Whenever I run into an anti-nuke person nowadays, the first thing I do is explain radiation.
I explain that a certain amount is natural, and that radiation can be measured, quantified, and protected against.
I start telling them about how much radiation it takes to get sick or die from it, and tell them, proportionally, how little I get as a field operator at a nuke plant.
Then I tell them that used nuclear fuel becomes as radioactive as the ore it was drawn from after 400 years or so. (I honestly don't remember where I read this, I should verify it. Seems about right.)
Then I tell them that if my company would pay me a lease rate for the space, yes, I would store used nuclear fuel (in a storage cask) in my back yard or even basement.
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
It takes Days- as in two or three- to cool down a steam plant, even one attached to a nuclear power plant.
We do mine every 18 months, and in the 30 or so day's it's offline, we can take apart EVERYTHING, work it, and put it back together again. Our minimum refueling outage time is perhaps a couple weeks.
Most nuke plans run on an 18-24 month fuel cycle- 18 months is fairly typical and balances out the required maintanence vs cost of being offline. We do buy and use things meant to run for years at a time, because we want to cut costs.
It costs us well over a million dollars a day (maybe two) in lost revenue and additional staffing costs during a planned refueling outage.
Aside from that timeline problem your post is pretty accurate.
I don't see why this is so damn hard for people to get straight. ID is a topic for sunday school, and 6,000 year old literal biblical creationism is just plain silly.
Now there is a great deal of contempt for religion here on slashdot. I fathom this is for two reasons-first, the frequently embarrasing and damaging conduct of people who boisterously proclaim their faith, and second, a complete and utter ignorance of how religion and faith in God has been entirely necessary for our current civilization to arise. The former is obvious and explaining the latter to the religion-ignorant people on this website is beyond my scope. I just want to point out that maybe you shouldn't be so f*cking proud of how smart you are for thinking all religion is rubbish.
Let me start off with some bait for pretty much everyone in this thread- though it might get less tasty if you read on.
I believe God created the earth and everything on it.
There! I must be a knuckle dragging creationist, right?
But wait! Here's the rest:
I believe science is our best bet for deciphering how He did it.
We live in a cause-and-effect world, God or no God. He's not in the habit of miracle'ng our asses out of tight situations, or populating entire continents with new species over night. He lets good people get cancer, bad people go free, and little boys get raped by priests.
Why? Because, given a belief in God, the only way existence makes sense is if there are defined, unyielding physical rules and free will.
So the only way God could have created anything in such a world is if He set up the initial state and the 'rules' from the beginning to reach a certain endgame- the last 6,000 or so years of recorded history, if you will.
That, however, is a philosophical stance for which I can offer no evidence. Taking that particular stance neither detracts from nor adds to our understanding of the unyielding, physical laws that govern our daily lives.
The purpose of science is to discover and utilize the laws of nature. Saying "God did it" is all fine and dandy, but I want to know how God did it, given the cause-and-effect, physical rule based world we live in.
It must be so hard.... someone as galactically brilliant as you, consigned to powerlessly rage away at the keyboard. Why, if only everyone would listen to the guy who comes across as little more than a stereotypical, upset, aimless college sophomore, everything could be set right.
You're so befuddled with anger that you are unable to repeat anything other than tired, worn cliches, which are so overplayed that any shred of truth in any of them is lost in your unmitigated, impotent, blind keyboard tantrum.
I pity you, honestly. There's something broken in you. I'm certainly not saying all is right in the world or the US, only that a poisoned psyche is required to see things in such a universally dismal and angry manner.
There are many other flaws in your argument, which I wouldn't go into, but the whole idea that one is to conform contrary to ones belief because we need to "trick" the "stupid" people into conforming with the establishment is simply wrong, and sick, and contrary to all the principles that make humans human. We aren't slaves.
That's not the only reason, but it's a better starting point than trying to convince people on slashdot that there are personal beneficial reasons for keeping one's dick in one's pants.
I'll confess that I tailored the message to your average liberal slashdotter who thinks that support of their hedonistic indulgences should be the primary motivator in their voting choices.
Easier to convince them that not everyone can handle it than maybe they shouldn't do it in the first place. If you accused me of slyly talking down to stewbacca (?), you'd be right more than accusing me of trying to trick stupid people.
Besides, aren't there already rules that are supposed to ensure well-being of society? They are called "laws", and even most stupid people know that it's not very pleasant to break them without good reason.
You can't legislate everything, and shouldn't- but that doesn't mean much of the world isn't trying now. I think it's safe to say that these past few decades have seen an astronomical increase in laws regarding personal behavoir and family matters.
The reason for this increase is because social and religious pressures used to keep most people behaving in a manner that benefitted society. We have seen the breakdown of personal responsibility, the family unit and religion. Moreover, most people lately have been blind to the secular, humanist utility of those factors.
Instead of trying to build back up those social (but non-law) structures that help keep society together, they prescribe an ever-increasing billet of laws that regulate every bit of behavoir. (Smoking, transfats, child discipline and so on).
All these laws are now put in place because the old methods of ensuring these behavoirs has been dismissed as superstition and primitive- yet in their place we use the oppressive power of the state, which is far more inescapable than religion.
Only people who are weak minded enough to NEED god to send them down the straight and narrow think this way.
Uh, yeah. So you pretty much agree with me? The way things are set up isn't for the guidance of the intelligent and properly raised, but for the stupid and the marginally to poorly raised.
The need for the intelligent and properly raised to follow the same rules stems from the need to set an example for those unable to grasp right and wrong from a secular point of view.
There's a pretty good chance that stupid + poorly raised + no fear of eternal consequences == burden on society (crook, welfare, etc). The christian ideals are there to keep such people behaving in a largely constructive way.
You don't need the fear to do right, but others do. You don't need strict rules of sexual and relationship behavoir to prevent making burdensome offspring, but you do need to follow the same rules to set an example for those who aren't as capable as you.
The rest of us know right from wrong, irrespective of the oppressive norms forced down society's throat by church.
With respect to oppressive, I can't defend every implementation of the rules- and I said that up front.
The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals)
Christian ideals serve a functional purpose to society. This is quite often unknown to those who dismiss religion as superstition- the confuse debate about the source of the rules with the utility of the rules themselves. IE, "these rules came from the invisible sky wizard, but the invisible sky wizard doesn't exist, so we don't need to follow these rules."
Let me make a computer analogy for a moment. Intel turns out thousands and thousands of microprocessers each week, all with the same design and fabrication process. However, there are factors beyond their control that affect the reliable operating speed of any individual processor.
So they test each processor, sorting and selling them by the highest speed they can reliably operate at. They can do this because it only takes a second to test a processor.
What if it took 21 years to test them? What would they do?
They would have no responsible choice but to set the rated speed for all processors to the lowest ensurable speed. That might be as little as 1/4 of what it's capable of, but they can't discover that in any reasonable time frame. Such a process might result in a universal rating that's 1/3 below the average actual capability- but there's no other responsible way to do it with a 21 year testing cycle.
"Christian Ideal" rules are set, and blamed on God, as a way to instill guidelines by which even the born-stupid can live modestly sucessful lives.
The "Christian Ideal" rules that you denigrate are mostly the result of thousands of years of societal trial and error. They are rules designed to pass on the behavoirs that allow advanced societies- diligence, honesty, sexual restraint, etc. There are several other such values that escape me right now.
The actual point of blaming these restrictions on "God" is that you can't argue with Him, and you can't fight with Him, and He supposedly knows everything- so you damn well better listen.
The reason for needing "God" to enforce these rules is because understanding the utility of the rules is something children and young adults don't have the experience or education to understand. The need to obey the rules is something that must be taken on authority, because the young lack the prerequisites to grasp them.
Hell, plenty of adults in their 40's-60's don't even understand the origin of the rules.
The intelligent need (and always needed to) obey these rules to show societal leadership, and because there's no way to know if they have the capacity to safely deviate from them until a couple decades into their lives.
Now I can't always support the specific implementation of any particular "Christian Ideal" rule, but in general, they are rules that enable and advance society- they are the rules that got us to where we are today, and we've only started to abandon them (foolishly) in the past couple of generations.
So more than 650 THOUSAND (in the first three years of occupation) iraqi civilian deaths are not filling them?
The population of Iraq is about 26 million people. You claim 2.5% of the population has died due to the US invasion. (1 out of 40 people)
Don't suppose you have an impeachable source for that fanatastic claim, do you? Or maybe just some shoddy sampling surveys extrapolated to the entire country in the most non-conservative way possible, with the aim of politically embarassing the united states?
Well over a decade ago a TV show "Beyond Tommorow" (IIRC) had a working example of this sort of thing- but it was pretty different.
The featured system shot a wheeled, tethered sled under the car being chased and released the microwaves directly below the engine.
Much trickier to use, but unless Beyond Tommorow was taking cues from dateline, it functioned as advertised- and it makes a lot more sense that you'd be able to cause destructive intereference from directly under the engine than from behind the car at any distance.
It's telling your response is to deflect the coversation away from communism. Scientoligists do the same thing when their religion is under attack, and now that I'm attacking your religion, you do the same.
But saying "we're the nicest country around when it comes to committing atrocities" still seems like a weak defense to me.
I made no such statement on purpose. I spoke not of the actual goodness or evilness of the United States.
My aim was and is to remind people that the communist expirement is evil and wrong. These comments are dripping with moral relativism, multicultural mush, the abandonment of rational judgement and ignorance of communist attrocities.
All of these factors typically come with reflexive anti-americanism, so the USA must be mentioned in passing- but it is hardly my focus.
So the only possible explanation for these atrocities is the political-economic system in use at the time, and has nothing to do with other factors, such as the people actually in charge of said system? Sounds really rational to me.
Show me the national implementation of communism that hasn't involved the deaths of millions.
"The right people haven't been in charge yet." is the oldest excuse out there. How many more millions have to be murdered or starved to find the right people?
The communist philosophy is inherently flawed. This is demonstrated by the mass murder that accompanies every attempt to implement it.
While nukes are scary, they ain't half as scary as they would have been if only one side had them. Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?
It's worth noting that it would be far worse if the USSR was the sole nuclear power in the world. Any rational evaluation of the mass starvations and outright idealistic purges that mark communism can only conclude that it's wrong and evil.
Even today, 20 years after the fall of the wall, Ex-soviet bloc countries continue to pay the price of a soviet legacy.
"The United States is the source of all evil" passes for 'enlightenment' and 'educated' these days, but such a shallow stance doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny.
"Wrong" exists. "Evil" exists. Both exist outside of and regardless of the United States. It's not nuanced, it's not sophisticated, but when you take a look at Pol Pot's killing fields, Mao's mass starvation or soviet gulags there is no other conclusion.
There is a tendancy in these comments to paint the Soviet Union as a cuddly, legitimate alternative to the 'nasty US capitilistic-imperialistic hegemon of doom.' Such a stance is utterly naive and either blind to history or indifferent to communism's millions of internal victims.
See, we're at a standoff then, because I imagine you just want to attack whatever answer I give, and I want to see if you have a clue. Of course I'm only going to refer to things you have talked about...
BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO ANSWER MY QUESTION, I WANT YOU TO ANSWER.
Sure, you're eager to hear it (the causes of the peace that does exist)... and attack it. I don't want to play that game as I've played it a million times before.
I'll give you a hint, though, and see if that leads you down any sort of path. Another person responded to my post and pointed out that the presence of trade has a lot to do with maintaining peace.
The more trade countries do, the less likely they are to attack each other.
Trade, however, is merely a result of and reinforcement to the factors which create peace between nations.
Now that I've led you by the nose to the right path, can you fill in more details?
Are you admitting you don't know? There are many factors besides naked force (ICBM's, Nuke subs, etc) that ensure the peace between several nations.
Not liking to go to war doesn't ensure the peace I'm talking about either. For example, wether we like to go to war or not, attacking Britain, Australia, or hell, even France, is pretty much unthinkable.
So my test is to you: Why?
I'm not going to ask you a question and then answer it myself, as I'm not interested in my answer. I'm interested if peaceniks have any clue on how actual peace exists.
That exchange, however, relies on the existance of shared values and cultural practices that enable the movement of goods, services and money with a healthy amount of trust.
Yawn. Nothing I haven't read before. Your response is typical, but there's no point in carrying on a conversation on those matters unless you get the bigger picture.
So, I'll bring it up again. You skipped the part entirely about:
1. What enables & perpetuates the reliable peace that currently exists between dozens of nations on this planet?
That you ignored this reinforces my original point:
Peaceniks are unable to identify the prerequisites of current peace, and are therefor not credible speakers when it comes to trying to spread peace.
Folks like the parent poster (you?) are unable to identify what creates the peace that currently exists, and are therefor unqualified to comment on how to spread peace.
Maybe wait until there is actual proof these nations wish to launch rockets at the US/NATO.
Would a smoking crater that was a base or a city do? How about we just watch them chant 'death to america', watch them build nuclear weapons, and then make an inference based on data that's before us?
If you are suggesting that the US strikes before there is an actual threat then what is to stop other countries doing the same?
They're stopped by the knowledge that we have the capability and possibly the will to retaliate overwhelmingly. Power matters, and we have it. Might doesn't make right, but might does make..... drumroll..... might.
North Korea will have to launch because the US is a threat, same for everyone else.
Back to the aforementioned 'power matters.'
They attack us, they WILL be destroyed. They don't attack us, they MIGHT be destroyed. One might argue that equation isn't as valid for the sort of people who spawn suicide bombers, but Asians are generally known for being more circumspect.
There IS an alternative to shoot first & invent evidence later.
Sure there is. You're just ill-equipped to consider realistic alternatives.
I doubt you have evaluated the conditions that enable reliable, kume-by-ya-campfire-sing-a-long peace between a good 600-800 million people in the world. You are incapable of identifying the common values, principles, interests and practices that pretty much ensure the continued peaceful relations between Europe, the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and a whole bunch of other countries I'm forgetting about.
As you are unable, I imagine, to correctly identify what ensures the peace between so much of the world, you are unqualified to credibly issue alternatives to what you call 'shoot first and invent evidence later.'
You are welcome to prove me wrong about your inability to analyze the current peace that exists between so many nations. If you respond, I'm betting you'll drivel on about racism, exploitation of poor and or brown people and similar nonsense instead of showing you have an ounce of non-leftist thought.
Seriously. Dude. I'm already a citizen of CANADA. Don't flatter yourselves.
That's funny you say that, because the number of Canadians immigrating to the US is proportionally superior to the Americans immigrating to Canada, by a multiple no less.
Apparently,being a citizen of CANADA isn't all that it's cracked up to be for lots of folks.
Relevant to the discussion: English has hundreds of thousands of words. Some dictionaries have 500,000 words. Some estimate there are nearly 1,000,000 words in the language.
I'm reasonably sure that's a significantly higher word count than most, if not all, other languages. I know it's hard for some people to admit there are any advantages to being an english speaker (especially an anglo saxon one) but it just might be true on occasion.
I'd search for more substantiation than this slate article, but it's late and I should go to bed.
The point is that human beings don't have to live that way. We can decide to be reasonable and rational and agree to set rules on the competitions short of life and death battles to the death. We don't have to breed like rabbits, live like pigs, and ultimately die like dogs. We are human beings, and we can make choices and live by them.
The problem is when 'we' decide to be your version of 'reasonable and rational', that 'we' has to be the entire world.
It takes two parties to have a conflict, but it only takes one party to start one. Unless you're willing to let your throat get slit by the first savage that comes along with the thinnest pretext, there will come a time when all good, decent, and rational men must say "No further."
And if the other goes further, you kill them.
If you are willing to let your throat get slit by the first savage that comes along, you are not a good, decent, rational person. You are a jelly-spined sop without the confidence to realize that the western way of life is better, even if we aren't perfect.
Your kum-by-ya vision of humanity doesn't have a shot until all 6 billion people on this planet are perfect humans.
why does it matter if their American? I'm for saving lives period. I've lived on the other side of the great divide. I've been in the military. I've since decided that it's wrong to think about being just an American citizen and defending this country. To truly move forward we must think of ourselves as global citizens and care for all people. It's when we divide ourselves into groups (American, Iraqi, etc...) that we forget to see the humanity in others.
You should trademark that and try to sell it to hallmark. It might make a nice UN-day card to send to some savage who just performed an 'honor killing' on his sister for going outside with her ankles exposed.
Then maybe spend a few minutes thinking about how this 'global citizen' concept is working out with the UN and the EU as they try to do something resembling a global government, or at least a pretty big one.
Sorry bud, culture counts, some are better than others, and there are bad people out there. Add those things up and you get conflict. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I run into an anti-nuke person nowadays, the first thing I do is explain radiation.
I explain that a certain amount is natural, and that radiation can be measured, quantified, and protected against.
I start telling them about how much radiation it takes to get sick or die from it, and tell them, proportionally, how little I get as a field operator at a nuke plant.
Then I tell them that used nuclear fuel becomes as radioactive as the ore it was drawn from after 400 years or so. (I honestly don't remember where I read this, I should verify it. Seems about right.)
Then I tell them that if my company would pay me a lease rate for the space, yes, I would store used nuclear fuel (in a storage cask) in my back yard or even basement.
Usually, they don't have much to say after that.
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
It takes Days- as in two or three- to cool down a steam plant, even one attached to a nuclear power plant.
We do mine every 18 months, and in the 30 or so day's it's offline, we can take apart EVERYTHING, work it, and put it back together again. Our minimum refueling outage time is perhaps a couple weeks.
Most nuke plans run on an 18-24 month fuel cycle- 18 months is fairly typical and balances out the required maintanence vs cost of being offline. We do buy and use things meant to run for years at a time, because we want to cut costs.
It costs us well over a million dollars a day (maybe two) in lost revenue and additional staffing costs during a planned refueling outage.
Aside from that timeline problem your post is pretty accurate.
I don't see why this is so damn hard for people to get straight. ID is a topic for sunday school, and 6,000 year old literal biblical creationism is just plain silly.
Now there is a great deal of contempt for religion here on slashdot. I fathom this is for two reasons-first, the frequently embarrasing and damaging conduct of people who boisterously proclaim their faith, and second, a complete and utter ignorance of how religion and faith in God has been entirely necessary for our current civilization to arise. The former is obvious and explaining the latter to the religion-ignorant people on this website is beyond my scope. I just want to point out that maybe you shouldn't be so f*cking proud of how smart you are for thinking all religion is rubbish.
Let me start off with some bait for pretty much everyone in this thread- though it might get less tasty if you read on.
I believe God created the earth and everything on it.
There! I must be a knuckle dragging creationist, right?
But wait! Here's the rest:
I believe science is our best bet for deciphering how He did it.
We live in a cause-and-effect world, God or no God. He's not in the habit of miracle'ng our asses out of tight situations, or populating entire continents with new species over night. He lets good people get cancer, bad people go free, and little boys get raped by priests.
Why? Because, given a belief in God, the only way existence makes sense is if there are defined, unyielding physical rules and free will.
So the only way God could have created anything in such a world is if He set up the initial state and the 'rules' from the beginning to reach a certain endgame- the last 6,000 or so years of recorded history, if you will.
That, however, is a philosophical stance for which I can offer no evidence. Taking that particular stance neither detracts from nor adds to our understanding of the unyielding, physical laws that govern our daily lives.
The purpose of science is to discover and utilize the laws of nature. Saying "God did it" is all fine and dandy, but I want to know how God did it, given the cause-and-effect, physical rule based world we live in.
It must be so hard.... someone as galactically brilliant as you, consigned to powerlessly rage away at the keyboard. Why, if only everyone would listen to the guy who comes across as little more than a stereotypical, upset, aimless college sophomore, everything could be set right.
You're so befuddled with anger that you are unable to repeat anything other than tired, worn cliches, which are so overplayed that any shred of truth in any of them is lost in your unmitigated, impotent, blind keyboard tantrum.
I pity you, honestly. There's something broken in you. I'm certainly not saying all is right in the world or the US, only that a poisoned psyche is required to see things in such a universally dismal and angry manner.
There are many other flaws in your argument, which I wouldn't go into, but the whole idea that one is to conform contrary to ones belief because we need to "trick" the "stupid" people into conforming with the establishment is simply wrong, and sick, and contrary to all the principles that make humans human. We aren't slaves.
That's not the only reason, but it's a better starting point than trying to convince people on slashdot that there are personal beneficial reasons for keeping one's dick in one's pants.
I'll confess that I tailored the message to your average liberal slashdotter who thinks that support of their hedonistic indulgences should be the primary motivator in their voting choices.
Easier to convince them that not everyone can handle it than maybe they shouldn't do it in the first place. If you accused me of slyly talking down to stewbacca (?), you'd be right more than accusing me of trying to trick stupid people.
Besides, aren't there already rules that are supposed to ensure well-being of society? They are called "laws", and even most stupid people know that it's not very pleasant to break them without good reason.
You can't legislate everything, and shouldn't- but that doesn't mean much of the world isn't trying now. I think it's safe to say that these past few decades have seen an astronomical increase in laws regarding personal behavoir and family matters.
The reason for this increase is because social and religious pressures used to keep most people behaving in a manner that benefitted society. We have seen the breakdown of personal responsibility, the family unit and religion. Moreover, most people lately have been blind to the secular, humanist utility of those factors.
Instead of trying to build back up those social (but non-law) structures that help keep society together, they prescribe an ever-increasing billet of laws that regulate every bit of behavoir. (Smoking, transfats, child discipline and so on).
All these laws are now put in place because the old methods of ensuring these behavoirs has been dismissed as superstition and primitive- yet in their place we use the oppressive power of the state, which is far more inescapable than religion.
Only people who are weak minded enough to NEED god to send them down the straight and narrow think this way.
Uh, yeah. So you pretty much agree with me? The way things are set up isn't for the guidance of the intelligent and properly raised, but for the stupid and the marginally to poorly raised.
The need for the intelligent and properly raised to follow the same rules stems from the need to set an example for those unable to grasp right and wrong from a secular point of view.
There's a pretty good chance that stupid + poorly raised + no fear of eternal consequences == burden on society (crook, welfare, etc). The christian ideals are there to keep such people behaving in a largely constructive way.
You don't need the fear to do right, but others do. You don't need strict rules of sexual and relationship behavoir to prevent making burdensome offspring, but you do need to follow the same rules to set an example for those who aren't as capable as you.
The rest of us know right from wrong, irrespective of the oppressive norms forced down society's throat by church.
With respect to oppressive, I can't defend every implementation of the rules- and I said that up front.
The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals)
Christian ideals serve a functional purpose to society. This is quite often unknown to those who dismiss religion as superstition- the confuse debate about the source of the rules with the utility of the rules themselves. IE, "these rules came from the invisible sky wizard, but the invisible sky wizard doesn't exist, so we don't need to follow these rules."
Let me make a computer analogy for a moment. Intel turns out thousands and thousands of microprocessers each week, all with the same design and fabrication process. However, there are factors beyond their control that affect the reliable operating speed of any individual processor.
So they test each processor, sorting and selling them by the highest speed they can reliably operate at. They can do this because it only takes a second to test a processor.
What if it took 21 years to test them? What would they do?
They would have no responsible choice but to set the rated speed for all processors to the lowest ensurable speed. That might be as little as 1/4 of what it's capable of, but they can't discover that in any reasonable time frame. Such a process might result in a universal rating that's 1/3 below the average actual capability- but there's no other responsible way to do it with a 21 year testing cycle.
"Christian Ideal" rules are set, and blamed on God, as a way to instill guidelines by which even the born-stupid can live modestly sucessful lives.
The "Christian Ideal" rules that you denigrate are mostly the result of thousands of years of societal trial and error. They are rules designed to pass on the behavoirs that allow advanced societies- diligence, honesty, sexual restraint, etc. There are several other such values that escape me right now.
The actual point of blaming these restrictions on "God" is that you can't argue with Him, and you can't fight with Him, and He supposedly knows everything- so you damn well better listen.
The reason for needing "God" to enforce these rules is because understanding the utility of the rules is something children and young adults don't have the experience or education to understand. The need to obey the rules is something that must be taken on authority, because the young lack the prerequisites to grasp them.
Hell, plenty of adults in their 40's-60's don't even understand the origin of the rules.
The intelligent need (and always needed to) obey these rules to show societal leadership, and because there's no way to know if they have the capacity to safely deviate from them until a couple decades into their lives.
Now I can't always support the specific implementation of any particular "Christian Ideal" rule, but in general, they are rules that enable and advance society- they are the rules that got us to where we are today, and we've only started to abandon them (foolishly) in the past couple of generations.
So more than 650 THOUSAND (in the first three years of occupation) iraqi civilian deaths are not filling them?
The population of Iraq is about 26 million people. You claim 2.5% of the population has died due to the US invasion. (1 out of 40 people)
Don't suppose you have an impeachable source for that fanatastic claim, do you? Or maybe just some shoddy sampling surveys extrapolated to the entire country in the most non-conservative way possible, with the aim of politically embarassing the united states?
What's your margin of error on that? 99%?
Well over a decade ago a TV show "Beyond Tommorow" (IIRC) had a working example of this sort of thing- but it was pretty different.
The featured system shot a wheeled, tethered sled under the car being chased and released the microwaves directly below the engine.
Much trickier to use, but unless Beyond Tommorow was taking cues from dateline, it functioned as advertised- and it makes a lot more sense that you'd be able to cause destructive intereference from directly under the engine than from behind the car at any distance.
It's telling your response is to deflect the coversation away from communism. Scientoligists do the same thing when their religion is under attack, and now that I'm attacking your religion, you do the same.
Pathetic.
But saying "we're the nicest country around when it comes to committing atrocities" still seems like a weak defense to me.
I made no such statement on purpose. I spoke not of the actual goodness or evilness of the United States.
My aim was and is to remind people that the communist expirement is evil and wrong. These comments are dripping with moral relativism, multicultural mush, the abandonment of rational judgement and ignorance of communist attrocities.
All of these factors typically come with reflexive anti-americanism, so the USA must be mentioned in passing- but it is hardly my focus.
So the only possible explanation for these atrocities is the political-economic system in use at the time, and has nothing to do with other factors, such as the people actually in charge of said system? Sounds really rational to me.
Show me the national implementation of communism that hasn't involved the deaths of millions.
"The right people haven't been in charge yet." is the oldest excuse out there. How many more millions have to be murdered or starved to find the right people?
The communist philosophy is inherently flawed. This is demonstrated by the mass murder that accompanies every attempt to implement it.
While nukes are scary, they ain't half as scary as they would have been if only one side had them. Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?
It's worth noting that it would be far worse if the USSR was the sole nuclear power in the world. Any rational evaluation of the mass starvations and outright idealistic purges that mark communism can only conclude that it's wrong and evil.
Even today, 20 years after the fall of the wall, Ex-soviet bloc countries continue to pay the price of a soviet legacy.
"The United States is the source of all evil" passes for 'enlightenment' and 'educated' these days, but such a shallow stance doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny.
"Wrong" exists. "Evil" exists. Both exist outside of and regardless of the United States. It's not nuanced, it's not sophisticated, but when you take a look at Pol Pot's killing fields, Mao's mass starvation or soviet gulags there is no other conclusion.
There is a tendancy in these comments to paint the Soviet Union as a cuddly, legitimate alternative to the 'nasty US capitilistic-imperialistic hegemon of doom.' Such a stance is utterly naive and either blind to history or indifferent to communism's millions of internal victims.
See, we're at a standoff then, because I imagine you just want to attack whatever answer I give, and I want to see if you have a clue. Of course I'm only going to refer to things you have talked about...
BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO ANSWER MY QUESTION, I WANT YOU TO ANSWER.
Sure, you're eager to hear it (the causes of the peace that does exist)... and attack it. I don't want to play that game as I've played it a million times before.
I'll give you a hint, though, and see if that leads you down any sort of path.
Another person responded to my post and pointed out that the presence of trade has a lot to do with maintaining peace.
The more trade countries do, the less likely they are to attack each other.
Trade, however, is merely a result of and reinforcement to the factors which create peace between nations.
Now that I've led you by the nose to the right path, can you fill in more details?
What kind of LCD "locks up"?
I have never, ever seen that happen.
Are you admitting you don't know? There are many factors besides naked force (ICBM's, Nuke subs, etc) that ensure the peace between several nations.
Not liking to go to war doesn't ensure the peace I'm talking about either. For example, wether we like to go to war or not, attacking Britain, Australia, or hell, even France, is pretty much unthinkable.
So my test is to you: Why?
I'm not going to ask you a question and then answer it myself, as I'm not interested in my answer. I'm interested if peaceniks have any clue on how actual peace exists.
That's a significant part of it, yes.
That exchange, however, relies on the existance of shared values and cultural practices that enable the movement of goods, services and money with a healthy amount of trust.
Yawn. Nothing I haven't read before. Your response is typical, but there's no point in carrying on a conversation on those matters unless you get the bigger picture.
So, I'll bring it up again. You skipped the part entirely about:
1. What enables & perpetuates the reliable peace that currently exists between dozens of nations on this planet?
That you ignored this reinforces my original point:
Peaceniks are unable to identify the prerequisites of current peace, and are therefor not credible speakers when it comes to trying to spread peace.
That's what I expected.
Folks like the parent poster (you?) are unable to identify what creates the peace that currently exists, and are therefor unqualified to comment on how to spread peace.
Maybe wait until there is actual proof these nations wish to launch rockets at the US/NATO.
Would a smoking crater that was a base or a city do? How about we just watch them chant 'death to america', watch them build nuclear weapons, and then make an inference based on data that's before us?
If you are suggesting that the US strikes before there is an actual threat then what is to stop other countries doing the same?
They're stopped by the knowledge that we have the capability and possibly the will to retaliate overwhelmingly. Power matters, and we have it. Might doesn't make right, but might does make..... drumroll..... might.
North Korea will have to launch because the US is a threat, same for everyone else.
Back to the aforementioned 'power matters.'
They attack us, they WILL be destroyed.
They don't attack us, they MIGHT be destroyed.
One might argue that equation isn't as valid for the sort of people who spawn suicide bombers, but Asians are generally known for being more circumspect.
There IS an alternative to shoot first & invent evidence later.
Sure there is. You're just ill-equipped to consider realistic alternatives.
I doubt you have evaluated the conditions that enable reliable, kume-by-ya-campfire-sing-a-long peace between a good 600-800 million people in the world. You are incapable of identifying the common values, principles, interests and practices that pretty much ensure the continued peaceful relations between Europe, the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and a whole bunch of other countries I'm forgetting about.
As you are unable, I imagine, to correctly identify what ensures the peace between so much of the world, you are unqualified to credibly issue alternatives to what you call 'shoot first and invent evidence later.'
You are welcome to prove me wrong about your inability to analyze the current peace that exists between so many nations. If you respond, I'm betting you'll drivel on about racism, exploitation of poor and or brown people and similar nonsense instead of showing you have an ounce of non-leftist thought.
Seriously. Dude. I'm already a citizen of CANADA. Don't flatter yourselves.
That's funny you say that, because the number of Canadians immigrating to the US is proportionally superior to the Americans immigrating to Canada, by a multiple no less.
Apparently,being a citizen of CANADA isn't all that it's cracked up to be for lots of folks.
So don't flatter yourself.
Relevant to the discussion: English has hundreds of thousands of words. Some dictionaries have 500,000 words. Some estimate there are nearly 1,000,000 words in the language.
I'm reasonably sure that's a significantly higher word count than most, if not all, other languages. I know it's hard for some people to admit there are any advantages to being an english speaker (especially an anglo saxon one) but it just might be true on occasion.
I'd search for more substantiation than this slate article, but it's late and I should go to bed.
http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/
They're easily a match for Islamists in evil intent to non believers
Perhaps, but they have the 'benefit' of being all talk and no action.
The point is that human beings don't have to live that way. We can decide to be reasonable and rational and agree to set rules on the competitions short of life and death battles to the death. We don't have to breed like rabbits, live like pigs, and ultimately die like dogs. We are human beings, and we can make choices and live by them.
The problem is when 'we' decide to be your version of 'reasonable and rational', that 'we' has to be the entire world.
It takes two parties to have a conflict, but it only takes one party to start one. Unless you're willing to let your throat get slit by the first savage that comes along with the thinnest pretext, there will come a time when all good, decent, and rational men must say "No further."
And if the other goes further, you kill them.
If you are willing to let your throat get slit by the first savage that comes along, you are not a good, decent, rational person. You are a jelly-spined sop without the confidence to realize that the western way of life is better, even if we aren't perfect.
Your kum-by-ya vision of humanity doesn't have a shot until all 6 billion people on this planet are perfect humans.
why does it matter if their American? I'm for saving lives period. I've lived on the other side of the great divide. I've been in the military. I've since decided that it's wrong to think about being just an American citizen and defending this country. To truly move forward we must think of ourselves as global citizens and care for all people. It's when we divide ourselves into groups (American, Iraqi, etc...) that we forget to see the humanity in others.
You should trademark that and try to sell it to hallmark. It might make a nice UN-day card to send to some savage who just performed an 'honor killing' on his sister for going outside with her ankles exposed.
Then maybe spend a few minutes thinking about how this 'global citizen' concept is working out with the UN and the EU as they try to do something resembling a global government, or at least a pretty big one.
Sorry bud, culture counts, some are better than others, and there are bad people out there. Add those things up and you get conflict. Only the dead have seen the end of war.