True, and well put. The point (and, no, I haven't read all 800 messages, so maybe this is redundant) is to pull Israel into a ground assault, which Hamas hopes will goad Egypt to engage in a ground war against Israel. I suppose Hamas is calculating that Israel's internal political pressure will force it to "fight back" on the ground, and Egypt's newly-discovered internal political pressure will force it to get involved. I imagine that there are Egyptian friends of Hamas who are telling them to go ahead, attack Israel, now is the time, Egypt is ready to join you in a jihad.
Let's hope Hamas and its Egyptian freinds are wrong. Let's hope, in short, that they are being gypped.
I don't think he was attacking Fox News, just comparing TAL's journalistic ethics favorably with those of Fox News.
Also, TAL's sin wasn't what I'd call a "massive lie". The remarkable part of this retraction is that the "lie" was actually rather subtle, yet TAL is treating it very seriously, because they have journalistic ethics. The reason it's relevant to bring up Fox News is to show that, by comparison with fully journalistic entities, TAL (which is only partially journalistic) has the highest of ethical standards, and is doing this retraction the way other entities, such as Fox News, should do them.
The lies were not "massive". They involved events that DID occur, just not all to the story-teller, Daisey. There *were* factory workers building Apple products who were poisoned by hexane. That's well-known. Daisey's lie was to say he met them. There *were* underage workers. Again, Daisey's lie was to say he was introduced to them. In the pursuit of a more dramatic story, he definitely pumped it up, introducing ironies, like the factory worker seeing the iPad for the first time and calling it "magic." That never happened. That's a lie, if you like, but no way it's a "massive" lie.
Moreover, if Daisey's crafting a story by embellishing the truth with story-telling elements serves to help Chinese workers get small, incremental improvements in their working conditions, that's good.
Yes. As you say, this brings up interesting issues on abortion. When do people begin and end? I suspect it has something to do with when brains begin and end. They most certainly do not begin as a blastocyst... And when the brain begins, it's not even necessarily a human person, it might be an electronic person, or even a cetacean person. Who knows?
As to where this takes us in abortion policy, that's also interesting. When there's a sufficiently developed brain, does a state interest begin in that unborn person? Or should the state interest, libertarian-style, always take a back seat to the parent's liberty? [NB: by libertarian, I mean a principled libertarian, not a modern Republican "libertarian"]
I kind of like the early Christian policy, which is that the baby is not a person until it becomes "ensouled", which, by tradition, occurs a month after birth. In that month, the mother has the right of life and death, much like the Roman paterfamilias.
Cordwainer Smith is fabulous. I think he was an ambassador to China (or something like that) and he had very interesting thoughts about how China would explore other planets.
One of my favorites is "Dimension of Miracles" by Robert Sheckley. Kind of a mess - the last part reads as if he used material he dug out of his trunk - but wonderfully fun to read. Amazed this hasn't been made into a SyFy series yet.
1) I don't see why a professor can't tell their fundamentalist students that just because a process looks random to us, doesn't mean a supernatural omnipotent being might not be pulling strings behind the scenes... can't be disproven (and isn't science) but might keep them in class.
2) My favorite story about Islam and science is from a conference on nuclear physics in Pakistan in the 80's - they had a talk about the role ifrits played in nuclear fission.
Why not! Jinn and ifrits might lie behind all phenomena!
I'm obviously missing something here, maybe with the word "legitimate". Many private citizens, as well as corporate "persons" project force all the time, with enough legitimacy that the state looks the other way. Just look at union-busters. Companies hired thugs (purely descriptive term; these were actual violent criminals, not hard-working, law-abiding rent-a-cops) to supplement their own security forces' efforts to bust strikers' heads.
POINT BEING, I can hire a wide variety of private, armed, security forces if I can afford them, and "project force". If I'm important enough to the leadership of the local government, I can so so with impunity. And "impunity" and "legitimacy" are so close as to be indistinguishable.
To sum up (awkwardly, I'm afraid), private violence is often permitted by the state (see lynch mobs, for instance) thus de facto legitimizing them.
I completed my BA in Physics at Columbia, but dropped out of grad school at Berkeley. It was less that I was badly prepared, and more that I was just... young, immature, scared, and lonely. My academics were good, but I was badly prepared socially, and I didn't know how, or who, to ask for help with emotional issues. I don't know if it's the proper purview of school to help with that sort of thing, but it would have helped me a lot.
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True, and well put. The point (and, no, I haven't read all 800 messages, so maybe this is redundant) is to pull Israel into a ground assault, which Hamas hopes will goad Egypt to engage in a ground war against Israel. I suppose Hamas is calculating that Israel's internal political pressure will force it to "fight back" on the ground, and Egypt's newly-discovered internal political pressure will force it to get involved. I imagine that there are Egyptian friends of Hamas who are telling them to go ahead, attack Israel, now is the time, Egypt is ready to join you in a jihad. Let's hope Hamas and its Egyptian freinds are wrong. Let's hope, in short, that they are being gypped.
I don't think he was attacking Fox News, just comparing TAL's journalistic ethics favorably with those of Fox News. Also, TAL's sin wasn't what I'd call a "massive lie". The remarkable part of this retraction is that the "lie" was actually rather subtle, yet TAL is treating it very seriously, because they have journalistic ethics. The reason it's relevant to bring up Fox News is to show that, by comparison with fully journalistic entities, TAL (which is only partially journalistic) has the highest of ethical standards, and is doing this retraction the way other entities, such as Fox News, should do them. The lies were not "massive". They involved events that DID occur, just not all to the story-teller, Daisey. There *were* factory workers building Apple products who were poisoned by hexane. That's well-known. Daisey's lie was to say he met them. There *were* underage workers. Again, Daisey's lie was to say he was introduced to them. In the pursuit of a more dramatic story, he definitely pumped it up, introducing ironies, like the factory worker seeing the iPad for the first time and calling it "magic." That never happened. That's a lie, if you like, but no way it's a "massive" lie. Moreover, if Daisey's crafting a story by embellishing the truth with story-telling elements serves to help Chinese workers get small, incremental improvements in their working conditions, that's good.
Yes. As you say, this brings up interesting issues on abortion. When do people begin and end? I suspect it has something to do with when brains begin and end. They most certainly do not begin as a blastocyst... And when the brain begins, it's not even necessarily a human person, it might be an electronic person, or even a cetacean person. Who knows? As to where this takes us in abortion policy, that's also interesting. When there's a sufficiently developed brain, does a state interest begin in that unborn person? Or should the state interest, libertarian-style, always take a back seat to the parent's liberty? [NB: by libertarian, I mean a principled libertarian, not a modern Republican "libertarian"] I kind of like the early Christian policy, which is that the baby is not a person until it becomes "ensouled", which, by tradition, occurs a month after birth. In that month, the mother has the right of life and death, much like the Roman paterfamilias.
Cordwainer Smith is fabulous. I think he was an ambassador to China (or something like that) and he had very interesting thoughts about how China would explore other planets. One of my favorites is "Dimension of Miracles" by Robert Sheckley. Kind of a mess - the last part reads as if he used material he dug out of his trunk - but wonderfully fun to read. Amazed this hasn't been made into a SyFy series yet.
1) I don't see why a professor can't tell their fundamentalist students that just because a process looks random to us, doesn't mean a supernatural omnipotent being might not be pulling strings behind the scenes... can't be disproven (and isn't science) but might keep them in class. 2) My favorite story about Islam and science is from a conference on nuclear physics in Pakistan in the 80's - they had a talk about the role ifrits played in nuclear fission. Why not! Jinn and ifrits might lie behind all phenomena!
I'm obviously missing something here, maybe with the word "legitimate". Many private citizens, as well as corporate "persons" project force all the time, with enough legitimacy that the state looks the other way. Just look at union-busters. Companies hired thugs (purely descriptive term; these were actual violent criminals, not hard-working, law-abiding rent-a-cops) to supplement their own security forces' efforts to bust strikers' heads. POINT BEING, I can hire a wide variety of private, armed, security forces if I can afford them, and "project force". If I'm important enough to the leadership of the local government, I can so so with impunity. And "impunity" and "legitimacy" are so close as to be indistinguishable. To sum up (awkwardly, I'm afraid), private violence is often permitted by the state (see lynch mobs, for instance) thus de facto legitimizing them.
I completed my BA in Physics at Columbia, but dropped out of grad school at Berkeley. It was less that I was badly prepared, and more that I was just... young, immature, scared, and lonely. My academics were good, but I was badly prepared socially, and I didn't know how, or who, to ask for help with emotional issues. I don't know if it's the proper purview of school to help with that sort of thing, but it would have helped me a lot.