who is willing to stay in academia despite the working condition
Actually, if you're a tenured senior professor with a good stream of grant money, like the prize winners are, life is pretty decent - and there are a few HHMI investigators on the list, so they don't exactly have to grovel for funding. Their salary doesn't put them in the top 1% but it certainly qualifies for the top 5% or better. It isn't a truly upper-class lifestyle, but if you are capable of living modestly, which most people are, it's not a bad career, and the non-material rewards are considerable. You don't have to worry about sociopaths with MBAs or law degrees fucking with you, your ultimate boss doesn't get a salary orders of magnitude higher for firing people, and you get to chose what you work on.
The real problem is for the rest of us who are competent and productive scientists, but not quite professorial caliber - I know plenty of bright, hardworking people who spent all of their 20s in school and lab and work overtime, yet are still making $50,000 a year as postdocs in their mid-30s. And since you're employed by the grace of a faculty member, who quite often is a total sociopath, the environment can be hellish. It's difficult to recommend this as a career path to anyone.
yet another funding source for destroying natural slelection in humans
Great, another amateur eugenicist on Slashdot. Jesus Christ, where do you people come from? As far as I'm concerned I'd happily trade one of you for a dozen starving African children with malaria, selected at random.
its arguable that there are already too many people on the planet
Why don't you become part of the solution then?
Medical research is already a shrewd racket that just focusses on patents and symptom-supressing drugs rather than actual cures because actual cures would remove the repeat business.
You've never done any actual medical research, have you? Pop quiz: how many people died from smallpox last year?
Believe me, if Big Pharma found a drug that would cure cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimer's, they would shit themselves in excitement, because it would be worth tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars, and probably a Nobel prize to boot, and massive positive PR for a century. There is zero incentive to degrade the effectiveness of a treatment whose patent exclusivity will wear out in less than two decades anyway. The reason we don't see "cures" like you expect is because we've already picked the low-hanging fruit, and there is much we still don't know about human physiology.
Any idiot can come up with a drug that blocks cancer-causing proteins in a test tube; pharma companies do this all the time. The problem is usually that the same drug gets chewed to pieces in the liver before it ever reaches the cancer cells, or it causes half of the test mice to go belly up, or it only works on a tiny subset of patients, etc. Promising therapies fail in clinical trials all the time for these reasons, and it makes everyone miserable. Do you really believe that medical researchers are actually going out of their way to make them less effective when they stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars invested in R&D (and billions in potential future revenue)?
I for one would like to see more money going to other more urgent and/or altruistic causes. Environmental research, theoretical physics, space, etc.
How the fuck is "space" a more urgent or altruistic cause than curing disease?
Do real scientist do this for the money and the prizes? No.
Who made you the arbiter of what constitutes a "real" scientist? Scientists are human beings just like everyone else, with the same motivations and aspirations - in fact, to be successful on the level of the people who just won the prize, you need to have quite a bit of self-confidence, often to the point of egotism. (Eric Lander, for instance, is not known for his humility, but he does some terrific science. Craig Venter is an even more extreme example, and the list goes on and on.) In general academic scientists are content with being merely upper-middle-class instead of truly rich, with the payoff being that they can spend most of their time thinking about and working on stuff that excites them, instead of stuff that will make them money. But make no mistake, we wouldn't be doing this if we had to spend our entire careers toiling in anonymity with no reward for success. The money isn't a big deal, but not having to scramble for grants? Getting your name plastered across the NYT as a potential savior of humanity? Most professors would love such recognition, and I don't blame them.
Have a look at the prize winners from the last 20 years. It's like an all-star list of left-wingers dear to the hearts of other left-wingers. Kofi Annan? Jimmy Carter? Al Gore? Yasser fucking Arafat?!?
And besides, isn't it better that we let the righteous distribute their earnings as they see fit, and not let those socialist tax collectors get in the way?
One of the stranger complaints I've read about the philanthropy of Bill Gates was that it unfairly allows Bill Gates to decide which causes are worthy, instead of the people of the United States. This is rather perverse if you consider what he's spending the money on - how many Americans do you think die from malaria each year? Any guesses how many Americans would vote to continue funding research into malaria versus, say, obesity or Alzheimer's or other 1st-world afflictions? Basically, people are upset that his charity is directed at impoverished equatorial nations instead of the American middle class.
I'm no fan of how Bill Gates made his money - I still wince every time I have to use Microsoft products, with the lone exception of their optical mice - nor am I a particular fan of Facebook. But I think in this case I'll trust their judgement over that of the people who elected Bush twice.
My mistake. Are these studies always done on less pathogenic viruses, then? I would imagine that taking a bunch of crystals of BSL 3 viruses to the synchrotron would present certain problems.
The synchrotron is a publicly funded project, they should churn out more info like this and more often to show this is useful.
Synchrotrons churn out stories like this all the time! Pretty much whenever someone scores a paper in a high-impact journal using their facilities, in fact. Most of the time the research involved is genuinely excellent work, but the actual impact is usually much less than the press releases suggest. They'd like everyone who's paying for the facilities to think they're on the verge of curing cancer, but it's usually really basic research - vital stuff, but just one step in a long process. In fact some of us worry about the effect of these stories; it really sets the public up for disappointment when scientists still haven't cured cancer (etc.) ten years later. (The Human Genome Project had similar issues.)
(The big exception to this that I can remember off the top of my head was the recently approved melanoma drug, Zelboraf, which was the result of structure-based drug design based on data collected at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley. But we never hear about most structures like this, because the pharma companies pay a substantial amount of money to the synchrotrons for the right to keep their results private - it helps offset operation costs.)
there's absolutely nothing new about using X-ray crystallography in the study of pathogens
The press release is horribly written. What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions. The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.
They didn't bother to link to the actual paper, but it is (remarkably) free online.
now president obama voted YES to all three of those issues you have addressed, while he was still a congressman.
Obama was still a state legislator when the war votes were made. The first Bush tax cuts also predated his term in the Senate, although I wouldn't be shocked if he did vote for some of the later ones.
Afterall, the pyramids weren't built in a day, even if our modern society pretty much lacks the vision to do or look forward to anything further away than the next weekend.
The pyramids were built using slave labor on the orders of an unelected absolute monarch. I hope you're not suggesting this is an example we can learn from.
You hate them for what they believe, that's the very definition of bigotry.
I can't speak to the views of the parent poster, but I think it's entirely possible to think someone is a drooling moron, and not actually hate him. I don't bear any ill will towards the state legislator in question; I just think it would be better for society if he left the science to actual scientists, and spent his time on Bible studies instead.
Do you think the current Pope is stupid (although he resigned) He ran an organization who's size, complexity and legacy dwarfs anything you could possibly imagine. You may disagree with their policies, not share their views, or believe in the same reality he does, but to simply dismiss the man as an idiot?
Irrelevant, since the Catholic church made its peace with evolution many years ago. I do find some of the positions of the church morally indefensible, but Ratzinger isn't trying to redefine science to fit Catholic doctrine.
One more point before I head out the door: despite years of trying, creationism (including its more PR-friendly bastard child Intelligent Design) has had absolutely zero impact in the one area where it might actually matter: actual science (both basic and applied). The only extent to which it affects biologists is that some people end up wasting time arguing with superstitious, scientifically illiterate morons instead of doing actual research. Every other scientist I know, including everyone I work with, just ignores them and continues applying our materialist worldview ("the scientific method") with ever-increasing gains. There will never be a disease cured by application of Biblical principles, which means the entire concept is ultimately doomed. It's just going to take another few centuries for the facts on the ground to catch up with the fundies, by which time the rest of us will have engineered ourselves into near-superhuman intelligence. (At least I hope so, but I probably read too much science fiction.)
I sure hope you are right, and they are only being louder, and not more influential, lately.
I'm old enough to remember all the way back to the 1980s, and I think if anything they've been getting less influential. There have been an endless succession of predatory, hypocritical evangelists fallen from grace, supposedly unstoppable coalitions of religious voters that quickly collapsed, token theocratic presidential candidates, and the usual fuckwits pushing creationism. News media love the story of "plucky zealots push for moral laws", which they issue with some regularity, but it's just lazy journalism. (Remember when Ralph Reed was a Newsweek cover boy?)
I think the only area in which the fundamentalists have made significant gains is restricting the availability of abortion services in "red" states, and even so I think that's about as far as they're going to get. (Does anyone actually believe that California or New York would outlaw abortion?) On the opposite end, look at gay rights, which has made immense gains since I started noticing politics. Sure, the conservatives managed to pass anti-gay marriage propositions in a number of states, which basically just restored the legal situation to where it was in 2003. And as I mentioned, four states just legalized it by popular vote, which has never happened before. And I'm sure the fundamentalists will complain louder than ever, but in ten years, when Washington state is just as happy and prosperous as it is now (barring further nationwide economic catastrophe), and hasn't been smote by lightning or plagued by locusts or blown up by volcanoes, it's going to be even more difficult to convince middle America that letting their hairdressers marry is going to bring about the end of Western civilization.
looking at Syria, America is currently pushing with all its might for yet another religious state, and in Egypt is also best friends with the forces of darkness (i.e. Mursi and his Brotherhood).
So we should have let Mubarak turn machine guns on the protestors? That's not really a good way to be a beacon of hope and modernism. Also, we haven't exactly done much in Syria, tens of thousands of deaths later. (Disclaimer: I am not actually advocating any particular course of action - I think we should mind our own business.)
This crazy foreign policy becomes much more comprehensible if we consider how America is already morphing into a religious state itself.
Dude, our religious fundamentalists despise the religious fundamentalists in the Middle East - one of the many reasons why they despise Obama is that they think it's his fault that the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt now. Rick Santorum, who is about as much of a hectoring, superstitious prude as you can find in our country, was quite vocal with his view that we should have backed Mubarak until the bitter end. Your statement makes pretty much zero sense.
Pretty soon now you will be just another religious state, just like the ones you are fighting right now, but with a different religion.
There is another, more optimistic way of looking at this: we are seeing the last frantic struggles of a reactionary movement which can't adapt to social change. If you were to go back in time to, say, 1950, do you really believe that Americans as a group were any less superstitious or closed-minded? In that era, not only were racism and sexism often overt (or even violent), gays were subject to criminal prosecution in most states, often with involuntary psychiatric commitment, and I suspect evolution wasn't even an issue because it wasn't even being taught in most schools. Maybe the reason why there wasn't a big controversy back then is because there wasn't much disagreement - the country was far more conservative as a whole.
Look at it from the perspective of the religious fundamentalists: in the past century (and some of these trends are far more recent), women have career opportunities that were unheard of (and are a majority of new college graduates); gays are "out, loud, and proud", with gay marriage now legal in four states (and civil unions in several more); no-fault divorce is available in nearly every state (I think NY is the lone holdout), and the divorce rate is something like 50% as a result; young women write exhibitionist columns in college newspapers glorifying their promiscuity; single motherhood is more common than ever; cohabitation before marriage is practically the norm (at least if you're a coastal elite like myself); the biological sciences are changing so fast that in another few decades (a century at the most) we'll probably have redefined reproduction (and humanity); the government has replaced the churches as the primary distributor of charity; and last but not least, we know more about the history of our universe and our species than ever before, and it's simply not compatible with Biblical literalism no matter how hard you try. The religious conservatives perceive their entire belief system to be under assault by the government, pop culture, and the dreaded liberal elites, and they are frantically trying to hold back the flood of perversity and Godlessness by every legal means at their disposal.
Mind you, I'm absolutely not defending them; I find them ignorant and contemptible, and their actions contradict nearly every moral and ethical value I have. But, as someone who reads a lot of history, and often feels just as alienated from modern society, I think I have a pretty good idea how they feel, and the word is desperate. They're not winning, they're fighting a rearguard action, trying to return to a idyllic, morally virtuous, and thoroughly mythical past.
I suggest you go to your local government office or branch and "demand" that you have better health care, "demand" that the TSA ban their backscatter x-ray machines from airports. See how long it takes some off duty cop or LAPD officer to shoot and taze the shit out of you for being a "terrorist."
Americans complain about this stuff all of the time, often loudly and rudely, both to government bureaucrats and anyone else who will listen, and they're not usually shot. North Koreans, on the other hand, get shot if they want to leave the country.
Criminality for example has skyrocketed and areas that used to have industry are now destitute
That's probably because much of the industry was horrifically inefficient and only survived due to state subsidies. In any case, they are now part of the EU and the Schengen Zone, which means that East Germans are free to seek work elsewhere (or find a safer neighborhood). That fact alone makes in an improvement over communist rule.
Just think how different your town/city/country was 40 years ago, and how long it'd take (even on an accelerated path) to reach the present.
Well, I'm an American, so it wouldn't actually be that difficult. I take your point about NK being far more backwards than East Germany was, and I agree that fixing their economy would be a total clusterfuck. I was mainly objecting to the idea that German re-unification was so awful - it's just not a very good comparison, and the East Germans at least did very well in the end.
i think your use of "stuck" and "trapped" demonstrate a good bit of ignorance
Actually, they're very appropriate for this context, since North Koreans are simply not allowed to leave their country - unlike the citizens of nearly every other country in the modern world. They're also not allowed to do a lot of other things we - socialist Europe included - take for granted, but the use of force to keep people in the country is nearly unique. They are serfs in every way that matters.
If we want the leaders of rogue nations to give up their nukes, maybe should stop killing them when they do.
We didn't kill Qaddafi, the Libyan rebels did, and that was after he had threatened to exterminate them like "cockroaches" (his word, not mine). I'm not happy with the way it ended - I would have preferred a trip to The Hague and a small jail cell for the rest of his life - but his death was not a foregone conclusion, and it was certainly not precipitated by his abandonment of WMDs. All of these despots have sufficient resources and wealth to escape and live happy, indulgent lives elsewhere; Qaddafi was simply too arrogant and bloodthirsty to recognize that he couldn't hold on to power indefinitely.
One thing is for sure, a re-unification would take the wind out of the sails of Korea's economy for at least two decedes.
Perhaps, but Germany's economy today is one of the strongest in Europe, and the East Germans aren't worse off then they were under Communist rule (and my guess is in purely economic terms they are significantly better off). Among other things, they're actually allowed to leave the country if they don't like it - surely that counts for something.
Well, there are some folks who know a lot more about medicine and biology than I do who believe that
I know a lot about biology and medicine, thanks to wasting half of my 20s in grad school, and I don't believe we'll have cured aging in 50 years. We may have some promising leads and a few very expensive experimental treatments, but I think it's going to take centuries before we'll have widespread longevity treatments. I would love to be proved wrong though.
Note that the average and median life spans for people have increased greatly in the last hundred years
That is basically the result of massive advances in public health and disease prevention, and massive reduction in child mortality (which is partly the same thing, but also specific medical advances). The life expectancy in wealthy countries hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, because we already did the easy part. We could probably add another few years easily with better preventive medicine, but even the countries with heavily subsidized healthcare don't have that much better life expectancy. It gets way more difficult from here.
To be fair, there was a time where travel to China from the UK was considered impossibly far, taking months of time assuming you didn't get killed along the way.
Not literally impossible, just impractical - we had the technology required to make the trip for millennia before it became commonplace, always within the lifespan of a human being, and almost certainly within the lifetime of the civilization which bankrolled such an expedition. (Even the Roman Empire had some limited contact with China, if not formal relations, and Alexander the Great basically made it to the borders of the modern PRC.) With current technology, traveling to another solar system would take longer than most extant religions (and all extant nations) have existed.
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who is willing to stay in academia despite the working condition
Actually, if you're a tenured senior professor with a good stream of grant money, like the prize winners are, life is pretty decent - and there are a few HHMI investigators on the list, so they don't exactly have to grovel for funding. Their salary doesn't put them in the top 1% but it certainly qualifies for the top 5% or better. It isn't a truly upper-class lifestyle, but if you are capable of living modestly, which most people are, it's not a bad career, and the non-material rewards are considerable. You don't have to worry about sociopaths with MBAs or law degrees fucking with you, your ultimate boss doesn't get a salary orders of magnitude higher for firing people, and you get to chose what you work on.
The real problem is for the rest of us who are competent and productive scientists, but not quite professorial caliber - I know plenty of bright, hardworking people who spent all of their 20s in school and lab and work overtime, yet are still making $50,000 a year as postdocs in their mid-30s. And since you're employed by the grace of a faculty member, who quite often is a total sociopath, the environment can be hellish. It's difficult to recommend this as a career path to anyone.
yet another funding source for destroying natural slelection in humans
Great, another amateur eugenicist on Slashdot. Jesus Christ, where do you people come from? As far as I'm concerned I'd happily trade one of you for a dozen starving African children with malaria, selected at random.
its arguable that there are already too many people on the planet
Why don't you become part of the solution then?
Medical research is already a shrewd racket that just focusses on patents and symptom-supressing drugs rather than actual cures because actual cures would remove the repeat business.
You've never done any actual medical research, have you? Pop quiz: how many people died from smallpox last year?
Believe me, if Big Pharma found a drug that would cure cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimer's, they would shit themselves in excitement, because it would be worth tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars, and probably a Nobel prize to boot, and massive positive PR for a century. There is zero incentive to degrade the effectiveness of a treatment whose patent exclusivity will wear out in less than two decades anyway. The reason we don't see "cures" like you expect is because we've already picked the low-hanging fruit, and there is much we still don't know about human physiology.
Any idiot can come up with a drug that blocks cancer-causing proteins in a test tube; pharma companies do this all the time. The problem is usually that the same drug gets chewed to pieces in the liver before it ever reaches the cancer cells, or it causes half of the test mice to go belly up, or it only works on a tiny subset of patients, etc. Promising therapies fail in clinical trials all the time for these reasons, and it makes everyone miserable. Do you really believe that medical researchers are actually going out of their way to make them less effective when they stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars invested in R&D (and billions in potential future revenue)?
I for one would like to see more money going to other more urgent and/or altruistic causes. Environmental research, theoretical physics, space, etc.
How the fuck is "space" a more urgent or altruistic cause than curing disease?
Do real scientist do this for the money and the prizes? No.
Who made you the arbiter of what constitutes a "real" scientist? Scientists are human beings just like everyone else, with the same motivations and aspirations - in fact, to be successful on the level of the people who just won the prize, you need to have quite a bit of self-confidence, often to the point of egotism. (Eric Lander, for instance, is not known for his humility, but he does some terrific science. Craig Venter is an even more extreme example, and the list goes on and on.) In general academic scientists are content with being merely upper-middle-class instead of truly rich, with the payoff being that they can spend most of their time thinking about and working on stuff that excites them, instead of stuff that will make them money. But make no mistake, we wouldn't be doing this if we had to spend our entire careers toiling in anonymity with no reward for success. The money isn't a big deal, but not having to scramble for grants? Getting your name plastered across the NYT as a potential savior of humanity? Most professors would love such recognition, and I don't blame them.
Have a look at the prize winners from the last 20 years. It's like an all-star list of left-wingers dear to the hearts of other left-wingers. Kofi Annan? Jimmy Carter? Al Gore? Yasser fucking Arafat?!?
How many of those prizes were for science?
And besides, isn't it better that we let the righteous distribute their earnings as they see fit, and not let those socialist tax collectors get in the way?
One of the stranger complaints I've read about the philanthropy of Bill Gates was that it unfairly allows Bill Gates to decide which causes are worthy, instead of the people of the United States. This is rather perverse if you consider what he's spending the money on - how many Americans do you think die from malaria each year? Any guesses how many Americans would vote to continue funding research into malaria versus, say, obesity or Alzheimer's or other 1st-world afflictions? Basically, people are upset that his charity is directed at impoverished equatorial nations instead of the American middle class.
I'm no fan of how Bill Gates made his money - I still wince every time I have to use Microsoft products, with the lone exception of their optical mice - nor am I a particular fan of Facebook. But I think in this case I'll trust their judgement over that of the people who elected Bush twice.
My mistake. Are these studies always done on less pathogenic viruses, then? I would imagine that taking a bunch of crystals of BSL 3 viruses to the synchrotron would present certain problems.
The synchrotron is a publicly funded project, they should churn out more info like this and more often to show this is useful.
Synchrotrons churn out stories like this all the time! Pretty much whenever someone scores a paper in a high-impact journal using their facilities, in fact. Most of the time the research involved is genuinely excellent work, but the actual impact is usually much less than the press releases suggest. They'd like everyone who's paying for the facilities to think they're on the verge of curing cancer, but it's usually really basic research - vital stuff, but just one step in a long process. In fact some of us worry about the effect of these stories; it really sets the public up for disappointment when scientists still haven't cured cancer (etc.) ten years later. (The Human Genome Project had similar issues.)
(The big exception to this that I can remember off the top of my head was the recently approved melanoma drug, Zelboraf, which was the result of structure-based drug design based on data collected at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley. But we never hear about most structures like this, because the pharma companies pay a substantial amount of money to the synchrotrons for the right to keep their results private - it helps offset operation costs.)
there's absolutely nothing new about using X-ray crystallography in the study of pathogens
The press release is horribly written. What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions. The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.
They didn't bother to link to the actual paper, but it is (remarkably) free online.
now president obama voted YES to all three of those issues you have addressed, while he was still a congressman.
Obama was still a state legislator when the war votes were made. The first Bush tax cuts also predated his term in the Senate, although I wouldn't be shocked if he did vote for some of the later ones.
Afterall, the pyramids weren't built in a day, even if our modern society pretty much lacks the vision to do or look forward to anything further away than the next weekend.
The pyramids were built using slave labor on the orders of an unelected absolute monarch. I hope you're not suggesting this is an example we can learn from.
You hate them for what they believe, that's the very definition of bigotry.
I can't speak to the views of the parent poster, but I think it's entirely possible to think someone is a drooling moron, and not actually hate him. I don't bear any ill will towards the state legislator in question; I just think it would be better for society if he left the science to actual scientists, and spent his time on Bible studies instead.
Do you think the current Pope is stupid (although he resigned) He ran an organization who's size, complexity and legacy dwarfs anything you could possibly imagine. You may disagree with their policies, not share their views, or believe in the same reality he does, but to simply dismiss the man as an idiot?
Irrelevant, since the Catholic church made its peace with evolution many years ago. I do find some of the positions of the church morally indefensible, but Ratzinger isn't trying to redefine science to fit Catholic doctrine.
One more point before I head out the door: despite years of trying, creationism (including its more PR-friendly bastard child Intelligent Design) has had absolutely zero impact in the one area where it might actually matter: actual science (both basic and applied). The only extent to which it affects biologists is that some people end up wasting time arguing with superstitious, scientifically illiterate morons instead of doing actual research. Every other scientist I know, including everyone I work with, just ignores them and continues applying our materialist worldview ("the scientific method") with ever-increasing gains. There will never be a disease cured by application of Biblical principles, which means the entire concept is ultimately doomed. It's just going to take another few centuries for the facts on the ground to catch up with the fundies, by which time the rest of us will have engineered ourselves into near-superhuman intelligence. (At least I hope so, but I probably read too much science fiction.)
I sure hope you are right, and they are only being louder, and not more influential, lately.
I'm old enough to remember all the way back to the 1980s, and I think if anything they've been getting less influential. There have been an endless succession of predatory, hypocritical evangelists fallen from grace, supposedly unstoppable coalitions of religious voters that quickly collapsed, token theocratic presidential candidates, and the usual fuckwits pushing creationism. News media love the story of "plucky zealots push for moral laws", which they issue with some regularity, but it's just lazy journalism. (Remember when Ralph Reed was a Newsweek cover boy?)
I think the only area in which the fundamentalists have made significant gains is restricting the availability of abortion services in "red" states, and even so I think that's about as far as they're going to get. (Does anyone actually believe that California or New York would outlaw abortion?) On the opposite end, look at gay rights, which has made immense gains since I started noticing politics. Sure, the conservatives managed to pass anti-gay marriage propositions in a number of states, which basically just restored the legal situation to where it was in 2003. And as I mentioned, four states just legalized it by popular vote, which has never happened before. And I'm sure the fundamentalists will complain louder than ever, but in ten years, when Washington state is just as happy and prosperous as it is now (barring further nationwide economic catastrophe), and hasn't been smote by lightning or plagued by locusts or blown up by volcanoes, it's going to be even more difficult to convince middle America that letting their hairdressers marry is going to bring about the end of Western civilization.
looking at Syria, America is currently pushing with all its might for yet another religious state, and in Egypt is also best friends with the forces of darkness (i.e. Mursi and his Brotherhood).
So we should have let Mubarak turn machine guns on the protestors? That's not really a good way to be a beacon of hope and modernism. Also, we haven't exactly done much in Syria, tens of thousands of deaths later. (Disclaimer: I am not actually advocating any particular course of action - I think we should mind our own business.)
This crazy foreign policy becomes much more comprehensible if we consider how America is already morphing into a religious state itself.
Dude, our religious fundamentalists despise the religious fundamentalists in the Middle East - one of the many reasons why they despise Obama is that they think it's his fault that the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt now. Rick Santorum, who is about as much of a hectoring, superstitious prude as you can find in our country, was quite vocal with his view that we should have backed Mubarak until the bitter end. Your statement makes pretty much zero sense.
Read and learn.
Let me guess - the government caused the collapse by forcing banks to sell mortgages to black people?
Pretty soon now you will be just another religious state, just like the ones you are fighting right now, but with a different religion.
There is another, more optimistic way of looking at this: we are seeing the last frantic struggles of a reactionary movement which can't adapt to social change. If you were to go back in time to, say, 1950, do you really believe that Americans as a group were any less superstitious or closed-minded? In that era, not only were racism and sexism often overt (or even violent), gays were subject to criminal prosecution in most states, often with involuntary psychiatric commitment, and I suspect evolution wasn't even an issue because it wasn't even being taught in most schools. Maybe the reason why there wasn't a big controversy back then is because there wasn't much disagreement - the country was far more conservative as a whole.
Look at it from the perspective of the religious fundamentalists: in the past century (and some of these trends are far more recent), women have career opportunities that were unheard of (and are a majority of new college graduates); gays are "out, loud, and proud", with gay marriage now legal in four states (and civil unions in several more); no-fault divorce is available in nearly every state (I think NY is the lone holdout), and the divorce rate is something like 50% as a result; young women write exhibitionist columns in college newspapers glorifying their promiscuity; single motherhood is more common than ever; cohabitation before marriage is practically the norm (at least if you're a coastal elite like myself); the biological sciences are changing so fast that in another few decades (a century at the most) we'll probably have redefined reproduction (and humanity); the government has replaced the churches as the primary distributor of charity; and last but not least, we know more about the history of our universe and our species than ever before, and it's simply not compatible with Biblical literalism no matter how hard you try. The religious conservatives perceive their entire belief system to be under assault by the government, pop culture, and the dreaded liberal elites, and they are frantically trying to hold back the flood of perversity and Godlessness by every legal means at their disposal.
Mind you, I'm absolutely not defending them; I find them ignorant and contemptible, and their actions contradict nearly every moral and ethical value I have. But, as someone who reads a lot of history, and often feels just as alienated from modern society, I think I have a pretty good idea how they feel, and the word is desperate. They're not winning, they're fighting a rearguard action, trying to return to a idyllic, morally virtuous, and thoroughly mythical past.
The States are not bound by the 1st amendment. Only the Federal government is.
Not since the 14th amendment. Your knowledge of Constitutional law is about 150 years out of date.
I suggest you go to your local government office or branch and "demand" that you have better health care, "demand" that the TSA ban their backscatter x-ray machines from airports. See how long it takes some off duty cop or LAPD officer to shoot and taze the shit out of you for being a "terrorist."
Americans complain about this stuff all of the time, often loudly and rudely, both to government bureaucrats and anyone else who will listen, and they're not usually shot. North Koreans, on the other hand, get shot if they want to leave the country.
Criminality for example has skyrocketed and areas that used to have industry are now destitute
That's probably because much of the industry was horrifically inefficient and only survived due to state subsidies. In any case, they are now part of the EU and the Schengen Zone, which means that East Germans are free to seek work elsewhere (or find a safer neighborhood). That fact alone makes in an improvement over communist rule.
Just think how different your town/city/country was 40 years ago, and how long it'd take (even on an accelerated path) to reach the present.
Well, I'm an American, so it wouldn't actually be that difficult. I take your point about NK being far more backwards than East Germany was, and I agree that fixing their economy would be a total clusterfuck. I was mainly objecting to the idea that German re-unification was so awful - it's just not a very good comparison, and the East Germans at least did very well in the end.
i think your use of "stuck" and "trapped" demonstrate a good bit of ignorance
Actually, they're very appropriate for this context, since North Koreans are simply not allowed to leave their country - unlike the citizens of nearly every other country in the modern world. They're also not allowed to do a lot of other things we - socialist Europe included - take for granted, but the use of force to keep people in the country is nearly unique. They are serfs in every way that matters.
If we want the leaders of rogue nations to give up their nukes, maybe should stop killing them when they do.
We didn't kill Qaddafi, the Libyan rebels did, and that was after he had threatened to exterminate them like "cockroaches" (his word, not mine). I'm not happy with the way it ended - I would have preferred a trip to The Hague and a small jail cell for the rest of his life - but his death was not a foregone conclusion, and it was certainly not precipitated by his abandonment of WMDs. All of these despots have sufficient resources and wealth to escape and live happy, indulgent lives elsewhere; Qaddafi was simply too arrogant and bloodthirsty to recognize that he couldn't hold on to power indefinitely.
One thing is for sure, a re-unification would take the wind out of the sails of Korea's economy for at least two decedes.
Perhaps, but Germany's economy today is one of the strongest in Europe, and the East Germans aren't worse off then they were under Communist rule (and my guess is in purely economic terms they are significantly better off). Among other things, they're actually allowed to leave the country if they don't like it - surely that counts for something.
Well, there are some folks who know a lot more about medicine and biology than I do who believe that
I know a lot about biology and medicine, thanks to wasting half of my 20s in grad school, and I don't believe we'll have cured aging in 50 years. We may have some promising leads and a few very expensive experimental treatments, but I think it's going to take centuries before we'll have widespread longevity treatments. I would love to be proved wrong though.
Note that the average and median life spans for people have increased greatly in the last hundred years
That is basically the result of massive advances in public health and disease prevention, and massive reduction in child mortality (which is partly the same thing, but also specific medical advances). The life expectancy in wealthy countries hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, because we already did the easy part. We could probably add another few years easily with better preventive medicine, but even the countries with heavily subsidized healthcare don't have that much better life expectancy. It gets way more difficult from here.
To be fair, there was a time where travel to China from the UK was considered impossibly far, taking months of time assuming you didn't get killed along the way.
Not literally impossible, just impractical - we had the technology required to make the trip for millennia before it became commonplace, always within the lifespan of a human being, and almost certainly within the lifetime of the civilization which bankrolled such an expedition. (Even the Roman Empire had some limited contact with China, if not formal relations, and Alexander the Great basically made it to the borders of the modern PRC.) With current technology, traveling to another solar system would take longer than most extant religions (and all extant nations) have existed.