That's not the discussion. The discussion is what methods are appropriate in law enforcement, and whether or not those who complain about the methods are inherently criminals.
Another note here: "Speeding cameras are against the constitution" - so?
Well, lets try this on for size:
Does it violate the US Constitution to pass legislation that allows the federal govt to detain a citizen of the US indefinately, without bail, without trial, and without so much as accusing them of a particular crime? It is most definately against our Constitution.
Now you could argue that detaining a person you -know- is a danger to society will save lives. May 1 life, maybe 1000 lives. But you just cant prove it. You TRUST your leadership to do the right thing. Maybe you TRUST Obama. (your call there...) But you've put a law on the books that allows ANY President the authority to violate ANY citizen's rights because he THINKS that person is a threat.
Can you ensure that the NEXT President will be worthy of all the trust you put into Obama to not abuse the authority of this law? Or do you intend to repeal any law this President would never abuse so that a dirtbag President that comes later cant? Maybe the next President really cant stand some demographic you fit into and thinks maybe, somehow, you might be a threat....
It might be playing with fire, but it's worth it to point out that we rely on people putting their own ass on the line to ensure we dont all end up in the fire.
I'm not suggesting that this particular case is the best example. However, if the cops are overstepping their authority and infringing on the rights of citizens, I damn well hope there's a Mr. McCrary willing to nut up and talk about it.
Following this line of reasoning, you'd be perfectly fine with cameras being placed inside your home, right? After all, they are only being placed there to ensure you're not breaking the law. It's really just a reasonable measure to bust the people who beat their wives and have meth labs and such, so no one innocent should have a complaint.
Think of all the crime we'd stop if every household was required to have cameras? We could eliminate the need for 911 calls in so many cases too! And just think of hundreds of thousands of jobs we could save or create to monitor the video feeds!
Ultimately censorship will be killed by end to end encryption and onion routing.
If they can censor the type of information that passes within their borders, what makes you think they cant control the method by which it is transfered?
And it's worth it to point out that the majority political party in the Greek Parliment is the "Panhellenic Socialist Movement". Which is allied with the Party of European Socialists and Socialists International.
Actually a strict definition of socialism is an economic model in which all citizens share ownership of all things equally. In marxist theory it is a transitory period of the above on the path toward communism.
If your society believes that because that guy has paid vacation then everyone has a right to it, that's a socialist philosophy. If they own a car, then everyone must have that right; socialism. If they have a pension... if they have healthcare... If your government actually has the resources to provide all those things to all people, great! But there isn't a government on the planet that can provide those things to all its citizens and not be bankrupt. In order to do so they would have to tax to amazing levels to net the proceeds. Yet there are major political forces all around the world pushing with every ounce of their ability for promises from their leaders for all those things. Greece being one of them, and being the most prominently bankrupt at the moment.
Greece is in financial ruin because they have promised so much to their populace that they can't possibly pay for it.
Socialism is ensuring that everyone has everything. Greece has taken that to mean that every person deserves every benefit. Including healthcare, pensions, vacations, cars, educations... But they have no way to pay for it.
Helping out your fellow man is a laudible goal. Destroying an entire nation and ALL the benefits that nation could have sustained out of self-entitlement is national financial suicide.
Unfortunately I cant completely disagree with this statement. But it is worth it to point out that the nutjobs at either end of the spectrum have had their fair share of the involvement in our current troubles.
If you look at the economy over the last hundred years or so, under Republican administrations, it grew on average less than one percent, while under Democrats, about eight percent.
Would that be the economy now largely recognized as built upon artificial and unsustainable bubbles?
Or the economy that progressives insisted become global? Whereby the horribly irresponsible economic choices of a few (Greece?) cascade in a catastrophic financial domino effect bringing entire groups of nations (EU) down?
Actually, I didn't miss your point at all. You missed mine entirely.
You have already conceeded that no person will have privacy over any part of their life. That is a surrender of the sovereignty of the individual. A concession of that is a tacit surrender into slavery.
When you conceed that you don't have a human right to privacy in any aspect of your life, you conceed that you have no control over any aspect of your life. If you cannot express an opposing position on any topic through any forum without everyone knowing your position, opposing thought cannot flourish. If all know you as the one who began the dissenting thought, you instantly become a lightning rod for any who would disagree. The possibilities of your life erode the more you deviate from the hive mentality. Your very thought is controlled by the majority through fear of reprisal for dissent.
If you do not understand this as the nature of man, you are more naive than I suspected. This is why there are specific protections to privacy in our laws, because our founders and even some current lawmakers understand that information about an individual is power over that individual. This is why a lawyers and doctors cannot discuss their interactions with their clients. This is why medical records are private. This is why a journalist's sources are protected, and the list of cases like these go on.
You are so cavalier that we have already reached the event horizon. You accept it without any apparent regret or resistance. You limit our decisions to whom it will be that controls our very essence.
You pose the choice we must make on what constitutes a fair and just society. My firm belief is that you cannot have a fair and just society without sovereignty of the individual, and that being reliant in part on a right to privacy.
Frankly, I'll be fighting to my dying breath to ensure that my choices are my own, and that my privacy remains intact. From the information available here, I'll be fighting against the cowards like you who have willingly forfeit their rights, and willfully aid in the erosion of our freedoms, even if only through inaction or acceptance.
Another way of stating this, is that liberals believe themselves to be intelectually superior, and that they alone know how best everyone should live. Little does it matter that people choose to live the way they have in the past. Liberals will liberate the less gifted from themselves.
We wont really get into how the liberal agenda often creates a colossal sense of entitlement, deep dependency, uncontrolled fiscal debt and social resentment.
This is only a problem while "one side" has a monopoly on the use of these technologies. If invasive technology is ubiquitous and uncontrollable, then any abuse of that technology should be totally transparent to everybody.
In short, the answer to "who will watch the watchers" needs to be "everyone... and records should be kept forever."
Let me get this straight....
It's really bad if the far-left nutjobs know way too much about me, invade my privacy, and track my activity. It's really bad if the far-right nutjobs do it instead. But it's accetable if they both do it?
Yeah, I'm not ok with that. Violating my rights isn't ok no matter who you are. And it sure as hell doesn't make me feel better if everyone does it.
If you want to have faith in... whoever..., that they won't take the building blocks of your being and use it in any way harmful to you (or anyone who shares your DNA), that's certainly your right. If you want to further have faith that no one else would steal it or sabotage you or anything else with that information, again, it's your right. But it takes pretty amazing naiveté to believe that nothing bad will happen so long as all the bad guys have the same info.
You miss the point. Your argument was that we're motivated to go into space because its too hard to repair the damage we've done here and we're hoping to escape from it.
The sarcastic counterargument is that it's really tough to fix the damage we've done to our nation, so we should just scrap it instead and start over.
I've never heard a person suggest that our World is not worth repairing and preserving. I have heard suggestion from the left that America is evil and should be systemtically dismantled; one could say, fundamentally transformed.
Critical thinking is invaluable. Follow your given advice.
Why do people invest billions into research?
1) Because they have to to survive.
2) To make a profit
You can claim that we have to achieve near-perfect recycling and zero footprint to survive as a species. But quite frankly there are millions of people who don't care or flat out wont believe you. Their attitude is that they will be dead and gone far before it's an issue they will feel the sting of, if there's ever a sting at all.
That leaves you with choice 2) above as a motivator for -most- people.
There's some potential for profit here in developing energy and recycling tech. But aside from the political nightmare in implementations there's limited potential for substantial profit margins when compared to initial investments. In space the potentials are greater because the possible returns are greater, and you're not dealing with nearly the same scale of sociological, political and economic impacts. You're not asking industry to change to accomodate you. You're not forcing business to adapt and change their entire model. You're not asking Joe to build solar panels on his roof, and you're not cluttering the view from Bob's porch swing with windmills. All of that reduces the profit of the initial endeavor.
What's more, you're not facing the same challenges here that you would be forced to find solutions to in space. In space you have to develop tech that would never be necessary here. So the investment here is entirely moot. Why spend money and reduce your profit margin to develop something that doesn't help you survive? But, what's the possibilty that the solution you arrived at in space couldn't have unanticipated application here?
Bottom line is that all the warm fuzzies about the altruistic nature of man doesnt pay the bills. Someone has to cut a check and 99% of the time he is planning on getting $10 back for every $1 spent.
Excellent reasoning. Let China, or Russia, or Japan (just those with manned spaceflight tech today) absorb the cost and risk of the endeavor. Let them go to the moon and go to Mars. Let them build up a technology base there and a platform from which they can advance further technologies.
Most importantly, let them establish a manned presence on those locations.
While the United Nations space treaties do designate that a nation may not claim ownership of the moon or celestial bodies (and it's been signed by 100ish nations), there's little argument that a manned presence on a body would constitute ownership of that portion of that body. It would be, in essence, a province of the nation state that deployed the men and technology.
So, let "them" (whoever "them" happens to be) get there first and establish their footholds. I'm quite sure that any exploitable resources or environmentally sound locations for establishment of a research center will be evenly spread across those bodies, and that there's no chance at all that we'll be left with the equivelant of Detroit when we finally get there. I'm equally sure that the nations who put forth the investment will happily provide us the technologies and advances that were the fruits of their risks. They wouldnt possibly presume to find inequal profit from their discoveries.
The logical follow-up to this line of reasoning is:
What's the point in trying to make America better? We're clearly screwed so we may as well just sink the whole thing and start over.
Is that the liberal logic of our leadership today?
It will clearly take many decades to develop technology to advance manned spaceflight to a point where manned interplanetary exploration is possible. Particularly when we have an attitide that there's no point in manned spaceflight.
Which is precisely the point of manned spaceflight today. You don't discover the gotcha's without continued evolutions of test and development. You don't know what hurdles you have to clear to take the next step if you refuse to take the previous "pointless" step.
I love the potential in these games. If it were possible to teach people some deeper skills in any number of fields while they had fun doing it we might be able to really make leaps forward in productivity and efficiency.
I'm not a big conspiracy theory person by any means, but the idea brough to mind the Orson Scott Card novel "Ender's Game". The premise of the book includes the concept of using computer game simulations in the abstract to solicit solutions to complex problems from unwitting players. (Great book, btw.)
That being said, the concept could be used for good as easily as not. Imagine abstract games in fantasy or sci-fi garb soliciting solutions from the millions upon millions of game players worldwide to issues like hunger, education, finance.... The trick of course is producing hyper-accurate simulations that are fun to engage in, and a mechanism to catalog and evaluate the solutions offered.
He was fine with twitter, and facebook, and media devices when he utilized them for his campaign. We've "moved on" and his stance is, "Now that enough of you have bought into my message, I'd like to discourage you from hearing messages from anyone else. Particularly my opposition."
Following a train of logic that suggest that a world full of healthy people equates to a world of smart people is entirely false. It only ensures a world where idiots have enough energy to pursue stupid plans longer.
1) I've seen evidence that the alternatives are effective.
2) I've not seen someone pursue alternatives and fail to improve their condition.
You acknowledge that it's rational to become more accepting after being presented with the positive evidence. You assume that I have mountains of evidence to the contrary. I dont. You might. Doctors might. Researchers might. But I dont.
If someone presents thousands of pages of conclusive evidence that no pain should be derived from an action, and yet when you perform that action it hurts, you stop. It would be illogical to continue doing something that brings you pain no matter how much you're told it shouldnt. Conversely, if I am presented with thousands of pages of evidence that an action cannot relieve pain, and yet when I do it the pain ceases, I will continue the action at least until someone demonstrates how it is directly harmful to me.
Even if you dont believe that there should be a real medical explanation for an activity helping relieve someone's pain and helps to improve their quality of life, why would you tell them to stop? The ultimate goal is not to legitamize traditional medicine. It is not to justify decades of medical research and education. The goal is to help people. If they are helped, and there is no harm to themselves or others, what do you care?
Several years ago my 4 year old stepson developed a horrible ear infection in both ears. The doctors at the time suggested it was one of the worst infections of this type they'd seen. The agreed among themselves that tubes were the only viable option.
My wife resisted this option. She requested a little bit of time to investigate alternatives. The doctors were reluctant, but granted us 2 weeks. They went ahead and scheduled the surgery fully believing that nothing could change the situation.
My wife talked to a homeopothist (sp?), who gave us some kind of grass shot stuff (no clue what it was) and asked that the kid drink a couple of ounces twice a day. The kid hated the stuff. I thought the whole thing was a crock. But it wasnt my kid, so my say in the matter was minimal.
We arrived for the surgery 2 weeks later, and the doctors were absolutely floored to discover ZERO infection. Nothing. They said it was the most dramatic turn around they'd ever observed. The surgery was canceled, and the kid (now 13) has had no similar event.
Now you can claim it was a fluke. But you cant convince me that a 4 year old who didn't understand the infection or the treatment was miraculously cured by placebo effect.
After this situation, I've been more receptive to alternative medicine. I've seen other situations with people dealing with debilitating pain and infection who have seen major improvement through the alternatives. I was a skeptic. I am now dumbfounded. The bottom line is I've witnessed people's condition and quality of life improve more often than not as a direct result of the alternative medicine.
I honestly pray that you never find yourself in a situation in which you've exhausted the 'accepted' methods of treatment. But if you do, swallow your pride and try the alternatives. My bet is that you'll look back at the time you spent in pain only to regret that your pride slowed your path to recovery.
1) Few if any of those scientists are climate scientists
What's the percentage of scientists who support global warming who are actually climate scientists?
2) Only a small minority (~9000) have PhDs
How many of the people actually pursuing climate data to prove global warming are PHD's? How many recognize the betrayal of the scientific method in massaging data in order to 'prove' their preconception?
3) 31,000 is a small minority of the American scientific community
If I recall my history correctly, there was just one scientist who started vocaly stating the notion that the Earth was not the center of the Universe... What exactly does the number of people have to do with how right or wrong they may be?
The only opinions that count are expressed in peer-reviewed journals of climate scientists (which virtually requires a PhD), not publicity stunts such as this.
In the political arena, you've just proven the point of the skeptics. Thank you.
You see, it's well known that if you can control the published works, and if you can suppress the voice of the opposition, then your position is the one that "counts". Ask the Vatican. They have proved masters at the tactic. The point being, if you control the publications, and if you refuse to publish anything that counters your position, you can honestly say that no one who disagrees is even published. So how could they possibly have a valid argument?
I have an MS in Software Engineering, but I wouldn't ever pronounce an opinion on if we'll get a computer to pass the Turing Test. I'm not an AI researcher, I don't know hard core Computer Science topics like Recursion Theory, and I never spent years earning a PhD to obtain a truly informed opinion.
But somehow you feel perfectly comfortable expressing your absolute conviction in the truth of Climate Change....
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the discussion. The discussion is what methods are appropriate in law enforcement, and whether or not those who complain about the methods are inherently criminals.
Another note here: "Speeding cameras are against the constitution" - so?
Well, lets try this on for size:
Does it violate the US Constitution to pass legislation that allows the federal govt to detain a citizen of the US indefinately, without bail, without trial, and without so much as accusing them of a particular crime? It is most definately against our Constitution.
Now you could argue that detaining a person you -know- is a danger to society will save lives. May 1 life, maybe 1000 lives. But you just cant prove it. You TRUST your leadership to do the right thing. Maybe you TRUST Obama. (your call there...) But you've put a law on the books that allows ANY President the authority to violate ANY citizen's rights because he THINKS that person is a threat.
Can you ensure that the NEXT President will be worthy of all the trust you put into Obama to not abuse the authority of this law? Or do you intend to repeal any law this President would never abuse so that a dirtbag President that comes later cant? Maybe the next President really cant stand some demographic you fit into and thinks maybe, somehow, you might be a threat....
It might be playing with fire, but it's worth it to point out that we rely on people putting their own ass on the line to ensure we dont all end up in the fire.
I'm not suggesting that this particular case is the best example. However, if the cops are overstepping their authority and infringing on the rights of citizens, I damn well hope there's a Mr. McCrary willing to nut up and talk about it.
Following this line of reasoning, you'd be perfectly fine with cameras being placed inside your home, right? After all, they are only being placed there to ensure you're not breaking the law. It's really just a reasonable measure to bust the people who beat their wives and have meth labs and such, so no one innocent should have a complaint.
Think of all the crime we'd stop if every household was required to have cameras? We could eliminate the need for 911 calls in so many cases too! And just think of hundreds of thousands of jobs we could save or create to monitor the video feeds!
The technology isnt exactly rocket science. It's very basic network administration.
Do I recognize this packet? Yes? Allowed.
Do I recognize this packet? No? Dropped.
Ultimately censorship will be killed by end to end encryption and onion routing.
If they can censor the type of information that passes within their borders, what makes you think they cant control the method by which it is transfered?
And it's worth it to point out that the majority political party in the Greek Parliment is the "Panhellenic Socialist Movement". Which is allied with the Party of European Socialists and Socialists International.
Actually a strict definition of socialism is an economic model in which all citizens share ownership of all things equally. In marxist theory it is a transitory period of the above on the path toward communism.
If your society believes that because that guy has paid vacation then everyone has a right to it, that's a socialist philosophy. If they own a car, then everyone must have that right; socialism. If they have a pension... if they have healthcare... If your government actually has the resources to provide all those things to all people, great! But there isn't a government on the planet that can provide those things to all its citizens and not be bankrupt. In order to do so they would have to tax to amazing levels to net the proceeds. Yet there are major political forces all around the world pushing with every ounce of their ability for promises from their leaders for all those things. Greece being one of them, and being the most prominently bankrupt at the moment.
Umm... Greece?
Greece is in financial ruin because they have promised so much to their populace that they can't possibly pay for it.
Socialism is ensuring that everyone has everything. Greece has taken that to mean that every person deserves every benefit. Including healthcare, pensions, vacations, cars, educations... But they have no way to pay for it.
Helping out your fellow man is a laudible goal. Destroying an entire nation and ALL the benefits that nation could have sustained out of self-entitlement is national financial suicide.
Dont promise shit you can deliver.
Unfortunately I cant completely disagree with this statement. But it is worth it to point out that the nutjobs at either end of the spectrum have had their fair share of the involvement in our current troubles.
If you look at the economy over the last hundred years or so, under Republican administrations, it grew on average less than one percent, while under Democrats, about eight percent.
Would that be the economy now largely recognized as built upon artificial and unsustainable bubbles?
Or the economy that progressives insisted become global? Whereby the horribly irresponsible economic choices of a few (Greece?) cascade in a catastrophic financial domino effect bringing entire groups of nations (EU) down?
Actually, I didn't miss your point at all. You missed mine entirely.
You have already conceeded that no person will have privacy over any part of their life. That is a surrender of the sovereignty of the individual. A concession of that is a tacit surrender into slavery.
When you conceed that you don't have a human right to privacy in any aspect of your life, you conceed that you have no control over any aspect of your life. If you cannot express an opposing position on any topic through any forum without everyone knowing your position, opposing thought cannot flourish. If all know you as the one who began the dissenting thought, you instantly become a lightning rod for any who would disagree. The possibilities of your life erode the more you deviate from the hive mentality. Your very thought is controlled by the majority through fear of reprisal for dissent.
If you do not understand this as the nature of man, you are more naive than I suspected. This is why there are specific protections to privacy in our laws, because our founders and even some current lawmakers understand that information about an individual is power over that individual. This is why a lawyers and doctors cannot discuss their interactions with their clients. This is why medical records are private. This is why a journalist's sources are protected, and the list of cases like these go on.
You are so cavalier that we have already reached the event horizon. You accept it without any apparent regret or resistance. You limit our decisions to whom it will be that controls our very essence.
You pose the choice we must make on what constitutes a fair and just society. My firm belief is that you cannot have a fair and just society without sovereignty of the individual, and that being reliant in part on a right to privacy.
Frankly, I'll be fighting to my dying breath to ensure that my choices are my own, and that my privacy remains intact. From the information available here, I'll be fighting against the cowards like you who have willingly forfeit their rights, and willfully aid in the erosion of our freedoms, even if only through inaction or acceptance.
Another way of stating this, is that liberals believe themselves to be intelectually superior, and that they alone know how best everyone should live. Little does it matter that people choose to live the way they have in the past. Liberals will liberate the less gifted from themselves.
We wont really get into how the liberal agenda often creates a colossal sense of entitlement, deep dependency, uncontrolled fiscal debt and social resentment.
This is only a problem while "one side" has a monopoly on the use of these technologies. If invasive technology is ubiquitous and uncontrollable, then any abuse of that technology should be totally transparent to everybody.
In short, the answer to "who will watch the watchers" needs to be "everyone ... and records should be kept forever."
Let me get this straight....
It's really bad if the far-left nutjobs know way too much about me, invade my privacy, and track my activity. It's really bad if the far-right nutjobs do it instead. But it's accetable if they both do it?
Yeah, I'm not ok with that. Violating my rights isn't ok no matter who you are. And it sure as hell doesn't make me feel better if everyone does it.
If you want to have faith in... whoever..., that they won't take the building blocks of your being and use it in any way harmful to you (or anyone who shares your DNA), that's certainly your right. If you want to further have faith that no one else would steal it or sabotage you or anything else with that information, again, it's your right. But it takes pretty amazing naiveté to believe that nothing bad will happen so long as all the bad guys have the same info.
You miss the point. Your argument was that we're motivated to go into space because its too hard to repair the damage we've done here and we're hoping to escape from it.
The sarcastic counterargument is that it's really tough to fix the damage we've done to our nation, so we should just scrap it instead and start over.
I've never heard a person suggest that our World is not worth repairing and preserving. I have heard suggestion from the left that America is evil and should be systemtically dismantled; one could say, fundamentally transformed.
Critical thinking is invaluable. Follow your given advice.
Why do people invest billions into research?
1) Because they have to to survive.
2) To make a profit
You can claim that we have to achieve near-perfect recycling and zero footprint to survive as a species. But quite frankly there are millions of people who don't care or flat out wont believe you. Their attitude is that they will be dead and gone far before it's an issue they will feel the sting of, if there's ever a sting at all.
That leaves you with choice 2) above as a motivator for -most- people.
There's some potential for profit here in developing energy and recycling tech. But aside from the political nightmare in implementations there's limited potential for substantial profit margins when compared to initial investments. In space the potentials are greater because the possible returns are greater, and you're not dealing with nearly the same scale of sociological, political and economic impacts. You're not asking industry to change to accomodate you. You're not forcing business to adapt and change their entire model. You're not asking Joe to build solar panels on his roof, and you're not cluttering the view from Bob's porch swing with windmills. All of that reduces the profit of the initial endeavor.
What's more, you're not facing the same challenges here that you would be forced to find solutions to in space. In space you have to develop tech that would never be necessary here. So the investment here is entirely moot. Why spend money and reduce your profit margin to develop something that doesn't help you survive? But, what's the possibilty that the solution you arrived at in space couldn't have unanticipated application here?
Bottom line is that all the warm fuzzies about the altruistic nature of man doesnt pay the bills. Someone has to cut a check and 99% of the time he is planning on getting $10 back for every $1 spent.
Excellent reasoning. Let China, or Russia, or Japan (just those with manned spaceflight tech today) absorb the cost and risk of the endeavor. Let them go to the moon and go to Mars. Let them build up a technology base there and a platform from which they can advance further technologies.
Most importantly, let them establish a manned presence on those locations.
While the United Nations space treaties do designate that a nation may not claim ownership of the moon or celestial bodies (and it's been signed by 100ish nations), there's little argument that a manned presence on a body would constitute ownership of that portion of that body. It would be, in essence, a province of the nation state that deployed the men and technology.
So, let "them" (whoever "them" happens to be) get there first and establish their footholds. I'm quite sure that any exploitable resources or environmentally sound locations for establishment of a research center will be evenly spread across those bodies, and that there's no chance at all that we'll be left with the equivelant of Detroit when we finally get there. I'm equally sure that the nations who put forth the investment will happily provide us the technologies and advances that were the fruits of their risks. They wouldnt possibly presume to find inequal profit from their discoveries.
The logical follow-up to this line of reasoning is:
What's the point in trying to make America better? We're clearly screwed so we may as well just sink the whole thing and start over.
Is that the liberal logic of our leadership today?
It will clearly take many decades to develop technology to advance manned spaceflight to a point where manned interplanetary exploration is possible. Particularly when we have an attitide that there's no point in manned spaceflight. Which is precisely the point of manned spaceflight today. You don't discover the gotcha's without continued evolutions of test and development. You don't know what hurdles you have to clear to take the next step if you refuse to take the previous "pointless" step.
I love the potential in these games. If it were possible to teach people some deeper skills in any number of fields while they had fun doing it we might be able to really make leaps forward in productivity and efficiency.
I'm not a big conspiracy theory person by any means, but the idea brough to mind the Orson Scott Card novel "Ender's Game". The premise of the book includes the concept of using computer game simulations in the abstract to solicit solutions to complex problems from unwitting players. (Great book, btw.)
That being said, the concept could be used for good as easily as not. Imagine abstract games in fantasy or sci-fi garb soliciting solutions from the millions upon millions of game players worldwide to issues like hunger, education, finance.... The trick of course is producing hyper-accurate simulations that are fun to engage in, and a mechanism to catalog and evaluate the solutions offered.
He was fine with twitter, and facebook, and media devices when he utilized them for his campaign. We've "moved on" and his stance is, "Now that enough of you have bought into my message, I'd like to discourage you from hearing messages from anyone else. Particularly my opposition."
There are innumerable idiots in perfect health.
Following a train of logic that suggest that a world full of healthy people equates to a world of smart people is entirely false. It only ensures a world where idiots have enough energy to pursue stupid plans longer.
1) I've seen evidence that the alternatives are effective.
2) I've not seen someone pursue alternatives and fail to improve their condition.
You acknowledge that it's rational to become more accepting after being presented with the positive evidence. You assume that I have mountains of evidence to the contrary. I dont. You might. Doctors might. Researchers might. But I dont.
If someone presents thousands of pages of conclusive evidence that no pain should be derived from an action, and yet when you perform that action it hurts, you stop. It would be illogical to continue doing something that brings you pain no matter how much you're told it shouldnt. Conversely, if I am presented with thousands of pages of evidence that an action cannot relieve pain, and yet when I do it the pain ceases, I will continue the action at least until someone demonstrates how it is directly harmful to me.
Even if you dont believe that there should be a real medical explanation for an activity helping relieve someone's pain and helps to improve their quality of life, why would you tell them to stop? The ultimate goal is not to legitamize traditional medicine. It is not to justify decades of medical research and education. The goal is to help people. If they are helped, and there is no harm to themselves or others, what do you care?
Several years ago my 4 year old stepson developed a horrible ear infection in both ears. The doctors at the time suggested it was one of the worst infections of this type they'd seen. The agreed among themselves that tubes were the only viable option.
My wife resisted this option. She requested a little bit of time to investigate alternatives. The doctors were reluctant, but granted us 2 weeks. They went ahead and scheduled the surgery fully believing that nothing could change the situation.
My wife talked to a homeopothist (sp?), who gave us some kind of grass shot stuff (no clue what it was) and asked that the kid drink a couple of ounces twice a day. The kid hated the stuff. I thought the whole thing was a crock. But it wasnt my kid, so my say in the matter was minimal.
We arrived for the surgery 2 weeks later, and the doctors were absolutely floored to discover ZERO infection. Nothing. They said it was the most dramatic turn around they'd ever observed. The surgery was canceled, and the kid (now 13) has had no similar event.
Now you can claim it was a fluke. But you cant convince me that a 4 year old who didn't understand the infection or the treatment was miraculously cured by placebo effect.
After this situation, I've been more receptive to alternative medicine. I've seen other situations with people dealing with debilitating pain and infection who have seen major improvement through the alternatives. I was a skeptic. I am now dumbfounded. The bottom line is I've witnessed people's condition and quality of life improve more often than not as a direct result of the alternative medicine.
I honestly pray that you never find yourself in a situation in which you've exhausted the 'accepted' methods of treatment. But if you do, swallow your pride and try the alternatives. My bet is that you'll look back at the time you spent in pain only to regret that your pride slowed your path to recovery.
1) Few if any of those scientists are climate scientists
What's the percentage of scientists who support global warming who are actually climate scientists?
2) Only a small minority (~9000) have PhDs
How many of the people actually pursuing climate data to prove global warming are PHD's? How many recognize the betrayal of the scientific method in massaging data in order to 'prove' their preconception?
3) 31,000 is a small minority of the American scientific community
If I recall my history correctly, there was just one scientist who started vocaly stating the notion that the Earth was not the center of the Universe... What exactly does the number of people have to do with how right or wrong they may be?
The only opinions that count are expressed in peer-reviewed journals of climate scientists (which virtually requires a PhD), not publicity stunts such as this.
In the political arena, you've just proven the point of the skeptics. Thank you.
You see, it's well known that if you can control the published works, and if you can suppress the voice of the opposition, then your position is the one that "counts". Ask the Vatican. They have proved masters at the tactic. The point being, if you control the publications, and if you refuse to publish anything that counters your position, you can honestly say that no one who disagrees is even published. So how could they possibly have a valid argument?
I have an MS in Software Engineering, but I wouldn't ever pronounce an opinion on if we'll get a computer to pass the Turing Test. I'm not an AI researcher, I don't know hard core Computer Science topics like Recursion Theory, and I never spent years earning a PhD to obtain a truly informed opinion.
But somehow you feel perfectly comfortable expressing your absolute conviction in the truth of Climate Change....