That is to say, the information is your example isn't -lost-, it's just -lost to us-. Given complete information about the state of all matter in your post-disaster scenario, every minute detail about the original building, is, in theory, recoverable.
The problem with this as support for 'living on' or a 'soul' or what have you, is that the encoding is arbitrary for each individual. If you are willing to allow arbitrary encoding, then the only constraint on what is 'recoverable' is the number of bits. So this kind of a system could also 'recover' a great number of things which never existed. I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim that this is any kind of preservation or storage mechanism. And it certainly isn't a runtime-supporting environment. Humans aren't built of particularly interesting materials – it is the shape/configuration/topology/what-have-you that gives us our complexity. Saying that you can in principle reconstruct a human after it has deteriorated isn't an argument for the soul. It's a necessary conclusion for deterministic materialism.
Well, considering that most organisms do in fact change shape throughout the lifespan, whether from development, diet, exercise, or injury, it's both adaptive and pragmatic to simply map your sense of agency to objects whose observable properties correlate with your sensations, or with your intended actions. This is how children learn to pick things up, to walk, and to talk. It's also the mechanism that subserves the extension of receptive fields during tool-use. This is just an elaborated instance of the practically-ancient rubber arm illusion (show someone a rubber arm, and hide their real arm. simultaneously stroke the fake and the real arm for a little while, and the person will come to view it as their own. hit the rubber hand with a hammer, and the person will get a gsr response greater than that for observing the same action without entrainment). Nothing new here.
First, to be clear – I'm not going to suggest that MSNBC isn't biased – but I do have some reservations about the study. I'll just list the four big ones, for me:
1) Funding: The source of the report – the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The funds for this charity come from the children of Joseph N. Pew, the founder of Sun Oil Company (Sunoco). Half of the current board of directors are from the Pew family. Does this mean everything they do is biased? Nope. But you sure don't see a lot of left think tanks financed by big oil...
2) Methodological Problems: They have twopages that list details of their methodologies, but nowhere is it indicated how 'fact' vs. 'opinion' was determined by the coders (nor do they report inter-rater reliability for these ratings). This isn't a simple task. For instance, if one newscaster takes a disputed datum and says "It seems that X" while another says "It is the case that X" – the latter will sound more factual, whereas the former is more factual. This sort of ambiguity is troubling. Further, from the report it would seem that the fact-opinion ratios scale with the proportion of air time given to interviews. This shouldn't come as much surprise – but the problem then is in giving primacy to the fact-opinion bias, rather than to the programming selection. The opposing bias would be something like "msnbc provides a greater breadth of viewpoints through more time devoted to interviews with guests". They should have given independent fact-opinion scales for each of the program types, or at minimum provided a program-normalized score instead of an aggregate.
3) Methodological bias: The following statement in the methodology was of particular interest to me: "Early Evening and Prime time (6 PM - 11PM) together as a unit, rather than separating out talk and news or early prime and late prime. Within this five hour period, we included all programming that focuses on general news events of the day. Basically, this removes three programs: Fox's Greta Van Susteren, which is more narrowly focused on crime, CNN's Larry King which as often as not is focused on entertainment or personal stories rather than news events and MSNBC's documentaries program." So they removed two highly opinionated programs from CNN and Fox, respectively, while removing documentaries from msnbc... The choices are odd, though the justification sounds reasonable – but it seems like another strong case for normalization at the analysis stage.
4) Rhetorical bias: From the report, we have the following two 'opener' paragraphs under the 'Comparisons by Cable Channel':
Fox - "In terms of programming, the top-rated Fox News Channel has been remarkably stable in prime time. The only personnel changes that occurred in the evening between 2007 and 2012 were Bret Baier replacing Brit Hume at 6 p.m. and the departure of liberal co-host Alan Colmes at 9 p.m., leaving his conservative sparring partner, Sean Hannity, as the sole host of the show."
MSNBC -"Given the current liberal approach at nighttime at MSNBC, it’s hard to remember that back in 2007, the prime-time airwaves were split between liberals (Keith Olbermann and, to a lesser extent, Chris Matthews) and conservatives (Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson). Now, Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are linchpins in an ideologically reconstructed liberal lineup."
If I were "told the story" I would absolutely ignore it. People tell stories all the time. It doesn't make for very compelling evidence. If you have a reference to documented evidence surrounding such a story, then we are in a different area entirely. If you can do so, I'd appreciate it.
As to whatever a 'fundamental atheist' is, which somehow differs from an 'atheist' in any sense other than rhetorical – I'm not one. I was actually quite please when a friend introduced me to the term igtheist which captures my beliefs perfectly. In any event – when did God enter into this discussion?
This makes sense to me. Even if you've ever had the experience of fainting or almost-fainting – it can actually be quite difficult to pinpoint when your vision goes, because you're more and more frantically inferring and filling in with the hopes of controlling your fall. Losing bloodflow means something needs to change - now - and the adaptive response is to evaluate as much of the world as you possibly can, reconstructed from the decaying visual trace, your memories, and maybe inferences from sound, and proprioception if those continue to function (which is probable, at least for sound, since auditory transduction is a lot less metabolically expensive than phototransduction).
People are desperate to explain things that need no explanation, because they're looking for something to bootstrap their paranormal beliefs off of. If you want me to believe there's anything special going on, you'd better give me some reliable evidence that can't be accounted for by what we already know. I've yet to encounter any such evidence. In contrast, we do know you can induce religious experiences and experiences of one-ness with the world through transcranial magnetic stimulation, and through pharmacology – both of which have understood mechanistic modes of action...
First off, I'll just mention that I agree with the general thrust of your comment, but a couple points of note:
1) The states are somewhat unique in their demonstrated and stated interest in being the world-police. So much of the perhaps-unbalanced criticism against the US and not against various other imperial nations should be seen in light of that image. If you tell everyone you're the saviour of the world, then proceed to rape and pillage, you actually look worse than if you'd just gone ahead with the raping and pillaging without comment. So I think that explains a bit of the bias.
2) People criticize China and Russia constantly. It's such a dominant premise that it's gone past a requisite genuflection, and simply become a background assumption. People take it as a given that these nations do bad things. The US seems to be more in the genuflection stage, which is a sort of transition period between background-assumption-good to background-assumption-bad, where every action is appraised with a critical and skeptical eye.
3) This is speculation, but as to the 'that was all in the 60s/70s,' it's reasonable to keep hindsight in mind. We generally don't learn about what's really going on in the moment. It takes time for the truth to surface, for documents to be declassified, or dislodged through targeted FOI requests. However, given that the US provides military aid to almost 90% of the countries in the world (170/193), the odds are very good that for any given conflict, they are aiding both sides...
4) And finally, also on the subject of timing, global economic hegemony has pretty much been achieved. Most of the world is capitalist – and most of those pesky leftist governments have been replaced with obedient client states. There isn't as much need to intervene anymore. There are still ideological and resource motivations – but most of the time, the necessary manipulations can go through more passive or indirect channels like the IMF, WB, trade-sanctions, and free-trade agreements. The transnational character of dominant economic motivations also makes coalition acts more likely than unilateral ones – which suggests legitimacy; so negative actions in recent history tend to have a diffusion of blame that keeps them off the 'list'.
So ultimately, I agree that other countries should be getting more criticism, but I don't really think the US should get less...
But, but.... it uses the MATHS! Of course it's credible.
What's that you say? Do the assumptions have any empirical validity? Who knows! Why bother testing when you can just write reports on 100k commissions without declaring conflicts of interest!
I like to think of economics as simply a very boring domain of number theory. If we take these arbitrary assumptions, what do the numbers do?
The bad idea was when they forgot they were playing make-believe and started applying their folksy theories to the real world...
A friend and I, after suffering through that appalling script in a sort of incredulous stupor, decided that what we would really like to see is for the artistic directors, modellers, and animators to read books and then just show us parts of them. I've more or less given up on expecting something resembling a plot in movies, and even moment to moment dialogue grows ever more painful, but the movies do get prettier and prettier, and sometimes the action sequences are moderately engaging – albeit contrived. So why not just cut to the chase, already? Stop pretending there's any such thing as a writer in hollywood. Just make pictures for my books!
The Earth will certainly adapt. It will even have a rich, healthy, and diverse biosphere. Whether or not humans will adapt is much less certain. While it's absolutely true that the Earth has undergone myriad and very dramatic climatic and atmospheric changes, it is worth reminding ourselves that something like 99.9% of species that have ever existed are now extinct, and that our own species is pretty young and not very hardy.
To say that change is the default mode for the Earth should offer us little comfort...
The assumption that the greenhouse effect will "run away" and kill all life is preposterous.
Maybe that's why no one credible has ever suggested such a thing? Indeed, it almost sounds like some kind of deliberately hyperbolic straw-man... But I'm sure I'm just being paranoid.
Indeed. Europe and much of N.Am already seem to be experiencing a certain amount of cooling because arctic meltwater is disrupting both the gulf stream and the jet stream... Local predictions are hard – both spatially and temporally. Hence why no one credible worries too much about them (except, e.g., weather forecasters, or modellers trying to develop better methods to deal with fine resolutions – but that's a whole other ball game).
Yup. Under the current administration, Canada is in some ways worse than the States with respect to domestic policy – it's just that the world is emphatically not watching, because – hey – it's Canada. Who cares?
...and/or (2) we noticed something special prior to 9/11 but, well, didn't do enough about it.
They knew all sorts of things. They knew a plot would likely unfold soon, involving massive casualties. They'd been warned about strikes using airplanes, and that Jihadis were in the US, and that four were receiving flight training.
And precisely nothing was done. They didn't even warn the airlines.
One way or another, any weirdness surrounding 9/11 is dead and buried at this point. Whether random terrorism, domestic false flag, or some hybrid of the two (a Bush - Saudi - Bin Ladin 'understanding'), there is likely no remaining information that will ever be dislodged to 'resolve' the issue for anyone who remains unconvinced one way or another. What we do know, with absolute certainty, was that 9/11 was a godsend for US imperialism. Writing in 2000 on the subject of revitalizing the US military to put it back on a war footing, with a focus on a 'two-war capability' (i.e., the ability to fight two major wars simultaneously), the Project for the New American Century report Rebuilding America's Defenses notes that: (pp. 51)
... the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
A range of high level members of the Bush administration were members or signatories of the PNAC.
So regardless of the extent to which (1) is true in the parent posting, (2) is definitely the case. And if you are willing to look for causality or intention in that stubborn inaction, you do not have to look far – though you should be prepared for an onslaught of "omg lolz conspiracy theory!" declamations to put closure on any honest discussion of the incentives, invested parties, and policy outcomes.
There are some candidate solutions to this problem. For instance bitmessage combines asymm encryption with a sort of giant glob of data, so you upload your encrypted email into the aggregate mass of data, and to receive emails, you download the entire glob and read the parts that you can decrypt. I'm being vague on the specifics here because I'm not a cryptographer (obviously).
It would be nice to have something comparable for generalized internet traffic, but the failings of the limit formulation are pretty clear – namely the prohibitive storage and bandwidth requirements. You'd basically be requiring everyone to keep a locally updated copy of the entire internets. But there are clever folks out there, and the solution has a nice intuitive appeal, so I wonder if there's a way to fragment this approach to mitigate the resource costs...
For example, you could randomly assign nodes to different globs. Members of those globs are responsible for maintaining their data and the data of all their co-globular compatriots. If the globs are large enough, then even using current protocols for inter-globular traffic, the person-to-person relationship networks would be very difficult to recover (I hesitate to say unrecoverable).
Sort of. Technically, 'anarchist' simply means 'without ruler' – not 'without order', 'without cooperation', or even necessarily 'without rules'. Etymologically, it is a political system only a hair's breadth from democracy (which simply means 'the people rule'). This fact is studiously ignored because it quite directly puts the lie to the idea that democracy has ever been attempted with any honesty.
Some relatively-parent poster hit on the core aspect, which is voluntarism, and is rightly now a +5 insightful. A ruler is someone who can force you to undertake certain behaviours, but the absence of a ruler doesn't restrict your ability to choose to follow someone, or to take their orders. Most apprentices are in this type of relationship with their mentors. They take instruction, and generally follow it, because they are confident in the topical authority of the mentor. If this confidence lapses, the apprentice finds a different mentor. If the apprentice successfully gains valuable experience, the relationship gradually shifts into a collaborative one based on equality and mutual respect.
Critically, the mentor's authority is always understood to be domain restricted. They are not a better or more worthy person – they are simply more knowledgeable and more experienced in a relevant area. Such individuals tend to accumulate followers quite naturally, and have no need to enforce their doctrines.
So, in practice, it might be better to reframe 'anarchists' as 'heterarchists' – highlighting transient, fluid, domain-restricted, and reciprocal hierarchies over entrenched asymmetrical trees with privilege, power, and authority accumulating at well-defined apical nodes.
Not to mention it has, over the years, produced billions in surplus. It's not the fault of social security programs that all that money gets skimmed off and rolled into the rest of the budget to pay for things that *aren't* sustainable...
All it would take is one law to make corporations illegal. Any country could do it.
Technically, sure. They could do that. But a brief perusal of history should tell you what happens to nations that try to drop out of the client state relationship... (c.f., Grenada as the most obvious example. "This is not about nutmeg" as Reagan noted – i.e., not about direct resources).
So who is 'mainstream america' that needs convincing, if not half of americans? And how exactly do you propose to convince them if not by broadcast TV, broadcast radio, print media, movies, advertisements, or political speeches? Should everyone make 'viral videos' or wear cardboard signs and walk down the street with a megaphone? Start a blog?
I suspect you'll find there are quite a number of lucid criticisms (and all sorts of crazy ones too, don't get me wrong) on youtube and in various online media outlets (probably even on a few soggy cardboard signs). So clearly there's no deficit of action there. What's the solution then? Just saying 'convince them' isn't very helpful advice.
The situation is even worse when the people who do have the means to reach a mass audience 24/7 are the people who benefit most from status quo, and benefit most from pushing their ideology as far as it will go (even the mainstream right only lost 2008 because they out-righted their base). And it's even worse when unelected life-term officials fabricate laws from the bench through judicial activism, so that corporate 'people' are entitled to such 'speech' as unlimited campaign expenditures.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread. - A. France
Slashdot Mirror
That is to say, the information is your example isn't -lost-, it's just -lost to us-. Given complete information about the state of all matter in your post-disaster scenario, every minute detail about the original building, is, in theory, recoverable.
The problem with this as support for 'living on' or a 'soul' or what have you, is that the encoding is arbitrary for each individual. If you are willing to allow arbitrary encoding, then the only constraint on what is 'recoverable' is the number of bits. So this kind of a system could also 'recover' a great number of things which never existed. I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim that this is any kind of preservation or storage mechanism. And it certainly isn't a runtime-supporting environment. Humans aren't built of particularly interesting materials – it is the shape/configuration/topology/what-have-you that gives us our complexity. Saying that you can in principle reconstruct a human after it has deteriorated isn't an argument for the soul. It's a necessary conclusion for deterministic materialism.
Well, considering that most organisms do in fact change shape throughout the lifespan, whether from development, diet, exercise, or injury, it's both adaptive and pragmatic to simply map your sense of agency to objects whose observable properties correlate with your sensations, or with your intended actions. This is how children learn to pick things up, to walk, and to talk. It's also the mechanism that subserves the extension of receptive fields during tool-use. This is just an elaborated instance of the practically-ancient rubber arm illusion (show someone a rubber arm, and hide their real arm. simultaneously stroke the fake and the real arm for a little while, and the person will come to view it as their own. hit the rubber hand with a hammer, and the person will get a gsr response greater than that for observing the same action without entrainment). Nothing new here.
No way that'll stay legal. Fortunately you can foil these things with the right makeup...
1) Funding: The source of the report – the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The funds for this charity come from the children of Joseph N. Pew, the founder of Sun Oil Company (Sunoco). Half of the current board of directors are from the Pew family. Does this mean everything they do is biased? Nope. But you sure don't see a lot of left think tanks financed by big oil...
2) Methodological Problems: They have two pages that list details of their methodologies, but nowhere is it indicated how 'fact' vs. 'opinion' was determined by the coders (nor do they report inter-rater reliability for these ratings). This isn't a simple task. For instance, if one newscaster takes a disputed datum and says "It seems that X" while another says "It is the case that X" – the latter will sound more factual, whereas the former is more factual. This sort of ambiguity is troubling. Further, from the report it would seem that the fact-opinion ratios scale with the proportion of air time given to interviews. This shouldn't come as much surprise – but the problem then is in giving primacy to the fact-opinion bias, rather than to the programming selection. The opposing bias would be something like "msnbc provides a greater breadth of viewpoints through more time devoted to interviews with guests". They should have given independent fact-opinion scales for each of the program types, or at minimum provided a program-normalized score instead of an aggregate.
3) Methodological bias: The following statement in the methodology was of particular interest to me: "Early Evening and Prime time (6 PM - 11PM) together as a unit, rather than separating out talk and news or early prime and late prime. Within this five hour period, we included all programming that focuses on general news events of the day. Basically, this removes three programs: Fox's Greta Van Susteren, which is more narrowly focused on crime, CNN's Larry King which as often as not is focused on entertainment or personal stories rather than news events and MSNBC's documentaries program." So they removed two highly opinionated programs from CNN and Fox, respectively, while removing documentaries from msnbc... The choices are odd, though the justification sounds reasonable – but it seems like another strong case for normalization at the analysis stage.
4) Rhetorical bias: From the report, we have the following two 'opener' paragraphs under the 'Comparisons by Cable Channel':
Fox - "In terms of programming, the top-rated Fox News Channel has been remarkably stable in prime time. The only personnel changes that occurred in the evening between 2007 and 2012 were Bret Baier replacing Brit Hume at 6 p.m. and the departure of liberal co-host Alan Colmes at 9 p.m., leaving his conservative sparring partner, Sean Hannity, as the sole host of the show."
MSNBC -"Given the current liberal approach at nighttime at MSNBC, it’s hard to remember that back in 2007, the prime-time airwaves were split between liberals (Keith Olbermann and, to a lesser extent, Chris Matthews) and conservatives (Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson). Now, Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are linchpins in an ideologically reconstructed liberal lineup."
And then we have the following gem that I stumbled across in another PEJ/PEW report: A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign. After noting various metrics of coverage time and coverage tone, the report asks:
In other words, not o
If I were "told the story" I would absolutely ignore it. People tell stories all the time. It doesn't make for very compelling evidence. If you have a reference to documented evidence surrounding such a story, then we are in a different area entirely. If you can do so, I'd appreciate it.
As to whatever a 'fundamental atheist' is, which somehow differs from an 'atheist' in any sense other than rhetorical – I'm not one. I was actually quite please when a friend introduced me to the term igtheist which captures my beliefs perfectly. In any event – when did God enter into this discussion?
This makes sense to me. Even if you've ever had the experience of fainting or almost-fainting – it can actually be quite difficult to pinpoint when your vision goes, because you're more and more frantically inferring and filling in with the hopes of controlling your fall. Losing bloodflow means something needs to change - now - and the adaptive response is to evaluate as much of the world as you possibly can, reconstructed from the decaying visual trace, your memories, and maybe inferences from sound, and proprioception if those continue to function (which is probable, at least for sound, since auditory transduction is a lot less metabolically expensive than phototransduction).
People are desperate to explain things that need no explanation, because they're looking for something to bootstrap their paranormal beliefs off of. If you want me to believe there's anything special going on, you'd better give me some reliable evidence that can't be accounted for by what we already know. I've yet to encounter any such evidence. In contrast, we do know you can induce religious experiences and experiences of one-ness with the world through transcranial magnetic stimulation, and through pharmacology – both of which have understood mechanistic modes of action...
(and for the record: I Am A Neuroscientist)
First off, I'll just mention that I agree with the general thrust of your comment, but a couple points of note:
1) The states are somewhat unique in their demonstrated and stated interest in being the world-police. So much of the perhaps-unbalanced criticism against the US and not against various other imperial nations should be seen in light of that image. If you tell everyone you're the saviour of the world, then proceed to rape and pillage, you actually look worse than if you'd just gone ahead with the raping and pillaging without comment. So I think that explains a bit of the bias.
2) People criticize China and Russia constantly. It's such a dominant premise that it's gone past a requisite genuflection, and simply become a background assumption. People take it as a given that these nations do bad things. The US seems to be more in the genuflection stage, which is a sort of transition period between background-assumption-good to background-assumption-bad, where every action is appraised with a critical and skeptical eye.
3) This is speculation, but as to the 'that was all in the 60s/70s,' it's reasonable to keep hindsight in mind. We generally don't learn about what's really going on in the moment. It takes time for the truth to surface, for documents to be declassified, or dislodged through targeted FOI requests. However, given that the US provides military aid to almost 90% of the countries in the world (170/193), the odds are very good that for any given conflict, they are aiding both sides...
4) And finally, also on the subject of timing, global economic hegemony has pretty much been achieved. Most of the world is capitalist – and most of those pesky leftist governments have been replaced with obedient client states. There isn't as much need to intervene anymore. There are still ideological and resource motivations – but most of the time, the necessary manipulations can go through more passive or indirect channels like the IMF, WB, trade-sanctions, and free-trade agreements. The transnational character of dominant economic motivations also makes coalition acts more likely than unilateral ones – which suggests legitimacy; so negative actions in recent history tend to have a diffusion of blame that keeps them off the 'list'.
So ultimately, I agree that other countries should be getting more criticism, but I don't really think the US should get less...
But, but.... it uses the MATHS! Of course it's credible.
What's that you say? Do the assumptions have any empirical validity? Who knows! Why bother testing when you can just write reports on 100k commissions without declaring conflicts of interest!
I like to think of economics as simply a very boring domain of number theory. If we take these arbitrary assumptions, what do the numbers do?
The bad idea was when they forgot they were playing make-believe and started applying their folksy theories to the real world...
A friend and I, after suffering through that appalling script in a sort of incredulous stupor, decided that what we would really like to see is for the artistic directors, modellers, and animators to read books and then just show us parts of them. I've more or less given up on expecting something resembling a plot in movies, and even moment to moment dialogue grows ever more painful, but the movies do get prettier and prettier, and sometimes the action sequences are moderately engaging – albeit contrived. So why not just cut to the chase, already? Stop pretending there's any such thing as a writer in hollywood. Just make pictures for my books!
The Earth will certainly adapt. It will even have a rich, healthy, and diverse biosphere. Whether or not humans will adapt is much less certain. While it's absolutely true that the Earth has undergone myriad and very dramatic climatic and atmospheric changes, it is worth reminding ourselves that something like 99.9% of species that have ever existed are now extinct, and that our own species is pretty young and not very hardy.
To say that change is the default mode for the Earth should offer us little comfort...
The assumption that the greenhouse effect will "run away" and kill all life is preposterous.
Maybe that's why no one credible has ever suggested such a thing? Indeed, it almost sounds like some kind of deliberately hyperbolic straw-man... But I'm sure I'm just being paranoid.
Indeed. Europe and much of N.Am already seem to be experiencing a certain amount of cooling because arctic meltwater is disrupting both the gulf stream and the jet stream... Local predictions are hard – both spatially and temporally. Hence why no one credible worries too much about them (except, e.g., weather forecasters, or modellers trying to develop better methods to deal with fine resolutions – but that's a whole other ball game).
What is it about confidence intervals that is so incredibly difficult to grasp?
Yup. Under the current administration, Canada is in some ways worse than the States with respect to domestic policy – it's just that the world is emphatically not watching, because – hey – it's Canada. Who cares?
Environmental charities are officially enemies of the state, budget watchdogs have to file freedom of information requests with their own money to get the information their mandates require, environmental protection and first nations rights have been gutted at the documented request of petroleum lobbies, it is now illegal to cover your face at a protest, activism of any kind is being branded as terrorism, and tens of millions of dollars are spent on blatant openly-reviled propaganda, while poverty is a growing problem.
Canada's a mess.
...and/or (2) we noticed something special prior to 9/11 but, well, didn't do enough about it.
They knew all sorts of things. They knew a plot would likely unfold soon, involving massive casualties. They'd been warned about strikes using airplanes, and that Jihadis were in the US, and that four were receiving flight training.
And precisely nothing was done. They didn't even warn the airlines.
One way or another, any weirdness surrounding 9/11 is dead and buried at this point. Whether random terrorism, domestic false flag, or some hybrid of the two (a Bush - Saudi - Bin Ladin 'understanding'), there is likely no remaining information that will ever be dislodged to 'resolve' the issue for anyone who remains unconvinced one way or another. What we do know, with absolute certainty, was that 9/11 was a godsend for US imperialism. Writing in 2000 on the subject of revitalizing the US military to put it back on a war footing, with a focus on a 'two-war capability' (i.e., the ability to fight two major wars simultaneously), the Project for the New American Century report Rebuilding America's Defenses notes that: (pp. 51)
... the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
A range of high level members of the Bush administration were members or signatories of the PNAC.
So regardless of the extent to which (1) is true in the parent posting, (2) is definitely the case. And if you are willing to look for causality or intention in that stubborn inaction, you do not have to look far – though you should be prepared for an onslaught of "omg lolz conspiracy theory!" declamations to put closure on any honest discussion of the incentives, invested parties, and policy outcomes.
There are some candidate solutions to this problem. For instance bitmessage combines asymm encryption with a sort of giant glob of data, so you upload your encrypted email into the aggregate mass of data, and to receive emails, you download the entire glob and read the parts that you can decrypt. I'm being vague on the specifics here because I'm not a cryptographer (obviously).
It would be nice to have something comparable for generalized internet traffic, but the failings of the limit formulation are pretty clear – namely the prohibitive storage and bandwidth requirements. You'd basically be requiring everyone to keep a locally updated copy of the entire internets. But there are clever folks out there, and the solution has a nice intuitive appeal, so I wonder if there's a way to fragment this approach to mitigate the resource costs...
For example, you could randomly assign nodes to different globs. Members of those globs are responsible for maintaining their data and the data of all their co-globular compatriots. If the globs are large enough, then even using current protocols for inter-globular traffic, the person-to-person relationship networks would be very difficult to recover (I hesitate to say unrecoverable).
Sort of. Technically, 'anarchist' simply means 'without ruler' – not 'without order', 'without cooperation', or even necessarily 'without rules'. Etymologically, it is a political system only a hair's breadth from democracy (which simply means 'the people rule'). This fact is studiously ignored because it quite directly puts the lie to the idea that democracy has ever been attempted with any honesty.
Some relatively-parent poster hit on the core aspect, which is voluntarism, and is rightly now a +5 insightful. A ruler is someone who can force you to undertake certain behaviours, but the absence of a ruler doesn't restrict your ability to choose to follow someone, or to take their orders. Most apprentices are in this type of relationship with their mentors. They take instruction, and generally follow it, because they are confident in the topical authority of the mentor. If this confidence lapses, the apprentice finds a different mentor. If the apprentice successfully gains valuable experience, the relationship gradually shifts into a collaborative one based on equality and mutual respect.
Critically, the mentor's authority is always understood to be domain restricted. They are not a better or more worthy person – they are simply more knowledgeable and more experienced in a relevant area. Such individuals tend to accumulate followers quite naturally, and have no need to enforce their doctrines.
So, in practice, it might be better to reframe 'anarchists' as 'heterarchists' – highlighting transient, fluid, domain-restricted, and reciprocal hierarchies over entrenched asymmetrical trees with privilege, power, and authority accumulating at well-defined apical nodes.
A private corporation is included under the designation of "person" in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, section I.
- Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania - 125 U.S. 181 (1888).
Cue the AC's pedantic rebuttal that 'person' isn't the same as 'people' in 3, 2, 1...
Not to mention it has, over the years, produced billions in surplus. It's not the fault of social security programs that all that money gets skimmed off and rolled into the rest of the budget to pay for things that *aren't* sustainable...
I think you mean a tautology...
Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, circa 1960, is probably the better prior...
All it would take is one law to make corporations illegal. Any country could do it.
Technically, sure. They could do that. But a brief perusal of history should tell you what happens to nations that try to drop out of the client state relationship... (c.f., Grenada as the most obvious example. "This is not about nutmeg" as Reagan noted – i.e., not about direct resources).
So no. Countries can't just 'opt out'.
So who is 'mainstream america' that needs convincing, if not half of americans? And how exactly do you propose to convince them if not by broadcast TV, broadcast radio, print media, movies, advertisements, or political speeches? Should everyone make 'viral videos' or wear cardboard signs and walk down the street with a megaphone? Start a blog?
I suspect you'll find there are quite a number of lucid criticisms (and all sorts of crazy ones too, don't get me wrong) on youtube and in various online media outlets (probably even on a few soggy cardboard signs). So clearly there's no deficit of action there. What's the solution then? Just saying 'convince them' isn't very helpful advice.
The situation is even worse when the people who do have the means to reach a mass audience 24/7 are the people who benefit most from status quo, and benefit most from pushing their ideology as far as it will go (even the mainstream right only lost 2008 because they out-righted their base). And it's even worse when unelected life-term officials fabricate laws from the bench through judicial activism, so that corporate 'people' are entitled to such 'speech' as unlimited campaign expenditures.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread. - A. France
You want changes on NSA spying or the environment? Convince mainstream America to vote your way.
I mean, come on – don't you own your own media conglomerate? What are you, poor or something?
Man given wrong map goes to wrong place. Full story at 11.
GPS spoofing is interesting, sure. But it ain't new, and the application here isn't exactly a mind-blowing revelation of the technique's potential...