Facts are what account for evidence, not baseless biased allegations.
Sure. However, hard facts are often not released to the public during an investigation.
Now, if there actually is no evidence of Russian interference, why the resistance to an investigation? If the Trump contacts with Russia were innocuous (as they very well could be), why try to cover them up? The Trump administration looks like it's in cover-up mode, and that raises my suspicions.
Do you actually believe there was a "hack" - an altering or deletion of voting data?
I actually believe that it might well have happened, that Russia would likely do it if they could, and that they have the capability, and that there are very good reasons why most of the evidence is not public.
If you believe that the above is possible then you should be advocating that we return to the old mechanical systems. They are unhackable.
If you're referring to the old machines with levers, they were hackable. It just had to be done a machine at a time, not wholesale in software.
Any voting system needs to keep anonymous voter-verifiable ballots. In my state, we use a large form and black in circles, and these are then fed into a machine, automatically counted, and stored. I'm not saying the machines can't be hacked, but if there's any suspicion of hacking or other inaccuracy (such as a very close election), the paper ballots can be counted.
Ever looked at the prospects of invading France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and large part of eastern europe, in two years?
Sure. None of them were over a large body of water that was patrolled by a much superior navy. Even Norway doesn't fall into that class, as the British were pretty much unable to interfere with the shipping to southern Norway. Germany sent a force to capture Narvik which did have to go through British-accessible waters. The force was destroyed and Narvik retaken, although the Allies decided it wasn't worth keeping Narvik once most of the rest of Norway had fallen. The claim that the invasion of Britain would not have been harder is hilarious. Germany planned for an invasion of Britain at its weakest, and there's good reasons why they never actually tried it. Hitler would have loved to conquer Britain.
So no, it wasn't "likely" for Germany to be able to do anything by invading the USSR
You're using 20/20 hindsight here, which is completely inapplicable to Hitler's decisions at the time. In fact, in 1941 and 1942 the Germans were incredibly more successful than the Germans were in WWI, and that resulted in the fall of the Russian government and a peace treaty very favorable to Germany. There was no compelling reason to think that the Soviet Union and Stalin would be so tremendously more resilient than Tsarist Russia and Nicholas.
This really doesn't help your idea of trying to downplay the embarrassing weakness of the UK armed forces in WWII.
The British Army, while of generally good quality, was never large enough to force a decision against Germany. It's conceivable that the Brits could have conducted all the Western Allied operations through the end of 1943 without the US, but no further. The RAF was strong, and the RN dominated.
I think we can agree that Christians as a whole are more tolerant of homosexuality than Muslims as a whole, but I still don't know about your majorities.
The Muslims I've known have not shown any propensity to go on, or even support, jihads, or to hate infidels. It is possible to be a practicing Muslim without shooting non-Muslims down in the street.
For some Christian denominations, the Bible is sacrosanct. That's how we tend to get young-Earth Creationism, for example. Many of these denominations appear to disregard parts of the Bible that I consider (as an outsider) important.
There are occasional acts of violence against abortion clinics and people who work there, and that looks to me like Christian terrorism. Currently, I'd say there's a lot more Muslim terrorism than Christian.
There are false equivalences, but there are also false differences. Christianity, right now, is a lot more housebroken than Islam, but that's a difference of degree rather than kind. Christianity has been worse behaved, and Islam better behaved, in some historical periods. Most Muslims and most Christians mostly want to live their lives without going on jihad or crusade or whatever. Christians have more support for cherry-picking their scriptures than Muslims have, but I don't know how significant that is.
All generalizations I've seen about organized religion have been at least partly wrong, sometimes way wrong.
The name of the party (translated into English) was National Socialist German Workers' Party. That name dates from well before Hitler took power, back when there was a socialist wing of the party (it never had a communist wing). If you steel yourself to read through Mein Kampf, you will find a discussion on why, even when you change your party's ideology, you don't change the propaganda. In other words, Hitler explained in some detail why, when he got rid of the socialists, he didn't change the party name.
The Nazis, when in power, never practiced socialism. Industrialists were theoretically as bound to obey the Fuehrer as anyone else, but they in practice had a good deal of freedom, as long as they delivered the goods. The US War Production Board exerted more control over US industry than anyone (with the possible exception of Speer in 1944-5) had control over German industry. For example, the WPB would order one aircraft company to license-build aircraft from another company. This is especially noticeable with US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft, since the designation included the manufacturer (so the F4F became the FM, for example). Manufacturers in Germany built their own designs. I'd call the US and UK wartime economies more socialist than the German.
Only a pathetic, ignorant fool would use a term like "mansplaining"
I like the word. It's a quick one-word description of something that happens all too often, and I'm not aware of another such word. It's mildly humorous and pokes fun at a group I happen to be a member of, so I feel like I can use it with a much lower chance of giving offense.
I'm not pathetic, and I know what I'm doing when I use the word, so I'm not ignorant.
Define "creationist question". Ask questions about iffy spots in evolution and you'll get answers. Ask why we don't see speciation in larger animals, and you'll likely get an answer (basically, it takes at least tens of thousands of years under ideal circumstances, so you'll have to be patient). Give the impression that you're not considering what the biologist is saying and you think the biologist has to be wrong for religious reasons, and you'll get a more or less polite brush-off.
This is either false or representative of a seriously-flawed system. Blindly analysing random sets of data is the perfect recipe for disaster.
Except when it works, and it often works much better than you appear to think. What matters is not what you think of the process, but how well the end product works. If the end product does a better job than human judgment, then it is a success.
I don't think that any (serious enough) system aiming to understand any situation has ever been developed by facing the analysis completely blindly
"Understand" is an iffy word here. Does the system actually understand anything? I'd be inclined to say "no". What it apparently can do is predict better than a human. If you choose to not think it possible, fine; lots of people thought rocket propulsion would not work in vacuum, or that heavier-than-air aircraft were impossible or impractical.
And I am completely sure that there is only one way to ever get there: by following the aforementioned steps and by relying on as high-quality information and as expert knowledge as possible.
What interests me about that statement is why you make it. The evidence disagrees with you, and you're apparently as sure of your belief as a devout Catholic is of the Trinity.
A human understanding of the actions to be performed (= accurate prediction of suicides) is a basic requirement.
This is wrong. The basic requirements are a set of data on each individual case, including the desired final outcome. We enter data for patient 1 and whether patient 1 attempted suicide. We do the same for all the other patients in the "training" process. The "required knowledge" is objectively recorded, including whether the patient attempted suicide. The "training" is a mechanical process, producing a set of arbitrary-looking parameters that have no obvious meaning. This is not an attempt to codify human understanding (which an expert system would do), but to create a program that will yield a certain output given certain input.
The developer presumably understands the structure of the program, and how the training process works, but the actual processing uses a set of numbers determined in the training process, and these numbers are typically not understandable. The processing is too intricate to convert this into human judgment. At best, a human with enough time and paper could emulate the computer, but that isn't understanding.
So, we have a mechanical process producing a program whose precise operation is not understandable, so it's not connected with human understanding or intuition. Since it's an entirely different thing from human judgment, it can be either better or worse. In this case, it's worse.
Talking about how your ideas are evident doesn't help. Lots of ideas that are evident turn out to be wrong, and this is one of them. I've done some work with machine learning, so I have a good idea how the AI program works. If this discussion goes nowhere, it's because you don't understand what I'm saying, not that I don't understand what you're saying.
In my experience, scientists love to talk about their work and are delighted to answer halfway intelligent questions about it, as long as they get the impression that someone is listening to what they say.
I see no issue with a policy requiring that the schools in the UW system take a neutral position on political issues.
What's a "political issue"? Are we supposed to ban faculty from talking about climate change, comparative religion, effects of vaccination, or paleontology? All of those have been made into political issues.
If it's a government funded school, shouldn't everyone be guaranteed equal Rights to free expression on the campus? If a group of students shout down a speaker and/or engage in violent behavior to stop an event entirely, isn't the government complicit in interfering with free speech?
First, just because an institution gets some of its money from the government doesn't mean it's part of the government.
Second, there are very good reasons why everyone is not guaranteed equal rights to actual forums. Everybody can say what they want, but not necessarily in the facilities they prefer.
Third, students are normally not government employees, and they don't act at the behest of the government. If students interfere with other people speaking, that's a private matter (the law should be involved if it gets violent, but that's because of any violence rather than free speech).
What you're probably trying to say is that the wage gap becomes small if you stick to similar jobs and similar seniority.A lot of people who apparently feel like you get defensive when asked questions of why the disparity in jobs and seniority, coming up with plausible excuses that often look like mansplaining.
This stuff is complicated. There are no easy-to-find final answers, and I'm very strongly against assuming that this is the best of all possible worlds, and all observed gender differences are biological.
Have you even *been* on college campuses today? The term "inmates are in charge of the asylum" is frighteningly accurate.
What's this "today" stuff about? People have been saying things like that for decades. I haven't seen any significant changes in the rhetoric since I was actually on a campus a lot, observing none of the things you say.
Nazis were in favor of gun control, animal rights, and socialism.
Read some history. The socialism was purged out of the Nazi Party in the early 30s. All totalitarian regimes like to limit ownership of guns, and the Nazis loosened Weimar restrictions on people the Nazis like owning guns. So, what you've got for your argument is animal rights? Why do you think that's left-wing? Along with environmental concerns, animal welfare has been of interest to left and right, not necessarily simultaneously.
State Universities are normally independent organizations that get some of their funding and some of their governance from the state. They are not normally property of the state.
Much religion doesn't involve brainwashing. Religion has done a lot of good in the world. Many people become happier with religion. Many people are better people because of religion. Many religions believe in freedom of thought. They have some things they want you to think, but they want you to think those things because you believe them, and many religious people recognize that people will stop believing in their religion and that's how things go.
Obviously, I'm not talking about all religion, and I can easily come up with counterexamples to everything I claimed, but what I wrote above is true according to my own observation and study.
Everyone demands special privileges. Lots of Christians think they should be allowed to make public schools Christian. Pastafarians are unusual in that they demand the exact same special privileges as others get.
Lots of people abuse children. Last I looked, the statistics were appalling.
Lots of religious fanatics murder people, and that doesn't change much by religion.
At what point do we drop the political correctness and accept that Islam in the present day is more violent than other religions?
Islam, as a religion, isn't violent. I don't know if Muslims are generally more violent than Christians, although I'd guess that's the case. They do tend to justify violence in religious terms more than Christians.
When do we decide that the Islamic religion of the present day is too violent and insist that it reform or be banned?
Never. Banning Islam is establishing thought crime. Insisting that it does anything will do no good. We have to do this the slow way.
If religion were generally the problem, we would see Christians committing violent acts the way Muslims are. The fact is, they're not.
Most Christians, and most Muslims, do not commit violent acts for their religion. There are exceptions in both. The Muslim acts of terrorism seem to get more play in the Western press, and we seem much more offended when a Muslim kills someone than when a Christian does.
Contrast that with fundamentalist Islam and you'll see a huge difference.
Contrasting Catholicism with fundamentalist Christianity also yields a huge difference. The big problem is the "fundamentalist", not the "Islam" or "Christianity".
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Sure. However, hard facts are often not released to the public during an investigation.
Now, if there actually is no evidence of Russian interference, why the resistance to an investigation? If the Trump contacts with Russia were innocuous (as they very well could be), why try to cover them up? The Trump administration looks like it's in cover-up mode, and that raises my suspicions.
I actually believe that it might well have happened, that Russia would likely do it if they could, and that they have the capability, and that there are very good reasons why most of the evidence is not public.
If you're referring to the old machines with levers, they were hackable. It just had to be done a machine at a time, not wholesale in software.
Any voting system needs to keep anonymous voter-verifiable ballots. In my state, we use a large form and black in circles, and these are then fed into a machine, automatically counted, and stored. I'm not saying the machines can't be hacked, but if there's any suspicion of hacking or other inaccuracy (such as a very close election), the paper ballots can be counted.
Sure. None of them were over a large body of water that was patrolled by a much superior navy. Even Norway doesn't fall into that class, as the British were pretty much unable to interfere with the shipping to southern Norway. Germany sent a force to capture Narvik which did have to go through British-accessible waters. The force was destroyed and Narvik retaken, although the Allies decided it wasn't worth keeping Narvik once most of the rest of Norway had fallen. The claim that the invasion of Britain would not have been harder is hilarious. Germany planned for an invasion of Britain at its weakest, and there's good reasons why they never actually tried it. Hitler would have loved to conquer Britain.
You're using 20/20 hindsight here, which is completely inapplicable to Hitler's decisions at the time. In fact, in 1941 and 1942 the Germans were incredibly more successful than the Germans were in WWI, and that resulted in the fall of the Russian government and a peace treaty very favorable to Germany. There was no compelling reason to think that the Soviet Union and Stalin would be so tremendously more resilient than Tsarist Russia and Nicholas.
The British Army, while of generally good quality, was never large enough to force a decision against Germany. It's conceivable that the Brits could have conducted all the Western Allied operations through the end of 1943 without the US, but no further. The RAF was strong, and the RN dominated.
I think we can agree that Christians as a whole are more tolerant of homosexuality than Muslims as a whole, but I still don't know about your majorities.
The Muslims I've known have not shown any propensity to go on, or even support, jihads, or to hate infidels. It is possible to be a practicing Muslim without shooting non-Muslims down in the street.
For some Christian denominations, the Bible is sacrosanct. That's how we tend to get young-Earth Creationism, for example. Many of these denominations appear to disregard parts of the Bible that I consider (as an outsider) important.
There are occasional acts of violence against abortion clinics and people who work there, and that looks to me like Christian terrorism. Currently, I'd say there's a lot more Muslim terrorism than Christian.
There are false equivalences, but there are also false differences. Christianity, right now, is a lot more housebroken than Islam, but that's a difference of degree rather than kind. Christianity has been worse behaved, and Islam better behaved, in some historical periods. Most Muslims and most Christians mostly want to live their lives without going on jihad or crusade or whatever. Christians have more support for cherry-picking their scriptures than Muslims have, but I don't know how significant that is.
All generalizations I've seen about organized religion have been at least partly wrong, sometimes way wrong.
I'm correcting your history.
The name of the party (translated into English) was National Socialist German Workers' Party. That name dates from well before Hitler took power, back when there was a socialist wing of the party (it never had a communist wing). If you steel yourself to read through Mein Kampf, you will find a discussion on why, even when you change your party's ideology, you don't change the propaganda. In other words, Hitler explained in some detail why, when he got rid of the socialists, he didn't change the party name.
The Nazis, when in power, never practiced socialism. Industrialists were theoretically as bound to obey the Fuehrer as anyone else, but they in practice had a good deal of freedom, as long as they delivered the goods. The US War Production Board exerted more control over US industry than anyone (with the possible exception of Speer in 1944-5) had control over German industry. For example, the WPB would order one aircraft company to license-build aircraft from another company. This is especially noticeable with US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft, since the designation included the manufacturer (so the F4F became the FM, for example). Manufacturers in Germany built their own designs. I'd call the US and UK wartime economies more socialist than the German.
Interesting. I don't know enough about it to give a good analysis of the details, though.
I like the word. It's a quick one-word description of something that happens all too often, and I'm not aware of another such word. It's mildly humorous and pokes fun at a group I happen to be a member of, so I feel like I can use it with a much lower chance of giving offense.
I'm not pathetic, and I know what I'm doing when I use the word, so I'm not ignorant.
Define "creationist question". Ask questions about iffy spots in evolution and you'll get answers. Ask why we don't see speciation in larger animals, and you'll likely get an answer (basically, it takes at least tens of thousands of years under ideal circumstances, so you'll have to be patient). Give the impression that you're not considering what the biologist is saying and you think the biologist has to be wrong for religious reasons, and you'll get a more or less polite brush-off.
Except when it works, and it often works much better than you appear to think. What matters is not what you think of the process, but how well the end product works. If the end product does a better job than human judgment, then it is a success.
"Understand" is an iffy word here. Does the system actually understand anything? I'd be inclined to say "no". What it apparently can do is predict better than a human. If you choose to not think it possible, fine; lots of people thought rocket propulsion would not work in vacuum, or that heavier-than-air aircraft were impossible or impractical.
What interests me about that statement is why you make it. The evidence disagrees with you, and you're apparently as sure of your belief as a devout Catholic is of the Trinity.
This is wrong. The basic requirements are a set of data on each individual case, including the desired final outcome. We enter data for patient 1 and whether patient 1 attempted suicide. We do the same for all the other patients in the "training" process. The "required knowledge" is objectively recorded, including whether the patient attempted suicide. The "training" is a mechanical process, producing a set of arbitrary-looking parameters that have no obvious meaning. This is not an attempt to codify human understanding (which an expert system would do), but to create a program that will yield a certain output given certain input.
The developer presumably understands the structure of the program, and how the training process works, but the actual processing uses a set of numbers determined in the training process, and these numbers are typically not understandable. The processing is too intricate to convert this into human judgment. At best, a human with enough time and paper could emulate the computer, but that isn't understanding.
So, we have a mechanical process producing a program whose precise operation is not understandable, so it's not connected with human understanding or intuition. Since it's an entirely different thing from human judgment, it can be either better or worse. In this case, it's worse.
Talking about how your ideas are evident doesn't help. Lots of ideas that are evident turn out to be wrong, and this is one of them. I've done some work with machine learning, so I have a good idea how the AI program works. If this discussion goes nowhere, it's because you don't understand what I'm saying, not that I don't understand what you're saying.
Given that I know exactly how depression works in a certain individual, WTF did you mean?
In my experience, scientists love to talk about their work and are delighted to answer halfway intelligent questions about it, as long as they get the impression that someone is listening to what they say.
What's a "political issue"? Are we supposed to ban faculty from talking about climate change, comparative religion, effects of vaccination, or paleontology? All of those have been made into political issues.
First, just because an institution gets some of its money from the government doesn't mean it's part of the government.
Second, there are very good reasons why everyone is not guaranteed equal rights to actual forums. Everybody can say what they want, but not necessarily in the facilities they prefer.
Third, students are normally not government employees, and they don't act at the behest of the government. If students interfere with other people speaking, that's a private matter (the law should be involved if it gets violent, but that's because of any violence rather than free speech).
The wage gap exists. It isn't false dogma.
What you're probably trying to say is that the wage gap becomes small if you stick to similar jobs and similar seniority.A lot of people who apparently feel like you get defensive when asked questions of why the disparity in jobs and seniority, coming up with plausible excuses that often look like mansplaining.
This stuff is complicated. There are no easy-to-find final answers, and I'm very strongly against assuming that this is the best of all possible worlds, and all observed gender differences are biological.
What's this "today" stuff about? People have been saying things like that for decades. I haven't seen any significant changes in the rhetoric since I was actually on a campus a lot, observing none of the things you say.
Read some history. The socialism was purged out of the Nazi Party in the early 30s. All totalitarian regimes like to limit ownership of guns, and the Nazis loosened Weimar restrictions on people the Nazis like owning guns. So, what you've got for your argument is animal rights? Why do you think that's left-wing? Along with environmental concerns, animal welfare has been of interest to left and right, not necessarily simultaneously.
You do realize that your news comes fro Breitbart, don't you, that bastion of fake news? Find some reputable quotes.
Exactly where were you during the Obama administration, that you didn't see the things the right-wing folks were saying and picturing about Obama?
State Universities are normally independent organizations that get some of their funding and some of their governance from the state. They are not normally property of the state.
Much religion doesn't involve brainwashing. Religion has done a lot of good in the world. Many people become happier with religion. Many people are better people because of religion. Many religions believe in freedom of thought. They have some things they want you to think, but they want you to think those things because you believe them, and many religious people recognize that people will stop believing in their religion and that's how things go.
Obviously, I'm not talking about all religion, and I can easily come up with counterexamples to everything I claimed, but what I wrote above is true according to my own observation and study.
Everyone demands special privileges. Lots of Christians think they should be allowed to make public schools Christian. Pastafarians are unusual in that they demand the exact same special privileges as others get.
Lots of people abuse children. Last I looked, the statistics were appalling.
Lots of religious fanatics murder people, and that doesn't change much by religion.
Islam, as a religion, isn't violent. I don't know if Muslims are generally more violent than Christians, although I'd guess that's the case. They do tend to justify violence in religious terms more than Christians.
Never. Banning Islam is establishing thought crime. Insisting that it does anything will do no good. We have to do this the slow way.
Most Christians, and most Muslims, do not commit violent acts for their religion. There are exceptions in both. The Muslim acts of terrorism seem to get more play in the Western press, and we seem much more offended when a Muslim kills someone than when a Christian does.
Contrasting Catholicism with fundamentalist Christianity also yields a huge difference. The big problem is the "fundamentalist", not the "Islam" or "Christianity".
They will. Assimilation can take a few generations.