemy soldiers', then that would mean the ability of the authorities to shoot on sight anyone classified by the Department of State as a terrorist. But how do you identify a terrorist--unless he is packing weapons or you find out about his plans?
The fact is this is *not* a war. The USA is *not* a combat zone, any more than London was a combat zone when IRA attacks were frequent. Terrorism is political crime, but it is crime nonetheless--not carried out by a sovereign state subject to treaty law, not carried out by centralised organisations with clearly defined hierarchies, and most importantly it is damn near impossible to identify a terrorist 'combatant' until it is obvious that they are going to actually carry out an act of terrorism.
And the State Department has already decided that loads of people are terrorists who do not fit this criterion--for example anarchists, like a 14-year-old kid I knew who was arrested and interrogated by the FBI because he had an anti-war leaflet in his bag at the airport, and added to the 'terrorism list' before they let him off.
Who is an enemy soldier is a very clear question. Who is a 'terrorist' however is an extremely subjective judgement. And by your logic my 14-year-old friend should have been shot on sight, or at least taken to a POW camp for indefinite detention and military trial.
The world is not different to what it was before 2001, terrorism has existed for hundreds of years, the difference is that it's being used as an excuse for the biggest crackdown on opposition in the west and in fact in the larger world since the 1930s.
How about one day you're hanging out at a bar, and you meet a girl who seems really friendly, you get along, and you start to go out. You happen to be a writer, and one day your typewriter breaks, and guess what? she happens to have a typewriter she can give you! Then you find out a year from now that the typewriter is bugged and records everything you write ...
This is what happened to Philip Agee, CIA defector, in Paris. A long and elaborate ruse involving gaining his trust and a series of 'accidental' occurrences seemingly unrelated. But that was done outside of the US, where warrants aren't necessary and it's basically just espionage.
Do you really want this kind of thing to be able to happen domestically? No constitution, no bill of rights, no need for warrants, no need for transparency--just all out domestic espionage operations.
The Plutonium Files is an account written by the journalist who uncovered and eventually forced the declassification of the story of about 60 years of secret radiation-exposure experiments by the US government on thousands of unknowing civilians and military personnel, including e.g. feeding pregnant women at a hospital a 'new infant formula' to test the effects of radiation on the foetus. These programmes have now actually been declassified and apologised for by the Department of Energy under Clinton, but few people actually know about them and they are definitely not written about in textbooks!
That's what industry standards are for.
You could just as easily make the argument, 'Standard Oil was good for the world because it standardised the chemical mix of oil, so everyone can expect the same lead content etc'. But of course, in every industry which is not monopolistic (while it may be oligopolistic) the way to solve this problem is not through dictation from one company to everyone, but through consensus on industry standards.
That was the whole point of the Open Group and the (1 year too late) advent of CDE--you agree on a system of library interfaces, protocols, file formats that will form the basis of your open systems desktop, then you can have as many implementations by as many vendors (or open source people) as you want, and they're all compatible. What's more, they can all LOOK completely different if you want--but they all play the same way with the same software. So, you have competition and alternatives, but compatibility at the same time.
NEITHER Microsoft NOR open source people are doing this of course. It requires a commitment to following published standards, and a consensus around them in the industry. THAT is the way to achieve consistent desktops--not stifling competition and making everyone accept your particular implementation, but agreeing on ground rules for compatibility and following them.
No, Land Rovers are a British invention, and are made for actual outdoor utility purposes, particularly in the countryside. In Britain, you see them but not even that many because most people who own them own them for a purpose. SUVs in the US are bigger than (British) Land Rovers, being essentially made by taking a pickup truck and putting a permanent hardtop on it. The vast majority of people you see driving SUVs, at least in coastal areas, are not driving them because they need them for navigating mountain passes or carrying loads of construction equipment. They're driving them because they think it makes them look good, or because they like feeling powerful. 18-wheelers, on the other hand, serve a functional purpose.
There's a big difference between 18-wheelers and SUVs. 18-wheelers are essential for the functioning of the economy as currently structured and the society. Taking out 18-wheelers is taking out a crucial component of infrastructure that would destroy a lot of other things. SUVs, on the other hand, are a highly destructive, wasteful consumer good (not intermediate good) that are a pure artefact of American consumer culture, and as such completely arbitrary. The best thing to do in the long run is to change this culture--but in the short run, radical changes have to be made if we want to stand any chance of avoiding further ecological damage and in fact, the huge economic waste involved in such mindless goods as SUVs as well.
In the words of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, former chief economist at the World Bank, former head of Clinton's council of economic advisers:
'The reason why the invisible hand is invisible is that it doesn't exist'.
a) The automobile and oil lobbies in the US are too large and powerful to allow these kinds of externalities to be internalised
b) Even if you were to try, what makes you think people wouldn't simply sacrifice something else (say, hamburgers) just to keep their SUVs? If it's important enough in American culture, people will spend the money for it. Not just a question of higher or lower indifference curves, but of a cultural necessity for some people.
Why not just outlaw them altogether? In fact, why not threaten to cripple the automotive industry unless they radically reform their entire way of doing business?
Of course, the answer is that the US government at many levels is in the pocket of the automotive industry. As long as it continues like that, you won't see any real reform.
a) I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was really thinking that the Web would become anything like what it is today--more just another service alongside gopher etc. Among other things, who could have foreseen the massive increase in public internet usage that the Web arguably precipitated?
b) If he had made it more complex to begin with, it would have been harder to sell the idea, harder to implement, and therefore it's possible it wouldn't have taken off as quickly and easily as it did. Part of the reason why it's become so big is that from early on there has been such a proliferation of crappy pages and ideas for pages, and the ones that have lasted have been selected out of this mess in an almost Darwinian way.
c) There's no way anyone can foresee what's going to happen to their simple idea; especially with big ideas, it takes enough guts/faith just to put it out there in the first place and evangelise it--let alone if you make it even *bigger*.
It's always easier and more effective to start small, both in terms of achieving it, and in terms of convincing people (people tend to go out on only one or maybe 2 limbs at a time, but not more). Unfortunately that leads to messiness years or decades later--but that's what differentiates humans from machines: we are always going to develop in an organic way.
That's like saying 'real feudalism (i.e. a kingdom of God in which the Church and the monarchy are acting by divine rule), as opposed to the corrupt, rapine, impoverished system that passed for feudalism in the middle ages'. Perfect competition has never existed and will never exist. It is a model, for use in economic theory, that is intended to represent a theoretical tendency.
In REAL capitalism, i.e. the real, actual, existing economic system, since its birth several hundred years ago, (as Adam Smith repeatedly points out in Wealth of Nations incidentally) firms constantly attempt to influence and control goverment to pursue their own profit maximisation goals. This includes raising tariffs when they want them (i.e. against competitors) and lowering them when they are a problem (i.e. for export markets). Manipulation of politics for profit maximisation is and always has been a feature of REAL capitalism, and the inevitable result of this is non-free markets (although even without it, markets would not be 'perfect' as we do not have perfect information, 0 barriers to entry, etc).
John Maynard Keynes was an idiot. He convinced many governments that the way to create wealth was to print money
Keynesianism does not argue that the way to create wealth is to print money. It argues that the government should correct the cyclical fluctuations of the capitalist economy by creating countercyclical expansions and contractions--borrowing and spending in periods of contraction, paying off the debt in periods of expansion, not printing money, but trying to stabilise the economy through spending. Don't get the neoclassical synthesis (today's ISLM model) confused with original Keynesianism. There's a big difference.
And John Maynard Keynes was not an idiot; even if you disagree with him, he was ahead of his time.
That's a feature of perfect competition (a theoretical state which is in actuality impossible and never exists, as it rests on 0 bars to entry of an industry, perfect information, and various other impossible conditions), not of capitalism (a real economic system more often characterised by oligopoly or monopoly conditions, imperfect information, and intentional 'distortions' of markets by firms).
To be more precise, Marx made PROJECTIONS, not predictions (see Bertell Ollman). What has set the Marxist enterprise apart from the start is its attempt to base itself in social science, not dogma or predictions--'this MUST happen'. The Communist Manifesto is, on the other hand, a political document rather than a theoretical document, which is why it both seems so much more clearly written than anything else Marx wrote and so much more imperatively, categorically stated. It is, however, an exaggeration, and does not represent the bulk of the theory.
I assume what you're referring to with peasants overthrowing the aristocracy is feudal society in which peasants are rising up against their feudal landlords. The trouble is, *before* capitalism, peasant revolts were frequent, but could never take power because they basically had neither a viable alternative to the aristocracy nor the military or economic might. The bourgeoisie however, which were growing inside feudal society engaging in the capitalist mode of production, had already built up this mode so far by the time they openly revolted that they had the economic might and the alternative ready at hand. They were therefore able to overthrow the last vestiges of feudal power.
But historical materialism is not a stage based, unilineal framework to be just sloppily applied in the same way to every society on earth (as many in the 2nd International and later the Soviet Union would have had us believe). Societies engage in complex constellations of different modes of production, and the ones Marx traced out as the specific precursors of capitalism, which only developed once--in Europe--are the ones that are emphasised in his writing (with minimal mention of the so-called 'Asiatic Mode of Production' which was based on the extremely limited evidence to hand from 19th century anthropology).
Marx's point was that in the theoretical model of the capitalist mode of production, which of course never exists in pure form, the tendencies are toward the oppressed class--*for the first time in history*--to successfully be responsible for the bringing about of a new dominant mode of production. Every previous transition had been brought about by some other forces, some other oppressor class, etc.
But what we saw developing in the 20th century is the possibility of peasant revolution. Simultaneoulsy developed by Mariategui and Mao, although in two different forms obviously, is the idea that global, imperialist capitalism actually stifles social development in the colonies or neocolonies, preserving feudal, slave, or other modes of production where it is most expeditious. Furthermore, as Engels had pointed out long before, societies do not have to linearly develop through the same series of modes of production--they can 'skip stages', in the stadial wording, if there are other societies which have created preconditions (i.e. an example to follow). Thus most of the socialist revolutions in the 20th century had peasants as their motive force, both thanks to the development of guerrilla warfare tactics, and thanks to advent of socialist theory, which was an outgrowth of European capitalism.
Because Marx was a social scientist, and not a witch making predictions with a crystal ball, this does not invalidate the whole of Marx's theory. On the contrary, it augments it with a greater understanding of the situation once we see what happens when capitalism reaches a truly global scale and starts to interact in new ways with other modes of production as a result.
Do you know where he refers to this? I would be very surprised, unless you're just misinterpreting something. Because the whole point of the development of class consciousness, the consolidation of what Marx calls 'proletarian political economy' within the capitalist mode of production, the increasing organisation of the proletariat in trade unions and co-operatives, is that it is creating a proletariat that is ever more aware and able to govern itself. Of course there is also the group of intellectuals, like Marx, who come from other classes to join the proletariat and aid them. But as far as I am aware, Marx does not refer to any 'benevolent dictatorship'--after all, specifically who would constitute this dictatorship? This is not the role of the intellectuals according to Marx, and not the role of anyone outside the proletariat--so who is it? I would be surprised if this reference actually exists.
Furthermore, Marxist theory, which is much bigger and more important than just Karl Marx, and has come a long way since he died, has (among many others) 2 strands within it: the proletariat must govern for itself and leadership must arise spontaneously, and the proletariat must govern for itself but leadership must come from a vanguard, an 'advance detachment' of the proletariat. The second one is Leninism. Neither one however denies the necessity of proletarian democracy; the difference is that Leninism involves a Party that tries to lead the people and in practice, has ended up governing the people as they defer to it and it takes on too much responsibility. Not in every case however. But in any case, this is Leninism, only one specific branch of Marxist theory; and while it is influenced by older strains, for example Babouvinism from the period of the French Revolution, it is quite novel and must be distinguished from previous revolutionary theory.
So, I would be surprised if you could find that 'reference', but even if so, Marxist theory does not rest on Karl Marx alone, by a long shot. So it's pretty unimportant.
What Marxist theory advocates is a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. This does not mean a 'dictatorship' in the sense of a small group of people telling everyone what to do; it comes from Marxist theory of the state, and is counterposed to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and before that the dictatorship of the aristocracy (in feudalism) and before that the dictatorship of the slave-owners (in ancient society).
The point is that in Marxist theory the state itself is by its very nature a class dictatorship; it is the instrument of one class against another, or several others. In a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat, because the vast majority of the population will have become proletarians as a result of capitalism (peasants gradually becoming rural proletariat as well), the dictatorship of the proletariat represents almost the entire population, i.e. like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it is democratic *within* *itself*, representing the interests of those who run it. So a dictatorship of the proletariat would be a democracy representing everyone except the leftovers--the bourgeoisie, and possibly the peasantry, although in practice, an alliance with the peasantry was made out of necessity if nothing else.
This then leads to the withering away of the state as such; if we see the state as being a representative of class interests, and the state now represents the only class, and is a weapon of repression against the tiny minority (Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, etc.) who would like to restore the old system, then once the new society is consolidated the state as a class dictatorship is no longer necessary, and withers away. This doesn't mean government withers away, just class dictatorship.
Don't criticise something you don't know anything about.
Yes, this is exactly about the law being equal for everyone.
The value of money is not intrinsic, but comes from what it can be used for, its purchasing power. But the value of its purchasing power is directly related to the utility people can derive from it: if the only thing you could buy with money was a manure, it would have value only for farmers, everyone else would want nothing to do with it.
If the law takes the same quantity of money away from two groups of people who derive different use values from this quantity (e.g. the farmers and the non-farmers) then it is not acting equally, because the non-farmers couldn't care less and therefore while a meaningless quantity of money has been taken away from them, no actual value has. For the law to act equally, it must apply based on the real value of the money, not based on a simple quantitative measurement that is, by itself, meaningless.
This is not about me determining for you how much you value your dollars. This is about a realistic assessment of the economic function of money and an actual assessment based on real data and many decades of studies of consumer behaviour. The fact is, consumers do, time and time again, exhibit characteristics corresponding to diminishing marginal utility. Should we simply ignore this mountain of data and assume that people have unending appetites for everything they consume? This seems unreasonable and unscientific.
It is a plain and simple error to construe money as a measure of value that simply maintains the same marginal value no matter what the number. No economist would actually agree with it, and for good reason.
Diminishing marginal utility.
Basic concept from microeconomic theory: the more you have of something, say for example money, the less each additional unit is worth to you. The marginal utility a person who makes $1 a day gets from a $1 is absolutely massive (life changing experience) compared to the marginal utility a billionare gets (almost nothing).
Adjusting fines and taxes to higher income is not discrimination, it's recognition of the fact that not every dollar is equal.
Do you think the goal of medicine is to produce a more efficient, 'genetically good' human race? Actually I thought the whole point of medicine, and in fact most other economic activities (agriculture, etc) was to promote the well-being of humans as they exist, and their offspring, as they exist, not to engage in some kind of bizarre project in eugenics. Don't confuse means with ends; efficiency, economic activity, and even 'good' genes are all means to an end: the well-being of humanity. Letting people starve, even lazy people, is not an effective way to promote their well-being.
If you want an efficient system, try fascism. Yes, it's more 'efficient' than anything at increasing production numbers, getting rid of those pesky weak and sick people, etc. But there's a reason why the vast majority of people on the planet do not want it: because we're willing to put up with a few lazy people free riding on benefits and a little bit of slacking to have a generally better quality of, and respect for human life.
The statement that 'we know Japanese don't work nearly as hard as Americans' is presumably based on high output per worker, i.e. GDP per worker. This number is known to be huge in the United States, something like 16x that of China adjusted by purchasing power parity.
There are 2 factors going into this kind of gap:
The first is marginal productivity of effective labour, which is related to education and most importantly technology available to the worker. This is not about how hard the person works, but about how much output comes out of him or her (i.e. factors like burnout would decrease rather than increase this figure, even though they represent harder work). The largest advantage the US has over many other countries (though not necessarily Japan) is higher quality of capital stock, i.e. higher technology per worker. This is particularly true when you have many of your service sector workers doing things like IT, which produce a massive contribution to GDP, versus people in factories producing a fairly small contribution to GDP.
The 2nd and more important factor however comes from how GDP is measured. GDP works like a 'value-added' measure; every time something is sold for more than it was bought or produced for, that counts into GDP, as it is considered new value being produced. Now, trade only accounts for something like 10% of US GDP, fairly small right? So why is it that US companies have such extensive investments in 3rd world countries and US foreign policy is so directed to protecting them? Because when you import a pair of shoes at $1/pair and resell them at $100/pair, you've just created $99 of value domestically while only $1 of it goes to trade. The point being, the US economy depends on this, and what you're doing is creating value out of thin air (by actually ripping off people employed in maquiladoras in Mexico, sweatshops in Indonesia, etc) and then dividing it up between US workers as if they had produced it.
Japan also has lots of overseas investments, but not on the same scale.
The point being, don't assume that EITHER marginal productivity of effective labour, or especially (and even less) that GDP/worker actually represents how hard people are working; these are interesting statistics but they are not relevant to this.
dictionary.com defines pagan as:
... Frankly I find it both an insulting and bizarrely self-insulting use of the word "pagan".
pagan, adj: not acknowledging the God of Christianity and Judaism and Islam [syn: heathen, heathenish]. noun: a person who does not acknowledge your God [syn: heathen, gentile, infidel]
Can someone tell me *why* this group of Aleister Crowley worshippers call themselves "pagans" when that is in fact a vague and derrogatory word? Even if you don't take it to mean "heathen", it simply means a non-Judeo-Christian, so it could mean Hindu, Sikh, Apache