Not to mention that thermal exhaust duct that's only supposed to stretch from the exhaust port at the surface 621/1000s of the way down to the main reactor.
I dunno. I like my Kindle, but all the math books I've bought have been so badly formatted as to be useless. When I read the same books on the Amazon reader for iTouch they're properly formatted, so I'm guessing something is broken with book rendering on the reader.
I've had my Kindle 2 hard reset. The books I'd bought from Amazon I was able to get back, but I lost all my notes and bookmarks on the books I'd loaded over USB -- one of the key buying points for me. No ability to put my own documents on, no sale. But the documentation doesn't explain that when it says notes are backed up over WhisperNet, that's only for books that you have bought through the Amazon store. That had me *pissed*, because they essentially told me they were backing my notes up when in fact they weren't.
Recently my Kindle has been taking a very long time to wake up from stand by or to go to stand by.. fifteen or twenty seconds. Enough to be annoying. At first I wasn't sure the Kindle was responding and so I'd hit the power button again, only to be rewarded by the Kindle turning on and off.
There have been lots of complaints about customer service -- especially where there have been screen problems. Several people I know (whom I trust as truthful) have had screens fail do to what should be normal handling for an ebook. Some people claim that the screen failed after being put through airport security, although that hasn't happened to anyone I know.
Finally, the user interface is really about as screwed up as you can make something that ought to be dead simple. Err. When do you want to hit "back" or "return" or "previous page" exactly? I know what to do if I think it through, but after over six months with the thing I still occasionally do the wrong thing.
Oh, it's a very good device overall, but there is vast room for improvement, even without talking about major updates like color or touch screen input.
Well, let's think in terms of what the climate deniers want. They don't care a fig about the scientific fight, what they want is a public policy that is favorable to fossil energy use.
It seems to me that the denialist position does its policy aims a disservice. You can make policy arguments for unfettered fossil energy use without having to engage in a debate about science you don't understand or really care about. It all comes down to different kinds of costs and risks. If you don't do anything about AGW, you risk costs due to more rapid climate change. If you do do something, you can't be sure of eliminating those costs, but you definitely take on the cost of not using the cheapest energy sources available.
I think you could make a credible argument on those terms. Not unassailable of course, but not nutty either.
. Certainly we know the globe is warming, but the greenhouse gas aspect of it is still very much up in the air.
Unless we go for carbon sequestration.
Anyhow, I've been following the "Global Warming" debate since the early 80s, before it was a political debate. It's simply ignorant to compare climate science to astrology. The debate has been scholarly and fiercely contested every inch of the way. Also at times ugly but if you've ever seen peer review comments you'll know that's par for the course. Science doesn't work because scientists are nice or wise or noble. But the process is a lot more honest than political debate.
The problem is that a lot of things we'd *like* to know cannot be known with very much certainty. For example, most would say humans contribute to climate change, but nobody really say whether we can do anything to stop it. Politics doesn't deal very well with that kind of thing. Politicians want a scapegoat that can be thrown in jail or invaded, not the message that (a) we are contributing to a problem but (b) we don't know whether stopping that will make any difference.
What we really need is some serious, deep *policy* thinking, one that takes into account uncertainty but doesn't think that the best course of action is to *assume* that everything will work out. It might be best to *act* that way, but only after a thorough examination of all the costs and benefits of acting and the best ways to hedge our bets if we are not going to take action.
In any case, be careful of rhetorical excess. If you compare climate science to astrology, you can't cite *anything* climate scientist say, even when it is favorable to your position.
Nice job of selecting the denominator to give you the result you wanted to report.
The total set aside for highway improvements: 30 billion. Amount of that to be spent in 2009-2010 : 5 billion.
Now I don't know who thinks that five billion dollars on top of the huge amount being spent for showcase infrastructure projects (pork) isn't a lot of money, but I sure wouldn't call them "fiscally conservative".
Now the thirty billion could be spent faster, but I've seen what happens when government is spending money like it's burning a hole in its pocket. It stinks. It's an invitation to corruption and boondoggle and crony capitalism.
After 9/11, and after the anthrax attacks, I was working in a field that could be related (in a very tenuous way) to bioterrorism security. The Feds wanted lot of money spent, and *fast*. Nobody even *knew* how to spend that much money that fast on the problems they were supposed to be solving. But certain operators sure knew how to build a machine to consume money. You set up a subsidiary or company, hire lobbyists, hire cheap contractors (often outsourced after a layer or two to really cheap labor) and throw together some total BS project that you expected to disappear as soon as the mania subsided. It was the bottom feeders who were ready and willing with "shovel ready" projects.
What did we get for all that money spent so quickly? Nothing. The only people who could absorb money that fast were the dishonest ones who were specialized in sucking up money when it had to be spent faster than anybody could manage responsibly. People who were working in fields for years who just needed *little* things, a couple thousand dollars or maybe even ten thousand dollars were frozen out while consultants with no actual domain knowledge absorbed hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions for BS projects.
Spending the money more slowly makes sense for several reasons. From the good government standpoint, it discourages the most rapacious freebooter contractors. It encourages people with sustainable projects to take the time to compete with the bottom feeders. If anything less jam today and more tomorrow would have been better.
OK... here's my problem. It's OK, to say that morally the government should not do this. It's OK to say that private industry would do a better job. What bothers me is saying these two things right next to each other as if they were logically equivalent.
I'm not saying you're doing this here, it's just that these two kinds of positions are so often marshaled with each other without comment that I think it's important to note that one does not necessarily follow from the other. It might be morally wrong for the government to explore space, AND that government space exploration is the only practical way to get that done.
I think the call for private industry to step up to the plate with LEO is smart. From a pragmatic standpoint if this is not th time to do it, it's at least pretty close. But if we imagined a history without any government support of space exploration, I don't think we'd be at this point today. That alternate history might be more morally defensible, but nature and economics aren't obligated to give us a happy ending when we make the "right" choices.
I can't see the Obama administration rattling sabers against China. That's not their style.
But I can see a big fight over which defense systems. Recent history hasn't been kind to Air Force procurement. F-22 production was halted, and the F-35 program is behind schedule, 16 billion over budget, and estimates have been that getting it on budget might take a further 30 billion of overruns. If this goes on much longer the F-35 will cost almost as much as the F-22. These are big numbers, even in a 534 billion dollar budget. So even if the defense budget isn't trimmed (which would be a bit crazy given the deficit problems), people must be worried about the programs they're employed on.
The argument for anti-missile technology is somewhat stronger now that we aren't facing the Soviet Union, although it isn't quite a slam-dunk yet. Iran now has a space program and can launch orbital vehicles, which pretty much means they're planning on developing ICBMs. But bad programs have a way of fighting for survival, even if the general problem being addressed is reasonable.
these demonstrations aren't exactly peer reviewed.
Not many people doubt that a directed energy weapon can, under the right conditions, shoot down a ballistic missile. The question is whether we'll see on, in our lifetime, shoot down a ballistic missile under realistic conditions. Then being able to that reliably enough.
I'm not doctrinally against developing directed energy weapons, or even anti-missile systems, especially boost-phase systems. But there's been too much fakery and even downright fraud in these programs for me to lend much credence to any "breakthroughs".
I'm just saying, a hammer doesn't have to be made out of some exotic material to be better than the run of the mill hammer.
Your point about where the mass should be is why I like Estwing's hammers. They're forged out of a single piece of metal, but the neck is very slim, putting more of the mass out at the head. Therefore you get more bang per ounce, but the head will never fly off.
But by your definition "propaganda" is not necessarily some thing one is vulnerable to.
I can try to persuade you to a position using entirely rational and supported arguments, motivated by the identification of some mutual, shared interest we have in your taking that position. If we use propaganda the way you propose to use it, that would be propaganda, so long as my attempt at rational persuasion wasn't targeted at one individual.
Why would that be reprehensible?
Dictionaries -- at least cheap ones -- aren't an adequate guide to word usage. In a case like this we can each hunt around until we find a definition that suits our rhetorical purpose. For example, the Oxford Compact Dictionary defines propaganda thus:
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
Now this suits me if I want to absolve Google of being a propagandist, because we aren't talking about political causes or points of view. But that's really a silly debate to be having. I emphasized "especially of a misleading nature" because even the OED has to deal with the issue of the usual sense of the word not being universal. That's the way words are. They aren't perfect instruments.
What I'm really interested in is the argument that any attempts at mass persuasion are ipso facto reprehensible. Your experience with Ayn Rand shed intriguing light on that question. I do not think attempts at persuasion are so injurious to a healthy, inquiring skeptical mind. The answer as you obviously know is to get out into the world and see for yourself, not to become too emotionally attached to some artificial paradigm somebody has constructed in some hermetically sealed, postulated world. Leaving aside trivial instances, every attempt at persuasion will necessarily contain some error, but often something of value which you can use to expand your understanding of the world... once you've tested it adequately.
Well, a lobotomy reduces the patient's capacity for introspection and self-consciousness. So what you write is true of lobotomies.
That said, it's premature to characterize these results as "blissful ignorance". In fact the researchers pinpoint two areas: the right angular gyrus and left inferior parietal lobe. It's intriguing that both of these areas are related to arithmetic abilities, but that's all the result is -- intriguing. We don't know whether it's the same thing going on in both cases, or whether either case is related it any way to what we think of as "spirituality".
You can look at the things these areas of the brain are supposed to do and make all kinds of interesting conjectures, but it could be something as simple as some of these patients not being able to understand the sense of the questions being put the them, or others not being able to monitor the kinds of emotional sensations they're being asked to report on. One area is believed to be used in the understanding of metaphors, the other in terms of bodily awareness.
Once I bought my father in law a really, really nice hammer. There wasn't made of titanium or anything like that; it didn't have any kind of electronic controls or clever mechanical gizmos to help you swing it straight. It wasn't innovative. It was just a really, really well made hammer.
He was pleased with it, even though the hammer he already owned was in approximate terms very similar to the one I gave him. In precise terms it wasn't anywhere near as nice.
On a personal note, I would be more emotionally moved if you had referred to Thomas Spence's "The Real Rights of Man", or Peter Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread".
It sounds like your view is more nuanced than it first appeared.
I still say that planned exercises (perhaps we should not call them "drills") are valuable. My experience is that most people aren't very imaginative. They can't see what would be obvious to them in a walk through when they are trying to plan ahead.
For years I sold a software package that was used in the public health field. I used to go to conferences and give training sessions and lectures, I know these were highly rated, because I read the evals. I also know that people who hadn't used the software before gained almost no benefit from the lectures, because I'd visit them later and *see*. On the other hand, I could take somebody through the exact same material at their desk, and come back a year later and they'd be rocking an rolling.
Why?
Because people make *connections* when they are in the environment where they are doing to actually do something. Most people don't seem to have the imagination to connect things they know on a intellectual level to actions they might need to take. Even somebody who's god at it can learn things he wouldn't have noticed. If they'd walked through the Apollo 13 scenario in advanced, somebody would have realized the CO2 filters from the LEM ought to be compatible with the Command Module too.
Now as far as abject failure is concerned, I don't want to be doctrinaire and say nobody ever learns anything from them. But my experience of human defensiveness tells me that you're more likely to get people digging in their heels than pulling in the same direction. The most useful kind of result is a generally positive one with clear areas for improvement. Then you keep raising the bar.
There's a time and a place for the surprise drill. But there's no use learning from simple failures that could be trained out of existence first.
So let's be clear: Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" was in your view reprehensible. Or the Federalist Papers. Or "Atlas Shrugged" if you prefe. All of them reprehensible.
By the way, recognizing that human language is full of ambiguous constructs like metonymy and polysemy isn't double-think. That's just an unfortunate fact of life. Cynically exploiting those bugs in language to make an emotionally loaded argument *is*.
If I had consciously stolen the widget then I must have decided that it's more in my interest to live outside the law than to support the rule of law. The more indefensible laws are and the more arbitrary their enforcement, the more people who will take the position that they have no interest in the matter.
And you can't just say, "Well, I'll just avoid it by buying legitimate copies of the music I listen to." The music industry wants you to buy something more like a *license* to use the music. This is especially so with digital music files, but it's also true with physical carriers like phonograph records and CDs. You can't just play them any place and time you want. You can't play a CD you bought in your place of business for your customers, for example. That's a fairly innocuous situation, but things can and will get more complicated in the future, especially as applies to books.
That's kind of an extreme position, don't you think?
Just because an unannounced drill is useful, doesn't mean announced drills aren't useful. For one thing, you *can't* do realistic drills of some scenarios. Some reactions to emergencies kill people. Clog the roads with emergency vehicles and panicking people and rush most of your EMTs and ambulances to the "disaster" site and people who need to ride in an ambulance for real suffer. Shutdown the airport for a few hours and somebody might not get his heart transplant.
People and groups learn by being stretched, and of course an unannounced drill stretches people, but sometimes when people are very poorly prepared they don't learn anything from abject failure. If *nothing* works, then you get a useless emotional reaction. If you give people a chance to prepare, you can get them to think about the general parameters of what an effective response would be.
Not everything in a drill people know is coming has to be expected. So you got your workers out there, and then you say, "OK everyone, the UHF radios have stopped working," or "You can't get any blood plasma from Mount Sinai because they're full up with casualties," or "Guess what, this isn't a chemical spill, it's radioactive."
The thing about disasters is that they disrupt normal systems. That's the definition of a disaster. It takes a while to get people trained up to the point where you can throw anything at them and it will be a learning experience.
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position
OK, if we define propaganda that way, that includes influencing the community towards a position it is in their interest to take using entirely truthful and honest means.
It is intellectually dishonest to try to trick somebody into condemning something by using an emotionally loaded term in an emotionally neutral sense. You should make clear that your version of propaganda includes MLK's "I have a dream" speech, and the surgeon general's report linking cigarettes with cancer. You ought to make it clear that your position is that literally anything that is intended to persuade people is morally reprehensible.
By "moral authority" I mean that an authority has a just and rational claim to my voluntary cooperation.
Suppose you and I go to court over the ownership of a widget that is in my possession, and lets say the court finds in your favor and orders me to hand over the widget. Naturally, in my view that order is wrong and the decision is unjust. However, no system of law is perfect and arrives at only just decisions. If we are to have any law at all, we have to live with the occasional unjust decision. So it is rational for me to comply voluntarily because as much as I hate losing the widget, I have a greater interest in living in a society governed by rules that are at least approximately fair and approximately impartially applied.
Let's say on the other hand that the law is crooked, and the case is fixed so you win because of your influence. Then the only rational reason for me to cooperate with this unjust and undesired decision is to avoid punishment. If I can undermine the system or thwart it in any way I am fully justified in doing so, provided I can avoid detection or punishment.
Rightly or wrongly, people feel that copyright laws are incomprehensible, unbalanced, and written to the specification of narrow special interests, not with the good of society in mind. Therefore they feel little compunction about breaking those laws if they can get away with it, because the laws are generated by a corrupt political system. When both the drafting and enforcement of certain laws favor certain special interests, then not only do those laws fail to gain voluntary cooperation, people become accustomed to committing petty "crimes".
This is the meaning of the Chinese proverb: many laws make many criminals. In autocratic societies, laws aren't made for the common good, therefore many laws only further alienate the people.
You forgot: making the defendant crawl underneath the horse and forcing him to carry both it and you.
A legal system in which the powerful can obtain the practical result they desire simply by grinding down the weak has no legitimate moral authority. Its principles are a sham; they have no practical significance. You might as well auction verdicts to the highest bidder.
This kind of reminds me of stories of 1960s sub warfare between the US and the Soviets. US subs would trail the soviets using only passive sonar to tell when rudder was applied or engine or trim adjusted. Soon each watch's OOD would feel like he could read the mind of his counterpart on the Soviet boat, whether he was going to turn left or right, or pull a "crazy Ivan", a dangerous figure eight maneuver designed to flush out enemy subs. All this was done blind, and US subs were almost totally silent.
So I'm picturing these security researchers huddled over a monitor plotting the hacker's nefarious activities. One turns to the other and says, "Bet you a bottle of Chivas he pulls a Wang-dang-doodle."
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. Remember when they replaced the trash can with the recycle bin? Think of all the virgin bits that have been saved over the years.
Not to mention that thermal exhaust duct that's only supposed to stretch from the exhaust port at the surface 621/1000s of the way down to the main reactor.
I dunno. I like my Kindle, but all the math books I've bought have been so badly formatted as to be useless. When I read the same books on the Amazon reader for iTouch they're properly formatted, so I'm guessing something is broken with book rendering on the reader.
I've had my Kindle 2 hard reset. The books I'd bought from Amazon I was able to get back, but I lost all my notes and bookmarks on the books I'd loaded over USB -- one of the key buying points for me. No ability to put my own documents on, no sale. But the documentation doesn't explain that when it says notes are backed up over WhisperNet, that's only for books that you have bought through the Amazon store. That had me *pissed*, because they essentially told me they were backing my notes up when in fact they weren't.
Recently my Kindle has been taking a very long time to wake up from stand by or to go to stand by .. fifteen or twenty seconds. Enough to be annoying. At first I wasn't sure the Kindle was responding and so I'd hit the power button again, only to be rewarded by the Kindle turning on and off.
There have been lots of complaints about customer service -- especially where there have been screen problems. Several people I know (whom I trust as truthful) have had screens fail do to what should be normal handling for an ebook. Some people claim that the screen failed after being put through airport security, although that hasn't happened to anyone I know.
Finally, the user interface is really about as screwed up as you can make something that ought to be dead simple. Err. When do you want to hit "back" or "return" or "previous page" exactly? I know what to do if I think it through, but after over six months with the thing I still occasionally do the wrong thing.
Oh, it's a very good device overall, but there is vast room for improvement, even without talking about major updates like color or touch screen input.
Well, let's think in terms of what the climate deniers want. They don't care a fig about the scientific fight, what they want is a public policy that is favorable to fossil energy use.
It seems to me that the denialist position does its policy aims a disservice. You can make policy arguments for unfettered fossil energy use without having to engage in a debate about science you don't understand or really care about. It all comes down to different kinds of costs and risks. If you don't do anything about AGW, you risk costs due to more rapid climate change. If you do do something, you can't be sure of eliminating those costs, but you definitely take on the cost of not using the cheapest energy sources available.
I think you could make a credible argument on those terms. Not unassailable of course, but not nutty either.
. Certainly we know the globe is warming, but the greenhouse gas aspect of it is still very much up in the air.
Unless we go for carbon sequestration.
Anyhow, I've been following the "Global Warming" debate since the early 80s, before it was a political debate. It's simply ignorant to compare climate science to astrology. The debate has been scholarly and fiercely contested every inch of the way. Also at times ugly but if you've ever seen peer review comments you'll know that's par for the course. Science doesn't work because scientists are nice or wise or noble. But the process is a lot more honest than political debate.
The problem is that a lot of things we'd *like* to know cannot be known with very much certainty. For example, most would say humans contribute to climate change, but nobody really say whether we can do anything to stop it. Politics doesn't deal very well with that kind of thing. Politicians want a scapegoat that can be thrown in jail or invaded, not the message that (a) we are contributing to a problem but (b) we don't know whether stopping that will make any difference.
What we really need is some serious, deep *policy* thinking, one that takes into account uncertainty but doesn't think that the best course of action is to *assume* that everything will work out. It might be best to *act* that way, but only after a thorough examination of all the costs and benefits of acting and the best ways to hedge our bets if we are not going to take action.
In any case, be careful of rhetorical excess. If you compare climate science to astrology, you can't cite *anything* climate scientist say, even when it is favorable to your position.
Nice job of selecting the denominator to give you the result you wanted to report.
The total set aside for highway improvements: 30 billion.
Amount of that to be spent in 2009-2010 : 5 billion.
Now I don't know who thinks that five billion dollars on top of the huge amount being spent for showcase infrastructure projects (pork) isn't a lot of money, but I sure wouldn't call them "fiscally conservative".
Now the thirty billion could be spent faster, but I've seen what happens when government is spending money like it's burning a hole in its pocket. It stinks. It's an invitation to corruption and boondoggle and crony capitalism.
After 9/11, and after the anthrax attacks, I was working in a field that could be related (in a very tenuous way) to bioterrorism security. The Feds wanted lot of money spent, and *fast*. Nobody even *knew* how to spend that much money that fast on the problems they were supposed to be solving. But certain operators sure knew how to build a machine to consume money. You set up a subsidiary or company, hire lobbyists, hire cheap contractors (often outsourced after a layer or two to really cheap labor) and throw together some total BS project that you expected to disappear as soon as the mania subsided. It was the bottom feeders who were ready and willing with "shovel ready" projects.
What did we get for all that money spent so quickly? Nothing. The only people who could absorb money that fast were the dishonest ones who were specialized in sucking up money when it had to be spent faster than anybody could manage responsibly. People who were working in fields for years who just needed *little* things, a couple thousand dollars or maybe even ten thousand dollars were frozen out while consultants with no actual domain knowledge absorbed hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions for BS projects.
Spending the money more slowly makes sense for several reasons. From the good government standpoint, it discourages the most rapacious freebooter contractors. It encourages people with sustainable projects to take the time to compete with the bottom feeders. If anything less jam today and more tomorrow would have been better.
You get to be the Master Race, so suck it up.
Who's it more sporting to kick,the boss up on his high horse or some poor bastard trying to pick himself out of the gutter?
OK ... here's my problem. It's OK, to say that morally the government should not do this. It's OK to say that private industry would do a better job. What bothers me is saying these two things right next to each other as if they were logically equivalent.
I'm not saying you're doing this here, it's just that these two kinds of positions are so often marshaled with each other without comment that I think it's important to note that one does not necessarily follow from the other. It might be morally wrong for the government to explore space, AND that government space exploration is the only practical way to get that done.
I think the call for private industry to step up to the plate with LEO is smart. From a pragmatic standpoint if this is not th time to do it, it's at least pretty close. But if we imagined a history without any government support of space exploration, I don't think we'd be at this point today. That alternate history might be more morally defensible, but nature and economics aren't obligated to give us a happy ending when we make the "right" choices.
I think you're probably right.
I can't see the Obama administration rattling sabers against China. That's not their style.
But I can see a big fight over which defense systems. Recent history hasn't been kind to Air Force procurement. F-22 production was halted, and the F-35 program is behind schedule, 16 billion over budget, and estimates have been that getting it on budget might take a further 30 billion of overruns. If this goes on much longer the F-35 will cost almost as much as the F-22. These are big numbers, even in a 534 billion dollar budget. So even if the defense budget isn't trimmed (which would be a bit crazy given the deficit problems), people must be worried about the programs they're employed on.
The argument for anti-missile technology is somewhat stronger now that we aren't facing the Soviet Union, although it isn't quite a slam-dunk yet. Iran now has a space program and can launch orbital vehicles, which pretty much means they're planning on developing ICBMs. But bad programs have a way of fighting for survival, even if the general problem being addressed is reasonable.
these demonstrations aren't exactly peer reviewed.
Not many people doubt that a directed energy weapon can, under the right conditions, shoot down a ballistic missile. The question is whether we'll see on, in our lifetime, shoot down a ballistic missile under realistic conditions. Then being able to that reliably enough.
I'm not doctrinally against developing directed energy weapons, or even anti-missile systems, especially boost-phase systems. But there's been too much fakery and even downright fraud in these programs for me to lend much credence to any "breakthroughs".
My Grandma never saw a computer in her life, but my mother in law hates everything but WordPerfect on DOS.
I'm just saying, a hammer doesn't have to be made out of some exotic material to be better than the run of the mill hammer.
Your point about where the mass should be is why I like Estwing's hammers. They're forged out of a single piece of metal, but the neck is very slim, putting more of the mass out at the head. Therefore you get more bang per ounce, but the head will never fly off.
But by your definition "propaganda" is not necessarily some thing one is vulnerable to.
I can try to persuade you to a position using entirely rational and supported arguments, motivated by the identification of some mutual, shared interest we have in your taking that position. If we use propaganda the way you propose to use it, that would be propaganda, so long as my attempt at rational persuasion wasn't targeted at one individual.
Why would that be reprehensible?
Dictionaries -- at least cheap ones -- aren't an adequate guide to word usage. In a case like this we can each hunt around until we find a definition that suits our rhetorical purpose. For example, the Oxford Compact Dictionary defines propaganda thus:
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
Now this suits me if I want to absolve Google of being a propagandist, because we aren't talking about political causes or points of view. But that's really a silly debate to be having. I emphasized "especially of a misleading nature" because even the OED has to deal with the issue of the usual sense of the word not being universal. That's the way words are. They aren't perfect instruments.
What I'm really interested in is the argument that any attempts at mass persuasion are ipso facto reprehensible. Your experience with Ayn Rand shed intriguing light on that question. I do not think attempts at persuasion are so injurious to a healthy, inquiring skeptical mind. The answer as you obviously know is to get out into the world and see for yourself, not to become too emotionally attached to some artificial paradigm somebody has constructed in some hermetically sealed, postulated world. Leaving aside trivial instances, every attempt at persuasion will necessarily contain some error, but often something of value which you can use to expand your understanding of the world ... once you've tested it adequately.
Well, a lobotomy reduces the patient's capacity for introspection and self-consciousness. So what you write is true of lobotomies.
That said, it's premature to characterize these results as "blissful ignorance". In fact the researchers pinpoint two areas: the right angular gyrus and left inferior parietal lobe. It's intriguing that both of these areas are related to arithmetic abilities, but that's all the result is -- intriguing. We don't know whether it's the same thing going on in both cases, or whether either case is related it any way to what we think of as "spirituality".
You can look at the things these areas of the brain are supposed to do and make all kinds of interesting conjectures, but it could be something as simple as some of these patients not being able to understand the sense of the questions being put the them, or others not being able to monitor the kinds of emotional sensations they're being asked to report on. One area is believed to be used in the understanding of metaphors, the other in terms of bodily awareness.
Once I bought my father in law a really, really nice hammer. There wasn't made of titanium or anything like that; it didn't have any kind of electronic controls or clever mechanical gizmos to help you swing it straight. It wasn't innovative. It was just a really, really well made hammer.
He was pleased with it, even though the hammer he already owned was in approximate terms very similar to the one I gave him. In precise terms it wasn't anywhere near as nice.
On a personal note, I would be more emotionally moved if you had referred to Thomas Spence's "The Real Rights of Man", or Peter Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread".
How is that not double-think?
It sounds like your view is more nuanced than it first appeared.
I still say that planned exercises (perhaps we should not call them "drills") are valuable. My experience is that most people aren't very imaginative. They can't see what would be obvious to them in a walk through when they are trying to plan ahead.
For years I sold a software package that was used in the public health field. I used to go to conferences and give training sessions and lectures, I know these were highly rated, because I read the evals. I also know that people who hadn't used the software before gained almost no benefit from the lectures, because I'd visit them later and *see*. On the other hand, I could take somebody through the exact same material at their desk, and come back a year later and they'd be rocking an rolling.
Why?
Because people make *connections* when they are in the environment where they are doing to actually do something. Most people don't seem to have the imagination to connect things they know on a intellectual level to actions they might need to take. Even somebody who's god at it can learn things he wouldn't have noticed. If they'd walked through the Apollo 13 scenario in advanced, somebody would have realized the CO2 filters from the LEM ought to be compatible with the Command Module too.
Now as far as abject failure is concerned, I don't want to be doctrinaire and say nobody ever learns anything from them. But my experience of human defensiveness tells me that you're more likely to get people digging in their heels than pulling in the same direction. The most useful kind of result is a generally positive one with clear areas for improvement. Then you keep raising the bar.
There's a time and a place for the surprise drill. But there's no use learning from simple failures that could be trained out of existence first.
So let's be clear: Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" was in your view reprehensible. Or the Federalist Papers. Or "Atlas Shrugged" if you prefe. All of them reprehensible.
By the way, recognizing that human language is full of ambiguous constructs like metonymy and polysemy isn't double-think. That's just an unfortunate fact of life. Cynically exploiting those bugs in language to make an emotionally loaded argument *is*.
You are making my point.
If I had consciously stolen the widget then I must have decided that it's more in my interest to live outside the law than to support the rule of law. The more indefensible laws are and the more arbitrary their enforcement, the more people who will take the position that they have no interest in the matter.
And you can't just say, "Well, I'll just avoid it by buying legitimate copies of the music I listen to." The music industry wants you to buy something more like a *license* to use the music. This is especially so with digital music files, but it's also true with physical carriers like phonograph records and CDs. You can't just play them any place and time you want. You can't play a CD you bought in your place of business for your customers, for example. That's a fairly innocuous situation, but things can and will get more complicated in the future, especially as applies to books.
That's kind of an extreme position, don't you think?
Just because an unannounced drill is useful, doesn't mean announced drills aren't useful. For one thing, you *can't* do realistic drills of some scenarios. Some reactions to emergencies kill people. Clog the roads with emergency vehicles and panicking people and rush most of your EMTs and ambulances to the "disaster" site and people who need to ride in an ambulance for real suffer. Shutdown the airport for a few hours and somebody might not get his heart transplant.
People and groups learn by being stretched, and of course an unannounced drill stretches people, but sometimes when people are very poorly prepared they don't learn anything from abject failure. If *nothing* works, then you get a useless emotional reaction. If you give people a chance to prepare, you can get them to think about the general parameters of what an effective response would be.
Not everything in a drill people know is coming has to be expected. So you got your workers out there, and then you say, "OK everyone, the UHF radios have stopped working," or "You can't get any blood plasma from Mount Sinai because they're full up with casualties," or "Guess what, this isn't a chemical spill, it's radioactive."
The thing about disasters is that they disrupt normal systems. That's the definition of a disaster. It takes a while to get people trained up to the point where you can throw anything at them and it will be a learning experience.
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position
OK, if we define propaganda that way, that includes influencing the community towards a position it is in their interest to take using entirely truthful and honest means.
It is intellectually dishonest to try to trick somebody into condemning something by using an emotionally loaded term in an emotionally neutral sense. You should make clear that your version of propaganda includes MLK's "I have a dream" speech, and the surgeon general's report linking cigarettes with cancer. You ought to make it clear that your position is that literally anything that is intended to persuade people is morally reprehensible.
By "moral authority" I mean that an authority has a just and rational claim to my voluntary cooperation.
Suppose you and I go to court over the ownership of a widget that is in my possession, and lets say the court finds in your favor and orders me to hand over the widget. Naturally, in my view that order is wrong and the decision is unjust. However, no system of law is perfect and arrives at only just decisions. If we are to have any law at all, we have to live with the occasional unjust decision. So it is rational for me to comply voluntarily because as much as I hate losing the widget, I have a greater interest in living in a society governed by rules that are at least approximately fair and approximately impartially applied.
Let's say on the other hand that the law is crooked, and the case is fixed so you win because of your influence. Then the only rational reason for me to cooperate with this unjust and undesired decision is to avoid punishment. If I can undermine the system or thwart it in any way I am fully justified in doing so, provided I can avoid detection or punishment.
Rightly or wrongly, people feel that copyright laws are incomprehensible, unbalanced, and written to the specification of narrow special interests, not with the good of society in mind. Therefore they feel little compunction about breaking those laws if they can get away with it, because the laws are generated by a corrupt political system. When both the drafting and enforcement of certain laws favor certain special interests, then not only do those laws fail to gain voluntary cooperation, people become accustomed to committing petty "crimes".
This is the meaning of the Chinese proverb: many laws make many criminals. In autocratic societies, laws aren't made for the common good, therefore many laws only further alienate the people.
You forgot: making the defendant crawl underneath the horse and forcing him to carry both it and you.
A legal system in which the powerful can obtain the practical result they desire simply by grinding down the weak has no legitimate moral authority. Its principles are a sham; they have no practical significance. You might as well auction verdicts to the highest bidder.
This kind of reminds me of stories of 1960s sub warfare between the US and the Soviets. US subs would trail the soviets using only passive sonar to tell when rudder was applied or engine or trim adjusted. Soon each watch's OOD would feel like he could read the mind of his counterpart on the Soviet boat, whether he was going to turn left or right, or pull a "crazy Ivan", a dangerous figure eight maneuver designed to flush out enemy subs. All this was done blind, and US subs were almost totally silent.
So I'm picturing these security researchers huddled over a monitor plotting the hacker's nefarious activities. One turns to the other and says, "Bet you a bottle of Chivas he pulls a Wang-dang-doodle."
You can call anyone a "propaganda machine" if you get to define "propaganda" to suit your case.