Sure there are many who think he should have been punished, but I think resigning in shame and having that as his legacy is probably one of the greatest punishment for a man with the drive to become president.
Shame? What shame? He's still defended as a hero by neocons. His people are still to be found in power in D.C.
The fact the Nixon didn't go to jail is what let Reagan and Bush II get away with their subversions of the Constitution.
It's interesting that the attempt against Regan that injured Brady gets so much notoriety but the two attempts against Ford are never talked about.
I know/. skews young, so it's possible you may not remember Reagan getting shot.
That's the thing: unlike Ford, he actually got shot, as did Brady and a Secret Service guy, Tim McCarthy. Missed killing Reagan by about an inch. We had to wait in suspense to see if he would survive or not. So, yeah, that stands out in people's memories. (I was 11 when it happened.)
I have a Timex clip watch (sort of like this) that is handy for travel (especially if I'm some where my cell phone doesn't work), and for timing when I'm running.
Pretty much never wear a wrist watch anymore, just clip this on my belt loop sometimes, or for fancy dress a pocketwatch.
but alcohol is the waste product of micro organisms as they ferment (wheat, barley, fruit, etc). There wouldn't be anything in your body to ferment and hence, no reaction.
Actually, microbes in your gut produce a small amount of ethanol each day. For some people it's even enough to cause a significant blood alcohol level.
The two, of course, are related to rise in population and cutting milk consumption will not prevent crime.
Actually, Alexander Schauss's research on the diets of juvenile criminals found that delinquents drank excessive amounts of milk, crowding frutis and vegetables out of the diet; and substituting orange juice or water resulted in a decrease in antisocial behavior. (Unfortunately I don't have a link; it's work from the 1980s, mentioned in passing in one of my dead trees books: "The Healing Arts", Kaptchuk and Croucher.)
Why is curing sickness so important, but the idea of curing sadness gets such scorn?
Sickness is by defintion a dysfunction. Sadness is often an appropriate reponse to circumstances - like pain, it tells us that something is wrong. The ability to experience pain is essential to our physical health; the ability to experience sadness is essential to our mental health.
Of course, sometimes pain or sadness can be overwhelming, or there's nothing to be done about their causes at the moment. If I break my leg, morphine for the pain, please. And if I've just been dumped by a girlfriend, a good stiff drink or three for the sadness, please. But if I try to block the pain and walk on the leg, or block the sadness and don't learn from whatever didn't work with the girl, that's not going to be healthy.
I wonder if the lesson of this study, that happy-thinking people are less likely to get sick, is that if you're in a situation where happy-thinking is easy, you're experiencing less stress, therefore have better immune functioning; whereas if you're tired, hungry, and broke - and therefore less likely to find yourself thinking happy thoughts - you're more likely to get sick.
My point was that the GGP was incorrect, physics was a major branch of science...Whether the public had the slightest concept of this is irrelevant.
I belive the poster's point was exactly that the public, the readers of pulp SF fiction, did not have the concept that physics was a major branch of science, therefore "so much of the wizz-bang new inventions are through the modern miracle of cutting edge chemistry."
When discussing science in fiction, it is very relevant what concepts of science the readers may hold.
So Einstein was just working on minor science? (1905 was his big year)
In popular thought, Einstein was a mathematician, really smart but not doing anything relevant to real life. Physics and physicists didn't much enter the public consciousness as The Big Science until WWII - radar, nukes, et cetera.
The death of 50 and 100 million people is "nothing"?
Please, for your safety and the safety of others, seek mental health
care immediately. You have clearly lost touch with consensual reality. Best of luck to you, I hope you can find effective treatment.
little primitive nano -organisms (viruses, bacteria, single cell organisms) (even artificially created ones) are not as grave dangers as he paints precisely because they are primitive.
Complex lifeforms such dominated all primitive lifeforms over the course of millions years, due to their inherent capability to adapt better to more varied environment and conditions
What are you talking about? Bacteria are found in more varied environment and conditions than any other form of life. They've been here for three and a half billion years. About 10% of your own body weight is bacteria. One good-sized rock hitting the Earth could wipe out Homo sapiens and most other "higher" animals, but anything short of the death of the Sun is not going to eliminate bacteria (and maybe not even that, since some live thousands of feet deep in the rock, living off geothermal heat).
As Stephen G. Gould puts it, "On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are--and always have been--the dominant forms of life on Earth."
that next step is more advanced and more complex entities (AI,trans-humans or whatever) capable of far surpassing humans in the ability to advance technology
And also capable of far more advanced and dangerous fuck-ups.
(P.S. Please learn proper orthography. Spaces come after, not before, commas. Thank you.)
Stop trying to portray "nanobots" as bogeymen when pathogens already exist with precisely the same FUD-inducing attributes like "self-replication" and "evolvability".
Pathogens such as the avian flu or ebola virus are worrisome because of their "self-replication" and "evolvability". Certainly creating "nanobots" with these characterists should give us pause.
These synthetic genomes will be innocuous for the same reason that bacteriophage are harmless to humans
I believe that the author's point is that we do not have experience with synthetic genomes, so predictions about how they will or won't be innocuous are highly speculative.
But unless you get through the short run and the medium run, the long run best interest is a non-factor.
If you don't understand your the long-run best interest, your short-run and medium-run are liable to be running in the wrong direction.
Also, to put animals before humans is not compassionate. In fact, it's the opposite.
No one has suggested putting animals before humans, granting non-human animals greater ethical consideration than Homo sapiens. I know that's a favorite straw man for people opposed to extending ethical consideration to our evolutionary cousins, but it's just not accurate.
Yeah, if only [the Buddha] posted on Slashdot he'd be better able to contribute to the discussion.
Some topics are a little too big to fit into a/. thread. The origin and nature of human suffering is probably one of them. Fortuantely we can fit pointers to books and other media into/. threads. If I thought you were interested, I'd post some titles, but it's obvious that the best I can hope for is to be a single raindrop wearing away at the rock.
We've only been listening for 100 years, but where are they? Why haven't we been found? Why haven't we found them?
Well, we've actually only been listening on and off since 1960. But I think we haven't heard anything because we're still primitive enough to think that broadcast radio is a decent means of communication.
I know it's a sci-fi cliche that aliens can pick up our TV and radio broadcast, but it's not true. The signals are just too weak. The only things we've sent out powerful enough to reach other stars at levels detectable by our current tech, are the Arecibo message (really of a publicity stunt than anything else) and two or three similar transmissions, and high-powered radar beams (which don't carry information, and from what I understand would probably look something like the "Wow!" signal to ET).
We did it with a free society and a decent respect for life.
But we're not talking about the "free society and a decent respect for life race". We're talking about the "space race".
Indeed, it is argued by some that the "space race", as far as it had a tendancy to focus on planting flags rather than useful exploration and science, was a distraction from the "free society and a decent respect for life race".
And you have to admit, our stuff worked better
Depends on how one defines "better". Russian tech has always gone for the "keep it simple and make it tough" approach (witness the Kalashnikov rifle), which is what kept Mir up and running all those years. It's not pretty but it works.
Actually, there are members fo the 'Society of Friends' [aka Quakers] who are Athiests, so it could be disputed if they could be considered a Christian group or not anymore
Only if you assume that the intersection of "Christian" and "Atheist" is the null set. It raises the question as to what Christianity is - a set of beliefs about the supernatural, or a set of ethical practices?
If a "Christian" is a "follower of Jesus Christ", and a person were to attempt to sort through the retconned[*] and mythologized BS and figure out the actual teachings of the historical Jeshua ben Joseph, and filter out the cultural biases and analogies that he would have used, all the supernaturalist stuff, our searcher would have a pretty good set of teachings to follow: love your neighbor, forgive people, stuff like that.
([*]Retcon, retroactive continuity, changing the story and then saying "it's always been this way". Bunch of guys in the desert, once a conquering people, now occupied by the Romans. Looking for a Messiah to come kick Roman ass. This fellow Jeshua, of the line of King David, comes along, starts making trouble. Lots of trouble, for the Romans and their quislings. His followers figure he's gotta be the guy, he's the Messiah! Jeshua gets tortured to death. Didn't kick Roman ass and free the Jews. Therefore, rather than saying "oops, guess he wasn't the Messiah," giving up their investment, they decide to change the concept of Messiah. "Messiah? No, no, the Messiah's job wasn't supposed to be to save us from the Romans. No, he was going to, uh, save us from...er...sin. Yeah. That's it. That's what we've always been looking for, someone to balance the metaphysical books, not someone to end the brutal oppression of Rome." Greatest retcon in history.)
Ethical value is a small part of that. People value things ethically, emotionally, practically, and in many other ways.
Yes, but when making an ethical decision, one is making it based on ethical value.
Of course, for many people ethical value is immediate emotional value, there's no critical thought put into ethical decisions. For many others ethical value is the misguided "self" interest of the monkey mind, the only application of critical though being "How will this get me closer to what I think I want?" The resulting decisions tend to not be very good.
You can try to convince people that acting in their own best interest is unethical if you want. The rational choice for an individual is to choose an ethical code where that tends not to be the case.
In the long run, compassion is in our best interest. I'll just refer you to the teachings of the Buddha on that one, he makes the argument better than I could.
"Oh, woe is me, shall I be Vulcan or Human because it isn't possible for me to forge my own distinct identity, I must only belong to one race, err, species!"
You do realize that TOS is product of the 1960s, right? And that racial politics in the U.S. were a little different back then?
Anyway, characters need struggles to overcome. Spock indeed does go on to forge his own distinct identity. But it's not easy, and watching him try to figure it out is what makes the story.
What other reasons would the Vulcans have for re-uniting with the Romulans? The Vulcans may be the same species but in almost every other way they are night and day; their culture, their philosophies, their approaches to problems, everything except maybe general arrogance.
It's suggested that they share the same cultural roots, though this would have been a good subject for further exploration.
The new series is pretty good, but does it really make sense for it to be a remake?
If they'd tried to do a whole new show about humans being nearly wiped out by a race they'd created, with a small group of survivors looking for a new home planet, everyone would have said "pah, that's just Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers filed off". There might have even been legal trouble.
Doing it this way, they get to use any elements they like from the old show and no one calls it stealing.
The anti-christian community utilizes the same methods in trying to enforce where/when people can pray or trying to change decorations on a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus.
You are absolutely free to pray anywhere and anyway you like - on your own time. (In theory. If you're Muslim, well, sorry.)
You are free to put up decorations commemorating any deities, heroes, mythological beats, prophets, or demigods you choose - on your own property.
Requiring that people do their jobs in a professional manner (e.g., teachers and military officers should not be spending their work time trying to convert others to their beliefs), and requiring that governments neither promote nor restrict religion, is not "anti-Christian", it's pro-professionalism and pro-liberty.
(Oh, and let's be honest and admit that Xmas is a pagan celebration wrapped in a thin Xian veneer, ok?)
I sure wouldn't like to meet any of those "progressive" Christians..
It is entirely possible (though sadly rather rare in the contempory U.S.) for a person to be a Christian, and yet not believe that every word of the Bible is true. (Especially the Old Testiment.) There were, after all, Christians before the Council of Trent.
Indeed, it's possible to be a Christian, and believe that Jeshua ben Joseph was no more or less divine than you or I; I've met some Quakers who (as far as I understand their ideas) would fall into this category.
So quoting the Bible says nothing about the beliefs of someone who claims to be "Christian", unless you know more about the parameters of their practice.
(I was raised Catholic but haven't identified as "Christian" for about 20 years.)
Say there's going to be a huge tragedy and someone's family is going to die. If you could chose whether your family dies or someone other family dies, which would you choose?
There is a large difference between "If between my father and some stranger, I can only save one, so I save my father", and "To save my father, I'm going to kill a stranger." Everyone understands if I throw the single life ring to my dad instead of some random guy (though I'd try hard to save both); everyone also undertands that it would be monsterous if I killed the stranger to get the new heart that my dad (hypothetically) needed.
My father's life is more precious to me, sentimentally, than that of a stranger, so if all else is equal and no one's rights are being violated his claims have priority to me. But his life is not, ethically, more precious than that of a stranger; I cannot make a good argument that his life is more precious than J. Random Stranger, so I'm going to kill J. Random Stranger to harvest that heart. We all understand that to be a violation of J. Random Stranger's rights.
Similarly, we all understand that if a dog and a human are both drowning and we can only save one, we save the human. (Usually. If it's Hitler versus Lassie, I'm saving Lassie.) But this does not imply anything about the ethics of harming the dog for the human's potential benefit.
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Shame? What shame? He's still defended as a hero by neocons. His people are still to be found in power in D.C.
The fact the Nixon didn't go to jail is what let Reagan and Bush II get away with their subversions of the Constitution.
I know /. skews young, so it's possible you may not remember Reagan getting shot.
That's the thing: unlike Ford, he actually got shot, as did Brady and a Secret Service guy, Tim McCarthy. Missed killing Reagan by about an inch. We had to wait in suspense to see if he would survive or not. So, yeah, that stands out in people's memories. (I was 11 when it happened.)
I have a Timex clip watch (sort of like this) that is handy for travel (especially if I'm some where my cell phone doesn't work), and for timing when I'm running.
Pretty much never wear a wrist watch anymore, just clip this on my belt loop sometimes, or for fancy dress a pocketwatch.
Actually, microbes in your gut produce a small amount of ethanol each day. For some people it's even enough to cause a significant blood alcohol level.
Or is it that one of the best ways to be happy is...not to be stressed? Is "being happy" an action or a result?
Yes! Jeez, childhood flashback...
Actually, Alexander Schauss's research on the diets of juvenile criminals found that delinquents drank excessive amounts of milk, crowding frutis and vegetables out of the diet; and substituting orange juice or water resulted in a decrease in antisocial behavior. (Unfortunately I don't have a link; it's work from the 1980s, mentioned in passing in one of my dead trees books: "The Healing Arts", Kaptchuk and Croucher.)
Sickness is by defintion a dysfunction. Sadness is often an appropriate reponse to circumstances - like pain, it tells us that something is wrong. The ability to experience pain is essential to our physical health; the ability to experience sadness is essential to our mental health.
Of course, sometimes pain or sadness can be overwhelming, or there's nothing to be done about their causes at the moment. If I break my leg, morphine for the pain, please. And if I've just been dumped by a girlfriend, a good stiff drink or three for the sadness, please. But if I try to block the pain and walk on the leg, or block the sadness and don't learn from whatever didn't work with the girl, that's not going to be healthy.
I wonder if the lesson of this study, that happy-thinking people are less likely to get sick, is that if you're in a situation where happy-thinking is easy, you're experiencing less stress, therefore have better immune functioning; whereas if you're tired, hungry, and broke - and therefore less likely to find yourself thinking happy thoughts - you're more likely to get sick.
I belive the poster's point was exactly that the public, the readers of pulp SF fiction, did not have the concept that physics was a major branch of science, therefore "so much of the wizz-bang new inventions are through the modern miracle of cutting edge chemistry."
When discussing science in fiction, it is very relevant what concepts of science the readers may hold.
In popular thought, Einstein was a mathematician, really smart but not doing anything relevant to real life. Physics and physicists didn't much enter the public consciousness as The Big Science until WWII - radar, nukes, et cetera.
The death of 50 and 100 million people is "nothing"?
Please, for your safety and the safety of others, seek mental health care immediately. You have clearly lost touch with consensual reality. Best of luck to you, I hope you can find effective treatment.
They are enough of a threat to wipe out between 50 and 100 million people, 2.5 - 5% of the human population, in one year. That is quite a sufficient danger that we ought to have some concern about "primitive" organisms.
What are you talking about? Bacteria are found in more varied environment and conditions than any other form of life. They've been here for three and a half billion years. About 10% of your own body weight is bacteria. One good-sized rock hitting the Earth could wipe out Homo sapiens and most other "higher" animals, but anything short of the death of the Sun is not going to eliminate bacteria (and maybe not even that, since some live thousands of feet deep in the rock, living off geothermal heat).
As Stephen G. Gould puts it, "On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are--and always have been--the dominant forms of life on Earth."
And also capable of far more advanced and dangerous fuck-ups.
(P.S. Please learn proper orthography. Spaces come after, not before, commas. Thank you.)
Pathogens such as the avian flu or ebola virus are worrisome because of their "self-replication" and "evolvability". Certainly creating "nanobots" with these characterists should give us pause.
I believe that the author's point is that we do not have experience with synthetic genomes, so predictions about how they will or won't be innocuous are highly speculative.
Better yet, buy one.
If you don't understand your the long-run best interest, your short-run and medium-run are liable to be running in the wrong direction.
No one has suggested putting animals before humans, granting non-human animals greater ethical consideration than Homo sapiens. I know that's a favorite straw man for people opposed to extending ethical consideration to our evolutionary cousins, but it's just not accurate.
Some topics are a little too big to fit into a /. thread. The origin and nature of human suffering is probably one of them. Fortuantely we can fit pointers to books and other media into /. threads. If I thought you were interested, I'd post some titles, but it's obvious that the best I can hope for is to be a single raindrop wearing away at the rock.
Well, we've actually only been listening on and off since 1960. But I think we haven't heard anything because we're still primitive enough to think that broadcast radio is a decent means of communication.
I know it's a sci-fi cliche that aliens can pick up our TV and radio broadcast, but it's not true. The signals are just too weak. The only things we've sent out powerful enough to reach other stars at levels detectable by our current tech, are the Arecibo message (really of a publicity stunt than anything else) and two or three similar transmissions, and high-powered radar beams (which don't carry information, and from what I understand would probably look something like the "Wow!" signal to ET).
But we're not talking about the "free society and a decent respect for life race". We're talking about the "space race".
Indeed, it is argued by some that the "space race", as far as it had a tendancy to focus on planting flags rather than useful exploration and science, was a distraction from the "free society and a decent respect for life race".
Depends on how one defines "better". Russian tech has always gone for the "keep it simple and make it tough" approach (witness the Kalashnikov rifle), which is what kept Mir up and running all those years. It's not pretty but it works.
Only if you assume that the intersection of "Christian" and "Atheist" is the null set. It raises the question as to what Christianity is - a set of beliefs about the supernatural, or a set of ethical practices?
If a "Christian" is a "follower of Jesus Christ", and a person were to attempt to sort through the retconned[*] and mythologized BS and figure out the actual teachings of the historical Jeshua ben Joseph, and filter out the cultural biases and analogies that he would have used, all the supernaturalist stuff, our searcher would have a pretty good set of teachings to follow: love your neighbor, forgive people, stuff like that.
([*]Retcon, retroactive continuity, changing the story and then saying "it's always been this way". Bunch of guys in the desert, once a conquering people, now occupied by the Romans. Looking for a Messiah to come kick Roman ass. This fellow Jeshua, of the line of King David, comes along, starts making trouble. Lots of trouble, for the Romans and their quislings. His followers figure he's gotta be the guy, he's the Messiah! Jeshua gets tortured to death. Didn't kick Roman ass and free the Jews. Therefore, rather than saying "oops, guess he wasn't the Messiah," giving up their investment, they decide to change the concept of Messiah. "Messiah? No, no, the Messiah's job wasn't supposed to be to save us from the Romans. No, he was going to, uh, save us from...er...sin. Yeah. That's it. That's what we've always been looking for, someone to balance the metaphysical books, not someone to end the brutal oppression of Rome." Greatest retcon in history.)
Yes, but when making an ethical decision, one is making it based on ethical value.
Of course, for many people ethical value is immediate emotional value, there's no critical thought put into ethical decisions. For many others ethical value is the misguided "self" interest of the monkey mind, the only application of critical though being "How will this get me closer to what I think I want?" The resulting decisions tend to not be very good.
In the long run, compassion is in our best interest. I'll just refer you to the teachings of the Buddha on that one, he makes the argument better than I could.
You do realize that TOS is product of the 1960s, right? And that racial politics in the U.S. were a little different back then?
Anyway, characters need struggles to overcome. Spock indeed does go on to forge his own distinct identity. But it's not easy, and watching him try to figure it out is what makes the story.
It's suggested that they share the same cultural roots, though this would have been a good subject for further exploration.
If they'd tried to do a whole new show about humans being nearly wiped out by a race they'd created, with a small group of survivors looking for a new home planet, everyone would have said "pah, that's just Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers filed off". There might have even been legal trouble.
Doing it this way, they get to use any elements they like from the old show and no one calls it stealing.
And I was pointing out the dangers of confusing sentimental value of X versus Y, with the ethical value of X versus Y.
You are absolutely free to pray anywhere and anyway you like - on your own time. (In theory. If you're Muslim, well, sorry.)
You are free to put up decorations commemorating any deities, heroes, mythological beats, prophets, or demigods you choose - on your own property.
Requiring that people do their jobs in a professional manner (e.g., teachers and military officers should not be spending their work time trying to convert others to their beliefs), and requiring that governments neither promote nor restrict religion, is not "anti-Christian", it's pro-professionalism and pro-liberty.
(Oh, and let's be honest and admit that Xmas is a pagan celebration wrapped in a thin Xian veneer, ok?)
It is entirely possible (though sadly rather rare in the contempory U.S.) for a person to be a Christian, and yet not believe that every word of the Bible is true. (Especially the Old Testiment.) There were, after all, Christians before the Council of Trent.
Indeed, it's possible to be a Christian, and believe that Jeshua ben Joseph was no more or less divine than you or I; I've met some Quakers who (as far as I understand their ideas) would fall into this category.
So quoting the Bible says nothing about the beliefs of someone who claims to be "Christian", unless you know more about the parameters of their practice.
(I was raised Catholic but haven't identified as "Christian" for about 20 years.)
There is a large difference between "If between my father and some stranger, I can only save one, so I save my father", and "To save my father, I'm going to kill a stranger." Everyone understands if I throw the single life ring to my dad instead of some random guy (though I'd try hard to save both); everyone also undertands that it would be monsterous if I killed the stranger to get the new heart that my dad (hypothetically) needed.
My father's life is more precious to me, sentimentally, than that of a stranger, so if all else is equal and no one's rights are being violated his claims have priority to me. But his life is not, ethically, more precious than that of a stranger; I cannot make a good argument that his life is more precious than J. Random Stranger, so I'm going to kill J. Random Stranger to harvest that heart. We all understand that to be a violation of J. Random Stranger's rights.
Similarly, we all understand that if a dog and a human are both drowning and we can only save one, we save the human. (Usually. If it's Hitler versus Lassie, I'm saving Lassie.) But this does not imply anything about the ethics of harming the dog for the human's potential benefit.