"We have the ability to wipe most human life off the planet in about an hour using nuclear weapons. Why is it arrogance to think we could do it in 50 years by other means?"
Exactly. In the last 50 years we landed on the freaking moon. We've introduced man-made objects to all the major bodies of the solar system and even tossed a couple outside the heliopause. We've also increased our population from millions to billions.
Our species' capabilities appear to be increasing exponentially, including our capability to stuff stuff up on a planetary scale. Or, perhaps, to fix things on a planetary scale.
"if you're looking for truth in science, you're looking in the wrong place. Philosophy is concerned with Truth. Science is merely concerned with accurately explaining the natural world around us."
But isn't accurate description the same thing as truth?
It's how we define "truth" in daily life, after all. "Did the witness say the truth" == "did the witness accurately describe the events observed"
Perhaps this is why I'm not a philosopher, but it seems to me that they make things far too complicated. Surely if we define truth as "correspondence to reality", there can be degrees of truth, and a model can be more or less "true" to the extent that it gives reliable predictions.
No model will be 100% congruent with reality unless it's the same size as reality -- but that's only a problem at the point where the model and reality diverge.
What's the philosophical problem with using models to give predictions, as long as we know what the margin of error is?
Or are you saying that there are Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns" in the practice of science, such that our models are likely to break down in unexpected and unpredictable ways and tell us to make bad policy decisions which we won't recognise until they're too late?
"I'm thinking of the NTP v Blackberry litigation. "
And let's not forget the Xerox vs Palm Graffiti 1 patent war.
I've lost track of who sued who - Wikipedia says that Palm appealed, lost the appeal but won a right to reevaluate whether the patent was valid in the first place (!), won that case, then Xerox counter-appealed and won.
Meanwhile, the best writing system ever devised for handheld devices got dropped for the ugly and finger-crippling Graffiti 2, and the customers lost.
"No, seriously... Any species that doesn't eventually figure out how to colonize other planets is doomed to extinction no matter how well adapted to their current environment due to unforeseen global disasters."
Given that there are no habitable planets within maybe a hundred light years of here, and no guarantee that there are *any* physical ways of accessing any within a human lifetime, it seems to me that the survival of our species has frankly NOTHING to do with colonising other planets and EVERYTHING to do with learning how to live sustainably on this one.
Yes, waking up to that reality is a bit of a shock. Give it time. It'll set in, and then you'll start each morning with a nice bracing scream, before you go use the composting toilet.
And think yourself lucky. The toilets in space are worse.
Our generation was sold dreams about how future == space and there'd be a new frontier to explore. Unfortunately, that was a convenient little white lie. Space is nothing but an empty radiation-filled hole that's quietly hostile to all forms of biological life. There's no frontier there, nowhere to go, nothing to do.
If we continue to predicate a society and economy based on resource-stripping and colonising an external frontier, yes we're doomed. So let's stop doing that.
And CORBA appears to have flamed out and died entirely. The latest GNOME releases are ditching it for D-Bus. KParts of course isn't interoperable with anything outside of KDE.
What do you call an 'interoperable' specification which only has one implementation?
"Or I would call it 'Graphium' which sounds like a radioactive element and is the name of a butterfly."
You might think you're kidding, but Adobe are right ahead of you, they already went there with their Creative Suite 3 icon sets that push the two-letter 'element' designations. Ps for Photoshop, Fl for Flash, etc.
I kind of like Rez myself. Except it's got to have already been taken, right?
But yes, GIMP is not quite the worst name ever, but up there in the top ten. It's deliberately and aggressively offensive and not open to discussion, and that is not an attitude that reflects well on the core dev team.
It was in the EULA at the hospital when you were born. Don't come crying to *me* because you didn't read it. Well, you were crying, but for other reasons.
"Being anti-violence to the point of denying it entirely is a form of violence itself, because it takes the option (choice) away from you, which is fundamentally evil in an of itself."
Sorry, but that statement is nonsense. Violence is violence. Choosing not to be violent is the opposite of violence, not 'another form of it'.
Being anti-violence isn't some kind of fashion statement. It's a tactical choice which flows out of a deeper vision of the universe, which is that all life is connected and that ultimately living as a fulfilled human requires respect and cooperation with others.
*That* aspect, the deeper vision of cooperation, is what is missing in even 'mostly nonviolent' games - there's no sense of *working together toward a common goal*. There's no sense that people on opposite teams can even *have* a shared goal, and no way to live from that philosophy; it's instantly rejected by the game world. You kill, or you die, and those are the two verbs the game is structured around. In story-driven FPSes, you may well switch your alliegance between multiple factions, but it's usually done just to give you a change of what colour uniforms you kill.
But real people are more than killing/dying machines, and the problems we now face as a planet are far more interesting than 'kill all the guys wearing the other uniform'. In fact, it's that kind of us/them thinking which has created many of our scariest problems.
I'd like to see a game, for instance, which starts from trying to *stop* a war and goes from there.
"When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life?"
Two words, dude: Robotic. Double.
Just don't let it take over your dating life. It's not pretty, being dumped for a very small Perl script.
"The truth is not enough is known to make such a game, not only that it is subject to aesthetic prejudices and what not. I would imagine text adventures would fall into the realm you're looking for..."
Text adventures do have a history of often being nonviolent, yes, but they're not necessarily so. They do take a more literary than combat-based approach to worldbuilding (ie, they're structured around verbs and nouns rather than weapons and enemies).
What you say about it being difficult to build such games is very true. The main problem with cooperative games is that they seem to lack fun or interest, a sense of challenge that we get with dynamic, live adversaries; whether that's because the field is still very young or because our brains can't conceive of non-combat encounters being fun, I'm not sure. I think it's not a simple either-or; I think our brains are plastic enough that we can train them to enjoy different types of activities.
"Finally.. go do good deeds in the real world, that is what the real world is for. Games are an escape from real life, that is what they are supposed to be - fantasy and wish fulfillment."
That's half true. The worlds we construct in shared fantasy will carry through to real life in terms of metaphors and views of looking at the world -- see George Lakoff on the intellectual power of metaphor and how it shapes and limits our cognitive abilities often at a very unconscious level.
If we believe that it is impossible to construct an enjoyable fantasy world where any human interaction other than combat occurs -- then it seems to me that we also necessarily believe that no *real-world* interaction of a non-dominance-submission type occurs between humans. We may not want to believe that we believe that, but if we find it impossible to *imagine* a different world, then that's the world we in fact believe.
And if we believe that -- that when two humans meet one must always 'win' and the other 'lose' or the encounter is not 'fun' -- then I think we have a very real social problem, because we're going to take that attitude through to economics, crimefighting, and international relations.
And we can't afford to use Space Invaders or Dungeons and Dragons thinking when we're holding nuclear weapons.
"So, if you're not a child, why would you want to immerse yourself in a world where you help people? "
For the same reason you might read a book or watch a movie where the protagonist helps people.
Because games have this really unique ability to give you a gut-level tactical/strategic intuition about decision-making, dealing with unknown information, juggling priorities. They're a great way to learn, and they're fun.
And we're wasting (or even worse, perverting) that capability by structuring almost all our games around a flawed conception of what life is about: conquering rivals and accumulating stuff. Which means we're unconsciously training, retraining and over-learning decision-making metaphors and mental reflexes which are just flat wrong and will hurt us badly if we then transfer those skills into the real world where acts have consequences and people we interact with are more than just mobile obstacles to overcome.
"There's a movie version scheduled for next year, and apparently the people involved understand that the book has serious flaws they need to work around."
Such as that the economy is currently imploding because Rand's prescription was taken too seriously, yes.
That's why my party will abolish both gravity and curvature within the first 30 days of our administration, as well as moving to increase solar output by 200% and crustal diameter by 50%. We will increase topsoil depth to 50 miles, mineable ore content to 100 kg per acre of gold, copper and iridium, and mandate that the Atlantic Ocean flow with light sweet crude.
The exponential growth of our economy demands no less, and it's high time we stopped crippling it with arbitrary 'resource limits'.
"we realized that "fixing" such people means that we're curtailing their freedom - freedom to be crazy, and freedom to make the choices that leave them homeless."
One thing I'm curious about -- what percentage of 'crazy homeless people' in the USA are war veterans? Are there any statistics on this?
"politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected"
Can we PLEASE stop using the content-free scare word "pander". When 'they' do it, it's 'pandering'; but when 'we' do it, it's 'remaining true to our core values and not selling out'.
The real word is "represent". That's what a representative does, you know?
Shock, horror: there are groups of people *who hold different political views to you!* Oh noes! And they have *political representatives*! Noooo! Pandering! Obviously their representative is completely devoid of a moral compass and is only cynically using those people with their silly beliefs. They can't actually *hold* those beliefs, surely.
Actually, no. That's not how it works. People have concerns; they elect representatives who share those concerns, and speak to them. When that happens, that's democracy *working*.
If you don't like a certain group of people's polical views, by all means attack those *views*, but don't attack their elected representatives for correctly and honestly representing the differing views of their constituency.
"Gas lines and hostages in Iran? The fact that Carter is allowed in public shows how generous we are."
Good lord. You believe Carter was a *failure*?
Carter was the first president smart enough to talk honestly about the oil crisis facing the world -- which, if you're paying attention, hasn't gone away, but is back with friends -- and tell you straight up that the system was broken and needed fixed. And he almost did it, too.
And you crucified him for it, and elected that smooth-talking snake-oil salesman Reagan who did nothing but toss a carpet over the hole in your economy and nearly brought the world to WWIII. If not for Gorbachev, we might be in a nuclear wasteland right now.
May the USA be smart enough to elect many more Carters.
"That overlooks the substantial number of us who picked Bush as the lesser evil. I wasn't pro-Bush in the slightest, but thought (and still think) he was a less-bad option than Kerry."
*Less*-bad?
Sadly, even being a 'reluctant' Bush voter still counts as being really really dumb, not to mention xenophobic and willingly ignorant of recent 20th century history.
Kerry was a Vietnam vet who protested Vietnam, and that's a good thing! You remember Vietnam, don't you? The bad war? The really bad one? The one you guys *shouldn't* have been in, that didn't work out well for anyone, that killed thousands of US guys but *millions* of Vietnamese? That took kids fresh out of college, fucked up their minds with war and hate and death, then dumped them onto society where they'd gravitate to crime and drugs?
That war? That was wrong, yes? We can all agree, history has judged it to be a bad war, right? And Kerry protested it, yes? Which means he was right?
Of course, Kerry himself did his darndest in 2004 to run *against* himself, with all that militaristic 'reporting for duty' crap... and he'd lost enough of his antiwar credentials to have voted *for* the Iraq moral disaster... but still. Even so, anyone who had the slightest awareness of history could tell he was at least a *little* better than Bush.
I mean, what the. Vietnam was only in the 1970s, you know? Have you guys *already* forgotten it?
"Maybe I'll start writing sports stories, and attribute everything I don't understand to the infield fly rule, since I don't really understand it. No matter if the story is about football."
And it's fifteen-love-all, Godspeed You! Black Emperor coming up the inside straight, tacking to windward and about to haul the spinnaker, but oh no what's this, the referee's calling a line-out, leg before wicket, straight to the solar plexus and his king's in check. Respawn, quad damage, but can he get a triple-word score on the centre square. Yes he can, he's cleared the sand trap, an eagle under par at silly mid off and what a finish, what a finish. Straight to Alpha Centauri. Magnificent.
"When I read that passage for the first time myself, I saw that today's society does exactly this with laws."
Unfortunately what Rand forgot is that the commercial world does exactly the same thing with *contracts*, and that the words coming out of Ferris' mouth would, in our world, actually be coming out of Reardon's. (Or Ballmer's, or Jobs'.)
You want to live in this country? You swear to uphold our law. You want to rent on my street? You sign the rental agreement. You want to plug your device into our network? You sign our service level agreement. You want to run our software? You click the shrinkwrap EULA.
And plenty of EULAs today make everyone criminals.
Except you get to vote on the law, and you don't get to vote on the SLA or EULA. With both states and companies, you can always vote with your feet by moving - but the lock-in cost can be sizeable for both, and that's where the potential for abuse lies.
Rand was so blinded by her vision of the idealistic, scientific, saintly egoist corporate god-man, that she forgot that both lawmaking and contract-writing are rulesets which can be gamed equally well -- and are -- by the same ruthless men. If you're driven by pure egoism with no sense of responsibility to others, it's just good business, after all, to get the best kind of deal you can, ethics be damned.
"This money is not being forcibly taken from the rich and given to the poor. There is absolutely NO social aspect to it."
I do not think the word "social" means what you think it means.
"If the city you live in were to find a thousand tons of pure gold beneath it, and then decided to share it equally among all currently recognized citizens, would you call that socialist?"
Yes.
I'd say the Alaskan subsidy is the perfect definition of socialism: collective action taken toward a collective goal, sharing common resources and treating all citizens equally.
But then I don't automatically assume that "socialism" is a synonym for "hellishly evil and of the Devil".
In fact I consider "socialism" to be pretty much a synonym for "acting like a good neighbour as a member of a society.
More than that, though, Alaska is inspirational to the left because it has effectively implemented a universal basic income, an idea still considered fringe and outre even among many mainline socialists. Weird that it's a conservative government which did it, but then many features of American "conservatism" (such as your huge military industrial establishment which socialises basic science and technology research) strike me as odd and, well, often quite Marxist (who argued for a standing "industrial army"). With both the good and bad features thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
"We have the ability to wipe most human life off the planet in about an hour using nuclear weapons. Why is it arrogance to think we could do it in 50 years by other means?"
Exactly. In the last 50 years we landed on the freaking moon. We've introduced man-made objects to all the major bodies of the solar system and even tossed a couple outside the heliopause. We've also increased our population from millions to billions.
Our species' capabilities appear to be increasing exponentially, including our capability to stuff stuff up on a planetary scale. Or, perhaps, to fix things on a planetary scale.
It's arrogance to *deny* that rising curve.
"if you're looking for truth in science, you're looking in the wrong place. Philosophy is concerned with Truth. Science is merely concerned with accurately explaining the natural world around us."
But isn't accurate description the same thing as truth?
It's how we define "truth" in daily life, after all. "Did the witness say the truth" == "did the witness accurately describe the events observed"
Perhaps this is why I'm not a philosopher, but it seems to me that they make things far too complicated. Surely if we define truth as "correspondence to reality", there can be degrees of truth, and a model can be more or less "true" to the extent that it gives reliable predictions.
No model will be 100% congruent with reality unless it's the same size as reality -- but that's only a problem at the point where the model and reality diverge.
What's the philosophical problem with using models to give predictions, as long as we know what the margin of error is?
Or are you saying that there are Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns" in the practice of science, such that our models are likely to break down in unexpected and unpredictable ways and tell us to make bad policy decisions which we won't recognise until they're too late?
"I'm thinking of the NTP v Blackberry litigation. "
And let's not forget the Xerox vs Palm Graffiti 1 patent war.
I've lost track of who sued who - Wikipedia says that Palm appealed, lost the appeal but won a right to reevaluate whether the patent was valid in the first place (!), won that case, then Xerox counter-appealed and won.
Meanwhile, the best writing system ever devised for handheld devices got dropped for the ugly and finger-crippling Graffiti 2, and the customers lost.
Hooray for the smoking crater.
"No, seriously... Any species that doesn't eventually figure out how to colonize other planets is doomed to extinction no matter how well adapted to their current environment due to unforeseen global disasters."
Given that there are no habitable planets within maybe a hundred light years of here, and no guarantee that there are *any* physical ways of accessing any within a human lifetime, it seems to me that the survival of our species has frankly NOTHING to do with colonising other planets and EVERYTHING to do with learning how to live sustainably on this one.
Yes, waking up to that reality is a bit of a shock. Give it time. It'll set in, and then you'll start each morning with a nice bracing scream, before you go use the composting toilet.
And think yourself lucky. The toilets in space are worse.
Our generation was sold dreams about how future == space and there'd be a new frontier to explore. Unfortunately, that was a convenient little white lie. Space is nothing but an empty radiation-filled hole that's quietly hostile to all forms of biological life. There's no frontier there, nowhere to go, nothing to do.
If we continue to predicate a society and economy based on resource-stripping and colonising an external frontier, yes we're doomed. So let's stop doing that.
"That's what CORBA and KParts are for."
And CORBA appears to have flamed out and died entirely. The latest GNOME releases are ditching it for D-Bus. KParts of course isn't interoperable with anything outside of KDE.
What do you call an 'interoperable' specification which only has one implementation?
"Or I would call it 'Graphium' which sounds like a radioactive element and is the name of a butterfly."
You might think you're kidding, but Adobe are right ahead of you, they already went there with their Creative Suite 3 icon sets that push the two-letter 'element' designations. Ps for Photoshop, Fl for Flash, etc.
I kind of like Rez myself. Except it's got to have already been taken, right?
But yes, GIMP is not quite the worst name ever, but up there in the top ten. It's deliberately and aggressively offensive and not open to discussion, and that is not an attitude that reflects well on the core dev team.
It was in the EULA at the hospital when you were born. Don't come crying to *me* because you didn't read it. Well, you were crying, but for other reasons.
Darn n00borns.
"war is the part that is more fun"
Or as Chris Hedges wrote: War is a force that gives us meaning.
Those words, if they are true, should make us all very, very scared for the future.
"Being anti-violence to the point of denying it entirely is a form of violence itself, because it takes the option (choice) away from you, which is fundamentally evil in an of itself."
Sorry, but that statement is nonsense. Violence is violence. Choosing not to be violent is the opposite of violence, not 'another form of it'.
Being anti-violence isn't some kind of fashion statement. It's a tactical choice which flows out of a deeper vision of the universe, which is that all life is connected and that ultimately living as a fulfilled human requires respect and cooperation with others.
*That* aspect, the deeper vision of cooperation, is what is missing in even 'mostly nonviolent' games - there's no sense of *working together toward a common goal*. There's no sense that people on opposite teams can even *have* a shared goal, and no way to live from that philosophy; it's instantly rejected by the game world. You kill, or you die, and those are the two verbs the game is structured around. In story-driven FPSes, you may well switch your alliegance between multiple factions, but it's usually done just to give you a change of what colour uniforms you kill.
But real people are more than killing/dying machines, and the problems we now face as a planet are far more interesting than 'kill all the guys wearing the other uniform'. In fact, it's that kind of us/them thinking which has created many of our scariest problems.
I'd like to see a game, for instance, which starts from trying to *stop* a war and goes from there.
"When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life?"
Two words, dude: Robotic. Double.
Just don't let it take over your dating life. It's not pretty, being dumped for a very small Perl script.
"The truth is not enough is known to make such a game, not only that it is subject to aesthetic prejudices and what not. I would imagine text adventures would fall into the realm you're looking for..."
Text adventures do have a history of often being nonviolent, yes, but they're not necessarily so. They do take a more literary than combat-based approach to worldbuilding (ie, they're structured around verbs and nouns rather than weapons and enemies).
What you say about it being difficult to build such games is very true. The main problem with cooperative games is that they seem to lack fun or interest, a sense of challenge that we get with dynamic, live adversaries; whether that's because the field is still very young or because our brains can't conceive of non-combat encounters being fun, I'm not sure. I think it's not a simple either-or; I think our brains are plastic enough that we can train them to enjoy different types of activities.
"Finally.. go do good deeds in the real world, that is what the real world is for. Games are an escape from real life, that is what they are supposed to be - fantasy and wish fulfillment."
That's half true. The worlds we construct in shared fantasy will carry through to real life in terms of metaphors and views of looking at the world -- see George Lakoff on the intellectual power of metaphor and how it shapes and limits our cognitive abilities often at a very unconscious level.
If we believe that it is impossible to construct an enjoyable fantasy world where any human interaction other than combat occurs -- then it seems to me that we also necessarily believe that no *real-world* interaction of a non-dominance-submission type occurs between humans. We may not want to believe that we believe that, but if we find it impossible to *imagine* a different world, then that's the world we in fact believe.
And if we believe that -- that when two humans meet one must always 'win' and the other 'lose' or the encounter is not 'fun' -- then I think we have a very real social problem, because we're going to take that attitude through to economics, crimefighting, and international relations.
And we can't afford to use Space Invaders or Dungeons and Dragons thinking when we're holding nuclear weapons.
"So, if you're not a child, why would you want to immerse yourself in a world where you help people? "
For the same reason you might read a book or watch a movie where the protagonist helps people.
Because games have this really unique ability to give you a gut-level tactical/strategic intuition about decision-making, dealing with unknown information, juggling priorities. They're a great way to learn, and they're fun.
And we're wasting (or even worse, perverting) that capability by structuring almost all our games around a flawed conception of what life is about: conquering rivals and accumulating stuff. Which means we're unconsciously training, retraining and over-learning decision-making metaphors and mental reflexes which are just flat wrong and will hurt us badly if we then transfer those skills into the real world where acts have consequences and people we interact with are more than just mobile obstacles to overcome.
I've looked for the sort of games you're talking about, and they're exceedingly rare, and yes, I would also be very interested in finding one.
Here's one in the meantime:
Based on the documentary/book series of the same name about nonviolent political struggles, A Force More Powerful: The Game of Nonviolent Strategy seems to be basically a 'sim protest'.
I don't think this really gets to the essence of 'building cooperation', but it's a start.
"There's a movie version scheduled for next year, and apparently the people involved understand that the book has serious flaws they need to work around."
Such as that the economy is currently imploding because Rand's prescription was taken too seriously, yes.
"The Earth demands sacrifice!"
That's why my party will abolish both gravity and curvature within the first 30 days of our administration, as well as moving to increase solar output by 200% and crustal diameter by 50%. We will increase topsoil depth to 50 miles, mineable ore content to 100 kg per acre of gold, copper and iridium, and mandate that the Atlantic Ocean flow with light sweet crude.
The exponential growth of our economy demands no less, and it's high time we stopped crippling it with arbitrary 'resource limits'.
No more sacrifices.
The Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter will do that next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter
"we realized that "fixing" such people means that we're curtailing their freedom - freedom to be crazy, and freedom to make the choices that leave them homeless."
One thing I'm curious about -- what percentage of 'crazy homeless people' in the USA are war veterans? Are there any statistics on this?
"politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected"
Can we PLEASE stop using the content-free scare word "pander". When 'they' do it, it's 'pandering'; but when 'we' do it, it's 'remaining true to our core values and not selling out'.
The real word is "represent". That's what a representative does, you know?
Shock, horror: there are groups of people *who hold different political views to you!* Oh noes! And they have *political representatives*! Noooo! Pandering! Obviously their representative is completely devoid of a moral compass and is only cynically using those people with their silly beliefs. They can't actually *hold* those beliefs, surely.
Actually, no. That's not how it works. People have concerns; they elect representatives who share those concerns, and speak to them. When that happens, that's democracy *working*.
If you don't like a certain group of people's polical views, by all means attack those *views*, but don't attack their elected representatives for correctly and honestly representing the differing views of their constituency.
"Gas lines and hostages in Iran? The fact that Carter is allowed in public shows how generous we are."
Good lord. You believe Carter was a *failure*?
Carter was the first president smart enough to talk honestly about the oil crisis facing the world -- which, if you're paying attention, hasn't gone away, but is back with friends -- and tell you straight up that the system was broken and needed fixed. And he almost did it, too.
And you crucified him for it, and elected that smooth-talking snake-oil salesman Reagan who did nothing but toss a carpet over the hole in your economy and nearly brought the world to WWIII. If not for Gorbachev, we might be in a nuclear wasteland right now.
May the USA be smart enough to elect many more Carters.
"This nation wasn't founded on partisanship at all."
Unless you supported the monarchy, in which case, Canada.
"That overlooks the substantial number of us who picked Bush as the lesser evil. I wasn't pro-Bush in the slightest, but thought (and still think) he was a less-bad option than Kerry."
*Less*-bad?
Sadly, even being a 'reluctant' Bush voter still counts as being really really dumb, not to mention xenophobic and willingly ignorant of recent 20th century history.
Kerry was a Vietnam vet who protested Vietnam, and that's a good thing! You remember Vietnam, don't you? The bad war? The really bad one? The one you guys *shouldn't* have been in, that didn't work out well for anyone, that killed thousands of US guys but *millions* of Vietnamese? That took kids fresh out of college, fucked up their minds with war and hate and death, then dumped them onto society where they'd gravitate to crime and drugs?
That war? That was wrong, yes? We can all agree, history has judged it to be a bad war, right? And Kerry protested it, yes? Which means he was right?
Of course, Kerry himself did his darndest in 2004 to run *against* himself, with all that militaristic 'reporting for duty' crap... and he'd lost enough of his antiwar credentials to have voted *for* the Iraq moral disaster... but still. Even so, anyone who had the slightest awareness of history could tell he was at least a *little* better than Bush.
I mean, what the. Vietnam was only in the 1970s, you know? Have you guys *already* forgotten it?
Except for Boston.
"Maybe I'll start writing sports stories, and attribute everything I don't understand to the infield fly rule, since I don't really understand it. No matter if the story is about football."
And it's fifteen-love-all, Godspeed You! Black Emperor coming up the inside straight, tacking to windward and about to haul the spinnaker, but oh no what's this, the referee's calling a line-out, leg before wicket, straight to the solar plexus and his king's in check. Respawn, quad damage, but can he get a triple-word score on the centre square. Yes he can, he's cleared the sand trap, an eagle under par at silly mid off and what a finish, what a finish. Straight to Alpha Centauri. Magnificent.
"When I read that passage for the first time myself, I saw that today's society does exactly this with laws."
Unfortunately what Rand forgot is that the commercial world does exactly the same thing with *contracts*, and that the words coming out of Ferris' mouth would, in our world, actually be coming out of Reardon's. (Or Ballmer's, or Jobs'.)
You want to live in this country? You swear to uphold our law. You want to rent on my street? You sign the rental agreement. You want to plug your device into our network? You sign our service level agreement. You want to run our software? You click the shrinkwrap EULA.
And plenty of EULAs today make everyone criminals.
Except you get to vote on the law, and you don't get to vote on the SLA or EULA. With both states and companies, you can always vote with your feet by moving - but the lock-in cost can be sizeable for both, and that's where the potential for abuse lies.
Rand was so blinded by her vision of the idealistic, scientific, saintly egoist corporate god-man, that she forgot that both lawmaking and contract-writing are rulesets which can be gamed equally well -- and are -- by the same ruthless men. If you're driven by pure egoism with no sense of responsibility to others, it's just good business, after all, to get the best kind of deal you can, ethics be damned.
"This money is not being forcibly taken from the rich and given to the poor. There is absolutely NO social aspect to it."
I do not think the word "social" means what you think it means.
"If the city you live in were to find a thousand tons of pure gold beneath it, and then decided to share it equally among all currently recognized citizens, would you call that socialist?"
Yes.
I'd say the Alaskan subsidy is the perfect definition of socialism: collective action taken toward a collective goal, sharing common resources and treating all citizens equally.
But then I don't automatically assume that "socialism" is a synonym for "hellishly evil and of the Devil".
In fact I consider "socialism" to be pretty much a synonym for "acting like a good neighbour as a member of a society.
More than that, though, Alaska is inspirational to the left because it has effectively implemented a universal basic income, an idea still considered fringe and outre even among many mainline socialists. Weird that it's a conservative government which did it, but then many features of American "conservatism" (such as your huge military industrial establishment which socialises basic science and technology research) strike me as odd and, well, often quite Marxist (who argued for a standing "industrial army"). With both the good and bad features thereof.