Since we're nitpicking, it all depends on how we're ordering the planets, i.e. what we mean by "first". If you assume that we're ordering by creation date, then of course you're right. But if we order by date detected by humans, this would in fact be "the first extra-solar planet".
This might even in fact be more reasonable, since it is in fact impossible to well-order events in time without referring to their distance from the observer. By your scheme, the "first extra-solar planet" is not even well-defined.
Countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China have been surprisingly successful at wiring up certain segments of their societies while controlling information deemed insensitive for political or religious reasons. The Net can, in fact, be used to make money and suppress freedom. These governments have undercut the great promise of globalism, prosperity, technology and democracy, allowing corrupt and anti-democratic governments to prosper, in part by censoring information -- something many of us thought the Net would make impossible.
I've heard this argument quite a few times, which essentially boils down to "when a country censors the net, the citizens become less free, thus the emergence of the Net has reduced freedom, not encouraged it". But perhaps a little perspective? If Saudi Arabia restricts the right of its citizens to use the Net, how are they less free than if the Net never existed at all? This isn't a step backward for these people, it's at worst the status quo.
Plus, it's just a matter of time. Saudi Arabia's restricting of the Net certainly doesn't help the country; look at the US. Any country which does this kind of stuff will have to pay the piper down the road.
I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant.
Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted.
This is certainly true, that there is a large amount of debate in paleontology. Even some of the fundamental mechanisms of evolution are not well understood. But when scientists do this debating, they are certainly not doing it with a view towards political ramifications. Ok, so the origin of humanity gets pushed around a few hundred thousand years. So what? If someone calls me up tomorrow and tells me the muon weighs twice as much as we thought it did, I 'm not going to freak.
Now, on the other hand, there are people with a political axe to grind, and they sometimes like to interpret scientific notions in their own way. But this is a different story.
Nor is it intended to be. New Scientist is a compendium of abstracts from serious scientific journals that have been edited to read by non-scientists.
I would disagree with this statement, at least to some degree. It is true that NS publishes abstracts of papers out there. But it does quite a bit more. You say that it edits it to be read by non-scientists, but the problem is that in such a review journal, the editors have to explain the implications of a scientific position. And very frequently, NS goes way overboard in their interpretation, IMHO. For example, one experiment measures the mass of some particle or another and finds it disagrees with previous measurements by 10%. NS then has a three-page article, complete with quotations from all kinds of people, about how this portends the death of quantum mechanics, etc., etc., et bloody cetera. Frankly, the letter section may in fact be the most entertaining, since it is always either someone bitching about something or another that the EU did, or someone ragging NS for their irresponsible comments.
In this case the study was published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn758).
This is exactly my point. Contrast the conclusions made in the Nature paper to those made in the NS article, and this is exactly my point.
Now as to the article as a whole, I think the study was little pointless if at all it was attempting to prove is that intelligence has a significant genetic component. If it didn't then humans would have the same level of intelligence as our ape ancestors.
This is an interesting argument. I think you're right, this of course shows that there is a significant physical difference between the brains of humans and, say, chimps. But, here's a good question: does this imply that there is a significant variation of brain function withinhomo sapiens? This seems to me to be the crucial question.
I've read a dozen books by Gould and I still have no ideas where along the political spectrum his opinions lie.
This would suggest, then, that his alleged political biases don't come through so strongly, eh?
Go back and read my post, anyway. I didn't say that SJG was the complete and total expert in the field and anything he says is gospel. I just said that if you want to understand the issues, this is certainly one place to go. He is a good writer and a reasonably good scientist.
And even getting more into it, it's not at all clear to me how this is tied in with politics. I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant. As a matter of fact, I think this is something which is symptomatic of the average American's bad misapprehension with how science works. Very frequently, scientific issues become political issues, and people question scientists' statements by their political ramifications. I oculd write a long list of these. Believe me, with very few exceptions, scientists are not political creatures at all. If a scientist says something, it may be right, and it may be wrong, but he's not saying it because of some ulterior motive.
It's a shame that Americans are so cynical today that they question the motives of the only truth-tellers out there.
So, first of all,let me say that, in general, the New Scientist is, IMHO, much closer to pseudoscience than science. It's maybe a good thing to read while you're eating lunch, but it's not a very serious publication. I think perhaps the title "New Pseudo-Scientific Mystic" might be perhaps more accurate. So I'm not too surprised to see this come out of there. Ok, enough trolling.
I think these studies are in general highly misinterpreted, which has been done so here. For example, in the article they refer to MRI studies in the similarities of identical twins' brains. Ok, great. Why would you expect anything different? These dudes look the same, they're built the same, of course their brains have similar structure. But given that our models of cognition are shite at this point in time, to extrapolate from a structural similarity to a functional similarity is preposterous.
Furthermore, this whole IQ testing thing is pretty much bunk to begin with. Quoting from the article:
These tests hone in on what's known as "g", the common element measured by IQ tests. People who do well on one of these tests tend to do well on them all, says Thompson.
Now, as we who have taken a statistics class know, when you do 17 tests which have a very high degree of correlation, you don't do all 17 damn tests, because they're all measuring the same thing. So you just do one. Second, to assume that you're actually measuring something real is also pretty ridiculous. If the only evidence that something exists is that you've designed 17 tests (which are all highly correlated), then you need to take Stats 101.
There is a very good exposition of all of these issues in Steven J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man. I would advise anyone who wants to understand some of the scientific issues in this field, as opposed to the crap, should look at that book.
Do you suppose having large icebergs break off is a symptom of global warming? Or does it just happen every once in a while?
Icebergs break off all of the time, although I think this is a really big one as far as that goes. I think that one shouldn't consider one iceberg a symptom of global warming, because it's just not that big in the grand scheme of things.
I would just guess that higher temperatures are making, not so much bigger icebergs, but just many more medium size icebergs.
Actually, it turns out that negative numbers are prime, mathematically. It works like this. Anytime you have a "ring" of objects (think of ring as set of objects where you've defined addition and multiplication), there are special elements of that set called "units". These are the elements in the ring which you can divide by, and stay in the set. For example, for the regular integers, the units are 1 and -1. In particular, 2 in not a unit because if you divide by 2, you don't get integers any more.
The way primes are defined in mathematics is that you say that a number is prime if it can only be divided by a unit, or, equivalently, p is prime if, whenever p divides ab, then p must divide either a or b. It is an easy theorem to show that a unit multiplied by a prime is also a prime. Thus, whenever n is prime, then so is (-n).
So, mathematically, it is more appropriate to say that -5 is prime just like 5 is. Of course, it is taught differently in elementary schools, where we say that a prime is positive integer which only has factors one and itself, but this is actually not quite correct.
Now, of course, a reasonable question is why would we consider primes of sets other than the integers? First, it turns out that the definitions, and most of the theorems, of number theory hold in any ring, i.e. any set with both an addition and a multiplication. It's a nice generalization to deal with other sets. Second, it is also practically useful if you're trying to prove things for regular integers also. Unfortunately, the examples for this are a bit too complicated, but trust me, this notion is useful.
}
Why globalism is the best idea around.
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I admit the title is somewhat provocative, but I really will try to answer the question. I claim that globalism is the best hope for any notion of equality across the world, any stopping to human rights abuses across the world, and for that most elusive of ideals, "world peace".
Let me start by saying that it is, in this country, essentially the popular leftist ideal to be anti-globalism. At the risk of looking rightist (which I think I am not), I will defend globalism.
First, I'll try to answer the question as to why globalism is good by dealing with the arguments against it. It seems that one major argument against globalism is simply that it allows our American corporations to go into (say) a third-world country, and take advantage of the people there. Or something along those lines. In general, the anti-globalism arguments are anti-corporate-domination arguments.
Now, believe me, I have no love lost for big corporations, but I think anti-globalism would actually make the problem worse. There are two bad things corporations can do by entering another country. The first is economically exploit the country, and the second is culturally homogenize the country.
I think the first point, the one about economic exploitation, can be dealt with in the following way. The argument against globalization is that we will show up, exploit the workers, and bring the profits back here. This is not an optimal solution to anything, I agree. If the alternative to American corporations showing up were some sort of local, culturally accurate, agrarian paradise, then I would say that American presense is bad. But I think this utopian alternative along exists only in the mind of disillusioned Westerners. The alternative to American (or in general foreign) corporations in a third-world country is similar to what one can see in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Burma... local dudes who do the same thing, but are even worse. As bad as Shell Oil might be in what it does, can you compare it to Idi Amin? This is what happens in a power vacuum.
Now, I don't want to sound like the argument is "the elightened West" brining freedom and democracy to the poor, downtrodden people of the world. Because that's a fantasy, too. We're not very idealistic about things as we would like to believe. But the one thing that Western democracies have, which is rare in other parts of the world (but certainly not nonexistent, Japan and India being two good examples), is that we have a long-standing tradition of civil disobedience and (if need be) revolution if our leaders (or corporations) get out of line. I mean, sure, the oil companies in the US do some crazy stuff. But, they
have to do it in secret, because we simply won't put up with certain things
have to respond to public opinion.
Now, the question is, how on earth does the working class in the US, England, or wherever, have so much power compared to other countries? The answer to the question is, I think, economic. First of all, because my personal middle-class economics are so good, I have time to think these things through, and question what is told to me. If I'm spending sunup to sundown farming, I don't have energy to question anything or educate myself on the issues. Second, I actually have economic power over these companies. If we as a people decide a company is going to go out of business, we tell them to go to hell. They can't use the local police or armed forces to strongarm us into doing their will. They must listen to the middle-class, because we are middle-class.
On a similar note, people deride globalization as allowing American (say) companies to move into other countries. What I think this argument doesn't appreciate is that there is nothing stopping American companies from moving into an area now, no matter what the policy of the US government is. You will never stop the oil companies of the US from moving into places where there is oil. It is completely inconceivable that you could do so. The question in the balance is, how do we force American companies to act abroad the same way they do at home? Some reflection on this question points to the fact that these things must be controlled by the local people, that we can do only so much. And in these countries, the people will have the power to control these things only when they have generated the economic power to do so. This requires that we allow American companies to go to these other countries. There will be some growing pains at first. But we can hold American companies accountable for what they do overseas just as easily. If you want to refuse to buy Nike products because of what they do in SE Asia, vote with your dollars. But you cannot, in any sense, make the company come home. You can only require it to act the way it does here. This is an important point, so let me restress it: we cannot make American companies not do business overseas, but we can only require that thy act there the same way they do here. That's how you help the overseas people, because any notion of stopping globalism is a radical pipe-dream, which, in the end, only hurts the people you're putatively trying to help.
One note about cultural homogenization: Anyone who has left the country and gone pretty much anywhere should have been struck by how heterogeneous the US is, and about how mulitcultural we allow ourselves to be. I've never been to most parts of Asia (or any of Africa) myself, but I can talk about Europe, Central and South America, and East Asia. And although we have some ways to go to destroy racism, and to economically invest our minorities, we are light-years ahead of just about anywhere else. I don't deny that it is hard to be a minority in this country, but it is
a hell of a lot better than being a Turk in Germany or a North African in Paris, and
being anyone in, say, Central Africa.
And I think any serious discussion of these issues must recognize the fact that since everyone is so economically empowered in the US (as compared to the rest of the world), that even the groups that are worst off here are doing pretty damn good.
Now, that's dealing with all the arguments against globalism. What is an argument for it? Simply the following claim: that making the rest of the world economically more like the United States is
good for the world as a whole,
good for the people of the world,
the most humane thing possible.
I think we can all agree that it is better to be in the US than it is in most third-world countries. Of course, I think the knee-jerk response to this (which gives rise to the anti-globalist ideology) is that you can't know that it's better. Well, we can tangle ourselves in circles all day about definitions of better or worse and economic stuff, but my evidence is simple: people are falling all over each other to get into the US, whereas the number of US emigrants to Chad is a bit small. In the court of world public opinion, people love this kind of thing. And why wouldn't they? Instead of starving working your ass off somewhere, here there is ample work to be done, and wonderful pay and benefits. (And this is another argument for the power of the populace: unions and health benefits do not exist becuase corporations, out of the goodness of their heart, have seen fit to bestow these things on us. We have taken them, through strikes and public opinion.)
It is also good for the world as a whole, because globalization, by diffusion of capital, will lead to a equalization of economic strength the world over. This is clear, and is obviously implied by the principles of economics. Now, most people who are anti-globalist are suspicious of this argument, because it sounds like I'm claiming that we will freely give away our advantages in the world. But it is not a zero-sum game. By equalization of economies around the world, we all gain.
Lastly, it will make things more peaceful. If all there was in this world was middle-class, there would be no need for conflict. Conflict almost always is started by a economically disenfranchised group which wants to get by force what it can't get otherwise. You don't want to go to war if you have a minivan and a DVD player
Ok, maybe I waxed a little there, but, hey... I think this is an important issue, and I think the anti-globalism crowd does have their hearts in the right place, they just don't have their heads in the right place on this one.
This is completely and totally wrong. First of all, the only reason that I heard of this in the first place was/., because all of the web news sites were down. Of course, I didn't know anything was up at all until I actually saw something on/.
Second, I definitely got useful information from/. long before I got it from anywhere. Since I have people in Queens, it was very important to me to know exactly where the plane had gone down. I could get none of this information from any news websites, but I got it from a early post.
Now, of course, the information one gets in/. posts is a bit less reliable than that from CNN, but, so? Obviously the 50 messages talking about whether or not it was terrorism were content-free, but there is certainly a possibility to get facts out to the public in such a forum. You have the chance of spreading misinformation, but anyone who blindly believes everything they hear on/. deserves to be misinformed, frankly.
The irony would be amusing were this subject not so important.
To all of those people - will you please not talk about things you don't understand? It's very easy to talk about freedom of speech whilst being very far away from the real issues, posting comfortably over your DSL link. Right here, right now, teenagers are being seduced into neo-fascist ideological groups every day. In France alone, there are local governments which have started banning books and newspapers that oppose them; Germany saw hundreds of attacks on blacks and non-Germans, with many of them dying in the attacks. [my emphasis]
Read that bold part again. Apparently, the author of this post abhors censorship of unwelcome ideas if his opponents are doing it, but encourages those with whom he agrees to censor all they want.
I think there is a distinction to be made between the two. I know that some of the replies to this have already made this point, but I want to put a different twist on it.
We can certainly make a distinction between the types of information, or speech, that are banned. At one coarse level, we can distinguish between banning something which you, as a political party or other group, disagree with, and society deciding that some type of speech is simply generally unacceptable. Once we make this distinction, we can decide that one is acceptable when the other is not.
There's a good example in the US. We would all consider it completely insane if the majority party (right now the Republicans) decided that anything concurrent with the ideology of the minority party (right now the Democrats) should be banned. If anything like this were proposed, the American people would got completely berzerk, and/. would probably get/.'ed itself under all of the comments on that. On the other hand, we have decided as a society that child pornography is simply unacceptable, and feel comfortable banning it.
One defense of this distinction which is often raised is that child porn hurts members of society. But certainly spreading Nazi propaganda can have ill effects, and we are loath to restrict that. On the other hand, there are members of our society and government who propose that all pornography is harmful to women, and should thus be banned. I claim that the distinction is not "harm", but whether something is minority political speech, or something just generally repugnant. In either case, if we allow ourselves to distinguish between these two different types of speech, then we have to make a judgement call.
Now, of course, the obvious question is, who makes the judgement call, and how do we make it in an objective way? This is exactly one of the difficult questions which makes self-government a challenge. One viewpoint is to say, well, this is a hard question, so we should ignore it, and therefore everything should be allowed under all circumstances. This is what I would call a "radical free speech" position, which is something which I think could only exist in America. And maybe this is the best answer, that the best answer to the question of where to draw the line is no line, i.e. ultimate freedom. But the majority of Americans would not agree with this in general, as evidenced by the fact that child pornography is illegal, and most people agree with that.
The difference between the US and Europe on this one is that we automatically associate any neo-Nazi stuff into the first group, i.e. it is a political stance, therefore should be ultimately protected, etc., and the Europeans put it in the second group, i.e. it is something which is generally repugnant to civilization and can thus be banned.
Now, I (probably because I am an American) agree with our viewpoint and think that it should be put out there so that it can be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. But you must remember that this is a judgement call and that we and the Europeans obviously have made a different call. It is not a question of whether or not Europeans value free speech, but simply a question of classification.
Sorry to jump into the middle of a thread hours after it ended, but you guys were obviously up all night...:)
Blockquoth the poster:
Does a community have a right to protect itself from being harmed?
Indeed. And the most grevious harm that can be done to a community through speech is the repression of any of it.
I would have to say that this last statement is not in any sense absolutely true. This isn't really much more than an opinion, and in fact the most it could be is an ideological statement. This is an ideology that we find dear in the US, but you have to realize it is in no sense absolute.
I must confess that I agree with you on this point; I believe strongly in the 1st Amendment, being an American. But this is not a universal opinion. Most citizens of the world, even today, would not agree with that statement. Certianly fewer would have agreed with it 500 years ago. Will this ideology be the majority one for humanity 500 years in the future? I certainly hope so, but I can also see it going the other way.
Only if all people are free to speak their minds on all topics, without prior restraint or fear of governmental retribution, is a nation free.
This is in fact true. This would even be a good operative definition of "free". But your argument makes the assumption that "free = good to the community". Again, I agree with you, but this is not universal.
The lesson drawn from history is that any restraint of speech based on content, no matter how well-intentioned, is corrosive to the freedom of the people involved.
I'm not sure if this is a defendable statement. It would depend highly on your definition of the phrase "corrosive to the freedom on the people". Certainly, a restriction on free speech is a restriction on the freedom of speech of the people; this is a tautology, since this would be how we define "freedom of speech". But if I interpret some content in your statement, especially using the connotation of the word "corrosive", it seems as if you are saying that a restricting of speech leads to a slow loss in other freedoms.
This is a statement for which there is much contrary evidence. For example, consider England, from, say, Magna Carta to U.S. Revolution. In no sense was there ever a notion of something equivalent to the 1st amendment. There was a notion of freedom of speech and press, but it was highly restrictive by modern American standards. Yet, during this same time period, we saw the modernization and development of the notion of "free citizenry". These people were continually invested in certain rights, while not having an absolute freedom of speech.
Now, I do agree with you that a citizenry needs some notion of freedom of speech and press, or freedoms will erode. But history teaches us the exact opposite of what you claim, that these freedoms not need be absolute.
Show me where, in the Constitution, one has a right to remain silent, a right to seek a safe and legal abortion, or the right to use birth control.
Well, the first one, I would say that's covered by the 1st and 5th amendments, depending on the situation. Or not covered at all, in other situations. For example, if it is proven in a court of law that you have evidence of a crime (or you have even been served a subpoena), you are forced to testify or you'll be held in contempt. For example, see here for Cal. Gov. Code 9405. In no sense do you have a "right to remain silent" if you have information about a crime. There are cases where you can remain silent, for example the 5th amendment says you don't have to incriminate yourself.
As for the others, it is not clear that these are Consitutional rights, to me, at least. Even being pro-choice, I'm not sure the reasoning in Roe v. Wade is anything but contrived. And given the tenuous support it has in the High Court today, I'm not alone. Of course, I won't say this too loudly, because, hey.
In general, though, I think it would be disingenuous for someone to declare the death of the US Constitution because they were restricted access to birth control or abortion. This was my original point, that, whether these things should be around or not can be debated, and just because something we are used to goes away, it is not a sign of the demise of the Constitution.
Well, to be honest, you can't. It takes some... eh... "interpretation". But that doesn't make these rights any less "Constitutional". That's because the true Constitution-of-the-USA is more than just the document referred to as "the Constitution".
This is a good point. That being said, it's not even clear to me what in the Constitution should be interpreted as a right to privacy in this situation. If you're a prisoner, you certainly don't have the right to privacy when communicating with any other member of the outside world. For an even more egregious example, you don't even have the right to keep the inside of your body, even yo acehole, private [insert goatse.cx joke here]. Since the courts have been very happy to restrict prisoners' right to privacy, it is just as reasonable to not consider this "right" as "Constitutional".
Bet your bottom dollar this will be a US Supreme Court case.
"Honestly, I think we need to cut the government a little slack and remember that 9/11 really happened."
That shouldn't matter.
Once upon a time, the Constitution was worth a whole lot more than just 6000 lives.
Still is.
Show me where, in the Constitution, one has a right to private communication with one's lawyer. Now, we consider losing this "right" a step backward, but the "right" of private communication with one's lawyer is not a right dilineated in the Constitution.
Your response would be correct if this one of our Constitutional rights, because they are not to be given up easily, and certainly not for something like this. But this is at best a privilege, and thus can be given up.
They are putting the listening devices in, and being trusted to turn them on and off at the correct time. "No potential for abuse" is a bit optimistic. Hollywood didn't come up with the idea of "accidentally" letting the witness see the guy getting booked and other charades on their own.
No, the point is is that there is a fear that if the authorities can monitor your conversation with your attorney, then you will not be as forthcoming. In other words, if I were arrested tomorrow, if I didn't know whether or not I was being monitored, then I would be careful with what I was saying to my attorney. But as this standard states, the authorities must inform you beforehand. So, even today, I can still have the confidence that they are not listening in, until they tell me.
Have you ever tried to backwards engineer anything? It is a lot easier to do the detective work to find evidence if you know what you are looking for during the search. The monitoring itself can't be used as evidence, but it can be used for other things, including locating other evidence to be used against you in a court of law.
Look, the algorithm is simple. Once they tell you that you are being monitored, then don't say anything that will incriminate yourself. As far as I can tell, your argument against it is that it restricts the rights of the guilty to get away with something. I see no way in which an innocent man could be hurt by this type of monitoring.
The biggest problem I see with this is that even if the DOJ followed the rules and didn't misuse the information, there's no way for a defendant in criminal prosecution to be sure. If you are being prosecuted and you know that your every conversation with your attorney is being listened too, how forthcoming will you be with them? You can't assume that the DOJ isn't breaking their own rules, so you clam up. The end result is that defense attorneys may have less information to work with and will be unable to build a proper defense for their clients. Eventually the courts will probably tell the DOJ they can't do this but in the mean time, how many people's legal cases will be effected by this new policy.
This is true, you have to worry that DOJ is breaking their own rules. But, let's imagine that this newest development didn't happen in the first place. As it stands now, DOJ can't monitor your conversation at all, and then use the info in court. But if they wanted to break their own rules today, they could surreptitiously monitor your conversation.
Ok, fine. In the new situation, they certainly won't be able to use this info in court, because then they would still have to convince a judge that it was admissible. The situation would be even more against them now, because they would have to show that the information they obtained was not gained in an inappropriate manner.
We still have judges, and the judges (for the most part) aren't stupid, so our rights are fine. I think most people are worried that DOJ will abuse this power, and this is a valid fear, but you have to remember, what stops overzealous prosecutors from going nuts is judges. With or without this new policy.
I realize they're saying that they are only going to use information about the person's "ongoing" crime or crime's they're considering committing, but who among us really believes them?
Perhaps you're right. But if you're assuming that the government is going to break the law anyway, how does this change anything? Why don't they just monitor you now, and not tell you?
There are a few things in the article which are not mentioned, or perhaps even misrepresented, in the summary. When I first read the summary, I was both surprised and worried, because it sounds pretty rough.
But as the CNN article states, this monitoring has many restrictions. First, the detainee must be informed of it, so there is no potential for the type of abuse which would make all detainees afraid to speak to their attorney; everyone would know when they were subject to such monitoring. Second, and even more importantly, this monitoring cannot be used as evidence against the detainee. The summary doesn't mention this, and this is crucial. The monitoring can only be used for informational purposes, to stop other crimes. And it is common that detainees communicate with the outside world with their lawyers, and I'm sure we can all believe there are situations where the detainee is communicating details of future crimes to their associates.
I guess one thing is true is that this probably has less to do with terrorism than the administration would have us believe. It seems as though this is something which would be more effective against organized crime than terrorism.
But once you actually read the article, this isn't such a big deal, and, in the grand scheme of things, might even be a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
This might even in fact be more reasonable, since it is in fact impossible to well-order events in time without referring to their distance from the observer. By your scheme, the "first extra-solar planet" is not even well-defined.
I've heard this argument quite a few times, which essentially boils down to "when a country censors the net, the citizens become less free, thus the emergence of the Net has reduced freedom, not encouraged it". But perhaps a little perspective? If Saudi Arabia restricts the right of its citizens to use the Net, how are they less free than if the Net never existed at all? This isn't a step backward for these people, it's at worst the status quo.
Plus, it's just a matter of time. Saudi Arabia's restricting of the Net certainly doesn't help the country; look at the US. Any country which does this kind of stuff will have to pay the piper down the road.
Eh?
Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted.
This is certainly true, that there is a large amount of debate in paleontology. Even some of the fundamental mechanisms of evolution are not well understood. But when scientists do this debating, they are certainly not doing it with a view towards political ramifications. Ok, so the origin of humanity gets pushed around a few hundred thousand years. So what? If someone calls me up tomorrow and tells me the muon weighs twice as much as we thought it did, I 'm not going to freak.
Now, on the other hand, there are people with a political axe to grind, and they sometimes like to interpret scientific notions in their own way. But this is a different story.
I've heard it said that Arthur C. Clarke had the idea for geosynchronous satellites, and wrote about them in a few of his novels.
Who is Kimmy?
I would disagree with this statement, at least to some degree. It is true that NS publishes abstracts of papers out there. But it does quite a bit more. You say that it edits it to be read by non-scientists, but the problem is that in such a review journal, the editors have to explain the implications of a scientific position. And very frequently, NS goes way overboard in their interpretation, IMHO. For example, one experiment measures the mass of some particle or another and finds it disagrees with previous measurements by 10%. NS then has a three-page article, complete with quotations from all kinds of people, about how this portends the death of quantum mechanics, etc., etc., et bloody cetera. Frankly, the letter section may in fact be the most entertaining, since it is always either someone bitching about something or another that the EU did, or someone ragging NS for their irresponsible comments.
In this case the study was published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn758).
This is exactly my point. Contrast the conclusions made in the Nature paper to those made in the NS article, and this is exactly my point.
Now as to the article as a whole, I think the study was little pointless if at all it was attempting to prove is that intelligence has a significant genetic component. If it didn't then humans would have the same level of intelligence as our ape ancestors.
This is an interesting argument. I think you're right, this of course shows that there is a significant physical difference between the brains of humans and, say, chimps. But, here's a good question: does this imply that there is a significant variation of brain function within homo sapiens? This seems to me to be the crucial question.
This would suggest, then, that his alleged political biases don't come through so strongly, eh?
Go back and read my post, anyway. I didn't say that SJG was the complete and total expert in the field and anything he says is gospel. I just said that if you want to understand the issues, this is certainly one place to go. He is a good writer and a reasonably good scientist.
And even getting more into it, it's not at all clear to me how this is tied in with politics. I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant. As a matter of fact, I think this is something which is symptomatic of the average American's bad misapprehension with how science works. Very frequently, scientific issues become political issues, and people question scientists' statements by their political ramifications. I oculd write a long list of these. Believe me, with very few exceptions, scientists are not political creatures at all. If a scientist says something, it may be right, and it may be wrong, but he's not saying it because of some ulterior motive.
It's a shame that Americans are so cynical today that they question the motives of the only truth-tellers out there.
I think these studies are in general highly misinterpreted, which has been done so here. For example, in the article they refer to MRI studies in the similarities of identical twins' brains. Ok, great. Why would you expect anything different? These dudes look the same, they're built the same, of course their brains have similar structure. But given that our models of cognition are shite at this point in time, to extrapolate from a structural similarity to a functional similarity is preposterous.
Furthermore, this whole IQ testing thing is pretty much bunk to begin with. Quoting from the article:
Now, as we who have taken a statistics class know, when you do 17 tests which have a very high degree of correlation, you don't do all 17 damn tests, because they're all measuring the same thing. So you just do one. Second, to assume that you're actually measuring something real is also pretty ridiculous. If the only evidence that something exists is that you've designed 17 tests (which are all highly correlated), then you need to take Stats 101.There is a very good exposition of all of these issues in Steven J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man. I would advise anyone who wants to understand some of the scientific issues in this field, as opposed to the crap, should look at that book.
Actually, I'm not sure if I'm joking.
Icebergs break off all of the time, although I think this is a really big one as far as that goes. I think that one shouldn't consider one iceberg a symptom of global warming, because it's just not that big in the grand scheme of things.
I would just guess that higher temperatures are making, not so much bigger icebergs, but just many more medium size icebergs.
Well, there's a lot more where that came from...:)
Yes. This is a consequence of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Actually, it turns out that negative numbers are prime, mathematically. It works like this. Anytime you have a "ring" of objects (think of ring as set of objects where you've defined addition and multiplication), there are special elements of that set called "units". These are the elements in the ring which you can divide by, and stay in the set. For example, for the regular integers, the units are 1 and -1. In particular, 2 in not a unit because if you divide by 2, you don't get integers any more.
The way primes are defined in mathematics is that you say that a number is prime if it can only be divided by a unit, or, equivalently, p is prime if, whenever p divides ab, then p must divide either a or b. It is an easy theorem to show that a unit multiplied by a prime is also a prime. Thus, whenever n is prime, then so is (-n).
So, mathematically, it is more appropriate to say that -5 is prime just like 5 is. Of course, it is taught differently in elementary schools, where we say that a prime is positive integer which only has factors one and itself, but this is actually not quite correct.
Now, of course, a reasonable question is why would we consider primes of sets other than the integers? First, it turns out that the definitions, and most of the theorems, of number theory hold in any ring, i.e. any set with both an addition and a multiplication. It's a nice generalization to deal with other sets. Second, it is also practically useful if you're trying to prove things for regular integers also. Unfortunately, the examples for this are a bit too complicated, but trust me, this notion is useful.
}
Let me start by saying that it is, in this country, essentially the popular leftist ideal to be anti-globalism. At the risk of looking rightist (which I think I am not), I will defend globalism.
First, I'll try to answer the question as to why globalism is good by dealing with the arguments against it. It seems that one major argument against globalism is simply that it allows our American corporations to go into (say) a third-world country, and take advantage of the people there. Or something along those lines. In general, the anti-globalism arguments are anti-corporate-domination arguments.
Now, believe me, I have no love lost for big corporations, but I think anti-globalism would actually make the problem worse. There are two bad things corporations can do by entering another country. The first is economically exploit the country, and the second is culturally homogenize the country.
I think the first point, the one about economic exploitation, can be dealt with in the following way. The argument against globalization is that we will show up, exploit the workers, and bring the profits back here. This is not an optimal solution to anything, I agree. If the alternative to American corporations showing up were some sort of local, culturally accurate, agrarian paradise, then I would say that American presense is bad. But I think this utopian alternative along exists only in the mind of disillusioned Westerners. The alternative to American (or in general foreign) corporations in a third-world country is similar to what one can see in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Burma... local dudes who do the same thing, but are even worse. As bad as Shell Oil might be in what it does, can you compare it to Idi Amin? This is what happens in a power vacuum.
Now, I don't want to sound like the argument is "the elightened West" brining freedom and democracy to the poor, downtrodden people of the world. Because that's a fantasy, too. We're not very idealistic about things as we would like to believe. But the one thing that Western democracies have, which is rare in other parts of the world (but certainly not nonexistent, Japan and India being two good examples), is that we have a long-standing tradition of civil disobedience and (if need be) revolution if our leaders (or corporations) get out of line. I mean, sure, the oil companies in the US do some crazy stuff. But, they
Now, the question is, how on earth does the working class in the US, England, or wherever, have so much power compared to other countries? The answer to the question is, I think, economic. First of all, because my personal middle-class economics are so good, I have time to think these things through, and question what is told to me. If I'm spending sunup to sundown farming, I don't have energy to question anything or educate myself on the issues. Second, I actually have economic power over these companies. If we as a people decide a company is going to go out of business, we tell them to go to hell. They can't use the local police or armed forces to strongarm us into doing their will. They must listen to the middle-class, because we are middle-class.
On a similar note, people deride globalization as allowing American (say) companies to move into other countries. What I think this argument doesn't appreciate is that there is nothing stopping American companies from moving into an area now, no matter what the policy of the US government is. You will never stop the oil companies of the US from moving into places where there is oil. It is completely inconceivable that you could do so. The question in the balance is, how do we force American companies to act abroad the same way they do at home? Some reflection on this question points to the fact that these things must be controlled by the local people, that we can do only so much. And in these countries, the people will have the power to control these things only when they have generated the economic power to do so. This requires that we allow American companies to go to these other countries. There will be some growing pains at first. But we can hold American companies accountable for what they do overseas just as easily. If you want to refuse to buy Nike products because of what they do in SE Asia, vote with your dollars. But you cannot, in any sense, make the company come home. You can only require it to act the way it does here. This is an important point, so let me restress it: we cannot make American companies not do business overseas, but we can only require that thy act there the same way they do here. That's how you help the overseas people, because any notion of stopping globalism is a radical pipe-dream, which, in the end, only hurts the people you're putatively trying to help.
One note about cultural homogenization: Anyone who has left the country and gone pretty much anywhere should have been struck by how heterogeneous the US is, and about how mulitcultural we allow ourselves to be. I've never been to most parts of Asia (or any of Africa) myself, but I can talk about Europe, Central and South America, and East Asia. And although we have some ways to go to destroy racism, and to economically invest our minorities, we are light-years ahead of just about anywhere else. I don't deny that it is hard to be a minority in this country, but it is
- a hell of a lot better than being a Turk in Germany or a North African in Paris, and
- being anyone in, say, Central Africa.
And I think any serious discussion of these issues must recognize the fact that since everyone is so economically empowered in the US (as compared to the rest of the world), that even the groups that are worst off here are doing pretty damn good.Now, that's dealing with all the arguments against globalism. What is an argument for it? Simply the following claim: that making the rest of the world economically more like the United States is
I think we can all agree that it is better to be in the US than it is in most third-world countries. Of course, I think the knee-jerk response to this (which gives rise to the anti-globalist ideology) is that you can't know that it's better. Well, we can tangle ourselves in circles all day about definitions of better or worse and economic stuff, but my evidence is simple: people are falling all over each other to get into the US, whereas the number of US emigrants to Chad is a bit small. In the court of world public opinion, people love this kind of thing. And why wouldn't they? Instead of starving working your ass off somewhere, here there is ample work to be done, and wonderful pay and benefits. (And this is another argument for the power of the populace: unions and health benefits do not exist becuase corporations, out of the goodness of their heart, have seen fit to bestow these things on us. We have taken them, through strikes and public opinion.)
It is also good for the world as a whole, because globalization, by diffusion of capital, will lead to a equalization of economic strength the world over. This is clear, and is obviously implied by the principles of economics. Now, most people who are anti-globalist are suspicious of this argument, because it sounds like I'm claiming that we will freely give away our advantages in the world. But it is not a zero-sum game. By equalization of economies around the world, we all gain.
Lastly, it will make things more peaceful. If all there was in this world was middle-class, there would be no need for conflict. Conflict almost always is started by a economically disenfranchised group which wants to get by force what it can't get otherwise. You don't want to go to war if you have a minivan and a DVD player
Ok, maybe I waxed a little there, but, hey... I think this is an important issue, and I think the anti-globalism crowd does have their hearts in the right place, they just don't have their heads in the right place on this one.
Second, I definitely got useful information from /. long before I got it from anywhere. Since I have people in Queens, it was very important to me to know exactly where the plane had gone down. I could get none of this information from any news websites, but I got it from a early post.
Now, of course, the information one gets in /. posts is a bit less reliable than that from CNN, but, so? Obviously the 50 messages talking about whether or not it was terrorism were content-free, but there is certainly a possibility to get facts out to the public in such a forum. You have the chance of spreading misinformation, but anyone who blindly believes everything they hear on /. deserves to be misinformed, frankly.
Read that bold part again. Apparently, the author of this post abhors censorship of unwelcome ideas if his opponents are doing it, but encourages those with whom he agrees to censor all they want.
I think there is a distinction to be made between the two. I know that some of the replies to this have already made this point, but I want to put a different twist on it.
We can certainly make a distinction between the types of information, or speech, that are banned. At one coarse level, we can distinguish between banning something which you, as a political party or other group, disagree with, and society deciding that some type of speech is simply generally unacceptable. Once we make this distinction, we can decide that one is acceptable when the other is not.
There's a good example in the US. We would all consider it completely insane if the majority party (right now the Republicans) decided that anything concurrent with the ideology of the minority party (right now the Democrats) should be banned. If anything like this were proposed, the American people would got completely berzerk, and /. would probably get /.'ed itself under all of the comments on that. On the other hand, we have decided as a society that child pornography is simply unacceptable, and feel comfortable banning it.
One defense of this distinction which is often raised is that child porn hurts members of society. But certainly spreading Nazi propaganda can have ill effects, and we are loath to restrict that. On the other hand, there are members of our society and government who propose that all pornography is harmful to women, and should thus be banned. I claim that the distinction is not "harm", but whether something is minority political speech, or something just generally repugnant. In either case, if we allow ourselves to distinguish between these two different types of speech, then we have to make a judgement call.
Now, of course, the obvious question is, who makes the judgement call, and how do we make it in an objective way? This is exactly one of the difficult questions which makes self-government a challenge. One viewpoint is to say, well, this is a hard question, so we should ignore it, and therefore everything should be allowed under all circumstances. This is what I would call a "radical free speech" position, which is something which I think could only exist in America. And maybe this is the best answer, that the best answer to the question of where to draw the line is no line, i.e. ultimate freedom. But the majority of Americans would not agree with this in general, as evidenced by the fact that child pornography is illegal, and most people agree with that.
The difference between the US and Europe on this one is that we automatically associate any neo-Nazi stuff into the first group, i.e. it is a political stance, therefore should be ultimately protected, etc., and the Europeans put it in the second group, i.e. it is something which is generally repugnant to civilization and can thus be banned.
Now, I (probably because I am an American) agree with our viewpoint and think that it should be put out there so that it can be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. But you must remember that this is a judgement call and that we and the Europeans obviously have made a different call. It is not a question of whether or not Europeans value free speech, but simply a question of classification.
Blockquoth the poster:
Does a community have a right to protect itself from being harmed?
Indeed. And the most grevious harm that can be done to a community through speech is the repression of any of it.
I would have to say that this last statement is not in any sense absolutely true. This isn't really much more than an opinion, and in fact the most it could be is an ideological statement. This is an ideology that we find dear in the US, but you have to realize it is in no sense absolute.
I must confess that I agree with you on this point; I believe strongly in the 1st Amendment, being an American. But this is not a universal opinion. Most citizens of the world, even today, would not agree with that statement. Certianly fewer would have agreed with it 500 years ago. Will this ideology be the majority one for humanity 500 years in the future? I certainly hope so, but I can also see it going the other way.
Only if all people are free to speak their minds on all topics, without prior restraint or fear of governmental retribution, is a nation free.
This is in fact true. This would even be a good operative definition of "free". But your argument makes the assumption that "free = good to the community". Again, I agree with you, but this is not universal.
The lesson drawn from history is that any restraint of speech based on content, no matter how well-intentioned, is corrosive to the freedom of the people involved.
I'm not sure if this is a defendable statement. It would depend highly on your definition of the phrase "corrosive to the freedom on the people". Certainly, a restriction on free speech is a restriction on the freedom of speech of the people; this is a tautology, since this would be how we define "freedom of speech". But if I interpret some content in your statement, especially using the connotation of the word "corrosive", it seems as if you are saying that a restricting of speech leads to a slow loss in other freedoms.
This is a statement for which there is much contrary evidence. For example, consider England, from, say, Magna Carta to U.S. Revolution. In no sense was there ever a notion of something equivalent to the 1st amendment. There was a notion of freedom of speech and press, but it was highly restrictive by modern American standards. Yet, during this same time period, we saw the modernization and development of the notion of "free citizenry". These people were continually invested in certain rights, while not having an absolute freedom of speech.
Now, I do agree with you that a citizenry needs some notion of freedom of speech and press, or freedoms will erode. But history teaches us the exact opposite of what you claim, that these freedoms not need be absolute.
Well, the first one, I would say that's covered by the 1st and 5th amendments, depending on the situation. Or not covered at all, in other situations. For example, if it is proven in a court of law that you have evidence of a crime (or you have even been served a subpoena), you are forced to testify or you'll be held in contempt. For example, see here for Cal. Gov. Code 9405. In no sense do you have a "right to remain silent" if you have information about a crime. There are cases where you can remain silent, for example the 5th amendment says you don't have to incriminate yourself.
As for the others, it is not clear that these are Consitutional rights, to me, at least. Even being pro-choice, I'm not sure the reasoning in Roe v. Wade is anything but contrived. And given the tenuous support it has in the High Court today, I'm not alone. Of course, I won't say this too loudly, because, hey.
In general, though, I think it would be disingenuous for someone to declare the death of the US Constitution because they were restricted access to birth control or abortion. This was my original point, that, whether these things should be around or not can be debated, and just because something we are used to goes away, it is not a sign of the demise of the Constitution.
Well, to be honest, you can't. It takes some ... eh... "interpretation". But that doesn't make these rights any less "Constitutional". That's because the true Constitution-of-the-USA is more than just the document referred to as "the Constitution".
This is a good point. That being said, it's not even clear to me what in the Constitution should be interpreted as a right to privacy in this situation. If you're a prisoner, you certainly don't have the right to privacy when communicating with any other member of the outside world. For an even more egregious example, you don't even have the right to keep the inside of your body, even yo acehole, private [insert goatse.cx joke here]. Since the courts have been very happy to restrict prisoners' right to privacy, it is just as reasonable to not consider this "right" as "Constitutional".
Bet your bottom dollar this will be a US Supreme Court case.
Here we definitely agree.
Actually, from my experience, this may be accurate. :-)
That shouldn't matter.
Once upon a time, the Constitution was worth a whole lot more than just 6000 lives.
Still is.
Show me where, in the Constitution, one has a right to private communication with one's lawyer. Now, we consider losing this "right" a step backward, but the "right" of private communication with one's lawyer is not a right dilineated in the Constitution.
Your response would be correct if this one of our Constitutional rights, because they are not to be given up easily, and certainly not for something like this. But this is at best a privilege, and thus can be given up.
No, the point is is that there is a fear that if the authorities can monitor your conversation with your attorney, then you will not be as forthcoming. In other words, if I were arrested tomorrow, if I didn't know whether or not I was being monitored, then I would be careful with what I was saying to my attorney. But as this standard states, the authorities must inform you beforehand. So, even today, I can still have the confidence that they are not listening in, until they tell me.
Have you ever tried to backwards engineer anything? It is a lot easier to do the detective work to find evidence if you know what you are looking for during the search. The monitoring itself can't be used as evidence, but it can be used for other things, including locating other evidence to be used against you in a court of law.
Look, the algorithm is simple. Once they tell you that you are being monitored, then don't say anything that will incriminate yourself. As far as I can tell, your argument against it is that it restricts the rights of the guilty to get away with something. I see no way in which an innocent man could be hurt by this type of monitoring.
This is true, you have to worry that DOJ is breaking their own rules. But, let's imagine that this newest development didn't happen in the first place. As it stands now, DOJ can't monitor your conversation at all, and then use the info in court. But if they wanted to break their own rules today, they could surreptitiously monitor your conversation.
Ok, fine. In the new situation, they certainly won't be able to use this info in court, because then they would still have to convince a judge that it was admissible. The situation would be even more against them now, because they would have to show that the information they obtained was not gained in an inappropriate manner.
We still have judges, and the judges (for the most part) aren't stupid, so our rights are fine. I think most people are worried that DOJ will abuse this power, and this is a valid fear, but you have to remember, what stops overzealous prosecutors from going nuts is judges. With or without this new policy.
Perhaps you're right. But if you're assuming that the government is going to break the law anyway, how does this change anything? Why don't they just monitor you now, and not tell you?
But as the CNN article states, this monitoring has many restrictions. First, the detainee must be informed of it, so there is no potential for the type of abuse which would make all detainees afraid to speak to their attorney; everyone would know when they were subject to such monitoring. Second, and even more importantly, this monitoring cannot be used as evidence against the detainee. The summary doesn't mention this, and this is crucial. The monitoring can only be used for informational purposes, to stop other crimes. And it is common that detainees communicate with the outside world with their lawyers, and I'm sure we can all believe there are situations where the detainee is communicating details of future crimes to their associates.
I guess one thing is true is that this probably has less to do with terrorism than the administration would have us believe. It seems as though this is something which would be more effective against organized crime than terrorism.
But once you actually read the article, this isn't such a big deal, and, in the grand scheme of things, might even be a good idea.