It's been known for years, if not decades, that parasites can influence their hosts' behavior to the benefit of the parasite. There are flukes (genus Leucochloridium)with a life cycle that involves being transmitted from snails to other animals—the fluke affects the snail's brain and causes the snail to become light-seeking rather than light-avoiding, which means the snails climb to the tops of plants, where they are easy prey for birds—the next host in the fluke's life cycle. More about that (and the evolutionary logic behind it) here. Another fluke has a similar life cycle involving ants, which it drives to the tops of grass blades where they can be eaten by sheep (which again become its next hosts).
A more obvious example might be rabies—animals with rabies ("mad dogs", most famously) have an irrational tendency to attack and bite other animals, unprovoked—which is how rabies is spread.
If you build a house by Lake Erie, you're going to have to shovel some snow. The federal government doesn't help you. If you build a house in the caldera of Kilauea, it's going to burn down or be encased in lava on a daily basis. The federal government still shouldn't help you—you should move somewhere safer. Clearly the Gulf Coast is somewhere in between, but I'd apply the same thinking—if the costs of living somewhere can be paid by the people who live there, they should be. If it's impractical to expect anyone to live there without external subsidies, they should probably move.
Do you honestly believe that the probable cost of damage due to natural disasters in Florida/California/Alaska/wherever over the next, say, ten years, exceeds the probable economic product of the state over that period?
If California is capable of paying for its own problems, let it. I think it is. If you think California is incapable of maintaining itself, then yes, it should probably be depopulated, rather than exist as a permanent economic drain on the rest of the country. (As it is, the population of LA increases by 25 people each day, while the population of Detroit decreases by two. California could raise its taxes quite a bit before it managed to stop growing, let alone depopulate itself.)
I'm not saying they shouldn't send federal troops in to help save lives—but federal money to rebuild homes and businesses? You can lose a home to fire in Cleveland, so you get fire insurance. If you live in California, get earthquake insurance. Live on the floodplain of the Mississippi? Get flood insurance. Don't expect a guy who lives in Detroit and may not have seen an ocean in years to help pay when your coastal home washes away.
I grew up in Cleveland, where the weather is often unpleasant, but never catastrophic. A few feet of snow, the occasional tornado—that's about as bad as it gets. But people still take measures to protect their homes, and to keep the city running. They pay for insurance against fire, they pay taxes to fund local fire departments and snowplows. Paying for snow removal is part of the cost of living along the Great Lakes; they don't expect people in Savannah or San Diego to help pay someone to clear their driveways.
That makes sense to me. And like it or not, dealing with floods and hurricanes is part of the cost of living on the Gulf Coast. It's possible for people to insure their homes against hurricane damage; it would be possible for municipal governments in the South to put aside money for dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes. If they aren't willing to do so, why should people in Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo (who deal with shitty weather all winter) have to subsidize them? None of those cities has exactly been an economic powerhouse lately. If your only reasoning is that dealing with hurricanes is really, really expensive, I'd say that's all the more reason not to continue providing incentives for people to live in hurricane-prone areas.
Assuming that what you want happens, and federal aid for disaster relief becomes a thing of the past, what are the effects? You seem to assert that people will simply not wish to live with the risk, so they'll move.
As it stands, people are moving out of the Midwest and into the South at a pretty good clip. Maybe if city taxes and home insurance rates were forced to reflect the real costs of living in those areas, that trend would slow down. Maybe not; either way I don't know that it would be a bad thing. I'm not against all disaster relief—if a volcano erupts in the middle of Des Moines tomorrow, some federal money might be a good idea. But hurricanes on the Gulf Coast are about as unexpected as sunny days in Phoenix and snowstorms in Buffalo—and no one expects the Federal government to pay for sunscreen and snow shovels.
The article you point to says nothing about Rumsfeld or the US selling weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. What it does say is that US firms sold helicopters to Iraq, in deals facilitated by the US government, during a period when Iraq was known to be using chemical weapons.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but when you make false claims (and then link to a source that shows your claim to be false!) you accomplish little but to discredit yourself and your position.
If the science is good, the historical oppression of women is irrelevant. If the science is bad, the historical oppression of women is, again, irrelevant.
My own experience doesn't suggest that women are particularly any more or less intelligent than men. What I do notice is that women seem to have a much harder time making the distinction between what they want to be true and what the evidence suggests is true. Men are much more likely (in my experience) to respect the validity of intellectual positions that run counter to their gut feelings.
Your post is a perfect example: you aren't saying, "here's why this study is poorly designed", you're saying, "here's why I object to the conclusions of this study"—whether or not they are correct. Which I see as completely beside the point.
He also claims that White people are more intelligent than black...
Which is entirely possible. Clearly the claim is not that every white person is more intelligent than every black person—we know that isn't true. But it may be that on average, whites are more intelligent. Or it may be that blacks are, on average, more intelligent. There's no conclusive evidence either way, and it wouldn't be a particularly meaningful discovery if there were—there's no reason the average intelligence levels of somewhat arbitrary groupings of people should affect individuals' legal rights, or school admissions, or anything else. But I don't see why we should rule out the possibility that there are such statistical differences, just because it is unpleasant to think so.
Am I allowed to say that Dutch people are taller than, say, Peruvians? Again, there are certainly people in the Netherlands who are shorter than most anyone in Peru, but the Dutch are, on average, taller. There are lots of statistically significant differences between racial, ethnic, and national groups—it might be more surprising if every ethnic group on the planet did have precisely the same mean intelligence. If there are race-correlated differences in facial features and body type, why shouldn't there be differences in the brain?
If you would like to argue instead that "intelligence", unlike height, is not a unified quantity or one that can be objectively measured, then you may have a point. But for any more objective subcategory of intelligence you might choose to measure (some specific skill, like memorization, or mental rotation of objects) there is still the possibility that there will be racial differences in average ability. Again, such a finding wouldn't mean much—clearly the differences between racial groups are pretty well swamped by the variance within groups—but I'm not aware of any a priori reason to believe that all racial groups are statistically identical in all mental characteristics, when they obviously tend to differ in physical characteristics.
And, incidentally, "you really just wanna piss on the head of this guy"? This is what passes for discourse here?
In general male bell curves are wider than women's... It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable.
I don't think it's so likely to be the "stability" of the X chromosome that makes a difference as the fact that men only have one of them. With only one X (and one Y), recessive traits will be expressed in men that would be suppressed by a dominant gene on the matching chromosome in women. Often those traits are bad things—color-blindness, hemophilia—but a recessive, X-linked tendency to greater intelligence will also be expressed more often in men than in women. That seems like an obvious explanation for why you might see more variance in all sorts of things among men than among women.
Nicely put. You'd probably like Philip K. Dick's short story, "The Pre-Persons", if you haven't already read it.
Macka and others who frame abortion as the simple, obvious right of the woman involved are presupposing that the fetus has no rights of its own, which should be a (if not the) central question in the debate over abortion. (Also, those who take the "her body, her life" position should, to be consistent, support legalized prostitution. I don't know how many of them do.)
Unless, of course, you claim that "a fetus is not a human being" and has the same rights as, say, a fly.
I don't see why humanness, for ethical purposes, should be a discontinuous, either-or variable. Clearly it is unreasonable to say that a 38-week fetus has the rights of a fly, while a newborn baby has the same rights as you, me, and Abe Vigoda, but it doesn't make much more sense to extend those same rights all the way back to the mindless, microscopic fertilized egg. I would say that factors like the ability to feel pain, to fear death, and to enjoy life are more relevant than any arbitrary, excluded-middle definition of humanity.
Personally I'd say that late-term abortion is sometimes wrong, and infanticide is sometimes right. Location (in or out of the womb) is not in itself a factor with ethical relevance.
Anyway, I'd guess there's quite a bit I disagree with you about, but you're dead on about the lack of rational debate, at least.
Scientifically, an embryo is, strictly speaking "human life"
Ever heard of "HeLa cells"? A woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, but her cancer cells have been cultured ever since. They are, strictly speaking, "human life"—they are genetically human, and they are indisputably alive—but it's hard for me to imagine what ethically significant distinction could be made between HeLa cells and any single-celled organism—say, Escherichia coli.
so, when and why is it ok to end such life, regardless of the state it may be in?
I find it difficult to understand why genetic "humanness" should be ethically relevant; embryos are no more able to feel pain, or fear, or to regret their deaths, than are HeLa cells, or stem cells, or the millions of skin cells I shed each day. Embryos do have the potential to develop into walking, conscious humans—but, with advances in cloning technology, so will every cell in my body (save erythrocytes and sperm).
Why should we not examine the important ethical questions?
Certainly we should. But to imagine that it is human molecules rather than human consciousness that define humanness is to engage in magical thinking, not ethical reasoning.
Speaking of which—
The ethical considerations are important: should we also clone humans?
Assuming the problem of telomere damage is dealt with, human clones will be equivalent to time-delayed twins (natural clones), so the question "should we clone humans?" is essentially equivalent to the question, "should we have children?". If we are [creating clones/having kids] to harvest their organs, or to "replace" dead children, then there are certainly ethical questions to answer. But cloning, per se, is not the primary issue. The ethical questions that relate to cloning as such derive from the unknown health consequences—clones may be prone to cancer and premature ageing. But substantially the same ethical concerns apply to any medical experimentation involving reproduction or children.
I do not dismiss all of Unitarianism as non-Christian. I've gone regularly to a Unitarian Universalist church for most of my life; I'm well aware of the history of Unitarianism, and that there are plenty of Christian Unitarians—Transylvania is full of them, for instance. But Unitarianism in colonial New England around the time of the Enlightenment was closely allied with Deism.
Most of your argument seems to go on the assumption that if a particular "founder" didn't wear his religion on his sleeve it was therefore in question.
And you seem to make the assumption that if a founder did not publicly proclaim his unbelief, he must have been a Christian. I would say that any claim is and should be in question, when there is not sufficient evidence to firmly decide it. (Which is, I suppose, the definition of agnosticism.)
55 delegates to the constitutional convention, how many were unquestionably deists?
Three (and one Methodist, as it turns out). Ben Franklin, James Wilson, and Hugh Williamson. Or rather, those three delegates are generally identified as having been deists. I don't know about "unquestionably deists"—but, as I've pointed out, none of our first six presidents were "unquestionably" Christian, which makes that an awkward standard for you to use.
At any rate, you are correct that most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were Christian, as was most of the electorate of the time. On the other hand, deists and those with probable deist leanings were unusually well represented among the leading statesmen and intellectuals.
As the first Methodist church was founded in 1784 I find it very unlikely that you will find any Methodists among our founding fathers.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Tom Paine were deists, and Paine's deism in particular was viciously opposed to Christianity (flip through his Age of Reason if you'd like to see how thoroughly irreligious his brand of deism was). Madison described himself as a deist, and John and John Quincy Adams were Unitarians (which is to say they denied the divinity of Jesus, but still went to church—essentially they were better-organized Deists). Washington's religious beliefs are unclear; he avoided saying much about religion, but there is some evidence that his beliefs leaned toward deism as well. The same is true of Monroe. So among our first six presidents you have two deists, two probable deists, and two Unitarians, none of whom appear to have been Christians in any particularly meaningful sense.
Add to them Franklin, Paine, and Ethan Allen, all deists—the only unambiguous Christian I can think of among the major figures is Alexander Hamilton.
The situation is slightly confused by the fact that many of those men (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe)were baptised and raised as Anglicans (or Episcopalians, if you like)—it was, after all, the established church of England, and of the colony of Virginia. Jefferson and Madison explicitly rejected Anglican beliefs as adults; Washington and Monroe (and no doubt others) were less outspoken, but were, at the very least, not particularly devout.
You are correct that there were no atheists, though Jefferson and Paine were repeatedly accused of atheism because they were not Christian.
I realize it's gauche to reply twice to the same comment, but there were a couple things I didn't answer:
What did E=MC2 give us the past 100 years?
It's a fact (approximately) about the nature of the universe. It doesn't need to give us anything. What did the discovery of the planet Neptune do for us? Nothing practical, but I think knowledge is worth seeking for its own sake.
What I think is more useful from E=MC2 is the idea of relativity. It is true, not just for science, but for almost every field of study.
If by "the idea of relativity" you mean, roughly, "there are no privileged inertial frames of reference", then I have a hard time imagining what bearing that idea has on, say, art history, or comparative religion. If you just mean that "everything is relative", then I'd say that your idea of relativity has very little to do with Einstein, and is probably too vague to be much use in any other field, either.
I don't know if I fully believe that energy equals mass... To take mass, and BANG, the mass is gone and there is energy, does not ring true to me.
And Newton's first law of motion didn't ring true to Aristotle—clearly objects in motion tend to come to a stop if nothing is pushing them. Our intuition about how the universe works is based on our limited experience of medium-sized objects moving at low speeds on the earth's surface, with the result that all physics post-Aristotle is more or less counterintuitive. The fact that you can't imagine it doesn't mean it isn't so.
It is both. All fifty states, including the "Commonwealth States" (Massachusets, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) are referred to as states in the U.S. Constitution ("We the people of the United States..."), but those four states call themselves commonwealths in their own constitutions. There is no difference in status or political structure between soi-disant "Commonwealths" and other states. You may call Virginia a commonwealth, but it is incorrect (and pointlessly pedantic, not that I'm one to criticize that) to say that it is not a state.
And education costs money, for books, for teacher salaries, for building maintenance, for new computers... It's not as though the revenue would be going into the school board members' pockets. So yes, the board's mandate is to educate, not to distribute electronics at low, low prices—and the county would be better equipped to educate if its schools were better funded, which they would be if the county didn't give away assets (originally purchased with taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on education) on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Wait—you're attempting to discredit an entire line of political and economic analysis by quoting an unrelated statement made by the emperor of Austria early in the last century? And pointing to the abysmal judgement of a political leader (an emperor, at that), as an argument for the virtues of top-down government control?
If only there were a "non-sequiturial, unintentionally ironic, ad hominem argument" moderation option.
I would love to see if out-of-print music is available on some legal download services, such as out-of-print albums and b-sides, but I doubt there is anything on these services you can't find in Circuit City or the mall...
Unfortunately that seems to be the case. A lot of the albums (and books) I'm looking for are out of print (or available only as expensive imports from Japan). I don't really understand why this is true - everyone would benefit from having the music available for download, since I'd be able to find the music I want, and the rights-holders would be making money off the music, which they aren't doing when no one can buy it.
I can understand that there are some costs involved when you're dealing with master tapes that have been sitting in a box for decades - but take, for example Os Mutantes - a somewhat legendary Brazilian psychedelic album (to the extent that there is such a thing) that was in print as recently as 1999 - now it's out of print again, and people are paying $40 for used copies. I'm sure many of those people would rather pay $10 for a CD-quality download.
Same goes for books, for that matter; I've sometimes been tempted to steal books from libraries that I know are long out of print, and pay for them as lost.
Maybe copyright laws should modified so that if a work is out of print for a certain period of time (say ten years) it provisionally enters the public domain, and can be freely distributed until the copyright holders reclaim their rights by making the work available again. That way those who hold the rights would still be able to profit from their work, but wouldn't be able to keep it from being distributed even when they weren't selling it.
There's no reason for anything to be out of print, when all it costs to keep an album "in print" is 600 MB of storage space.
While I mostly agree with the people writing to lament the death of the album, I'd also point out that iTunes does not always let you buy songs individually - and when it requires you to buy a whole album, the cost is still about the same as buying a physical CD.
The first album I thought to check iTunes for was Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, since it's a single, album-length song on CD (divided into two sides on vinyl). ITunes didn't have that album (again, the selection is quite limited, which is the main reason I don't use it much), so I tried Yes's Close to the Edge - three songs on the album (plus bonus tracks on the latest remaster). As usual, iTunes won't let you buy the >10 min. tracks individually, and the album as a whole costs $9.99. Then I checked Amazon for the same version of the same album, and I can get it for $10.99, with art and liner notes, and without DRM. The only advantage to iTunes, in this case, is instant gratification.
If your argument is that iTunes prices are effectively better because most people are really buying an album for the two or three songs they like, and ($.99*3) is less than they'd pay for the CD - then why does iTunes still need to charge $10 when you are buying the whole album?
But Canibus doesn't say "per (linear) inch", he says "$5 per square inch". So yes, (40-5)/5=7, but that means we're dealing with a penis with seven inches of surface area, not one that's seven inches long.
An average penis of about 6" length and 1.5" diameter would have a surface area of 25 or 30 square inches, and the cost for servicing would be more like $140, not including the "tip". For a more precise estimate you might want to model the shape as a cylinder surmounted by a hemisphere.
Interesting article - but how could they leave out the godfather of nerdcore, MC Stephen Hawking?
Instead they mention (ex-CS major) Canibus, who has an obvious interest in math but is spectacularly bad at it: on one song he makes the embarrassing claim that he is "your worst nightmare squared/that's double, for niggas who ain't mathematically aware"; on another another he gives us the story problem, "if a bitch sucks yo' dick/for five dollars per square inch/and gets forty dollars including a five dollar tip/how big was the dick she just sucked?" - which can't be solved without making some assumptions about dick shape, but I'd say that the dick in question was about three inches long, which probably wasn't what Canibus had in mind.
Yes, and there were the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Sedition Act of 1918, and the McCarthy "witch-hunts", and a certain amount of "hate crimes" legislation and campaign finance regulation that concern me today - but to my knowledge there are, in the United States, no ideas which it is illegal to express. That is not the case in much of Europe: Germany, Austria, and France (at least) have laws against denying the Holocaust, and several European countries have (rarely enforced) laws against blasphemy or insulting religious beliefs (as do some U.S. states, though those laws are void because they are superceded by the first amendment to our constitution). I'll stand by my assertion: legally, practically, and certainly historically, the U.S. does have stronger protection for the expression of ideas than most of Europe (again, despite our continued puritanism when it comes to "obscenity").
I did appreciate your witticism re "Free Speech Zones", though; sorry if you didn't mean to provoke a serious response.
"In Germany... it is illegal to promote Nazi ideology. In many European countries [France, for one], it is illegal to deny the reality of the Holocaust."
Similarly, Mein Kampfcannot be sold in the Netherlands, and there seem to be some restrictions on its sale in Germany.
I understand the desire to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, but it seems like a dangerous precedent to outlaw historical claims, however absurd. And banning books is something you'd think Germany in particular would be wary about.
Nazism aside, there's Poland, where "[a]s of 2005, people are sometimes convicted... for insults to religious feeling", and the Republic of Ireland, where "the constitution explicitly requires that the publication of 'blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter' be a criminal offence." "Blasphemous matter"? Anyway, that's what Wikipedia turns up on the subject.
The U.S. has an embarrassing history when it comes to obcenity laws, but we do have stronger protection for political speech than most (if not all) of Europe.
If you actually read the article you'll see that he was sitting outside someone's house in his SUV using his laptop.
Hell, I've done that once in a while - mostly to check mapquest, to figure out how to get the rest of the way to wherever I was driving. I don't see that as particularly different from using the glow of someone's porch light to read a paper map from my car.
For that matter, I wouldn't ordinarily know whose wireless I'm using - If I'm stopped for a long time in front of someone's house, using the connection from one of their neighbors, or a coffee shop down the street, the owner of the house might still be uncomfortable - in which case I'd hope he would ask me to move, rather than calling the police. On the other hand, if I were sitting outside in a public park, using the wireless connection from a house in the area, I don't anyone would have cause to complain, even if I visited the park "for the sole purpose of leeching off [the] internet connection". If the owner of the access point is broadcasting his signal into public areas and doesn't want it used, he should put a password on it.
I thought the article was needlessly sensationalistic, too - the man was "furtively hunched over his computer"? Maybe he's just nearsighted.
Or again:
People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.
And people have used "the internet" and "the U.S. Postal Service" to do all those things, too. And they sometimes just use wireless (sorry, "the cloak of wireless") to check their email and mapquest some directions.
I was disappointed by the medical marijuana ruling too, but the decision was in line with sixty years of precedent in related cases (look up Wickard v. Filburn) - and all the justices, left or right, constructionist or not, to some extent acknowledge the value of consistency in law. So the problem in that case was weighing constructionist logic against respect for precedent - stare decisis. The most important case ever in extending the scope of federal power was McCulloch v. Maryland, back in 1819, and for all I know Scalia disagrees with the logic of that decision, but he's not going to try to overturn it, because an awful lot of what our government does today is predicated on that decision - as are nearly two centuries of subsequent Court decisions. Whereas very little law, and none of our government's structure, is based on the Roe decision (which most constructionists would like to overturn).
So - I don't entirely disagree, but the conservative justices are not, in my opinion, as cynical or as partisan as you think.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been known for years, if not decades, that parasites can influence their hosts' behavior to the benefit of the parasite. There are flukes (genus Leucochloridium)with a life cycle that involves being transmitted from snails to other animals—the fluke affects the snail's brain and causes the snail to become light-seeking rather than light-avoiding, which means the snails climb to the tops of plants, where they are easy prey for birds—the next host in the fluke's life cycle. More about that (and the evolutionary logic behind it) here. Another fluke has a similar life cycle involving ants, which it drives to the tops of grass blades where they can be eaten by sheep (which again become its next hosts).
A more obvious example might be rabies—animals with rabies ("mad dogs", most famously) have an irrational tendency to attack and bite other animals, unprovoked—which is how rabies is spread.
If you build a house by Lake Erie, you're going to have to shovel some snow. The federal government doesn't help you. If you build a house in the caldera of Kilauea, it's going to burn down or be encased in lava on a daily basis. The federal government still shouldn't help you—you should move somewhere safer. Clearly the Gulf Coast is somewhere in between, but I'd apply the same thinking—if the costs of living somewhere can be paid by the people who live there, they should be. If it's impractical to expect anyone to live there without external subsidies, they should probably move.
Do you honestly believe that the probable cost of damage due to natural disasters in Florida/California/Alaska/wherever over the next, say, ten years, exceeds the probable economic product of the state over that period?
If California is capable of paying for its own problems, let it. I think it is. If you think California is incapable of maintaining itself, then yes, it should probably be depopulated, rather than exist as a permanent economic drain on the rest of the country. (As it is, the population of LA increases by 25 people each day, while the population of Detroit decreases by two. California could raise its taxes quite a bit before it managed to stop growing, let alone depopulate itself.)
I'm not saying they shouldn't send federal troops in to help save lives—but federal money to rebuild homes and businesses? You can lose a home to fire in Cleveland, so you get fire insurance. If you live in California, get earthquake insurance. Live on the floodplain of the Mississippi? Get flood insurance. Don't expect a guy who lives in Detroit and may not have seen an ocean in years to help pay when your coastal home washes away.
I grew up in Cleveland, where the weather is often unpleasant, but never catastrophic. A few feet of snow, the occasional tornado—that's about as bad as it gets. But people still take measures to protect their homes, and to keep the city running. They pay for insurance against fire, they pay taxes to fund local fire departments and snowplows. Paying for snow removal is part of the cost of living along the Great Lakes; they don't expect people in Savannah or San Diego to help pay someone to clear their driveways.
That makes sense to me. And like it or not, dealing with floods and hurricanes is part of the cost of living on the Gulf Coast. It's possible for people to insure their homes against hurricane damage; it would be possible for municipal governments in the South to put aside money for dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes. If they aren't willing to do so, why should people in Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo (who deal with shitty weather all winter) have to subsidize them? None of those cities has exactly been an economic powerhouse lately. If your only reasoning is that dealing with hurricanes is really, really expensive, I'd say that's all the more reason not to continue providing incentives for people to live in hurricane-prone areas.
Assuming that what you want happens, and federal aid for disaster relief becomes a thing of the past, what are the effects? You seem to assert that people will simply not wish to live with the risk, so they'll move.
As it stands, people are moving out of the Midwest and into the South at a pretty good clip. Maybe if city taxes and home insurance rates were forced to reflect the real costs of living in those areas, that trend would slow down. Maybe not; either way I don't know that it would be a bad thing. I'm not against all disaster relief—if a volcano erupts in the middle of Des Moines tomorrow, some federal money might be a good idea. But hurricanes on the Gulf Coast are about as unexpected as sunny days in Phoenix and snowstorms in Buffalo—and no one expects the Federal government to pay for sunscreen and snow shovels.
The article you point to says nothing about Rumsfeld or the US selling weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. What it does say is that US firms sold helicopters to Iraq, in deals facilitated by the US government, during a period when Iraq was known to be using chemical weapons.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but when you make false claims (and then link to a source that shows your claim to be false!) you accomplish little but to discredit yourself and your position.
If the science is good, the historical oppression of women is irrelevant. If the science is bad, the historical oppression of women is, again, irrelevant.
My own experience doesn't suggest that women are particularly any more or less intelligent than men. What I do notice is that women seem to have a much harder time making the distinction between what they want to be true and what the evidence suggests is true. Men are much more likely (in my experience) to respect the validity of intellectual positions that run counter to their gut feelings.
Your post is a perfect example: you aren't saying, "here's why this study is poorly designed", you're saying, "here's why I object to the conclusions of this study"—whether or not they are correct. Which I see as completely beside the point.
He also claims that White people are more intelligent than black...
Which is entirely possible. Clearly the claim is not that every white person is more intelligent than every black person—we know that isn't true. But it may be that on average, whites are more intelligent. Or it may be that blacks are, on average, more intelligent. There's no conclusive evidence either way, and it wouldn't be a particularly meaningful discovery if there were—there's no reason the average intelligence levels of somewhat arbitrary groupings of people should affect individuals' legal rights, or school admissions, or anything else. But I don't see why we should rule out the possibility that there are such statistical differences, just because it is unpleasant to think so.
Am I allowed to say that Dutch people are taller than, say, Peruvians? Again, there are certainly people in the Netherlands who are shorter than most anyone in Peru, but the Dutch are, on average, taller. There are lots of statistically significant differences between racial, ethnic, and national groups—it might be more surprising if every ethnic group on the planet did have precisely the same mean intelligence. If there are race-correlated differences in facial features and body type, why shouldn't there be differences in the brain?
If you would like to argue instead that "intelligence", unlike height, is not a unified quantity or one that can be objectively measured, then you may have a point. But for any more objective subcategory of intelligence you might choose to measure (some specific skill, like memorization, or mental rotation of objects) there is still the possibility that there will be racial differences in average ability. Again, such a finding wouldn't mean much—clearly the differences between racial groups are pretty well swamped by the variance within groups—but I'm not aware of any a priori reason to believe that all racial groups are statistically identical in all mental characteristics, when they obviously tend to differ in physical characteristics.
And, incidentally, "you really just wanna piss on the head of this guy"? This is what passes for discourse here?
In general male bell curves are wider than women's... It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable.
I don't think it's so likely to be the "stability" of the X chromosome that makes a difference as the fact that men only have one of them. With only one X (and one Y), recessive traits will be expressed in men that would be suppressed by a dominant gene on the matching chromosome in women. Often those traits are bad things—color-blindness, hemophilia—but a recessive, X-linked tendency to greater intelligence will also be expressed more often in men than in women. That seems like an obvious explanation for why you might see more variance in all sorts of things among men than among women.
Nicely put. You'd probably like Philip K. Dick's short story, "The Pre-Persons", if you haven't already read it.
Macka and others who frame abortion as the simple, obvious right of the woman involved are presupposing that the fetus has no rights of its own, which should be a (if not the) central question in the debate over abortion. (Also, those who take the "her body, her life" position should, to be consistent, support legalized prostitution. I don't know how many of them do.)
Unless, of course, you claim that "a fetus is not a human being" and has the same rights as, say, a fly.
I don't see why humanness, for ethical purposes, should be a discontinuous, either-or variable. Clearly it is unreasonable to say that a 38-week fetus has the rights of a fly, while a newborn baby has the same rights as you, me, and Abe Vigoda, but it doesn't make much more sense to extend those same rights all the way back to the mindless, microscopic fertilized egg. I would say that factors like the ability to feel pain, to fear death, and to enjoy life are more relevant than any arbitrary, excluded-middle definition of humanity.
Personally I'd say that late-term abortion is sometimes wrong, and infanticide is sometimes right. Location (in or out of the womb) is not in itself a factor with ethical relevance.
Anyway, I'd guess there's quite a bit I disagree with you about, but you're dead on about the lack of rational debate, at least.
Scientifically, an embryo is, strictly speaking "human life"
Ever heard of "HeLa cells"? A woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, but her cancer cells have been cultured ever since. They are, strictly speaking, "human life"—they are genetically human, and they are indisputably alive—but it's hard for me to imagine what ethically significant distinction could be made between HeLa cells and any single-celled organism—say, Escherichia coli.
so, when and why is it ok to end such life, regardless of the state it may be in?
I find it difficult to understand why genetic "humanness" should be ethically relevant; embryos are no more able to feel pain, or fear, or to regret their deaths, than are HeLa cells, or stem cells, or the millions of skin cells I shed each day. Embryos do have the potential to develop into walking, conscious humans—but, with advances in cloning technology, so will every cell in my body (save erythrocytes and sperm).
Why should we not examine the important ethical questions?
Certainly we should. But to imagine that it is human molecules rather than human consciousness that define humanness is to engage in magical thinking, not ethical reasoning.
Speaking of which—
The ethical considerations are important: should we also clone humans?
Assuming the problem of telomere damage is dealt with, human clones will be equivalent to time-delayed twins (natural clones), so the question "should we clone humans?" is essentially equivalent to the question, "should we have children?". If we are [creating clones/having kids] to harvest their organs, or to "replace" dead children, then there are certainly ethical questions to answer. But cloning, per se, is not the primary issue. The ethical questions that relate to cloning as such derive from the unknown health consequences—clones may be prone to cancer and premature ageing. But substantially the same ethical concerns apply to any medical experimentation involving reproduction or children.
I do not dismiss all of Unitarianism as non-Christian. I've gone regularly to a Unitarian Universalist church for most of my life; I'm well aware of the history of Unitarianism, and that there are plenty of Christian Unitarians—Transylvania is full of them, for instance. But Unitarianism in colonial New England around the time of the Enlightenment was closely allied with Deism.
Most of your argument seems to go on the assumption that if a particular "founder" didn't wear his religion on his sleeve it was therefore in question.
And you seem to make the assumption that if a founder did not publicly proclaim his unbelief, he must have been a Christian. I would say that any claim is and should be in question, when there is not sufficient evidence to firmly decide it. (Which is, I suppose, the definition of agnosticism.)
55 delegates to the constitutional convention, how many were unquestionably deists?
Three (and one Methodist, as it turns out). Ben Franklin, James Wilson, and Hugh Williamson. Or rather, those three delegates are generally identified as having been deists. I don't know about "unquestionably deists"—but, as I've pointed out, none of our first six presidents were "unquestionably" Christian, which makes that an awkward standard for you to use.
At any rate, you are correct that most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were Christian, as was most of the electorate of the time. On the other hand, deists and those with probable deist leanings were unusually well represented among the leading statesmen and intellectuals.
As the first Methodist church was founded in 1784 I find it very unlikely that you will find any Methodists among our founding fathers.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Tom Paine were deists, and Paine's deism in particular was viciously opposed to Christianity (flip through his Age of Reason if you'd like to see how thoroughly irreligious his brand of deism was). Madison described himself as a deist, and John and John Quincy Adams were Unitarians (which is to say they denied the divinity of Jesus, but still went to church—essentially they were better-organized Deists). Washington's religious beliefs are unclear; he avoided saying much about religion, but there is some evidence that his beliefs leaned toward deism as well. The same is true of Monroe. So among our first six presidents you have two deists, two probable deists, and two Unitarians, none of whom appear to have been Christians in any particularly meaningful sense.
Add to them Franklin, Paine, and Ethan Allen, all deists—the only unambiguous Christian I can think of among the major figures is Alexander Hamilton.
The situation is slightly confused by the fact that many of those men (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe)were baptised and raised as Anglicans (or Episcopalians, if you like)—it was, after all, the established church of England, and of the colony of Virginia. Jefferson and Madison explicitly rejected Anglican beliefs as adults; Washington and Monroe (and no doubt others) were less outspoken, but were, at the very least, not particularly devout.
You are correct that there were no atheists, though Jefferson and Paine were repeatedly accused of atheism because they were not Christian.
See also wikipedia's list of U.S. Presidential religious affiliations.
I realize it's gauche to reply twice to the same comment, but there were a couple things I didn't answer:
What did E=MC2 give us the past 100 years?
It's a fact (approximately) about the nature of the universe. It doesn't need to give us anything. What did the discovery of the planet Neptune do for us? Nothing practical, but I think knowledge is worth seeking for its own sake.
What I think is more useful from E=MC2 is the idea of relativity. It is true, not just for science, but for almost every field of study.
If by "the idea of relativity" you mean, roughly, "there are no privileged inertial frames of reference", then I have a hard time imagining what bearing that idea has on, say, art history, or comparative religion. If you just mean that "everything is relative", then I'd say that your idea of relativity has very little to do with Einstein, and is probably too vague to be much use in any other field, either.
I don't know if I fully believe that energy equals mass... To take mass, and BANG, the mass is gone and there is energy, does not ring true to me.
And Newton's first law of motion didn't ring true to Aristotle—clearly objects in motion tend to come to a stop if nothing is pushing them. Our intuition about how the universe works is based on our limited experience of medium-sized objects moving at low speeds on the earth's surface, with the result that all physics post-Aristotle is more or less counterintuitive. The fact that you can't imagine it doesn't mean it isn't so.
Virginia is not a state. It's a Commonwealth.
It is both. All fifty states, including the "Commonwealth States" (Massachusets, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) are referred to as states in the U.S. Constitution ("We the people of the United States..."), but those four states call themselves commonwealths in their own constitutions. There is no difference in status or political structure between soi-disant "Commonwealths" and other states. You may call Virginia a commonwealth, but it is incorrect (and pointlessly pedantic, not that I'm one to criticize that) to say that it is not a state.
And education costs money, for books, for teacher salaries, for building maintenance, for new computers... It's not as though the revenue would be going into the school board members' pockets. So yes, the board's mandate is to educate, not to distribute electronics at low, low prices—and the county would be better equipped to educate if its schools were better funded, which they would be if the county didn't give away assets (originally purchased with taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on education) on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Wait—you're attempting to discredit an entire line of political and economic analysis by quoting an unrelated statement made by the emperor of Austria early in the last century? And pointing to the abysmal judgement of a political leader (an emperor, at that), as an argument for the virtues of top-down government control?
If only there were a "non-sequiturial, unintentionally ironic, ad hominem argument" moderation option.
I would love to see if out-of-print music is available on some legal download services, such as out-of-print albums and b-sides, but I doubt there is anything on these services you can't find in Circuit City or the mall...
Unfortunately that seems to be the case. A lot of the albums (and books) I'm looking for are out of print (or available only as expensive imports from Japan). I don't really understand why this is true - everyone would benefit from having the music available for download, since I'd be able to find the music I want, and the rights-holders would be making money off the music, which they aren't doing when no one can buy it.
I can understand that there are some costs involved when you're dealing with master tapes that have been sitting in a box for decades - but take, for example Os Mutantes - a somewhat legendary Brazilian psychedelic album (to the extent that there is such a thing) that was in print as recently as 1999 - now it's out of print again, and people are paying $40 for used copies. I'm sure many of those people would rather pay $10 for a CD-quality download.
Same goes for books, for that matter; I've sometimes been tempted to steal books from libraries that I know are long out of print, and pay for them as lost.
Maybe copyright laws should modified so that if a work is out of print for a certain period of time (say ten years) it provisionally enters the public domain, and can be freely distributed until the copyright holders reclaim their rights by making the work available again. That way those who hold the rights would still be able to profit from their work, but wouldn't be able to keep it from being distributed even when they weren't selling it.
There's no reason for anything to be out of print, when all it costs to keep an album "in print" is 600 MB of storage space.
While I mostly agree with the people writing to lament the death of the album, I'd also point out that iTunes does not always let you buy songs individually - and when it requires you to buy a whole album, the cost is still about the same as buying a physical CD.
The first album I thought to check iTunes for was Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, since it's a single, album-length song on CD (divided into two sides on vinyl). ITunes didn't have that album (again, the selection is quite limited, which is the main reason I don't use it much), so I tried Yes's Close to the Edge - three songs on the album (plus bonus tracks on the latest remaster). As usual, iTunes won't let you buy the >10 min. tracks individually, and the album as a whole costs $9.99. Then I checked Amazon for the same version of the same album, and I can get it for $10.99, with art and liner notes, and without DRM. The only advantage to iTunes, in this case, is instant gratification.
If your argument is that iTunes prices are effectively better because most people are really buying an album for the two or three songs they like, and ($.99*3) is less than they'd pay for the CD - then why does iTunes still need to charge $10 when you are buying the whole album?
But Canibus doesn't say "per (linear) inch", he says "$5 per square inch". So yes, (40-5)/5=7, but that means we're dealing with a penis with seven inches of surface area, not one that's seven inches long.
An average penis of about 6" length and 1.5" diameter would have a surface area of 25 or 30 square inches, and the cost for servicing would be more like $140, not including the "tip". For a more precise estimate you might want to model the shape as a cylinder surmounted by a hemisphere.
Interesting article - but how could they leave out the godfather of nerdcore, MC Stephen Hawking?
Instead they mention (ex-CS major) Canibus, who has an obvious interest in math but is spectacularly bad at it: on one song he makes the embarrassing claim that he is "your worst nightmare squared/that's double, for niggas who ain't mathematically aware"; on another another he gives us the story problem, "if a bitch sucks yo' dick/for five dollars per square inch/and gets forty dollars including a five dollar tip/how big was the dick she just sucked?" - which can't be solved without making some assumptions about dick shape, but I'd say that the dick in question was about three inches long, which probably wasn't what Canibus had in mind.
Yes, and there were the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Sedition Act of 1918, and the McCarthy "witch-hunts", and a certain amount of "hate crimes" legislation and campaign finance regulation that concern me today - but to my knowledge there are, in the United States, no ideas which it is illegal to express. That is not the case in much of Europe: Germany, Austria, and France (at least) have laws against denying the Holocaust, and several European countries have (rarely enforced) laws against blasphemy or insulting religious beliefs (as do some U.S. states, though those laws are void because they are superceded by the first amendment to our constitution). I'll stand by my assertion: legally, practically, and certainly historically, the U.S. does have stronger protection for the expression of ideas than most of Europe (again, despite our continued puritanism when it comes to "obscenity").
I did appreciate your witticism re "Free Speech Zones", though; sorry if you didn't mean to provoke a serious response.
According to the ADL:
"In Germany... it is illegal to promote Nazi ideology. In many European countries [France, for one], it is illegal to deny the reality of the Holocaust."
Similarly, Mein Kampf cannot be sold in the Netherlands, and there seem to be some restrictions on its sale in Germany.
I understand the desire to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, but it seems like a dangerous precedent to outlaw historical claims, however absurd. And banning books is something you'd think Germany in particular would be wary about.
Nazism aside, there's Poland, where "[a]s of 2005, people are sometimes convicted... for insults to religious feeling", and the Republic of Ireland, where "the constitution explicitly requires that the publication of 'blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter' be a criminal offence."
"Blasphemous matter"? Anyway, that's what Wikipedia turns up on the subject.
The U.S. has an embarrassing history when it comes to obcenity laws, but we do have stronger protection for political speech than most (if not all) of Europe.
Hell, I've done that once in a while - mostly to check mapquest, to figure out how to get the rest of the way to wherever I was driving. I don't see that as particularly different from using the glow of someone's porch light to read a paper map from my car.
For that matter, I wouldn't ordinarily know whose wireless I'm using - If I'm stopped for a long time in front of someone's house, using the connection from one of their neighbors, or a coffee shop down the street, the owner of the house might still be uncomfortable - in which case I'd hope he would ask me to move, rather than calling the police.
On the other hand, if I were sitting outside in a public park, using the wireless connection from a house in the area, I don't anyone would have cause to complain, even if I visited the park "for the sole purpose of leeching off [the] internet connection". If the owner of the access point is broadcasting his signal into public areas and doesn't want it used, he should put a password on it.
I thought the article was needlessly sensationalistic, too - the man was "furtively hunched over his computer"? Maybe he's just nearsighted.
Or again:
And people have used "the internet" and "the U.S. Postal Service" to do all those things, too. And they sometimes just use wireless (sorry, "the cloak of wireless") to check their email and mapquest some directions.
I was disappointed by the medical marijuana ruling too, but the decision was in line with sixty years of precedent in related cases (look up Wickard v. Filburn) - and all the justices, left or right, constructionist or not, to some extent acknowledge the value of consistency in law. So the problem in that case was weighing constructionist logic against respect for precedent - stare decisis. The most important case ever in extending the scope of federal power was McCulloch v. Maryland, back in 1819, and for all I know Scalia disagrees with the logic of that decision, but he's not going to try to overturn it, because an awful lot of what our government does today is predicated on that decision - as are nearly two centuries of subsequent Court decisions. Whereas very little law, and none of our government's structure, is based on the Roe decision (which most constructionists would like to overturn).
So - I don't entirely disagree, but the conservative justices are not, in my opinion, as cynical or as partisan as you think.
A person who can't be bothered to learn the simple basics of their mother tongue is a person who's lazy and self-involved.
My spelling and grammar are excellent, and I'm still lazy and self-involved.