What you neglect to explain, while conceeding that scoring wouldn't work is how the "metagovernment" (which is somewhat of an athenean democracy in reality) would come to a decision.
There's a range of opinions on what should be law. There are actually people on campuses in America campaigning for the stoning of women if they leave their shoulders uncovered (yes "that" religion, but there are loons all around), so I daresay there's quite a range of opinions.
Obviously you're going to have to make something law. In other words, on a lot of issues you'll have to take a singular opinion, and use military force to kill off all other opinions (that's, after all, what law is : using military force to ensure compliance with a singular point of view. "Freedom of opinion, conscience, religion..." only exists insofar that the law is not "totalitarian" like for example muslim law is. There are many, many, many blank spaces, for everyone to fill in as they'd like.
There is no "real" ("absolute" if you prefer) freedom of conscience (otherwise how would you forbid muslims stoning muslim women when 2 men claim they've not been good ? It's part of their religion to do so, and they'll claim "freedom of religion". As many religions contain the death penalty for certain acts (again islam is particularly nasty, but it is true that most religions contain this))
So whatever government system you use, you're going to have to force a lot of people militarily to comply. Sorry but that's how humans work, and nothing can change that.
"Metagovernment" is not, at all, as good as representative democracy, as you yourself conceed. Btw : I'm a mathematician myself, and I daresay it can't be done.
(to be completely honest, I'd feel most at ease with a "static" government. A singular, never ever changing set of laws that only govern the very, very basic needs of people : a stable currency (ie. no bailouts, ever), personal and property security where necessary (and a lot more than there is right now) (I'd like a system where there is a large mobile force that ensures compliance, with normally hardly any presence at all, and overwhelming force when necessary). And everything else, done by normal people, who have no real option to use force (without having to go against said mobile force).
Now *that* would be government. No co2-insanity, no oh-no-nuclear-s-so-scary, no let-s-make-cars-3-times-more-expensive-because-oh-no-think-of-the-children... you get it. Just "10 commandments" (a redesigned set, but basically similar ie : don't kill, don't steal, etc.)
Reading about history, I'm starting to think that a system like that would resemble a medieval kingdom more than our society... but hey.
These can and sometimes do occur, but natural selection operates on atomic "blocks", making it a "streaming" process at the level of the gene (the "atoms" in the transformation). Either a gene reproduces before it is destroyed by its environment, or it doesn't; there is some debate about the whether larger "block sizes" are special cases of this or not (group selection, etc.), but there is no doubt that selection units extend to individuals (organisms). "Darwinism" is natural selection operating at the level of the organism, and this specificity illustrates how general the process of selection (natural or man-made) really is, and how much the modern understanding of evolution transcends "mere" Darwinian selection.
This is only true as long as the economy (the food base) keeps growing constantly at at least 1-2% per year, and is furthermore dependant on "restraint" in the species. If the economy grows 1 year at 10% instead of 1, and the number of children goes x10 as a response to that (like rabbits do), disasters happen.
Once that stops, evolution switches to "block" extinctions. That this is true invalidates most of your evolution claims (that don't even deny mass die-offs).
Worse, mere number instability (wildly varying birthrates, not actual ecological problems) are responsible for some extinctions. Species can die out merely for "growing too fast".
This is philosophical realism; a more rigorous way of stating it is to say that "There may, in principle, exist truths which cannot, in principle, be ascertained."
No it is known as "Godel's incompliteness theorem", and is fact. Not philosophy. It's worse than fact : it doesn't just apply in our universe, but in every possible universe. Those truths that are independant of science, but nevertheless true or false, are called "Godel sentences". They form a "double infinite" class (there isn't just infinitely many godel sentences, but you can always find a godel sentence "between" any two others)
Obviously that this is a proven mathematical fact, and not a theory changes all your other claims. It's not a "theory" that science is "incomplete", and will always remain so.
Science has a LOT more confidence in it's own incompleteness than it has in the correctness of evolution theory.
No offence, but we both know how internet fora work, and what the inevitable result is. All scoring systems really do (esp. if they work by letting people score eachother's posts) is create a small in-crowd with a VERY singular opinion, drowning out all other points of view. This are not the smartest users, nor the most reasonable, they're just the people with the most time on their hands for gaming the system.
Besides, captcha's don't prevent bots anymore, and can provide semi-reasonable replies to just about any question (reasonable enough to pass first inspections, certainly more reasonable than the average facebook reply) so having small groups improve their own karma in circular ways by using bots has been degraded from "not possible for non-phd students" to "difficult, but doable".
The metagovernment would in practice be controlled by a small elite. Probably you nor me would be in it.
Because we all know, on internet the smart voices drown out the dumb right ? I do wonder why all those smart voices keep asking me if I want penis enlargement... or how they want to be my "friend" on facebook.
Actually since science has "accepted" a few things people just aren't willing to accept, atheists don't go "out into the rain" either :
1) the basic algorithm of life is to multiply with errors, then kill off everything except the best specimens (except the top-10 so to speak). Periods of exponential growth end with either massacres of huge die-offs. This is normal, and has been part of accepted theory for over a century now. This is obviously the real problem people have with evolution. If it applies to humans, it means lots of people are going to die at some point. 2) science, even mathematics, will never have the answers to all questions. Worse, we're getting close to proving that a lot of quite interesting questions are independant of scientific theories, but ARE true or false (meaning you cannot scientifically deduct their truth or falsehood, but they are either true or false in the real world). We do know that there are infinitely such problems, we don't know how "essential" they are. Any scientific theory will have this problem, always. 3) science, while it's formation is not dogmatic per se, it is dogmatic for it is describing a world which is quite dogmatic. Dogmatism is the main problem the world has with religious ideas, but science has proven that religion is right in getting that principle correct : the world is dogmatic. The truth is absolute (even if determining the actual truth may be impossible, it's still absolute), unyielding and totally non-negotiable (which is a big problem when combined with point 1 : it means that at some point massacres and huge die-offs will restart. Many people claim they will restart before the population of the world doubles again, which means they will restart within 30 years). 4) Even if much of religious dogma has been "disproven", not all of it has, some of it has been proven. In fact, many religious truths, for example that forcing the "golden rule" onto people, and indoctrinating it into children, is advantageous to society (in fact unless someone finds a way to refute Nash it may become accepted theory that any society that doesn't do this is doomed to extinction). This is not what most people expected from science.
Atheists have stopped being "realists" a long time ago. Mainly due to point 1 being
I have read enough of those "eastern religions versus 'particle physics'" books to know one thing :
they suck on the particle physics, getting basic things wrong (usually hugely failing why newtonian physics, the ones we're confronted with on a daily basis, DO provide a most excellent approximation. The first thing they do is throwing out newtonian physics, because they directly contradict their other points, usually focussing on "free" energy or other such bullshit)
They ALSO suck on the part of describing the eastern philosophy accurately. Mostly because it doesn't fit. They for example focus on parts that have recently changed, failing to mention that little fact. Or they add stuff to it.
They're no better than Harun Yahya's "atlas of creation", or all the "perpetuum mobile" books.
So eliminating "delusion" is eliminating all your posessions, like food, even the mere desire for possessions, like the desire to eat ? That's easy. Heck, the banking collapse might make us all Buddhist.
That can only work (and lead to survival) if sollipsism is true... because... ahem... won't that kill anyone who actually tries to do it ? Anyone freed from desire to eat obviously dies. I'd like to state that dieing from hunger is not any way to "end suffering". Just wondering...
It would also lead to the evident conclusion "the only good buddhist (as in follows buddhism) is a dead one (died from starvation)"...
*ahem* our definition of the word "omnipotent" is problematic. Would you consider someone who can do anything, anything at all, as long as it does not violate mathematics ? (e.g. the person behind the keyboard of the computer that runs the simulation we call "universe" would have exactly that power).
The problem is more with our definition of the word "omnipotent" than with whether God can or cannot do anything. No God cannot make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, because that's a paradox. Does that really place any limit on his power ? Not in any meaningful sense of the word... A being that can't create paradoxes could still be perfectly capable of changing a frog into a princess... Or destroying the world... or whatever...
Evidence for God is problematic because the concept of God is "too large". If everything is created by God, anything, anything at all, is proof of his existence, so that kinda sucks. And as the AC parent post explains, any miracle that you'd accept as "proof" would quickly fade into history and be denied.
If God is anything like the laws of physics (and everybody claims that is so) you can tell him to fuck off all you want, but you'll just get hurt. The sad thing is, that statement might be correct even if there is no God. (read : "Religion is not about God" for an illustration of that point)
And I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of stuff in this world that you "would not bow to", and that's going to be forced on you. Things like the laws of physics, human nature, religion, law, and what might be called "historical baggage"... and I'm sorry to say you'll get fucked badly if you indeed do refuse to bow. None of those negotiate with you, and yet force themselves on you. Suck it up.
Actually it's a basic assumption of science. Let's put it like this : I accept that you don't believe in science, and you stop using things that were built with that science. Your clothes, your car, your computer,... you all quit those and I will no accept this statement. After all it's merely an "assumption" that your cell phone can even work, so why have it at all ?
If you don't stop using the accomplishments of science, however, you're a hypocrite for not accepting it's assumptions as true.
Have you read what it says ? He *clearly* states that there *is* indeed violence resulting from video games.
It's just "not that much". Between a half a percent and 2 percent of gamers actually get involved in violence due to playing games (and this is causation people, not correlation). That doesn't mean they don't all become more "predisposed" towards violence.
And yes, perhaps there are bigger factors. However this guy states plainly that there is indeed violence resulting from playing violent games.
I sidestep moral issues because they're not part of evolution. Or they are only part in the sense that respecting or not respecting them gives people advantages or not.
They're like a virus : you have it or not, and it provides advantages or disadvantages... the only thing Darwin does is observe and predict. It makes NO value judgements. Not a single act is "off-limits" to a rational mind.
Not mass-murder (especially not mass-murder, which is the ultimate way to prove superiority according to evolution), not child rape, nothing.
Therefore yes I "completely sidestep" it. It's simply not part of science at all, and certainly the only place for morals in evolution is as study objects, determining advantages/disadvantages morals give.
Any morals purely based on evolution will obviously include (active or passive) genocide (passive means making others starve like "co2 limiting" ethanol production is doing)
But I am most interested in your other claim : where, exactly, am I "misunderstanding" evolution ? Because you state this, but you don't illustrate the problem.
So those nations attacked, and then were basically set-free. The US could certainly take Cuba and the Philippines today, it could take them then.
So scratch those from your list.
That leaves Puerto Rico and a tiny piece of Cuba. The Cuba site is basically a naval base (and nothing else), which was agreed between Cuba and America in a treaty.
Puerto Rico has full rights to it's own government, including all 3 powers.
So I call bullshit on your entire list. The US hasn't conquered a single square meter in the last century.
Compare that with just about any other nation... Heck, even holland conquered more ground than the US.
Well do you believe in Darwin ? If it is man-made, natural selection says that large masses of humans should start dieing off to compensate, and there is nothing, nothing at all that can be done about it (save a massive genocide). This may be right.
We don't know with 100% certainty, as already stated.
Nevertheless you work from the assumption that this *is* 100% certain.
The big question is: what if this time it really is man made, as it seems?
What should be done, in that case? Would doing that be sensible even if the global warming was not man made (or even true)?
Not changing our behavior more than otherwise would be sensible. In fact, modifying our behavior like humans have always done : everyone decides for themselves, in groups. People who like to build coal power plants build them. Those who see nuclear as a solution build nuclear, those who think solar power is grand live without electricity during the night... and so on. Then we will see which is best.
That's how human's have always survived. On the policy "level" that obviously means : not doing anything at all, and drop any restrictions on any kind of power plant building.
So should we protect the environment (more and bigger sanctuaries for wildlife)? Should we cut gas usage and move to electric (higher mpg) cars? Should we cut pollution?
We should most defineately don't do that, if Darwin is right. In fact we should try to exterminate the remaining wildlife reserves when doing so is useful, when it's effect is increasing the number of humans alive.
That, after all, would be "natural" behavior. That would be the behavior any genetic algorithm has.
Again, this means NO policy restrictions on anyone.
What if global warming is not man made? Would trying to limit it harm? Would cutting CO2 emission be bad?
Yes. It is already robbing enormous masses of people of food, and the damage it's doing in the food supply for humans is already extreme.
Ethanol is the main killer right now, but limiting co2 emissions will lower agricultural output, and we don't have that much food to spare. Meaning co2 policies, WILL result in human casualties. You can make it as indirect as you like, but you can't further stretch the food supply (much).
What does your risk evaluation say?
A central government policy might be right, it might be wrong. In reality some policies work and others don't. We don't know which is which, if we're fair.
Therefore the answer is deregulation : let people try as many policy options as possible, and at their own expense. Let california, if it must, be nuclear and co2 "free" (importing everything), and let it's neighbor states produce electricity exports for california using coal power plants that provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.
That's what my risk evaluation says : don't touch the system of evolution. It's worked so far, and gotten us through temperature changes of 15 degrees celcius worldwide and more. It's gotten us through floods that seemed to cover the entire planet, through the worst weather that ever occured on the planet, it's gotten us through periods of extreme co2 "pollution" in the past, certainly 10 times worse than today.
So risk evaluation says : deregulate everything.
So ? Do you believe evolution is correct ? Or is it a load of crap ?
A better question for you would be : what is the normal rate of species die-off ?
30% is not that high. Or at least it can hardly be called a historic high (a historic high would have to be over 99.9% after all). If we're not even talking every species, but merely groups of them : in perfectly normal environmental circumstances there was a time when just about every land animal, larger than 50 cm that lays eggs died off. 100%. Every last one.
That's natural. Isn't it grand ?
After all, without species dieing off, evolution would stop. You'd have to repeal the laws of physics to make that happen, but still... it wouldn't be a good thing if animals (and, yes, humans) stopped dieing off, stopped passively or actively attempting to cause eachother's extinction... If they stopped fighting to exterminate eachother, they wouldn't improve, in fact they'd worsen. The organs would lose their function even. Without people killing eachother, in the long term, everybody would be blind, cripple, leukemic and worse.
(the technical reason would be that bad genes would drown out good genes very quickly due to sheer numbers)
Name one, just one other nation that the US has conquered.
One.
Conquering means that the US invaded, and that the subjects are now part of the US without voting rights. Like any minority in the islamic lands for example...
Name one. Since the US "does this all the time" can't be that hard, now can it ?
The problem with open source is simple : authors don't bother, which makes their apps vulnerable in transmission, and the source itself can be infected.
Of course really providing unbreakeable process isolation is evil (drm-enforcement, palladium, microsoft)
Redhat, btw, does do this, but nobody really bothers to check their installation.
And as for the anti-virus companies, every virus author runs all the antivirus tools against his new creation (obviously).
If you add "why not quarantine everything" you're at what microsoft is trying to do with palladium.
Obviously one of the first side-effects is simple : that quarantine, unoverrideable (which is what security researchers want), is exactly what you need to implement "real" drm.
That's can't happen because we need other things to live. The price will go up and up until people can't afford it any more, then it will stop rising. The only real solution to to try to increase the availability of health care. This can be done by either allowing more people to become doctors or allowing lower-level staff to carry out routine procedures, or allowing less time intensive procedures to be used in place of more time intensive, higher quality procedures etc. . ..
So the only solution for the problem is... more of it ?
You're right if there is a single financier of the health care for everyone. Needless to say, always increasing the problem scope leads only towards a crash...
If there are insurance companies, the market will decide what is possible and what isn't
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You keep sidestepping the issue. This program needs the ability to direct violence at people in order to have even basic abilities.
Unless you think laws about theft should be dropped at the request of the first thief that notices them ...
What you neglect to explain, while conceeding that scoring wouldn't work is how the "metagovernment" (which is somewhat of an athenean democracy in reality) would come to a decision.
There's a range of opinions on what should be law. There are actually people on campuses in America campaigning for the stoning of women if they leave their shoulders uncovered (yes "that" religion, but there are loons all around), so I daresay there's quite a range of opinions.
Obviously you're going to have to make something law. In other words, on a lot of issues you'll have to take a singular opinion, and use military force to kill off all other opinions (that's, after all, what law is : using military force to ensure compliance with a singular point of view. "Freedom of opinion, conscience, religion ..." only exists insofar that the law is not "totalitarian" like for example muslim law is. There are many, many, many blank spaces, for everyone to fill in as they'd like.
There is no "real" ("absolute" if you prefer) freedom of conscience (otherwise how would you forbid muslims stoning muslim women when 2 men claim they've not been good ? It's part of their religion to do so, and they'll claim "freedom of religion". As many religions contain the death penalty for certain acts (again islam is particularly nasty, but it is true that most religions contain this))
So whatever government system you use, you're going to have to force a lot of people militarily to comply. Sorry but that's how humans work, and nothing can change that.
"Metagovernment" is not, at all, as good as representative democracy, as you yourself conceed. Btw : I'm a mathematician myself, and I daresay it can't be done.
(to be completely honest, I'd feel most at ease with a "static" government. A singular, never ever changing set of laws that only govern the very, very basic needs of people : a stable currency (ie. no bailouts, ever), personal and property security where necessary (and a lot more than there is right now) (I'd like a system where there is a large mobile force that ensures compliance, with normally hardly any presence at all, and overwhelming force when necessary). And everything else, done by normal people, who have no real option to use force (without having to go against said mobile force).
Now *that* would be government. No co2-insanity, no oh-no-nuclear-s-so-scary, no let-s-make-cars-3-times-more-expensive-because-oh-no-think-of-the-children ... you get it. Just "10 commandments" (a redesigned set, but basically similar ie : don't kill, don't steal, etc.)
Reading about history, I'm starting to think that a system like that would resemble a medieval kingdom more than our society ... but hey.
These can and sometimes do occur, but natural selection operates on atomic "blocks", making it a "streaming" process at the level of the gene (the "atoms" in the transformation). Either a gene reproduces before it is destroyed by its environment, or it doesn't; there is some debate about the whether larger "block sizes" are special cases of this or not (group selection, etc.), but there is no doubt that selection units extend to individuals (organisms). "Darwinism" is natural selection operating at the level of the organism, and this specificity illustrates how general the process of selection (natural or man-made) really is, and how much the modern understanding of evolution transcends "mere" Darwinian selection.
This is only true as long as the economy (the food base) keeps growing constantly at at least 1-2% per year, and is furthermore dependant on "restraint" in the species. If the economy grows 1 year at 10% instead of 1, and the number of children goes x10 as a response to that (like rabbits do), disasters happen.
Once that stops, evolution switches to "block" extinctions. That this is true invalidates most of your evolution claims (that don't even deny mass die-offs).
Worse, mere number instability (wildly varying birthrates, not actual ecological problems) are responsible for some extinctions. Species can die out merely for "growing too fast".
This is philosophical realism; a more rigorous way of stating it is to say that "There may, in principle, exist truths which cannot, in principle, be ascertained."
No it is known as "Godel's incompliteness theorem", and is fact. Not philosophy. It's worse than fact : it doesn't just apply in our universe, but in every possible universe. Those truths that are independant of science, but nevertheless true or false, are called "Godel sentences". They form a "double infinite" class (there isn't just infinitely many godel sentences, but you can always find a godel sentence "between" any two others)
Obviously that this is a proven mathematical fact, and not a theory changes all your other claims. It's not a "theory" that science is "incomplete", and will always remain so.
Science has a LOT more confidence in it's own incompleteness than it has in the correctness of evolution theory.
Of course this party is totally different from all other "liberal" parties. Right ...
Oh wait ... not right. They ARE England's liberal party.
Just think of it as "looking inward". You can hardly argue with that one ...
No offence, but we both know how internet fora work, and what the inevitable result is. All scoring systems really do (esp. if they work by letting people score eachother's posts) is create a small in-crowd with a VERY singular opinion, drowning out all other points of view. This are not the smartest users, nor the most reasonable, they're just the people with the most time on their hands for gaming the system.
Besides, captcha's don't prevent bots anymore, and can provide semi-reasonable replies to just about any question (reasonable enough to pass first inspections, certainly more reasonable than the average facebook reply) so having small groups improve their own karma in circular ways by using bots has been degraded from "not possible for non-phd students" to "difficult, but doable".
The metagovernment would in practice be controlled by a small elite. Probably you nor me would be in it.
Because we all know, on internet the smart voices drown out the dumb right ? I do wonder why all those smart voices keep asking me if I want penis enlargement ... or how they want to be my "friend" on facebook.
Isn't labor government grand ?
Actually since science has "accepted" a few things people just aren't willing to accept, atheists don't go "out into the rain" either :
1) the basic algorithm of life is to multiply with errors, then kill off everything except the best specimens (except the top-10 so to speak). Periods of exponential growth end with either massacres of huge die-offs. This is normal, and has been part of accepted theory for over a century now. This is obviously the real problem people have with evolution. If it applies to humans, it means lots of people are going to die at some point.
2) science, even mathematics, will never have the answers to all questions. Worse, we're getting close to proving that a lot of quite interesting questions are independant of scientific theories, but ARE true or false (meaning you cannot scientifically deduct their truth or falsehood, but they are either true or false in the real world). We do know that there are infinitely such problems, we don't know how "essential" they are. Any scientific theory will have this problem, always.
3) science, while it's formation is not dogmatic per se, it is dogmatic for it is describing a world which is quite dogmatic. Dogmatism is the main problem the world has with religious ideas, but science has proven that religion is right in getting that principle correct : the world is dogmatic. The truth is absolute (even if determining the actual truth may be impossible, it's still absolute), unyielding and totally non-negotiable (which is a big problem when combined with point 1 : it means that at some point massacres and huge die-offs will restart. Many people claim they will restart before the population of the world doubles again, which means they will restart within 30 years).
4) Even if much of religious dogma has been "disproven", not all of it has, some of it has been proven. In fact, many religious truths, for example that forcing the "golden rule" onto people, and indoctrinating it into children, is advantageous to society (in fact unless someone finds a way to refute Nash it may become accepted theory that any society that doesn't do this is doomed to extinction). This is not what most people expected from science.
Atheists have stopped being "realists" a long time ago. Mainly due to point 1 being
I have read enough of those "eastern religions versus 'particle physics'" books to know one thing :
they suck on the particle physics, getting basic things wrong (usually hugely failing why newtonian physics, the ones we're confronted with on a daily basis, DO provide a most excellent approximation. The first thing they do is throwing out newtonian physics, because they directly contradict their other points, usually focussing on "free" energy or other such bullshit)
They ALSO suck on the part of describing the eastern philosophy accurately. Mostly because it doesn't fit. They for example focus on parts that have recently changed, failing to mention that little fact. Or they add stuff to it.
They're no better than Harun Yahya's "atlas of creation", or all the "perpetuum mobile" books.
So eliminating "delusion" is eliminating all your posessions, like food, even the mere desire for possessions, like the desire to eat ? That's easy. Heck, the banking collapse might make us all Buddhist.
That can only work (and lead to survival) if sollipsism is true ... because ... ahem ... won't that kill anyone who actually tries to do it ? Anyone freed from desire to eat obviously dies. I'd like to state that dieing from hunger is not any way to "end suffering". Just wondering ...
It would also lead to the evident conclusion "the only good buddhist (as in follows buddhism) is a dead one (died from starvation)" ...
-- ... where's my 5000$ ?
Hey Barack
You might mention what Buddhism *does* believe is the structure of the world, if you wanted to make a believeable point.
*ahem* our definition of the word "omnipotent" is problematic. Would you consider someone who can do anything, anything at all, as long as it does not violate mathematics ? (e.g. the person behind the keyboard of the computer that runs the simulation we call "universe" would have exactly that power).
The problem is more with our definition of the word "omnipotent" than with whether God can or cannot do anything. No God cannot make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, because that's a paradox. Does that really place any limit on his power ? Not in any meaningful sense of the word ... A being that can't create paradoxes could still be perfectly capable of changing a frog into a princess ... Or destroying the world ... or whatever ...
Evidence for God is problematic because the concept of God is "too large". If everything is created by God, anything, anything at all, is proof of his existence, so that kinda sucks. And as the AC parent post explains, any miracle that you'd accept as "proof" would quickly fade into history and be denied.
If God is anything like the laws of physics (and everybody claims that is so) you can tell him to fuck off all you want, but you'll just get hurt. The sad thing is, that statement might be correct even if there is no God. (read : "Religion is not about God" for an illustration of that point)
And I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of stuff in this world that you "would not bow to", and that's going to be forced on you. Things like the laws of physics, human nature, religion, law, and what might be called "historical baggage" ... and I'm sorry to say you'll get fucked badly if you indeed do refuse to bow. None of those negotiate with you, and yet force themselves on you. Suck it up.
--
Say Obama, where's my 5000$ ?
Actually it's a basic assumption of science. Let's put it like this : I accept that you don't believe in science, and you stop using things that were built with that science. Your clothes, your car, your computer, ... you all quit those and I will no accept this statement. After all it's merely an "assumption" that your cell phone can even work, so why have it at all ?
If you don't stop using the accomplishments of science, however, you're a hypocrite for not accepting it's assumptions as true.
Have you read what it says ? He *clearly* states that there *is* indeed violence resulting from video games.
It's just "not that much". Between a half a percent and 2 percent of gamers actually get involved in violence due to playing games (and this is causation people, not correlation). That doesn't mean they don't all become more "predisposed" towards violence.
And yes, perhaps there are bigger factors. However this guy states plainly that there is indeed violence resulting from playing violent games.
I sidestep moral issues because they're not part of evolution. Or they are only part in the sense that respecting or not respecting them gives people advantages or not.
They're like a virus : you have it or not, and it provides advantages or disadvantages ... the only thing Darwin does is observe and predict. It makes NO value judgements. Not a single act is "off-limits" to a rational mind.
Not mass-murder (especially not mass-murder, which is the ultimate way to prove superiority according to evolution), not child rape, nothing.
Therefore yes I "completely sidestep" it. It's simply not part of science at all, and certainly the only place for morals in evolution is as study objects, determining advantages/disadvantages morals give.
Any morals purely based on evolution will obviously include (active or passive) genocide (passive means making others starve like "co2 limiting" ethanol production is doing)
But I am most interested in your other claim : where, exactly, am I "misunderstanding" evolution ? Because you state this, but you don't illustrate the problem.
It says no more than "you misunderstand HAND".
So those nations attacked, and then were basically set-free. The US could certainly take Cuba and the Philippines today, it could take them then.
So scratch those from your list.
That leaves Puerto Rico and a tiny piece of Cuba. The Cuba site is basically a naval base (and nothing else), which was agreed between Cuba and America in a treaty.
Puerto Rico has full rights to it's own government, including all 3 powers.
So I call bullshit on your entire list. The US hasn't conquered a single square meter in the last century.
Compare that with just about any other nation ... Heck, even holland conquered more ground than the US.
Well do you believe in Darwin ? If it is man-made, natural selection says that large masses of humans should start dieing off to compensate, and there is nothing, nothing at all that can be done about it (save a massive genocide). This may be right.
We don't know with 100% certainty, as already stated.
Nevertheless you work from the assumption that this *is* 100% certain.
The big question is: what if this time it really is man made, as it seems?
What should be done, in that case? Would doing that be sensible even if the global warming was not man made (or even true)?
Not changing our behavior more than otherwise would be sensible. In fact, modifying our behavior like humans have always done : everyone decides for themselves, in groups. People who like to build coal power plants build them. Those who see nuclear as a solution build nuclear, those who think solar power is grand live without electricity during the night ... and so on. Then we will see which is best.
That's how human's have always survived. On the policy "level" that obviously means : not doing anything at all, and drop any restrictions on any kind of power plant building.
So should we protect the environment (more and bigger sanctuaries for wildlife)? Should we cut gas usage and move to electric (higher mpg) cars? Should we cut pollution?
We should most defineately don't do that, if Darwin is right. In fact we should try to exterminate the remaining wildlife reserves when doing so is useful, when it's effect is increasing the number of humans alive.
That, after all, would be "natural" behavior. That would be the behavior any genetic algorithm has.
Again, this means NO policy restrictions on anyone.
What if global warming is not man made? Would trying to limit it harm? Would cutting CO2 emission be bad?
Yes. It is already robbing enormous masses of people of food, and the damage it's doing in the food supply for humans is already extreme.
Ethanol is the main killer right now, but limiting co2 emissions will lower agricultural output, and we don't have that much food to spare. Meaning co2 policies, WILL result in human casualties. You can make it as indirect as you like, but you can't further stretch the food supply (much).
What does your risk evaluation say?
A central government policy might be right, it might be wrong. In reality some policies work and others don't. We don't know which is which, if we're fair.
Therefore the answer is deregulation : let people try as many policy options as possible, and at their own expense. Let california, if it must, be nuclear and co2 "free" (importing everything), and let it's neighbor states produce electricity exports for california using coal power plants that provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.
That's what my risk evaluation says : don't touch the system of evolution. It's worked so far, and gotten us through temperature changes of 15 degrees celcius worldwide and more. It's gotten us through floods that seemed to cover the entire planet, through the worst weather that ever occured on the planet, it's gotten us through periods of extreme co2 "pollution" in the past, certainly 10 times worse than today.
So risk evaluation says : deregulate everything.
So ? Do you believe evolution is correct ? Or is it a load of crap ?
Don't worry. They do what governments always do. They don't move the termometers, that costs money.
They do however "adjust" the measurements. Both sattellite measurements and thermometre measurements.
The sad thing is : without these adjustments, there'd be global cooling for about 20 years now.
I know this sounds like a joke, but unfortunately it's not.
The problem is that the termometers are actually denying global warming.
But don't worry, the IPCC "adjusts" their readings.
A better question for you would be : what is the normal rate of species die-off ?
30% is not that high. Or at least it can hardly be called a historic high (a historic high would have to be over 99.9% after all). If we're not even talking every species, but merely groups of them : in perfectly normal environmental circumstances there was a time when just about every land animal, larger than 50 cm that lays eggs died off. 100%. Every last one.
That's natural. Isn't it grand ?
After all, without species dieing off, evolution would stop. You'd have to repeal the laws of physics to make that happen, but still ... it wouldn't be a good thing if animals (and, yes, humans) stopped dieing off, stopped passively or actively attempting to cause eachother's extinction ... If they stopped fighting to exterminate eachother, they wouldn't improve, in fact they'd worsen. The organs would lose their function even. Without people killing eachother, in the long term, everybody would be blind, cripple, leukemic and worse.
(the technical reason would be that bad genes would drown out good genes very quickly due to sheer numbers)
Unless of course you don't believe in evolution.
Name one, just one other nation that the US has conquered.
One.
Conquering means that the US invaded, and that the subjects are now part of the US without voting rights. Like any minority in the islamic lands for example ...
Name one. Since the US "does this all the time" can't be that hard, now can it ?
Answer this : "God damn America !" - McCain or Obama
The problem with open source is simple : authors don't bother, which makes their apps vulnerable in transmission, and the source itself can be infected.
Of course really providing unbreakeable process isolation is evil (drm-enforcement, palladium, microsoft)
Redhat, btw, does do this, but nobody really bothers to check their installation.
And as for the anti-virus companies, every virus author runs all the antivirus tools against his new creation (obviously).
If you add "why not quarantine everything" you're at what microsoft is trying to do with palladium.
Obviously one of the first side-effects is simple : that quarantine, unoverrideable (which is what security researchers want), is exactly what you need to implement "real" drm.
That's can't happen because we need other things to live. The price will go up and up until people can't afford it any more, then it will stop rising. The only real solution to to try to increase the availability of health care. This can be done by either allowing more people to become doctors or allowing lower-level staff to carry out routine procedures, or allowing less time intensive procedures to be used in place of more time intensive, higher quality procedures etc. . . .
So the only solution for the problem is ... more of it ?
You're right if there is a single financier of the health care for everyone. Needless to say, always increasing the problem scope leads only towards a crash ...
If there are insurance companies, the market will decide what is possible and what isn't