Also - one more possible nod in the new series would be to handle the Valeyard. But then, they've diverged far enough from proper continuity that it'd be hard to do it in a way that makes sense.
I hope this is more of the "we hope to work with you" type of release than the "dropping kittens in a box at the side of the highway" type of release. Either way, good to have software to manage this kind of thing.
I wouldn't buy that too much - Fox is also an extremist network that's very skeptical of any government action. It's also a network where their efforts to modernise towards digital distribution have been an utter failure.
According to our models, yes we are so capable. Don't just use your intuitions - "common sense" is often wrong. There are people who study these things - go to your local university and ask professors with knowledge in the relevant fields.
If we damage the environment, we *are* causing misery of mankind.
I don't think it'd be fair to link modern American conservativism with fascism - the similarities are not nearly deep enough for any but some small and radical factions. Buckley wasn't trying for a particular version of conservativism anyhow - he was trying to build a coalition between many different kinds in order to define and advance what was in common between them. I don't trust the MIC and I dislike their influence in politics, but as far as I can tell they're mainly interested in keeping their contracts, not transforming society. (I also dislike the CoC, but I don't see them as anything but a puppet of business interests)
I think Fascism really was meant to be a popular movement as an answer to the popular socialist movements - it was grassroots, it had values it wanted people to hold, and it wanted to change the world in an organic way. It wasn't very pretty, but I don't think it was corporatist or profit-driven in the way these other organisations you're trying to link to it are. I really think that with rare exception, these groups are just in it for the money.
I'm not a democrat and I'm not in the habit of defending them, but I don't think the main problem with Dems is that they're willing to spend money. To the extent that we're going to live in a capitalist system, I think it's one that should have high taxes and should use those taxes to support a large, effective, ambitious, and efficient public sector. We should have a lot more infrastructure, a lot more investment in education, entirely publicly funded healthcare, and many guarantees that we presently leave to chance. The only spending cuts we should support are for programs that should not exist in the first place, not those that we're trying to improve. With campaign finance reform and some other types of political reforms we could clear the cruft out of our programs and whip our government into (better) shape.
I would be reluctant to consider coalitions with libertarians - the ground I share with them is too narrow and our desired directions for society are too different for anything but occasional short-term tactical agreements on certain issues.
Fascist doesn't mean ruling by corporations. The economic component to fascism is underdeveloped and relatively nonspecific - trying to reduce it to that gives you a notion of fascism that's almost empty. Fascism is more of an attempt to use nationalism and a myth of peoples to reject rationalism and use a spirit of the people to achieve greatness. It never said much about economic policy ; its only real commitment is to a strangely warped version of conservativism. Unlike the socialists who were trying to sweep across europe and throw off old oppressive social structures, fascists didn't really have a clear idea where they were going, they just had this idea of reclaiming the greatness of the roman empire.. somehow, and fighting off the socialist movements. It'd probably be best to consider fascism to be a state of mind - an ambition and delusion that desires to be shared by an entire injured society on its way "up".
The word "crisis" is more often a creation of media than science or government (as media know that people like drama), but in this case (like in global warming), it's appropriate - we are unlikely to accept coal as an option because of pollution, it's uncertain whether present-day alternative energy sources can produce enough for our needs, and unless we do some legitimate planning and steering of our society, our supply will drop and prices will leap far upwards.
Optimism is a fine thing - yes we are an inventive species. Still, relying on something coming together last minute would be stupid when we could reign in the market and give ourselves more breathing room. Of course government intervention has been required in the past - humanity is littered with tales of dead societies that failed to react to crises. We don't want to join them, so we'll do whatever it takes to avoid that. Giving people personal autonomy is a fine default, but it is not a suicide pact.
Governmental conflict of interest is only rarely real, while it is usually real for "think tank" scientists and other private researchers. Academia is not perfect, but they're the best we have, and probably the best we could have in a system like ours.
If there's talk of legislation, there's a very good chance that we can reduce the level of exposure. Just because it's present in nature doesn't mean it's present in such high levels - trace levels of arsenic, gold, and other things are also part of nature but we still would be worried about ingesting a brick of arsenic. It's also likely there's a real statistical effect of lessened health for us due to our exposure levels.
Where are you getting this stuff? It's textbook conspiracy theory rubbish. This is not a crisis, and nobody is presenting it as a crisis. It's an issue.
The world will always have issues. It's too complex not to. As I noted above, it's facile but empty to portray this as mind control - no responsible government would simply put its rubber stamp on us doing unhealthy things when there's something better possible.
No, they stay employed because they're either required by our system of government, or because they work for agencies creatable and destroyable by our system of government. Many of us see all this testing a being a very good thing. There are probably people who don't understand/care, and probably people who see it as bad or useless and want it stopped.
It's your choice on how to react to this. They're not "scaring the hell out of me", although if they decide these things are unhealthy, I have a certain amount of trust in their judgement because they're more qualified and knowledgeable than I am on these topics. The world is too complex for us all to independently verify every bit of it. I'd suggest you accept whatever judgement they come up with but not get too freaked out - it might not be an "imminent disaster" level problem, but even if it's a "it would be a lot healthier if we changed things" level problem, it's good that we have people thinking about it.
Perhaps you should take a look at these studies and consider that they're there to protect you. There's a lot of room for hazards that are long-term unhealthy or risky that won't create dramatic, visible dangers, and given how artificial our modern environment is, it's prudent to enter it with eyes open and people using oars to help steer us from the worst of what hazards we can predict.
The world is a complex place. If your threshold for "OMG they want to control us" is someone warning you that something is probably unhealthy, you'll have conspiracy theories from cradle to grave.
What would you say if we live in a world where people's lifestyles must change in order to avoid great danger (of whatever kind), and those people are so selfish or ignorant that their ears are closed to anything that'd impact their daily lives?
It's horse-puckey that politicians are doing this for the glee of control - they're responding to necessity. It will take some amount of your freedom to deal with a crisis (of whatever type). Live with it. You should shout out if you think anyone is using bad judgement on anything you're competent to judge, and certainly shout out if you think anyone's being malicious, but the one thing you don't get to do is say "my freedom is a suicide pact - I would rather smoke in a sealed room and doom us all than put out my cigarette". The rest of us (and I hope there are enough) will not let you pretend your actions don't have circumstances.
I am aware of those parts. The journal in question had issues with peer review where some peer reviewers decided to "acknowledge" the "controversy" among nonscientists by allowing some papers to be published in a particular journal that didn't meet the standards of science. As can be expected when a journal starts to go south, they suggested stopping use of that journal. This kind of thing is not unheard of - journals depend on their reputation just as much as scientists do, and when they misbehave it's a big deal.
If you had a biology journal that suddenly decided to publish papers from the creation institute, you can bet that they would soon find themselves relegated to history. That's how it should be - their job is to act as a barrier, through peer review, between good science and fringe/not-good-enough-yet science.
Were Gore *not* to be investing in the technology (not that I'm aware of the specifics of his investments), might you accuse him of not putting his money where his mouth is? In our current economic system, people direct investment to meet the challenges and necessities of tomorrow.
The conclusion that there *is* manmade climate change was reached some time ago; the current efforts are moving towards measuring it. There are scientific journals that you could read for the bare facts, classes you could take on it at good universities, and there are probably books that attempt to phrase it in terms the general public can understand. It's not always an easy task - what other scientific facts do you demand be "proven" in that way? How often do you see such "proofs"? The academic system works by broad consensus among scientists working in a field - that consensus has been there for a long time (even as outside of academia, people with vested interests do their best to amplify the voices of those few outside the consensus as well as popular figures who don't know what the hell they're talking about). The best you're likely to get that's really science is in those journals.
The emails are in fact not pesky at all. If you want an unorthodox way to dive right into how the data is parsed and analysed in the field, they show standard good practice. They only look ugly if one doesn't understand the terms of art they use, and really mostly if one is very careful to select the smallest snippets that one can so one doesn't understand what the emails are actually about. It's a bit dickish that the emails were snagged and published, but the emails themselves are not embarassing and there's nothing to be ashamed of in them (that I've seen).
The blogosphere needs to stuff it. If they really think they can understand anything in the world without subject-specific training and education, if they think their arguments should be taken as seriously and responded to with the same frequency as in-channel discussion, and if they think reputation in their sphere is the most important kind of reputation, they're deluded. You find the same idiots digging out a law book, arguing about terms of art as if they were common-speak versions of the term, ignoring the weight of history and legal philosophy that governs the sphere, and thinking they have some great insight. It's a good thing they don't crack medical books, or we'd have the geeks following the homeopaths into placebo-land.
In academia, science is open. It's not perfect, but it works, and the fringe science is kept roughly at the right distance where on the one time in ten thousand they have a good idea, it can be tested by the mainstream and maybe eventually join the broad scientific consensus. If you want a publication, you can get it. If you want data, you can probably get that too. If you don't think a study is valid, reproduce it under the same or slightly different circumstances. You have to know what you're doing or the journals will weed you out.
People outside of the research community should tone down their hubris and get comfortable with the fact that to be qualified to talk about something, they should become educated about it first and be prepared to deal with the way the scientific community works. Until then, they're best off relying on the broadest scientific consensus they can find on whatever topic is at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Also - one more possible nod in the new series would be to handle the Valeyard. But then, they've diverged far enough from proper continuity that it'd be hard to do it in a way that makes sense.
The new series is a remake in the same way the recent Battlestar Galactica is. There may be nods all around, but it doesn't go much beyond that.
The last canonical Doctor is the seventh anyhow.
I hope this is more of the "we hope to work with you" type of release than the "dropping kittens in a box at the side of the highway" type of release. Either way, good to have software to manage this kind of thing.
I wouldn't buy that too much - Fox is also an extremist network that's very skeptical of any government action. It's also a network where their efforts to modernise towards digital distribution have been an utter failure.
Not scared? Maybe you should be.
According to our models, yes we are so capable. Don't just use your intuitions - "common sense" is often wrong. There are people who study these things - go to your local university and ask professors with knowledge in the relevant fields.
If we damage the environment, we *are* causing misery of mankind.
See Lawrence Lessig on why we failed in broadband compared to other highly developed nations:
http://lessig.blip.tv/file/3485790/
It's not that we over or under-regulated, it's that we got the regulation wrong.
This was in the list of "most interesting linux distros" posted here maybe two weeks ago. Sigh.
A nice little virus could effectively brick the phone on its own, at least as far as most consumers are considered.
I don't think it'd be fair to link modern American conservativism with fascism - the similarities are not nearly deep enough for any but some small and radical factions. Buckley wasn't trying for a particular version of conservativism anyhow - he was trying to build a coalition between many different kinds in order to define and advance what was in common between them. I don't trust the MIC and I dislike their influence in politics, but as far as I can tell they're mainly interested in keeping their contracts, not transforming society. (I also dislike the CoC, but I don't see them as anything but a puppet of business interests)
I think Fascism really was meant to be a popular movement as an answer to the popular socialist movements - it was grassroots, it had values it wanted people to hold, and it wanted to change the world in an organic way. It wasn't very pretty, but I don't think it was corporatist or profit-driven in the way these other organisations you're trying to link to it are. I really think that with rare exception, these groups are just in it for the money.
I'm not a democrat and I'm not in the habit of defending them, but I don't think the main problem with Dems is that they're willing to spend money. To the extent that we're going to live in a capitalist system, I think it's one that should have high taxes and should use those taxes to support a large, effective, ambitious, and efficient public sector. We should have a lot more infrastructure, a lot more investment in education, entirely publicly funded healthcare, and many guarantees that we presently leave to chance. The only spending cuts we should support are for programs that should not exist in the first place, not those that we're trying to improve. With campaign finance reform and some other types of political reforms we could clear the cruft out of our programs and whip our government into (better) shape.
I would be reluctant to consider coalitions with libertarians - the ground I share with them is too narrow and our desired directions for society are too different for anything but occasional short-term tactical agreements on certain issues.
Imagine this being said in a Hugh Bliss voice.
*ring*
Fascist doesn't mean ruling by corporations. The economic component to fascism is underdeveloped and relatively nonspecific - trying to reduce it to that gives you a notion of fascism that's almost empty. Fascism is more of an attempt to use nationalism and a myth of peoples to reject rationalism and use a spirit of the people to achieve greatness. It never said much about economic policy ; its only real commitment is to a strangely warped version of conservativism. Unlike the socialists who were trying to sweep across europe and throw off old oppressive social structures, fascists didn't really have a clear idea where they were going, they just had this idea of reclaiming the greatness of the roman empire.. somehow, and fighting off the socialist movements. It'd probably be best to consider fascism to be a state of mind - an ambition and delusion that desires to be shared by an entire injured society on its way "up".
For some values of "fix".
The word "crisis" is more often a creation of media than science or government (as media know that people like drama), but in this case (like in global warming), it's appropriate - we are unlikely to accept coal as an option because of pollution, it's uncertain whether present-day alternative energy sources can produce enough for our needs, and unless we do some legitimate planning and steering of our society, our supply will drop and prices will leap far upwards.
Optimism is a fine thing - yes we are an inventive species. Still, relying on something coming together last minute would be stupid when we could reign in the market and give ourselves more breathing room. Of course government intervention has been required in the past - humanity is littered with tales of dead societies that failed to react to crises. We don't want to join them, so we'll do whatever it takes to avoid that. Giving people personal autonomy is a fine default, but it is not a suicide pact.
Governmental conflict of interest is only rarely real, while it is usually real for "think tank" scientists and other private researchers. Academia is not perfect, but they're the best we have, and probably the best we could have in a system like ours.
If there's talk of legislation, there's a very good chance that we can reduce the level of exposure. Just because it's present in nature doesn't mean it's present in such high levels - trace levels of arsenic, gold, and other things are also part of nature but we still would be worried about ingesting a brick of arsenic. It's also likely there's a real statistical effect of lessened health for us due to our exposure levels.
Where are you getting this stuff? It's textbook conspiracy theory rubbish. This is not a crisis, and nobody is presenting it as a crisis. It's an issue.
The world will always have issues. It's too complex not to. As I noted above, it's facile but empty to portray this as mind control - no responsible government would simply put its rubber stamp on us doing unhealthy things when there's something better possible.
No, they stay employed because they're either required by our system of government, or because they work for agencies creatable and destroyable by our system of government. Many of us see all this testing a being a very good thing. There are probably people who don't understand/care, and probably people who see it as bad or useless and want it stopped.
It's your choice on how to react to this. They're not "scaring the hell out of me", although if they decide these things are unhealthy, I have a certain amount of trust in their judgement because they're more qualified and knowledgeable than I am on these topics. The world is too complex for us all to independently verify every bit of it. I'd suggest you accept whatever judgement they come up with but not get too freaked out - it might not be an "imminent disaster" level problem, but even if it's a "it would be a lot healthier if we changed things" level problem, it's good that we have people thinking about it.
Perhaps you should take a look at these studies and consider that they're there to protect you. There's a lot of room for hazards that are long-term unhealthy or risky that won't create dramatic, visible dangers, and given how artificial our modern environment is, it's prudent to enter it with eyes open and people using oars to help steer us from the worst of what hazards we can predict.
The world is a complex place. If your threshold for "OMG they want to control us" is someone warning you that something is probably unhealthy, you'll have conspiracy theories from cradle to grave.
What would you say if we live in a world where people's lifestyles must change in order to avoid great danger (of whatever kind), and those people are so selfish or ignorant that their ears are closed to anything that'd impact their daily lives?
It's horse-puckey that politicians are doing this for the glee of control - they're responding to necessity. It will take some amount of your freedom to deal with a crisis (of whatever type). Live with it. You should shout out if you think anyone is using bad judgement on anything you're competent to judge, and certainly shout out if you think anyone's being malicious, but the one thing you don't get to do is say "my freedom is a suicide pact - I would rather smoke in a sealed room and doom us all than put out my cigarette". The rest of us (and I hope there are enough) will not let you pretend your actions don't have circumstances.
I am aware of those parts. The journal in question had issues with peer review where some peer reviewers decided to "acknowledge" the "controversy" among nonscientists by allowing some papers to be published in a particular journal that didn't meet the standards of science. As can be expected when a journal starts to go south, they suggested stopping use of that journal. This kind of thing is not unheard of - journals depend on their reputation just as much as scientists do, and when they misbehave it's a big deal.
If you had a biology journal that suddenly decided to publish papers from the creation institute, you can bet that they would soon find themselves relegated to history. That's how it should be - their job is to act as a barrier, through peer review, between good science and fringe/not-good-enough-yet science.
Were Gore *not* to be investing in the technology (not that I'm aware of the specifics of his investments), might you accuse him of not putting his money where his mouth is? In our current economic system, people direct investment to meet the challenges and necessities of tomorrow.
The conclusion that there *is* manmade climate change was reached some time ago; the current efforts are moving towards measuring it. There are scientific journals that you could read for the bare facts, classes you could take on it at good universities, and there are probably books that attempt to phrase it in terms the general public can understand. It's not always an easy task - what other scientific facts do you demand be "proven" in that way? How often do you see such "proofs"? The academic system works by broad consensus among scientists working in a field - that consensus has been there for a long time (even as outside of academia, people with vested interests do their best to amplify the voices of those few outside the consensus as well as popular figures who don't know what the hell they're talking about). The best you're likely to get that's really science is in those journals.
The emails are in fact not pesky at all. If you want an unorthodox way to dive right into how the data is parsed and analysed in the field, they show standard good practice. They only look ugly if one doesn't understand the terms of art they use, and really mostly if one is very careful to select the smallest snippets that one can so one doesn't understand what the emails are actually about. It's a bit dickish that the emails were snagged and published, but the emails themselves are not embarassing and there's nothing to be ashamed of in them (that I've seen).
The blogosphere needs to stuff it. If they really think they can understand anything in the world without subject-specific training and education, if they think their arguments should be taken as seriously and responded to with the same frequency as in-channel discussion, and if they think reputation in their sphere is the most important kind of reputation, they're deluded. You find the same idiots digging out a law book, arguing about terms of art as if they were common-speak versions of the term, ignoring the weight of history and legal philosophy that governs the sphere, and thinking they have some great insight. It's a good thing they don't crack medical books, or we'd have the geeks following the homeopaths into placebo-land.
In academia, science is open. It's not perfect, but it works, and the fringe science is kept roughly at the right distance where on the one time in ten thousand they have a good idea, it can be tested by the mainstream and maybe eventually join the broad scientific consensus. If you want a publication, you can get it. If you want data, you can probably get that too. If you don't think a study is valid, reproduce it under the same or slightly different circumstances. You have to know what you're doing or the journals will weed you out.
People outside of the research community should tone down their hubris and get comfortable with the fact that to be qualified to talk about something, they should become educated about it first and be prepared to deal with the way the scientific community works. Until then, they're best off relying on the broadest scientific consensus they can find on whatever topic is at hand.