If you punch me, I'm sure as hell going to punch you right back. I might even decide to kick you in the balls. Is that seriously a threat?
Yes, that's basically the definition of a threat. "If you _____, I will do in response." That is a threat.
What it is, is a statement to show that they are prepared to respond to violent and/or forceful attempts to silence them, and that is a very reasonable thing to do in their position. Make it clear that silencing them by force would make things worse than they are.
No, it's an ambiguous threat. They're saying "If something happens, and we're not going to say what our criteria for that action is, we will release a key which will be really, really bad for you... but we're not going to tell you what THAT is, either.
It's a threat. It's not a very specific one... it's nebulous at best... but it is a threat nonetheless. It may be reasonable, justified, rational, or moral, but I think we can all agree that it is a threat.
The problem is that the people making this threat seem rather paranoid. What happens if Assange gets drunk, hops in a car, and manages to get himself in a fatal accident in a month? Plenty of people will suspect CIA involvement, and may just go ahead and carry out their threat.
Personally, I feel this threat is illogical and non-credible. If WikiLeaks (WL) staff is willing to carry out their threat because of one or two mysterious deaths, they have a very high danger of carrying out this action regardless of the actions taken by the opposition. If they aren't, then the threat is not credible and a few key people in the organization can be picked off.
Adding to that, the risk of WL staff coming up with a false positive/alarm and releasing makes disarming wikileaks more imperative. If I were responsible for dealing with WikiLeaks, knowing this threat, I would step up efforts to actively remove key players, cause internal divisions, and do everything I could to eliminate them before they randomly struck due to a false alarm.
Wait what? This happened TWICE while he was in Sweden?... How huge is this mans penis that he's breaking condoms left and right?
Condom breakage is only rare when correctly fitting condoms are worn appropriately. From what I've read, most "one size fits most" condoms are actually a bit dangerously off from the sizes most men need. Also, if it was on the same trip, this could've just been from a pack of condoms he left on the dash of his car or in the freezing cold.
And how on earth is this even remotely provable? "Hey, we were having consensual sex and half way through I changed my mind. Throw that guy in jail!"
Usually from confessions or other evidence. Personally, I feel that forcing someone to continue having sex in this sort of a situation IS rape. If a girl agrees to have sex with you using a condom, the condoms break, then you say, "fuck you, I'm finishing!"... that is rape. (and legally rape in Sweden, it seems)
Finally, they charge him 2 DAYS AFTER HE RELEASES THE LARGEST GOVERNMENT LEAK IN HISTORY?!?!? Is that not even remotely fishy?
Irrelevant. All that really matters is his guilt or non guilt and whether that can be shown to the satisfaction of the relevant legal system.
You assume here that it is in the best interests of Pakistan not to be aware of its own weaknesses and to keep an ineffective government in power through secrecy.
You make a good point and yes, I do. IMO, Pakistan is too divided and underdeveloped to be ruled by anything other than a totalitarian regime, authoritarian regime, military junta (which cannot control the tribal areas), or a very weak semi-democratic regime (which would essentially only control major cities).
How is this better than the Pakistan government making the US involvement public to show that they have the support of the US in these actions thus strengthening their position.
We both have to make assumptions here regarding favorability. My assumption is that, for a lot of different reasons, American endorsement is a liability in Pakistan. Tribal loyalties are probably far more important than "but the US said this would be good". Overall, I imagine the favorability and trust towards the US is very low there.
The data should be pretty easy to find, though.
Finally, Pakistan certainly has that option. The fact that Pakistan has chosen to attempt to keep this secret and risk being caught indicates that they feel keeping this a secret is the better course of action. I trust their government to know the impact of such disclosures far better than I would.
TBF, there are quite a few people who both work in intelligence and are nerdy enough to find slashdot worth reading. Quite a few slashdot readers probably already did know everything in your paragraph.
(Assuming, of course, that the intelligence community came to the same conclusion, that none of these reports were altered, etc.)
If governments are to represents us, they need to talk to us with the truth and nothing but the truth.
That's actually not true, your assertion operates off a version of the world where all governments are representative of the people OR all representative governments do not have to deal/negotiate with less democratic regimes.
This is not the world we live in.
In the real world, democratic governments need to be able to have confidential communication with other governments. For example, the leadership of Pakistan knows it is in the best interest of both Pakistan and the US to combat extremist groups within its borders. Pakistan is unable to do so directly, but expressing weakness and inability to operate in its own territory could lead to invasion by foreign powers or the downfall of the government. Pakistani govt. is therefore unable to publicly discuss these things, but they can privately tell the US: "ok, if you guys come in here and kill some of our mutual enemies, we won't try to stop you. Just don't try not to kill too many civilians."
This is the best solution for all parties involved, where the US is acting in its capacity to represent the interests of the public. You'll find that public opinion polls generally favor this sort of activity, and everyone KNOWS we're doing it, but the US govt. could not officially acknowledge that they were operating under the permission of the Pakistani government. Wikileaks' revelations could ultimately destabilize regimes like this.
You might counter that we should "simply make Pakistan democratic", but I think you will find this task quite difficult. You may want to go to Iraq and ask how well forced democratization works.
One might argue that doing anything overt to him would only reinforce the belief that the government(s) in question are actually scared of Wikileaks rather than just angry with them; the last thing they want to risk doing is martyring him.
Eh, if I were Ecuador I'd have the guy killed then blame the CIA.
At this point, China, Russia, the US, most of the middle east, and probably every other state actor out there has a motive. Naturally, most people will blame the CIA if Assange dies because they watch too many movies and feel the CIA is the only group that would do this.
Quite interesting you think so while possibly the only reason for you being able to write down this is because of a politician that resolved to be honest and perfectly clear at least once: Kennedy managed to cold down the Cuba missiles crisis by being clear about what could or couldn't be standed by USA. Probably the two-faced approach would have ended up on a global nuclear war, so go figure.
That's a pretty misinformed claim. One of Kennedy's biggest regrets was his public pledge to not tolerate nuclear weapons in Cuba. Kennedy would have happily accepted a nuclear Cuba rather than risk war, but his hands were tied because of his public statements made to score some cheap political points.
Funny enough, Kennedy made this pledge because the USSR had already secretly agreed with the US govt. that they would not place nuclear weapons in Cuba. The USSR was being two-faced about this, and it nearly worked. The crisis only came about because the US did not know about the nukes and did not know that they were operational... this would have been a Soviet victory if the US either had better intelligence and knew they were operational or if the soviets had done a good job of camouflaging the facilities.
What we really need are journalists who understand the issues and have the guts to catch politicians in lies and noisespin and call them on it.
I recommend Current, particularly the series Vanguard. You want to see REAL journalism? Watch it. They even have all the episodes available on podcast (vodcast, actually).
Which is simply to say, that kind of stuff is less likely to happen with a divided Congress, since it generally won't get introduced on the side controlled by Republicans.
Yes.. what people don't seem to get is that its a good thing to have a ravenously partisan congress in these days of idiocracy. It prevents them from getting the particularly stupid bills passed. Or at least it slows them down.
Ugh, I hate this argument because it's so absurd... and I subscribed to it when I was young!
Slowing down bad bills is good, but slowing down good bills is bad. A divided, ineffective congress is also unable to repeal crapy old legislation, implement better policies, or react in sufficient time to a crisis. This can be seen in the current congress where issues with overwhelming public support aren't being addressed because congress is hamstrung by itself.
Which implied all Republicans pushed this which is false. Or in fact that any did, which is also false.
No, it doesn't. It implies that those who pushed it were Republicans or Republican-affiliated. Yes, I include both Tea Partiers and Fox News commentators with the Republican camp. Tea Partiers because 100% of their federal candidates ran on the Republican ticket and Fox News for the obvious as well as their direct promotion of the tea parties.
Stop-over generalizing, as I said it makes you look like an idiot, instead of understanding the nuances of arguments presented.
*yawn*. Rubber, glue, yadda yadda. Re-read what he and I said and quit ignoring the inherent nuances of the argument.
You're basically saying "not all men shot Kennedy!" when the original statement was "a man shot Kennedy." Nobody said "all" or "always" until you came along and tried to make the argument about that.
Going back to his argument, this propaganda originated from Republicans. Not ALL Republicans, just those who argued this position on this issue. The poster was spot-on when he said that some idiots believed it and we now have quite a few idiots who don't want "the government" getting involved with their medicare.
It sounds like you're advocating another type of award I'd love to actually see: the hindsight impact award. What works from 50 years ago really enlightened future research and altered the course of science? What works seemed significant and ultimately led us down the wrong road for a very long time until we discovered their flaws? That would be a fun award process, but it'd probably be post-mortem for most of the recipients.
The world is going to be very different when just China and India have reached our standards of living.
Literally impossible (barring technology beyond the stuff in Star Trek). The only way the US, China, and India can be at the same standards of living is if the US takes one hell of a crash and India and China stay pretty close to where they are... and even that would be unsustainable with modern technology.
Actually, no... just... no. Social security and medicare and unemployment benefits and all those other social programs produce SOMETHING--they just don't produce anything you care about. The difference is profound.
Student loans and aid produce a more educated populace, medicare produces a higher life expectancy and acts as a valuable social safety net. Social security produces a reduction in impoverished people. These are benefits that are quantifiable and whose effects on society and the economy can be quantitatively analyzed and modeled. Likewise, the goal of national highways isn't to "produce some tangible good", it's to produce an a number of benefits: increased mobility for the military, enablement of increased economic activity, etc.
You can argue that these government functions are immoral, unconstitutional, too expensive, or better performed by other entities, but you can not simply assert that they produce no service.
Thank you, I really couldn't have said it better myself.
As one of those former AP students, I can say that I cheated a bit on the homework in exactly the types of classes you described. I never cheated on the tests, and my AP scores were my own. I even got a non-passing grade in one AP class despite rocking the AP exam because I disliked the workload and teaching style.
Because thanks to Republican propoganda, idiots think any government regulation is "communist" and evil,
And I guess liberals like you think that all regulation is always good, like requiring pat-downs if you don't accept a body scan? Or this blocking cell phones in cars?
You see, when you start to overgeneralize you simply end up looking like the idiot you are trying to make the scary "Other" look like.
No, the GP was 100% correct. The propaganda that fed this WAS from the Republicans. He didn't say "all Republicans think ___", he said "Republicans pushed this issue from this angle and now a certain segment of the population believes it".
You could just have hazard light activation automatically disable the jammer... that'd solve all sorts of problems, and make it far easier for cops to catch people.
Yeah, bombing a few sites is what's called an "act of war," in case you didn't know that.
I'm not AC, but... "act of war" doesn't necessarily mean it will result in a war.
I'm not saying that a strike would be effective, have a high probability of success, or not create other problems, but it is certainly possible to carry out a strike against a much weaker, non-nuclear opponent without sparking a war. That's one of the main reasons Iran wants nukes...
I know someone who did similar work in the early/mid 1990s. He wasn't as good as the guy in the article purports to be; he seemed to mostly wind up doing glorified book reports for first-year English coeds.
...then thanks for the memories and thanks for passing my email address around to your friends.:-)
Did you frequently confuse the third and first person in those papers as well?
I know plenty of people who have done this, but it was usually for real sex. I think you got a raw deal, although that's based on my memory of STDs being relatively uncommon 15 years ago.
I agree with your assessment (GE requirements are skewed towards the humanities as part of a western/liberal education), but not entirely with your logic.
Based on the communication skills of some of the STEM graduates I know, I say there is no way in hell they all passed their humanities requirements without cheating. Additionally, those humanities requirements are pretty low level at a lot of schools. Very simple English, maybe a few semesters/quarters of another language, a little history, and they're about done... and I'd argue that nearly all of these classes teach skills that are vital to graduate/post-graduate-level work in all fields.
Humanities majors in most schools (well, all six of the colleges/universities I've experienced) do have basic science and math requirements as well. Perhaps not necessarily physics, but they most certainly had to pass a low-level natural science, some sort of life science, and a basic math course (probably statistics--and don't give me that "statistics isn't math" speel, I've heard it before). I'd say these courses are about as low-level as their humanities counter-parts that are required of STEM majors.
As for the overall skew, I do think it makes sense to have more humanities requirements than hard science/math requirements. Scholars in both the humanities and harder sciences need to master English and the related fields to publish their papers. Humanities scholars, however, have little need for physics or calculus. Most humanities rely on a good knowledge of statistics, and this seems to be about the average requirement for a humanities degree. It makes sense to me.
To be fair, nuclear was never cost effective. Without the government providing subsidized loans, waived liability, assistance in acquiring fuel, assistance in transporting and storing waste, paying for massive R&D in many directly and indirectly related fields, nuclear would never have been commercially viable.
The goal of nuclear power has always been energy independence, not cost effectiveness.
If you strip away all regulations AND all liability waivers AND all subsidies, I think you'll find wind to be far cheaper.
It's people's morals - often based on or at least supported by what you blithely dismiss as "fiction" - that stop us from doing those sorts of things.
Those of us that aren't sociopaths don't need religion to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Those who are sociopaths use religion as an excuse as often as it prevents them from harming others.
Indeed, but religion can allow (and even drive) an otherwise normal and mentally healthy person to commit terrible atrocities.
I'd argue that religion is one of the only systems in the history of the world that has so consistently made many of its practitioners indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it a threat?
If you punch me, I'm sure as hell going to punch you right back. I might even decide to kick you in the balls. Is that seriously a threat?
Yes, that's basically the definition of a threat. "If you _____, I will do in response." That is a threat.
What it is, is a statement to show that they are prepared to respond to violent and/or forceful attempts to silence them, and that is a very reasonable thing to do in their position. Make it clear that silencing them by force would make things worse than they are.
No, it's an ambiguous threat. They're saying "If something happens, and we're not going to say what our criteria for that action is, we will release a key which will be really, really bad for you... but we're not going to tell you what THAT is, either.
It's a threat. It's not a very specific one... it's nebulous at best... but it is a threat nonetheless. It may be reasonable, justified, rational, or moral, but I think we can all agree that it is a threat.
The problem is that the people making this threat seem rather paranoid. What happens if Assange gets drunk, hops in a car, and manages to get himself in a fatal accident in a month? Plenty of people will suspect CIA involvement, and may just go ahead and carry out their threat.
Personally, I feel this threat is illogical and non-credible. If WikiLeaks (WL) staff is willing to carry out their threat because of one or two mysterious deaths, they have a very high danger of carrying out this action regardless of the actions taken by the opposition. If they aren't, then the threat is not credible and a few key people in the organization can be picked off.
Adding to that, the risk of WL staff coming up with a false positive/alarm and releasing makes disarming wikileaks more imperative. If I were responsible for dealing with WikiLeaks, knowing this threat, I would step up efforts to actively remove key players, cause internal divisions, and do everything I could to eliminate them before they randomly struck due to a false alarm.
Why do you think Sweden is more willing to extradite Assange on bogus charges than the UK?
Wait what? This happened TWICE while he was in Sweden? ... How huge is this mans penis that he's breaking condoms left and right?
Condom breakage is only rare when correctly fitting condoms are worn appropriately. From what I've read, most "one size fits most" condoms are actually a bit dangerously off from the sizes most men need. Also, if it was on the same trip, this could've just been from a pack of condoms he left on the dash of his car or in the freezing cold.
And how on earth is this even remotely provable? "Hey, we were having consensual sex and half way through I changed my mind. Throw that guy in jail!"
Usually from confessions or other evidence. Personally, I feel that forcing someone to continue having sex in this sort of a situation IS rape. If a girl agrees to have sex with you using a condom, the condoms break, then you say, "fuck you, I'm finishing!"... that is rape. (and legally rape in Sweden, it seems)
Finally, they charge him 2 DAYS AFTER HE RELEASES THE LARGEST GOVERNMENT LEAK IN HISTORY?!?!? Is that not even remotely fishy?
Irrelevant. All that really matters is his guilt or non guilt and whether that can be shown to the satisfaction of the relevant legal system.
You assume here that it is in the best interests of Pakistan not to be aware of its own weaknesses and to keep an ineffective government in power through secrecy.
You make a good point and yes, I do. IMO, Pakistan is too divided and underdeveloped to be ruled by anything other than a totalitarian regime, authoritarian regime, military junta (which cannot control the tribal areas), or a very weak semi-democratic regime (which would essentially only control major cities).
How is this better than the Pakistan government making the US involvement public to show that they have the support of the US in these actions thus strengthening their position.
We both have to make assumptions here regarding favorability. My assumption is that, for a lot of different reasons, American endorsement is a liability in Pakistan. Tribal loyalties are probably far more important than "but the US said this would be good". Overall, I imagine the favorability and trust towards the US is very low there.
The data should be pretty easy to find, though.
Finally, Pakistan certainly has that option. The fact that Pakistan has chosen to attempt to keep this secret and risk being caught indicates that they feel keeping this a secret is the better course of action. I trust their government to know the impact of such disclosures far better than I would.
TBF, there are quite a few people who both work in intelligence and are nerdy enough to find slashdot worth reading. Quite a few slashdot readers probably already did know everything in your paragraph.
(Assuming, of course, that the intelligence community came to the same conclusion, that none of these reports were altered, etc.)
If governments are to represents us, they need to talk to us with the truth and nothing but the truth.
That's actually not true, your assertion operates off a version of the world where all governments are representative of the people OR all representative governments do not have to deal/negotiate with less democratic regimes.
This is not the world we live in.
In the real world, democratic governments need to be able to have confidential communication with other governments. For example, the leadership of Pakistan knows it is in the best interest of both Pakistan and the US to combat extremist groups within its borders. Pakistan is unable to do so directly, but expressing weakness and inability to operate in its own territory could lead to invasion by foreign powers or the downfall of the government. Pakistani govt. is therefore unable to publicly discuss these things, but they can privately tell the US: "ok, if you guys come in here and kill some of our mutual enemies, we won't try to stop you. Just don't try not to kill too many civilians."
This is the best solution for all parties involved, where the US is acting in its capacity to represent the interests of the public. You'll find that public opinion polls generally favor this sort of activity, and everyone KNOWS we're doing it, but the US govt. could not officially acknowledge that they were operating under the permission of the Pakistani government. Wikileaks' revelations could ultimately destabilize regimes like this.
You might counter that we should "simply make Pakistan democratic", but I think you will find this task quite difficult. You may want to go to Iraq and ask how well forced democratization works.
One might argue that doing anything overt to him would only reinforce the belief that the government(s) in question are actually scared of Wikileaks rather than just angry with them; the last thing they want to risk doing is martyring him.
Eh, if I were Ecuador I'd have the guy killed then blame the CIA.
At this point, China, Russia, the US, most of the middle east, and probably every other state actor out there has a motive. Naturally, most people will blame the CIA if Assange dies because they watch too many movies and feel the CIA is the only group that would do this.
Quite interesting you think so while possibly the only reason for you being able to write down this is because of a politician that resolved to be honest and perfectly clear at least once: Kennedy managed to cold down the Cuba missiles crisis by being clear about what could or couldn't be standed by USA. Probably the two-faced approach would have ended up on a global nuclear war, so go figure.
That's a pretty misinformed claim. One of Kennedy's biggest regrets was his public pledge to not tolerate nuclear weapons in Cuba. Kennedy would have happily accepted a nuclear Cuba rather than risk war, but his hands were tied because of his public statements made to score some cheap political points.
Funny enough, Kennedy made this pledge because the USSR had already secretly agreed with the US govt. that they would not place nuclear weapons in Cuba. The USSR was being two-faced about this, and it nearly worked. The crisis only came about because the US did not know about the nukes and did not know that they were operational... this would have been a Soviet victory if the US either had better intelligence and knew they were operational or if the soviets had done a good job of camouflaging the facilities.
What we really need are journalists who understand the issues and have the guts to catch politicians in lies and noisespin and call them on it.
I recommend Current, particularly the series Vanguard. You want to see REAL journalism? Watch it. They even have all the episodes available on podcast (vodcast, actually).
Which is simply to say, that kind of stuff is less likely to happen with a divided Congress, since it generally won't get introduced on the side controlled by Republicans.
Yes.. what people don't seem to get is that its a good thing to have a ravenously partisan congress in these days of idiocracy. It prevents them from getting the particularly stupid bills passed. Or at least it slows them down.
Ugh, I hate this argument because it's so absurd... and I subscribed to it when I was young!
Slowing down bad bills is good, but slowing down good bills is bad. A divided, ineffective congress is also unable to repeal crapy old legislation, implement better policies, or react in sufficient time to a crisis. This can be seen in the current congress where issues with overwhelming public support aren't being addressed because congress is hamstrung by itself.
Republicans pushed this issue from this angle
Which implied all Republicans pushed this which is false. Or in fact that any did, which is also false.
No, it doesn't. It implies that those who pushed it were Republicans or Republican-affiliated. Yes, I include both Tea Partiers and Fox News commentators with the Republican camp. Tea Partiers because 100% of their federal candidates ran on the Republican ticket and Fox News for the obvious as well as their direct promotion of the tea parties.
Stop-over generalizing, as I said it makes you look like an idiot, instead of understanding the nuances of arguments presented.
*yawn*. Rubber, glue, yadda yadda. Re-read what he and I said and quit ignoring the inherent nuances of the argument.
You're basically saying "not all men shot Kennedy!" when the original statement was "a man shot Kennedy." Nobody said "all" or "always" until you came along and tried to make the argument about that.
Going back to his argument, this propaganda originated from Republicans. Not ALL Republicans, just those who argued this position on this issue. The poster was spot-on when he said that some idiots believed it and we now have quite a few idiots who don't want "the government" getting involved with their medicare.
It sounds like you're advocating another type of award I'd love to actually see: the hindsight impact award. What works from 50 years ago really enlightened future research and altered the course of science? What works seemed significant and ultimately led us down the wrong road for a very long time until we discovered their flaws? That would be a fun award process, but it'd probably be post-mortem for most of the recipients.
But at least they didn't grope your daughter and taked naked pictures of your wife (or spouse/significant other/etc.)...
The world is going to be very different when just China and India have reached our standards of living.
Literally impossible (barring technology beyond the stuff in Star Trek). The only way the US, China, and India can be at the same standards of living is if the US takes one hell of a crash and India and China stay pretty close to where they are... and even that would be unsustainable with modern technology.
I'm all out of chips... I lost them in the Indian casino :(
Actually, no... just... no. Social security and medicare and unemployment benefits and all those other social programs produce SOMETHING--they just don't produce anything you care about. The difference is profound.
Student loans and aid produce a more educated populace, medicare produces a higher life expectancy and acts as a valuable social safety net. Social security produces a reduction in impoverished people. These are benefits that are quantifiable and whose effects on society and the economy can be quantitatively analyzed and modeled. Likewise, the goal of national highways isn't to "produce some tangible good", it's to produce an a number of benefits: increased mobility for the military, enablement of increased economic activity, etc.
You can argue that these government functions are immoral, unconstitutional, too expensive, or better performed by other entities, but you can not simply assert that they produce no service.
Thank you, I really couldn't have said it better myself.
As one of those former AP students, I can say that I cheated a bit on the homework in exactly the types of classes you described. I never cheated on the tests, and my AP scores were my own. I even got a non-passing grade in one AP class despite rocking the AP exam because I disliked the workload and teaching style.
Because thanks to Republican propoganda, idiots think any government regulation is "communist" and evil,
And I guess liberals like you think that all regulation is always good, like requiring pat-downs if you don't accept a body scan? Or this blocking cell phones in cars?
You see, when you start to overgeneralize you simply end up looking like the idiot you are trying to make the scary "Other" look like.
No, the GP was 100% correct. The propaganda that fed this WAS from the Republicans. He didn't say "all Republicans think ___", he said "Republicans pushed this issue from this angle and now a certain segment of the population believes it".
You could just have hazard light activation automatically disable the jammer... that'd solve all sorts of problems, and make it far easier for cops to catch people.
Yeah, bombing a few sites is what's called an "act of war," in case you didn't know that.
I'm not AC, but... "act of war" doesn't necessarily mean it will result in a war.
I'm not saying that a strike would be effective, have a high probability of success, or not create other problems, but it is certainly possible to carry out a strike against a much weaker, non-nuclear opponent without sparking a war. That's one of the main reasons Iran wants nukes...
I know you're a troll, but... in this case, Iran actually is producing WMD. And they actually do have well-documented ties and support for terrorists.
Come to think of it, Iran is guilty of basically everything the US charged Iraq with.
I know someone who did similar work in the early/mid 1990s. He wasn't as good as the guy in the article purports to be; he seemed to mostly wind up doing glorified book reports for first-year English coeds.
...then thanks for the memories and thanks for passing my email address around to your friends. :-)
Did you frequently confuse the third and first person in those papers as well?
I know plenty of people who have done this, but it was usually for real sex. I think you got a raw deal, although that's based on my memory of STDs being relatively uncommon 15 years ago.
I agree with your assessment (GE requirements are skewed towards the humanities as part of a western/liberal education), but not entirely with your logic.
Based on the communication skills of some of the STEM graduates I know, I say there is no way in hell they all passed their humanities requirements without cheating. Additionally, those humanities requirements are pretty low level at a lot of schools. Very simple English, maybe a few semesters/quarters of another language, a little history, and they're about done... and I'd argue that nearly all of these classes teach skills that are vital to graduate/post-graduate-level work in all fields.
Humanities majors in most schools (well, all six of the colleges/universities I've experienced) do have basic science and math requirements as well. Perhaps not necessarily physics, but they most certainly had to pass a low-level natural science, some sort of life science, and a basic math course (probably statistics--and don't give me that "statistics isn't math" speel, I've heard it before). I'd say these courses are about as low-level as their humanities counter-parts that are required of STEM majors.
As for the overall skew, I do think it makes sense to have more humanities requirements than hard science/math requirements. Scholars in both the humanities and harder sciences need to master English and the related fields to publish their papers. Humanities scholars, however, have little need for physics or calculus. Most humanities rely on a good knowledge of statistics, and this seems to be about the average requirement for a humanities degree. It makes sense to me.
To be fair, nuclear was never cost effective. Without the government providing subsidized loans, waived liability, assistance in acquiring fuel, assistance in transporting and storing waste, paying for massive R&D in many directly and indirectly related fields, nuclear would never have been commercially viable.
The goal of nuclear power has always been energy independence, not cost effectiveness.
If you strip away all regulations AND all liability waivers AND all subsidies, I think you'll find wind to be far cheaper.
It's people's morals - often based on or at least supported by what you blithely dismiss as "fiction" - that stop us from doing those sorts of things.
Those of us that aren't sociopaths don't need religion to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Those who are sociopaths use religion as an excuse as often as it prevents them from harming others.
Indeed, but religion can allow (and even drive) an otherwise normal and mentally healthy person to commit terrible atrocities.
I'd argue that religion is one of the only systems in the history of the world that has so consistently made many of its practitioners indistinguishable from sociopaths.