Quite a few years ago, I was looking all over for Pearl Harbor conspiracy websites and books (the one that made the most sense was concerned that Nimitz, not Kimmel, was the Celestial Commander-in-Chief, Pacific - that's something I don't absolutely know is nonsense, and there is a good argument to be made that Kimmel received more than his share of the blame). I might as well have been looking for Holocaust denial sites, since I was looking at the structure of some claims from Banned-CPU. Doesn't mean I believe in the conspiracy theories, or that the Holocaust didn't happen.
What do you do when someone who has been observed by the authorities commits an act of terror? Russia warned us about the Tsarnevs, and there was that nightclub shooter who was under surveillance. I haven't noticed much excoriation of the US authorities for these.
Not to mention that a two-year prison sentence won't prevent him from committing terrorism. It'll make him think it's more necessary, and it'll give him skills and contacts to be more effective.
I'd love to see a good study on what the availability of child pornography that doesn't involve actual children in its production does to child molestation rates.
As far as I can tell, most people drank like Tony Stark if they could afford it (hence "drunk as a lord"), and temperance was an important virtue. It seems to have consisted of consistently showing up to work sufficiently sober to function well. Nowadays, that definition of temperance is a basic requirement to hold most jobs.
How about browsing child pornography sites in the US?
I can easily see myself searching out ISIS websites, collecting ISIS video, etc., as personal research project. I'm unlikely to do it, since I don't feel like doing my own ISIS research, but I've done it on other topics.
I believe that was while he was flying back to this home state, but if it had been when he was going to Washington it would have been a direct violation of the Constitution.
Yes, odd things happen, and one of the strangest/oddest things is that it doesn't matter how good a risk assessment has been carried out, management and politics will always find a way to defeat it. And this is historically proven.
If the risk assessment is carried out properly, it can reduce the danger from widespread to isolated incidents. Chernobyl was a perfect storm of badness, which isn't going to be repeated. Fukushima was an example of corporate neglect of safety, along with government corruption or negligence and some freak circumstances, and that is going to happen again on rare occasions. Rare. We have statistical data on reactor disasters, and they're pretty darn safe.
Reactors aren't going to explode like popcorn. In most, if a meltdown takes place it will be confined (and some reactor designs don't permit a real meltdown).
Standing directly in front of someone can constitute a threat, under some circumstances, particularly if it's with the intention to restrict someone's ability to leave. I don't know nearly enough to judge this situation, and I've found that when someone is pulling an example of the law acting like an ass it's more likely than not that they're misstating the situation to serve their agenda. There's tort reform and the woman whose McDonald's cup collapsed in normal operation, spilling unexpectedly hot coffee on her, and was denied the reimbursement of medical expenses McDonald's had offered to other people in her situation. There's the bakers who had to pay a large sum of money for launching an internet harassment campaign against the lesbians they'd previously insulted while refusing their business.
The concept of "agape" isn't exactly modern, and it's part of what is generally considered "love". I come to love people over time. Participating in reproduction-related acts adds something to it ("eros"), but there's many commonalities between how I love my wife and how I love some of my male friends. Are you using "love" in some restricted modern sense to mean "eros" only?
No, you miss my point about morality. You seem to think that absolute morality only comes with a god. Gods don't come in objective packages, so it's just as easy to pick a religion as to pick a morality. Morality and religion are equally subjective. Also, many who believe in a God don't derive their morality from religion. Ask one if murder is bad because God forbade it, or whether God forbade it because it's bad. You'll get some people who pick the second alternative, meaning that they don't get their morality from their religion. Logically, there's no difference in morality between these people and atheists, as they both get it from something other than a religion.
You don't know that much about Christianity as a whole, do you? You're describing a relatively small segment, although one I approve of. IIRC, Jesus also said he wasn't there to replace the Law, so, whether you consider the Old Testament law binding or not depends on how you cherry-pick the New. The Old Testament is a canonical part of the Bible, and is not merely a history in any case. You're wantonly disregarding what hundreds of millions of Christians have believed and do believe.
I've read enough of the Koran to know that it's self-contradictory, and I know enough of how it was written to understand why. I dislike Islam on theological grounds, and Muslim regimes on other grounds, but it looks like you're conflating the two. In one paragraph, you say that the whole mindset behind the Inquisition and conversion by the sword is an aberration from Christianity, and and in the next you take the behavior of a large number of Muslims to be exactly what Islam is. We're talking serious double standard here.
I've read some Hindu holy literature, and don't remember reading that all lives are of the same value. It's true that a worm in the garden might be Aunt Bertha reincarnated, in which case Aunt Bertha must have done some really horrible things, and this is her karma. The Bhagavad-Gita is, on one level, Krishna talking Arjuna into killing as many people as he can. I don't remember Hindus I've known being particularly solicitous of nonhuman life. Methinks you've hit on a common attitude that got attached to Hinduism and ran with it.
From where I sit, Eich contributed a substantial amount of money to deny certain people basic civil rights. I don't compromise my opinion of civil rights based on popularity.
Denying homosexuals the right to marry the person they love leads to ease of harassment. I can't be arbitrarily separated from the love of my life easily if she's incapacitated, to give one example.
In a US where there is a broadly sweeping and growing generational consensus that government should:
- provide all healthcare
I haven't seen that. There are lots of people who think that we should provide quality health care to everyone without overly onerous personal cost, which is not the same thing. The US has the most expensive health care in the world per capita, and it's not anywhere close. The difference between US health care costs and the next highest (Switzerland) would pay for Spain's health care. You think the F-35 is wasteful? If we had a health care system as expensive as the second most on the planet, we'd save more than the cost of the F-35 program every two years.
We also have unimpressive public health stats for such a wealthy country, and all sorts of issues caused by the expense of health care. US businesses are less competitive because they often have to finance their employee's health care. We have lots of bankruptcies caused by high individual medical costs. We have a less healthy workforce.
- protect everyone from any conceivable harm whether practical, realistic or not (from terrorists to pedophiles), - even from their OWN CHOICES - and at literally any expense
The two groups have little to do with each other. All sorts of people want the government to protect them against some stupid threat that isn't worth worrying about. The insignificant threats to sacrifice money and civil liberties to (often ineffectively) protect against vary some from group to group.
You could also argue that marijuana use is sufficiently widespread in its use as to make it impractical to ban, just like alcohol. We banned alcohol during Prohibition (which is an unusually general word for a specific thing), and we had a lot of bad effects. I'd say we're having similar bad effects from marijuana bans, although I don't have a good idea of the relative impact.
One big difference between the Constitution and Federal law is what it can be. The Constitution can have anything in it, and it would be law (if we had an amendment saying that the President had to be sworn in while wearing a green strapless minidress and bright red lipstick, inaugurations would at least be more interesting), but Federal law must conform to the Constitution (at least enough to make the Supreme Court happy).
If the speed of light is infinite, how would you measure time? Pretty much everything above the level of quantum mechanics is run by electromagnetic forces, which would propagate infinitely fast, so what sort of clock could you have?
Atheism means the lack of belief in a god. This doesn't mean abandoning the idea of morality in general. I'd guess that most people have non-divine ethical systems. Pick up an ethical question or moral view that a religious person agrees with and ask if it's good because God said it's good or if God said it's good because it's good. Lots of theists believe in good and evil that are logically prior to God.
Both Christians and Muslims believe themselves superior, and want the world under God's law, and they typically aren't slow to punish people who disagree with them. Leviticus is part of Christian holy literature inspired (or written) by God, and lots of Christians like to cherry-pick that book to serve their prejudices. Muslims are also supposed to love God and care for fellow humans. Charity is one of the five Pillars of Islam (the others are the declaration of faith, scheduled prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the pilgrimage to Mecca). Christianity and Islam have different effects on the world today, but they're quite similar in extreme practice.
Buddhism has branches devoted to individual revelation and the revelation of others, and I see no reason to believe that "I've got mine, Jack" is the logical conclusion. Gautama Buddha certainly tried to bring others along his path.
Hinduism involves karma in the wheel of rebirth. Take that to the extreme and we'll all be behaving very well to each other to stock up karma.
While love is significant in human reproduction, it covers a much wider range. That I love my wife and child makes evolutionary sense. However, I also love people I can't reproduce with and who don't share any of my chromosomes.
"Assault" usually means a credible threat of physical violence. "Battery" is the actual violence. You don't have to actually shoot someone to be convicted of assault with a deadly weapon; pointing it and threatening to shoot is quite enough.
If you think the far right wants to interpret the Constitution as it's written, you're biased. They aren't fond of the "establishment of religion" clause, preferring to spend my tax money on their religious practices. They don't seem to like the Fourth Amendment (not that the far left does, either).
One problem of interpreting the Constitution exactly as written is that we do things they didn't think of. Lots of my private stuff is in computer files, which are not literally papers, and, while the computer itself is part of my effects the files inside don't seem to quite match that. I'd really like the Fourth to cover these things.
Odd things happen, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, yes. This does not mean we can't make risk assessments. Modern airliners go down only through sequences of odd events, and companies are still willing to sell insurance. Statistics is the mathematical discipline that covers risk assessment when you don't know all the basic causes but do know some of the effects. It works.
I'm not trying to make fun of your fears. I'm saying that irrational fears are a bad basis for decisions, and that you're not going to get me to share them without showing me you know what you're talking about.
You have constructed an incredibly unlikely scenario for nuclear power. Let me do the same for solar or wind: a nifty new process is developed to produce solar panels/wind generators. As a side effect, it produces a harmless-looking chemical that disperses all over the globe and can't be cleaned up. It turns out that ten years of exposure to this causes permanent and complete sterility in humans. We've already got one for coal: increasing surface temperatures put strains on species we rely on, resulting in massive food shortages; this could involve massive methane releases triggered by warmer surface temperatures to emphasize the warming.
Hitler was not elected. His National Socialist party did get something like 40% of the vote, which meant he was the logical candidate for Chancellor. Once he was Chancellor, he just kept grabbing more and more power without bothering with elections.
Chernobyl required a lot of odd things to happen, and was as bad as it was because it lacked the containment all modern reactors have and will continue to have. It's not going to be repeated. Fukushima did much less harm, and the worst accidents to come are not likely to exceed that by much. That's two significant incidents (Three Mile Island leaked a trivial amount of radioactivity) in something like fifty years. The worst case of TMI endangering someone outside the plant was a guy chain-smoking in worry.
There is no way we're going to get a world-wide disaster out of a nuclear power plant, except possibly if it's hit by a nuke (and if the nukes are flying we have bigger problems to worry about). There just isn't enough radioactive material in them.
Nuclear power has a very good safety record, despite the irrational fears some people have.
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Quite a few years ago, I was looking all over for Pearl Harbor conspiracy websites and books (the one that made the most sense was concerned that Nimitz, not Kimmel, was the Celestial Commander-in-Chief, Pacific - that's something I don't absolutely know is nonsense, and there is a good argument to be made that Kimmel received more than his share of the blame). I might as well have been looking for Holocaust denial sites, since I was looking at the structure of some claims from Banned-CPU. Doesn't mean I believe in the conspiracy theories, or that the Holocaust didn't happen.
What do you do when someone who has been observed by the authorities commits an act of terror? Russia warned us about the Tsarnevs, and there was that nightclub shooter who was under surveillance. I haven't noticed much excoriation of the US authorities for these.
Not to mention that a two-year prison sentence won't prevent him from committing terrorism. It'll make him think it's more necessary, and it'll give him skills and contacts to be more effective.
True. That happened well before Reagan, starting centuries ago.
I'd love to see a good study on what the availability of child pornography that doesn't involve actual children in its production does to child molestation rates.
As far as I can tell, most people drank like Tony Stark if they could afford it (hence "drunk as a lord"), and temperance was an important virtue. It seems to have consisted of consistently showing up to work sufficiently sober to function well. Nowadays, that definition of temperance is a basic requirement to hold most jobs.
How about browsing child pornography sites in the US?
I can easily see myself searching out ISIS websites, collecting ISIS video, etc., as personal research project. I'm unlikely to do it, since I don't feel like doing my own ISIS research, but I've done it on other topics.
I believe that was while he was flying back to this home state, but if it had been when he was going to Washington it would have been a direct violation of the Constitution.
If the risk assessment is carried out properly, it can reduce the danger from widespread to isolated incidents. Chernobyl was a perfect storm of badness, which isn't going to be repeated. Fukushima was an example of corporate neglect of safety, along with government corruption or negligence and some freak circumstances, and that is going to happen again on rare occasions. Rare. We have statistical data on reactor disasters, and they're pretty darn safe.
Reactors aren't going to explode like popcorn. In most, if a meltdown takes place it will be confined (and some reactor designs don't permit a real meltdown).
Standing directly in front of someone can constitute a threat, under some circumstances, particularly if it's with the intention to restrict someone's ability to leave. I don't know nearly enough to judge this situation, and I've found that when someone is pulling an example of the law acting like an ass it's more likely than not that they're misstating the situation to serve their agenda. There's tort reform and the woman whose McDonald's cup collapsed in normal operation, spilling unexpectedly hot coffee on her, and was denied the reimbursement of medical expenses McDonald's had offered to other people in her situation. There's the bakers who had to pay a large sum of money for launching an internet harassment campaign against the lesbians they'd previously insulted while refusing their business.
The concept of "agape" isn't exactly modern, and it's part of what is generally considered "love". I come to love people over time. Participating in reproduction-related acts adds something to it ("eros"), but there's many commonalities between how I love my wife and how I love some of my male friends. Are you using "love" in some restricted modern sense to mean "eros" only?
No, you miss my point about morality. You seem to think that absolute morality only comes with a god. Gods don't come in objective packages, so it's just as easy to pick a religion as to pick a morality. Morality and religion are equally subjective. Also, many who believe in a God don't derive their morality from religion. Ask one if murder is bad because God forbade it, or whether God forbade it because it's bad. You'll get some people who pick the second alternative, meaning that they don't get their morality from their religion. Logically, there's no difference in morality between these people and atheists, as they both get it from something other than a religion.
You don't know that much about Christianity as a whole, do you? You're describing a relatively small segment, although one I approve of. IIRC, Jesus also said he wasn't there to replace the Law, so, whether you consider the Old Testament law binding or not depends on how you cherry-pick the New. The Old Testament is a canonical part of the Bible, and is not merely a history in any case. You're wantonly disregarding what hundreds of millions of Christians have believed and do believe.
I've read enough of the Koran to know that it's self-contradictory, and I know enough of how it was written to understand why. I dislike Islam on theological grounds, and Muslim regimes on other grounds, but it looks like you're conflating the two. In one paragraph, you say that the whole mindset behind the Inquisition and conversion by the sword is an aberration from Christianity, and and in the next you take the behavior of a large number of Muslims to be exactly what Islam is. We're talking serious double standard here.
I've read some Hindu holy literature, and don't remember reading that all lives are of the same value. It's true that a worm in the garden might be Aunt Bertha reincarnated, in which case Aunt Bertha must have done some really horrible things, and this is her karma. The Bhagavad-Gita is, on one level, Krishna talking Arjuna into killing as many people as he can. I don't remember Hindus I've known being particularly solicitous of nonhuman life. Methinks you've hit on a common attitude that got attached to Hinduism and ran with it.
From where I sit, Eich contributed a substantial amount of money to deny certain people basic civil rights. I don't compromise my opinion of civil rights based on popularity.
Denying homosexuals the right to marry the person they love leads to ease of harassment. I can't be arbitrarily separated from the love of my life easily if she's incapacitated, to give one example.
It took me until junior high to realize that my "permanent record" wasn't going to follow me around for the rest of my life.
I haven't seen that. There are lots of people who think that we should provide quality health care to everyone without overly onerous personal cost, which is not the same thing. The US has the most expensive health care in the world per capita, and it's not anywhere close. The difference between US health care costs and the next highest (Switzerland) would pay for Spain's health care. You think the F-35 is wasteful? If we had a health care system as expensive as the second most on the planet, we'd save more than the cost of the F-35 program every two years.
We also have unimpressive public health stats for such a wealthy country, and all sorts of issues caused by the expense of health care. US businesses are less competitive because they often have to finance their employee's health care. We have lots of bankruptcies caused by high individual medical costs. We have a less healthy workforce.
The two groups have little to do with each other. All sorts of people want the government to protect them against some stupid threat that isn't worth worrying about. The insignificant threats to sacrifice money and civil liberties to (often ineffectively) protect against vary some from group to group.
You could also argue that marijuana use is sufficiently widespread in its use as to make it impractical to ban, just like alcohol. We banned alcohol during Prohibition (which is an unusually general word for a specific thing), and we had a lot of bad effects. I'd say we're having similar bad effects from marijuana bans, although I don't have a good idea of the relative impact.
One big difference between the Constitution and Federal law is what it can be. The Constitution can have anything in it, and it would be law (if we had an amendment saying that the President had to be sworn in while wearing a green strapless minidress and bright red lipstick, inaugurations would at least be more interesting), but Federal law must conform to the Constitution (at least enough to make the Supreme Court happy).
If the speed of light is infinite, how would you measure time? Pretty much everything above the level of quantum mechanics is run by electromagnetic forces, which would propagate infinitely fast, so what sort of clock could you have?
That's a rather slanted view.
Atheism means the lack of belief in a god. This doesn't mean abandoning the idea of morality in general. I'd guess that most people have non-divine ethical systems. Pick up an ethical question or moral view that a religious person agrees with and ask if it's good because God said it's good or if God said it's good because it's good. Lots of theists believe in good and evil that are logically prior to God.
Both Christians and Muslims believe themselves superior, and want the world under God's law, and they typically aren't slow to punish people who disagree with them. Leviticus is part of Christian holy literature inspired (or written) by God, and lots of Christians like to cherry-pick that book to serve their prejudices. Muslims are also supposed to love God and care for fellow humans. Charity is one of the five Pillars of Islam (the others are the declaration of faith, scheduled prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the pilgrimage to Mecca). Christianity and Islam have different effects on the world today, but they're quite similar in extreme practice.
Buddhism has branches devoted to individual revelation and the revelation of others, and I see no reason to believe that "I've got mine, Jack" is the logical conclusion. Gautama Buddha certainly tried to bring others along his path.
Hinduism involves karma in the wheel of rebirth. Take that to the extreme and we'll all be behaving very well to each other to stock up karma.
While love is significant in human reproduction, it covers a much wider range. That I love my wife and child makes evolutionary sense. However, I also love people I can't reproduce with and who don't share any of my chromosomes.
"Assault" usually means a credible threat of physical violence. "Battery" is the actual violence. You don't have to actually shoot someone to be convicted of assault with a deadly weapon; pointing it and threatening to shoot is quite enough.
If you think the far right wants to interpret the Constitution as it's written, you're biased. They aren't fond of the "establishment of religion" clause, preferring to spend my tax money on their religious practices. They don't seem to like the Fourth Amendment (not that the far left does, either).
One problem of interpreting the Constitution exactly as written is that we do things they didn't think of. Lots of my private stuff is in computer files, which are not literally papers, and, while the computer itself is part of my effects the files inside don't seem to quite match that. I'd really like the Fourth to cover these things.
Odd things happen, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, yes. This does not mean we can't make risk assessments. Modern airliners go down only through sequences of odd events, and companies are still willing to sell insurance. Statistics is the mathematical discipline that covers risk assessment when you don't know all the basic causes but do know some of the effects. It works.
I'm not trying to make fun of your fears. I'm saying that irrational fears are a bad basis for decisions, and that you're not going to get me to share them without showing me you know what you're talking about.
You have constructed an incredibly unlikely scenario for nuclear power. Let me do the same for solar or wind: a nifty new process is developed to produce solar panels/wind generators. As a side effect, it produces a harmless-looking chemical that disperses all over the globe and can't be cleaned up. It turns out that ten years of exposure to this causes permanent and complete sterility in humans. We've already got one for coal: increasing surface temperatures put strains on species we rely on, resulting in massive food shortages; this could involve massive methane releases triggered by warmer surface temperatures to emphasize the warming.
Nuclear power is pretty darn safe.
Judging by the Bush-Obama transition, sometime in December things will cease to be Bush's fault and will be Trump's fault.
Hitler was not elected. His National Socialist party did get something like 40% of the vote, which meant he was the logical candidate for Chancellor. Once he was Chancellor, he just kept grabbing more and more power without bothering with elections.
Chernobyl required a lot of odd things to happen, and was as bad as it was because it lacked the containment all modern reactors have and will continue to have. It's not going to be repeated. Fukushima did much less harm, and the worst accidents to come are not likely to exceed that by much. That's two significant incidents (Three Mile Island leaked a trivial amount of radioactivity) in something like fifty years. The worst case of TMI endangering someone outside the plant was a guy chain-smoking in worry.
There is no way we're going to get a world-wide disaster out of a nuclear power plant, except possibly if it's hit by a nuke (and if the nukes are flying we have bigger problems to worry about). There just isn't enough radioactive material in them.
Nuclear power has a very good safety record, despite the irrational fears some people have.