This does not mean that homosexuality, et al., do not exist naturally in some individuals. Ethics involving these situations are a good exercise for casuists, and the debate has been a heated one. Unfortunately it has been rather dominated by theism on one side and atheism on the other. It has become a religious debate.
Oh, this sounds like the "Homosexuality isn't bad per se, but homosexual sex is, and you have a choice; if you are homosexual you should choose not have sex in a manner offensive to God/Nature." Not that you are espousing that, but it seems pretty easy to get there from where you're at. And yeah it sucks there.
You also said "sexuality" earlier, which is a (large) superset of sexual reproduction. It seems to me that you're in danger of a "masturbating is genocide" reductio ad absurdum (or however you spell that) by taking such constricted biological interpretation of sexuality. Though I suppose if you look to Nature as the sole vendor for your Laws, and if you're a seventeenth century philosopher who doesn't know about bonobo monkeys, that's the risk you run.:)
I probably don't get the whole "causist" thing.
Also it seems presumptuous to assert with even the slightest degree of totality that one can know what Nature's intended usage is -- or that one could even begin to know that without observing common usage patterns, or that there's no possibility to "think outside the box". What is the intended use of your appendix? Of a tree? Nature's recommendations for the use of a sunset are not clear to me, though if I were a cat or a bat I could probably hazard a guess.
One might ask this question another way: What is Nature's intended purpose of a man's nipples? And if we know that men's nipples are nothing more than a by-product of a design which grows nipples first and decides later if they will ever function as breasts, then the camel's nose has just snuck its way under the tent. Any sort of "rightness" about Nature's choices or recommended course of action is certainly clouded and possibly rendered fallible by the inevitability of useless nipples as a natural by-product of "right" sex. If Nature can make as bad or seemingly useless a choice as putting nipples on a man, which do nothing for a man but give him a way to get breast cancer, then I am inherently endowed with the "right" to make bad decisions too. (I suppose to fully flesh this out I might have to consider things like the degree of harm, etc. but like I said, nose under tent.)
I feel like we've strayed from abortion and that's okay.:)
it is a worry to those who see sexuality divorced from its natural partner, which is biological reproduction.
This seems to be the lynch pin of your argument, and I cannot accept it. Sexuality can be seen in many ways, and biological reproduction is certainly one of them. But you've just defined homosexual sex, oral sex, any sort of sex apart from that which may induce pregnancy as being "against nature" when cleary no such thing is the case. These events are commonplace throughout the animal kingdom, humans included. Heck there's even a video of a chimpanzee fucking a frog.
Largely I see this stuff about Natural Law as part and parcel of the rise of a middle class and the end of monarchy. To me it's just a bunch of hand-waving. Not without purpose, but ultimately it just needed to "sound good enough" to convince enough people it was workable. The Declaration of Independence "sounds good enough" which is impressive considering the men who signed it agreed that a skave = 3/5 of a person a few years later. I also seriously question how well they were able to even observe Nature and its Laws 300 years ago. A "Natural Law" movement of today would have to embrace an absolute moral relativism in light of Schrodinger's Cat, you might even be able to work some Social Darwinism in there.
Be they "rights" or "liberties," they are still only ours at the pleasure of the guys with the guns, just as it was in the days of Pharaoh (except of course they didn't have guns, SG-1 notwithstanding). The need to appeal to a "Natural Law" was borne of necessity to rationalize the hierarchy once civilization woke up one morning to discover Kings, whose right to power was granted by an absolute God, were no longer a viable form of government. Not that Natural Law should be dismissed, but it's no more "natural," or "law-"based, than Divine Right, or Might Makes Right, or any of the definitions of the Golden Rule. (Hmm I guess I must be a moral relativist.)
I haven't read Hardin's essay but it seems his thesis is accurate. Birth rate is declining in the industrialized countries. At least among people with comfortable lives, people do indeed trade progeny for lifestyle.
I assure you, though, as a personal matter, whatever faith I may or may not have in evolution or the scientific method in general has an infinitessimal impact as I make my rounds through the day. I do not have a "personal relationship with Evolution" as you do with Jesus. And I don't mean that as a nasty comment.
What I do mean to say is there is a big difference between your faith in Jesus and my belief (for lack of a better term) in science. At least, I think there is. As I don't believe in Jesus or any other deity, and can't imagine ever doing so, perhaps I will never know.
While it's true that large cities lean Democratic, New York City has had Republican mayors for the past 14 years.
Manufacturing and industry does not disappear because of the mayor. By that logic, 9/11 was Guiliani's fault. No, our industrial greatness has declined because the leaders of industry have closed their factories and shipped the jobs overseas or across the Rio Grande.
You're right, though, Appalachia sure is beautiful. Though you won't see too many beautiful hills in certain parts of West Virginia since they've all had their tops scraped off in the past ten years.
No, I haven't followed the news lately about "Rengal." Coincidentally, does Ragnel stand a chance at becoming President?
You asserted Democrats are just as criminal if not moreso. Now, let's consider reality:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hRFsQsb9wa2_mXH0dRzlBvwTMfegD938AR300 Republicans, in the minority in both the House and Senate, desperately needed a new Democratic scandal. Before Rangel's ethical troubles became known -- and there has been no finding of wrongdoing -- the GOP was trailing 7-2 in the most serious corruption tally: lawmakers indicted or convicted since 2000.
But at least I recognize that I feel that way because of my own predisposition to dislike socialist elitists who want to keep me from ever experiencing the American Dream that they have gotten to live.
If you think either political party is particularly concerned with your American Dream, you're dreaming.
Replace "socialist" with "corporate" and you just described the other party, by the way.
Maybe I'm not getting it, but isn't liberty a license to... do the things you have the liberty to do?
I'm not convinced that license != liberty. Perhaps you are suggesting that liberty is a more "inherent" quality, in which a normative state of freedom exists, whereas a license is a sort of dispensation to perform actions one does not normally have the liberty to do.
Anyhoo, by your logic, I don't see how a carve-out for rape or better yet incest can be made. As you said, we well understand the natural biological consequences of sexual intercourse, those consequences don't go away owing to the peculiarity of the nature of sexual union, do they?
I don't see why there would be a separate Natural Laws governing the "evilness" of certain types of pregnancy. You'll end up with one of those Aristotelian cosomologies full of exceptions and exemptions to try and explain away the inconsistencies arising from the falsehood of your initial premise.
The problem is most commenters have no clue about creationism or evolution Here's a clue I have about evolution and creationism: Only one is a scientific theory.:)
It's really tough to hear all these baseless arguments against my faith. Paradox alert? Faith is, according to Merriam Webster, is "firm belief in something for which there is no proof."
It's lying. Check the dictionary. Here I'll do it for you.
(from m-w.com) lie intransitive verb 1 : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive 2 : to create a false or misleading impression
The Niger yellowcake uranium claim meets defintion 1. See Also: UAV chemical sprayers capable of reaching our shores, Colin Powell's appearance at the UN, Cheney's office feeding propaganda to Judith Miller, then using her stories in the New York Times to further their cause, Rumsfeld's post-invasion statement "we know where the WMD are," etc. etc.
To sum up, the totality of the propaganda effort leading up to the war is an example of def. 2.
Now, I have no idea whether lying in and of itself warrants impeachment. Regardless, GWB et.al. most certainly lied.
I agree with your assessment that the administration's modus operandi is consistent with hubris of an unprecedented magnitude.
I am not saying something wrong wasn't committed by JOrgePeixoto, it's just that he should not post two rebuttals to the same +5 post.
+2 + +2 does not equal +5. Not even under Bush.
While we're on the topic, you might want to look at the role the Macedonian government played in the "War on Terror." "Believing" a passport to be false... that sure comes in handy when you want to detain somebody whose name is on a(n unvetted) list provided by the Americans so you can demonstrate your loyalty and get more American aid money.
I read your response and the contents of your sig.
I suspect that if the Arab nations were on the verge of deploying autonomous military robots, you would be willing to sacrifice a very large numbers of Americans to alleviate the very thing you just claimed was a bogus concern.
So let's say you build the army of robots, and you can pull off the most amazing military operation with practically no risk. There's always the possibility that your shiny new toys will be used something bad, such as a coup, or indiscriminant massacres of civilians. Robots won't have to shoot through their tears like our boys at My-Lai.
You know, we could win all our battles and not lose a man if we used neutron bombs and poison gas. But we've chosen not to go down that path. (Well, we've researched the stuff but it's never been a big part of the arsenal and to my knowledge we've never used chemical weapons in battle.)
So as technology evolves, we will face these choices again. We can decide to built autonomous killer robots, or we can decide not to. We can militarize space, or we can decide not to.
(Tinfoil hat: We can have the FBI to collect DNA from everyone they arrest, from which in 20 years time a killer bug targeting one specific person's DNA might be developed, or we can decide not to.)
It's not foolish to consider carefully the implications of pursuing a technology track. Quite the contrary.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilan populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarilay valuable property has been destroyed.
I guessed you missed the part where we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki?:/
Allow me to pick a less flammable exmaple: During Clinton's escapade in Yugoslavia, roughly half the casualties were civilians. We bombed hospitals. We bombed a TV station while it was broadcasting becase it potentially could be used for military communications too (a rationale that could be applied to the World Trade Center, I might add. But only parenthetically, for that too is quite an incendiary remark. See also: destruction of "Dual-Use" desalination plants during Desert Storm and the subsequent impact on civilians.) We bombed a passenger train as it crossed a bridge. We used cluster bombs in desnely populated urban areas.
We put much more effort into keeping our soldiers from being harmed than we do to not harming civilians. Back to Yugoslavia: not one American soldier died in combat.
As has been demonstrated repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will gladly level an apartment building, killing the insurgent, his family, relatives, children, neighbors, etc., if we know we can get him, and he's a valuable enough target.
We are much more interested in keeping our troops safe than keeping civilians safe. (Not that we are out to kill civilians, there's just no military value there.) But when it's safer to drop a bomb, or rather too dangerous to send the Marines into a high-value target's apartment block at 3AM, we drop the bomb and accept the "collateral damage" that comes along with it.
This was the case in WWII and it's still the case today.
I'm not saying this is the wrong way or the right way to fight a war. I'm just spicing up your comment with a much-needed dose of reality.
And how does passport records (assuming it is just entry & exit times) relate to Real ID in any fashion?
The issue is not the records, it's who has access to them, and what they do with that access.
You certainly don't have access, but somebody with an axe to grind might. Nixon had his Enemies List. The TSA has the No-Fly List. According to Newsweek, 1.3 million Americans have their bank accounts under the same sort of "special scrutiny" that noticed Eliot Spitzer moving a few thousand dollars around. (Less than the $10,000 banks are required to report.) The bank account monitoring came about due to PATRIOT, by the way.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway
Actually that's not as true as you might think, but regardless, it's irrelevant. As this case demonstrates, now the contractor folks are snooping government records too.
My guess is, as more and more data gets collected, we simply won't have privacy any more. The only fix I see is to simply stop collecting (and storing, and making more available, and organizing so intelligently) so much data.
In the Spitzer case, I don't see how his downfall benefits New York. Why are we collecting all this data about people? Whatever good comes of it (if any, can somebody think of any good that's come of it) seems to be completely outweighed by the bad.
Perhaps I'm okay with collecting the data, but it should be abstracted away from the person's identity. You should probably need to convince a judge to issue a search warrant on the basis that User_ID 136137134 is showing a pattern of suspicious activity.
As I recall this is more or less why we have a FISA court in the first place. To prevent exactly the sorts of abuses of surveillance that Nixon, Hoover, et. al. were so fond of.
Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite".
I'm going to go ahead and have a difference of opinion with you there. "The elite" refers to the church, not the nobles. If the Pope didn't like what you were doing, the threat of excommunication brought even kings back in line.
The church essentially had "monopoly power" over literacy. A bit like The Onion's fake headline about Microsoft patenting Ones and Zeros. Except this joke went on for centuries.
The church kept reading and writing tightly controlled, which is why we have a period of history known as the Dark Ages.
Probably the only good thing they did was make copies of important ancient historical works that we might otherwise not know of today. But in every practical way, it was a pure power play.
If you want to compare somebody to Gutenberg, maybe Tim Berners-Lee is a better choice? I think he already has a medal though.
I strongly adhere to the premise that the Internet is every bit as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press. As with Gutenberg's invention, we're not really going to fully realize the effects for the next century or so. Shameless Plug: Support the EFF, etc. The laws that are being written now will have tremendous (and almost certainly unforseen) impact on the evolution of communications.
I mean, the battle lines are evident today. The "old school" publishers -- who wouldn't exist without Gutenberg -- are more or less at war with "Printing Press 2.0."
I suppose don't quite see the open source/free software movement in the same light. Mostly, the closed/pay model thrives because businesses are accustomed to purchasing goods and services from other businesses and part of the regular course of things. It fits nicely into the business paradigm. And then you've got the marketing, particularly to the technophobic executives in charge of said businesses.
As the saying goes, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Has anyone else noticed how terrible tabbed browsing is in IE7?
Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm at my favorite porn site, looking at thumbnails. The plan is to ctrl-click the thumbnails and open them in tabs.
Once you get enough tabs open, there comes a point where IE7 bogs down tremendously when asked to dispaly jpgs, each in her own tab. Symptoms include clicks on the first tab are no longer acknowledged, and tremendous slowness moving between tabs.
After that, there comes a point where your ctrl-click won't even spawn a new tab.
Tabbed browsing is a great "innovation" in the IE product line, but in terms of performance and not being a resource hog, IE7 is easily outpaced by Mozilla and many others.
There is nothing new, it is the same thing you could archive with normal breeding but it would take centuries and would only work with closely related species
In other words, it's something completely new.:)
I think "Frankenfoods" is a completely apt analogy. Dr. Frankenstein chose a body for its desirable traits and the brain from another for its desirable traits. He invented his monster from whole cloth, rather than selectively breed for generations. This is exactly what you've just described.
Of course this is in stark contrast to the practice of 'accelerated breeding by random mutations through irradiation' that nobody ever complained about and where most results are far less then desirable and you really have no clue on what else might have changed.
First of all, there is a very special circle in Hell for the grad studends who work in the fly rooms. Whether or not that's true, I hope they all worry about it a little.
But second of all, the type of experimentation you describe takes place in a controlled laboratory environment. We, and our food supply, are the guinea pigs in Monsanto's experiments.
Oh, and 'permanent' is of course also incorrect, crossbreeding with non-modified crops will of course weaken (and over time could eliminate) the traits and this is the same for the old and this new approach.
After how many inbreedings is Monsanto willing to release their IP claim to the offspring?
Slashdot Mirror
You sound like Gorbachev, asking for more time to dismantle the USSR.
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
This does not mean that homosexuality, et al., do not exist naturally in some individuals. Ethics involving these situations are a good exercise for casuists, and the debate has been a heated one. Unfortunately it has been rather dominated by theism on one side and atheism on the other. It has become a religious debate.
Oh, this sounds like the "Homosexuality isn't bad per se, but homosexual sex is, and you have a choice; if you are homosexual you should choose not have sex in a manner offensive to God/Nature." Not that you are espousing that, but it seems pretty easy to get there from where you're at. And yeah it sucks there.
You also said "sexuality" earlier, which is a (large) superset of sexual reproduction. It seems to me that you're in danger of a "masturbating is genocide" reductio ad absurdum (or however you spell that) by taking such constricted biological interpretation of sexuality. Though I suppose if you look to Nature as the sole vendor for your Laws, and if you're a seventeenth century philosopher who doesn't know about bonobo monkeys, that's the risk you run. :)
I probably don't get the whole "causist" thing.
Also it seems presumptuous to assert with even the slightest degree of totality that one can know what Nature's intended usage is -- or that one could even begin to know that without observing common usage patterns, or that there's no possibility to "think outside the box". What is the intended use of your appendix? Of a tree? Nature's recommendations for the use of a sunset are not clear to me, though if I were a cat or a bat I could probably hazard a guess.
One might ask this question another way: What is Nature's intended purpose of a man's nipples? And if we know that men's nipples are nothing more than a by-product of a design which grows nipples first and decides later if they will ever function as breasts, then the camel's nose has just snuck its way under the tent. Any sort of "rightness" about Nature's choices or recommended course of action is certainly clouded and possibly rendered fallible by the inevitability of useless nipples as a natural by-product of "right" sex. If Nature can make as bad or seemingly useless a choice as putting nipples on a man, which do nothing for a man but give him a way to get breast cancer, then I am inherently endowed with the "right" to make bad decisions too. (I suppose to fully flesh this out I might have to consider things like the degree of harm, etc. but like I said, nose under tent.)
I feel like we've strayed from abortion and that's okay. :)
it is a worry to those who see sexuality divorced from its natural partner, which is biological reproduction.
This seems to be the lynch pin of your argument, and I cannot accept it. Sexuality can be seen in many ways, and biological reproduction is certainly one of them. But you've just defined homosexual sex, oral sex, any sort of sex apart from that which may induce pregnancy as being "against nature" when cleary no such thing is the case. These events are commonplace throughout the animal kingdom, humans included. Heck there's even a video of a chimpanzee fucking a frog.
Largely I see this stuff about Natural Law as part and parcel of the rise of a middle class and the end of monarchy. To me it's just a bunch of hand-waving. Not without purpose, but ultimately it just needed to "sound good enough" to convince enough people it was workable. The Declaration of Independence "sounds good enough" which is impressive considering the men who signed it agreed that a skave = 3/5 of a person a few years later. I also seriously question how well they were able to even observe Nature and its Laws 300 years ago. A "Natural Law" movement of today would have to embrace an absolute moral relativism in light of Schrodinger's Cat, you might even be able to work some Social Darwinism in there.
Be they "rights" or "liberties," they are still only ours at the pleasure of the guys with the guns, just as it was in the days of Pharaoh (except of course they didn't have guns, SG-1 notwithstanding). The need to appeal to a "Natural Law" was borne of necessity to rationalize the hierarchy once civilization woke up one morning to discover Kings, whose right to power was granted by an absolute God, were no longer a viable form of government. Not that Natural Law should be dismissed, but it's no more "natural," or "law-"based, than Divine Right, or Might Makes Right, or any of the definitions of the Golden Rule. (Hmm I guess I must be a moral relativist.)
I haven't read Hardin's essay but it seems his thesis is accurate. Birth rate is declining in the industrialized countries. At least among people with comfortable lives, people do indeed trade progeny for lifestyle.
Scientific theories are validated, not proven. I had to go to wikipedia for that one. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution
I assure you, though, as a personal matter, whatever faith I may or may not have in evolution or the scientific method in general has an infinitessimal impact as I make my rounds through the day. I do not have a "personal relationship with Evolution" as you do with Jesus. And I don't mean that as a nasty comment.
What I do mean to say is there is a big difference between your faith in Jesus and my belief (for lack of a better term) in science. At least, I think there is. As I don't believe in Jesus or any other deity, and can't imagine ever doing so, perhaps I will never know.
Great point, and it also serves to underscore the tyipcal meaninglessness of the forced dichotomy between Republican and Democrat.
While it's true that large cities lean Democratic, New York City has had Republican mayors for the past 14 years.
Manufacturing and industry does not disappear because of the mayor. By that logic, 9/11 was Guiliani's fault. No, our industrial greatness has declined because the leaders of industry have closed their factories and shipped the jobs overseas or across the Rio Grande.
You're right, though, Appalachia sure is beautiful. Though you won't see too many beautiful hills in certain parts of West Virginia since they've all had their tops scraped off in the past ten years.
No, I haven't followed the news lately about "Rengal." Coincidentally, does Ragnel stand a chance at becoming President?
You asserted Democrats are just as criminal if not moreso. Now, let's consider reality:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hRFsQsb9wa2_mXH0dRzlBvwTMfegD938AR300
Republicans, in the minority in both the House and Senate, desperately needed a new Democratic scandal. Before Rangel's ethical troubles became known -- and there has been no finding of wrongdoing -- the GOP was trailing 7-2 in the most serious corruption tally: lawmakers indicted or convicted since 2000.
Thank you for reading.
But at least I recognize that I feel that way because of my own predisposition to dislike socialist elitists who want to keep me from ever experiencing the American Dream that they have gotten to live.
If you think either political party is particularly concerned with your American Dream, you're dreaming.
Replace "socialist" with "corporate" and you just described the other party, by the way.
Maybe I'm not getting it, but isn't liberty a license to... do the things you have the liberty to do?
I'm not convinced that license != liberty. Perhaps you are suggesting that liberty is a more "inherent" quality, in which a normative state of freedom exists, whereas a license is a sort of dispensation to perform actions one does not normally have the liberty to do.
Anyhoo, by your logic, I don't see how a carve-out for rape or better yet incest can be made. As you said, we well understand the natural biological consequences of sexual intercourse, those consequences don't go away owing to the peculiarity of the nature of sexual union, do they?
I don't see why there would be a separate Natural Laws governing the "evilness" of certain types of pregnancy. You'll end up with one of those Aristotelian cosomologies full of exceptions and exemptions to try and explain away the inconsistencies arising from the falsehood of your initial premise.
The problem is most commenters have no clue about creationism or evolution :)
Here's a clue I have about evolution and creationism: Only one is a scientific theory.
It's really tough to hear all these baseless arguments against my faith.
Paradox alert? Faith is, according to Merriam Webster, is "firm belief in something for which there is no proof."
Kind regards
What you are describing is a conspiracy.
From the latin "cons piraces" or "with pirates."
Some credit must go to Sid Meier for I have pirated Pirates! twice.
So here a smiley and a Fast Schooner.
=)
hmmmm "NT" ... I wonder what that stands for ...
Nice Troll?
It's lying. Check the dictionary. Here I'll do it for you.
(from m-w.com)
lie
intransitive verb
1 : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2 : to create a false or misleading impression
The Niger yellowcake uranium claim meets defintion 1. See Also: UAV chemical sprayers capable of reaching our shores, Colin Powell's appearance at the UN, Cheney's office feeding propaganda to Judith Miller, then using her stories in the New York Times to further their cause, Rumsfeld's post-invasion statement "we know where the WMD are," etc. etc.
To sum up, the totality of the propaganda effort leading up to the war is an example of def. 2.
Now, I have no idea whether lying in and of itself warrants impeachment. Regardless, GWB et.al. most certainly lied.
I agree with your assessment that the administration's modus operandi is consistent with hubris of an unprecedented magnitude.
I am not saying something wrong wasn't committed by JOrgePeixoto, it's just that he should not post two rebuttals to the same +5 post.
+2 + +2 does not equal +5. Not even under Bush.
While we're on the topic, you might want to look at the role the Macedonian government played in the "War on Terror." "Believing" a passport to be false... that sure comes in handy when you want to detain somebody whose name is on a(n unvetted) list provided by the Americans so you can demonstrate your loyalty and get more American aid money.
These system rely on facial characteristics like eye-nose-mouth ratio
This system must really excel at catching criminals who don't have a 2:1:1 ratio like the rest of us.
I read your response and the contents of your sig.
I suspect that if the Arab nations were on the verge of deploying autonomous military robots, you would be willing to sacrifice a very large numbers of Americans to alleviate the very thing you just claimed was a bogus concern.
Be well.
So let's say you build the army of robots, and you can pull off the most amazing military operation with practically no risk. There's always the possibility that your shiny new toys will be used something bad, such as a coup, or indiscriminant massacres of civilians. Robots won't have to shoot through their tears like our boys at My-Lai.
You know, we could win all our battles and not lose a man if we used neutron bombs and poison gas. But we've chosen not to go down that path. (Well, we've researched the stuff but it's never been a big part of the arsenal and to my knowledge we've never used chemical weapons in battle.)
So as technology evolves, we will face these choices again. We can decide to built autonomous killer robots, or we can decide not to. We can militarize space, or we can decide not to.
(Tinfoil hat: We can have the FBI to collect DNA from everyone they arrest, from which in 20 years time a killer bug targeting one specific person's DNA might be developed, or we can decide not to.)
It's not foolish to consider carefully the implications of pursuing a technology track. Quite the contrary.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilan populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarilay valuable property has been destroyed.
:/
I guessed you missed the part where we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Allow me to pick a less flammable exmaple: During Clinton's escapade in Yugoslavia, roughly half the casualties were civilians. We bombed hospitals. We bombed a TV station while it was broadcasting becase it potentially could be used for military communications too (a rationale that could be applied to the World Trade Center, I might add. But only parenthetically, for that too is quite an incendiary remark. See also: destruction of "Dual-Use" desalination plants during Desert Storm and the subsequent impact on civilians.) We bombed a passenger train as it crossed a bridge. We used cluster bombs in desnely populated urban areas.
We put much more effort into keeping our soldiers from being harmed than we do to not harming civilians. Back to Yugoslavia: not one American soldier died in combat.
As has been demonstrated repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will gladly level an apartment building, killing the insurgent, his family, relatives, children, neighbors, etc., if we know we can get him, and he's a valuable enough target.
We are much more interested in keeping our troops safe than keeping civilians safe. (Not that we are out to kill civilians, there's just no military value there.) But when it's safer to drop a bomb, or rather too dangerous to send the Marines into a high-value target's apartment block at 3AM, we drop the bomb and accept the "collateral damage" that comes along with it.
This was the case in WWII and it's still the case today.
I'm not saying this is the wrong way or the right way to fight a war. I'm just spicing up your comment with a much-needed dose of reality.
Be well.
Deleting the emails may not have been intentional, but storing them on a non-government email system was certainly intentional.
Barring any other explanation, it's only reasonable to conclude the White House did it as an end-run around the Presidential Records Act.
A lot of these guys date back to Nixon, whose misdeeds were the impetus for the Presidential Records Act in the first place.
And how does passport records (assuming it is just entry & exit times) relate to Real ID in any fashion?
The issue is not the records, it's who has access to them, and what they do with that access.
You certainly don't have access, but somebody with an axe to grind might. Nixon had his Enemies List. The TSA has the No-Fly List. According to Newsweek, 1.3 million Americans have their bank accounts under the same sort of "special scrutiny" that noticed Eliot Spitzer moving a few thousand dollars around. (Less than the $10,000 banks are required to report.) The bank account monitoring came about due to PATRIOT, by the way.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway
Actually that's not as true as you might think, but regardless, it's irrelevant. As this case demonstrates, now the contractor folks are snooping government records too.
My guess is, as more and more data gets collected, we simply won't have privacy any more. The only fix I see is to simply stop collecting (and storing, and making more available, and organizing so intelligently) so much data.
In the Spitzer case, I don't see how his downfall benefits New York. Why are we collecting all this data about people? Whatever good comes of it (if any, can somebody think of any good that's come of it) seems to be completely outweighed by the bad.
Perhaps I'm okay with collecting the data, but it should be abstracted away from the person's identity. You should probably need to convince a judge to issue a search warrant on the basis that User_ID 136137134 is showing a pattern of suspicious activity.
As I recall this is more or less why we have a FISA court in the first place. To prevent exactly the sorts of abuses of surveillance that Nixon, Hoover, et. al. were so fond of.
Thank you for this informative post.
Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite".
I'm going to go ahead and have a difference of opinion with you there. "The elite" refers to the church, not the nobles. If the Pope didn't like what you were doing, the threat of excommunication brought even kings back in line.
The church essentially had "monopoly power" over literacy. A bit like The Onion's fake headline about Microsoft patenting Ones and Zeros. Except this joke went on for centuries.
The church kept reading and writing tightly controlled, which is why we have a period of history known as the Dark Ages.
Probably the only good thing they did was make copies of important ancient historical works that we might otherwise not know of today. But in every practical way, it was a pure power play.
If you want to compare somebody to Gutenberg, maybe Tim Berners-Lee is a better choice? I think he already has a medal though.
I strongly adhere to the premise that the Internet is every bit as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press. As with Gutenberg's invention, we're not really going to fully realize the effects for the next century or so. Shameless Plug: Support the EFF, etc. The laws that are being written now will have tremendous (and almost certainly unforseen) impact on the evolution of communications.
I mean, the battle lines are evident today. The "old school" publishers -- who wouldn't exist without Gutenberg -- are more or less at war with "Printing Press 2.0."
I suppose don't quite see the open source/free software movement in the same light. Mostly, the closed/pay model thrives because businesses are accustomed to purchasing goods and services from other businesses and part of the regular course of things. It fits nicely into the business paradigm. And then you've got the marketing, particularly to the technophobic executives in charge of said businesses.
As the saying goes, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
This is somewhat off topic, but whatever.
Has anyone else noticed how terrible tabbed browsing is in IE7?
Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm at my favorite porn site, looking at thumbnails. The plan is to ctrl-click the thumbnails and open them in tabs.
Once you get enough tabs open, there comes a point where IE7 bogs down tremendously when asked to dispaly jpgs, each in her own tab. Symptoms include clicks on the first tab are no longer acknowledged, and tremendous slowness moving between tabs.
After that, there comes a point where your ctrl-click won't even spawn a new tab.
Tabbed browsing is a great "innovation" in the IE product line, but in terms of performance and not being a resource hog, IE7 is easily outpaced by Mozilla and many others.
We should note also that the Monster was indeed shown superior to its creator by the end of the story.
:)
In that case, we should also note that the Monster killed several people and was completely uncontrollable by its creator.
You know, I'm liking the Frankenfood analogy more and more.
Besides as I see it, any lingering uncertainty is outweighed by the benefits of GM food.
Of course you see it that way. Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be sending you to college without it. You're hardly an impartial judge.
There is nothing new, it is the same thing you could archive with normal breeding but it would take centuries and would only work with closely related species
:)
In other words, it's something completely new.
I think "Frankenfoods" is a completely apt analogy. Dr. Frankenstein chose a body for its desirable traits and the brain from another for its desirable traits. He invented his monster from whole cloth, rather than selectively breed for generations. This is exactly what you've just described.
Of course this is in stark contrast to the practice of 'accelerated breeding by random mutations through irradiation' that nobody ever complained about and where most results are far less then desirable and you really have no clue on what else might have changed.
First of all, there is a very special circle in Hell for the grad studends who work in the fly rooms. Whether or not that's true, I hope they all worry about it a little.
But second of all, the type of experimentation you describe takes place in a controlled laboratory environment. We, and our food supply, are the guinea pigs in Monsanto's experiments.
Oh, and 'permanent' is of course also incorrect, crossbreeding with non-modified crops will of course weaken (and over time could eliminate) the traits and this is the same for the old and this new approach.
After how many inbreedings is Monsanto willing to release their IP claim to the offspring?