If these guys had known anything about Ellison, they'd know his assholedom is not a schtick. Everything he says or does is a melodrama, with him as the long-suffering hero.
To paraphrase Clark's Law: "Any sufficiently advance melodrama is indistinguishable from assholedom."
Actually, I really like his work (though I haven't read much of his from after the late 70s), but he is truly irritating in person, though I had a friend who really loved that about him. I guess its the lack of caring for social convention that some people admire in him. Go figure.
Anybody remember the ad in it from April of a few years back where they offered a "mail order bride" parody service to get you in touch with Russian gamer girls? They were described as being fans of GURPS and games with heavy detail. Apparently, they got a LOT of calls to the number they gave from desperate guys who didn't realize it was a joke.
Physics realism in the game is nothing compared to the lack of social realism especially with regard to crime. If you steal something anywhere in the game, everyone in the game knows that it wasn't yours and may take steps to punish you for it.
You can steal a horse in one town and ride it to the furthest town away that you can get to, and everyone will know that it's not your horse. You can pick up an alchemy book to read it with no one in the room and put it back down when finished only to be accosted as soon as you open the door. If you kill a guard in an alleyway, every single guard in town will come straight for you to kill you.
Until the game gets social realism down, a few odd-looking collisions means nothing for my immersion.
I was very good at writing legal briefs and then arguing them in front of judges. So I specialized in appeals.
If you don't mind me asking, what kind of appelate court cases do you normally work, and how'd you find the job? I toy with the idea of law school occasionally, but I'm sort of ignorant about the variety of jobs available if I pursue that path.
Some attorneys prefer not to use "terps" and instead use Computer-Aided Real-Time Captioning (CART). That works well in a trial situation, in particular, because the court stenographer is taking down the proceedings anyway, and since everything is all wired together anyway, that transcript can be sent directly to the deaf attorney's computer screen so he or she can follow along.
Neat. I never knew such devices existed. How good are they at "speech"-to-text translation? Are they camera-based, does the user have to wear special gloves or other attachments, or do they work some other way? How does the captioning get displayed to court observers?
I'm deaf and a lawyer, and in spite of my deafness I have argued and won cases in the Washington Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
I'm actually fascinated by this. How does communicating with the judge and (especially) with the jury work? I'd be worried about the jury being prejudiced against a deaf lawyer if any special measures were taken for communication out of the normal since people typically have a negative attitude towards waiting for translation or people whose voices sound a little off. People have a bad enough attitude about people who only speak a foreign language or have a strong accent, so I'm guessing that the deaf have it worse. Am I off base there?
It's the association between Chinese manufacturing and cheap, flimsy crap from Wal-Mart that's hurting Lenovo if any reputation is hurting them. Chinese manufacturing doesn't really have any other reputation in America despite the fact that most notebooks are assembled there and all notebooks are made of parts primarily manufactured there. China's spent so long trying to undercut everybody that they've done a lot of damage to their reputation for quality.
On the other hand, that's exactly how America was 200 years ago. We undercut everyone with cheap, crappy goods thanks to our abundant workforce and raw supplies, and we built quality goods much later. China will eventually overcome this reputation once they've bootstrapped their economy and their own consumers become more sophisticated and demanding.
Then again, what do I know? I haven't shopped for PC notebooks recently, and I don't know if there's an actual quality decline in Thinkpads instead of a perceived problem due to national origin.
So it can happen that the guy next to you reads a nice tentakel manga. Quite funny actually (from a western point of view).
I deliberately didn't mention manga because it's treated differently -- supposedly, anyway. I'm beginning to suspect that that's another Western myth about Japan too.
I didn't see more than about four people reading manga on public transit when I was there for three weeks back in 2000, and I never saw anyone doing anything with porn except in the creepy otaku shops in Akihabara. I suspect that while manga is more respected there than comics here that it's not nearly as respected as you might think (with the same sort of prohibitions against enjoying frivolous kid's entertainment and fetishized adult products), and I'm absolutely positive that anyone reading porn in public would be just as ostracized there as here.
The Japanese do love to read in public, but it's almost always novels, newspapers, and text messages as far as I could tell from my time in Sendai with a couple of weekends in Tokyo.
The Japanese are viewed by many Americans as all lovers of anime, video games, and all the other "pop" culture things that we love to import from them. However, the truth is much different.
Anime & video games in Japan is largely split into two different groups: 1) For kids and shown on public TV. 2) For geeks and loners and shown on subscription channels and direct to video shows.
The average adult attitude about adults that spend a lot of time watching anime & video games is very dim thanks to widely publicized crimes by loners over the past two decades. These isolated incidents are basically the equivalent of the D&D killings in the 80s, Columbine, etc. over here and have resulted in a very similar attitude in the Japanese public about the otaku. While there's little religious fundamentalist opposition to the fan service, porn, and violence in adult targetted anime, the mainstream public still views it as unseemly and regards fans with suspicion.
I'm personally surprised they haven't launched an investigation sooner.
Only wackos and flakes think the USA or Japan has an overpopulation problem. The population density in Japan is greater than just about anywhere, and yet they have none of the problems attributed to overpopulation.
Overpopulation is about the capacity of the entire planet, not just localized regions. Japan and the US import a significant portion of what they need to surive. Japan has almost no natural resources of its own and very little farmland. They import most of their food (and fish the seas of the world for much of the rest) and are reliant on the rest of the world for energy.
Saying that Japan does not suffer from overpopulation is not looking at the complete system. It's analogous to saying that fridges disprove thermodymics by decreasing entropy as they cool their food. They don't because all of that entropy and heat go out the back.
The world could not support a population density like Japan's everywhere on the Earth. You need to look at the whole system first.
Call it what you will, but a work that heavily based on *actual* research and laden with citations at least deserves some merit.
I take it you haven't read Prey or any of Crichton's other works, have you? His books are filled with both good and junk science and the plots frequently hinge on technologically impossible McGuffins. They're essentially about fearmongering more than anything else and frequently follow the theme of "science out of control."
Andromeda Strain is about a disease brought back on a space probe. Prey is a classic BS grey goo scenario. Jurassic Park is also about scientists tampering with things that they shouldn't and it getting out of hand. All three books paint a veneer of scientific credibility with impressive technical jargon but contain a lot of junk science (or in the case of Jurassic Park a credibility stretching series of improbable outcomes).
State of Fear is just another in Crichton's body of work about how science will doom the world one day due to the carelessness, lack or foresight, or human capacity for error that some scientists in control of dangerous technology may possess. State of Fear is the most junk science filled book yet (except maybe Andromeda Strain which has a crystal virus capable of transforming energy into matter and which would benefit from being nuked).
The book presents a wide array of graphs and citations to bolster the point that GW is not caused by humans, but it's drawing from the same body of easily debunked data that anti-GW supporters have been using for years in spite of clear rebuttals. A list of footnotes and a pretty chart does not make for scientific accuracy.
If you permit all parties to conduct research, then there will be pro-green, pro-oil and indeed neutral parties, all conducting research.
Not in anything approaching equal proportion nor in proportion to where the truth lies. Pro-green and neutral parties have far, far less funding than pro-fossil parties in a purely free market funding system. The truth is frequently inconvenient to those with money. Look where we'd be today if we relied purely on private interests to fund research on asbestos, PCBs, and smoking. Monsanto new how toxic PCBs were for years and hid the research while publicly trumpeting their safety.
Heck, just look at the state of antibiotic research. There's been a long period without significant investment in a life saving drug that will immediately be rationed and used as little as possible to avoid spreading resistance. There's little profit in it despite the fact that it would save lives, so there's little funding in it.
One naturally considers the source of research when considering what is being argued.
Of course! People do that all the time when considering research on smoking, global warming, and creationism vs. evolution, right? Right? *crickets chirp* Right?
In many cases, industry and openly partisan research primarily exists to back up the dialogue of pundits that "there's no scientific consensus." Few people actually consider the source of the research they use to back their political views instead accepting biased results as fact because their confirm their own worldview. This is known as confirmation bias, and a lot parties exploit it to keep the truth from being known.
I would rather have an open field for all comers than the State imposing its invisible foot upon those who offer unacceptable views.
There is a difference between stifling dissent and funding what would not have been funded otherwise. The State has a valuable utility in funding discovery of truths that the market provides an incentive to hide. Pollution research, public health research, and pure, non-applied science are fields provide public benefit but are either harmful or uninteresting to market leaders focused entirely on their quarterly profit.
Sometimes, you have to admit, the invisible hand is a pimp slap.
I just noticed your reply. I'm not sure where you stand still based on your first paragraph and your last paragraph.
Your point, is that we should try to prevent global warming, so that WE don't die. My point is that its more important now that to help improve OTHER people's living conditions, so that they don't die. Global warming or not.
Actually, my point is that we should try to prevent global warming so that all of us (as in the sense of everybody in the world and not just the US) won't die. I agree that we need to do more to improve life in Africa. Boy do we ever need to do more. Just think how much the money going to Iraq could do to fix up the majority of the continent if spent wisely.
However, I do get the impression that you're saying that stopping hunger in Africa is more important than fixing global warming to which I respond that the problems are in no way separate problems and must be looked at together. You cannot ignore GW when trying to deal with the declining fertility of Africa's breadbasket. The problems are inexorably linked and until Africa is capable of feeding itself it is going to be extremely hard for it to build up the industry to produce goods that could pay for food from other regions.
I just noticed this comment. First, I'll address the question of ethics.
Barring divinity, ethics is of course purely subjective; there is no other way for objective morality to exist other than for there to be divine providence. Since I don't want to get into a religious battle, we will posit that there is no fixed frame of reference for morality and thus leave ethics to be subjective or to simply allow for ethics and morality to be different.
As such, ethics is essentially an opinion based on value judgements of the world around us. Asking whether we need ethics is essentially the same as asking whether we need opinions or judgement. It's an irrelevant question since it's outside human experience to live entirely without opinions or judgement. We have ethics because we are sapient or maybe at a baser level because we are sentient.
However, by that simple definition even fruit bats have something like a sense of ethics, though it's ruthlessly tuned towards self surivival and group survival. An amoeba does not because it simply has stimulus and response without conscious perception. Humans, however, are capable of making decisions that are counter to both self survival and group survival in counter to our own instincts. Our self-destructive capabilities make our choices much more significant because we are not slaves to instinct (though it does rule much of what we do).
As (mostly) free thinkers, our actions have significance that the actions of species incapable of turning themselves from survival. We can choose to embrace our instincts to kill those who differ from us, eat those who are weaker than us, and breed until our progeny replace all around us. We can also turn the other cheek, starve ourselves for a stranger's benefit, or practice celibacy to avoid the distractions of lust. Our choices have meaning because we can choose to put something else ahead of our survival.
Even if human ethics are subjective, they could be said have objective value because our capability to make choices distinguishes us from other objects in the universe.
Of course, I should get out of the way that the question of predeterminism is ultimately just as much of an intellectual dead end as nihilism and solipsism because whether our choices exist, whether they objectively matter, and whether their consequences exist are all irrelevant to the fact that we must make them.
If humans are only important to humans, for purely subjective reasons, then humans truly are no more important than viruses, whether you like it or not.
Either your existence is justified according to some higher power, or your existence is no more meaningful than anything else in the universe. I mean, it's meaningful to you, but your opinion is subjective and irrelevant.
A subjective opinion on human motives is hardly irrelevant. Given the connection between observation and existence, a subjective opinion may in fact be more important than an objective one (since there may not even be any such thing as an objective truth).
Furthermore, you fail to define importance. Without a fixed frame of reference in the universe, I hardly see that the word "importance" itself can have any objective meaning. Give me some reason to care about any part of the universe that doesn't directly impact human life (or any other life capable of suffering / making choices / etc.).
Why do we need a valid system of ethics? Why do we need a guidance for behavior, beyond raw need and individual desire? Why do we need to ascribe good or evil to any human action?
We need such a measurement (from a purely subjective point of view) because the alternative is that choices which may be bad would go unrecognized as such even though they may do significant harm (to self and others).
The problem of which ethic is better or not is mostly subjective unless you can find some external measuring stick to measure it by, though objective measures are often hard to come by. For example, selfishnes
Shenmue has to be one of the most defining DC games. Personally, I thought it was one of the greatest games of all time. Certainly, most immersive ever at the time. Just incredible.
Um, no.
Shenmue's voice acting and horrible script alone loses any chance it ever had at being immersive. Lines like the one I used for the title of this post combined with some of the worst recordings of people reading out loud made for a grating experience. (Seriously, people, try reading the lines a few times and putting some emotion into them instead of just taking whatever comes from reading the script the first time.)
Oh, and the ending? What an utterly anti-climatic experience.
Going with T-Mobile shouldn't fix your problem. T-Mobile uses GSM phone just like Cingular and AT&T. Well, it shouldn't fix your problem unless it's the use of the 850 MHz GSM band that causes the issue since I believe T-Mobile doesn't use that frequency while Cingular/AT&T does.
I actually had two issues with your original post. 1) The bizarro, Newspeakish definition of natural to erase its opposite. 2) The assertion that humans are no more important than viruses.
These are independent arguments, and I'm not arguing that the natural/unnatural divide is unimportant -- simply that it's unimportant to questions of ethics related to nihilism.
But then, what's the point of ethics? What's the point of sanity? Do they have some transcendent value? Do they address some metaphysical need? Do they have any importance at all, apart from purely subjective egocentric or anthropocentric perceptions?
Ethics has no value except as related to human motives and actions. If human motives and actions are unimportant in a system, then it's not a valid system of ethics because it attempts to redefine the problem into nonexistence. A system that ascribes no good or evil to any human action provides no guidance for behavior and is thus, not a valid system of ethics.
Also, we place value judgements on actions simply as part of perceiving the world, and the question of whether having an ethic at all is inherently meritorious is essentially a waste of time to consider as it is outside human experience to not have one. It's like asking whether or not there's inherent value in perception itself.
How about caring about someone who actually exists right now and is starving and dying, RIGHT THIS MINUTE? Shall I give you examples or are you all up on the world's issues?
Now it's your turn. Name me ways in which doing something about global warming would result in a loss of life, and I'll show you a matching number of ways in which not doing something about it will result in loss of life.
Also, no one in this world is starving and dying for any reason other than geopolitics. Drought in Africa kills people because the abundence of the rest of the world is not brought to those in need. No one is starving because of efforts to prevent global warming. No one.
They are the only branch of the state that can track anyone down quickely and eaisly; surley they should be put in chrge of what you call "homeland security".;)
I know you're joking and all, but I still feel like pointing out for those who modded you Insightful why this isn't so simple.
American taxpayers sign up each year and tell the government whether they're obeying the law or not by filing (or not filing) their tax returns. Terrorists don't register with the government to say that they're terrorists. The government has a much easier time knowing whether your a tax evader than a terrorist because it's all on record.
After that, it's a simple matter or when and where you next use your SSN or other government ID to nail you down. Alternately, it's a matter of when you get caught using fake ID to evade the government to nail you down. Once you've ID'ed a tax evader, tracking them down isn't hard because evading the government once it actually wants you is much, much harder than you might think unless you completely cut yourself off from society.
There are roughly 280 to 560 times as many active volcanoes in the world as Mt. St. Helens.
No, not really. The exact number of active volcanoes varies based on your definition of "active" and of "volcano," but an estimate of 50-70 each year is more accurate.
Even if there were that many volcanoes and they all put out the same amount of CO2 as St. Helens, you'd have matched the state of Washington with all the active volcanoes in the world. Now add Oregon. Now add California. Now add the other 47 states of the Union, and then add the other 191 countries in the world.
You continue to contradict yourself by using the word "natural" while simultaneously stating that its antonym has no meaning. I personally don't care one way or another whether actions are natural or unnatural -- I just hold that the words should have valid meaning to exist in the language. For natural to have meaning, something must be unnatural, artificial, etc. Pick your own definition of those words if you will, but the way the word is used by the majority of people (which is how language is defined) is to represent the distinction between those things which are man made and those things which are not.
Incidentally, objects made by other animals are also sometimes considered to be artificial depending on the speaker.
Because you're right: if we're just another random evolutionary outcome, then we really do have no basis for making ethical judgements. See also: nihilism and Nietzche's Ubermensch.
I prefer not to. Nihilism is just as much of an intellectual dead-end as solipsism. People who believe strongly in either should simply step aside and let the people who care about the consequences of their actions make decisions.
The conundrum of man's place in--or out of--nature must be resolved before you can discuss "sane ethical and philosophical system[s]".
That's what I mean about contradicting yourself. You state that there is nothing that is not natural and then state that it's possible for man to have a place outside of nature. By your definition of "natural," that's impossible for any being except God, and it's arguable that by your definitions even God is natural and cannot be outside nature.
Anyway, whether things are natural or not is a separate consideration entirely from ethics, and whether or not we are the result of random happenstance over billions of year, divine providence 6000 years ago, or the push of some simulator's button 3 seconds ago is also utterly irrelevant to the condition of being human and living life. Ethics and decisions based on them have to result in the person believing in that they have a stake in some action or they are not sane. Nihilism and solipsism both fail because they ultimately argue that one can never have a stake in any action because they don't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
If these guys had known anything about Ellison, they'd know his assholedom is not a schtick. Everything he says or does is a melodrama, with him as the long-suffering hero.
To paraphrase Clark's Law:
"Any sufficiently advance melodrama is indistinguishable from assholedom."
Actually, I really like his work (though I haven't read much of his from after the late 70s), but he is truly irritating in person, though I had a friend who really loved that about him. I guess its the lack of caring for social convention that some people admire in him. Go figure.
Anybody remember the ad in it from April of a few years back where they offered a "mail order bride" parody service to get you in touch with Russian gamer girls? They were described as being fans of GURPS and games with heavy detail. Apparently, they got a LOT of calls to the number they gave from desperate guys who didn't realize it was a joke.
You post reminded me ot this.
Physics realism in the game is nothing compared to the lack of social realism especially with regard to crime. If you steal something anywhere in the game, everyone in the game knows that it wasn't yours and may take steps to punish you for it.
You can steal a horse in one town and ride it to the furthest town away that you can get to, and everyone will know that it's not your horse. You can pick up an alchemy book to read it with no one in the room and put it back down when finished only to be accosted as soon as you open the door. If you kill a guard in an alleyway, every single guard in town will come straight for you to kill you.
Until the game gets social realism down, a few odd-looking collisions means nothing for my immersion.
I was very good at writing legal briefs and then arguing them in front of judges. So I specialized in appeals.
If you don't mind me asking, what kind of appelate court cases do you normally work, and how'd you find the job? I toy with the idea of law school occasionally, but I'm sort of ignorant about the variety of jobs available if I pursue that path.
Some attorneys prefer not to use "terps" and instead use Computer-Aided Real-Time Captioning (CART). That works well in a trial situation, in particular, because the court stenographer is taking down the proceedings anyway, and since everything is all wired together anyway, that transcript can be sent directly to the deaf attorney's computer screen so he or she can follow along.
Neat. I never knew such devices existed. How good are they at "speech"-to-text translation? Are they camera-based, does the user have to wear special gloves or other attachments, or do they work some other way? How does the captioning get displayed to court observers?
I'm deaf and a lawyer, and in spite of my deafness I have argued and won cases in the Washington Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
I'm actually fascinated by this. How does communicating with the judge and (especially) with the jury work? I'd be worried about the jury being prejudiced against a deaf lawyer if any special measures were taken for communication out of the normal since people typically have a negative attitude towards waiting for translation or people whose voices sound a little off. People have a bad enough attitude about people who only speak a foreign language or have a strong accent, so I'm guessing that the deaf have it worse. Am I off base there?
"I'm Helen Keller, you insenstive clod!!"
No irony in that sentence there! Nope. No siree!
It's the association between Chinese manufacturing and cheap, flimsy crap from Wal-Mart that's hurting Lenovo if any reputation is hurting them. Chinese manufacturing doesn't really have any other reputation in America despite the fact that most notebooks are assembled there and all notebooks are made of parts primarily manufactured there. China's spent so long trying to undercut everybody that they've done a lot of damage to their reputation for quality.
On the other hand, that's exactly how America was 200 years ago. We undercut everyone with cheap, crappy goods thanks to our abundant workforce and raw supplies, and we built quality goods much later. China will eventually overcome this reputation once they've bootstrapped their economy and their own consumers become more sophisticated and demanding.
Then again, what do I know? I haven't shopped for PC notebooks recently, and I don't know if there's an actual quality decline in Thinkpads instead of a perceived problem due to national origin.
So it can happen that the guy next to you reads a nice tentakel manga. Quite funny actually (from a western point of view).
I deliberately didn't mention manga because it's treated differently -- supposedly, anyway. I'm beginning to suspect that that's another Western myth about Japan too.
I didn't see more than about four people reading manga on public transit when I was there for three weeks back in 2000, and I never saw anyone doing anything with porn except in the creepy otaku shops in Akihabara. I suspect that while manga is more respected there than comics here that it's not nearly as respected as you might think (with the same sort of prohibitions against enjoying frivolous kid's entertainment and fetishized adult products), and I'm absolutely positive that anyone reading porn in public would be just as ostracized there as here.
The Japanese do love to read in public, but it's almost always novels, newspapers, and text messages as far as I could tell from my time in Sendai with a couple of weekends in Tokyo.
The Japanese are viewed by many Americans as all lovers of anime, video games, and all the other "pop" culture things that we love to import from them. However, the truth is much different.
Anime & video games in Japan is largely split into two different groups:
1) For kids and shown on public TV.
2) For geeks and loners and shown on subscription channels and direct to video shows.
The average adult attitude about adults that spend a lot of time watching anime & video games is very dim thanks to widely publicized crimes by loners over the past two decades. These isolated incidents are basically the equivalent of the D&D killings in the 80s, Columbine, etc. over here and have resulted in a very similar attitude in the Japanese public about the otaku. While there's little religious fundamentalist opposition to the fan service, porn, and violence in adult targetted anime, the mainstream public still views it as unseemly and regards fans with suspicion.
I'm personally surprised they haven't launched an investigation sooner.
Or at least, that's what my company's web filter says. Grrr....
It's fine to look at whatever you expected the words "hot chick" to link to.
You do realize that "chicks" can be "hot" even with their clothes on, right? I mean, are we really that jaded?
Also, the post was modded funny and it was on the Wikipedia. I personally wasn't aware that the Wikipedia allowed NSFW images until today.
Only wackos and flakes think the USA or Japan has an overpopulation problem. The population density in Japan is greater than just about anywhere, and yet they have none of the problems attributed to overpopulation.
Overpopulation is about the capacity of the entire planet, not just localized regions. Japan and the US import a significant portion of what they need to surive. Japan has almost no natural resources of its own and very little farmland. They import most of their food (and fish the seas of the world for much of the rest) and are reliant on the rest of the world for energy.
Saying that Japan does not suffer from overpopulation is not looking at the complete system. It's analogous to saying that fridges disprove thermodymics by decreasing entropy as they cool their food. They don't because all of that entropy and heat go out the back.
The world could not support a population density like Japan's everywhere on the Earth. You need to look at the whole system first.
Call it what you will, but a work that heavily based on *actual* research and laden with citations at least deserves some merit.
I take it you haven't read Prey or any of Crichton's other works, have you? His books are filled with both good and junk science and the plots frequently hinge on technologically impossible McGuffins. They're essentially about fearmongering more than anything else and frequently follow the theme of "science out of control."
Andromeda Strain is about a disease brought back on a space probe. Prey is a classic BS grey goo scenario. Jurassic Park is also about scientists tampering with things that they shouldn't and it getting out of hand. All three books paint a veneer of scientific credibility with impressive technical jargon but contain a lot of junk science (or in the case of Jurassic Park a credibility stretching series of improbable outcomes).
State of Fear is just another in Crichton's body of work about how science will doom the world one day due to the carelessness, lack or foresight, or human capacity for error that some scientists in control of dangerous technology may possess. State of Fear is the most junk science filled book yet (except maybe Andromeda Strain which has a crystal virus capable of transforming energy into matter and which would benefit from being nuked).
The book presents a wide array of graphs and citations to bolster the point that GW is not caused by humans, but it's drawing from the same body of easily debunked data that anti-GW supporters have been using for years in spite of clear rebuttals. A list of footnotes and a pretty chart does not make for scientific accuracy.
If you permit all parties to conduct research, then there will be pro-green, pro-oil and indeed neutral parties, all conducting research.
Not in anything approaching equal proportion nor in proportion to where the truth lies. Pro-green and neutral parties have far, far less funding than pro-fossil parties in a purely free market funding system. The truth is frequently inconvenient to those with money. Look where we'd be today if we relied purely on private interests to fund research on asbestos, PCBs, and smoking. Monsanto new how toxic PCBs were for years and hid the research while publicly trumpeting their safety.
Heck, just look at the state of antibiotic research. There's been a long period without significant investment in a life saving drug that will immediately be rationed and used as little as possible to avoid spreading resistance. There's little profit in it despite the fact that it would save lives, so there's little funding in it.
One naturally considers the source of research when considering what is being argued.
Of course! People do that all the time when considering research on smoking, global warming, and creationism vs. evolution, right? Right? *crickets chirp* Right?
In many cases, industry and openly partisan research primarily exists to back up the dialogue of pundits that "there's no scientific consensus." Few people actually consider the source of the research they use to back their political views instead accepting biased results as fact because their confirm their own worldview. This is known as confirmation bias, and a lot parties exploit it to keep the truth from being known.
I would rather have an open field for all comers than the State imposing its invisible foot upon those who offer unacceptable views.
There is a difference between stifling dissent and funding what would not have been funded otherwise. The State has a valuable utility in funding discovery of truths that the market provides an incentive to hide. Pollution research, public health research, and pure, non-applied science are fields provide public benefit but are either harmful or uninteresting to market leaders focused entirely on their quarterly profit.
Sometimes, you have to admit, the invisible hand is a pimp slap.
I just noticed your reply. I'm not sure where you stand still based on your first paragraph and your last paragraph.
Your point, is that we should try to prevent global warming, so that WE don't die. My point is that its more important now that to help improve OTHER people's living conditions, so that they don't die. Global warming or not.
Actually, my point is that we should try to prevent global warming so that all of us (as in the sense of everybody in the world and not just the US) won't die. I agree that we need to do more to improve life in Africa. Boy do we ever need to do more. Just think how much the money going to Iraq could do to fix up the majority of the continent if spent wisely.
However, I do get the impression that you're saying that stopping hunger in Africa is more important than fixing global warming to which I respond that the problems are in no way separate problems and must be looked at together. You cannot ignore GW when trying to deal with the declining fertility of Africa's breadbasket. The problems are inexorably linked and until Africa is capable of feeding itself it is going to be extremely hard for it to build up the industry to produce goods that could pay for food from other regions.
It's a bootstrapping problem.
I just noticed this comment. First, I'll address the question of ethics.
Barring divinity, ethics is of course purely subjective; there is no other way for objective morality to exist other than for there to be divine providence. Since I don't want to get into a religious battle, we will posit that there is no fixed frame of reference for morality and thus leave ethics to be subjective or to simply allow for ethics and morality to be different.
As such, ethics is essentially an opinion based on value judgements of the world around us. Asking whether we need ethics is essentially the same as asking whether we need opinions or judgement. It's an irrelevant question since it's outside human experience to live entirely without opinions or judgement. We have ethics because we are sapient or maybe at a baser level because we are sentient.
However, by that simple definition even fruit bats have something like a sense of ethics, though it's ruthlessly tuned towards self surivival and group survival. An amoeba does not because it simply has stimulus and response without conscious perception. Humans, however, are capable of making decisions that are counter to both self survival and group survival in counter to our own instincts. Our self-destructive capabilities make our choices much more significant because we are not slaves to instinct (though it does rule much of what we do).
As (mostly) free thinkers, our actions have significance that the actions of species incapable of turning themselves from survival. We can choose to embrace our instincts to kill those who differ from us, eat those who are weaker than us, and breed until our progeny replace all around us. We can also turn the other cheek, starve ourselves for a stranger's benefit, or practice celibacy to avoid the distractions of lust. Our choices have meaning because we can choose to put something else ahead of our survival.
Even if human ethics are subjective, they could be said have objective value because our capability to make choices distinguishes us from other objects in the universe.
Of course, I should get out of the way that the question of predeterminism is ultimately just as much of an intellectual dead end as nihilism and solipsism because whether our choices exist, whether they objectively matter, and whether their consequences exist are all irrelevant to the fact that we must make them.
If humans are only important to humans, for purely subjective reasons, then humans truly are no more important than viruses, whether you like it or not.
Either your existence is justified according to some higher power, or your existence is no more meaningful than anything else in the universe. I mean, it's meaningful to you, but your opinion is subjective and irrelevant.
A subjective opinion on human motives is hardly irrelevant. Given the connection between observation and existence, a subjective opinion may in fact be more important than an objective one (since there may not even be any such thing as an objective truth).
Furthermore, you fail to define importance. Without a fixed frame of reference in the universe, I hardly see that the word "importance" itself can have any objective meaning. Give me some reason to care about any part of the universe that doesn't directly impact human life (or any other life capable of suffering / making choices / etc.).
Why do we need a valid system of ethics? Why do we need a guidance for behavior, beyond raw need and individual desire? Why do we need to ascribe good or evil to any human action?
We need such a measurement (from a purely subjective point of view) because the alternative is that choices which may be bad would go unrecognized as such even though they may do significant harm (to self and others).
The problem of which ethic is better or not is mostly subjective unless you can find some external measuring stick to measure it by, though objective measures are often hard to come by. For example, selfishnes
Shenmue has to be one of the most defining DC games. Personally, I thought it was one of the greatest games of all time. Certainly, most immersive ever at the time. Just incredible.
Um, no.
Shenmue's voice acting and horrible script alone loses any chance it ever had at being immersive. Lines like the one I used for the title of this post combined with some of the worst recordings of people reading out loud made for a grating experience. (Seriously, people, try reading the lines a few times and putting some emotion into them instead of just taking whatever comes from reading the script the first time.)
Oh, and the ending? What an utterly anti-climatic experience.
Going with T-Mobile shouldn't fix your problem. T-Mobile uses GSM phone just like Cingular and AT&T. Well, it shouldn't fix your problem unless it's the use of the 850 MHz GSM band that causes the issue since I believe T-Mobile doesn't use that frequency while Cingular/AT&T does.
...it would be nice to add a zero to my return...
I decided to help you out there. Here you go.
Instead of getting a return of $237.13, you will now receive $237.130.
Have a nice day!
I actually had two issues with your original post.
1) The bizarro, Newspeakish definition of natural to erase its opposite.
2) The assertion that humans are no more important than viruses.
These are independent arguments, and I'm not arguing that the natural/unnatural divide is unimportant -- simply that it's unimportant to questions of ethics related to nihilism.
But then, what's the point of ethics? What's the point of sanity? Do they have some transcendent value? Do they address some metaphysical need? Do they have any importance at all, apart from purely subjective egocentric or anthropocentric perceptions?
Ethics has no value except as related to human motives and actions. If human motives and actions are unimportant in a system, then it's not a valid system of ethics because it attempts to redefine the problem into nonexistence. A system that ascribes no good or evil to any human action provides no guidance for behavior and is thus, not a valid system of ethics.
Also, we place value judgements on actions simply as part of perceiving the world, and the question of whether having an ethic at all is inherently meritorious is essentially a waste of time to consider as it is outside human experience to not have one. It's like asking whether or not there's inherent value in perception itself.
How about caring about someone who actually exists right now and is starving and dying, RIGHT THIS MINUTE? Shall I give you examples or are you all up on the world's issues?
How about trying to prevent droughts in Africa?
What about preventing the wars predicted by the Pentagon as a result of global climate change?
What about trying to prevent a predicted increase in hurricane frequency and strength as a result of raised ocean temperatures?
Now it's your turn. Name me ways in which doing something about global warming would result in a loss of life, and I'll show you a matching number of ways in which not doing something about it will result in loss of life.
Also, no one in this world is starving and dying for any reason other than geopolitics. Drought in Africa kills people because the abundence of the rest of the world is not brought to those in need. No one is starving because of efforts to prevent global warming. No one.
They are the only branch of the state that can track anyone down quickely and eaisly; surley they should be put in chrge of what you call "homeland security". ;)
I know you're joking and all, but I still feel like pointing out for those who modded you Insightful why this isn't so simple.
American taxpayers sign up each year and tell the government whether they're obeying the law or not by filing (or not filing) their tax returns. Terrorists don't register with the government to say that they're terrorists. The government has a much easier time knowing whether your a tax evader than a terrorist because it's all on record.
After that, it's a simple matter or when and where you next use your SSN or other government ID to nail you down. Alternately, it's a matter of when you get caught using fake ID to evade the government to nail you down. Once you've ID'ed a tax evader, tracking them down isn't hard because evading the government once it actually wants you is much, much harder than you might think unless you completely cut yourself off from society.
There are roughly 280 to 560 times as many active volcanoes in the world as Mt. St. Helens.
No, not really. The exact number of active volcanoes varies based on your definition of "active" and of "volcano," but an estimate of 50-70 each year is more accurate.
Even if there were that many volcanoes and they all put out the same amount of CO2 as St. Helens, you'd have matched the state of Washington with all the active volcanoes in the world. Now add Oregon. Now add California. Now add the other 47 states of the Union, and then add the other 191 countries in the world.
I repeat: Drop in the bucket.
You continue to contradict yourself by using the word "natural" while simultaneously stating that its antonym has no meaning. I personally don't care one way or another whether actions are natural or unnatural -- I just hold that the words should have valid meaning to exist in the language. For natural to have meaning, something must be unnatural, artificial, etc. Pick your own definition of those words if you will, but the way the word is used by the majority of people (which is how language is defined) is to represent the distinction between those things which are man made and those things which are not.
Incidentally, objects made by other animals are also sometimes considered to be artificial depending on the speaker.
Because you're right: if we're just another random evolutionary outcome, then we really do have no basis for making ethical judgements. See also: nihilism and Nietzche's Ubermensch.
I prefer not to. Nihilism is just as much of an intellectual dead-end as solipsism. People who believe strongly in either should simply step aside and let the people who care about the consequences of their actions make decisions.
The conundrum of man's place in--or out of--nature must be resolved before you can discuss "sane ethical and philosophical system[s]".
That's what I mean about contradicting yourself. You state that there is nothing that is not natural and then state that it's possible for man to have a place outside of nature. By your definition of "natural," that's impossible for any being except God, and it's arguable that by your definitions even God is natural and cannot be outside nature.
Anyway, whether things are natural or not is a separate consideration entirely from ethics, and whether or not we are the result of random happenstance over billions of year, divine providence 6000 years ago, or the push of some simulator's button 3 seconds ago is also utterly irrelevant to the condition of being human and living life. Ethics and decisions based on them have to result in the person believing in that they have a stake in some action or they are not sane. Nihilism and solipsism both fail because they ultimately argue that one can never have a stake in any action because they don't matter.
Quit spreading nonsense. The phrase is not anti-Semitic at all. It's a nonsense word coined by a comic strip artist. More information in the third article from the bottom here.