The NCCAM is exactly real science. Both you and the "QuackWatch" author seem to have forgotten that the basis of science is research, experimentation, and observation - as opposed to disregarding observations which don't agree with your model and demanding that any research with the potential to undercut your own biases be de-funded.
The most you will ever get from acupuncture, reflexology, chiropracty or any other bullshit is the placebo effect. If anyone claims that any of these things are real, as them why they haven't won the million dollar challenge.
The JREF challenge is for demonstrations of "paranormal, supernatural, or occult" phenomena. There's nothing in the least supernatural or paranormal about acupressure or Chinese medicine!
But don't believe me just on my word. Do your own research. Use google. Go to the library
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not stupid to suspect that research that showed acupuncture to work was incorrect.
There's nothing extraordinary about claiming that a system of healthcare used continuously for several thousand years may actually have some benefit. There's nothing extraordinary about claiming that stimulating one part of the body can have a distal effect - anyone who's found the "skritchy spot" on a dog that makes the leg spasm has seen it.
Indeed it is an extraordinary claim that the millions of people who feel that they have benefitted from CM over the past 4,000 years - as well as those researchers finding a benefit in controlled studies - were all fooled, that Chinese Medicine is a massive conspiracy.
It's not stupid to suspect that research that showed acupuncture not to work was incorrect. Many of these studies did not involve anything like the acupuncture that is practiced clinically - for example they didn't have the procedure performed by trained acupuncturists, or don't use CM methods of assessment/diagnosis, or use acupressure as a sham for acupuncure when both will stimulate a tsubo, or don't allow for anything like a normal course of treatment.
Knocking down strawman versions of CM may be fun for psuedo-skeptics and defenders of current medical orthodoxy, but it ain't science.
if it is rooted in "reflexology" and "traditional chinese medicine" then I'd have to bet that there will never be any truly scientific studies that prove this product...
Reflexology has nothing to do with Chinese Medicine.
And remember folks, think critically. Anything that advertises itself using "accupressure" or "hidden pathways" is bunk.
"Thinking critically" also means being skeptical of the claims of current medical orthodoxy - looking at the actual evidence rather than being swayed by name-calling.
The NCCAOM has started working more closely with the NCCAM, and I hope to see more and better research forthcoming. Meanwhile, acupressure is an extremely safe treatment that seems to clearly have, at a bare minimum, positive non-specific effects in relieving stress and chronic muscle tension.
I commented on the relationship between the physiological/reductionist and the Chinese Medicine models here a few days ago, I'll take the liberty of briefly repeating myself:
There are several physiological theories about the meridians and points of acupressure, three that I know about involve nervous reflexes, the electrical properties of fascia, and a supposed network of less-differentiated cells throughout the body. It's possible that different points work by different mechanisms. Certainly the "placebo effect" plays a role - as it does in any treatment. Google for placebo surgery, it's fascinating.
Many pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for how acupuncture, Asian bodywork therapy, and Chinese herbs, create their effects. They see it work every day, that's enough for them. (The same can be said of many Western physicians, a surprising number of whom have little interest or knowledge of biology.) But there is certainly a subset of the community that is interested in understanding from both points of view.
IMHO it's unfortunate that many practitioners of CM have latched on to the idea that qi, a fundamental ascept of the CM model, is some sort of electromagnetic-like energy field. This is a misinterpretation, attempting to fit Taoist concepts of the Universe into a Aristotelian grid. The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one; the Vital Substances, the Zang-Fu organs, and the meridians are best understood by what they do, not by chopping people up looking for them.
I recommend Ted Kaptchuk's book The Web That Has No Weaver to those interested in learning more about Chinese Medicine.
However a recent study showed the SAME results are obtained when one does acupuncture 'by the book' and when one just wings it (same needles, but applied nearly at random).
Interesting, but other studies disagree and have found quite specific response using the traditional points.
The points are also quite distinct when self-acupressure is applied.
Of course, it's entirely possible that if you took a random guy off the steeet and told him "stick a needle here" you'd get no better results if he was righ on top of a point than if he was a little off. Proper stimulation of acupoints requires skill, and part of the ambiguity of studies of acupuncture (or any treament) is how much what goes on in the lab resembles what goes on in clinical practice. Studies that attempt to use acupuncture outside of the assessment/diagnostic framework of Chinese medicine, for example, are pretty useless (it's not as simple as "needle here for headache").
One suggestion was that the tiny pains of the needles cause the body to release more endorphins to deal with the pain. Another ascribes this effect to the placebo effect.
Certainly the placebo effect plays a role in any treatment - including modern Western drugs and surgery. (Goole "placebo surgery" sometime,it's fascinating.) But acupuncture has been consistently found to have a greater effect than placebo alone - and is also effective in animals, where it's difficult to attribute a placebo effect.
And the endorphin link is well known, it probably is another factor in the physiological action of acupuncture and moxabustion.
Even in asia, fery few people believe in chi these days. The entire chi meridian system has been explained through the nervous system.
There are several physiological theories about the meridians and points of acupressure. Nervous reflexes are one; there are others involving the electrical properties of fascia, and another involving a network of less-differentiated cells throughout the body. It's possible that different points work by different mechanisms. The explanation is far from complete.
Most pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for why acupuncture, Asian bodywork therapy, and Chinese herbs, are effective; any more than most musicians are deeply interested in the physics of sound, or the physiology of hearing.
As for "believing" in qi, qi is not something one has to "believe" in. Qi is something that is experienced. If you get up in the morning as say "I feel full of energy today!" - you just made an observation about qi.
"O genki desu ka?" - "How is your ki (qi)?"- is the Japanese version of "How are you?" (Specifically, "genki" is what the Chinese call "yuan" or "original" qi, a specific type.) It doesn't require a voltmeter or any objective observation to answer.:-)
It's unfortunate that many practitioners of CM and of Asian martial arts have latched on to the idea that qi is some sort of electromagnetic like energy field. This is a misinterpretation, attempting to fit Taoist concepts of the Universe into a Platonic/Aristotelian grid.
Like other aspects of Chinese Medicine's model of the human being, qi is best understood not by what it is but by what is does. The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one.
I recommend Tad Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver to those interested in learning more.
Bruce Lee explained his one-inch punch's power as comming from his body's fluid motion and rapid muscle expansion rather than "chi".
The two are no more incompatible than the description of a certain sound in terms of a time-varying frequency spectrum, versus "that's an A chord played on a steel-string guitar". The former description may tell you why, when you play it through your amp, it makes your speaker buzz because of some resonance; the latter tells you how it works in the music. They're both correct.
Forest C. Adcock 3rd degree Tae Kwon Do 4th degree Shinjukki-Jin Jitsu
(Tom Swiss, NCCAOM Diplomate in Asian Body Therapy; Sandan, World Seido Karate Organization)
...with floating point arithmetic. A "double" can represent a number between 0 and 1 with 15 decimals of precision, way more precise than any biological phenomenon.
A double is no more or less precise than any other 64 bit quantity. You can still only represent 2^64 states, whether you label them as 0,1,2... or.000000000001,.000000000002,.000000000003..., or whatever.
I'm willing to bet that any given neuron in your brain will require more than 64 bits to represent its state in any reasonably accurate fashion.
"Precision" is an attribute of measurement or of modeling. Biological phenomena, like any actual physical phenomena, are a completely "precise" model of themselves.
Your "designed" coment implies you do not believe in god. Thus where exactly do ethics come from? I would argue they are based solely upon a social contract. I.E. I give up the "right" to kill you with the expectation that you give up the "right" to kill me.
Contractarianism makes for a poor ethical system, since it cannot cover children or the mentally infirm (except as indirect recipients of the sentiments of contractors). And it means that numbers determine morality - if enough of us agree that persons of a certain skin tone, or gender, or religious belief, aren't worth, we just agree to a contract that excludes them. Might makes right.
Supernaturalism, of course, is even worse, since the existance of god(s) is doubtful, and their desires ever moreso.
Non-supernatural ethical theories include utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and the rights view. Rationalism - "act as if your will were universal law" tells me how I should behave in light of my own values, but doesn't inform what those values should be. Its problems are described well in this Wikipedia article.
For an introduction to the rights view, especially as applied to animals, I suggest the work of TomRegan (two different links there).
For utilitarian perspective on animal issues, PeterSinger is the go-to guy (two different links there).
Only those social contracts which are beneficial to both parties tend to survive.
Racism, sexism, and other abuses of the weak by the powerful have survived quite well over the centuries, largely due to social contracts amoung power-holders that excluded everyone else.
Not to defend either, but you do realize that many laws are cultural and vary from place to place. There are cultures where polygamy and polyandry are an accepted norm. Is their lifestyle immoral? Only BY YOUR standards, not theirs.
First, I have no argument with honest polygamy or polyandry. I identify as polyamorous. Infidelity is different - it means lying or breaking an agreement. If I have two lovers and tell them they are the only two, and then take a third without telling them, that's unethical.
Second, law (institutionalized social norms) is orthogonal to ethics. So are mores (non-institutionalized social norms). Yes, I will state that regardless of law or mores of any given culture, rape is unethical.
What about medical experiments? If 1000 dogs needed to die in order to learn some new technique to save 1000 people, is it worth it?
The lives of those dogs are not ours to take.
If one person needed to to die in order to learn some new technique to save 1000 people, is it worth it? I'm sure that we could learn a lot by vivisecting a few children.
There's a considerable difference between the usually minor losses in most state changes - and the six-fold loss in the manufacture of ethanol.
Except there isn't such a loss. Ethanol generates more energy than it takes to produce. TFA is FUD from an oil industry shill. (Which is not to say that corn-derivved ethanol is a great solution; there are better crops and better growing methods.)
Patzek is an oil company shill, and this is just more FUD against renewable energy.
But, it is true that corn ethanol using modern energy-intensive agricultural methods is still a pretty poor path. Using waste biomass, or using less resource-intensive crops (like industrial hemp) is much better; and we need sustainable agriculture whether we're growing just food or fuel too.
Lions and Tigers eat meat, and thus they kill herbivores. This means they cause pain to their prey as well. Are their acts then immoral?
It is not approriate to label the actions of non-human animals as "immoral", nor to take those actions as an ethical guide.
When a dog takes a bone from a smaller dog, is it immoral? Is it theft? Would you take that dog's action as justification for a man to steal money from a smaller, weaker man?
WE are omnivores. We are designed to eat both plants and animals. Thus IMO it is not wrong to eat meat.
"Designed"? By whom?
The fact that we are biologically to do something doesn't mean it's ethically correct to do so. I'm biologically able - encouraged by basic drives, even - to have sex with every reasonably attractive woman I see. That doesn't make rape or infidelity ethical behavior.
Yes, I know the analogy isn't exact, but it's correct in essence: You want the benefit of something that isn't yours without paying for it, until you decide that it's worth paying for..
No, it's not a correct analogy, because information is not property.
If you were honest, you'd not have infringed on someone else's copyright in the first place.
Honesty is an ethical concept, copyright a legal one. I hope we all understand that ethics and law have little to do with each other.
In 10 years, that hard drive will probably be dead no matter what you do. But a properly stored tape backup would still be around.
Few people need data retention for 10 years. For most of us, if we can reconstruct the current state of our drive after a crash, and restore files we recently accidently deleted or altered, we've got all we need.
Would you be willing to pay far more for the adless, condensed newspaper?
In return for paying less for everything else? Maybe. Especially if I get to only buy the newspaper sections I want.
You don't get that newspaper subsidy for free, you know. It's paid for with a few extra pennies from that Coke, a few bucks from that pair of Levis, and so on.
...Did you just blame political correctness on the Republicans?
No, I blame the 90% of the fuss about PC that has no basis on the Republicans.
Re:At least Jim Anchower is still there
on
The Onion in 2056
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Globalisation? Would you define that as the specialism of industries/expertise in certain countries resulting in necessary trade?
No, I wouldn't. I'd define it as the expansion, partly by means of political duress, of industrial corporate capitalism. It is not a free-trade phenomenon - no activity involving multi-national corporations can be, since the issuance of corporate charaters is a state intervention into the marketplace.
What would you rather they do? Live a subsistence lifestyle as a farmer and die at 35, or generate a better future through economic growth?
Economic growth would be great. But economic growth doesn't mean building a factory owned by a foreign corporation - it mean building your own locally-owned businesses.
Non-free Trade As long as there is trade it will be free or non-free. Non free trade includes countries imposing tariffs, corruption of import/export laws.
Free markets / free trade require that buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with roughly equal power. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism, that is not the case with the current move towards "globalization", where multi-national corporations (chartered by the governments of those former colonial powers) exploit the people and resources of "third world" nations.
In that sense, I suppose you're correct that it's nothing new - just colonialism in new bottles.
If, for example, my site does not render correctly in your browser because of some wiz-bang feature I have, well, I'm not going to really care and I'm going to tell you to go download IE.
Sorry to hear that you have content you value so little, that you're willing to shut out potential viewers.
Maybe if you focused on upgrading that content rather than "wiz-bang features", we'd all win - you'd have something you want everyone to see, and we'd all be able to see it.
People are not dying for a lack of pot. Therefore it has no comparison to the underground railroad.
Dying? No. Suffering? Yes, sometimes enormously; suffering from the inability to get a medicine that works well for them; suffering from the inability to follow their religious practices without risking prosecution.
Merely lighting up a fatty may not have parallels with the Underground Railroad, but operating "medical marijuana" clubs, or helping to shield fugitives fleeing procesution for drug possession, would.
I would say that those who broke prohibition were most certainly not doing society any favors
Then I would say you're...well, "a fool" is too strong. "Naive", perhaps. There's no difference between the state telling you what you can put into your body and into what states you can engage your nervous system, and telling you what gods you can worship, what books you can read, or what music you can play. Freedom is worth fighting for.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that recreational smoking of cannabis may be no more "vital to our way of life" that reading comic books. (Of course that ignores medical and religious uses, and who am I to decide what's vital to someone else's life?) But the right to choose to read comics - or to smoke weed - is vital, worth fighting for.
You forget the utmost important first step--petitioning ones governmetn for a redress of grievences. And that very important second step--attempting to change the government through peaceful means.
So when the government makes immoral and unconstitutional laws, I'm supposed to follow them until my congresscritter gets around to reading my mail? It's only ok to help fugitive slaves escape if you write your legislators first? Pardon me, but I must disagree.
Yes, I've written a letters to my congresscritters over the years, and have donated money to NORML and the ACLU, and my vote is certainly influenced by candidates stances on the War on (some) Drugs and other abuses of state power. But it's pissing in the wind.
And since you mentioned doing things that are illegal, let's not forget the first rule of civil disobedience, as taught by Ghandi and King--you NEED the other side to be seen to carry out the law onto you.
I never mentioned civil disobedience. I'm certainly not talking here about civil disobedience as a social movement as practiced by Ghandi and King. If the term "civil disobedience" applies at all, it is in the original sense as used by Thoreau:
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? WHy has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
...
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
But I'm not, a priori, limiting the options to civil disobedience; I'm willing to consider the use of justifiable defensive force against violent actions by agents of the state.
I hardly consider getting high even comparable to the things that you listed.
The choice to control one's own nervous system is as fundamental as the right to control one's own reproductive system, perhaps even more so.
The use of drugs as religious sacrements is well-established; religious freedom cases involving the use of peyote and cannabis have come before the courts. And many people have gotten more of a divine experience out of cannabis or other psychoactive drugs than out of Christianity.
Just because you want to get high doens't mean that it's not illegal.
Just because Christians in ancient Rome wanted to worship Jesus didn't mean that it wasn't illegal.
Just because black people in 1860 wanted to be free didn't mean that helping escaped slaves wasn't illegal.
Just because women before the 1960s wanted to control their own bodies didn't mean that contraception and abortion weren't illegal.
Anyone who attempts to live by any reasonable code of ethics is going to find themselves quite often rooting for, actively assisting, or even becoming, "criminals".
Why Mongolian? Maybe harkening back to Genghis Khan - if those great conquerors the Mongols are after you, you're righteously screwed.
Are Mongolians somehow more fucked up than someone from Baltimore?
Of course not, and I can crack jokes about Balti-morons, Harm City, the City that Bleeds, Mobtown...from big-haired hons downy ocean, to our nation-leading murder and heroin addiction rates, it's a gold mine of ridiculous material. (Which is not to say it can't be tragic at the same time.)
Don't confuse refusal to be PC with intolerance or prejudice. Consult the works of George Carlin and other great comedians for more information.
It is nominally 10/1 liberally biased.(That based on an unscientific poll my Dad did of the paper some years ago..)
How do you define "liberal bias"? I hear some people call "bias" when newpapers report such simple and obvious facts as that the invasion of Iraq has turrned into a Mongolian clusterfuck, or that there is a global scientific consensus that human action is impacting the climate.
Newspapers are as "liberal" as the corporations that own them. Much of the bias is better seen as "urban versus rural" - for example, fear of firearms versus the RKBA breaks down better along urban/rural lines than left/right. Acceptance for those of other races, religious, and sexual orientations is more vital when you pass a half-dozen different cultures on your way to work in the morning than when your nearest neighbor is
a ten-minute walk away.
And since these large papers are based in large cities, it should be no surprise that their bias tends to the urban.
Slashdot Mirror
The NCCAM is exactly real science. Both you and the "QuackWatch" author seem to have forgotten that the basis of science is research, experimentation, and observation - as opposed to disregarding observations which don't agree with your model and demanding that any research with the potential to undercut your own biases be de-funded.
The JREF challenge is for demonstrations of "paranormal, supernatural, or occult" phenomena. There's nothing in the least supernatural or paranormal about acupressure or Chinese medicine!
I've done my own research. I provived a link to PubMed citing many studies. Here is is again: PubMed search on shiatsu or acupressure. Some especially interesing studies involved measuring physiological data such as gastric myoelectrical activity, EEG indications of anesthesia, and norepinephrine levels to show definite effects of acupressure on the body.
There's nothing extraordinary about claiming that a system of healthcare used continuously for several thousand years may actually have some benefit. There's nothing extraordinary about claiming that stimulating one part of the body can have a distal effect - anyone who's found the "skritchy spot" on a dog that makes the leg spasm has seen it.
Indeed it is an extraordinary claim that the millions of people who feel that they have benefitted from CM over the past 4,000 years - as well as those researchers finding a benefit in controlled studies - were all fooled, that Chinese Medicine is a massive conspiracy.
It's not stupid to suspect that research that showed acupuncture not to work was incorrect. Many of these studies did not involve anything like the acupuncture that is practiced clinically - for example they didn't have the procedure performed by trained acupuncturists, or don't use CM methods of assessment/diagnosis, or use acupressure as a sham for acupuncure when both will stimulate a tsubo, or don't allow for anything like a normal course of treatment.
Knocking down strawman versions of CM may be fun for psuedo-skeptics and defenders of current medical orthodoxy, but it ain't science.
Reflexology has nothing to do with Chinese Medicine.
"Thinking critically" also means being skeptical of the claims of current medical orthodoxy - looking at the actual evidence rather than being swayed by name-calling.
I don't know anything about reflexology, or about this particular study. But I know more than a little bit about acupressure and Chinese Medicine. While the research is still scanty, there are good clinical studies showing acupressure to be effective.
The NCCAOM has started working more closely with the NCCAM, and I hope to see more and better research forthcoming. Meanwhile, acupressure is an extremely safe treatment that seems to clearly have, at a bare minimum, positive non-specific effects in relieving stress and chronic muscle tension.
I commented on the relationship between the physiological/reductionist and the Chinese Medicine models here a few days ago, I'll take the liberty of briefly repeating myself:
There are several physiological theories about the meridians and points of acupressure, three that I know about involve nervous reflexes, the electrical properties of fascia, and a supposed network of less-differentiated cells throughout the body. It's possible that different points work by different mechanisms. Certainly the "placebo effect" plays a role - as it does in any treatment. Google for placebo surgery, it's fascinating.
Many pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for how acupuncture, Asian bodywork therapy, and Chinese herbs, create their effects. They see it work every day, that's enough for them. (The same can be said of many Western physicians, a surprising number of whom have little interest or knowledge of biology.) But there is certainly a subset of the community that is interested in understanding from both points of view.
IMHO it's unfortunate that many practitioners of CM have latched on to the idea that qi, a fundamental ascept of the CM model, is some sort of electromagnetic-like energy field. This is a misinterpretation, attempting to fit Taoist concepts of the Universe into a Aristotelian grid. The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one; the Vital Substances, the Zang-Fu organs, and the meridians are best understood by what they do, not by chopping people up looking for them.
I recommend Ted Kaptchuk's book The Web That Has No Weaver to those interested in learning more about Chinese Medicine.
Interesting, but other studies disagree and have found quite specific response using the traditional points.
The points are also quite distinct when self-acupressure is applied.
Of course, it's entirely possible that if you took a random guy off the steeet and told him "stick a needle here" you'd get no better results if he was righ on top of a point than if he was a little off. Proper stimulation of acupoints requires skill, and part of the ambiguity of studies of acupuncture (or any treament) is how much what goes on in the lab resembles what goes on in clinical practice. Studies that attempt to use acupuncture outside of the assessment/diagnostic framework of Chinese medicine, for example, are pretty useless (it's not as simple as "needle here for headache").
Certainly the placebo effect plays a role in any treatment - including modern Western drugs and surgery. (Goole "placebo surgery" sometime,it's fascinating.) But acupuncture has been consistently found to have a greater effect than placebo alone - and is also effective in animals, where it's difficult to attribute a placebo effect.
And the endorphin link is well known, it probably is another factor in the physiological action of acupuncture and moxabustion.
There are several physiological theories about the meridians and points of acupressure. Nervous reflexes are one; there are others involving the electrical properties of fascia, and another involving a network of less-differentiated cells throughout the body. It's possible that different points work by different mechanisms. The explanation is far from complete.
Most pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for why acupuncture, Asian bodywork therapy, and Chinese herbs, are effective; any more than most musicians are deeply interested in the physics of sound, or the physiology of hearing.
As for "believing" in qi, qi is not something one has to "believe" in. Qi is something that is experienced. If you get up in the morning as say "I feel full of energy today!" - you just made an observation about qi.
"O genki desu ka?" - "How is your ki (qi)?"- is the Japanese version of "How are you?" (Specifically, "genki" is what the Chinese call "yuan" or "original" qi, a specific type.) It doesn't require a voltmeter or any objective observation to answer. :-)
It's unfortunate that many practitioners of CM and of Asian martial arts have latched on to the idea that qi is some sort of electromagnetic like energy field. This is a misinterpretation, attempting to fit Taoist concepts of the Universe into a Platonic/Aristotelian grid.
Like other aspects of Chinese Medicine's model of the human being, qi is best understood not by what it is but by what is does. The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one.
I recommend Tad Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver to those interested in learning more.
The two are no more incompatible than the description of a certain sound in terms of a time-varying frequency spectrum, versus "that's an A chord played on a steel-string guitar". The former description may tell you why, when you play it through your amp, it makes your speaker buzz because of some resonance; the latter tells you how it works in the music. They're both correct.
(Tom Swiss, NCCAOM Diplomate in Asian Body Therapy; Sandan, World Seido Karate Organization)
A double is no more or less precise than any other 64 bit quantity. You can still only represent 2^64 states, whether you label them as 0,1,2... or .000000000001, .000000000002, .000000000003..., or whatever.
I'm willing to bet that any given neuron in your brain will require more than 64 bits to represent its state in any reasonably accurate fashion.
"Precision" is an attribute of measurement or of modeling. Biological phenomena, like any actual physical phenomena, are a completely "precise" model of themselves.
Contractarianism makes for a poor ethical system, since it cannot cover children or the mentally infirm (except as indirect recipients of the sentiments of contractors). And it means that numbers determine morality - if enough of us agree that persons of a certain skin tone, or gender, or religious belief, aren't worth, we just agree to a contract that excludes them. Might makes right.
Supernaturalism, of course, is even worse, since the existance of god(s) is doubtful, and their desires ever moreso.
Non-supernatural ethical theories include utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and the rights view. Rationalism - "act as if your will were universal law" tells me how I should behave in light of my own values, but doesn't inform what those values should be. Its problems are described well in this Wikipedia article.
For an introduction to the rights view, especially as applied to animals, I suggest the work of Tom Regan (two different links there).
For utilitarian perspective on animal issues, Peter Singer is the go-to guy (two different links there).
Racism, sexism, and other abuses of the weak by the powerful have survived quite well over the centuries, largely due to social contracts amoung power-holders that excluded everyone else.
First, I have no argument with honest polygamy or polyandry. I identify as polyamorous. Infidelity is different - it means lying or breaking an agreement. If I have two lovers and tell them they are the only two, and then take a third without telling them, that's unethical.
Second, law (institutionalized social norms) is orthogonal to ethics. So are mores (non-institutionalized social norms). Yes, I will state that regardless of law or mores of any given culture, rape is unethical.
The lives of those dogs are not ours to take.
If one person needed to to die in order to learn some new technique to save 1000 people, is it worth it? I'm sure that we could learn a lot by vivisecting a few children.
Except there isn't such a loss. Ethanol generates more energy than it takes to produce. TFA is FUD from an oil industry shill. (Which is not to say that corn-derivved ethanol is a great solution; there are better crops and better growing methods.)
Except that it doesn't.
Patzek is an oil company shill, and this is just more FUD against renewable energy.
But, it is true that corn ethanol using modern energy-intensive agricultural methods is still a pretty poor path. Using waste biomass, or using less resource-intensive crops (like industrial hemp) is much better; and we need sustainable agriculture whether we're growing just food or fuel too.
It is not approriate to label the actions of non-human animals as "immoral", nor to take those actions as an ethical guide.
When a dog takes a bone from a smaller dog, is it immoral? Is it theft? Would you take that dog's action as justification for a man to steal money from a smaller, weaker man?
"Designed"? By whom?
The fact that we are biologically to do something doesn't mean it's ethically correct to do so. I'm biologically able - encouraged by basic drives, even - to have sex with every reasonably attractive woman I see. That doesn't make rape or infidelity ethical behavior.
No, it's not a correct analogy, because information is not property.
Honesty is an ethical concept, copyright a legal one. I hope we all understand that ethics and law have little to do with each other.
You might consider getting a pile of EIDE drives and a just a handful of USB enclosures/adaptors - it's easy to swap drives into the enclosures.
Few people need data retention for 10 years. For most of us, if we can reconstruct the current state of our drive after a crash, and restore files we recently accidently deleted or altered, we've got all we need.
You know, the more and the harder I look, the more I see the truth of the Law of Fives... :-)
Not to mention the 17-23 connection...
In return for paying less for everything else? Maybe. Especially if I get to only buy the newspaper sections I want.
You don't get that newspaper subsidy for free, you know. It's paid for with a few extra pennies from that Coke, a few bucks from that pair of Levis, and so on.
No, I blame the 90% of the fuss about PC that has no basis on the Republicans.
No, I wouldn't. I'd define it as the expansion, partly by means of political duress, of industrial corporate capitalism. It is not a free-trade phenomenon - no activity involving multi-national corporations can be, since the issuance of corporate charaters is a state intervention into the marketplace.
Economic growth would be great. But economic growth doesn't mean building a factory owned by a foreign corporation - it mean building your own locally-owned businesses.
Free markets / free trade require that buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with roughly equal power. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism, that is not the case with the current move towards "globalization", where multi-national corporations (chartered by the governments of those former colonial powers) exploit the people and resources of "third world" nations.
In that sense, I suppose you're correct that it's nothing new - just colonialism in new bottles.
Damn. I didn't know he had passed.
Everyone should read his book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country (available on-line at the link, or at the usual dead trees vendors).
Sorry to hear that you have content you value so little, that you're willing to shut out potential viewers.
Maybe if you focused on upgrading that content rather than "wiz-bang features", we'd all win - you'd have something you want everyone to see, and we'd all be able to see it.
Dying? No. Suffering? Yes, sometimes enormously; suffering from the inability to get a medicine that works well for them; suffering from the inability to follow their religious practices without risking prosecution.
Merely lighting up a fatty may not have parallels with the Underground Railroad, but operating "medical marijuana" clubs, or helping to shield fugitives fleeing procesution for drug possession, would.
Then I would say you're...well, "a fool" is too strong. "Naive", perhaps. There's no difference between the state telling you what you can put into your body and into what states you can engage your nervous system, and telling you what gods you can worship, what books you can read, or what music you can play. Freedom is worth fighting for.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that recreational smoking of cannabis may be no more "vital to our way of life" that reading comic books. (Of course that ignores medical and religious uses, and who am I to decide what's vital to someone else's life?) But the right to choose to read comics - or to smoke weed - is vital, worth fighting for.
So when the government makes immoral and unconstitutional laws, I'm supposed to follow them until my congresscritter gets around to reading my mail? It's only ok to help fugitive slaves escape if you write your legislators first? Pardon me, but I must disagree.
Yes, I've written a letters to my congresscritters over the years, and have donated money to NORML and the ACLU, and my vote is certainly influenced by candidates stances on the War on (some) Drugs and other abuses of state power. But it's pissing in the wind.
I never mentioned civil disobedience. I'm certainly not talking here about civil disobedience as a social movement as practiced by Ghandi and King. If the term "civil disobedience" applies at all, it is in the original sense as used by Thoreau:
But I'm not, a priori, limiting the options to civil disobedience; I'm willing to consider the use of justifiable defensive force against violent actions by agents of the state.
The choice to control one's own nervous system is as fundamental as the right to control one's own reproductive system, perhaps even more so.
The use of drugs as religious sacrements is well-established; religious freedom cases involving the use of peyote and cannabis have come before the courts. And many people have gotten more of a divine experience out of cannabis or other psychoactive drugs than out of Christianity.
Just because Christians in ancient Rome wanted to worship Jesus didn't mean that it wasn't illegal.
Just because black people in 1860 wanted to be free didn't mean that helping escaped slaves wasn't illegal.
Just because women before the 1960s wanted to control their own bodies didn't mean that contraception and abortion weren't illegal.
Anyone who attempts to live by any reasonable code of ethics is going to find themselves quite often rooting for, actively assisting, or even becoming, "criminals".
It's un-PC, to be sure, but a well-known idiom. Like a "Chinese fire-drill", but to the nth power.
Why Mongolian? Maybe harkening back to Genghis Khan - if those great conquerors the Mongols are after you, you're righteously screwed.
Of course not, and I can crack jokes about Balti-morons, Harm City, the City that Bleeds, Mobtown...from big-haired hons downy ocean, to our nation-leading murder and heroin addiction rates, it's a gold mine of ridiculous material. (Which is not to say it can't be tragic at the same time.)
Don't confuse refusal to be PC with intolerance or prejudice. Consult the works of George Carlin and other great comedians for more information.
How do you define "liberal bias"? I hear some people call "bias" when newpapers report such simple and obvious facts as that the invasion of Iraq has turrned into a Mongolian clusterfuck, or that there is a global scientific consensus that human action is impacting the climate.
Newspapers are as "liberal" as the corporations that own them. Much of the bias is better seen as "urban versus rural" - for example, fear of firearms versus the RKBA breaks down better along urban/rural lines than left/right. Acceptance for those of other races, religious, and sexual orientations is more vital when you pass a half-dozen different cultures on your way to work in the morning than when your nearest neighbor is a ten-minute walk away.
And since these large papers are based in large cities, it should be no surprise that their bias tends to the urban.