Which is not what I was responding to, but never mind. Mathematics has nothing to do with truth or otherwise: it is simply the logical consequences that arise from given axioms. It so happens that if you pick the right axioms then there are many correspondences with the real world, but truth? Nowt to do with it.
Yes, but the point is that any inconsistency can be translated into 1=2. So if math were to be inconsistent there would be ZERO consequences of said inconsistent axioms.
Suppose the peano axioms were inconsistent, then there is no reason why a car travelling at a constant speed 10km/h would travel 20 km in 2 hours. It might as well be 100, or 2, or 5 cm. All would be correct answers. In other words, inconsistent mathematical theories get us nowhere.
So obviously math and truth are related concepts. And there are demands on mathematics (such as consistency) that are required for theories based on maths to have ANY truth in them, or frankly to have anything at all in them. As such when one talks about truth in math, one is generally talking about those requirements
Literally I mean "For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths* and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."
* he means the peano axioms (to be exact a small subset of them). In general you could say he means any "reasonable" axiom set that contains a sucessor function, as that's the essential part.
Actually it means you might want to lookup, say "incompleteness theory". Or the subject of this strip, "Bertrand Rusell". His philosophy's more than worthless but he did some actual work in mathematical logic that you really ought to have seen by now.
And by the way, in this argument the person making it (math is inconsistent) is generally considered "the man", as it's the academic and unassailable viewpoint.
Generally the "radical" viewpoint is the one where "every theory is correct" in some way or another. Supposedly that's what quantum mechanics and multiverse theories say. Well not in reality, of course, but certainly in the spiderman cartoon series. And also in the democrat party. After all, just because it goes wrong 100 times does *not* in fact mean that it will go wrong the 101th time. Anyone who claims different must obviously be a racist !
And there are several problems in the natural numbers system that all of science uses that might turn out to be sources of inconsistency.
Just for an example : have they solved the barber's paradox yet ?
In an infinitely large village, there's 1 barber. He shaves all the people that do not shave themselves. The question to be answered is : does the barber shave himself ? You can prove that he does, and you can prove that he doesn't, both entirely correctly reasoned.
Either someone must make a convincing case that there is a real problem with this question (obviously with the set theory equivalent of this question) or the axioms must be changed to create a real problem with this question. Otherwise math as we know it is inconsistent.
(and the point being : just because "it works" does not mean it's consistent. Lots of things work. When it comes to women, according to hollywood the "either they're ugly, or they want to sleep with me" way of thinking seems to work. Yet I'm told it's not all that consistent)
And for designing buildings we use simulations that describe a world that resembles the discworld (building stands on a disc floating in space and gravity is just a dead simple straight down, also known as the "it's turtles all the way down" argument) and only contains springs, all described by VERY newtonian physics, which we *know* to be inconsistent.
So your point is ? Every last event that any human will ever be confronted with, and the inner workings of said human, with can be explained perfectly well explained by newtonian physics. The only earthly structures that deviate from newtonian physics are nuclear power plants and sufficiently powerful particle accelerators.
The only place to find quantum mechanics, for any human being, is in said human's imagination. The only place to find relativity theory in action is off the planet. Even the most advanced computer chips can be almost perfectly described with electron-as-a-particle assumptions. It's literally the case that we don't need the physics theories of the last 80-or-so years to describe the computer revolution.
Nevertheless, we know newtonian physics to be inconsistent, due to the black body radiation problem.
Math (all useful mathematical theories, and therefore all science based on them) is one of 2 things, but not both : -> logically inconsistent -> not logically consistent*
* this is not the same as the first thing. The difference is that it might very well be logically consistent, but you can't prove it one way or the other. This means that while God might know it to be logically consistent, you can't say it *is* logically consistent since there is no procedure to verify this. Not even in infinite time. So nobody will ever know for sure, no matter how far in the future.
** Whether this means that any faith in math is exactly that, irrational faith (as you're believing in an unproveable thing), or that it's somehow "better" is a religious discussion. Above this you'll find just the facts.
Saying that the ITU doesn't censor the telephone network is like saying that a spy satellite doesn't spy by itself. It's the guy sitting behind the spying device that does it. The device is designed, and supported by the ITU, but they don't deliver the guy sitting behind it. So "they don't spy". It's a beautiful flawed argument : it gives a horribly wrong impression, but it is technically, and logically correct.
So the ITU does help governments censor "their" telephone network. Obviously they don't have any surveillance in place themselves, and Iran would never trust them to do it either. Nor would any other country. But they do help them.
Obviously a technical standards organisation does not censor themselves. They design equipment and make it interoperate. They do not operate equipment. ICANN, on the other hand, does operate equipment and will probably be approached to implement censorship. Almost all members of the board come from countries that do indeed censor at least part of the internet.
I'm honestly not sure who to trust more, the dept. of commerce or these guys. Wait actually I think I actually prefer the government. These guys gave a monopoly to verisign. We all know what happened. Let's not pretend these guys are our friends, they're not.
"Realistic promises" - I see a tiny problem : re-election.
This is Obama. Okay Americans, especially unionized ones and living-outside-of-your-means-credit-carders, we're going to have to buckle down. Forget about big tv's for 20 years or-so and please realize that you're dumb fucks who urgently need to be put into your place. Get the cheapest car you can find from now on, and just, you know, lie to women. Stop dreaming. Stop eating. Stop... well, just about everything. Oh and you pensioned geezers, yes subsidizing euthanasia, that was for you, what, you don't get the hint ?
And -needless to say- a statement is one person asking "hey, aren't black/hispanic/old/yellow/muslim/... people more likely to..." away from being that most horrible of things - racist. What are you, Hitler ?
Or he could continue to lie, and get re-elected. How big a lie ? Well, for a "black president", he sure as hell does not have all that much color in his skin. He doesn't have all that many black parents or grandparents either. It'd be much more accurate to state that he isn't completely white.
Sorry but I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. Perhaps you need to visit a muslim country. If the worst is true, and it indeed wasn't muslims that brought down the towers in jihad, it wasn't for lack of trying, or lack of want.
Which unfortunately makes it a moot point whether one specific incident, no matter how large, was comitted as an act of war by muslims against everyone else (they really see the world like this).
EVERY non-secular muslim is against us, and "against us" in the sense that they'd like to massacre Americans. Fortunately there's a lot of secular muslims, but they will never react against the jihadi's, for that will make them targets of the terrorists.
Terrorism has such a long, long history in the middle east. So very long that people have absolutely internalized it. If anyone were to start blowing up kids to make them convert to whatever, they would do so en masse, and they won't react against the agressors.
You really should visit some muslim country and walk around and talk to people.
Do you really think most soldiers do the work for the pay even today ? America does not have a professional military in the sense that you have mercenaries, it's got a volunteer military that enables volunteers to support their family.
Would you die for the pay of a normal soldier ? No. Would anyone in the American military ? No.
I don't think your answer is good enough. Do tell : would it be good enough for you. Would you take the risk of dying, and face armed opponents for the pay of a normal soldier ? Note that is only slightly more than you'd get at McDonalds.
Re:is there any other way to prevent crowd dispers
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Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's also a very safe thing for them to rely on. The contemporary population of the entire Western world has been domesticated more chronically than at any other time in human history. Only very small percentages of that population have actually seen active combat. The rest of them would have less than no chance, and that includes you and me. Training and physical fitness aside, the single biggest problem is probably simply the extent to which we would not have the stomach for it.
In other words : you have it too easy and cannot effectively defend yourself. You should consider how lucky you are to live in 21st century in the west, in most other periods, and most other cultures, you'd be dead. Or at least beaten. Your problem would not be theoretical and academic with situations on far-off battlefields that you really don't have sufficient information to judge. Your problem would most likely be with the treatment of your sister (or yourself) by the local police officer, and the body parts it involves.
You refuse to be troubled by defending freedom, but demand the result of it. Why should anyone choose to die for you ? For your freedom ? If you can't answer that question... heh... guess what will happen when too much of the population cannot answer that question anymore. The old answer was simple : "Christ". Of course that answer had shortcomings, like it's dogmatic nature and it's obvious intolerance of different cultures (but the cultures that support individual freedom are few and far between, and certainly "western culture" is the only ideology that tolerates individual freedom today)
Most of the mass-media, imho, actually attack anyone who defends freedom, because hard choices and mistakes are made when violence is used against those who curtail freedom of others. Instead they offer the "neutrality" option as a supposedly morally good option. In reality, however, neutrality favors the stronger, and is the opposite of the ethic of defending the weak against the strong. Anyone claiming any neutral position really favors the short-term stronger party. Neutrality really favors the taliban, and not afghan journalists. Neutrality favors the murderer, not the victim. And that unfortunately includes "not judging a culture" when it's about something like honor-killing. In reality neutrality (or "tolerance") is, in this case, supporting the murderers. Everything except supporting violence against the culture is in practice equivalent to supporting the murders that are part of it.
In other words, it's rather trivial to design cases and electrical grounding structures that will not cease operation merely due to a large voltage spike. In fact, I'd expect lots of devices to be immune to this right now. It depends on the capacitors used. I'd expect even some cell phones to be able to take this kind of punishment.
Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that merely placing a capacitor between the voltage line and ground would make this sort of attack impossible. Historically this was not done due to cost reasons, but these days in the spirit of "chip space is cheap and power grids have quirks you wouldn't believe" it is done on virtually every line that could be affected by this weapon. The EMP guns I've heard described, even those that require physical contact with the target do not work on more recent BMW's, so it seems to me they'll lose all effectiveness in a few years anyway, as cars are replaced with newer ones (a HERF really disables the injectors of the motor's cylinders. If they're isolated from the exterior of the car, you're out of luck with your HERF even with ancient cars. Newer cars simply take precautions against voltage spikes).
The real issue is what happens when everyone and his goat can construct stuff like this and carry it around. Weapons that target the human body cannot be effectively countered, as we cannot redesign the human body. And directional sound... not hard (especially focusing it on a single guy... not hard, and the effects *will* be quite lethal, or at the very least cause brain damage, if turned up a notch). And if properly done it's absurdly hard to hear, or otherwise determine, where the sound is coming from, and the speaker array does not have to be turned toward the target, it doesn't have to move. You could just have what appears to be a black plate hanging in a window frame even hundreds of meters away from the target, and aim with a webcam (since aiming would be based on calculations you would presumably need a computer to aim anyway).
Most newer weapons design have this flaw : a bit of study and anyone can make them. They do not require exotic materials, large labs or difficult to acquire electronics. Instead, they're using very well understood principles, and off-the-shelf items.
People who die remove critical knowledge and skills from the economy that makes a society function.
Pardon me but so fucking what? You're going to charge me to kill myself? That's idiotic.
Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions.
I'm sorry if my death is an inconvenience to the rest of the planet but really, so fucking what?
I know the GP is not a communist. But I am nevertheless going to accuse him of collectivist thinking, which makes it perfectly clear. You damage the collective by committing suicide, for obvious reasons.
And no collectivist will ever forgive anyone for appearing to damage the collective. Well, they will never forgive almost anyone : they will, obviously, forgive themselves. It baffles the mind but collectivists actually elected tax-evaders.
We actually have entire countries that are below sea level. Holland. Signapore barely makes it above sea level (and has huge parts below sea level).
Large parts of other countries are also below sea level. The better part of Belgium, Venice, parts of southern France, the dead sea (boy is that deep below sea level)...
Holland is on average 2 meters below sea level. There are places that are -12 meters. Parts of Israel are -800 meters (though that particular arrangement seems hard to duplicate in Holland).
We won't lose cities because of flooding. On the contrary, we will gain massive tracts of land that will support cities due to the water and temperature rise. Parts of the middle east might actually become liveable (obviously I mean for plants, which will presumably be followed by people)
Historically our civilization had to cope with 2 warming periods and 2 cooling periods. You can go and read for yourself but the gist is this : warming : massive prosperity, increased crop yields, large expansion of nature (forests,...) and large gains against deserts, or desert-like places.
Cooling periods : massive economic misery, millions of dead people. Entire countries (even an entire continent) starved. Loss of large cities to advancing ice...
If the choice is between rising water/temperature and dropping water/temperature it's very, very easy to pick.
The number of species waxes and wanes. No reason to believe that won't continue to be the case unless we humans or a very large asteroid turn the planet into a cinder.
Mind if I ask where you get this ? Is this some article of faith ? Some political opinion ? It sure sounds like it. I gave an explanation why the number of species (and the difference between species) will diminish over time, culminating in a single set of genes conquering all.
I did not claim this would happen tomorrow (though since evolution is exponential it will happen a hell of a lot faster than you'd think, which still leaves probably several million years).
So where do you get this information that number of species is a random floating around variable that rises and falls ? That sure as hell is not consistent with evolution theory.
And yes that means that all ethnic groups will merge. Blacks will disappear, whites (as in north europeans) will disappear. It is an open question (and probably undecided) what the resulting ethnicity will be. The funny thing is that while it's probably natural barriers that created the ethnic groups, at least some ethnic groups were created by racism, and by the wars and economic disasters it caused over time.
Tolerance, what we have today (in the west, not in muslim countries, not in india, and not in china), leads to mixing genes, which leads to a single ethnicity. It is truly astounding at which speed this is happening.
Everybody knows this graph. The "real" one for research is many times larger. Note how just about all of the lines do not continue to the present. All of those species are dead, every last man, woman and child. Most species were "offshoots" from the hominid family tree and we are *not* their decendants.
Note also how there are large gaps, which must be filled with separate species. These species were so completely destroyed that now 250 years of searching by thousands of people did not turn up a single recognizable bone of them.
4 Billion years of evolution ? Really ? You need to check basic facts. Life doesn't exist 4 billion years. The earth itself barely makes that number.
Furthermore, you just might want to check just how badly surviving species are outnumbered by non-surviving species. Sure the "one species conquers all" event hasn't yet happened, but an "a few species conquer all" event has in fact happened.
There are 4 "human" species alive today. Used to be 5 not that long ago. In history there have been thousands of human species, at least. Almost hundred of those have been found. And most weren't "intermediate steps", most were evolutionary dead ends.
The diversity you see today is still quite extensive, but it's pitiful compared to what existed even a few million years ago. There was a time when dozens of human species existed.
Okay the "it doesn't have to be a war" crowd is probably right, but whatever action evolution does involve does have to end with the other guy dead (meaning specific entire ethnic groups).
Your argument is stupid imho... it's technically correct though. Killing is not required. Making the other guy die *IS* required.
But whether this is due to starvation, taxation, national freaking healthcare (also known as healthcare rationing),... that is indeed less than important.
Whether that's truly a consolation to the ones going to be exterminated (just not necessarily by direct killing)... I doubt it very much.
Note that in nature there are *VERY* few species with distinct ethnic groups like humans. It only happens when natural (or in the case of humans : cultural) barriers prevent interbreeding (intermarrying) and/or limit the scope of conflicts. I seriously doubt civilization has stopped evolution, though...
I'd say it's not only plausible but that it has already happened. Economies of scale tend to work against diversity. That's not always a bad thing (starvation is a worse problem than a non-diverse food supply) but monocultures do expose us to new risks.
*ahem* evolution requires a sort-of "minimum efficiency"* from any species in order to have it survive. This minimum efficiency level is constantly being raised by the competition.
There are multiple phases to any evolutionary process. In the first stage, when the *initial* colonization of a lifeless environment takes place, there is a massive explosion of diversity. But once that initial wave dies out, it only goes down**, as more and more species fail to achieve the minimum efficiency levels. Initially this merely eliminates harmful mutations, but it will start killing entire species and ethnicities within those species soon. Eventually (usually this takes a looooooooooooooooong while though) a "grey goo" type event takes place : some species finds a very efficient process and colonizes the whole planet (since no other species can acquire the energy necessary to stop it).
* minimum efficiency comprises a lot of factors, not just energy collection and use, but anti-getting eaten strategies, anti-parasite strategy, anti-symbiosis strategy... it is some number that summarizes everything. A sort of inverse "price" on the species' survival, so to speak. Eventually there is no stopping the species with the lowest price.
** in the same way temperature equalizes : there is no single physical law that prohibits that everyone's house just heats itself without energy expenditure. It's just so massively unlikely it's considered absurd. That doesn't mean that all sorts of effects change the required heating level in a house, but on average, the entropy of the solar system can only decrease. Likewise species diversity, once the lifeless environment is colonized, can only decrease.
So, his argument that we're better off now is perfectly valid, although I'm sure the people living in the various conflict zones would disagree. Of course, figuring out how to live together without killing each other would be better still, but humans have been around for a long time and have yet to do that, so I guess we take what we can get.
Or if you believe in evolution, and that the human race is not above evolution, it is normal to have ethnic wars, fought to extermination. Okay the "it doesn't have to be a war" crowd is probably right, but whatever action evolution does involve does have to end with the other guy dead (meaning specific entire ethnic groups).
And if "the selfish meme" is correct, with memes evolving faster than genes (similar to viruses evolving many times faster than their host organisms) then most conflicts will be ideological from a certain point forward, and they will be fought to extermination.
It seems to me the expected result of both technological advance and pluralism should be increasing conflicts. As such, nuclear weapons have done a very, very good job. They have made everything except low-level terrorist activity impossible (low-level as compared to the holocaust, the soviet purges in eastern europe and asia, the muslim conquest of india, and other mass-killings in history. There is no shortage at all of mass-killing in history, in fact it's rather peculiar that they have all but disappeared since the end of the cold war, with relatively few, and geographically confined exceptions)
Of course, it's a very open question what will happen if nukes get into the hands of people who aren't so concerned with their own survival. And whatever you think about the actual motivations of the Iranian leadership, they at least claim they're not concerned at all about that, if they can push their ideology or exterminate Jews. Of course, I would agree with the assertion that that claim is very unlikely to be true. But there only has to be 1 lunatic.
I do find it difficult. Outlawing nuclear weapons, is essentially outlawing knowledge, even though other things are involved, such as uranium sources. And if any of the fusion experiments bears fruit, it is extremely likely that they can be weaponized, and the fuel for fusion bombs is trivially harvestable from sea water, outlawing fusion weapons would be a "thought crime" law. Also the potential is there for technology to evolve to the point that any physicist, or even anyone will be empowered to end the world.
Of course, terrorism is in essence the first waves of that phenomenon. Making large bombs is now well within the realm of possiblity for any jack, jane and muhammad with internet access. God forbid they discover that, for example, 2-stage napalm bombs are idiotically easy to make devices, and start using those instead of the usual large firecracker.
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the connection between mathematics and truth
Which is not what I was responding to, but never mind. Mathematics has nothing to do with truth or otherwise: it is simply the logical consequences that arise from given axioms. It so happens that if you pick the right axioms then there are many correspondences with the real world, but truth? Nowt to do with it.
Yes, but the point is that any inconsistency can be translated into 1=2. So if math were to be inconsistent there would be ZERO consequences of said inconsistent axioms.
Suppose the peano axioms were inconsistent, then there is no reason why a car travelling at a constant speed 10km/h would travel 20 km in 2 hours. It might as well be 100, or 2, or 5 cm. All would be correct answers. In other words, inconsistent mathematical theories get us nowhere.
So obviously math and truth are related concepts. And there are demands on mathematics (such as consistency) that are required for theories based on maths to have ANY truth in them, or frankly to have anything at all in them. As such when one talks about truth in math, one is generally talking about those requirements
Actually I mean this.
Literally I mean "For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths* and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."
* he means the peano axioms (to be exact a small subset of them). In general you could say he means any "reasonable" axiom set that contains a sucessor function, as that's the essential part.
Actually it means you might want to lookup, say "incompleteness theory". Or the subject of this strip, "Bertrand Rusell". His philosophy's more than worthless but he did some actual work in mathematical logic that you really ought to have seen by now.
And by the way, in this argument the person making it (math is inconsistent) is generally considered "the man", as it's the academic and unassailable viewpoint.
Generally the "radical" viewpoint is the one where "every theory is correct" in some way or another. Supposedly that's what quantum mechanics and multiverse theories say. Well not in reality, of course, but certainly in the spiderman cartoon series. And also in the democrat party. After all, just because it goes wrong 100 times does *not* in fact mean that it will go wrong the 101th time. Anyone who claims different must obviously be a racist !
And there are several problems in the natural numbers system that all of science uses that might turn out to be sources of inconsistency.
Just for an example : have they solved the barber's paradox yet ?
In an infinitely large village, there's 1 barber. He shaves all the people that do not shave themselves. The question to be answered is : does the barber shave himself ? You can prove that he does, and you can prove that he doesn't, both entirely correctly reasoned.
Either someone must make a convincing case that there is a real problem with this question (obviously with the set theory equivalent of this question) or the axioms must be changed to create a real problem with this question. Otherwise math as we know it is inconsistent.
(and the point being : just because "it works" does not mean it's consistent. Lots of things work. When it comes to women, according to hollywood the "either they're ugly, or they want to sleep with me" way of thinking seems to work. Yet I'm told it's not all that consistent)
And for designing buildings we use simulations that describe a world that resembles the discworld (building stands on a disc floating in space and gravity is just a dead simple straight down, also known as the "it's turtles all the way down" argument) and only contains springs, all described by VERY newtonian physics, which we *know* to be inconsistent.
So your point is ? Every last event that any human will ever be confronted with, and the inner workings of said human, with can be explained perfectly well explained by newtonian physics. The only earthly structures that deviate from newtonian physics are nuclear power plants and sufficiently powerful particle accelerators.
The only place to find quantum mechanics, for any human being, is in said human's imagination. The only place to find relativity theory in action is off the planet. Even the most advanced computer chips can be almost perfectly described with electron-as-a-particle assumptions. It's literally the case that we don't need the physics theories of the last 80-or-so years to describe the computer revolution.
Nevertheless, we know newtonian physics to be inconsistent, due to the black body radiation problem.
Which is great, and I don't doubt they're very smart women, worthy of recognition in informatics (and especially Ada is never denied that) ...
But none of them has any bearing on the issue of the connection between mathematics and truth.
Math (all useful mathematical theories, and therefore all science based on them) is one of 2 things, but not both :
-> logically inconsistent
-> not logically consistent*
* this is not the same as the first thing. The difference is that it might very well be logically consistent, but you can't prove it one way or the other. This means that while God might know it to be logically consistent, you can't say it *is* logically consistent since there is no procedure to verify this. Not even in infinite time. So nobody will ever know for sure, no matter how far in the future.
** Whether this means that any faith in math is exactly that, irrational faith (as you're believing in an unproveable thing), or that it's somehow "better" is a religious discussion. Above this you'll find just the facts.
... because it seems a better option than to have China, Iran, ... have an over 50% say in how it's run. Obviously.
Saying that the ITU doesn't censor the telephone network is like saying that a spy satellite doesn't spy by itself. It's the guy sitting behind the spying device that does it. The device is designed, and supported by the ITU, but they don't deliver the guy sitting behind it. So "they don't spy". It's a beautiful flawed argument : it gives a horribly wrong impression, but it is technically, and logically correct.
So the ITU does help governments censor "their" telephone network. Obviously they don't have any surveillance in place themselves, and Iran would never trust them to do it either. Nor would any other country. But they do help them.
Obviously a technical standards organisation does not censor themselves. They design equipment and make it interoperate. They do not operate equipment. ICANN, on the other hand, does operate equipment and will probably be approached to implement censorship. Almost all members of the board come from countries that do indeed censor at least part of the internet.
It's simple. The internet is a tree. It grew from a seed. Who planted the seed ? The US military, DARPA, to be exact.
WHO is the "global committee". You might think, at first glance, that it's you and me.
Well, no. It's ISPs. Big, very, very big ISPs. Think Verizon, AT&T, Telefonica, ...
I'm honestly not sure who to trust more, the dept. of commerce or these guys. Wait actually I think I actually prefer the government. These guys gave a monopoly to verisign. We all know what happened. Let's not pretend these guys are our friends, they're not.
"Realistic promises" - I see a tiny problem : re-election.
This is Obama. Okay Americans, especially unionized ones and living-outside-of-your-means-credit-carders, we're going to have to buckle down. Forget about big tv's for 20 years or-so and please realize that you're dumb fucks who urgently need to be put into your place. Get the cheapest car you can find from now on, and just, you know, lie to women. Stop dreaming. Stop eating. Stop ... well, just about everything. Oh and you pensioned geezers, yes subsidizing euthanasia, that was for you, what, you don't get the hint ?
And -needless to say- a statement is one person asking "hey, aren't black/hispanic/old/yellow/muslim/... people more likely to ..." away from being that most horrible of things - racist. What are you, Hitler ?
Or he could continue to lie, and get re-elected. How big a lie ? Well, for a "black president", he sure as hell does not have all that much color in his skin. He doesn't have all that many black parents or grandparents either. It'd be much more accurate to state that he isn't completely white.
Sorry but I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. Perhaps you need to visit a muslim country. If the worst is true, and it indeed wasn't muslims that brought down the towers in jihad, it wasn't for lack of trying, or lack of want.
Which unfortunately makes it a moot point whether one specific incident, no matter how large, was comitted as an act of war by muslims against everyone else (they really see the world like this).
EVERY non-secular muslim is against us, and "against us" in the sense that they'd like to massacre Americans. Fortunately there's a lot of secular muslims, but they will never react against the jihadi's, for that will make them targets of the terrorists.
Terrorism has such a long, long history in the middle east. So very long that people have absolutely internalized it. If anyone were to start blowing up kids to make them convert to whatever, they would do so en masse, and they won't react against the agressors.
You really should visit some muslim country and walk around and talk to people.
Do you really think most soldiers do the work for the pay even today ? America does not have a professional military in the sense that you have mercenaries, it's got a volunteer military that enables volunteers to support their family.
Would you die for the pay of a normal soldier ? No. Would anyone in the American military ? No.
I don't think your answer is good enough. Do tell : would it be good enough for you. Would you take the risk of dying, and face armed opponents for the pay of a normal soldier ? Note that is only slightly more than you'd get at McDonalds.
It's also a very safe thing for them to rely on. The contemporary population of the entire Western world has been domesticated more chronically than at any other time in human history. Only very small percentages of that population have actually seen active combat. The rest of them would have less than no chance, and that includes you and me. Training and physical fitness aside, the single biggest problem is probably simply the extent to which we would not have the stomach for it.
In other words : you have it too easy and cannot effectively defend yourself. You should consider how lucky you are to live in 21st century in the west, in most other periods, and most other cultures, you'd be dead. Or at least beaten. Your problem would not be theoretical and academic with situations on far-off battlefields that you really don't have sufficient information to judge. Your problem would most likely be with the treatment of your sister (or yourself) by the local police officer, and the body parts it involves.
You refuse to be troubled by defending freedom, but demand the result of it. Why should anyone choose to die for you ? For your freedom ? If you can't answer that question ... heh ... guess what will happen when too much of the population cannot answer that question anymore. The old answer was simple : "Christ". Of course that answer had shortcomings, like it's dogmatic nature and it's obvious intolerance of different cultures (but the cultures that support individual freedom are few and far between, and certainly "western culture" is the only ideology that tolerates individual freedom today)
Most of the mass-media, imho, actually attack anyone who defends freedom, because hard choices and mistakes are made when violence is used against those who curtail freedom of others. Instead they offer the "neutrality" option as a supposedly morally good option. In reality, however, neutrality favors the stronger, and is the opposite of the ethic of defending the weak against the strong. Anyone claiming any neutral position really favors the short-term stronger party. Neutrality really favors the taliban, and not afghan journalists. Neutrality favors the murderer, not the victim. And that unfortunately includes "not judging a culture" when it's about something like honor-killing. In reality neutrality (or "tolerance") is, in this case, supporting the murderers. Everything except supporting violence against the culture is in practice equivalent to supporting the murders that are part of it.
In other words, it's rather trivial to design cases and electrical grounding structures that will not cease operation merely due to a large voltage spike. In fact, I'd expect lots of devices to be immune to this right now. It depends on the capacitors used. I'd expect even some cell phones to be able to take this kind of punishment.
Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that merely placing a capacitor between the voltage line and ground would make this sort of attack impossible. Historically this was not done due to cost reasons, but these days in the spirit of "chip space is cheap and power grids have quirks you wouldn't believe" it is done on virtually every line that could be affected by this weapon. The EMP guns I've heard described, even those that require physical contact with the target do not work on more recent BMW's, so it seems to me they'll lose all effectiveness in a few years anyway, as cars are replaced with newer ones (a HERF really disables the injectors of the motor's cylinders. If they're isolated from the exterior of the car, you're out of luck with your HERF even with ancient cars. Newer cars simply take precautions against voltage spikes).
The real issue is what happens when everyone and his goat can construct stuff like this and carry it around. Weapons that target the human body cannot be effectively countered, as we cannot redesign the human body. And directional sound ... not hard (especially focusing it on a single guy ... not hard, and the effects *will* be quite lethal, or at the very least cause brain damage, if turned up a notch). And if properly done it's absurdly hard to hear, or otherwise determine, where the sound is coming from, and the speaker array does not have to be turned toward the target, it doesn't have to move. You could just have what appears to be a black plate hanging in a window frame even hundreds of meters away from the target, and aim with a webcam (since aiming would be based on calculations you would presumably need a computer to aim anyway).
Most newer weapons design have this flaw : a bit of study and anyone can make them. They do not require exotic materials, large labs or difficult to acquire electronics. Instead, they're using very well understood principles, and off-the-shelf items.
People who die remove critical knowledge and skills from the economy that makes a society function.
Pardon me but so fucking what? You're going to charge me to kill myself? That's idiotic.
Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions.
I'm sorry if my death is an inconvenience to the rest of the planet but really, so fucking what?
I know the GP is not a communist. But I am nevertheless going to accuse him of collectivist thinking, which makes it perfectly clear. You damage the collective by committing suicide, for obvious reasons.
And no collectivist will ever forgive anyone for appearing to damage the collective. Well, they will never forgive almost anyone : they will, obviously, forgive themselves. It baffles the mind but collectivists actually elected tax-evaders.
Death is free. It's life that has costs. You'd think this is rather obvious to anyone who's ever tilled a field or had to buy his/her own food.
The future is replacing humans with AI, which has a hugely lower cost-of-life than we ourselves, even if it is nonzero.
We actually have entire countries that are below sea level. Holland. Signapore barely makes it above sea level (and has huge parts below sea level).
Large parts of other countries are also below sea level. The better part of Belgium, Venice, parts of southern France, the dead sea (boy is that deep below sea level) ...
Holland is on average 2 meters below sea level. There are places that are -12 meters. Parts of Israel are -800 meters (though that particular arrangement seems hard to duplicate in Holland).
We won't lose cities because of flooding. On the contrary, we will gain massive tracts of land that will support cities due to the water and temperature rise. Parts of the middle east might actually become liveable (obviously I mean for plants, which will presumably be followed by people)
Historically our civilization had to cope with 2 warming periods and 2 cooling periods. You can go and read for yourself but the gist is this : warming : massive prosperity, increased crop yields, large expansion of nature (forests, ...) and large gains against deserts, or desert-like places.
Cooling periods : massive economic misery, millions of dead people. Entire countries (even an entire continent) starved. Loss of large cities to advancing ice ...
If the choice is between rising water/temperature and dropping water/temperature it's very, very easy to pick.
The number of species waxes and wanes. No reason to believe that won't continue to be the case unless we humans or a very large asteroid turn the planet into a cinder.
Mind if I ask where you get this ? Is this some article of faith ? Some political opinion ? It sure sounds like it. I gave an explanation why the number of species (and the difference between species) will diminish over time, culminating in a single set of genes conquering all.
I did not claim this would happen tomorrow (though since evolution is exponential it will happen a hell of a lot faster than you'd think, which still leaves probably several million years).
So where do you get this information that number of species is a random floating around variable that rises and falls ? That sure as hell is not consistent with evolution theory.
And yes that means that all ethnic groups will merge. Blacks will disappear, whites (as in north europeans) will disappear. It is an open question (and probably undecided) what the resulting ethnicity will be. The funny thing is that while it's probably natural barriers that created the ethnic groups, at least some ethnic groups were created by racism, and by the wars and economic disasters it caused over time.
Tolerance, what we have today (in the west, not in muslim countries, not in india, and not in china), leads to mixing genes, which leads to a single ethnicity. It is truly astounding at which speed this is happening.
Everybody knows this graph. The "real" one for research is many times larger. Note how just about all of the lines do not continue to the present. All of those species are dead, every last man, woman and child. Most species were "offshoots" from the hominid family tree and we are *not* their decendants.
Note also how there are large gaps, which must be filled with separate species. These species were so completely destroyed that now 250 years of searching by thousands of people did not turn up a single recognizable bone of them.
4 Billion years of evolution ? Really ? You need to check basic facts. Life doesn't exist 4 billion years. The earth itself barely makes that number.
Furthermore, you just might want to check just how badly surviving species are outnumbered by non-surviving species. Sure the "one species conquers all" event hasn't yet happened, but an "a few species conquer all" event has in fact happened.
There are 4 "human" species alive today. Used to be 5 not that long ago. In history there have been thousands of human species, at least. Almost hundred of those have been found. And most weren't "intermediate steps", most were evolutionary dead ends.
The diversity you see today is still quite extensive, but it's pitiful compared to what existed even a few million years ago. There was a time when dozens of human species existed.
Quote from GGP :
Okay the "it doesn't have to be a war" crowd is probably right, but whatever action evolution does involve does have to end with the other guy dead (meaning specific entire ethnic groups).
Your argument is stupid imho ... it's technically correct though. Killing is not required. Making the other guy die *IS* required.
But whether this is due to starvation, taxation, national freaking healthcare (also known as healthcare rationing), ... that is indeed less than important.
Whether that's truly a consolation to the ones going to be exterminated (just not necessarily by direct killing) ... I doubt it very much.
Note that in nature there are *VERY* few species with distinct ethnic groups like humans. It only happens when natural (or in the case of humans : cultural) barriers prevent interbreeding (intermarrying) and/or limit the scope of conflicts. I seriously doubt civilization has stopped evolution, though ...
I'd say it's not only plausible but that it has already happened. Economies of scale tend to work against diversity. That's not always a bad thing (starvation is a worse problem than a non-diverse food supply) but monocultures do expose us to new risks.
*ahem* evolution requires a sort-of "minimum efficiency"* from any species in order to have it survive. This minimum efficiency level is constantly being raised by the competition.
There are multiple phases to any evolutionary process. In the first stage, when the *initial* colonization of a lifeless environment takes place, there is a massive explosion of diversity. But once that initial wave dies out, it only goes down**, as more and more species fail to achieve the minimum efficiency levels. Initially this merely eliminates harmful mutations, but it will start killing entire species and ethnicities within those species soon. Eventually (usually this takes a looooooooooooooooong while though) a "grey goo" type event takes place : some species finds a very efficient process and colonizes the whole planet (since no other species can acquire the energy necessary to stop it).
* minimum efficiency comprises a lot of factors, not just energy collection and use, but anti-getting eaten strategies, anti-parasite strategy, anti-symbiosis strategy ... it is some number that summarizes everything. A sort of inverse "price" on the species' survival, so to speak. Eventually there is no stopping the species with the lowest price.
** in the same way temperature equalizes : there is no single physical law that prohibits that everyone's house just heats itself without energy expenditure. It's just so massively unlikely it's considered absurd. That doesn't mean that all sorts of effects change the required heating level in a house, but on average, the entropy of the solar system can only decrease. Likewise species diversity, once the lifeless environment is colonized, can only decrease.
So, his argument that we're better off now is perfectly valid, although I'm sure the people living in the various conflict zones would disagree. Of course, figuring out how to live together without killing each other would be better still, but humans have been around for a long time and have yet to do that, so I guess we take what we can get.
Or if you believe in evolution, and that the human race is not above evolution, it is normal to have ethnic wars, fought to extermination. Okay the "it doesn't have to be a war" crowd is probably right, but whatever action evolution does involve does have to end with the other guy dead (meaning specific entire ethnic groups).
And if "the selfish meme" is correct, with memes evolving faster than genes (similar to viruses evolving many times faster than their host organisms) then most conflicts will be ideological from a certain point forward, and they will be fought to extermination.
It seems to me the expected result of both technological advance and pluralism should be increasing conflicts. As such, nuclear weapons have done a very, very good job. They have made everything except low-level terrorist activity impossible (low-level as compared to the holocaust, the soviet purges in eastern europe and asia, the muslim conquest of india, and other mass-killings in history. There is no shortage at all of mass-killing in history, in fact it's rather peculiar that they have all but disappeared since the end of the cold war, with relatively few, and geographically confined exceptions)
Of course, it's a very open question what will happen if nukes get into the hands of people who aren't so concerned with their own survival. And whatever you think about the actual motivations of the Iranian leadership, they at least claim they're not concerned at all about that, if they can push their ideology or exterminate Jews. Of course, I would agree with the assertion that that claim is very unlikely to be true. But there only has to be 1 lunatic.
I do find it difficult. Outlawing nuclear weapons, is essentially outlawing knowledge, even though other things are involved, such as uranium sources. And if any of the fusion experiments bears fruit, it is extremely likely that they can be weaponized, and the fuel for fusion bombs is trivially harvestable from sea water, outlawing fusion weapons would be a "thought crime" law. Also the potential is there for technology to evolve to the point that any physicist, or even anyone will be empowered to end the world.
Of course, terrorism is in essence the first waves of that phenomenon. Making large bombs is now well within the realm of possiblity for any jack, jane and muhammad with internet access. God forbid they discover that, for example, 2-stage napalm bombs are idiotically easy to make devices, and start using those instead of the usual large firecracker.