Well, that's probably good, since I actually agreed with 90% of what the parent said.
Indoctrination 101: "someone says something bad about your country, don't listen, defend!"
Logical fallacies 101: " If someone says something that's 90% true, but then includes demonstrably false assertions or makes unnuanced analogies, you should still act like that person is 100% correct. If anyone attempts to present a more nuanced perspective, you should immediately level an ad hominem attack, asserting that the person is obviously stupid and brainwashed."
The general sentiment is that in the USSR, the people at least knew their government was bullshitting them, but in the US, they succeeded. The people actually believe that they're living in paradise while in reality they are trapped in a hellhole.
I live in the U.S. I've also spent significant time living outside of the U.S. I agree with you that there are many, many things about the U.S. to criticize, and elements of its foreign policy are quite criminal.
However, your statement there is more than a little extreme. Many U.S. citizens do recognize that there are serious flaws (a lot of them post frequently on Slashdot, for example), though admittedly the pro-American rhetoric is stupid and ignorant at times.
On the other hand, I think compared to many years of life under the USSR, Americans are not "trapped in a hellhole." The USSR was in existence for roughly 70 years. Of those 70 years, the first 30 under Stalin experienced not only random purges and murders from the government, but largescale famines, along with economic and political uncertainty. For the last 15 years or so of the USSR, there was a gradual decline that saw economic conditions, shortages, etc. that are unlike anything generally seen in the U.S.
So, yeah, basically if by the "USSR" you want to only count the 25 years or so from the late 50s to the early 70s when conditions were pretty good, yeah the U.S. currently isn't much better than that.
But to say that U.S. people are gullible or dumb because they don't recognize -- unlike the USSR -- that the government is bad... well, we don't have random purges of people we know happening every other week... ya know, like Stalin did. In case you're unaware, Stalin ordered the murder of what historians estimate to be between 20 and 60 million people, most of them his own countrymen.
When everybody knows someone who "was disappeared" by the government, you can bet that citizens would become more suspicious of anything that government says.
In contrast, it's only in the past few years that it's become somewhat acceptable for the President of the U.S. to outright kill American citizens without a trial. Our leaders haven't deliberately killed tens of millions of citizens.
The only similar period in the U.S. that experienced turmoil on the level of most of the history of the USSR was probably during the Great Depression. So 10-15 years of the past century, compared to most years in the entire history of the USSR. And even then, the government wasn't going around killing people.
So yeah, I think some Americans are deluded about how "great" their country is, and they don't realize how many things have decayed or what rights have been restricted. But to call it a "hellhole" compared to the USSR where the citizens were smart enough to recognize how bad they had it... well, if the U.S. actually ever gets as bad as the world of Stalinist purges, I bet the American people would be smart enough to have the kind of cynicism you expect.
It's based on the weaker assumption that the number within each ward who change won't be significant. Or more accurately the net number.
Well, yes, obviously that's a better way of saying it (and more accurate). The effect is somewhat similar, though. The model basically ignores the fact that differences between individual candidates might matter (or candidate's actions, or campaigning, or whatever). While it may not be strictly equivalent to "straight ticket" voting, it assumes voters behave in similar ways, i.e., their party choices would never change (collectively) no matter which candidates were running or how those candidates acted.
While such an assumption may be true for many and likely a majority of voters in many areas, many elections are also won on much thinner margins. If even 10-20% of the electorate might actually vote for a different party if the candidate changes, it could sway this model significantly in many races.
You ought to be shocked at the original purpose of those laws
Who said I'm not? Of course I recognize racial disparities in the U.S. Of course I recognize the need to change the system to avoid racism -- both overt and systemic -- now.
My post wasn't about judging the validity of arguments for redressing racism or preventing racist political actions. My post is bringing up the obvious point that if you gerrymander a bunch of Democrats (of whatever race) into one district for whatever reason, you may end up making it more difficult for Democrats to win surrounding districts.
Hence, if we gerrymander to allow minorities a chance to get someone elected to Congress, but in the process we also gather together a lot of Democrats in one place, we can SIMULTANEOUSLY enhance the minority effect of voting while diluting the overall effect of Democratic voters.
At no point did I say we haven't had significant racial problems in the U.S., nor did I in any way imply we still don't have a long way to go to overcome various racist parts of our political system. But even if you find the creation of majority-minority districts a good idea, you still have to recognize that it can also potentially set-back the Democratic cause at large. That's the tension I was actually pointing out.
They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.
False. Legislators are required to draw districts in such a way that minority votes will NOT be diluted. Thus, if they are forced to redraw districts (say, due to new allocations of the number of representatives after a census), they are REQUIRED to take minority distribution into account and produce a new set of districts which will not negatively affect minority voters.
It has been easier for these issues to end up in the courts in places that have a history of suppressing minority votes -- but the restrictions are binding on all states, regardless of past wrongs.
Did they take into account the Voting Rights Act provision that requires that minority voters be concentrated into districts that they have a good likelihood of winning? That alone has the effect of diluting minority strength elsewhere.
Who the hell modded this as "troll"?? Not only have other posts cited examples of how the VRA has frequently been used for it, the issue is specifically discussed in one of the linked articles in TFS:
But, he cautions, in the real world, there are many other factors that go into drawing district lines.
"One of them is our national commitment to minority voting rights," says Levitt. "It's really the strongest national commitment we have to minority representation anywhere, the voting rights act, and as I think the professor and student would say, their model districts don't even comply with the voting rights act, that's not what they were aiming to do."
Levitt says other factors matter too, including geography.
In response, Mattingly says it's possible to design the program to account for minority representation, but he and Vaughn chose to keep it as simple and as transparent as possible for now.
You don't mod someone as "troll" for bringing up a legitimate issue that's actually discussed in TFA.
Personally, I find it all to be a bunch of bullcrap. Have you seen those voting districts that are along, squiggly lines that wander all over the place?
Yeah, and you know what? One of the most famous ones is in North Carolina, the site of this study.
And guess who created it and why? Democrats did, in order to secure a minority voting block big enough to elect a black person to Congress. Ever since, it's been one of the most litigated districts in the U.S.
I'm always shocked at how many people don't realize that this is one of the primary LEGAL rationales for gerrymandering -- back in the 1980s and 1990s you even saw unholy alliances between minority leaders and conservative Republicans conspiring to create awkward districts in some states that would give each group what they wanted: the minorities got enough people together in a district to elect a minority to Congress, and the Republicans got to excise many of those annoying mostly Democratic minority voters from their districts.
We are still living with that legacy in many states, and I frankly have found news coverage in recent years of gerrymandering to be lacking in discussion of this issue. It's not all just Republicans who have taken control of state legislatures -- we've also had a committed effort for quite a few decades to segregate voter districts in such a way that would allow more minorities in Congress.
But of course that creates a problem, because it ends up disenfranching non-minority Democrats who get stuck in all the surrounding districts that can no longer elect a Democrat because a large portion of Democrats were deliberately removed from swing districts to create the minority-majority district.
So the Democrats end up in a Catch-22. If they want to promote Congressional "diversity," they can create districts where minorities get elected, but they can end up screwing themselves over in the process because then all the surrounding districts become more Republican and make it more difficult for Democrats to actually achieve an overall Congressional majority.
It's certainly not the only issue that has led to Republican majorities in Congress -- but it's one that's not often talked about, and it has had some significant effects.
This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.
This is true, and I have absolutely no doubt that there is some serious manipulation going on in drawing districts, as there has been by both parties for centuries.
That said, there's quite a big gap of logic in one of the assumptions of this study. From TFS:
"If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."
To what extent is this assumption valid, though? The model appears based on the assumption that ALL voters are "straight-ticket" types who just vote Republican or Democrat mindlessly.
In other words, it doesn't take into account whether (1) a voter might actually care about a specific candidate and what he/she says, (2) a voter might actually respond to campaign advertising or other candidate promotions, (3) for incumbents, a voter might actually continue to vote for an incumbent is he/she is perceived to have served well. (Stats generally show that incumbents have a huge advantage in elections -- voters prefer to vote for familiar names.)
Without controlling for such factors (e.g., by looking at previous election vote counts and comparing how "faithful" voters are to a particular party over the course of a number of elections), this study is SERIOUSLY flawed.
Also, candidates run campaigns according to the rules that are in place. They may visit areas in their district because they have to win those areas and make promises they might not otherwise make because those areas are in their district. If the district lines were drawn differently, they would probably campaign differently.
This strikes me as flawed as those who get into arguments about how Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election. (To be clear, I definitely was never a Bush fan, but I'm interested in rational argument, not fantasies.)
Anyhow, Gore and Bush weren't campaigning to win the popular vote across the country. They were campaigning to win the electoral college vote, which required strategy based on regions and state boundaries. To come back later and say, "But, but... Gore should have won because he got the popular vote" is like some idiot saying, "I know I lost Monopoly, but I had the most properties -- if you changed the rules to allow me to build houses based on the number of properties I own rather than the number of monopolies I had, I could have won!" So what? Those aren't the rules of the game.
The rules of the game may be stupid (and are in the case of gerrymandered districts). But the players choose strategies based on them. The voters may respond to such strategies. None of this appears to have been considered in this model.
So, the same as with meteor showers. Not entire unexpected, i'd think.
Not entirely unexpected, but -- to be clear -- this study is NOT talking about normal meteors in meteor showers (which are presumed to be clustered since they are typically remnants of a comet).
Instead, this study is focusing on LARGER bodies (multi-kiloton impacts), most of which do not have a common origin like bits of a comet. Many scientists assume that they are random hunks of rock from the asteroid belt or some other collection that get perturbed from their normal orbit by interacting with Jupiter or something. Point being -- there's no actual reason why they should cluster together unless they originated from a body that fractured.
From TFA:
The paths followed by these objects are strongly perturbed, and exhibit fast and chaotic nodal
precession over time-scales of ~10 Myr (see e.g. Ito & Malhotra 2006). It is therefore not surprising that most studies assume that the angular elements, in particular the longitude of the ascending node, of the orbits of near-Earth objects (NEOs) are randomly and
uniformly distributed in the range 0-2 pi. For many, this intrinsic chaoticity necessarily means that they are completely random, and that all the impacts must be interpreted as uncorrelated events distributed according to Poisson statistics.
In other words, many people -- who probably know much more about this than the average Slashdot poster -- have recognized there are many differences exhibited in the behavior of these big hunks of rock compared to meteor showers, and thus assume their origin is probably different. Which means there's no reason to assume the same sort of clustering.
This study seems to show clustering. If this study seems valid, the next thing is to explain WHY this sort of clustering happens with large bodies. The authors suggest it may have something to do with planetary perturbations. In any case, it's probably not the same mechanism as meteor showers.
It's even worse than that. Going by this quote, they're using it to mean even or homogeneous:
contrary to what they thought, such events are not random, and these explosions may occur more frequently on certain days.
You know, like if a coin comes up heads four times in a row that's "not random".
Actually, that's not a very good analogy. The main pattern that they noticed is clustering of events over long periods of time. It would be more like if you had a coin that was weighted in such a way that it only came up heads about 1 time out of a 100 or something. You flipped it once per day.
According to normal probability, if the only thing that's influencing the coin is just its weight that produces a 1 in 100 chance of heads, the pattern of heads should look relatively homogeneous over a long time span.
Instead, what they tended to find was a lot of clustering of events -- so it would be like going for hundreds of days and then suddenly getting heads on 2 or 3 days in a row, then going again for hundreds of days without any heads again.
In that case, it would be fair to say that there is something else influencing the distribution -- it's not just a "random" distribution you'd expect for a 1 in 100 chance of getting heads. Some other factor is leading to clustering.
Just from looking briefly at the article, it doesn't seem to me that they have a long-enough timespan or enough events to claim strong evidence for a pattern. They basically come up with a 2% stat that this pattern could occur by chance -- sure, that's better than the standard 95% confidence interval for exploratory studies, but there are various statistical features of their study that could be giving them a false-positive here. But it's enough that further study may be warranted.
You know where a lot of processed foods came into vogue? -- all the "low-fat" food crazy beginning in the 1980s
There are still plenty of high fat processed foods that are very popular. Candy bars, pizza, cookies, and ice cream to name a few.
You may want to look up the definition of "a lot of." Hint: it does not mean ALL. The trend to mass produce snack foods which conformed to a low-fat diet most certainly led to more innovative and complex food processing. That in no way implies that ALL processed foods are low-fat -- only that engineering low-fat foods actually required significantly more processing in ways that could trick your body into thinking it was eating things it wasn't. Also, things like pizza, cookies, and ice cream can be made at home with relatively few ingredients which are significantly less "processed" than many of the new low-fat or no-fat snack foods designed to fit the new dietary trends of the 1980s and 1990s.
Uh, once again -- look at most snack foods. Derived from grains
Plain old grains are too boring. People are unlikely to overeat on them. In snack foods, the grains are usually combined with extra sugar, (usually) some fat, salt, and aromas.
Uh, yeah. So? When people see "grains" in the food pyramid, what do you think they're going to eat? Plain rice, plain wheat berries, plain buckwheat? No -- at a minimum, even if they got those "plain old grains," they would generally cook them and -- you guessed it -- add "some fat, salt, and aromas [spices, herbs, etc.]". Probably not as much sugar as snack foods, but most people won't eat "plain old grains" even if they are served looking like grains -- they put in salt, spices, and a few pats of butter on top.
So, I'm not sure I understand what the great distinction you're drawing here is. Snack foods "doctor up" grains to make them palatable; people do the same thing if they were to prepare grains for themselves.
In itself, grains aren't bad, as long as you eat them in moderation.
See the first point I responded to in my previous post. I never said grains were bad -- but they do provide lesser feelings of satiety, hence often requiring more calories consumed before people feel full. A diet that excludes other sources of calories and emphasizes carb sources (like grains) can have a tendency to promote more overeating. It isn't necessarily true, but the triggers are there.
Anyhow, I think you may have missed the overall point of my post, which was to respond to another posts claim that the food pyramid had no influence on obesity levels. I didn't say grains were evil. I said that the desire to emphasize grains and carb-based foods, while demonizing fats, contributed to some of the trends mentioned by GP. My whole point was that the causes are complex and may be interrelated.
No, grain does not equal carbs. Grain has quite a bit of carbs, but also other things.
And even that is a simplification.
You probably want to re-read the beginning of my post. My whole point started with the oversimplification of the post I was responding to by claiming that the food pyramid wasn't involved in the obesity epidemic. I then proceeded to show how it might be connected, i.e., pointing out a FEW of the complex issues involved which actually show connections between various threads.
Uh, you know, while on the surface you are saying you disagree with him, the actual content of your writing is agreeing with him.
How so? The primary claim of the post I was replying to was that the "USA's obesity epidemy... is not from any given food pyramid." I then go on to show how the alternative explanations may actually be RELATED TO the food pyramid.
Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:
Thanks for this list -- yes, it's important to note the limitations of this study.
However, one broader issue that this study should point out is the continued stupidity of the medical profession in assuming that because the quantity of X in diet is increased, it will necessarily increase the quantity of X in one's blood or other chemical markers.
We've seen this for many years with cholesterol studies -- the body manufactures most cholesterol, so dietary consumption has little relation to blood cholesterol levels. But that hasn't stopped decades of doctors demonizing any food with cholesterol (e.g., eggs) with no actual basis. I know doctors who still give out this crap advice to focus on a "low cholesterol diet" to lower cholesterol. It just doesn't work that way for many (most?) people, and there's no reason it should.
Now we have a study showing clearly that dietary saturated fat intake does not necessarily relate to the levels that ultimately end up in the bloodstream. Once again, this is common sense -- given that the body PRODUCES fat to store energy. If you're throwing fat into a system that is capable of producing fat, you have to actually consider what causes the system to produce fat... rather than just assuming it's only about how much fat is taken into the system.
Anyhow, more studies like this will hopefully cause clueless doctors to realize this. Once again, when a system produces the vast majority of X, dietary intake of X is probably not the most important variable -- you need to figure out what regulates the production of X.
Again, this seems like an intuitively obvious element for isolating what's going on in a system with such characteristics. But it seems beyond the comprehension of medical science -- hence all of the crappy dietary advice with no proven basis.
As a foreigner I can easily see where USA's obesity epidemy comes from and it is not from any given food pyramid:
Wow. What a complete logic failure. First off, obviously there can be more than one cause to anything. There could be a number of trends that relate to obesity problems, and dietary advice with the old "food pyramid" could in fact be one of them. In fact, it might even relate to other apparent issues.
To wit:
have you paid attention lately to the ridiculously big rations you ingest?
The food pyramid recommended lots of carbs, while downplaying things like fat. Many, many studies have shown that carbs tend to lead to less of a feeling of satiety than fats or proteins (because carbs are generally more easily digested), so emphasizing carbs tends to make people hungry more... hence, larger portions are required to feel "full."
The ridiculously high levels of processed food?
You know where a lot of processed foods came into vogue? -- all the "low-fat" food crazy beginning in the 1980s or so, which forced food manufacturers to stop using so many less-processed ingredients (which generally had things like fat in them) and instead replace them with -- you guessed it -- carbs. The grains in the big part of the pyramid grew to excess, while processing removed the fats that were claimed to be evil. While sure it is possible to consume processed foods that are not carbs, the vast majority of heavily processed foods seem to be about throwing in extra carbs to replace flavor removed by less emphasized elements in the old food pyramid.
The ridiculously high comsumption of snacks and soda drinks?
Uh, once again -- look at most snack foods. Derived from grains. I.e., carbs. Soda is generally made from sugar... derived from grain... more carbs.
Whether or not all of these are connected directly to the food pyramid, the emphasis on grains and other carbs (and avoidance of fat and excess protein, particularly high-fat protein) led to increased reliance on and production of carb-centric foods... which are definitely related to all of the trends in your rhetorical questions.
Maybe more because the educated class didn't get to run the place anymore and those that did get to run the place appointed their young catamites to run departments instead of people with the experience to operate effectively.
I probably shouldn't respond to a post that uses a word like "catamite" so loosely... but do you really think nepotism (which might be a better term for what you're talking about) was new to the 20th century? It was not. That sort of corruption has been around a LONG time. Incompetent friends and relatives have always been a staple of the political process.
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here.
[Citation needed] -- I mean, seriously, let's be TRULY honest: for most of history, there have been people living under much, much, much more poorer circumstances than today. And the lower classes have been much more oppressed than today. How exactly would capitalism "have fallen" just because the poor were only slightly better off than they were for -- well, all of history -- rather than MUCH better off (as they are in modern industrial societies for the most part)?
I fail to see what democracy has to do with capitalism, other than if you only see the world through skewed Marxist "lenses." And most of my post was about ancient societies, which had dynamics very different from modern capitalism. While capitalism certainly became tethered to American democracy at some point, that was an outgrowth of an older strand of (old-school) "liberalism," which would be the more accurate companion of a democratic republic as the Founding Fathers understood it.
In any case, my argument was NOT that we shouldn't help the poor, but rather that promising the poor things coupled with increased suffrage and power to the poor will likely lead to voting for politicians who might have other motives and will expand power as necessary to create their own personal vision.
For an example from the beginning of the era I'm talking about, see Huey Long, a man who seemed to want to go to extreme measures to help the poor and downtrodden -- but when he was threatened, he responded by becoming increasingly dictatorial in his governance. Long's story has many parallels with the Gracchi brothers of ancient Rome, which arguably began the big downslide in the republic.
As for all the stuff about the fundamental irrationality of people -- sure, yeah, that's true. But it's not capitalism's fault. (Not that I'm defending unbridled capitalism either.) Marxist socialism won't fix it either. It just is.
A pool of antennas, slightly larger than the number of peak subscribers; it was never 1:1 antenna:subscriber -- a minor point some people don't understand.
THIS.
I see so many uninformed posters here stating that people were "renting" an antenna of their very own, which was solely allocated to them permanently. While Aereo tried to claim something like that, it was never true. This was not like any "lease" or "renting" in any normal sense -- the antennas were allocated dynamically and returned to the "pool" after they had streamed for a particular customer.
Basically, customers were paying for a service -- a dynamic allocation of whatever antenna happened to be available at that time, which would then return to a pool after use. That's not "renting" an antenna. That's paying for an on-demand service. It's not significantly different from paying for any kind of streaming service that allocates part of system resources for the stream -- the only difference here is that those resources included individual antennas rather than merely individual datastreams.
The cable companies did exactly this for years (with a single antenna) and paid nobody. So what was your point again?
Yes, but then the law was changed, and cable companies can no longer do this. Aereo therefore can't either. Or should we allow some companies to play by different rules because they weren't around in the "good ole days"?
So what was your point again?
(Note that I'm NOT in favor of our current system. But whatever crappy rules exist should apply equally to everyone.)
We call ourselves a "democratic country" but are we truly democratic?
Our government, the government of the United States of America, is behaving exactly like a tyrannical regime - in which it not only conveniently ignores the wish of the citizentry, it continues to carry out programs which are designed to undermine the validity of the democratic principles within the country
Many have argued that this is the natural tendency of democracy. Plato ranked democracy as the second-worst type of government, inevitably degrading into tyranny, since the "mob" will always eventually be swayed to vote away their power by promises from some prospective tyrant who promises them something that appeals to their immediate concerns (safety, security, food, wealth, homes, land, etc.). So, the "mob" votes away their rights in exchange for something else that seems more important at the moment.
The ancient Romans solved this problem with a special office of dictator, which was only appointed for limited times to deal with a crisis. There was a strong tradition in the Roman Republic (which held for at least a few centuries) where ambition to be a sole leader was strongly discouraged among the ruling class -- to be accused of desiring power was one of the worst sins. The topmost offices were only to be held for one short term in one's lifetime, or at least with a period of several years between, to prevent anything like a "king" or "tyrant" gaining permanent power.
But in the late 2nd century BCE, various elements were set in motion that ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic, mostly due to populist reformers who wanted to give suffrage to more people beyond the traditional "Roman citizens," and those reformers who promised the poor and landless all sorts of things. In exchange, the poor and landless broke with Roman tradition and started electing people to offices for many consecutive terms, and when crises arose, the dictators stayed in their offices for longer and longer.
Eventually, Julius Caesar came along and got himself declared dictator to deal with various things, but then arranged to become effectively dictator for life. (There's a lot more to the story, involving the gradual accumulation of power in central locations and people, standing armies who supported generals in lawless actions, etc.)
Anyhow -- the founders of the U.S. tried their darnedest to keep such a degradation from happening in the republic they designed. They were terrified of the mob (as Plato had been), and they saw the mistakes of the Roman Republic. So, they only gave the vote to those who seemed to have responsibility (male landowners, effectively similar to the heads of the ancient Greek demos, the root of democratic ideas). They isolated the upper chamber from popular election in the federal government. They deplored standing armies, preferring to rely on militias when a crisis occurred. They included even more checks and balances than the Roman Republic. In case any group of people did gain control, they built in strict Constitutional limits to federal power, so even if someone had a lot of power within the federal government, most of the powers and rights would be handled by state and local governments.
Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system.
Is it a coincidence that this also happened around the same time that the educated class stopped reading the classics? You couldn't graduate high school in the 1800s without having a level of knowledge of Latin and Greek that would probably beat out an undergraduate classics major today. And with that knowledge of ancient languages generally came a
So we're cutting down the criteria to not just people carrying guns, but people carrying guns actively shooting at you?
Actually, the definition of civilian is well-defined in the Laws of War, commonly codified today in international laws by Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
In sum, a "civilian" is anyone who is not a "privileged combatant," i.e., basically someone (1) carrying arms, (2) taking orders in an organized military structure, and (3) following the laws and customs of warfare. (Also, usually privileged combatants are required to wear insignia.)
Someone who carries arms but does not satisfy those criteria is still a "civilian," though if those arms are actively used in support of an organized military force, he/she may be a civilian who is also an "unprivileged combatant," i.e., he/she not eligible for protection under the normal rules for prisoners of war.
So, actually the criteria are much more specific than you describe. "Civilians" can fight in wars, in which case they become "combatants," but they do not cease to be "civilians," as the term is commonly understood in contrast to organized military personnel.
As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions.
Hey, at least it wasn't Bennet Haselton telling us about it.
You just wait. Tomorrow, there will be a Slashdot headline about how Bennet Haselton believes that this "rediscovered" visual processing link in the brain explains why some people find breastfeeding photos of black women offensive. (Note that this pathway apparently has to do with how we process "visual categories.")
Oh, and this link will clearly be proven when Haselton hires a few dozen people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk to stare at the phrase "Wernicke's vertical occipital fasciculus" before seeing breastfeeding photos. His statistics will clearly prove that this knowledge of brain structure is inherently racist (or maybe it serves to debunk racism... or... heck, I don't know, but Bennet Haselton will... he always does).
Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.
Nothing was "missing." I'm not an expert in neuroanatomy, but just like most press releases from university research labs, this "rediscovery" appears to be quite exaggerated.
The thing they claim to have "rediscovered" is Wernicke's "vertical occipital fasciculus" (or VOF). Just out of curiosity, I just did a quick search in Google Scholar for this term, and it popped up dozens of articles, starting in the 1940s, quite a few in the late 1970s, some in the 1980s, some in the 1990s, and some in the 2000s.
For something that was supposedly "unknown" for a century, it has shown up quite a few times in the literature, particularly since the 1970s. So, it looks like some people "know" about it, and have known about it... and have discussed it in papers. A number of these studies clearly also mention processing of visual information, so it's not like these were just mentioning some old anatomical term for a structure nobody knew the purpose of either.
Granted, I haven't done a full literature search, and I don't know how influential these dozens of papers were/are, but claiming like the last time any scientist noted this part of the brain or its function was a century ago appears to be absolute nonsense. Maybe it deserves to be better known. Maybe it deserves a more prominent place in textbooks.
But clearly SOME scientists have known about it before this "rediscovery."
Slashdot Mirror
You just proved the parent's point.
Well, that's probably good, since I actually agreed with 90% of what the parent said.
Indoctrination 101: "someone says something bad about your country, don't listen, defend!"
Logical fallacies 101: " If someone says something that's 90% true, but then includes demonstrably false assertions or makes unnuanced analogies, you should still act like that person is 100% correct. If anyone attempts to present a more nuanced perspective, you should immediately level an ad hominem attack, asserting that the person is obviously stupid and brainwashed."
The general sentiment is that in the USSR, the people at least knew their government was bullshitting them, but in the US, they succeeded. The people actually believe that they're living in paradise while in reality they are trapped in a hellhole.
I live in the U.S. I've also spent significant time living outside of the U.S. I agree with you that there are many, many things about the U.S. to criticize, and elements of its foreign policy are quite criminal.
However, your statement there is more than a little extreme. Many U.S. citizens do recognize that there are serious flaws (a lot of them post frequently on Slashdot, for example), though admittedly the pro-American rhetoric is stupid and ignorant at times.
On the other hand, I think compared to many years of life under the USSR, Americans are not "trapped in a hellhole." The USSR was in existence for roughly 70 years. Of those 70 years, the first 30 under Stalin experienced not only random purges and murders from the government, but largescale famines, along with economic and political uncertainty. For the last 15 years or so of the USSR, there was a gradual decline that saw economic conditions, shortages, etc. that are unlike anything generally seen in the U.S.
So, yeah, basically if by the "USSR" you want to only count the 25 years or so from the late 50s to the early 70s when conditions were pretty good, yeah the U.S. currently isn't much better than that.
But to say that U.S. people are gullible or dumb because they don't recognize -- unlike the USSR -- that the government is bad... well, we don't have random purges of people we know happening every other week... ya know, like Stalin did. In case you're unaware, Stalin ordered the murder of what historians estimate to be between 20 and 60 million people, most of them his own countrymen.
When everybody knows someone who "was disappeared" by the government, you can bet that citizens would become more suspicious of anything that government says.
In contrast, it's only in the past few years that it's become somewhat acceptable for the President of the U.S. to outright kill American citizens without a trial. Our leaders haven't deliberately killed tens of millions of citizens.
The only similar period in the U.S. that experienced turmoil on the level of most of the history of the USSR was probably during the Great Depression. So 10-15 years of the past century, compared to most years in the entire history of the USSR. And even then, the government wasn't going around killing people.
So yeah, I think some Americans are deluded about how "great" their country is, and they don't realize how many things have decayed or what rights have been restricted. But to call it a "hellhole" compared to the USSR where the citizens were smart enough to recognize how bad they had it... well, if the U.S. actually ever gets as bad as the world of Stalinist purges, I bet the American people would be smart enough to have the kind of cynicism you expect.
It's based on the weaker assumption that the number within each ward who change won't be significant. Or more accurately the net number.
Well, yes, obviously that's a better way of saying it (and more accurate). The effect is somewhat similar, though. The model basically ignores the fact that differences between individual candidates might matter (or candidate's actions, or campaigning, or whatever). While it may not be strictly equivalent to "straight ticket" voting, it assumes voters behave in similar ways, i.e., their party choices would never change (collectively) no matter which candidates were running or how those candidates acted.
While such an assumption may be true for many and likely a majority of voters in many areas, many elections are also won on much thinner margins. If even 10-20% of the electorate might actually vote for a different party if the candidate changes, it could sway this model significantly in many races.
You ought to be shocked at the original purpose of those laws
Who said I'm not? Of course I recognize racial disparities in the U.S. Of course I recognize the need to change the system to avoid racism -- both overt and systemic -- now.
My post wasn't about judging the validity of arguments for redressing racism or preventing racist political actions. My post is bringing up the obvious point that if you gerrymander a bunch of Democrats (of whatever race) into one district for whatever reason, you may end up making it more difficult for Democrats to win surrounding districts.
Hence, if we gerrymander to allow minorities a chance to get someone elected to Congress, but in the process we also gather together a lot of Democrats in one place, we can SIMULTANEOUSLY enhance the minority effect of voting while diluting the overall effect of Democratic voters.
At no point did I say we haven't had significant racial problems in the U.S., nor did I in any way imply we still don't have a long way to go to overcome various racist parts of our political system. But even if you find the creation of majority-minority districts a good idea, you still have to recognize that it can also potentially set-back the Democratic cause at large. That's the tension I was actually pointing out.
They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.
False. Legislators are required to draw districts in such a way that minority votes will NOT be diluted. Thus, if they are forced to redraw districts (say, due to new allocations of the number of representatives after a census), they are REQUIRED to take minority distribution into account and produce a new set of districts which will not negatively affect minority voters.
It has been easier for these issues to end up in the courts in places that have a history of suppressing minority votes -- but the restrictions are binding on all states, regardless of past wrongs.
Oops -- wrong link. The article linked in TFS that I quoted is here.
Did they take into account the Voting Rights Act provision that requires that minority voters be concentrated into districts that they have a good likelihood of winning? That alone has the effect of diluting minority strength elsewhere.
Who the hell modded this as "troll"?? Not only have other posts cited examples of how the VRA has frequently been used for it, the issue is specifically discussed in one of the linked articles in TFS:
But, he cautions, in the real world, there are many other factors that go into drawing district lines.
"One of them is our national commitment to minority voting rights," says Levitt. "It's really the strongest national commitment we have to minority representation anywhere, the voting rights act, and as I think the professor and student would say, their model districts don't even comply with the voting rights act, that's not what they were aiming to do."
Levitt says other factors matter too, including geography.
In response, Mattingly says it's possible to design the program to account for minority representation, but he and Vaughn chose to keep it as simple and as transparent as possible for now.
You don't mod someone as "troll" for bringing up a legitimate issue that's actually discussed in TFA.
Personally, I find it all to be a bunch of bullcrap. Have you seen those voting districts that are along, squiggly lines that wander all over the place?
Yeah, and you know what? One of the most famous ones is in North Carolina, the site of this study.
And guess who created it and why? Democrats did, in order to secure a minority voting block big enough to elect a black person to Congress. Ever since, it's been one of the most litigated districts in the U.S.
I'm always shocked at how many people don't realize that this is one of the primary LEGAL rationales for gerrymandering -- back in the 1980s and 1990s you even saw unholy alliances between minority leaders and conservative Republicans conspiring to create awkward districts in some states that would give each group what they wanted: the minorities got enough people together in a district to elect a minority to Congress, and the Republicans got to excise many of those annoying mostly Democratic minority voters from their districts.
We are still living with that legacy in many states, and I frankly have found news coverage in recent years of gerrymandering to be lacking in discussion of this issue. It's not all just Republicans who have taken control of state legislatures -- we've also had a committed effort for quite a few decades to segregate voter districts in such a way that would allow more minorities in Congress.
But of course that creates a problem, because it ends up disenfranching non-minority Democrats who get stuck in all the surrounding districts that can no longer elect a Democrat because a large portion of Democrats were deliberately removed from swing districts to create the minority-majority district.
So the Democrats end up in a Catch-22. If they want to promote Congressional "diversity," they can create districts where minorities get elected, but they can end up screwing themselves over in the process because then all the surrounding districts become more Republican and make it more difficult for Democrats to actually achieve an overall Congressional majority.
It's certainly not the only issue that has led to Republican majorities in Congress -- but it's one that's not often talked about, and it has had some significant effects.
This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.
This is true, and I have absolutely no doubt that there is some serious manipulation going on in drawing districts, as there has been by both parties for centuries.
That said, there's quite a big gap of logic in one of the assumptions of this study. From TFS:
"If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."
To what extent is this assumption valid, though? The model appears based on the assumption that ALL voters are "straight-ticket" types who just vote Republican or Democrat mindlessly.
In other words, it doesn't take into account whether (1) a voter might actually care about a specific candidate and what he/she says, (2) a voter might actually respond to campaign advertising or other candidate promotions, (3) for incumbents, a voter might actually continue to vote for an incumbent is he/she is perceived to have served well. (Stats generally show that incumbents have a huge advantage in elections -- voters prefer to vote for familiar names.)
Without controlling for such factors (e.g., by looking at previous election vote counts and comparing how "faithful" voters are to a particular party over the course of a number of elections), this study is SERIOUSLY flawed.
Also, candidates run campaigns according to the rules that are in place. They may visit areas in their district because they have to win those areas and make promises they might not otherwise make because those areas are in their district. If the district lines were drawn differently, they would probably campaign differently.
This strikes me as flawed as those who get into arguments about how Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election. (To be clear, I definitely was never a Bush fan, but I'm interested in rational argument, not fantasies.)
Anyhow, Gore and Bush weren't campaigning to win the popular vote across the country. They were campaigning to win the electoral college vote, which required strategy based on regions and state boundaries. To come back later and say, "But, but... Gore should have won because he got the popular vote" is like some idiot saying, "I know I lost Monopoly, but I had the most properties -- if you changed the rules to allow me to build houses based on the number of properties I own rather than the number of monopolies I had, I could have won!" So what? Those aren't the rules of the game.
The rules of the game may be stupid (and are in the case of gerrymandered districts). But the players choose strategies based on them. The voters may respond to such strategies. None of this appears to have been considered in this model.
How about an image of shoveling a pile of poop, maybe something like this?
So, the same as with meteor showers. Not entire unexpected, i'd think.
Not entirely unexpected, but -- to be clear -- this study is NOT talking about normal meteors in meteor showers (which are presumed to be clustered since they are typically remnants of a comet).
Instead, this study is focusing on LARGER bodies (multi-kiloton impacts), most of which do not have a common origin like bits of a comet. Many scientists assume that they are random hunks of rock from the asteroid belt or some other collection that get perturbed from their normal orbit by interacting with Jupiter or something. Point being -- there's no actual reason why they should cluster together unless they originated from a body that fractured. From TFA:
The paths followed by these objects are strongly perturbed, and exhibit fast and chaotic nodal precession over time-scales of ~10 Myr (see e.g. Ito & Malhotra 2006). It is therefore not surprising that most studies assume that the angular elements, in particular the longitude of the ascending node, of the orbits of near-Earth objects (NEOs) are randomly and uniformly distributed in the range 0-2 pi. For many, this intrinsic chaoticity necessarily means that they are completely random, and that all the impacts must be interpreted as uncorrelated events distributed according to Poisson statistics.
In other words, many people -- who probably know much more about this than the average Slashdot poster -- have recognized there are many differences exhibited in the behavior of these big hunks of rock compared to meteor showers, and thus assume their origin is probably different. Which means there's no reason to assume the same sort of clustering.
This study seems to show clustering. If this study seems valid, the next thing is to explain WHY this sort of clustering happens with large bodies. The authors suggest it may have something to do with planetary perturbations. In any case, it's probably not the same mechanism as meteor showers.
It's even worse than that. Going by this quote, they're using it to mean even or homogeneous:
contrary to what they thought, such events are not random, and these explosions may occur more frequently on certain days.
You know, like if a coin comes up heads four times in a row that's "not random".
Actually, that's not a very good analogy. The main pattern that they noticed is clustering of events over long periods of time . It would be more like if you had a coin that was weighted in such a way that it only came up heads about 1 time out of a 100 or something. You flipped it once per day.
According to normal probability, if the only thing that's influencing the coin is just its weight that produces a 1 in 100 chance of heads, the pattern of heads should look relatively homogeneous over a long time span.
Instead, what they tended to find was a lot of clustering of events -- so it would be like going for hundreds of days and then suddenly getting heads on 2 or 3 days in a row, then going again for hundreds of days without any heads again.
In that case, it would be fair to say that there is something else influencing the distribution -- it's not just a "random" distribution you'd expect for a 1 in 100 chance of getting heads. Some other factor is leading to clustering.
Just from looking briefly at the article, it doesn't seem to me that they have a long-enough timespan or enough events to claim strong evidence for a pattern. They basically come up with a 2% stat that this pattern could occur by chance -- sure, that's better than the standard 95% confidence interval for exploratory studies, but there are various statistical features of their study that could be giving them a false-positive here. But it's enough that further study may be warranted.
You know where a lot of processed foods came into vogue? -- all the "low-fat" food crazy beginning in the 1980s
There are still plenty of high fat processed foods that are very popular. Candy bars, pizza, cookies, and ice cream to name a few.
You may want to look up the definition of "a lot of." Hint: it does not mean ALL. The trend to mass produce snack foods which conformed to a low-fat diet most certainly led to more innovative and complex food processing. That in no way implies that ALL processed foods are low-fat -- only that engineering low-fat foods actually required significantly more processing in ways that could trick your body into thinking it was eating things it wasn't. Also, things like pizza, cookies, and ice cream can be made at home with relatively few ingredients which are significantly less "processed" than many of the new low-fat or no-fat snack foods designed to fit the new dietary trends of the 1980s and 1990s.
Uh, once again -- look at most snack foods. Derived from grains
Plain old grains are too boring. People are unlikely to overeat on them. In snack foods, the grains are usually combined with extra sugar, (usually) some fat, salt, and aromas.
Uh, yeah. So? When people see "grains" in the food pyramid, what do you think they're going to eat? Plain rice, plain wheat berries, plain buckwheat? No -- at a minimum, even if they got those "plain old grains," they would generally cook them and -- you guessed it -- add "some fat, salt, and aromas [spices, herbs, etc.]". Probably not as much sugar as snack foods, but most people won't eat "plain old grains" even if they are served looking like grains -- they put in salt, spices, and a few pats of butter on top.
So, I'm not sure I understand what the great distinction you're drawing here is. Snack foods "doctor up" grains to make them palatable; people do the same thing if they were to prepare grains for themselves.
In itself, grains aren't bad, as long as you eat them in moderation.
See the first point I responded to in my previous post. I never said grains were bad -- but they do provide lesser feelings of satiety, hence often requiring more calories consumed before people feel full. A diet that excludes other sources of calories and emphasizes carb sources (like grains) can have a tendency to promote more overeating. It isn't necessarily true, but the triggers are there.
Anyhow, I think you may have missed the overall point of my post, which was to respond to another posts claim that the food pyramid had no influence on obesity levels. I didn't say grains were evil. I said that the desire to emphasize grains and carb-based foods, while demonizing fats, contributed to some of the trends mentioned by GP. My whole point was that the causes are complex and may be interrelated.
No, grain does not equal carbs. Grain has quite a bit of carbs, but also other things.
And even that is a simplification.
You probably want to re-read the beginning of my post. My whole point started with the oversimplification of the post I was responding to by claiming that the food pyramid wasn't involved in the obesity epidemic. I then proceeded to show how it might be connected, i.e., pointing out a FEW of the complex issues involved which actually show connections between various threads.
You bring up some other issues. Congratulations.
Uh, you know, while on the surface you are saying you disagree with him, the actual content of your writing is agreeing with him.
How so? The primary claim of the post I was replying to was that the "USA's obesity epidemy ... is not from any given food pyramid." I then go on to show how the alternative explanations may actually be RELATED TO the food pyramid.
How is that agreeing with the original post?
Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:
Thanks for this list -- yes, it's important to note the limitations of this study.
However, one broader issue that this study should point out is the continued stupidity of the medical profession in assuming that because the quantity of X in diet is increased, it will necessarily increase the quantity of X in one's blood or other chemical markers.
We've seen this for many years with cholesterol studies -- the body manufactures most cholesterol, so dietary consumption has little relation to blood cholesterol levels. But that hasn't stopped decades of doctors demonizing any food with cholesterol (e.g., eggs) with no actual basis. I know doctors who still give out this crap advice to focus on a "low cholesterol diet" to lower cholesterol. It just doesn't work that way for many (most?) people, and there's no reason it should.
Now we have a study showing clearly that dietary saturated fat intake does not necessarily relate to the levels that ultimately end up in the bloodstream. Once again, this is common sense -- given that the body PRODUCES fat to store energy. If you're throwing fat into a system that is capable of producing fat, you have to actually consider what causes the system to produce fat... rather than just assuming it's only about how much fat is taken into the system.
Anyhow, more studies like this will hopefully cause clueless doctors to realize this. Once again, when a system produces the vast majority of X, dietary intake of X is probably not the most important variable -- you need to figure out what regulates the production of X.
Again, this seems like an intuitively obvious element for isolating what's going on in a system with such characteristics. But it seems beyond the comprehension of medical science -- hence all of the crappy dietary advice with no proven basis.
As a foreigner I can easily see where USA's obesity epidemy comes from and it is not from any given food pyramid:
Wow. What a complete logic failure. First off, obviously there can be more than one cause to anything. There could be a number of trends that relate to obesity problems, and dietary advice with the old "food pyramid" could in fact be one of them. In fact, it might even relate to other apparent issues.
To wit:
have you paid attention lately to the ridiculously big rations you ingest?
The food pyramid recommended lots of carbs, while downplaying things like fat. Many, many studies have shown that carbs tend to lead to less of a feeling of satiety than fats or proteins (because carbs are generally more easily digested), so emphasizing carbs tends to make people hungry more... hence, larger portions are required to feel "full."
The ridiculously high levels of processed food?
You know where a lot of processed foods came into vogue? -- all the "low-fat" food crazy beginning in the 1980s or so, which forced food manufacturers to stop using so many less-processed ingredients (which generally had things like fat in them) and instead replace them with -- you guessed it -- carbs. The grains in the big part of the pyramid grew to excess, while processing removed the fats that were claimed to be evil. While sure it is possible to consume processed foods that are not carbs, the vast majority of heavily processed foods seem to be about throwing in extra carbs to replace flavor removed by less emphasized elements in the old food pyramid.
The ridiculously high comsumption of snacks and soda drinks?
Uh, once again -- look at most snack foods. Derived from grains. I.e., carbs. Soda is generally made from sugar... derived from grain... more carbs.
Whether or not all of these are connected directly to the food pyramid, the emphasis on grains and other carbs (and avoidance of fat and excess protein, particularly high-fat protein) led to increased reliance on and production of carb-centric foods... which are definitely related to all of the trends in your rhetorical questions.
Maybe more because the educated class didn't get to run the place anymore and those that did get to run the place appointed their young catamites to run departments instead of people with the experience to operate effectively.
I probably shouldn't respond to a post that uses a word like "catamite" so loosely... but do you really think nepotism (which might be a better term for what you're talking about) was new to the 20th century? It was not. That sort of corruption has been around a LONG time. Incompetent friends and relatives have always been a staple of the political process.
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here.
[Citation needed] -- I mean, seriously, let's be TRULY honest: for most of history, there have been people living under much, much, much more poorer circumstances than today. And the lower classes have been much more oppressed than today. How exactly would capitalism "have fallen" just because the poor were only slightly better off than they were for -- well, all of history -- rather than MUCH better off (as they are in modern industrial societies for the most part)?
I fail to see what democracy has to do with capitalism, other than if you only see the world through skewed Marxist "lenses." And most of my post was about ancient societies, which had dynamics very different from modern capitalism. While capitalism certainly became tethered to American democracy at some point, that was an outgrowth of an older strand of (old-school) "liberalism," which would be the more accurate companion of a democratic republic as the Founding Fathers understood it.
In any case, my argument was NOT that we shouldn't help the poor, but rather that promising the poor things coupled with increased suffrage and power to the poor will likely lead to voting for politicians who might have other motives and will expand power as necessary to create their own personal vision.
For an example from the beginning of the era I'm talking about, see Huey Long, a man who seemed to want to go to extreme measures to help the poor and downtrodden -- but when he was threatened, he responded by becoming increasingly dictatorial in his governance. Long's story has many parallels with the Gracchi brothers of ancient Rome, which arguably began the big downslide in the republic.
As for all the stuff about the fundamental irrationality of people -- sure, yeah, that's true. But it's not capitalism's fault. (Not that I'm defending unbridled capitalism either.) Marxist socialism won't fix it either. It just is.
A pool of antennas, slightly larger than the number of peak subscribers; it was never 1:1 antenna:subscriber -- a minor point some people don't understand.
THIS.
I see so many uninformed posters here stating that people were "renting" an antenna of their very own, which was solely allocated to them permanently. While Aereo tried to claim something like that, it was never true. This was not like any "lease" or "renting" in any normal sense -- the antennas were allocated dynamically and returned to the "pool" after they had streamed for a particular customer.
Basically, customers were paying for a service -- a dynamic allocation of whatever antenna happened to be available at that time, which would then return to a pool after use. That's not "renting" an antenna. That's paying for an on-demand service. It's not significantly different from paying for any kind of streaming service that allocates part of system resources for the stream -- the only difference here is that those resources included individual antennas rather than merely individual datastreams.
The cable companies did exactly this for years (with a single antenna) and paid nobody. So what was your point again?
Yes, but then the law was changed, and cable companies can no longer do this. Aereo therefore can't either. Or should we allow some companies to play by different rules because they weren't around in the "good ole days"?
So what was your point again?
(Note that I'm NOT in favor of our current system. But whatever crappy rules exist should apply equally to everyone.)
We call ourselves a "democratic country" but are we truly democratic?
Our government, the government of the United States of America, is behaving exactly like a tyrannical regime - in which it not only conveniently ignores the wish of the citizentry, it continues to carry out programs which are designed to undermine the validity of the democratic principles within the country
Many have argued that this is the natural tendency of democracy. Plato ranked democracy as the second-worst type of government, inevitably degrading into tyranny, since the "mob" will always eventually be swayed to vote away their power by promises from some prospective tyrant who promises them something that appeals to their immediate concerns (safety, security, food, wealth, homes, land, etc.). So, the "mob" votes away their rights in exchange for something else that seems more important at the moment.
The ancient Romans solved this problem with a special office of dictator, which was only appointed for limited times to deal with a crisis. There was a strong tradition in the Roman Republic (which held for at least a few centuries) where ambition to be a sole leader was strongly discouraged among the ruling class -- to be accused of desiring power was one of the worst sins. The topmost offices were only to be held for one short term in one's lifetime, or at least with a period of several years between, to prevent anything like a "king" or "tyrant" gaining permanent power.
But in the late 2nd century BCE, various elements were set in motion that ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic, mostly due to populist reformers who wanted to give suffrage to more people beyond the traditional "Roman citizens," and those reformers who promised the poor and landless all sorts of things. In exchange, the poor and landless broke with Roman tradition and started electing people to offices for many consecutive terms, and when crises arose, the dictators stayed in their offices for longer and longer.
Eventually, Julius Caesar came along and got himself declared dictator to deal with various things, but then arranged to become effectively dictator for life. (There's a lot more to the story, involving the gradual accumulation of power in central locations and people, standing armies who supported generals in lawless actions, etc.)
Anyhow -- the founders of the U.S. tried their darnedest to keep such a degradation from happening in the republic they designed. They were terrified of the mob (as Plato had been), and they saw the mistakes of the Roman Republic. So, they only gave the vote to those who seemed to have responsibility (male landowners, effectively similar to the heads of the ancient Greek demos, the root of democratic ideas). They isolated the upper chamber from popular election in the federal government. They deplored standing armies, preferring to rely on militias when a crisis occurred. They included even more checks and balances than the Roman Republic. In case any group of people did gain control, they built in strict Constitutional limits to federal power, so even if someone had a lot of power within the federal government, most of the powers and rights would be handled by state and local governments.
Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system.
Is it a coincidence that this also happened around the same time that the educated class stopped reading the classics? You couldn't graduate high school in the 1800s without having a level of knowledge of Latin and Greek that would probably beat out an undergraduate classics major today. And with that knowledge of ancient languages generally came a
So we're cutting down the criteria to not just people carrying guns, but people carrying guns actively shooting at you?
Actually, the definition of civilian is well-defined in the Laws of War, commonly codified today in international laws by Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
In sum, a "civilian" is anyone who is not a "privileged combatant," i.e., basically someone (1) carrying arms, (2) taking orders in an organized military structure, and (3) following the laws and customs of warfare. (Also, usually privileged combatants are required to wear insignia.)
Someone who carries arms but does not satisfy those criteria is still a "civilian," though if those arms are actively used in support of an organized military force, he/she may be a civilian who is also an "unprivileged combatant," i.e., he/she not eligible for protection under the normal rules for prisoners of war.
So, actually the criteria are much more specific than you describe. "Civilians" can fight in wars, in which case they become "combatants," but they do not cease to be "civilians," as the term is commonly understood in contrast to organized military personnel.
As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions.
Hey, at least it wasn't Bennet Haselton telling us about it.
You just wait. Tomorrow, there will be a Slashdot headline about how Bennet Haselton believes that this "rediscovered" visual processing link in the brain explains why some people find breastfeeding photos of black women offensive. (Note that this pathway apparently has to do with how we process "visual categories.")
Oh, and this link will clearly be proven when Haselton hires a few dozen people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk to stare at the phrase "Wernicke's vertical occipital fasciculus" before seeing breastfeeding photos. His statistics will clearly prove that this knowledge of brain structure is inherently racist (or maybe it serves to debunk racism... or... heck, I don't know, but Bennet Haselton will... he always does).
Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.
Nothing was "missing." I'm not an expert in neuroanatomy, but just like most press releases from university research labs, this "rediscovery" appears to be quite exaggerated.
The thing they claim to have "rediscovered" is Wernicke's "vertical occipital fasciculus" (or VOF). Just out of curiosity, I just did a quick search in Google Scholar for this term, and it popped up dozens of articles, starting in the 1940s, quite a few in the late 1970s, some in the 1980s, some in the 1990s, and some in the 2000s.
For something that was supposedly "unknown" for a century, it has shown up quite a few times in the literature, particularly since the 1970s. So, it looks like some people "know" about it, and have known about it... and have discussed it in papers. A number of these studies clearly also mention processing of visual information, so it's not like these were just mentioning some old anatomical term for a structure nobody knew the purpose of either.
Granted, I haven't done a full literature search, and I don't know how influential these dozens of papers were/are, but claiming like the last time any scientist noted this part of the brain or its function was a century ago appears to be absolute nonsense. Maybe it deserves to be better known. Maybe it deserves a more prominent place in textbooks.
But clearly SOME scientists have known about it before this "rediscovery."