Yeah sure. If we did that, there would be so many politicians in jail, that there would be special politician jails that were more like resorts or country clubs than prisons.
"This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them. New wars should break out, cities should rise and fall, and all hell should break loose at least once a month--and the players should be the ones to make it happen.
I want to be snarky and point out that this guy obvious has no idea how these games are designed, but I think he pretty much nails what very MMOG player really wants out of a game. Now, if only it were feasible within the bounds of money, time, and talent."
Isn't this basically starcraft or the original warcraft, albeit perhaps with sturdier buildings?
I think the trick is to have avatars manage resources, like a king, mayor or general. Avatars would capture territory, harvest resources, defend territory, build cities and armies, and go forth and conquer some more. You wouldn't directly control armies through mouse-click micromanagement, but rather they would simply follow orders. (A neat feature would be where you could capture enemy buildings instead of having to destroy others and only build your own.)
All of the back story elements that are difficult and expensive to develop would naturally arise as players form alliances, use each other, backstab, double-cross, and try every technique from the dirty playbook of human history to gain more power and wealth.
Not everyone starts college immediately after high school, and not everyone finishes in exactly four years.
Even if it were for young professionals, 25 miles pretty much covers a town/city radius. You would only be getting a notification if someone was coming in from out of town, or totally crossing town. If someone were traveling 25+ miles into your area and they wanted to see you, or even had the time to see you, don't you think this meeting would already be planned?
This is marketed to the under 25 crowd? So if you are sitting in a lecture hall, you are constantly getting an update of where everybody in your 50+ buddy list is on campus at that moment?
What I am arguing against is what you said earlier: "And no-one's quashing anything...". Do you deny that Native Americans have been the victim of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced relocation? For several hundred years, it was illegal for Native Americans to practice their religion, speak their language, and practice other elements of their culture. The reasoning that "these indians are backwards and primitive; they don't know how to take care of themselves" is the intellectual justice to forbid them from practicing their religion and medicine. After all, who cares if indians want to sit around in a humid hut? That doesn't hurt anybody. However, when they want to use traditional medicine on a seriously ill patient, you quickly get into arguments of negligent homicide, and was the justification from taking cultural and religious freedom away from colonized people.
"Well, where do you think this "herbal lore" originally came from:"
I would suggest actually reading the literature before commenting. We don't have to guess -- it's written down.
" * Some very bright spark came up with the correct answer every time for every disease they ever came across, then people wrote it down and started spreading the knowledge.
* Space aliens came down, ushered in a golden age of scientific enlightenment from which we devolved, and now herbal lore represents the last saved knowledge from our previous state of scientifically-achieved near-omniscience, or
* Shamas and witch-doctors fed people a variety of things they hoped would work, and they carried on feeding people the things that didn't actively kill them?
"I admit I was deliberately characterising the process as negative to make a point, but the point still stands. "
No, it doesn't stand. All I'm asking you to do is read some ethnography. You will soon find out that the actual reality is closer to the first option, except without the strawman of the fantastic success rate that you threw in. Typically healers apprentice with an established practitioner, they learn a set of common cures for everyday illnesses, and techniques for divining novel cures for difficult cases. It's a master/student tradition. They don't hope it works, they know it works because they apprenticed with a master who routinely gave plant cures to sick patients. I'm not going to claim that they were cured, but those patients figured they were better enough to continue on with their lives. Chalk it up to the natural course of illness, placebo effect, or the occasional medicinal plant,
They don't write it down. They learn in through practice and oral tradition. Illiterate people have good memorization skills compared to readers, especially when information is presented in rhyming verse, or in story format. Years of apprenticeship also help people memorize things.
The problem with trial and error methods of curing is that there are *way* too many poisonous plants. If you start feeding a person plants wily-nily, you will soon kill them. Especially if that person is already ill. Read any modern, western book on plant identification or military survival manual -- eating plants and random is one of the best ways to kill yourself. Most survival manuals will recommend that you *not* eat any plants if you find yourself in a survival situation. Plants make all kinds of poisons to prevent themselves from getting eaten, and they work very well except for animals who are specifically adapted to eating that plant and counter-acting its poison.
Nobody goes to a shaman who kills his patients. Typically, witch doctoring is a dangerous profession because there isn't a good way to defend yourself from charges of purposely killing your patients. Families or communities often kill or run off a witch doctor who is alleged to have killed a patient, either with malice or out of incompetence.
So all I am claiming here is that shamans, witch doctors, traditional healers, *do not* use a trial-and-error me
Because the laws are written by IP owners, not the people.
You know, if you are in a band and you do a cover of a song at the bar on Friday night, you are supposed to pay into some union or organization that gives money to song writers. However, very few people pay in, and we have plenty of cover songs. In short, people are ignoring the law. People continue play songs that they've heard and that they like, just as they have for thousands of years. Just like they re-tell stories they read in books, etc.
People don't care about law, they just go ahead and ignore it. They play cover songs freely, and download music freely. Until jackbooted thugs start cracking down on average citizens, the law will stand.
Your claim was that it is illegal to reverse engineer software and network protocols. I offered evidence ( samba, WINE ) that contradicted your claim. If you are debating fairly, you must either explain why the instances of samba and WINE are not cases of reverse engineering software or network protocols, retract your claim, or provide a more nuanced argument ( e.g. reverse engineering is not illegal in certain situations, and samba and WINE are instances of one or more of these situations ).
I'll be happy to provide an explanation of your cases, but by rights, you must respond to my evidence first, because I asked first. If you are not going to debate fairly, I will not continue this particular thread with you ; )
"You believe that physical property rights are different in that "people naturally respect them anyway". But I'd say there's the same general respect for the principle of "don't copy without permission"."
I disagree. People generally have respect for personal property -- you can't take something that doesn't belong to you. You wouldn't want somebody taking something that belonged to you.
However, digital copies, in the popular mind, work pretty much like knowledge, information, or word of mouth. You are pretty much allowed to repeat anything you hear from anybody to anyone you want to, at any time. People are chatty; we live in information rich cultures, where we are always talking, sharing, updating people, telling stories, gossiping, teaching, giving opinions, complaining, etc.
Contrary to the physical nature of personal property and ownership, sharing information benefits you. When you share information you don't lose it, and it costs very little to talk. Participating in an information-sharing culture gets you access to much more information than you could ever obtain on your own, for very little cost.
"Network protocols are easy to monitor and reverse engineer with the right equipment. Why can't people reverse engineer the interfaces and duplicate them in their own software? Oh yeah, the State says it is illegal."
This is false. It is legal to reverse engineer software and network protocols. It is also legal to duplicate them in your own software. This is what the samba project, the wine project, amongst many others, are based on.
I agree with you that we can't blindly accept something just because it was old. The tendency to stick with tradition just because it's what we've always done is a natural human tendency -- it happens everywhere, not just in western or indigenous medicine. But I have to clear up some misconceptions that you espouse. I can't help but think it's because you haven't exposed yourself to the literature. Accounts of shamanism describe a type of person who is interested in learning and exploration, always willing to try new methods and techniques. Yes, there is a traditional body of knowledge that they learn, but the overall impression that they give is one of awe and wonder at the sheer immensity and mystery of the universe.
A traditional healer who I met in Ecuador was well into his 80s. He told us that he is always learning new things every day, and he is always in awe of how much mystery and exploration there is left to do. This person can hardly be described a dogmatic who is stuck in tradition.
"There are other areas where western medicine has a lot of work to do, such as in treating cardiovascular problems. But at least there is hope that eventually we'll figure out the answers, and more importantly we'll be able to prove that they are the right answer."
The thing is that traditional systems have their own methods of proving the success of a particular course of treatement. We have our own system for proving the validity of cures; it has to do with logical positivism and statistical methods. Native healers have their own logic for determining validity; most westerners disagree with it and find the basic assumptions to be wrong. But they do have systems for finding, examining, accepting and rejecting new information and techniques. It's not a rigorous dogma.
Clients of indigenous healers aren't suckers who are willing to accept anyone that comes along. Traditional healers get clients from whom they've apprenticed with and their own reputation. There are healers who are better than others. For all of the talk about native healers being con artists, there are some who are unable to heal people. There are also those who are genuinely are con artists, just like there are fraudulent western doctors.
"
The problem with more traditional medicines is that there's no real progress. There's no way to show that one treatment is really better than another, since it's all approached anecdotally. "
That's not really true. It tells me that you really haven't read any literature. I would recommend looking at Plotkin's _Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice_. You will find that traditional healers are committed to learning for the rest of their life/career. They are always taking on apprenticeships from healers who are more powerful or have a better reputation than them. They are constantly willing to explore the spirit world or learn new techniques. If you read Burroughs' or Ginsberg's descriptions of their interactions with Amazonian shamans. They were very interested in the LSD that the beat poets brought with them. They are not rigorous dogmatics.
"
And the emphasis is on "traditional". The reason you use a certain technique or medicine is simply because that's the tradition based on a theory that has never been and can never be proven."
Again, that's untrue. If you read any of the literature about witch doctors or shamans, they are constantly learning new cures. A typical cure story involves the shaman making contact with the spirit world and finding a plant that the shaman had not used before, in order to heal this particular clients' specific disease. So it is a dynamic, personal system, not a simple look-up table like "take this plant for this illness".
"But in all those hundreds/thousands of years, it never figured out how to reattach a finger, how to do a skin graft for a burn victim, how to keep someone from dying from rabies, how to cure malaria, etc. It's a dead end."
I think it's ironic that you claim that western me
I have been hypnotized, I guess -- I saw a hypnotherapist and he talked me through a hypnotisation session. For me, it was a lot like drifting into a nap and having a really intense day-dream.
I also practice meditation and visualization, and have tried various methods and techniques. Up until this post, I kind of thought that they were mostly identical, except visualization specifically engaged your visual imagination. Can you tell me what you see as the difference between all of these states?
I'm not saying it's easy to learn to hypnotize yourself, but here in America, we always seem to take the pill/device answer or anything that might require the slightest bit of effort, like changing your diet to lose weight. I think we could stand to learn some low-tech, somewhat laborous answers.
How would the drug companies make money if there were a natural painkiller and anti-depressant that can be grown for free in your backyard? Those poor fellows would lose profitability.
"Recall that most of this "store of herbal and animal lore" was discovered by feeding patients a variety of random items and watching for the ones who didn't die horribly from an infection or allergic reaction."
This is patently false. There is no recorded evidence of 'trial and error' shotgun testing of herbal or traditional remedies in historical or anthropological literature. (If you have evidence of such, I'd like to see it.) Most traditional medicines are passed down through apprenticeships. Novel cures are based on the medical paradigm held by the practitioners ( e.g. Doctrine of Similars from the middle ages, or traditional categorical kinship, such as otters, rivers, and disorders of the female reproductive system amongst Native Americans of the Northwest), or revelatory experiences (i.e. receiving information from spirits, learning directly from plants themselves).
The trial and error technique is part of the scientific method, not traditional or non-western approaches. I'm not claiming here that traditional medical practices are better, or even on par with modern medicine, but I find it interesting that the single fact you ask us to 'recall' has no documentation in the literature. I think that shows a bias on your part. At the very least, it shows you are unresearched.
"Make that "a whole store of vague, sometimes contradictory waffle that only intermittently produces results with absolutely no theoretical underpinnings to explain why, how or when it works."
That's utter BS. Take a look into Hopi or Navajo theories of health and disease. You will find a systematized, theoretical system. Granted, it is not scientific, and most westerners would reject its basic assumptions, but it is nonetheless a complete and coherent. It makes sense and is self-supporting within its own logic. For instance, we might criticize Navajo medicine for inadequate or totally ineffective cancer treatments. However, a Navajo medicine man might criticize western medicine for having inadequate inter-personal counseling for mental health and social stress. Can you imagine a western doctor calling in your boss and reaming him out because he is being too harsh and working you too hard, causing you stress and ulcers? For us, a western doctor has no place to confront our boss, parents, or spouse for treating us poorly, causing us stress, headache, indigestion, ulcers, hemorrhoids, etc. All he can do is prescribe a medication, tell you to take it easy, and recommend a counselor that your health plan will hopefully reimburse. Then the shrink will prescribe you anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication -- all the while, the root cause of the illness -- the unhealthy relationship between you and someone else -- will go unaddressed and untreated. However, in Navajo medicine, a primary function of a doctor is to get people together and work out their problems. As far as vague and contradictory -- the Kachina system is certainly not vague. It might be unfamiliar and illogical to westerners, but that does not mean it lacks rigor.
In fact, you will find similar systematic schools of though in almost any culture you study. I am not claiming that they are scientifically sound or even make sense to us -- they do not, nor do they claim to. But to say that they are vague, contradictory, or waffling shows utter ignorance.
You claim that there isn't any quashing or destroying anything, but that has been the recorded history for thousands of years. (I guess you are correct in the sense that it's *already* been almost completely quashed.) The Christian churches burned witches at the stake and forbade practice of witchcraft, who were the medicine practitioners before churches. Modern policies of assimilation in Native American communities forbade practicing their religion, speaking their language, and practicing and more importantly *teaching* and *passing on* their medical traditions -- aside from the genocide, massacres, ethnic cleansing, and forced relocation.
Claiming western understanding as the only safe and right way has been the intellectual justification for genocide and cultural assimilation for as long as Europe has been colonizing people.
The votes in this town of 80 people still have to be tallied with the votes of larger towns, counties, and cities. The benefit of having everyone voting on electronic machines is that you can immediately tally with all of the other electronic voters.
If they did the voting on paper, they would at some point have to enter the totals into some electronic machine in order to tally them with everyone else.
What exactly was her "link" to terrorists? Perhaps these files themselves?
I have a wide circle of friends. Perhaps one or two of them sells weed. If I downloaded a pot-growing manual, does that give the government enough cause to arrest me as a narco-trafficker?
I don't think that Nintendo will be the next big thing. Like Apple, they are in the high-end niche market, though they are cheaper. They concentrate on making a well-polished, high-quality product, and don't worry about trying to market themselves into the #1 position.
That's the thing. It's the republicans who are doing the hunting of gays, liberals, and San Francisco sodomites, and burning them in effigy.
If the leader of the RNC is outed as gay, they presumably won't hunt one of their own. That *should* put a stop to the gay-bashing on the part of the RNC, if they have any moral decency.
Even if Dems took the Senate, there would only have a majority of 1. They can get their bills on the president's desk, but if the president vetoes the bill, congress can only override the veto with a 2/3rd majority -- which means they will need republican votes. If the dems want a bill that the president will sign into law, then they will need to compromise with him to create a bill that he will find acceptable.
Also, if dems do take the senate, they will only have a majority of one. The democratic party doesn't have discipline necessary to get them to vote along party lines. You only then need 1 or 2 people willing to cross the line to stymie a bill. Keep in mind that Lieberman ran as an independent and is a big supporter of the president. Bye-bye majority -- and Cheney casts the tie-breaking vote.
"One way out is to give up. This will make us look weak. (The reality is, when it comes to controlling what happens inside other countries we are weak)....
The only other option is to stay the course."
Staying the "course" will make us look weak because we *are* weak -- The insurgents have us on the run, and we are not in charge over there. We are unwilling to commit the necessary resources and manpower to do the job. We have the most powerful military in the world, yet we can't keep ahead of these insurgents. That is what makes us look weak.
A strong leader picks battles that he can win. He doesn't cling desperately to lost causes. Falling back to Kurdistan would make us look smart and strong. We would still be technically in Iraq, and we can launch operations into other parts of Iraq at a moments' notice. Not relying on American forces would force the Iraqis to take security seriously.
The ethnic/religious power struggle in Iraq is going to shake out with lots of blood, and it won't be over any time soon. There is no reason for us to lose countless more lives over a process that will have no effect on the final results. Americans don't care as much about Iraq as Iraqis do. They are going to fight stronger, longer, and harder. It's their country and their future.
Sorry to break this to you -- I don't have the time nor inclination to follow the money. Can you just go ahead and tell me who is funding all of this research and these conferences? Is it the governments themselves, whose ultimate goal is a one-world totalitarian state?
Slashdot Mirror
And me my rich, luxurious scalp of hair.
If you
Yeah sure. If we did that, there would be so many politicians in jail, that there would be special politician jails that were more like resorts or country clubs than prisons.
"This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them. New wars should break out, cities should rise and fall, and all hell should break loose at least once a month--and the players should be the ones to make it happen.
I want to be snarky and point out that this guy obvious has no idea how these games are designed, but I think he pretty much nails what very MMOG player really wants out of a game. Now, if only it were feasible within the bounds of money, time, and talent."
Isn't this basically starcraft or the original warcraft, albeit perhaps with sturdier buildings?
I think the trick is to have avatars manage resources, like a king, mayor or general. Avatars would capture territory, harvest resources, defend territory, build cities and armies, and go forth and conquer some more. You wouldn't directly control armies through mouse-click micromanagement, but rather they would simply follow orders. (A neat feature would be where you could capture enemy buildings instead of having to destroy others and only build your own.)
All of the back story elements that are difficult and expensive to develop would naturally arise as players form alliances, use each other, backstab, double-cross, and try every technique from the dirty playbook of human history to gain more power and wealth.
Not everyone starts college immediately after high school, and not everyone finishes in exactly four years.
Even if it were for young professionals, 25 miles pretty much covers a town/city radius. You would only be getting a notification if someone was coming in from out of town, or totally crossing town. If someone were traveling 25+ miles into your area and they wanted to see you, or even had the time to see you, don't you think this meeting would already be planned?
This is marketed to the under 25 crowd? So if you are sitting in a lecture hall, you are constantly getting an update of where everybody in your 50+ buddy list is on campus at that moment?
This can't operate the way they describe.
What I am arguing against is what you said earlier: "And no-one's quashing anything...". Do you deny that Native Americans have been the victim of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced relocation? For several hundred years, it was illegal for Native Americans to practice their religion, speak their language, and practice other elements of their culture. The reasoning that "these indians are backwards and primitive; they don't know how to take care of themselves" is the intellectual justice to forbid them from practicing their religion and medicine. After all, who cares if indians want to sit around in a humid hut? That doesn't hurt anybody. However, when they want to use traditional medicine on a seriously ill patient, you quickly get into arguments of negligent homicide, and was the justification from taking cultural and religious freedom away from colonized people.
"Well, where do you think this "herbal lore" originally came from:"
I would suggest actually reading the literature before commenting. We don't have to guess -- it's written down.
" * Some very bright spark came up with the correct answer every time for every disease they ever came across, then people wrote it down and started spreading the knowledge.
* Space aliens came down, ushered in a golden age of scientific enlightenment from which we devolved, and now herbal lore represents the last saved knowledge from our previous state of scientifically-achieved near-omniscience, or
* Shamas and witch-doctors fed people a variety of things they hoped would work, and they carried on feeding people the things that didn't actively kill them?
"I admit I was deliberately characterising the process as negative to make a point, but the point still stands. "
No, it doesn't stand. All I'm asking you to do is read some ethnography. You will soon find out that the actual reality is closer to the first option, except without the strawman of the fantastic success rate that you threw in. Typically healers apprentice with an established practitioner, they learn a set of common cures for everyday illnesses, and techniques for divining novel cures for difficult cases. It's a master/student tradition. They don't hope it works, they know it works because they apprenticed with a master who routinely gave plant cures to sick patients. I'm not going to claim that they were cured, but those patients figured they were better enough to continue on with their lives. Chalk it up to the natural course of illness, placebo effect, or the occasional medicinal plant,
They don't write it down. They learn in through practice and oral tradition. Illiterate people have good memorization skills compared to readers, especially when information is presented in rhyming verse, or in story format. Years of apprenticeship also help people memorize things.
The problem with trial and error methods of curing is that there are *way* too many poisonous plants. If you start feeding a person plants wily-nily, you will soon kill them. Especially if that person is already ill. Read any modern, western book on plant identification or military survival manual -- eating plants and random is one of the best ways to kill yourself. Most survival manuals will recommend that you *not* eat any plants if you find yourself in a survival situation. Plants make all kinds of poisons to prevent themselves from getting eaten, and they work very well except for animals who are specifically adapted to eating that plant and counter-acting its poison.
Nobody goes to a shaman who kills his patients. Typically, witch doctoring is a dangerous profession because there isn't a good way to defend yourself from charges of purposely killing your patients. Families or communities often kill or run off a witch doctor who is alleged to have killed a patient, either with malice or out of incompetence.
So all I am claiming here is that shamans, witch doctors, traditional healers, *do not* use a trial-and-error me
Is he really an astroturfer? Who is paying him?
I thought he was a self-motivated libertarian.
Because the laws are written by IP owners, not the people.
You know, if you are in a band and you do a cover of a song at the bar on Friday night, you are supposed to pay into some union or organization that gives money to song writers. However, very few people pay in, and we have plenty of cover songs. In short, people are ignoring the law. People continue play songs that they've heard and that they like, just as they have for thousands of years. Just like they re-tell stories they read in books, etc.
People don't care about law, they just go ahead and ignore it. They play cover songs freely, and download music freely. Until jackbooted thugs start cracking down on average citizens, the law will stand.
You are moving the goal post.
Your claim was that it is illegal to reverse engineer software and network protocols. I offered evidence ( samba, WINE ) that contradicted your claim. If you are debating fairly, you must either explain why the instances of samba and WINE are not cases of reverse engineering software or network protocols, retract your claim, or provide a more nuanced argument ( e.g. reverse engineering is not illegal in certain situations, and samba and WINE are instances of one or more of these situations ).
I'll be happy to provide an explanation of your cases, but by rights, you must respond to my evidence first, because I asked first. If you are not going to debate fairly, I will not continue this particular thread with you ; )
"You believe that physical property rights are different in that "people naturally respect them anyway". But I'd say there's the same general respect for the principle of "don't copy without permission"."
I disagree. People generally have respect for personal property -- you can't take something that doesn't belong to you. You wouldn't want somebody taking something that belonged to you.
However, digital copies, in the popular mind, work pretty much like knowledge, information, or word of mouth. You are pretty much allowed to repeat anything you hear from anybody to anyone you want to, at any time. People are chatty; we live in information rich cultures, where we are always talking, sharing, updating people, telling stories, gossiping, teaching, giving opinions, complaining, etc.
Contrary to the physical nature of personal property and ownership, sharing information benefits you. When you share information you don't lose it, and it costs very little to talk. Participating in an information-sharing culture gets you access to much more information than you could ever obtain on your own, for very little cost.
"Network protocols are easy to monitor and reverse engineer with the right equipment. Why can't people reverse engineer the interfaces and duplicate them in their own software? Oh yeah, the State says it is illegal."
This is false. It is legal to reverse engineer software and network protocols. It is also legal to duplicate them in your own software. This is what the samba project, the wine project, amongst many others, are based on.
I agree with you that we can't blindly accept something just because it was old. The tendency to stick with tradition just because it's what we've always done is a natural human tendency -- it happens everywhere, not just in western or indigenous medicine. But I have to clear up some misconceptions that you espouse. I can't help but think it's because you haven't exposed yourself to the literature. Accounts of shamanism describe a type of person who is interested in learning and exploration, always willing to try new methods and techniques. Yes, there is a traditional body of knowledge that they learn, but the overall impression that they give is one of awe and wonder at the sheer immensity and mystery of the universe.
A traditional healer who I met in Ecuador was well into his 80s. He told us that he is always learning new things every day, and he is always in awe of how much mystery and exploration there is left to do. This person can hardly be described a dogmatic who is stuck in tradition.
"There are other areas where western medicine has a lot of work to do, such as in treating cardiovascular problems. But at least there is hope that eventually we'll figure out the answers, and more importantly we'll be able to prove that they are the right answer."
The thing is that traditional systems have their own methods of proving the success of a particular course of treatement. We have our own system for proving the validity of cures; it has to do with logical positivism and statistical methods. Native healers have their own logic for determining validity; most westerners disagree with it and find the basic assumptions to be wrong. But they do have systems for finding, examining, accepting and rejecting new information and techniques. It's not a rigorous dogma.
Clients of indigenous healers aren't suckers who are willing to accept anyone that comes along. Traditional healers get clients from whom they've apprenticed with and their own reputation. There are healers who are better than others. For all of the talk about native healers being con artists, there are some who are unable to heal people. There are also those who are genuinely are con artists, just like there are fraudulent western doctors.
" The problem with more traditional medicines is that there's no real progress. There's no way to show that one treatment is really better than another, since it's all approached anecdotally. "
That's not really true. It tells me that you really haven't read any literature. I would recommend looking at Plotkin's _Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice_. You will find that traditional healers are committed to learning for the rest of their life/career. They are always taking on apprenticeships from healers who are more powerful or have a better reputation than them. They are constantly willing to explore the spirit world or learn new techniques. If you read Burroughs' or Ginsberg's descriptions of their interactions with Amazonian shamans. They were very interested in the LSD that the beat poets brought with them. They are not rigorous dogmatics.
" And the emphasis is on "traditional". The reason you use a certain technique or medicine is simply because that's the tradition based on a theory that has never been and can never be proven." Again, that's untrue. If you read any of the literature about witch doctors or shamans, they are constantly learning new cures. A typical cure story involves the shaman making contact with the spirit world and finding a plant that the shaman had not used before, in order to heal this particular clients' specific disease. So it is a dynamic, personal system, not a simple look-up table like "take this plant for this illness".
"But in all those hundreds/thousands of years, it never figured out how to reattach a finger, how to do a skin graft for a burn victim, how to keep someone from dying from rabies, how to cure malaria, etc. It's a dead end."
I think it's ironic that you claim that western me
I have been hypnotized, I guess -- I saw a hypnotherapist and he talked me through a hypnotisation session. For me, it was a lot like drifting into a nap and having a really intense day-dream. I also practice meditation and visualization, and have tried various methods and techniques. Up until this post, I kind of thought that they were mostly identical, except visualization specifically engaged your visual imagination. Can you tell me what you see as the difference between all of these states?
I'm not saying it's easy to learn to hypnotize yourself, but here in America, we always seem to take the pill/device answer or anything that might require the slightest bit of effort, like changing your diet to lose weight. I think we could stand to learn some low-tech, somewhat laborous answers.
How would the drug companies make money if there were a natural painkiller and anti-depressant that can be grown for free in your backyard? Those poor fellows would lose profitability.
"...the graphics used by the computer look very crude, almost comically so, but apparently the system works."
Could this also be accomplished by hypnosis and visualization? If useful, that would reduce the cost -- namely the expensive electronics.
"Recall that most of this "store of herbal and animal lore" was discovered by feeding patients a variety of random items and watching for the ones who didn't die horribly from an infection or allergic reaction."
This is patently false. There is no recorded evidence of 'trial and error' shotgun testing of herbal or traditional remedies in historical or anthropological literature. (If you have evidence of such, I'd like to see it.) Most traditional medicines are passed down through apprenticeships. Novel cures are based on the medical paradigm held by the practitioners ( e.g. Doctrine of Similars from the middle ages, or traditional categorical kinship, such as otters, rivers, and disorders of the female reproductive system amongst Native Americans of the Northwest), or revelatory experiences (i.e. receiving information from spirits, learning directly from plants themselves).
The trial and error technique is part of the scientific method, not traditional or non-western approaches. I'm not claiming here that traditional medical practices are better, or even on par with modern medicine, but I find it interesting that the single fact you ask us to 'recall' has no documentation in the literature. I think that shows a bias on your part. At the very least, it shows you are unresearched.
"Make that "a whole store of vague, sometimes contradictory waffle that only intermittently produces results with absolutely no theoretical underpinnings to explain why, how or when it works."
That's utter BS. Take a look into Hopi or Navajo theories of health and disease. You will find a systematized, theoretical system. Granted, it is not scientific, and most westerners would reject its basic assumptions, but it is nonetheless a complete and coherent. It makes sense and is self-supporting within its own logic. For instance, we might criticize Navajo medicine for inadequate or totally ineffective cancer treatments. However, a Navajo medicine man might criticize western medicine for having inadequate inter-personal counseling for mental health and social stress. Can you imagine a western doctor calling in your boss and reaming him out because he is being too harsh and working you too hard, causing you stress and ulcers? For us, a western doctor has no place to confront our boss, parents, or spouse for treating us poorly, causing us stress, headache, indigestion, ulcers, hemorrhoids, etc. All he can do is prescribe a medication, tell you to take it easy, and recommend a counselor that your health plan will hopefully reimburse. Then the shrink will prescribe you anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication -- all the while, the root cause of the illness -- the unhealthy relationship between you and someone else -- will go unaddressed and untreated. However, in Navajo medicine, a primary function of a doctor is to get people together and work out their problems. As far as vague and contradictory -- the Kachina system is certainly not vague. It might be unfamiliar and illogical to westerners, but that does not mean it lacks rigor.
In fact, you will find similar systematic schools of though in almost any culture you study. I am not claiming that they are scientifically sound or even make sense to us -- they do not, nor do they claim to. But to say that they are vague, contradictory, or waffling shows utter ignorance.
You claim that there isn't any quashing or destroying anything, but that has been the recorded history for thousands of years. (I guess you are correct in the sense that it's *already* been almost completely quashed.) The Christian churches burned witches at the stake and forbade practice of witchcraft, who were the medicine practitioners before churches. Modern policies of assimilation in Native American communities forbade practicing their religion, speaking their language, and practicing and more importantly *teaching* and *passing on* their medical traditions -- aside from the genocide, massacres, ethnic cleansing, and forced relocation. Claiming western understanding as the only safe and right way has been the intellectual justification for genocide and cultural assimilation for as long as Europe has been colonizing people.
The votes in this town of 80 people still have to be tallied with the votes of larger towns, counties, and cities. The benefit of having everyone voting on electronic machines is that you can immediately tally with all of the other electronic voters.
If they did the voting on paper, they would at some point have to enter the totals into some electronic machine in order to tally them with everyone else.
In an electronic voting system, the cost of counting write-ins should be negligible.
It is a normal geologic property.
What exactly was her "link" to terrorists? Perhaps these files themselves?
I have a wide circle of friends. Perhaps one or two of them sells weed. If I downloaded a pot-growing manual, does that give the government enough cause to arrest me as a narco-trafficker?
I don't think that Nintendo will be the next big thing. Like Apple, they are in the high-end niche market, though they are cheaper. They concentrate on making a well-polished, high-quality product, and don't worry about trying to market themselves into the #1 position.
That's the thing. It's the republicans who are doing the hunting of gays, liberals, and San Francisco sodomites, and burning them in effigy.
If the leader of the RNC is outed as gay, they presumably won't hunt one of their own. That *should* put a stop to the gay-bashing on the part of the RNC, if they have any moral decency.
Even if Dems took the Senate, there would only have a majority of 1. They can get their bills on the president's desk, but if the president vetoes the bill, congress can only override the veto with a 2/3rd majority -- which means they will need republican votes. If the dems want a bill that the president will sign into law, then they will need to compromise with him to create a bill that he will find acceptable.
Also, if dems do take the senate, they will only have a majority of one. The democratic party doesn't have discipline necessary to get them to vote along party lines. You only then need 1 or 2 people willing to cross the line to stymie a bill. Keep in mind that Lieberman ran as an independent and is a big supporter of the president. Bye-bye majority -- and Cheney casts the tie-breaking vote.
"One way out is to give up. This will make us look weak. (The reality is, when it comes to controlling what happens inside other countries we are weak)....
The only other option is to stay the course."
Staying the "course" will make us look weak because we *are* weak -- The insurgents have us on the run, and we are not in charge over there. We are unwilling to commit the necessary resources and manpower to do the job. We have the most powerful military in the world, yet we can't keep ahead of these insurgents. That is what makes us look weak.
A strong leader picks battles that he can win. He doesn't cling desperately to lost causes. Falling back to Kurdistan would make us look smart and strong. We would still be technically in Iraq, and we can launch operations into other parts of Iraq at a moments' notice. Not relying on American forces would force the Iraqis to take security seriously.
The ethnic/religious power struggle in Iraq is going to shake out with lots of blood, and it won't be over any time soon. There is no reason for us to lose countless more lives over a process that will have no effect on the final results. Americans don't care as much about Iraq as Iraqis do. They are going to fight stronger, longer, and harder. It's their country and their future.
Sorry to break this to you -- I don't have the time nor inclination to follow the money. Can you just go ahead and tell me who is funding all of this research and these conferences? Is it the governments themselves, whose ultimate goal is a one-world totalitarian state?