How much longer can we burn carbon for fuel and do only "minor" damage to the environment? If we're going to switch away from gasoline, it makes sense to use the opportunity to switch away from carbon entirely.
Let's not forget what dumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere is going to do. Even if fracking could be done safely and cleanly, it won't matter if we end up with climates last seen in the Cretaceous period.
Please do not construe my criticism of conventional medicine as an endorsement of alternative medicine. Conventional medicine is largely bunk, alternative medicine is completely bunk.
Which is a great reason to disregard the opinion of audiophiles in favor of that of sound engineers. The problems with CD audio have nothing to do with the format (16bit 44.1khz audio is transparent to the human ear), and everything to do with mastering practices.
The reason working societies mostly make acting within the law the only accepted determination of "good" and "evil" are that these things can be relative.
Only if you define "working" as purely authoritarian. Many of our greatest leaders, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. have been law breakers. Allowing the law to replace your personal conscience is to utterly fail as a citizen. The law exists to serve us, not the other way around.
Ok, which? Laws against killing? Should an anti-abortion activist kill aborters? Too incendiary? Killing is absolute?
If you truly believe that abortion is murder, than I expect nothing less than guerilla warfare against the institutionalized massacre of children. The fact that we haven't seen this implies that the anti-choice community doesn't really believe what they say they do.
Yes, I get that. What astounds me is that Santorum apparently knows this, and has no problem torpedoing his parties chances at winning the general election.
Even if we assume that Manning was doing 'the right thing by [caring] about freedom of information, exposing war crimes, and holding the powerful responsible for their atrocities , his acts are those of a vigilante. Thus, his methods subvert his cause.
This right here is plain nonsense. Sometimes it's necessary to break the law to improve justice. When the law protects evil, working within the law is evil.
If, OTOH, he asked wikileaks for help... if JA helped him decide what to steal; how to steal it; how to cover his thefts, etc... if JA persuaded Manning to do as he did... well then he may well have participated in a crime (conspiracy; accessory; theft of data; unauthorized access) at a US military installation. Why would we want to support this?
Because the good outweighs the bad. Nobody can point to a single wrongful death caused by the Wikileaks dump. We can point to many wrongful deaths inappropriately covered up by the military.
Now it's not Bradley Manning's job to decide whether the good outweighs the bad. And it's not Julian Assange's either. But whoever's job it is, they have failed badly. We should be thanking Manning and Assange for bringing that to our attention.
In short, vigilantism is a symptom of a broken justice system. If you don't like vigilantism, you should be working to implement the kind of oversight that would make whistle blowers obsolete.
You assume that the countries in question still apply the rule of law. I don't know much about Sweden, but I know the US hasn't cared about the rule of law for a while now. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect the governments in question are quite a bit more lawless than most people want to admit.
You'd like to think so, but it's not. The US government is indeed in the habit of p(ro|er)secuting people who have done nothing wrong when it suits their interests. That is the world in which we live.
No matter who is in the White House, there's a very good chance WWIII will be started on his watch. There's not one plausible candidate, D or R who doesn't have warmongering with Iran as a major part of their foreign policy platform.
If anything, Obama is a bigger threat to world peace than Santorum. The cult of personality behind him has made most voters oblivious to the fact that he has doubled down on all the worst offenses of the Bush administration. Obama could ask for any power whatsoever, and the so-called "moderates" would hand it over to him just because he's "not Bush".
I'd be extremely surprised if we didn't see an Obama reelection shortly followed by a propaganda blitz extremely similar to what we saw in the lead up to Iraq. And he'll get away with it, because people are more concerned about their team winning, than not being hypocrits.
Drug companies spend more on marketing than they spend on research. Is it any surprise that these stories keep coming up? SSRIs were going to cure everyone's depression. Now we find out that they're addictive, and only effective in the very worst cases of depression. Vioxx was going to usher in a new age of pain relief for arthritis, turns out it killed tens of thousands of people. Hormone replacement therapy was considered essential to prevent osteoporosis in women. Turns out it also causes bone remodeling that makes certain types of fractures even more common. Don't be surprised if we find out in the future that wonder drugs like statins carry risks we haven't been made aware of.
Pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to market. Not to the general public, and not to doctors either.
If there's no punative component, then it would make economic sense for the petrochemical company to be negligent in all cases, and only fix the damage they cause when they're caught.
Why would Santorum want to engage Democrats in the Republican primary. He's the fringe right wing candidate. Romney is nigh indistinguishable from the Democratic incumbant. If a Democrat shows up at the Republican primary, the odds are very good that he'll vote Romney.
The only way I can see a Democrat voting for Santorum in the primary is to help Obama win in the general election. Is Santorum banking on his own unelectability to win the primary? Or is that reading too much into this?
You're right. Manning did aid the enemy. Anyone who cares about freedom of information, exposing war crimes, and holding the powerful responsible for their atrocities is now an enemy of the United States. If that's treason, thank god for treason.
Your argument, however, is nonsensical. Being a US citizen doesn't mean you're allowed to go to Germany and break their laws
I bolded the relevant point. Extraditing Assange to the US for breaking US law is like extraditing one of use to Germany for Holocaust denial. You don't have to like the act or the actor to understand that such an extradition would be unjust.
The difference is like the difference between butterflies and moths; frogs and toads. Sometimes it is easy to tell the difference- sometimes it isn't
The rules of thumb I've learned are pretty easy. If it holds its wings vertically at rest, and has smooth antennae, it's a butterfly. If it holds its wings flat at rest, and has furry antennae, it's a moth.
Frogs are smooth and slimey, live in water, and have protruding eyes on the top of their head to see from under the water. Toads have dry warty skin, can survive away from bodies of water, and their eyes are more internal.
Using these rules, I've never seen a butterfly, moth, frog, or toad that was hard to classify. I'm curious if they exist though. Examples?
Reagan bailed out the S&Ls, but at least he put a few hundred bank execs in jail. And that was a much smaller crisis with less egregious crimes. Bush/Obama discovered that part was optional.
For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12â"even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score.
How is the size of your bank account going to affect your behavior if you don't know you can get caught cheating?
Slashdot Mirror
How much longer can we burn carbon for fuel and do only "minor" damage to the environment? If we're going to switch away from gasoline, it makes sense to use the opportunity to switch away from carbon entirely.
Let's not forget what dumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere is going to do. Even if fracking could be done safely and cleanly, it won't matter if we end up with climates last seen in the Cretaceous period.
Please do not construe my criticism of conventional medicine as an endorsement of alternative medicine. Conventional medicine is largely bunk, alternative medicine is completely bunk.
Which is a great reason to disregard the opinion of audiophiles in favor of that of sound engineers. The problems with CD audio have nothing to do with the format (16bit 44.1khz audio is transparent to the human ear), and everything to do with mastering practices.
The reason working societies mostly make acting within the law the only accepted determination of "good" and "evil" are that these things can be relative.
Only if you define "working" as purely authoritarian. Many of our greatest leaders, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. have been law breakers. Allowing the law to replace your personal conscience is to utterly fail as a citizen. The law exists to serve us, not the other way around.
Ok, which? Laws against killing? Should an anti-abortion activist kill aborters? Too incendiary? Killing is absolute?
If you truly believe that abortion is murder, than I expect nothing less than guerilla warfare against the institutionalized massacre of children. The fact that we haven't seen this implies that the anti-choice community doesn't really believe what they say they do.
Yes, I get that. What astounds me is that Santorum apparently knows this, and has no problem torpedoing his parties chances at winning the general election.
Even if we assume that Manning was doing 'the right thing by [caring] about freedom of information, exposing war crimes, and holding the powerful responsible for their atrocities , his acts are those of a vigilante. Thus, his methods subvert his cause.
This right here is plain nonsense. Sometimes it's necessary to break the law to improve justice. When the law protects evil, working within the law is evil.
If, OTOH, he asked wikileaks for help... if JA helped him decide what to steal; how to steal it; how to cover his thefts, etc... if JA persuaded Manning to do as he did... well then he may well have participated in a crime (conspiracy; accessory; theft of data; unauthorized access) at a US military installation. Why would we want to support this?
Because the good outweighs the bad. Nobody can point to a single wrongful death caused by the Wikileaks dump. We can point to many wrongful deaths inappropriately covered up by the military.
Now it's not Bradley Manning's job to decide whether the good outweighs the bad. And it's not Julian Assange's either. But whoever's job it is, they have failed badly. We should be thanking Manning and Assange for bringing that to our attention.
In short, vigilantism is a symptom of a broken justice system. If you don't like vigilantism, you should be working to implement the kind of oversight that would make whistle blowers obsolete.
You assume that the countries in question still apply the rule of law. I don't know much about Sweden, but I know the US hasn't cared about the rule of law for a while now. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect the governments in question are quite a bit more lawless than most people want to admit.
Yes, the situation you described fits the parent post exactly. Said Russian spy would not and should not be extraditable to the US.
You'd like to think so, but it's not. The US government is indeed in the habit of p(ro|er)secuting people who have done nothing wrong when it suits their interests. That is the world in which we live.
No matter who is in the White House, there's a very good chance WWIII will be started on his watch. There's not one plausible candidate, D or R who doesn't have warmongering with Iran as a major part of their foreign policy platform.
If anything, Obama is a bigger threat to world peace than Santorum. The cult of personality behind him has made most voters oblivious to the fact that he has doubled down on all the worst offenses of the Bush administration. Obama could ask for any power whatsoever, and the so-called "moderates" would hand it over to him just because he's "not Bush".
I'd be extremely surprised if we didn't see an Obama reelection shortly followed by a propaganda blitz extremely similar to what we saw in the lead up to Iraq. And he'll get away with it, because people are more concerned about their team winning, than not being hypocrits.
Drug companies spend more on marketing than they spend on research. Is it any surprise that these stories keep coming up? SSRIs were going to cure everyone's depression. Now we find out that they're addictive, and only effective in the very worst cases of depression. Vioxx was going to usher in a new age of pain relief for arthritis, turns out it killed tens of thousands of people. Hormone replacement therapy was considered essential to prevent osteoporosis in women. Turns out it also causes bone remodeling that makes certain types of fractures even more common. Don't be surprised if we find out in the future that wonder drugs like statins carry risks we haven't been made aware of.
Pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to market. Not to the general public, and not to doctors either.
If there's no punative component, then it would make economic sense for the petrochemical company to be negligent in all cases, and only fix the damage they cause when they're caught.
All that means is that there hasn't been a victor yet. The real war is only now starting.
Why would Santorum want to engage Democrats in the Republican primary. He's the fringe right wing candidate. Romney is nigh indistinguishable from the Democratic incumbant. If a Democrat shows up at the Republican primary, the odds are very good that he'll vote Romney.
The only way I can see a Democrat voting for Santorum in the primary is to help Obama win in the general election. Is Santorum banking on his own unelectability to win the primary? Or is that reading too much into this?
No. With regular bits, you can only be in one state at once. Adding a bit doubles - 1 the number of states you are not in.
You're right. Manning did aid the enemy. Anyone who cares about freedom of information, exposing war crimes, and holding the powerful responsible for their atrocities is now an enemy of the United States. If that's treason, thank god for treason.
Your argument, however, is nonsensical. Being a US citizen doesn't mean you're allowed to go to Germany and break their laws
I bolded the relevant point. Extraditing Assange to the US for breaking US law is like extraditing one of use to Germany for Holocaust denial. You don't have to like the act or the actor to understand that such an extradition would be unjust.
I think you misunderstand. The ones who constantly give ground to the extreme right are no liberals at all.
The difference is like the difference between butterflies and moths; frogs and toads. Sometimes it is easy to tell the difference- sometimes it isn't
The rules of thumb I've learned are pretty easy. If it holds its wings vertically at rest, and has smooth antennae, it's a butterfly. If it holds its wings flat at rest, and has furry antennae, it's a moth.
Frogs are smooth and slimey, live in water, and have protruding eyes on the top of their head to see from under the water. Toads have dry warty skin, can survive away from bodies of water, and their eyes are more internal.
Using these rules, I've never seen a butterfly, moth, frog, or toad that was hard to classify. I'm curious if they exist though. Examples?
Criminalizing investigative journalism is exactly what they intend to do.
What makes you think the rule of law applies in America?
On a global scale, you may well discover that you are the 1%.
Why would that be a surprise to anyone? Economic equality is a good thing, no matter which percentile you occupy.
Reagan bailed out the S&Ls, but at least he put a few hundred bank execs in jail. And that was a much smaller crisis with less egregious crimes. Bush/Obama discovered that part was optional.
FTFA:
How is the size of your bank account going to affect your behavior if you don't know you can get caught cheating?