As a physicist and philospher who is currently developing his writing career, I don't agree with this. It's true that some writers are just what you describe. They aren't artists, they aren't original thinkers. They are what used to be known as "hacks".
Writers, however, are expected to come up with their own ideas, and in the case in point, with their own words--at least some of the time. While it's true that "mediocrity borrows, genius steals", it takes more than theft to make a genius: it takes intelligent transmutation of the stolen material into an original and interesting form. Insofar as a writer does that, they are not a hack, but that is a requirement, not just "expressing old ideas in interesting ways."
And the best writers, of course, express new ideas in interesting ways. Melville wasn't just regurgitating facts about whales (although he was doing that too...)
Yet we still buy their gas because we have no other practical alternatives
That depends entirely on what you consider "practical".
I choose to live within walking distance of where I work. I consider that "practical" even though it means I live in a small house, have no yard to speak of (although I live across from a park, so big deal) and sometimes the street theatre can get loud (although I find drunks being screamed at by their girlfreinds kind of amusing most of the time.)
I get all of that, and fill my car up once every two or three months. I still haven't quite given up my car, but I'd be the last person to claim that I don't have practical alternatives: they just aren't quite convenient enough for me to pursue them yet.
Henry Ford once said if you'd asked his customers what they'd wanted before he started building cars they'd have told him "a faster horse."
This is the military or geo-political equivalent of a faster horse.
Rather than approaching the enemy in new and interesting ways, the same old stupid and destructive deadweight loss tactics are being applied: blowing people up and killing them. To anyone who cares about economics, this is idiotic. These people are useful, capable and potentially produtive members of the human community. Rather than intelligently find ways to exploit that, we spend billions of dollars we can't really afford to find more and more sophisticated ways to blow them up.
If blowing things up in Afghanistan solved the Afghan problem, there wouldn't be an Afghan problem anymore. It didn't work for the British, it didn't work for the Russians, and not it's not working for NATO.
Maybe it's time we started thinking about using new technology in ways that are actually likely to bring about the desired end--which is peace and prosperity (right?--rather than just stupidly and unimaginately pursuing the dead-end dream of a faster horse.
but this is really irrelevant - the text of the Convention is what is important.)
No! No! If you've been following the "arguments" put forth here by the appologists for the murderers you'll see that irrelevance is their entire argument.
They have nothing more to offer: all they are trying to do, consistently and repeatedly, is to distract from the central point, which is that an American guncrew requested, was granted, and acted on permission to fire on unarmed good samaritans who were trying to help the people the guncrew had previously shot.
That the defenders of the murderers have nothing to offer but irrelevance proves they have no moral or legal leg to stand on, and they know it. It is their way of conceding the argument.
That could probably be construed as putting the lives of many soldiers in danger.
So since you're so concerned about the lives of American soldiers you must absolutely HATE George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chenney and Colin Powell for putting so many American soldiers in danger, right?
Just as a matter of interest, could you point me to where you've ranted and raved against them for putting so many American soldiers in danger during the illegal and unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Unless you can point me to that, I'm afraid I'm going to be skeptical about your purported concern. If you think it's ok for GW Bush and Co to put the lives of American soldiers in danger for no readily apparent reason, but not ok for some random guy who is trying to expose wrong-doing and hold the government to account, then you really don't care about the lives of American soldiers: you're just a shill for the organs of the state.
No, but we shouldn't assume that the pilots are bloodthirsty, trigger-happy murderers who completely ignore the ROEs and Geneva Convention.
We don't have to assume it: we can see them behaving as bloodthirsty, trigger-happy murderers on the released video when they fire on innocent unarmed civilians who are exercising their natural right to help the wounded from the helicopter's previous (legal) attack.
This attempt to distract from what is actually shown by invoking the irrelevant reminds me of nothing so much as the old Cold War arguments where any criticism of the Russians was met not by a defense of their actions but by a reciprocal criticism of the Americans. It may work on the thinking-disabled, I guess, but there are fewer of those than you'd think.
Loud insistence that some irrelevant action for which we have no evidence is what really matters in this debate is proof only that the person doing the insisting is either morally or mentally bankrupt. Or, more likely, both.
I wonder if NASA has been routinely sterilizing soft landers for decades to avoid exactly the kind of thing you are wondering about.
I wonder if it might be possible to tell the difference between Earth-based contaminants and indigenous lifeforms by biochemical and (in the extremely improbable case of biochemical similarity) genetic analysis.
I wonder if it's possible to post questions on/. without knowing the first thing about a topic.
which are not as nicely probabilistic as many social scientists would like us to believe.
Huh? I don't even know what that means. You can say that the distributions aren't particularly nice, but then neither are lots of the distributions physicists routinely deal with. Specatral lines don't even have a second central moment, for example.
Furthermore, the "huge volume of variables" individuals take into account makes it easier to deal with their actions probabilistically, as any physicist will tell you.
You're basically saying "people are magic", which is the same lame excuse that has been used by social "scientists" for decades to try to give themselves a free pass out of empirical reality. Economists are if anything worse about this than other social scientists, as their entire field is based on a false presumption: that one can make make interesting claims about human behaviour when considering only pecuniary incentives.
In physics, economics wouldn't be considered a discipline at all, but rather a useful approximation, like linear response theory. We need a scientific approach to human behaviour that spans the accidental disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics and political science. All of these take a particular approximation of humans as being primary, and then try to "fix up" their flawed model in an ad hoc way when it runs into reality. We have learned again and again in physics that this is the wrong way to go: you need to build a concept of humans that is fundamentally accurate first, then split it into areas of specialized study later on, not the other way around.
Moral philosophy (Adam Smith's field) might have been useful for this were philosophers not so entirely clueless. As it stands, we have no science of human behaviour, although one is likely to arise in the next few decades out of the more rational elements of evolutionary psychology.
So you would deliberately try to run someone into the cones and you are calling *him* an asshole???
Failing to yield to an asshole doesn't make you an asshole. It makes you a good citizen, enforcing basic social control on the assholes in our midst.
Unfortunately, assholes are too stupid to see this, and instead believe they are engaged in some kind of contest with the individual who happens at the moment to be taking responsible for applying basic simian social control procedures.
you're thinking of the assholes that actually DO force their way in because they think they're too important to wait around.
He's almost certainly thinking of these people, and you are almost certainly one of them, as the odds of just happening to find a car-length gap in right lane in the scenario you describe without forcing your way in are sufficiently low that your suggestion that you can do it reliably is highly implausible.
The odds of you being an asshole are much, much higher.
More to the point, 'species' is an entirely human construction for classification of what we see, just like 'planet'
Which is to say, it's exactly like every other concept used by humans for anything anywhere ever, and just as in the case of "planet", when ambiguity arises due to the inevitable contiuum issues near the boundary, new concepts are required. In biology, the first-order new concept one finds at the boundary of species is "hybrid", although it is clearly inadequate because it takes the biological species concept as the "true" classification (for some sufficiently weird notion of "true") and implies that hybrids are "mixed" from "true" species.
This would be like defining "beach" as "a hybrid between land and water" rather than "a boundary between land and water with these characteristics..."
The existence of broad and fuzzy boundaries between distinct regions of conceptual space of course does not make those regions any less distinct. I point this out because some idiot always comes to these discussions with questions about "where do you draw the line?" as if everyone didn't already know the answer is "where-ever is the most useful." I presume such people have never been to the beach, as they would clearly drown, being unable to tell the difference between land and water since there is no infinitely precise line between them.
What I would like is to use such a thing to read books that I own, not DRM-krippled rental boks that Amazon foists on Kindle users.
Until then, no thanks. I've got books on my shelves that are over 100 years old, and I can still read them, although the publisher, printer and distributer have all long-since gone out of business. I've got books I bought 20 years ago, and I can still read them.
There's no commitment, and no possibility of commitment, from Amazon or any of the other DRM-krippled e-bok vendors that I will be able to read their rental boks tomorrow, much less twenty years from now.
It is almost assured that they would have happened later, though, since they didn't beat the military research to begin with.
Why do you say that? We're talking about counter-factuals. In MY imaginary dream world where people are on average somewhat smarter or perhaps just more humane than they actually were, historically, rather than spending billions and billions of dollars on the deadweight loss industry to develop these technologies, they were developed instead by massive expenditure of tax dollars for the exploration of space.
And in this imaginary alternate universe all of these technologies and more besides were developed sooner because some of the people who were responsible for it didn't die senselessly in bombings or on battlefields, and some of the labs and factories where it was worked on weren't blown to bits.
The benefits of massive public expenditure on new technology should be sufficiently obvious that it does not need to be coupled to deadweight loss spending of the kind the military specializes in.
Whether or not you agree with it, military research has led to an enormous number of scientific advances that were initially used by the military but later disseminated more broadly.
So did the space programme, with the notable advantage that it killed orders of magnitude fewer people.
So while military research is one particularly wasteful and stupid way to get these results, there is really no justification for promoting over the many other ways that are far less wasteful and stupid.
They want to be able to say "Fire" and have the missile in the air within minutes and at target within hours; with the added benefit of not putting any American lives in harms way.
Sorry, you've lost me there. How does threatening or actually blowing people up NOT put Americans in harm's way? Your statement makes no sense.
The inevitable retaliation will kill Americans. The inevitable retaliation is inevitable.
So saying blowing people up in far off lands won't put Americans in harm's way is trivially false, like saying humans didn't evolve from apes or the equivalent: the product of a pre-scientific, anti-empirical understanding of how the world actually is.
I am wondering whether this story is some kind of practical joke.
Given that most of what passes for mathematical logic is pretty much a joke, and mathematical logicians are for the most part far more logician than mathematician, and therefore some of the stupidest people in math, that's my read as well.
Pretty much every logician I've ever dealt with has thought that Leibniz's Law is not only reasonable, but true, whereas we've known it to be emprically false for nearly a century. But logics that violate it are considered cutting edge, and are mostly toy models.
On the other hand, logicians are also amongst the most obtuse and incoherent people on the planet, so selling a line of bullshit to the morons on Wall Street would be just their thing, and they're so dumb they probably aren't even aware that the whole thing is just a scam.
If I look around me, a lot of folks seem pretty happy with what they have, opting instead to improve their lives in non-financial ways when the opportunity arises.
If they are opting to "improve their lives" they aren't "pretty happy with what they have", as if they were it wouldn't need improvement.
I know you mean their material goods, but this is the whole point: there is plenty of empirical data, including direct studies on the subject that are only a google away, that show that "feeling better off than the people around you" is a fundamental component of human happiness. We are all tuned up as a species to be in perpetual pursuit of "more", and there's not a damned thing we can do about it.
The choice we do have, however, is what kind of "more" we're after. Idiots are all about "more money" as if that was the only kind of "more" there was. People from more civilized cultures pursue more musical or artistic skill, more time with their kids or friends, more sex, more fishing, more whatever... and importantly, more civilized cultures give those people some feeling of recognition that helps satisfy the deep inner need we all have to be superior to those around us.
The only thing that separates idiots from civilized people is that civilized people recognize that there are as many standards against which to measure "superior" as their are poeple, whereas idiots recognize only money (and it's evil twin, power) as being legitimate measures of superiority.
The casino doesn't produce any "real" wealth - it just distributes it.
Sorry, stopped reading at that point, as your ignorance of economics is obviously profound. How wealth is distributed has an enormous effect on a society's ability to produce new wealth. Many dirt-poor native tribes in Canada, for example, are "wealthy" on paper, but the ordinary people have no access to that money, only the band council does. A financial system that allowed ordinary people access to that money would make everyone but a few assholes at the top enormously richer.
Likewise, systems that attempt to "spread the wealth" uniformly across all individuals, the way Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska did with oil revenues, are also vastly less productive than systems with moderate gate-keepers that try to ensure capital is deployed in somewhat productive ways.
Learn a tiny bit of economic theory and--far more importantly--economic history before making up lame analogies, please.
On the other hand, throwing up your hands and saying "nothing can be done" assures that the maximum number of people are killed and maimed.
Yeah, it's curious how many innumerate, anti-empirical wankers are on here proclaiming "nothing can be done". I think it's part and parcel of the right-wing bible-believing crackpottery so common in the US. I'm not quite sure what the causality is, although I think innumeracy is probably the biggest part of it: at some point beyond three people dead and a few buildings down they declare that "everyone" will die and "everything" will be destroyed. It's a very difficult mindset for a scientist, steeped in quantitative reasoning, to grasp.
This story is not the least bit sensationalist, and it is something worth reminding people of. I grew up on the West Coast, and earthquake preparedness was something everyone was familiar with. But talking to people who didn't grow up there reminds me that they need to learn about it. Given the large influx of Easterners into Vancouver and environs in recent years getting people to pay attention to the reality they are quite likely to face is important.
Now if only Vancouver were spending $6 billion on emergency preparedness rather than having pissed it away on that athletics festival a few months ago...
It specifically prohibits profiling based on skin color, and if the people claims the police officer did arrest them because of their skin color (and they can prove it), they hit pay dirt.
Well, that's reassuring, because I'm sure the organs of the state would never do anything that they are specifically prohibited by law from doing, like running a secret prison system and torturing confessions out of people all over the world.
And of course proving intent is so simple! I'm sure there will be no difficulty with that, because a police officer would never lie about their intent, nor take any action to cover up their racist reasons for stopping someone.
Do you think that non-violence works in China? North Korea? Russia? Any Islamic country (with the exception of Turkey)?
Has it been tried in any of those places, particularly with the intelligent and systematic guidance of any kind similar to what Gandhi used in India? The Indian opposition to British rule wasn't just non-violent, it was also carefully targeted, using well-trained people and intelligent strategies.
And how's that violence working out in Ireland? Or Spain, where the Basque have been killing each other for half a century... they must have independence by now, since violence works so well, right? Or Palestine, where a couple of generations of violence on both sides has already solved all their problems. Or Russia, as you mention, where Chetchyn violence seems to be doing a really good job... Oh, and then there's the libertarian paradise of Somalia, where violence has resulted in a better life for all, and Sri Lanka where the Tigers of Tamil Elam used violence successfully win an independent state for themselves. Likewise, invading Iraq and Afghanistan both have worked out so well, too.
So yeah, I can see how with a record like that everyone would reach for violence as the best tool to bring about political change. It has worked so well so many times that I really can't see anyone trying anything else. I mean, it just makes sense!
The truth is that arguments against non-violence depend on fantasies about counter-factual outcomes. If you'd been arguing with Gandhi in 1920 you would have said the same things to him--pointed out the British guilt in the Tasmanian genocide, and the atrocities in India in the Mutiny, and said non-violence would never work against them. You aren't actually deploying any empirical data, which is all on the side of non-violence. You're appealing to what seems plausible, and as the history of science teaches: what seems most plausible is rarely correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Writers are not philosophers or physicists
As a physicist and philospher who is currently developing his writing career, I don't agree with this. It's true that some writers are just what you describe. They aren't artists, they aren't original thinkers. They are what used to be known as "hacks".
Writers, however, are expected to come up with their own ideas, and in the case in point, with their own words--at least some of the time. While it's true that "mediocrity borrows, genius steals", it takes more than theft to make a genius: it takes intelligent transmutation of the stolen material into an original and interesting form. Insofar as a writer does that, they are not a hack, but that is a requirement, not just "expressing old ideas in interesting ways."
And the best writers, of course, express new ideas in interesting ways. Melville wasn't just regurgitating facts about whales (although he was doing that too...)
Yet we still buy their gas because we have no other practical alternatives
That depends entirely on what you consider "practical".
I choose to live within walking distance of where I work. I consider that "practical" even though it means I live in a small house, have no yard to speak of (although I live across from a park, so big deal) and sometimes the street theatre can get loud (although I find drunks being screamed at by their girlfreinds kind of amusing most of the time.)
I get all of that, and fill my car up once every two or three months. I still haven't quite given up my car, but I'd be the last person to claim that I don't have practical alternatives: they just aren't quite convenient enough for me to pursue them yet.
Productivity rises.
Err... not quite. "Destructivity rises," rather.
Henry Ford once said if you'd asked his customers what they'd wanted before he started building cars they'd have told him "a faster horse."
This is the military or geo-political equivalent of a faster horse.
Rather than approaching the enemy in new and interesting ways, the same old stupid and destructive deadweight loss tactics are being applied: blowing people up and killing them. To anyone who cares about economics, this is idiotic. These people are useful, capable and potentially produtive members of the human community. Rather than intelligently find ways to exploit that, we spend billions of dollars we can't really afford to find more and more sophisticated ways to blow them up.
If blowing things up in Afghanistan solved the Afghan problem, there wouldn't be an Afghan problem anymore. It didn't work for the British, it didn't work for the Russians, and not it's not working for NATO.
Maybe it's time we started thinking about using new technology in ways that are actually likely to bring about the desired end--which is peace and prosperity (right?--rather than just stupidly and unimaginately pursuing the dead-end dream of a faster horse.
but this is really irrelevant - the text of the Convention is what is important.)
No! No! If you've been following the "arguments" put forth here by the appologists for the murderers you'll see that irrelevance is their entire argument.
They have nothing more to offer: all they are trying to do, consistently and repeatedly, is to distract from the central point, which is that an American guncrew requested, was granted, and acted on permission to fire on unarmed good samaritans who were trying to help the people the guncrew had previously shot.
That the defenders of the murderers have nothing to offer but irrelevance proves they have no moral or legal leg to stand on, and they know it. It is their way of conceding the argument.
That could probably be construed as putting the lives of many soldiers in danger.
So since you're so concerned about the lives of American soldiers you must absolutely HATE George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chenney and Colin Powell for putting so many American soldiers in danger, right?
Just as a matter of interest, could you point me to where you've ranted and raved against them for putting so many American soldiers in danger during the illegal and unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Unless you can point me to that, I'm afraid I'm going to be skeptical about your purported concern. If you think it's ok for GW Bush and Co to put the lives of American soldiers in danger for no readily apparent reason, but not ok for some random guy who is trying to expose wrong-doing and hold the government to account, then you really don't care about the lives of American soldiers: you're just a shill for the organs of the state.
No, but we shouldn't assume that the pilots are bloodthirsty, trigger-happy murderers who completely ignore the ROEs and Geneva Convention.
We don't have to assume it: we can see them behaving as bloodthirsty, trigger-happy murderers on the released video when they fire on innocent unarmed civilians who are exercising their natural right to help the wounded from the helicopter's previous (legal) attack.
This attempt to distract from what is actually shown by invoking the irrelevant reminds me of nothing so much as the old Cold War arguments where any criticism of the Russians was met not by a defense of their actions but by a reciprocal criticism of the Americans. It may work on the thinking-disabled, I guess, but there are fewer of those than you'd think.
Loud insistence that some irrelevant action for which we have no evidence is what really matters in this debate is proof only that the person doing the insisting is either morally or mentally bankrupt. Or, more likely, both.
I wonder if NASA has been routinely sterilizing soft landers for decades to avoid exactly the kind of thing you are wondering about.
I wonder if it might be possible to tell the difference between Earth-based contaminants and indigenous lifeforms by biochemical and (in the extremely improbable case of biochemical similarity) genetic analysis.
I wonder if it's possible to post questions on /. without knowing the first thing about a topic.
I wonder what I'll have for dinner.
I wonder where my socks are.
which are not as nicely probabilistic as many social scientists would like us to believe.
Huh? I don't even know what that means. You can say that the distributions aren't particularly nice, but then neither are lots of the distributions physicists routinely deal with. Specatral lines don't even have a second central moment, for example.
Furthermore, the "huge volume of variables" individuals take into account makes it easier to deal with their actions probabilistically, as any physicist will tell you.
You're basically saying "people are magic", which is the same lame excuse that has been used by social "scientists" for decades to try to give themselves a free pass out of empirical reality. Economists are if anything worse about this than other social scientists, as their entire field is based on a false presumption: that one can make make interesting claims about human behaviour when considering only pecuniary incentives.
In physics, economics wouldn't be considered a discipline at all, but rather a useful approximation, like linear response theory. We need a scientific approach to human behaviour that spans the accidental disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics and political science. All of these take a particular approximation of humans as being primary, and then try to "fix up" their flawed model in an ad hoc way when it runs into reality. We have learned again and again in physics that this is the wrong way to go: you need to build a concept of humans that is fundamentally accurate first, then split it into areas of specialized study later on, not the other way around.
Moral philosophy (Adam Smith's field) might have been useful for this were philosophers not so entirely clueless. As it stands, we have no science of human behaviour, although one is likely to arise in the next few decades out of the more rational elements of evolutionary psychology.
Or in other words, the guys with the money don't give a fuck if a bubble pops unless they lose money
And with the socialization of risk under Bush/Cheney and carried forward by Obama/Biden, the guys with the money never lose.
You could have done worse than Obama, though, with a real hard-core "share the wealth" type socialist like Sarah Palin.
So you would deliberately try to run someone into the cones and you are calling *him* an asshole???
Failing to yield to an asshole doesn't make you an asshole. It makes you a good citizen, enforcing basic social control on the assholes in our midst.
Unfortunately, assholes are too stupid to see this, and instead believe they are engaged in some kind of contest with the individual who happens at the moment to be taking responsible for applying basic simian social control procedures.
you're thinking of the assholes that actually DO force their way in because they think they're too important to wait around.
He's almost certainly thinking of these people, and you are almost certainly one of them, as the odds of just happening to find a car-length gap in right lane in the scenario you describe without forcing your way in are sufficiently low that your suggestion that you can do it reliably is highly implausible.
The odds of you being an asshole are much, much higher.
More to the point, 'species' is an entirely human construction for classification of what we see, just like 'planet'
Which is to say, it's exactly like every other concept used by humans for anything anywhere ever, and just as in the case of "planet", when ambiguity arises due to the inevitable contiuum issues near the boundary, new concepts are required. In biology, the first-order new concept one finds at the boundary of species is "hybrid", although it is clearly inadequate because it takes the biological species concept as the "true" classification (for some sufficiently weird notion of "true") and implies that hybrids are "mixed" from "true" species.
This would be like defining "beach" as "a hybrid between land and water" rather than "a boundary between land and water with these characteristics..."
The existence of broad and fuzzy boundaries between distinct regions of conceptual space of course does not make those regions any less distinct. I point this out because some idiot always comes to these discussions with questions about "where do you draw the line?" as if everyone didn't already know the answer is "where-ever is the most useful." I presume such people have never been to the beach, as they would clearly drown, being unable to tell the difference between land and water since there is no infinitely precise line between them.
I look at elaborate, show-stopping design sites, and I wonder, who is this performance supposed to be for?
For the idiot suits who pay for them, and the greedy consultants who create them.
What I would like is to use such a thing to read books that I own, not DRM-krippled rental boks that Amazon foists on Kindle users.
Until then, no thanks. I've got books on my shelves that are over 100 years old, and I can still read them, although the publisher, printer and distributer have all long-since gone out of business. I've got books I bought 20 years ago, and I can still read them.
There's no commitment, and no possibility of commitment, from Amazon or any of the other DRM-krippled e-bok vendors that I will be able to read their rental boks tomorrow, much less twenty years from now.
It is almost assured that they would have happened later, though, since they didn't beat the military research to begin with.
Why do you say that? We're talking about counter-factuals. In MY imaginary dream world where people are on average somewhat smarter or perhaps just more humane than they actually were, historically, rather than spending billions and billions of dollars on the deadweight loss industry to develop these technologies, they were developed instead by massive expenditure of tax dollars for the exploration of space.
And in this imaginary alternate universe all of these technologies and more besides were developed sooner because some of the people who were responsible for it didn't die senselessly in bombings or on battlefields, and some of the labs and factories where it was worked on weren't blown to bits.
The benefits of massive public expenditure on new technology should be sufficiently obvious that it does not need to be coupled to deadweight loss spending of the kind the military specializes in.
Dresden, London, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, Carthage, Ypres, Crimea, Nanking, the Crusades... Really, it's the gift that keeps on giving!
Killed millions and millions of people?
Whether or not you agree with it, military research has led to an enormous number of scientific advances that were initially used by the military but later disseminated more broadly.
So did the space programme, with the notable advantage that it killed orders of magnitude fewer people.
So while military research is one particularly wasteful and stupid way to get these results, there is really no justification for promoting over the many other ways that are far less wasteful and stupid.
They want to be able to say "Fire" and have the missile in the air within minutes and at target within hours; with the added benefit of not putting any American lives in harms way.
Sorry, you've lost me there. How does threatening or actually blowing people up NOT put Americans in harm's way? Your statement makes no sense.
The inevitable retaliation will kill Americans. The inevitable retaliation is inevitable.
So saying blowing people up in far off lands won't put Americans in harm's way is trivially false, like saying humans didn't evolve from apes or the equivalent: the product of a pre-scientific, anti-empirical understanding of how the world actually is.
I am wondering whether this story is some kind of practical joke.
Given that most of what passes for mathematical logic is pretty much a joke, and mathematical logicians are for the most part far more logician than mathematician, and therefore some of the stupidest people in math, that's my read as well.
Pretty much every logician I've ever dealt with has thought that Leibniz's Law is not only reasonable, but true, whereas we've known it to be emprically false for nearly a century. But logics that violate it are considered cutting edge, and are mostly toy models.
On the other hand, logicians are also amongst the most obtuse and incoherent people on the planet, so selling a line of bullshit to the morons on Wall Street would be just their thing, and they're so dumb they probably aren't even aware that the whole thing is just a scam.
If I look around me, a lot of folks seem pretty happy with what they have, opting instead to improve their lives in non-financial ways when the opportunity arises.
If they are opting to "improve their lives" they aren't "pretty happy with what they have", as if they were it wouldn't need improvement.
I know you mean their material goods, but this is the whole point: there is plenty of empirical data, including direct studies on the subject that are only a google away, that show that "feeling better off than the people around you" is a fundamental component of human happiness. We are all tuned up as a species to be in perpetual pursuit of "more", and there's not a damned thing we can do about it.
The choice we do have, however, is what kind of "more" we're after. Idiots are all about "more money" as if that was the only kind of "more" there was. People from more civilized cultures pursue more musical or artistic skill, more time with their kids or friends, more sex, more fishing, more whatever... and importantly, more civilized cultures give those people some feeling of recognition that helps satisfy the deep inner need we all have to be superior to those around us.
The only thing that separates idiots from civilized people is that civilized people recognize that there are as many standards against which to measure "superior" as their are poeple, whereas idiots recognize only money (and it's evil twin, power) as being legitimate measures of superiority.
The casino doesn't produce any "real" wealth - it just distributes it.
Sorry, stopped reading at that point, as your ignorance of economics is obviously profound. How wealth is distributed has an enormous effect on a society's ability to produce new wealth. Many dirt-poor native tribes in Canada, for example, are "wealthy" on paper, but the ordinary people have no access to that money, only the band council does. A financial system that allowed ordinary people access to that money would make everyone but a few assholes at the top enormously richer.
Likewise, systems that attempt to "spread the wealth" uniformly across all individuals, the way Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska did with oil revenues, are also vastly less productive than systems with moderate gate-keepers that try to ensure capital is deployed in somewhat productive ways.
Learn a tiny bit of economic theory and--far more importantly--economic history before making up lame analogies, please.
On the other hand, throwing up your hands and saying "nothing can be done" assures that the maximum number of people are killed and maimed.
Yeah, it's curious how many innumerate, anti-empirical wankers are on here proclaiming "nothing can be done". I think it's part and parcel of the right-wing bible-believing crackpottery so common in the US. I'm not quite sure what the causality is, although I think innumeracy is probably the biggest part of it: at some point beyond three people dead and a few buildings down they declare that "everyone" will die and "everything" will be destroyed. It's a very difficult mindset for a scientist, steeped in quantitative reasoning, to grasp.
This story is not the least bit sensationalist, and it is something worth reminding people of. I grew up on the West Coast, and earthquake preparedness was something everyone was familiar with. But talking to people who didn't grow up there reminds me that they need to learn about it. Given the large influx of Easterners into Vancouver and environs in recent years getting people to pay attention to the reality they are quite likely to face is important.
Now if only Vancouver were spending $6 billion on emergency preparedness rather than having pissed it away on that athletics festival a few months ago...
It specifically prohibits profiling based on skin color, and if the people claims the police officer did arrest them because of their skin color (and they can prove it), they hit pay dirt.
Well, that's reassuring, because I'm sure the organs of the state would never do anything that they are specifically prohibited by law from doing, like running a secret prison system and torturing confessions out of people all over the world.
And of course proving intent is so simple! I'm sure there will be no difficulty with that, because a police officer would never lie about their intent, nor take any action to cover up their racist reasons for stopping someone.
Really, I feel safter already.
Do you think that non-violence works in China? North Korea? Russia? Any Islamic country (with the exception of Turkey)?
Has it been tried in any of those places, particularly with the intelligent and systematic guidance of any kind similar to what Gandhi used in India? The Indian opposition to British rule wasn't just non-violent, it was also carefully targeted, using well-trained people and intelligent strategies.
And how's that violence working out in Ireland? Or Spain, where the Basque have been killing each other for half a century... they must have independence by now, since violence works so well, right? Or Palestine, where a couple of generations of violence on both sides has already solved all their problems. Or Russia, as you mention, where Chetchyn violence seems to be doing a really good job... Oh, and then there's the libertarian paradise of Somalia, where violence has resulted in a better life for all, and Sri Lanka where the Tigers of Tamil Elam used violence successfully win an independent state for themselves. Likewise, invading Iraq and Afghanistan both have worked out so well, too.
So yeah, I can see how with a record like that everyone would reach for violence as the best tool to bring about political change. It has worked so well so many times that I really can't see anyone trying anything else. I mean, it just makes sense!
The truth is that arguments against non-violence depend on fantasies about counter-factual outcomes. If you'd been arguing with Gandhi in 1920 you would have said the same things to him--pointed out the British guilt in the Tasmanian genocide, and the atrocities in India in the Mutiny, and said non-violence would never work against them. You aren't actually deploying any empirical data, which is all on the side of non-violence. You're appealing to what seems plausible, and as the history of science teaches: what seems most plausible is rarely correct.