I understand you may want to argue that the US is entitled to lock him up without trial (although I think that's a bloody stupid thing to do). I understand you may want to argue that he wasn't actually tortured and it's a put-up job. But I don't understand why you would want to argue that he had it coming, when the "it" is torture. Torture is unacceptable, whether practiced on sweet old grandmothers who've never hurt a fly or dastardly vicious terrorists who've killed thousands. It is morally unconscionable, even on someone who has an Arab name and wants to establish a Caliphate across the North American continent.
In addition to the moral arguments against torture, there are of course the pragmatic arguments, of which two compelling examples are that you are just as likely to be told what the victim thinks you want to hear in order to get you to stop, and that you are likely to inflame the passions of the other side and encourage retributory acts of cruelty on your own captured agents.
Erm, every foreign state is going to be working hell-for-leather to subvert this database because of the value of the information on millions of people that it contains. And this database will need millions of access points. So it is exceptionally unlikely to be secure.
And the simplest way to get unauthorised access for a foreign state will be to use insiders (either plants or 'turned' agents.
Y'know, in terms of who's profited more effectively from the current US administration: oil companies, or environmental scientists, you're going to have a hard time demonstrating that we should be weeping for Exxon.
You may be right about "psychological experiments", but you should attribute the quote properly: "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal", Robert Heinlein, from Gulf, 1949 (collected in Assignment in Eternity, 1953)
You're not being fair -- it looks like you didn't RTFA, which was written in the spirit of "shit, or get off the pot" -- a challenge to those complaining about scientific bias to demonstrate it actually exists or stop complaining about it. It wasn't about "fair and balanced".
1) Talking about "absent global warming" rather ignores the elephant in the room. The question for *you* is, "given the presence of global warming, do you advocate not making collective decisions via governments, but instead relying on market mechanisms?" I'd love to know the rationale for answering yes to this question, given that externalities and market failure come as part of Economics 101 rather than the Little Red Book.
2) Compromise may not be enough. If you'd like us to be at point X, I'd like point Y, and we compromise at point Z, that's only sensible if point Z doesn't take us over the precipice. And frankly, it's more than likely to.
Trouble is, saying that "it's all terribly complicated and can't possibly be explained in simple language" is a classic tactic used to a) stall, and b) generate apathy.
I also have real difficulties in people who are skeptical about the idea that 6 billion humans, 1 billion of whom live extremely resource-intensive lives, are able to have a dramatic, negative, effect on the viability of the current biosphere. We have plenty of evidence that both species other than ours, and some of our own species's cultures, have caused environmental degradation in the past, and that in some cases, this has led to extinctions.
I also think it odd that people claim there is no substantive downside from taking the (literally) embodied energy from many hundreds of billions of the creatures that have roamed the earth over hundreds of millions of years and inefficiently converting it into kinetic energy.
You've hit on good examples to think through but drawn the wrong conclusions: 1) The best way to think about climate science is to imagine how much time scientists would be prepared to spend debating whether the earth is more nearly round or flat with a vocal bunch of folks from various Flat Earth Societies. Especially when those folks often (but not always) turn out to be backed financially by a bunch of businesses with a huge economic interest in demonstrating the earth is flat, not round. And when those folks even more frequently insist that it is the scientists, earning a pittance by comparison, who are biased.
2) Sadly, you couldn't show that the world is warming because of a "reduction in pirates" because there has been no such reduction. The International Maritime Bureau reports a trend downwards for the 3rd quarter of 06, but the historical trend over the last decade is upwards.
Not for grandma. And in this case, grandma = our current biosphere. Beetles will be doubtless be fine, come what may. It may be a bit tougher for most of the rest of us.
Neither toilet paper nor furniture arrives in cars. Getting rid of all cars is not the same as getting rid of all road transport. Cars are certaintly not an absolute necessity in a city -- my family is the living proof. It's also true to say that car *ownership* is a stupid waste of time in a city -- far better to participate in car clubs, as each car in the club takes an average of six privately-owned vehicles off the road.
Do you honestly think the economic incentives of the oil majors (several hundred billion in revenue each year) and greenpeace et al (erm, rather less) are even remotely comparable. There's a whole lot more value at stake for one side than the other...
Firstly, his system doesn't require democratic engagement in the same way -- because it doesn't require turnout. Second, you've assumed that people are more likely to vote if the voting system is simple. But people may prefer fair to simple.
For what it's worth, I think instant runoff voting is fair, simple enough and effective. And I think that stochasticracy is a silly, complicated name for an idea people are very familiar with: jury service. A revising chamber comprised of randomly selected citizens might well be an effective check on an elected legislative chamber. It would surely be no more liable to unwanted influence.
Why does it not shock me to see that a group of people who are strongly in favour of free-market capitalism took time and effort to try to pull Jared Diamond's work to pieces? I've read some of the criticisms, but I'm not particularly convinced by them; they speak of writers proffering faux-authority.
As to what you wrote, what you actually said was "...and selling prime real estate in the green fields of Greenland..."
If you had meant what you now claim you mean, you should have written "and selling 'prime' real estate in the green fields of Greenland". Are you honestly claiming you were talking about the activities of Norse estate agents, rather than alluding to Greenland having a balmy climate? Because that goes against the plain reading of your prior words.
Oh for god's sake! Look, real left-wing ideology doesn't suggest that we kinda sorta might like to look at introducing a Bismarckian system of compulsory state insurance for healthcare, which is the kind of thing that's treated as daringly outre on CNN. Real left-wing ideology talks about 80% tax rates on incomes above $100k, nationalisation of major industries (yuck, who'd want a state audit firm when we've seen how much we can rely on the private ones like Arthur Enron Andersen?), land redistribution etc etc. This is the left-wing thinking that's the equivalent of Rush and the boys on the other side of the political spectrum, not Ted frickin' Turner.
I'd love to understand the logic behind your proposition that, if it took 100 to 150 years of fossil fuel burning to institute the change, it will therefore take the same amount of time to stop it. If it takes me three seconds to smash a valuable vase, does it therefore take three seconds to mend it?
I know you have the ring of authority and all, but you're still being disingenuous. The Vikings may have settled Greenland, but it was hardly "prime real estate" in 1100. The evidence clearly shows that it was bloody cold, enough so that their imported patterns of subsistence had to be modified if they were to survive. Indeed, the environmental challenges that Greenland presented, coupled with a reluctance on the part of the Norse to adapt fully to the new conditions or learn from better adapted locals (i.e., Inuit), was part of the reason that their colonies didn't survive.
It's especially ironic that you chose this example given that it figures prominently in Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is in large part a discussion of how people tend to pretend that environmental degradation isn't happening until it's too late and societal collapse is upon them.
Two thoughts: 1) The main reason why American babies cry so much is because the US has a very dysfunctional parenting culture. You want your kids to stop being whiny brats, try not leaving them to scream their lungs out for hours at a time at the age of 3 months. And try hugging them too. Oh, and feeding them with breastmilk when they show signs of being hungry/thirsty. And letting them sleep next to you for the first couple of years of their life, as they are evolved to do. That way they will generally grow up secure, happy and aware that they don't need to immediately scream if they want to have any chance of having their needs met. 2) That dysfunctional parenting culture is part of a wider culture with some seriously negative attitudes towards kids... and towards food. In places where good food is standard, kids are welcomed in the poshest of restaurants. Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir Aux Quatr'Saisons is a case in point; see also the whole of Spain, where kids are loved and attended to, and allowed to be kids, and where food is generally good and often great.
It may not be too long in relative terms but it's far too long term to be relevant. Humans emerged as a species about c8m years ago. For about the first 7m years, we were just one among many large primates living in Africa. Significant colonisation of the planet began a few hundred thousand years ago, and in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, our teeming billions we have covered the earth. We have absolutely no guarantees that we have done so in a sustainable manner or that we are equipped to deal with even tiny changes to our environment. The evidence points to repeated catastrophic failures of human civilisations in the face of environmental degradation (eg the Anasazi, Easter Islanders etc etc); it's likely we'll end up suffering the same fate, but on a much larger scale.
Where did I say "shooting at someone"? Or anything about murder?
Fact is, any type of shooting across a border, whether or not someone is likely to get hit, is inadvisable, even if you're just duck hunting and both the nation state you're shooting from and the one you're firing into have laws expressly permitting you to go duck hunting.
How about this for a pertinent saying: "Two wrongs don't make a right". Just because the police are wrong to talk, doesn't make it right for the press to publish (in a moral sense).
I like my press to be just slightly more cynical than you appear to want them to be. It's helpful for them to do the old cui bono test when considering information that's passed to them. And that may mean choosing not to publish from time to time, because a source is too dodgy to be trusted -- even if it's the State.
You've missed the point. The UK has not asked for anything to happen. Insofar as the British state has acted, it has acted to subvert the UK judicial process (by having state actors leak prejudicial and untested allegations in the foreign press). I'm sure the British state would actually prefer for this information to find its way back to the UK and for the NYT to have taken the very opposite action to the one it did.
To whom would we say "you don't have authority to do that" in this case? The NYT is certainly not under an *obligation* to make this information public to people viewing its website from a.uk domain. The risk it ran is that its executives could have been jailed if they either visited or were extradited to the UK, or that its UK business operations could have been adversely affected through fines, reputational damage, etc. If any of that had happened, the national sovereignty of the US would have been respected -- the British courts had no way of affecting its US operations.
I don't see how you can think that the NYT has been in any way nobbled by the British state (except perhaps in publishing untested allegations in the first place): it's clearly not what has happened.
I also reject your argument that the transnational nature of the case trumps all consideration of whether the law in dispute is a good one.
Finally, few people (or nations!) have held that national sovereignty is always and in all circumstances absolute, which is what you appear to be arguing. Shooting across a border is inadvisable for just that reason. I can't see that we are all better served by developing a doctrine of absolute sovereignty, although I readily admit that interventions are not wonderful either.
To make sure they get their convictions? It would be unfortunate for the police and security services, to say the least, if they can't make the cases stick after all this disruption has been caused. And it's not as if they don't have form in fitting people up and using the media to spread scurrilous accusations about victims and defendants in terror cases. Jean Charles de Menezes being a case in point.
The article does *not* have simple facts. It has alleged facts -- evidence, waiting to be tested in court. Journalists in every country, including the US, do not publish everything they know -- not because they are kowtowing to authority but because there is nothing to be gained by, for instance, publishing the name, address, photograph and age of a 14-year old rape victim.
It's more important that justice is both done and seen to be done in this criminal trial, than that we get to pore over juicy, headline-grabbing allegations ahead of a trial.
I understand your sentiment, but on the contrary, there are plenty of people in all of history (and prehistory) who've shot themselves in the foot quite as effectively as the American working class. They include Easter Islanders, the Khmer Empire, the Norse in Greenland, Polynesians on Pitcairn, the Anasazi etc etc. However, it's fair to say that the consumption patterns of the American working class are more likely to have unfortunate consequences for the rest of humanity.
Have you worked out whether it'd be cost-effective to do something about the 24/7/365 bit yet? Two obvious routes would be either motion sensors or timed switches (eg light stays on for x mins after pressing the button).
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I understand you may want to argue that the US is entitled to lock him up without trial (although I think that's a bloody stupid thing to do). I understand you may want to argue that he wasn't actually tortured and it's a put-up job. But I don't understand why you would want to argue that he had it coming, when the "it" is torture. Torture is unacceptable, whether practiced on sweet old grandmothers who've never hurt a fly or dastardly vicious terrorists who've killed thousands. It is morally unconscionable, even on someone who has an Arab name and wants to establish a Caliphate across the North American continent.
In addition to the moral arguments against torture, there are of course the pragmatic arguments, of which two compelling examples are that you are just as likely to be told what the victim thinks you want to hear in order to get you to stop, and that you are likely to inflame the passions of the other side and encourage retributory acts of cruelty on your own captured agents.
Erm, every foreign state is going to be working hell-for-leather to subvert this database because of the value of the information on millions of people that it contains. And this database will need millions of access points. So it is exceptionally unlikely to be secure.
And the simplest way to get unauthorised access for a foreign state will be to use insiders (either plants or 'turned' agents.
Y'know, in terms of who's profited more effectively from the current US administration: oil companies, or environmental scientists, you're going to have a hard time demonstrating that we should be weeping for Exxon.
You may be right about "psychological experiments", but you should attribute the quote properly: "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal", Robert Heinlein, from Gulf, 1949 (collected in Assignment in Eternity, 1953)
You're not being fair -- it looks like you didn't RTFA, which was written in the spirit of "shit, or get off the pot" -- a challenge to those complaining about scientific bias to demonstrate it actually exists or stop complaining about it. It wasn't about "fair and balanced".
This is problematic in two ways:
1) Talking about "absent global warming" rather ignores the elephant in the room. The question for *you* is, "given the presence of global warming, do you advocate not making collective decisions via governments, but instead relying on market mechanisms?" I'd love to know the rationale for answering yes to this question, given that externalities and market failure come as part of Economics 101 rather than the Little Red Book.
2) Compromise may not be enough. If you'd like us to be at point X, I'd like point Y, and we compromise at point Z, that's only sensible if point Z doesn't take us over the precipice. And frankly, it's more than likely to.
Trouble is, saying that "it's all terribly complicated and can't possibly be explained in simple language" is a classic tactic used to a) stall, and b) generate apathy.
I also have real difficulties in people who are skeptical about the idea that 6 billion humans, 1 billion of whom live extremely resource-intensive lives, are able to have a dramatic, negative, effect on the viability of the current biosphere. We have plenty of evidence that both species other than ours, and some of our own species's cultures, have caused environmental degradation in the past, and that in some cases, this has led to extinctions.
I also think it odd that people claim there is no substantive downside from taking the (literally) embodied energy from many hundreds of billions of the creatures that have roamed the earth over hundreds of millions of years and inefficiently converting it into kinetic energy.
You've hit on good examples to think through but drawn the wrong conclusions:
1) The best way to think about climate science is to imagine how much time scientists would be prepared to spend debating whether the earth is more nearly round or flat with a vocal bunch of folks from various Flat Earth Societies. Especially when those folks often (but not always) turn out to be backed financially by a bunch of businesses with a huge economic interest in demonstrating the earth is flat, not round. And when those folks even more frequently insist that it is the scientists, earning a pittance by comparison, who are biased.
2) Sadly, you couldn't show that the world is warming because of a "reduction in pirates" because there has been no such reduction. The International Maritime Bureau reports a trend downwards for the 3rd quarter of 06, but the historical trend over the last decade is upwards.
Not for grandma. And in this case, grandma = our current biosphere. Beetles will be doubtless be fine, come what may. It may be a bit tougher for most of the rest of us.
Neither toilet paper nor furniture arrives in cars. Getting rid of all cars is not the same as getting rid of all road transport. Cars are certaintly not an absolute necessity in a city -- my family is the living proof. It's also true to say that car *ownership* is a stupid waste of time in a city -- far better to participate in car clubs, as each car in the club takes an average of six privately-owned vehicles off the road.
Do you honestly think the economic incentives of the oil majors (several hundred billion in revenue each year) and greenpeace et al (erm, rather less) are even remotely comparable. There's a whole lot more value at stake for one side than the other...
Firstly, his system doesn't require democratic engagement in the same way -- because it doesn't require turnout. Second, you've assumed that people are more likely to vote if the voting system is simple. But people may prefer fair to simple.
For what it's worth, I think instant runoff voting is fair, simple enough and effective. And I think that stochasticracy is a silly, complicated name for an idea people are very familiar with: jury service. A revising chamber comprised of randomly selected citizens might well be an effective check on an elected legislative chamber. It would surely be no more liable to unwanted influence.
Why does it not shock me to see that a group of people who are strongly in favour of free-market capitalism took time and effort to try to pull Jared Diamond's work to pieces? I've read some of the criticisms, but I'm not particularly convinced by them; they speak of writers proffering faux-authority.
As to what you wrote, what you actually said was "...and selling prime real estate in the green fields of Greenland..."
If you had meant what you now claim you mean, you should have written "and selling 'prime' real estate in the green fields of Greenland". Are you honestly claiming you were talking about the activities of Norse estate agents, rather than alluding to Greenland having a balmy climate? Because that goes against the plain reading of your prior words.
Oh for god's sake! Look, real left-wing ideology doesn't suggest that we kinda sorta might like to look at introducing a Bismarckian system of compulsory state insurance for healthcare, which is the kind of thing that's treated as daringly outre on CNN. Real left-wing ideology talks about 80% tax rates on incomes above $100k, nationalisation of major industries (yuck, who'd want a state audit firm when we've seen how much we can rely on the private ones like Arthur Enron Andersen?), land redistribution etc etc. This is the left-wing thinking that's the equivalent of Rush and the boys on the other side of the political spectrum, not Ted frickin' Turner.
I'd love to understand the logic behind your proposition that, if it took 100 to 150 years of fossil fuel burning to institute the change, it will therefore take the same amount of time to stop it. If it takes me three seconds to smash a valuable vase, does it therefore take three seconds to mend it?
I know you have the ring of authority and all, but you're still being disingenuous. The Vikings may have settled Greenland, but it was hardly "prime real estate" in 1100. The evidence clearly shows that it was bloody cold, enough so that their imported patterns of subsistence had to be modified if they were to survive. Indeed, the environmental challenges that Greenland presented, coupled with a reluctance on the part of the Norse to adapt fully to the new conditions or learn from better adapted locals (i.e., Inuit), was part of the reason that their colonies didn't survive.
It's especially ironic that you chose this example given that it figures prominently in Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is in large part a discussion of how people tend to pretend that environmental degradation isn't happening until it's too late and societal collapse is upon them.
Two thoughts: ... and towards food. In places where good food is standard, kids are welcomed in the poshest of restaurants. Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir Aux Quatr'Saisons is a case in point; see also the whole of Spain, where kids are loved and attended to, and allowed to be kids, and where food is generally good and often great.
1) The main reason why American babies cry so much is because the US has a very dysfunctional parenting culture. You want your kids to stop being whiny brats, try not leaving them to scream their lungs out for hours at a time at the age of 3 months. And try hugging them too. Oh, and feeding them with breastmilk when they show signs of being hungry/thirsty. And letting them sleep next to you for the first couple of years of their life, as they are evolved to do. That way they will generally grow up secure, happy and aware that they don't need to immediately scream if they want to have any chance of having their needs met.
2) That dysfunctional parenting culture is part of a wider culture with some seriously negative attitudes towards kids
It may not be too long in relative terms but it's far too long term to be relevant. Humans emerged as a species about c8m years ago. For about the first 7m years, we were just one among many large primates living in Africa. Significant colonisation of the planet began a few hundred thousand years ago, and in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, our teeming billions we have covered the earth. We have absolutely no guarantees that we have done so in a sustainable manner or that we are equipped to deal with even tiny changes to our environment. The evidence points to repeated catastrophic failures of human civilisations in the face of environmental degradation (eg the Anasazi, Easter Islanders etc etc); it's likely we'll end up suffering the same fate, but on a much larger scale.
Where did I say "shooting at someone"? Or anything about murder?
Fact is, any type of shooting across a border, whether or not someone is likely to get hit, is inadvisable, even if you're just duck hunting and both the nation state you're shooting from and the one you're firing into have laws expressly permitting you to go duck hunting.
How about this for a pertinent saying: "Two wrongs don't make a right". Just because the police are wrong to talk, doesn't make it right for the press to publish (in a moral sense).
I like my press to be just slightly more cynical than you appear to want them to be. It's helpful for them to do the old cui bono test when considering information that's passed to them. And that may mean choosing not to publish from time to time, because a source is too dodgy to be trusted -- even if it's the State.
You've missed the point. The UK has not asked for anything to happen. Insofar as the British state has acted, it has acted to subvert the UK judicial process (by having state actors leak prejudicial and untested allegations in the foreign press). I'm sure the British state would actually prefer for this information to find its way back to the UK and for the NYT to have taken the very opposite action to the one it did.
.uk domain. The risk it ran is that its executives could have been jailed if they either visited or were extradited to the UK, or that its UK business operations could have been adversely affected through fines, reputational damage, etc. If any of that had happened, the national sovereignty of the US would have been respected -- the British courts had no way of affecting its US operations.
To whom would we say "you don't have authority to do that" in this case? The NYT is certainly not under an *obligation* to make this information public to people viewing its website from a
I don't see how you can think that the NYT has been in any way nobbled by the British state (except perhaps in publishing untested allegations in the first place): it's clearly not what has happened.
I also reject your argument that the transnational nature of the case trumps all consideration of whether the law in dispute is a good one.
Finally, few people (or nations!) have held that national sovereignty is always and in all circumstances absolute, which is what you appear to be arguing. Shooting across a border is inadvisable for just that reason. I can't see that we are all better served by developing a doctrine of absolute sovereignty, although I readily admit that interventions are not wonderful either.
To make sure they get their convictions? It would be unfortunate for the police and security services, to say the least, if they can't make the cases stick after all this disruption has been caused. And it's not as if they don't have form in fitting people up and using the media to spread scurrilous accusations about victims and defendants in terror cases. Jean Charles de Menezes being a case in point.
The article does *not* have simple facts. It has alleged facts -- evidence, waiting to be tested in court. Journalists in every country, including the US, do not publish everything they know -- not because they are kowtowing to authority but because there is nothing to be gained by, for instance, publishing the name, address, photograph and age of a 14-year old rape victim.
It's more important that justice is both done and seen to be done in this criminal trial, than that we get to pore over juicy, headline-grabbing allegations ahead of a trial.
I understand your sentiment, but on the contrary, there are plenty of people in all of history (and prehistory) who've shot themselves in the foot quite as effectively as the American working class. They include Easter Islanders, the Khmer Empire, the Norse in Greenland, Polynesians on Pitcairn, the Anasazi etc etc. However, it's fair to say that the consumption patterns of the American working class are more likely to have unfortunate consequences for the rest of humanity.
Have you worked out whether it'd be cost-effective to do something about the 24/7/365 bit yet? Two obvious routes would be either motion sensors or timed switches (eg light stays on for x mins after pressing the button).