I could see some Al Qaeda presence in Iran among some part of the Sunni population, but I have a hard time imagining the state itself would assist or hide them.
At a stretch I could see them aiding some Sunni extremists with the goal of destabilizing regional rivals like Israel and the bigger Arab powers. But Al Qaeda seems an odd choice since they have a history of attacking western powers which is the last thing Iran would want (the less the west thinks about the Middle East the more influence Iran will have).
How would he be breaking the law? And where is he suggesting hacking?
I think the thought was he could somehow use the numbers the thief called (ie people the thief knew), but it sounds like those were scam toll numbers or something else that wouldn't be helpful.
I'd argue for scientifically rational policies but people seem to disagree as to what those are.
I just listened to a debate about abolishing the minimum wage, and fundamentally it wasn't a moral debate so much as a wonk debate. The libertarians arguing that abolishing the minimum wage would bring more people into the work force and help the poor, the opponents claiming that studies suggested a more complicated relationship and that the minimum wage didn't cost many jobs and transferred more wealth to the poorest part of the population. Fundamentally I don't know which argument is the right one.
For a real party I would suggest two bedrock principals: 1) Clearly identify that your party works towards moral goals, a policy is only a tool to achieve those goals. ie you're not interested in "Open Government (data) access" but the public being able to act as an effective watchdog over government.
2) To achieve 1 write policy with research in mind. If people are considering abolishing the minimum wage write legislation that will help you gather data to tell you if it's a good idea, if you want to promote science and math than apply that legislation in a handful of states and see if it works. It's not possible to do for all legislation but if you approach lawmaking with the idea that it's still an experiment and you have to gather data than I think you can really increase the quality of the governance.
I'll admit that my first thought was 'right wing nuts' though I toned down the speculation once I decided it didn't really matter.
Unless more info comes out I don't see these guys as fundamentally different than other spree killers. The marathon isn't a symbolic target for Islamists, they didn't put out any videos or have a specific cause or demand like actual terrorist groups, they wanted to make a big statement and kill a bunch of people and they did it in the way suggested by their cultural religion.
They were two loners who were profoundly dissatisfied with their lives, if they were Christian maybe they'd have doubled down in their Christian faith, ranted about Obama being a secret Muslim, then shot up the MIT campus. If they were black or Mexican they might have joined a nasty gang and done some killing that way. Instead they double down on their Muslim faith and bombed the marathon.
I'm not a fan of religion and I suspect that the current culture of Islam means that these guys did a lot more damage than they would have with other beliefs. But I wouldn't call it Islamic terrorism as much as state that Muslim's really losing their shit have a worse template to follow than other people really losing their shit. If we turn up some evidence of a terrorist network and/or recruiting I'll change my tune.
I'm surprised they couldn't clean up the images more. Clearly you can't do much with a single image since there's only so much information, but with a video you're getting a slightly different set of information with each frame, I always figured you could do a mapping/averaging of all the different shots and extract something a little cleaner. Unfortunately it looks like that's not the case (or at least it doesn't work well here).
For the China example if China invaded Canada maybe I'd fight back, but I'd fight back in Canada, not China, and I'd target the invading forces, not civilians. I think that's the distinction I'm thinking of. If you're resisting in your own country or society, and taking the fight to people who signed up for it that's an understandable reaction and that's when 'freedom fighter' or 'insurgent' also becomes an accurate term.
But if you start targeting civilians as a part of your conflict, particularly civilians outside of your country, that's the dysfunctional terrorist mindset I'm talking about. And yeah, having "your relatives shot and blown to pieces" can generate that dysfunctional mindset, but I think that's more of a movie trope. The injustice generates societies who might support terrorists, but the actual terrorists tend to have the most in common with frat boys. They're young guys without a social circle or a strong purpose, a group comes along and gives them a family, gives them a purpose as heroes to all these oppressed people. If they were actually motivated by justice or compassion then they wouldn't be able to target civilians.
Really is there big difference? So if police catches the guy who did this and he says he wasn't targeting civilians but some unspecified militants, are you going to pat him on the back and give him a medal? Or better yet, what if he doesn't tell you why he did that, doesn't show you the laws he thinks let him do what he did, nor explains what informations led him to target the marathon. At least not officially, that is. Instead he denies he is doing any such attacks at all, although everyone knows that is a lie.
Still giving him thumbs up and the medal even if the dead aren't brown people in far away country?
Huh? You're stretching the comparison too far, if the perpetrator isn't targeting civilians they're so delusional they're not mentally competent to stand trial (which would change how we see the attack).
Intent matters. Imagine one guy who runs over a guy camouflaged in the middle of the road, another is drunk and hits a pedestrian, another is having a bad day so deliberately runs down a random pedestrian. You're basically arguing that all three acts are morally equivalent. Whoever did this specifically targeted civilians, that's a far worse crime than unintentionally hitting civilians while shooting at people who want to kill you.
Some of our top politicians held high ranking positions in the IRA.
Note I included 'political party hack' in my list:)
They are not dysfunctional people looking for a purpose, they are normal people who grow up in places where their entire family/friends/society are being violently oppressed.
Lets say China took over the US by force. There's chinese soldiers controlling your city, all decked out in military equipment and armaments, going door to door kicking them in and taking away all the males. Protests get shot at by chinese soldiers and you have nothing to protect you. You would fight them any way you can, its a natural response.
In a different environment you would be a different person.
The IRA is a little different as it was more of a separatist movement, and if you're actively invaded/oppressed it's another thing entirely (ie militants in Gaza). But we're talking about Islamic terrorists, they're not lashing out at oppressors or invaders, they're lashing out at ideological foes. And I don't deny they would be different in a different environment, most people who do important things, good or bad, are on some level dysfunctional (that's what drives them). The problem with Islamic terrorism is they're being driven in the worst possible direction.
I think you missed my point. bin Laden was a bad guy, I don't care what your political beliefs were, he wasn't a misguided idealist or some sort of freedom fighter. He cared about two things, having a purpose and being famous, and the easiest way to get those things was to use fear and murder to create a theocracy. I have strong criticisms for what the US does wrt Muslim nations, but the people making those decisions don't come from the same mindset as terrorists.
The bad element of Occupy protests involve juvenile delinquency, not stuff that often leads to domestic terrorism. The bad element of Tea Party protests sees themselves as the last stand before the collapse of civilization by some sort of muslim atheist communist takeover. The second group is far more likely too fall into the terrorist mindset.
Either way judging a group by its craziest member doesn't tell you much about the group. For me the only way their political allegiance becomes significant is if the perpetrator was actually accepted by the movements mainstream.
And the terrorists aren't just doing it to senselessly kill people - they are usually trying to (whether accurately or not) protect thousands or millions of people from threats they perceive.
I'm not a fan of drone strikes. But there's a big difference between the killing of civilians while you're aiming for fighters (even if your aim is super sloppy), and deliberately killing civilians.
If governments earnestly listened to concerned citizens groups from both outside and inside their borders, there would be no terrorism. No happy person wakes up and thinks "Oh, I'll become a terrorist today. It's lovely weather for it". They usually do it because of perceived threats to their family/culture/country/their notion of "us". This is not a mystery. They see it as them having to do it to spare even more misery down the road. Some idiot throwing pipe bombs without political motive is not terrorism, but simple violence. And knowingly using shoddy intelligence to take out what might be a military target is hardly more noble, is it? Drone strikes suck donkey dick. So does terrorism. Solution: honest diplomacy.
I'm all for understanding terrorists and root causes but you're giving terrorists a lot more credit than they deserve. Those reasons you gave lead to societies that tend to generate terrorists. But as for the actual terrorists, they're dysfunctional individuals looking for a purpose. In a healthy society they're join a fraternity, cult, gang, political party hack, or become a spree shooter. In a threatened society they play the hero by becoming a soldier in a war against a great enemy (a terrorist), but the motive is the same, forget your morals and become a part of something.
The image in that article is more gross than pornographic, and I still haven't seen the image that got it banned. It could be that being gay was what got the comic banned, but without seeing the relevant images it's really not obvious.
I'd be curious to see the examples they were talking about. I'd say in general that male genitalia are the most pornographic body part of either gender, and that images involving men are generally considered more pornographic than those involving women, ie two women is less pornographic than a mixed pair, which is less pornographic than two guys. Basically I'm saying it's not clear that it's discrimination at work so much as different standards as to what constitutes pornography.
You can change the tense all you want, you are still making a broad, blanket judgement with an unbounded scope covering innumerable events and phenomena you have absolutely no direct knowledge of and telling me you KNOW, a priori, that they are ALL bull. You can dress that up and dance around with it all you want, it's still a statement of faith and cannot be anything else.
And the more of your post I try to reply to the more I see it is all just the same. Your questions make no sense, your premises are held by faith and will not be examined, so I fear the conversation dead ends. "Like all supernatural things the results are only murky when you do a crappy experiment, when you have a well designed experiment they always fail." Here we go, your faith in a nutshell.
No I'm describing my experience, my views are educated by evidence, the opposite of faith.
There is no need for you to actually do any research or even just survey research that other people have done to date, you know what you will find without reading a single boring page. Experiments with the right results are well done, those with results that might cast doubt on your faith were obviously poorly designed or executed, and all this is known before the experiments are even done!
Ironically if you eleminted the words 'all' and 'always' from your statement I would probably be unable to disagree with it. But without those words you dont have a faith anymore.
I'm sorry but when the study is done well they do always fail (although good studies sometimes get marginally statistically significant results as would be expected). You seem to think I've declared the supernatural doesn't exist and therefore anything that supports it is flawed. In reality in the past I very much wanted the supernatural to exist, but every supernatural incident... well you have to trust this person saw what they did, because there wasn't any other evidence, and every positive study, when you look at it the design is just broken or doesn't show what proponents say it does.
I'm sure you've heard of psychics helping police solve crimes? Did you know that in even their best examples they can't claim the psychic actually helped solve the crime, because they never have. And the predictions are never as specific or accurate as gets reported (or if they were it's someone remembering the prediction, it's never written down or recorded). There is a very definite pattern with any supernatural phenomena, those viewed at a distance are spectacular and amazing, those viewed more closely are murky, and those investigated vanish entirely. You can see that in the Randi dowsing episode I linked. The dowsers at first look amazing, able to detect anything with ease, but when subjected to a controlled experiment their powers vanish entirely. I don't argue that I can't be wrong, if I relied on 100% certainty when I used the words 'all' or 'always' I'd never speak them, but the level of doubt I have is educated by the experience and research I've done, and that makes me very comfortable asserting the supernatural doesn't exist.
You assert that I'm operating on faith, in that case you should be able to supply at least one non-crappy experiment that show a supernatural phenomena and isn't just a marginal statistical result.
You said "Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms."
Yet you claim you were not talking about things that havent occurred yet. But logically, given your statement above, would it not be fair to say that any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred, let us say, tomorrow, would still be covered as something that can NEVER be reproduced and ALWAYS explained materially?
If so, then you are indeed making claims about things that have yet to happen, long before any evidence could be brought to bear. If not I must say your statement becomes unintelligible.
My statement meant that for everything we've ever observed everything that could be studied was explainable through naturalistic mechanisms, the tense would have been cleaner if I said "could always be explained". As for "any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred" it can be explained materially since people are easily deluded.
"Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate."
But the VAST VAST majority of such cases, you were simply unable to investigate. And always will be. This is certainly no reason to simply believe outlandish stories, I dont disagree with you there, but certainty of falsehood is an entirely different animal from uncommited nonbelief.
The problem is we have mechanisms to explain all of those mechanisms, pareidolia, sleep paralysis, brain phenomena in near death experiences, and once in a while hallucinations and even lies. Yeah it sounds like a convenient way to explain away anecdotes but we've shown it's VERY easy to reproduce those spiritual experiences in the lab. As for physical miracles, any that persist long enough to investigate always have a naturalistic explanation.
"A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural?"
I will quote INXS. "You cant go against nature, because if you do, going against nature is part of nature too." No, I think "supernatural" is a silly word really. It appears to refer to something in objective reality but it only makes sense if you apply it subjectively instead. Each seemingly arbitrary or random phenomena of nature, in the human mind, was once "supernatural" and then at some point we formed a workable mental model that allowed us to predict it and/or manipulate it with some success. And suddenly it became natural. So, no, I dont believe in any "supernatural" powers. I do believe there are plenty of facts about the universe we do not yet fully understand however. It wouldnt be surprising at all if there are things left for us to discover that would seem 'supernatural' until we understand them. Oh, and water dousing? Do a little meta research on it sometime. The results of prior research is a bit murky. It isnt an easily repeatable always works thing, no, that's true - but there is also clearly individual variation and certain practitioners, for whatever reason, seem to consistently score much better than random chance could explain. Why? I very much doubt it has anything to do with demons or angels (though it is possible the internal representations of such beings might be involved when an individual practitioner is at work) but the first step to finding out why, for someone like Randi, is just acknowledging the possibility he might be wrong.
Can you name a single aspect of science in the last few hundred years that was once considered supernatural?
As for water dousing, did you watch the Randi documentary someone posted? I know dowsing is BS, yet at 3:50 you see a guy pick out a chunk of metal buried in some grass. When I first saw that my mind said 'WHOA?!? How did he do that?!?", if I didn't rewatch and see the upturned dirt (it was
I wasn't talking about things that haven't happened yet, though if the universe has operated on materialist principals up till now why would it stop? (this is the foundation of why science works)
What I was talking about is that for every supernatural occurrence that has happened up till now one of two things has occurred. Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate.
For things like miracles from the bible, or even many modern miracles (like the ones the Catholic church uses to create saints), if they happen outside a lab we really can't investigate them properly. But for all the people with supernatural powers, every single one when subjected to real scrutiny has had their powers fail spectacularly.
If I flip a coin a million times and it always comes up heads there's two explanations, either it's a fair coin and I had a.5^1e6 chance of getting that result, or it's not a biased coin and has a strong predisposition towards heads. Am I a biased coin fundamentalist or just rational?
A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural? What kind of supernatural? Religion? Psychics? Dowsers? If so why do you believe in it?
Randi is a Fundamentalist Materialist. Just about as annoying as the other Fundamentalists, in his own way, though he certainly has a charming side as well. But you are right, objectivity? He has none, he has faith in materialism just as unquestioning as the faith others hold in supernaturalism.
Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms.
Materialists have faith in something that occurs every damn time.
If Randi, after decades of seeking out the world's best psychics/faith healers/dowsers/etc and seeing a complete lack of supernatural powers every time is a complete materialist that doesn't make him a fundamentalist, that makes him sane.
I meant the original poster who had the exchange "May I ask what your objections are to the scanner?" I said, "No, you may not.". It's not an offensive response but it is a bit of a power play. "No thank you" or "I'd rather not go into it" asserts that you're equals and you respect them but don't want to give the info and he probably moves through.
"No, you may not" asserts they don't have the right to have that information and implies you have higher authority than them, it escalates the situation. If someone responded "No, you may not" to me I'd probably be a bit annoyed and think they were a bit rude. If it's done to someone with authority they might feel the urge to establish or re-establish their authority and then you get a minor incident.
So when I reach the checkpoint, I say, "I'd like to opt out of the scanner, please." About 75% of the time, they nod and say, "Okay, we'll have to do an inspection over here, sir." The (small) number of times that they've questioned my decision, I simply say, "I fly frequently, and I'm not convinced of the safety or dosing of the radiation from these machines, so I prefer the old school pat-down."
I've yet to be hassled, and I fly 3-4 times a month, year round, and have been doing so for years. I see tough guys and funny guys get hassled frequently enough because they make jokes about weapons and bombs, or opt out by being abusive and rude. Opt out politely, and you'll be waved over to the side and patted down and sent on your way. Opt out like a douche-mouth, and you'll hold up the line for 20 minutes.
People who travel frequently hate the guys like you because you disrupt the line, distract security, and waste our time - we wish you'd get ball cancer and die.
Oh, who's a good boy? You are! That's right! Does the good boy wanna biscuit? Such a good, good doggy...
We don't know the tone or body language but it sounds like the original poster was being mildly rude, basically trying to stir up shit. If you're a person who likes to stir up shit and you meet another person who also likes to stir up shit, then you're probably going to make things shitty for everyone around you.
I live in Alberta, too far north for solar, no geothermal, and most of the province doesn't get much wind.
Sure we could invest absurd amounts of money in wind, or ship power from solar installations in the southern US (losing a large fraction in the transmission), or we could go Nuclear and get the power cheaper with an arguable lower environmental impact (since the big 3 renewables aren't well suited and would be inefficient).
I don't argue that a lot of places do have great renewable power sources, and they should use them, but it doesn't work everywhere.
0.3% of the energy that falls on the Sahara could power all of Europe
That fact is almost meaningless, you can't cover 3+% of the Sahara with collectors, and even if you could it would be a massive environmental disaster. Renewables are part of the energy solution, but until the technology improves drastically that's all they are, a part. If you want a hope in hell of reducing further global warming your only choice is to go hard core nuclear.
I'm pretty sure that they already know, and don't care why it's impractical. After all, if it was practical, they'd be more common than airplanes, which they are not.
Well the cost of helium, and the explosiveness of hydrogen, are pretty good reasons why they're impractical. If graphene aerogel could remove these issues than the question is if there's additional impracticalities.
My guess would be weather (having that large a profile makes it too hard to stay on course with wind), carrying capacity, and speed.
It depends on the purpose of the video. Was it a fun and engaging way for the employees involved to familiarize themselves with the process of making videos (before making regular training videos), if so it was money well spent.
Was it something to lighten up the mood and engage the participents at the start of the training conference? If so it was probably worth it.
Was it just play money for the involved employees? If so it was probably wasted, but I don't think that was the objective.
The fact they found a way to make part of their job enjoyable doesn't mean it was a waste.
For the people thinking the earth hour itself is helping I agree that it's junk science.
But for debates like this I find there's often a bad argument 'it helps the environment', and a good argument 'it inspires people to help the environment'. Even if most people make the bad argument I believe the good argument is the one that needs to be addressed.
I'm not a big fan but I don't think Earth hour qualifies as meaningless junk science, it's only 1 hour, even if it worked perfectly it would only reduce CO2 by ~1/(24*365)=0.011415525%, the fact that the effect is marginally in the other direction isn't the point, it's a PR stunt about saving energy and reducing light pollution.
Junk science would be "use candles instead of light bulbs", or more realistically "buy a new electric car instead of taking the bus" (not quite, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel they're helping the environment when driving an electric car, rather than just hurting it less). I am critical about a lot of the 'fixes' that the environmental movement has embraced, particularly the anti-Nuclear crowd (imagine the irony if it turns out the biggest threat to the environment was actually the environmental movement), but Earth hour isn't supposed to be a fix, just a PR stunt.
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I could see some Al Qaeda presence in Iran among some part of the Sunni population, but I have a hard time imagining the state itself would assist or hide them.
At a stretch I could see them aiding some Sunni extremists with the goal of destabilizing regional rivals like Israel and the bigger Arab powers. But Al Qaeda seems an odd choice since they have a history of attacking western powers which is the last thing Iran would want (the less the west thinks about the Middle East the more influence Iran will have).
How would he be breaking the law? And where is he suggesting hacking?
I think the thought was he could somehow use the numbers the thief called (ie people the thief knew), but it sounds like those were scam toll numbers or something else that wouldn't be helpful.
I'd argue for scientifically rational policies but people seem to disagree as to what those are.
I just listened to a debate about abolishing the minimum wage, and fundamentally it wasn't a moral debate so much as a wonk debate. The libertarians arguing that abolishing the minimum wage would bring more people into the work force and help the poor, the opponents claiming that studies suggested a more complicated relationship and that the minimum wage didn't cost many jobs and transferred more wealth to the poorest part of the population. Fundamentally I don't know which argument is the right one.
For a real party I would suggest two bedrock principals:
1) Clearly identify that your party works towards moral goals, a policy is only a tool to achieve those goals. ie you're not interested in "Open Government (data) access" but the public being able to act as an effective watchdog over government.
2) To achieve 1 write policy with research in mind. If people are considering abolishing the minimum wage write legislation that will help you gather data to tell you if it's a good idea, if you want to promote science and math than apply that legislation in a handful of states and see if it works. It's not possible to do for all legislation but if you approach lawmaking with the idea that it's still an experiment and you have to gather data than I think you can really increase the quality of the governance.
I'll admit that my first thought was 'right wing nuts' though I toned down the speculation once I decided it didn't really matter.
Unless more info comes out I don't see these guys as fundamentally different than other spree killers. The marathon isn't a symbolic target for Islamists, they didn't put out any videos or have a specific cause or demand like actual terrorist groups, they wanted to make a big statement and kill a bunch of people and they did it in the way suggested by their cultural religion.
They were two loners who were profoundly dissatisfied with their lives, if they were Christian maybe they'd have doubled down in their Christian faith, ranted about Obama being a secret Muslim, then shot up the MIT campus. If they were black or Mexican they might have joined a nasty gang and done some killing that way. Instead they double down on their Muslim faith and bombed the marathon.
I'm not a fan of religion and I suspect that the current culture of Islam means that these guys did a lot more damage than they would have with other beliefs. But I wouldn't call it Islamic terrorism as much as state that Muslim's really losing their shit have a worse template to follow than other people really losing their shit. If we turn up some evidence of a terrorist network and/or recruiting I'll change my tune.
I'm surprised they couldn't clean up the images more. Clearly you can't do much with a single image since there's only so much information, but with a video you're getting a slightly different set of information with each frame, I always figured you could do a mapping/averaging of all the different shots and extract something a little cleaner. Unfortunately it looks like that's not the case (or at least it doesn't work well here).
For the China example if China invaded Canada maybe I'd fight back, but I'd fight back in Canada, not China, and I'd target the invading forces, not civilians. I think that's the distinction I'm thinking of. If you're resisting in your own country or society, and taking the fight to people who signed up for it that's an understandable reaction and that's when 'freedom fighter' or 'insurgent' also becomes an accurate term.
But if you start targeting civilians as a part of your conflict, particularly civilians outside of your country, that's the dysfunctional terrorist mindset I'm talking about. And yeah, having "your relatives shot and blown to pieces" can generate that dysfunctional mindset, but I think that's more of a movie trope. The injustice generates societies who might support terrorists, but the actual terrorists tend to have the most in common with frat boys. They're young guys without a social circle or a strong purpose, a group comes along and gives them a family, gives them a purpose as heroes to all these oppressed people. If they were actually motivated by justice or compassion then they wouldn't be able to target civilians.
Really is there big difference? So if police catches the guy who did this and he says he wasn't targeting civilians but some unspecified militants, are you going to pat him on the back and give him a medal? Or better yet, what if he doesn't tell you why he did that, doesn't show you the laws he thinks let him do what he did, nor explains what informations led him to target the marathon. At least not officially, that is. Instead he denies he is doing any such attacks at all, although everyone knows that is a lie.
Still giving him thumbs up and the medal even if the dead aren't brown people in far away country?
Huh? You're stretching the comparison too far, if the perpetrator isn't targeting civilians they're so delusional they're not mentally competent to stand trial (which would change how we see the attack).
Intent matters. Imagine one guy who runs over a guy camouflaged in the middle of the road, another is drunk and hits a pedestrian, another is having a bad day so deliberately runs down a random pedestrian. You're basically arguing that all three acts are morally equivalent. Whoever did this specifically targeted civilians, that's a far worse crime than unintentionally hitting civilians while shooting at people who want to kill you.
Where did you pull alll that from, some tv drama?
Some of our top politicians held high ranking positions in the IRA.
Note I included 'political party hack' in my list :)
They are not dysfunctional people looking for a purpose, they are normal people who grow up in places where their entire family/friends/society are being violently oppressed.
Lets say China took over the US by force. There's chinese soldiers controlling your city, all decked out in military equipment and armaments, going door to door kicking them in and taking away all the males. Protests get shot at by chinese soldiers and you have nothing to protect you. You would fight them any way you can, its a natural response.
In a different environment you would be a different person.
The IRA is a little different as it was more of a separatist movement, and if you're actively invaded/oppressed it's another thing entirely (ie militants in Gaza). But we're talking about Islamic terrorists, they're not lashing out at oppressors or invaders, they're lashing out at ideological foes. And I don't deny they would be different in a different environment, most people who do important things, good or bad, are on some level dysfunctional (that's what drives them). The problem with Islamic terrorism is they're being driven in the worst possible direction.
I think you missed my point. bin Laden was a bad guy, I don't care what your political beliefs were, he wasn't a misguided idealist or some sort of freedom fighter. He cared about two things, having a purpose and being famous, and the easiest way to get those things was to use fear and murder to create a theocracy. I have strong criticisms for what the US does wrt Muslim nations, but the people making those decisions don't come from the same mindset as terrorists.
The bad element of Occupy protests involve juvenile delinquency, not stuff that often leads to domestic terrorism. The bad element of Tea Party protests sees themselves as the last stand before the collapse of civilization by some sort of muslim atheist communist takeover. The second group is far more likely too fall into the terrorist mindset.
Either way judging a group by its craziest member doesn't tell you much about the group. For me the only way their political allegiance becomes significant is if the perpetrator was actually accepted by the movements mainstream.
And the terrorists aren't just doing it to senselessly kill people - they are usually trying to (whether accurately or not) protect thousands or millions of people from threats they perceive.
I'm not a fan of drone strikes. But there's a big difference between the killing of civilians while you're aiming for fighters (even if your aim is super sloppy), and deliberately killing civilians.
If governments earnestly listened to concerned citizens groups from both outside and inside their borders, there would be no terrorism. No happy person wakes up and thinks "Oh, I'll become a terrorist today. It's lovely weather for it". They usually do it because of perceived threats to their family/culture/country/their notion of "us". This is not a mystery. They see it as them having to do it to spare even more misery down the road. Some idiot throwing pipe bombs without political motive is not terrorism, but simple violence. And knowingly using shoddy intelligence to take out what might be a military target is hardly more noble, is it? Drone strikes suck donkey dick. So does terrorism. Solution: honest diplomacy.
I'm all for understanding terrorists and root causes but you're giving terrorists a lot more credit than they deserve. Those reasons you gave lead to societies that tend to generate terrorists. But as for the actual terrorists, they're dysfunctional individuals looking for a purpose. In a healthy society they're join a fraternity, cult, gang, political party hack, or become a spree shooter. In a threatened society they play the hero by becoming a soldier in a war against a great enemy (a terrorist), but the motive is the same, forget your morals and become a part of something.
The image in that article is more gross than pornographic, and I still haven't seen the image that got it banned. It could be that being gay was what got the comic banned, but without seeing the relevant images it's really not obvious.
I'd be curious to see the examples they were talking about. I'd say in general that male genitalia are the most pornographic body part of either gender, and that images involving men are generally considered more pornographic than those involving women, ie two women is less pornographic than a mixed pair, which is less pornographic than two guys. Basically I'm saying it's not clear that it's discrimination at work so much as different standards as to what constitutes pornography.
You can change the tense all you want, you are still making a broad, blanket judgement with an unbounded scope covering innumerable events and phenomena you have absolutely no direct knowledge of and telling me you KNOW, a priori, that they are ALL bull. You can dress that up and dance around with it all you want, it's still a statement of faith and cannot be anything else.
And the more of your post I try to reply to the more I see it is all just the same. Your questions make no sense, your premises are held by faith and will not be examined, so I fear the conversation dead ends. "Like all supernatural things the results are only murky when you do a crappy experiment, when you have a well designed experiment they always fail." Here we go, your faith in a nutshell.
No I'm describing my experience, my views are educated by evidence, the opposite of faith.
There is no need for you to actually do any research or even just survey research that other people have done to date, you know what you will find without reading a single boring page. Experiments with the right results are well done, those with results that might cast doubt on your faith were obviously poorly designed or executed, and all this is known before the experiments are even done!
Ironically if you eleminted the words 'all' and 'always' from your statement I would probably be unable to disagree with it. But without those words you dont have a faith anymore.
I'm sorry but when the study is done well they do always fail (although good studies sometimes get marginally statistically significant results as would be expected). You seem to think I've declared the supernatural doesn't exist and therefore anything that supports it is flawed. In reality in the past I very much wanted the supernatural to exist, but every supernatural incident... well you have to trust this person saw what they did, because there wasn't any other evidence, and every positive study, when you look at it the design is just broken or doesn't show what proponents say it does.
I'm sure you've heard of psychics helping police solve crimes? Did you know that in even their best examples they can't claim the psychic actually helped solve the crime, because they never have. And the predictions are never as specific or accurate as gets reported (or if they were it's someone remembering the prediction, it's never written down or recorded). There is a very definite pattern with any supernatural phenomena, those viewed at a distance are spectacular and amazing, those viewed more closely are murky, and those investigated vanish entirely. You can see that in the Randi dowsing episode I linked. The dowsers at first look amazing, able to detect anything with ease, but when subjected to a controlled experiment their powers vanish entirely. I don't argue that I can't be wrong, if I relied on 100% certainty when I used the words 'all' or 'always' I'd never speak them, but the level of doubt I have is educated by the experience and research I've done, and that makes me very comfortable asserting the supernatural doesn't exist.
You assert that I'm operating on faith, in that case you should be able to supply at least one non-crappy experiment that show a supernatural phenomena and isn't just a marginal statistical result.
You said "Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms."
Yet you claim you were not talking about things that havent occurred yet. But logically, given your statement above, would it not be fair to say that any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred, let us say, tomorrow, would still be covered as something that can NEVER be reproduced and ALWAYS explained materially?
If so, then you are indeed making claims about things that have yet to happen, long before any evidence could be brought to bear. If not I must say your statement becomes unintelligible.
My statement meant that for everything we've ever observed everything that could be studied was explainable through naturalistic mechanisms, the tense would have been cleaner if I said "could always be explained". As for "any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred" it can be explained materially since people are easily deluded.
"Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate."
But the VAST VAST majority of such cases, you were simply unable to investigate. And always will be. This is certainly no reason to simply believe outlandish stories, I dont disagree with you there, but certainty of falsehood is an entirely different animal from uncommited nonbelief.
The problem is we have mechanisms to explain all of those mechanisms, pareidolia, sleep paralysis, brain phenomena in near death experiences, and once in a while hallucinations and even lies. Yeah it sounds like a convenient way to explain away anecdotes but we've shown it's VERY easy to reproduce those spiritual experiences in the lab. As for physical miracles, any that persist long enough to investigate always have a naturalistic explanation.
"A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural?"
I will quote INXS. "You cant go against nature, because if you do, going against nature is part of nature too." No, I think "supernatural" is a silly word really. It appears to refer to something in objective reality but it only makes sense if you apply it subjectively instead. Each seemingly arbitrary or random phenomena of nature, in the human mind, was once "supernatural" and then at some point we formed a workable mental model that allowed us to predict it and/or manipulate it with some success. And suddenly it became natural. So, no, I dont believe in any "supernatural" powers. I do believe there are plenty of facts about the universe we do not yet fully understand however. It wouldnt be surprising at all if there are things left for us to discover that would seem 'supernatural' until we understand them. Oh, and water dousing? Do a little meta research on it sometime. The results of prior research is a bit murky. It isnt an easily repeatable always works thing, no, that's true - but there is also clearly individual variation and certain practitioners, for whatever reason, seem to consistently score much better than random chance could explain. Why? I very much doubt it has anything to do with demons or angels (though it is possible the internal representations of such beings might be involved when an individual practitioner is at work) but the first step to finding out why, for someone like Randi, is just acknowledging the possibility he might be wrong.
Can you name a single aspect of science in the last few hundred years that was once considered supernatural?
As for water dousing, did you watch the Randi documentary someone posted? I know dowsing is BS, yet at 3:50 you see a guy pick out a chunk of metal buried in some grass. When I first saw that my mind said 'WHOA?!? How did he do that?!?", if I didn't rewatch and see the upturned dirt (it was
I wasn't talking about things that haven't happened yet, though if the universe has operated on materialist principals up till now why would it stop? (this is the foundation of why science works)
What I was talking about is that for every supernatural occurrence that has happened up till now one of two things has occurred. Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate.
For things like miracles from the bible, or even many modern miracles (like the ones the Catholic church uses to create saints), if they happen outside a lab we really can't investigate them properly. But for all the people with supernatural powers, every single one when subjected to real scrutiny has had their powers fail spectacularly.
If I flip a coin a million times and it always comes up heads there's two explanations, either it's a fair coin and I had a .5^1e6 chance of getting that result, or it's not a biased coin and has a strong predisposition towards heads. Am I a biased coin fundamentalist or just rational?
A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural? What kind of supernatural? Religion? Psychics? Dowsers? If so why do you believe in it?
Randi is a Fundamentalist Materialist. Just about as annoying as the other Fundamentalists, in his own way, though he certainly has a charming side as well. But you are right, objectivity? He has none, he has faith in materialism just as unquestioning as the faith others hold in supernaturalism.
Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms.
Materialists have faith in something that occurs every damn time.
If Randi, after decades of seeking out the world's best psychics/faith healers/dowsers/etc and seeing a complete lack of supernatural powers every time is a complete materialist that doesn't make him a fundamentalist, that makes him sane.
I meant the original poster who had the exchange "May I ask what your objections are to the scanner?" I said, "No, you may not.". It's not an offensive response but it is a bit of a power play. "No thank you" or "I'd rather not go into it" asserts that you're equals and you respect them but don't want to give the info and he probably moves through.
"No, you may not" asserts they don't have the right to have that information and implies you have higher authority than them, it escalates the situation. If someone responded "No, you may not" to me I'd probably be a bit annoyed and think they were a bit rude. If it's done to someone with authority they might feel the urge to establish or re-establish their authority and then you get a minor incident.
So when I reach the checkpoint, I say, "I'd like to opt out of the scanner, please." About 75% of the time, they nod and say, "Okay, we'll have to do an inspection over here, sir." The (small) number of times that they've questioned my decision, I simply say, "I fly frequently, and I'm not convinced of the safety or dosing of the radiation from these machines, so I prefer the old school pat-down."
I've yet to be hassled, and I fly 3-4 times a month, year round, and have been doing so for years. I see tough guys and funny guys get hassled frequently enough because they make jokes about weapons and bombs, or opt out by being abusive and rude. Opt out politely, and you'll be waved over to the side and patted down and sent on your way. Opt out like a douche-mouth, and you'll hold up the line for 20 minutes.
People who travel frequently hate the guys like you because you disrupt the line, distract security, and waste our time - we wish you'd get ball cancer and die.
Oh, who's a good boy? You are! That's right! Does the good boy wanna biscuit? Such a good, good doggy...
We don't know the tone or body language but it sounds like the original poster was being mildly rude, basically trying to stir up shit. If you're a person who likes to stir up shit and you meet another person who also likes to stir up shit, then you're probably going to make things shitty for everyone around you.
Snow
I live in Alberta, too far north for solar, no geothermal, and most of the province doesn't get much wind.
Sure we could invest absurd amounts of money in wind, or ship power from solar installations in the southern US (losing a large fraction in the transmission), or we could go Nuclear and get the power cheaper with an arguable lower environmental impact (since the big 3 renewables aren't well suited and would be inefficient).
I don't argue that a lot of places do have great renewable power sources, and they should use them, but it doesn't work everywhere.
0.3% of the energy that falls on the Sahara could power all of Europe
That fact is almost meaningless, you can't cover 3+% of the Sahara with collectors, and even if you could it would be a massive environmental disaster. Renewables are part of the energy solution, but until the technology improves drastically that's all they are, a part. If you want a hope in hell of reducing further global warming your only choice is to go hard core nuclear.
I'm pretty sure that they already know, and don't care why it's impractical. After all, if it was practical, they'd be more common than airplanes, which they are not.
Well the cost of helium, and the explosiveness of hydrogen, are pretty good reasons why they're impractical. If graphene aerogel could remove these issues than the question is if there's additional impracticalities.
My guess would be weather (having that large a profile makes it too hard to stay on course with wind), carrying capacity, and speed.
It depends on the purpose of the video. Was it a fun and engaging way for the employees involved to familiarize themselves with the process of making videos (before making regular training videos), if so it was money well spent.
Was it something to lighten up the mood and engage the participents at the start of the training conference? If so it was probably worth it.
Was it just play money for the involved employees? If so it was probably wasted, but I don't think that was the objective.
The fact they found a way to make part of their job enjoyable doesn't mean it was a waste.
For the people thinking the earth hour itself is helping I agree that it's junk science.
But for debates like this I find there's often a bad argument 'it helps the environment', and a good argument 'it inspires people to help the environment'. Even if most people make the bad argument I believe the good argument is the one that needs to be addressed.
I'm not a big fan but I don't think Earth hour qualifies as meaningless junk science, it's only 1 hour, even if it worked perfectly it would only reduce CO2 by ~1/(24*365)=0.011415525%, the fact that the effect is marginally in the other direction isn't the point, it's a PR stunt about saving energy and reducing light pollution.
Junk science would be "use candles instead of light bulbs", or more realistically "buy a new electric car instead of taking the bus" (not quite, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel they're helping the environment when driving an electric car, rather than just hurting it less). I am critical about a lot of the 'fixes' that the environmental movement has embraced, particularly the anti-Nuclear crowd (imagine the irony if it turns out the biggest threat to the environment was actually the environmental movement), but Earth hour isn't supposed to be a fix, just a PR stunt.