Reason 1: Because I'll go to jail. It's alot like hell only colder and it happens sooner.
Reason 2: Because I can't. I can't even shoot an animal, let alone a person. My brain seizes up and doesn't allow me to pull the trigger. It is very hard for most species to kill another member of that species (which is why the military has a significant conditioning program to get around it).
I find that religon gives better reasons to kill people than most sources. I mean Moses ordered mass murder while carrying the big tablet that said 'Thou shalt not kill' (or at least just after smashing it).
But believing is doing something. It's just as much doing something as 'giving up desire' is. It's just not a physical something (like Mohammad or Moses), it's a mental somthing. It seems that Jesus is saying 'Do the something I tell you to do, not what other people tell you to do', just like all the other religions. (Though I do believe that the Buddha didn't actually discuss salvation, that was tacked on later because the people wanted a god and/or heaven. As I understand it Buddha was atheistic, he was more talking about how to not suffer.)
Actually the problem is more accurately put as 'species are fragile and delicate'. The Earth will be fine, the question is if we will all die out. Right now we have WAY more people to support than we can on subsitance. If there is a major climactic shift that makes grain producing regions stop producing we are kinda screwed (Especially since alot of the non grain-producing regions are already taken with other activities).
The other problem is the size of the system; If we do manage to destabilize it it will most likely not become obvious until it is far to late to fix it. The inertia of a giant system plunging merrily to collapse (as defined as 'humanity dies') is enormous.
Weather pattern changes for one. Much like how deforestation of the Amazon has changed the weather patterns there, adding trees also changes weather patterns.
Aside from that, you are changing the habitat of the plain dwelling creatures that are now living in the forest and starving to death.
Um, we do have the ability to choose what laws to obey. Assuming that we have free will as humans. There is no possible way to take that away from us (as far as we know). He wasn't even saying that he shouldn't be punished for it, he was just saying that he didn't care and was willing to take the risk (thus the 'bust me' line). So unless you are advocating behaviour control chips being implanted in everyone, so that they cannot choose to violate the law, what are you asking?
I'd go so far as to say that it is our duty as Americans (assuming you are one) to disobey unjust and especially unconstitutional laws, since that is the only way to get them thrown out (and set court precedent). You just have to be willing to pay the consequences. Along those lines, I tend to think that Ghandi and MLK (and even Scopes) were good for society as a whole (they chose to disobey laws that they viewed as wrong). The key is to be willing to pay the consequences, should you get busted.
Offense is not abuse. Otherwise you could never say that blacks are human beings, since it would offend some KKK member. Nor could you say that they are not human beings, because that would offend me. So you basically can say almost nothing at all.
You can't threaten someone. You can't cause physical harm to someone. You are pretty limited in what you can say that is not actually true (or more accurately provably false). Other than that, offend away.
It's the difference between something being intrinsically un-testable and something that we can't test now. I can't test that firing photons at a sheet of metal generates electricity right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't testable.
God is intrinsically untestable, you can't come up with a concievable method to test it; String Theory is too hard for us to test now, but it could be concievably disproven.
So I'd be inclined to say that String Theory is funky science that is of questionable present use (and a giant math orgy), but it is still science.
The nastiest test I took in college (CS) was multiple choice.
If an option is correct, select it; if it is not correct, do not select it. So if all answers are correct, select them all; if none, select none. +1 for every correct selected answer, -1 for every correct answer that was not selected as well as for each incorrect answer that was selected. The last part was true/false if false explain why. Written by a devious professor (and he was), this is an EVIL test...
The curve was 'Take your score and add 40' as I recall.
Aren't ALL definitions arbitrary? The universe is not discrete, everything blends from one to the other. Any distinction between things is an arbitrary drawing of a line between what makes something apple-y and what is more orange-y...
Conveniently your odds of being killed by a terrorist START at almost zero! Even closer to almost zero than your best hope for protecting yourself against freak car accidents.
Terrorists have almost exactly the power we give them.
I love photoshop as an example. How many people would ever buy it? How much popularity does it get by being on every pirates computer? How many extra sales does it get to pirates turned professional graphic artists or pirates working for a company? It's like free advertising for Adobe with a generally minimal loss of sales. It's THE graphics program and everyone "knows" it, you can't buy better advertising than that. If I was at Adobe the last thing I'd want is to cause a massive migration that leads to people calling things "Gimp Contests" instead of "Photoshop Contests."
Not to mention that when you are using your illegal copy of Photoshop you are most likely not out buying a competitor's product, thus putting Adobe at a monetary disadvantage.
You can change the wording to get around the part that was ruled 'unconstitutional' and try to get the courts to ok this version. Oh yeah, and toss people in jail until the new law gets up to the supreme court...
I always go for the 'Oh, really? So what is your credit card number? Do you have a daughter? What path does she take home from school? Is there a nice secluded grove of trees along that route? What do you have to hide if you are not a terrorist?' angle myself. It's much the same as the hunter analogy, but it's a little more personal that way.
People on the 'What do you have to hide?' bandwagon always seem to assume that it is GUILTY things I want to keep secret...
The problem is that that isn't what it was sold on.
The best reason for the war is that to set up a pro-US arab secular democracy in the Middle East would be great for the US and likely for the world. Now I don't think that we are going to actually pull it off, but it is a laudable goal.
Now I realize that Bush couldn't really say that diplomatically so he went for the 'low-hanging' fruit of WMDs as a public reason, which when it turned out to be not an issue it left him with a large credibility problem. And he is perhaps the most incompetent PR president since Nixon (and maybe worse than him), so he was unable to come up with an alternate justification that could stick.
The humanitarian angle applies far better for other countries, we would be occupying a goodly chunk of Africa if that is the standard (let alone North Korea). The violating the cease fire is an ok justification, but a little weak since it's not like anything particularly significant had just happened, so why did we invade when we did?
It seems to me that the biggest problem with the war is a combination of really bad PR and some kind of naive belief that "Freedom solves everything, so if we heap some freedom on the Iraqis they will be all happy and stuff" (Which lead to some strategic problems when it didn't happen).
"i think if country A had financed an 8 year blood bath and then taken over canada under a false premise"
The problem with such unrelated analogies that if you can't even get the name of Iraq and Iran straight, then who even knows what you are saying? Do you mean Canada, or did you mean to say China? Does any of it have anything to do with anything?
Canada == Iraq, US == Iran, Country A == US... So we financed an 8 year bloodbath betwixt Iran and Iraq, then invaded Iraq...."busheviks. you see, this guy is playing to the soviets"
IS playing to the Soviets? IS??? What does Lenin have to do with it?
soviets == Russia. Habits die hard?
"hitler headed a vastly superior military force and picked on the militarily weak in his society and the surrounding countries, none of whom was a real threat to hitler."
None of them was any threat to Hitler. That is, if you don't count Britain and the USSR. I guess we can't count those anyway. We're playing your make-believe history. Was Hitler surrounded by such weak countries as Grand Fenwicke, the Shire, Lilliput, and Oz?
USSR was no threat (In fact was an ally). Britain was no threat until Churchill came to power, because Chamberlain was a pussy. I don't think France or Poland or Austria was planning on invading Germany, or was even an actual threat... And really, the invasion of USSR was just stupid/meglomaniacal (never start a land war in Asia)
"the usa attacks iraq under a false premise"
What false premise is that? Specifically?
I assume this would be the WMDs that the government has categorically said that it turns out that Iraq didn't have.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7634313/
"...the soviet union and china....
Again with mentioning a country that does not even EXIST? Tell me, dear AC, I wonder if you have any revelations about the impact of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes on this situation. Do you think Ceasar or Napoleon will send troops to Lebanon?
see above "the next time a usa speech sounds good, who will listen?"
I bet if you were the speechwriter, and did not know the difference between Iran and Iraq, and constantly spoke of the Soviet Union as a modern global player, it sure would be quite interesting.
While I can't really disagree with your response... (AC had some issues with clarity) I do think that the invasion of Iraq and the truly horrible PR associated will damage the international credibility of the US
Basically if you are going to destroy the AC on points at least TRY and attack what he meant, rather then pedantically focussing on what he said, it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Disclaimer- I am not the original poster, nor do I necessarily agree with the points. I just get annoyed at mischaracterizations.
The problem is that, like '1984', we are involved in a war with a nebulous enemy with no real end or finish visible (or perhaps even possible). So when we give up rights for the war on 'terrorism' how can we EVER get them back? Will 'terrorism' give up and sign a surrender? Will the government say "Ok, we didn't need these extra powers after all, so we'll give them up."? I don't see either case happening.
Just because is is a cliche doesn't mean that it is an inaccurate or useless comparison.
So are you arguing that eating peanuts should be illegal in public, because someone MIGHT have an allergy to them? Not to mention mowing lawns, smoking, driving a car, making food from wheat, et al. Can we only legally do hypo-allergenic/non-annoying things?
If you are throwing grass at me to induce an allergic reaction, that is probably assault and/or harrassment. Why do you need another law to outlaw it?
And for that matter if I walk into the 'throwing grass' section of my local restaurant shouldn't I expect to get some grass tossed around me? Can't I avoid that section? Or failing that go to a 'no grass throwing' place? Why do we need to government involved at all?
PS. I don't smoke. I find smoke annoying. I have no urge to outlaw it.
Actually, no. You look at the test cases, they tell you exactly what the subsystem should be doing. And since the code passes all the tests, it tells you what the code actually is doing.
You may not know how the system is working, but unless you need to change it you generally don't need to know that. And if you need to change it, the constant refactoring leads to a more streamlined design and commonly the system has evolved to the point where changes become easy...
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Reason 1: Because I'll go to jail. It's alot like hell only colder and it happens sooner.
Reason 2: Because I can't. I can't even shoot an animal, let alone a person. My brain seizes up and doesn't allow me to pull the trigger. It is very hard for most species to kill another member of that species (which is why the military has a significant conditioning program to get around it).
I find that religon gives better reasons to kill people than most sources. I mean Moses ordered mass murder while carrying the big tablet that said 'Thou shalt not kill' (or at least just after smashing it).
But believing is doing something. It's just as much doing something as 'giving up desire' is. It's just not a physical something (like Mohammad or Moses), it's a mental somthing. It seems that Jesus is saying 'Do the something I tell you to do, not what other people tell you to do', just like all the other religions. (Though I do believe that the Buddha didn't actually discuss salvation, that was tacked on later because the people wanted a god and/or heaven. As I understand it Buddha was atheistic, he was more talking about how to not suffer.)
Actually the problem is more accurately put as 'species are fragile and delicate'. The Earth will be fine, the question is if we will all die out. Right now we have WAY more people to support than we can on subsitance. If there is a major climactic shift that makes grain producing regions stop producing we are kinda screwed (Especially since alot of the non grain-producing regions are already taken with other activities).
The other problem is the size of the system; If we do manage to destabilize it it will most likely not become obvious until it is far to late to fix it. The inertia of a giant system plunging merrily to collapse (as defined as 'humanity dies') is enormous.
Weather pattern changes for one. Much like how deforestation of the Amazon has changed the weather patterns there, adding trees also changes weather patterns.
Aside from that, you are changing the habitat of the plain dwelling creatures that are now living in the forest and starving to death.
Um, we do have the ability to choose what laws to obey. Assuming that we have free will as humans. There is no possible way to take that away from us (as far as we know). He wasn't even saying that he shouldn't be punished for it, he was just saying that he didn't care and was willing to take the risk (thus the 'bust me' line). So unless you are advocating behaviour control chips being implanted in everyone, so that they cannot choose to violate the law, what are you asking?
I'd go so far as to say that it is our duty as Americans (assuming you are one) to disobey unjust and especially unconstitutional laws, since that is the only way to get them thrown out (and set court precedent). You just have to be willing to pay the consequences. Along those lines, I tend to think that Ghandi and MLK (and even Scopes) were good for society as a whole (they chose to disobey laws that they viewed as wrong). The key is to be willing to pay the consequences, should you get busted.
Of course life is just a collection of atoms in an untidy heap.
That said, I hate getting ganked.
Offense is not abuse. Otherwise you could never say that blacks are human beings, since it would offend some KKK member. Nor could you say that they are not human beings, because that would offend me. So you basically can say almost nothing at all.
You can't threaten someone. You can't cause physical harm to someone. You are pretty limited in what you can say that is not actually true (or more accurately provably false). Other than that, offend away.
It's the difference between something being intrinsically un-testable and something that we can't test now. I can't test that firing photons at a sheet of metal generates electricity right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't testable.
God is intrinsically untestable, you can't come up with a concievable method to test it; String Theory is too hard for us to test now, but it could be concievably disproven.
So I'd be inclined to say that String Theory is funky science that is of questionable present use (and a giant math orgy), but it is still science.
The nastiest test I took in college (CS) was multiple choice.
If an option is correct, select it; if it is not correct, do not select it. So if all answers are correct, select them all; if none, select none. +1 for every correct selected answer, -1 for every correct answer that was not selected as well as for each incorrect answer that was selected. The last part was true/false if false explain why. Written by a devious professor (and he was), this is an EVIL test...
The curve was 'Take your score and add 40' as I recall.
Would you? Would I?
Plus the keyboard. Carpal Tunnel doesn't prevent itself you know...
Of course from the perspective of someone on Earth the Sun orbits the Earth anyway, so it is all a moot point...
Aren't ALL definitions arbitrary? The universe is not discrete, everything blends from one to the other. Any distinction between things is an arbitrary drawing of a line between what makes something apple-y and what is more orange-y...
Conveniently your odds of being killed by a terrorist START at almost zero! Even closer to almost zero than your best hope for protecting yourself against freak car accidents.
Terrorists have almost exactly the power we give them.
I love photoshop as an example. How many people would ever buy it? How much popularity does it get by being on every pirates computer? How many extra sales does it get to pirates turned professional graphic artists or pirates working for a company? It's like free advertising for Adobe with a generally minimal loss of sales. It's THE graphics program and everyone "knows" it, you can't buy better advertising than that. If I was at Adobe the last thing I'd want is to cause a massive migration that leads to people calling things "Gimp Contests" instead of "Photoshop Contests."
Not to mention that when you are using your illegal copy of Photoshop you are most likely not out buying a competitor's product, thus putting Adobe at a monetary disadvantage.
You can change the wording to get around the part that was ruled 'unconstitutional' and try to get the courts to ok this version. Oh yeah, and toss people in jail until the new law gets up to the supreme court...
I always go for the 'Oh, really? So what is your credit card number? Do you have a daughter? What path does she take home from school? Is there a nice secluded grove of trees along that route? What do you have to hide if you are not a terrorist?' angle myself. It's much the same as the hunter analogy, but it's a little more personal that way.
People on the 'What do you have to hide?' bandwagon always seem to assume that it is GUILTY things I want to keep secret...
The problem is that that isn't what it was sold on.
The best reason for the war is that to set up a pro-US arab secular democracy in the Middle East would be great for the US and likely for the world. Now I don't think that we are going to actually pull it off, but it is a laudable goal.
Now I realize that Bush couldn't really say that diplomatically so he went for the 'low-hanging' fruit of WMDs as a public reason, which when it turned out to be not an issue it left him with a large credibility problem. And he is perhaps the most incompetent PR president since Nixon (and maybe worse than him), so he was unable to come up with an alternate justification that could stick.
The humanitarian angle applies far better for other countries, we would be occupying a goodly chunk of Africa if that is the standard (let alone North Korea). The violating the cease fire is an ok justification, but a little weak since it's not like anything particularly significant had just happened, so why did we invade when we did?
It seems to me that the biggest problem with the war is a combination of really bad PR and some kind of naive belief that "Freedom solves everything, so if we heap some freedom on the Iraqis they will be all happy and stuff" (Which lead to some strategic problems when it didn't happen).
Not according to the official report of the CIA. (as linked)
5 547.html
They did find some 500 badly degraded chemical rounds, several years later than that report, that 'could not currently be used as originally intended' http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2006/20060629_
I don't really consider that as a sufficient risk to warrant an invasion...
I'm kinda bummed I didn't get a response on the whole Hitler angle. heh...
This is interesting. I haven't heard a 'face/honor' basis for suicide bombers before. I may have to look into this.
But alas, I have no mod points for you.
Just for grins, I'll answer for the AC...
..."busheviks. you see, this guy is playing to the soviets"
"i think if country A had financed an 8 year blood bath and then taken over canada under a false premise"
The problem with such unrelated analogies that if you can't even get the name of Iraq and Iran straight, then who even knows what you are saying? Do you mean Canada, or did you mean to say China? Does any of it have anything to do with anything?
Canada == Iraq, US == Iran, Country A == US... So we financed an 8 year bloodbath betwixt Iran and Iraq, then invaded Iraq.
IS playing to the Soviets? IS??? What does Lenin have to do with it?
soviets == Russia. Habits die hard?
"hitler headed a vastly superior military force and picked on the militarily weak in his society and the surrounding countries, none of whom was a real threat to hitler."
None of them was any threat to Hitler. That is, if you don't count Britain and the USSR. I guess we can't count those anyway. We're playing your make-believe history. Was Hitler surrounded by such weak countries as Grand Fenwicke, the Shire, Lilliput, and Oz?
USSR was no threat (In fact was an ally). Britain was no threat until Churchill came to power, because Chamberlain was a pussy. I don't think France or Poland or Austria was planning on invading Germany, or was even an actual threat... And really, the invasion of USSR was just stupid/meglomaniacal (never start a land war in Asia)
"the usa attacks iraq under a false premise"
What false premise is that? Specifically?
I assume this would be the WMDs that the government has categorically said that it turns out that Iraq didn't have.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7634313/
"...the soviet union and china....
Again with mentioning a country that does not even EXIST? Tell me, dear AC, I wonder if you have any revelations about the impact of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes on this situation. Do you think Ceasar or Napoleon will send troops to Lebanon?
see above
"the next time a usa speech sounds good, who will listen?"
I bet if you were the speechwriter, and did not know the difference between Iran and Iraq, and constantly spoke of the Soviet Union as a modern global player, it sure would be quite interesting.
While I can't really disagree with your response... (AC had some issues with clarity) I do think that the invasion of Iraq and the truly horrible PR associated will damage the international credibility of the US
Basically if you are going to destroy the AC on points at least TRY and attack what he meant, rather then pedantically focussing on what he said, it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Disclaimer- I am not the original poster, nor do I necessarily agree with the points. I just get annoyed at mischaracterizations.
The problem is that, like '1984', we are involved in a war with a nebulous enemy with no real end or finish visible (or perhaps even possible). So when we give up rights for the war on 'terrorism' how can we EVER get them back? Will 'terrorism' give up and sign a surrender? Will the government say "Ok, we didn't need these extra powers after all, so we'll give them up."? I don't see either case happening.
Just because is is a cliche doesn't mean that it is an inaccurate or useless comparison.
Well, you already can't leave your house in any major city without increasing you chances of lung cancer. So you are pretty much screwed anyway.
If McDonalds wants to sell unhealthy fattening foods, should that be legal?
So are you arguing that eating peanuts should be illegal in public, because someone MIGHT have an allergy to them? Not to mention mowing lawns, smoking, driving a car, making food from wheat, et al. Can we only legally do hypo-allergenic/non-annoying things?
If you are throwing grass at me to induce an allergic reaction, that is probably assault and/or harrassment. Why do you need another law to outlaw it?
And for that matter if I walk into the 'throwing grass' section of my local restaurant shouldn't I expect to get some grass tossed around me? Can't I avoid that section? Or failing that go to a 'no grass throwing' place? Why do we need to government involved at all?
PS. I don't smoke. I find smoke annoying. I have no urge to outlaw it.
Actually, no. You look at the test cases, they tell you exactly what the subsystem should be doing. And since the code passes all the tests, it tells you what the code actually is doing.
You may not know how the system is working, but unless you need to change it you generally don't need to know that. And if you need to change it, the constant refactoring leads to a more streamlined design and commonly the system has evolved to the point where changes become easy...