I'd add that we should consider impacts to their environment...
No, we should consider impacts to the environment, including the subset that affects dolphins, regardless.
Concern for the environment should not stem from wanting to respect the rights of dolphins, as that is an incomplete and ineffective environmentalism.
As far as rights go, tolerance and segregation really are all they need. Environmentalism is a separate issue altogether and vastly more complex than just what dolphins need.
This is awfully absurd. Maybe they are already asking to be let out of Seaworld and all the other cages we keep them in. Perhaps we aren't capable of understanding them? Does one simply ignore all signs of intelligence because we simply enjoy their tricks? Your suggestion in many ways is how slavery was justified by stating that the slaves were somehow an inferior animal.
Indeed. So are you really surprised that someone should suggest that some other being doesn't deserve rights because of their own ignorance?
Well, I have no problem recognizing the sentience of dolphins. I could even accept them as "non-human persons", though I'm not sure exactly what that means.
But as far as the upshot of what rights should we give dolphins, that's where I don't like the tack this is taking.
Talking about "equal rights" among people -- human people -- makes sense, as we are all human and equal and have the same essential needs when living together in our societies.
Dolphins don't live in our society. They live in dolphin societies. The only right they need is the right to live in that society without us bothering them. So, I'm against fishing them, and even keeping them in captivity outside of injured or rescued dolphins. anything else is unnecessary.
As someone who upgraded from an '87 Toyota Tercel to an '03 Toyota Echo, sometimes even to this day I'm all "WHOA there, Nelly!" when I put the accelerator down too hard when the light turns green.
Of course Nelly, the old gray mare, is too far ahead to even hear me by then, but my old Tercel would have been behind is my point! It's all relative.:)
I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?
Any bacteria or other organism that are alive down there have spent the last 14 million years adapting to that environment.
It is a near certainty that they would find our bodies to be a completely inhospitable environment.
The dangerous bacteria are the ones that are adapted to human bodies -- or close enough bodies that it's only a small jump to humans. There are many, many viruses and bacteria that infect mammals but are incapable of reproducing inside our bodies. Antarctic under-ice lake bacteria? No chance.
Lies?!? Never, we're being honest with the people. We're giving those who want to be different a choice.
Well you're not exactly being upfront about the whole "and then polar bears eat you" thing, which I'm sure that the vaccinaphobic, if they could speak after being devoured and then plopped out the back end of a bear, would agree was misleading.
I should run for Congress!
Well if you run for Congress instead of trying to take over America, you'll have to deal with some political realities. Like, the vacci-tards will most likely demand Texas instead of Siberia. Not many polar bears there. And if you do manage to win their votes by getting them to agree to Siberia, then you'll have to try to win over the environmentalists who will point out that the average American, even (especially) those who listen to Jenny McCarthy, are high in saturated fats and full of contaminates that accrue up the food chain.
I see that you are! It's all lies to make them happily walk into polar bear maws, very clever. As long as we're going to dive in the deep end and go full Evil Genius, then I approve, even though it would still never work.
Of course I did, it was the first sentence in my first post.
If you're unhappy with that because I allowed it to be ambiguous (oh noes! ambiguity in english!) whether or not it included or excluded the physical -- which by the way did not mean "and/or" as in "both simultaneously connected by a logical OR operator" but rather that it may mean either -- definition #1 at dictionary.com serves nicely as well.
But where do you draw the lines, you want to make vaccinations a mandatory criteria for citizenship.
Um, no, I'm making it mandatory for everyone subject to U.S. law.
What, are you only going to ship non-vaccinated citizens away? So someone on a long-term Visa or an illegal alien is free to spread rubella and measles?
And I'm not drawing a line; I've already said I'm being authoritarian too. However I am identifying our relative positions on the scale, and you are much farther on the authoritarian side than me.
Also, remember, Every drug recalled in the US was approved as safe and effective by the FDA. This includes vaccines. My way is safer because we don't expose people to the *possible* effects of vaccination, rather the cold and polar bears.
Your way is better because it exposes them to real hardship rather than hypothetical hardship?
And when did the hypothetical non-safety of vaccines become relevant to our thought process? I thought we had already agreed that whatever the risks of vaccines may be, the diseases they prevent are worse -- isn't that the whole reason you want to ship the un-vaccinated kooks off? I thought you were allowing these cooks to hold their opinions for the sake of freedom, not because you thought they might actually hold water.
I also didn't say concentration camps, they could go in Winnebagos, thus helping the Economy of Indiana along the way.
You're still uprooting their entire lives and forcing them to live in an area they are not free to leave. When the qualitative difference between a concentration camp and a not-so-concentrated camp matter to you, that's when you know you're in the deep end of the authoritarian jackboot pool trying to tread water.:)
"Perception" is only tautologically a "sense" for certain senses of "sense", which is not the sense meant by ESP.
Um, no. The word 'sense' is not in 'ESP', the word extrasensory is in ESP. Extrasensory means outside the senses, which rather makes your entire comment about that sort of 'sense' very strange, as you just defined a type of 'sense' to mean exactly what you wanted ESP to mean, when in actuality you should do the opposite, because ESP must be 'beyond' senses.
Looks like I failed to communicate my meaning because I was in fact doing the opposite of what you think I was -- I was defining "sense" to mean exactly what ESP isn't. So let me try again:
Extrasensory means "outside the senses".
The definition of the word "senses" in the definition of "Extrasensory" in the acroym ESP is not the same as the definition you are using when you say "Perception is interpreting your senses. That is literally what it means."
"Sense" has multiple definitions. You are using one valid definition of sense, but it is not the intended meaning and thus the incorrect one. ESP is only meaningless if you use this incorrect definition. Which should have been the first hint that it was the incorrect one.
I am for personal freedom and parental rights, no question... If you endanger the rest of us, you're on the fringe. So if they want to be on the fringe put them there, literally.
I'm quite certain that everyone who wants the freedom to not vaccinate their kids also wants the freedom to raise them in the community of their choice, and not be forced to live in a concentration camp.
You're looking to violate their rights much more by relocating them to a quarantine zone than I am by forcing them to vaccinate.
The fact that you're still allowing them to hold their belief is irrelevant. Technically, I am too. And technically, in Soviet Russia you were allowed to criticize the government and be an openly practicing Christian, they would just send you to Siberia if you did.
It wasn't long ago that people were forcibly sent to Leper (Hansen's disease) Colonies, people of all ages, kids too.... Society wasn't being Jackbooted were they? They were just protecting the rest of the herd.
If they had continued to do this after a cure for leprosy was found, then yes that would have been jackbooted.
So yes, you're looking to be a jackbooted authoritarian. Is that okay with you? For the good of society?
But if not, I'll defend their right to have their opinion but off to Siberia they go.
Oh, I think I understand now. I thought you were an advocate for personal freedom even if there were harmful consequences, but you're actually vastly more of an jack-booted authoritarian than I must admit I am for wanting to require parents to vaccinate.
The root problem is nobody has a sense of the fear that Polio, Smallpox and other preventable diseases once caused.
No shit. Even if we were for the sake of argument to accept the worst proclamations of the anti-vaccine morons as true, that still wouldn't be anywhere close to the horror visited upon humanity by the diseases the vaccines prevent or eliminate.
Seriously. Forget their foolishness in attributing autism to vaccines. These idiots just have no idea of the kind of world they are wishing on their children.
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses. It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
"Perception" is only tautologically a "sense" for certain senses of "sense", which is not the sense meant by ESP.
I don't agree, we have to allow those who don't have common sense to suffer the consequences.
Then we must extend the definition of "common sense" to "don't live anywhere near significant pockets of people who lack the common sense to have their children vaccinated".
Do you? Have you checked? Are you sure? No? Then any consequences to your children are the result of your own lack of common sense!
These people don't just endanger themselves. They endanger us all. I'm sorry, but like people who dump used motor oil in the creek behind their house, they cannot be "allowed" to not have common sense.
Except for threat modelling done by the RAND corporation nothing shows the F-35 to be effective in Combat... if you can't evade, you die.
Sounds then like the Rand corporation was lowballing the aerodynamic performance of the F-35 in their estimates when running their simulation.
Personally, I'm going to go with the opinion of the test pilot, who has also flown all those other craft and the F-22. He seems to think the F-35 performs extremely well, about equal to an F-16 and getting very close to or matching the F-22 in some respects. The performance of an F-16 with the targeting, avionics and stealth capabilities of a 5th generation fighter sounds pretty survivable to me.
Note in particular the part near the end where he says that unlike any of the 4th generation aircraft, the F-35 can achieve it's excellent flight performance in a combat configuration -- i.e. when it actually matters.
I mean, we won't fully know until it's actually operational and real war games (or war, heaven forbid), but if the opinion that the F-35 won't be effective in combat is based on presuming it "can't evade", then I'm not going to put much stock in it.
Ah. So the set of people who actually have precognitive or other supernatural ability turns out, for some reason, to have no intersection with the demonstrably large set of people who believe they do.
After all, no one starts down their path to self-improvement by admitting to themselves that they are an unexceptional, not particularly good or worthwhile person. They start by telling themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" even if they know deep-down that they're lying to themselves.
No, the only way people start down the path to true self improvement is by admitting that they are deeply flawed, unexceptional, and not particularly good. It's what motivates them to change. It's also what motivates them to accept that actually becoming better will be hard, and that failures, backslides will happen but they must push through.
Nobody ever cured their alcoholism without first admitting that they were a damned drunk. Nobody ever stopped abusing the ones they loved by first telling themselves that they were great people. Nobody ever stopped being a bigot without admitting to themselves that they had been a prejudiced fool. And they never succeeded in fixing their problems without recognizing that they were still that same flawed person, and only via constant attention and effort could they avoid reverting to their previous state. Not to go all AA, since I do think they go too far with their "once an alchy, always an alchy" thing, but it is true that admitting to yourself that you were, are, and always will be a flawed individual is a necessary step in the process of becoming better.
Or here's an example of this philosophy put to pragmatic use: Science.
Do you think scientists go about the task of investigating the empirical universe by first lying to themselves by telling themselves that they are exceptional, and above the common human foibles of selection bias and confirmation bias? That they, being the awesome people they are, would never subconsciously skew the results towards what they expected or wanted the result to be?
NO! Instead, science is about accepting these flaws, and then taking meticulous steps to account for and thus avoid them! It's the reason medical studies must be double-blind, because research physicians are not above these flaws and they know it! In fact I'd say probably the biggest difference between a successful scientist and a well-meaning crank is that the real scientist has made this admission to themselves, and would not believe their own experimental evidence if they allowed their perfectly ordinary human psychology to affect it.
We will never eliminate racism, war, or other forms of human flaws by pretending they don't exist as part of human nature.
Okay. Let's look at this clearly: Big Pharma is a mixed bag of positive and negative. They have undeniably provided products of great benefit to human health. And there is also undeniably many cases of them providing unnecessary vanity products, unintentionally harmful products, and products they knew were harmful or useless which they skewed data to get approved. I have lots of problems with Big Pfizer^H^H^H^H^Hharma.
Junk science is not a mixed bag. At best it causes people to get ripped off buying placebos, and at worst causes significant harm by making people not seek real medical treatment when they need it, or not vaccinate their kids so you get outbreaks of measels or whooping cough that affect not just their children, but the children of people who didn't buy into the junk science.
Please let us not talk about these things as if they are equal. There should be lots of money in legitimate pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, but we should also push to solve the problems with it. The problem with junk science, homeopathy, anti-vaccination movements, etc is the junk science itself.
It wasn't just rules of engagement that made the "down em with a missile from beyond visual range" doctrine a no-go. It was that the enemy was not kind enough to always fly in open sky with clear line-of-sight to our guys to let us see them on radar from far enough away to do that, and the doctrine was proven ineffective in it's first real use in Vietnam. The F-4 that was mentioned before as having no dogfighting weapons (and wasn't designed for dogfighting at all) was forced by the North Vietnamese to become a dogfighter flown by pilots who had not been extensively trained in dogfighting which resulted in a lot of lost planes and quickly brought back dogfighting as an important requirement for fighters and fighter pilots.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd add that we should consider impacts to their environment...
No, we should consider impacts to the environment, including the subset that affects dolphins, regardless.
Concern for the environment should not stem from wanting to respect the rights of dolphins, as that is an incomplete and ineffective environmentalism.
As far as rights go, tolerance and segregation really are all they need. Environmentalism is a separate issue altogether and vastly more complex than just what dolphins need.
This is awfully absurd. Maybe they are already asking to be let out of Seaworld and all the other cages we keep them in. Perhaps we aren't capable of understanding them? Does one simply ignore all signs of intelligence because we simply enjoy their tricks? Your suggestion in many ways is how slavery was justified by stating that the slaves were somehow an inferior animal.
Indeed. So are you really surprised that someone should suggest that some other being doesn't deserve rights because of their own ignorance?
So's Spanish, but it's really easy to spell anyway.
Oh, sorry if I didn't make it clear, but I'm not Satan, so no. :)
Well, I have no problem recognizing the sentience of dolphins. I could even accept them as "non-human persons", though I'm not sure exactly what that means.
But as far as the upshot of what rights should we give dolphins, that's where I don't like the tack this is taking.
Talking about "equal rights" among people -- human people -- makes sense, as we are all human and equal and have the same essential needs when living together in our societies.
Dolphins don't live in our society. They live in dolphin societies. The only right they need is the right to live in that society without us bothering them. So, I'm against fishing them, and even keeping them in captivity outside of injured or rescued dolphins. anything else is unnecessary.
Oh God, you've just described the perfect vision of Hell on Earth.
As someone who upgraded from an '87 Toyota Tercel to an '03 Toyota Echo, sometimes even to this day I'm all "WHOA there, Nelly!" when I put the accelerator down too hard when the light turns green.
Of course Nelly, the old gray mare, is too far ahead to even hear me by then, but my old Tercel would have been behind is my point! It's all relative. :)
I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?
Any bacteria or other organism that are alive down there have spent the last 14 million years adapting to that environment.
It is a near certainty that they would find our bodies to be a completely inhospitable environment.
The dangerous bacteria are the ones that are adapted to human bodies -- or close enough bodies that it's only a small jump to humans. There are many, many viruses and bacteria that infect mammals but are incapable of reproducing inside our bodies. Antarctic under-ice lake bacteria? No chance.
Lies?!? Never, we're being honest with the people. We're giving those who want to be different a choice.
Well you're not exactly being upfront about the whole "and then polar bears eat you" thing, which I'm sure that the vaccinaphobic, if they could speak after being devoured and then plopped out the back end of a bear, would agree was misleading.
I should run for Congress!
Well if you run for Congress instead of trying to take over America, you'll have to deal with some political realities. Like, the vacci-tards will most likely demand Texas instead of Siberia. Not many polar bears there. And if you do manage to win their votes by getting them to agree to Siberia, then you'll have to try to win over the environmentalists who will point out that the average American, even (especially) those who listen to Jenny McCarthy, are high in saturated fats and full of contaminates that accrue up the food chain.
LOL, No I'm being pragmatic
I see that you are! It's all lies to make them happily walk into polar bear maws, very clever. As long as we're going to dive in the deep end and go full Evil Genius, then I approve, even though it would still never work.
Of course I did, it was the first sentence in my first post.
If you're unhappy with that because I allowed it to be ambiguous (oh noes! ambiguity in english!) whether or not it included or excluded the physical -- which by the way did not mean "and/or" as in "both simultaneously connected by a logical OR operator" but rather that it may mean either -- definition #1 at dictionary.com serves nicely as well.
But where do you draw the lines, you want to make vaccinations a mandatory criteria for citizenship.
Um, no, I'm making it mandatory for everyone subject to U.S. law.
What, are you only going to ship non-vaccinated citizens away? So someone on a long-term Visa or an illegal alien is free to spread rubella and measles?
And I'm not drawing a line; I've already said I'm being authoritarian too. However I am identifying our relative positions on the scale, and you are much farther on the authoritarian side than me.
Also, remember, Every drug recalled in the US was approved as safe and effective by the FDA. This includes vaccines. My way is safer because we don't expose people to the *possible* effects of vaccination, rather the cold and polar bears.
Your way is better because it exposes them to real hardship rather than hypothetical hardship?
And when did the hypothetical non-safety of vaccines become relevant to our thought process? I thought we had already agreed that whatever the risks of vaccines may be, the diseases they prevent are worse -- isn't that the whole reason you want to ship the un-vaccinated kooks off? I thought you were allowing these cooks to hold their opinions for the sake of freedom, not because you thought they might actually hold water.
I also didn't say concentration camps, they could go in Winnebagos, thus helping the Economy of Indiana along the way.
You're still uprooting their entire lives and forcing them to live in an area they are not free to leave. When the qualitative difference between a concentration camp and a not-so-concentrated camp matter to you, that's when you know you're in the deep end of the authoritarian jackboot pool trying to tread water. :)
Looks like I failed to communicate my meaning because I was in fact doing the opposite of what you think I was -- I was defining "sense" to mean exactly what ESP isn't. So let me try again:
Extrasensory means "outside the senses".
The definition of the word "senses" in the definition of "Extrasensory" in the acroym ESP is not the same as the definition you are using when you say "Perception is interpreting your senses. That is literally what it means."
"Sense" has multiple definitions. You are using one valid definition of sense, but it is not the intended meaning and thus the incorrect one. ESP is only meaningless if you use this incorrect definition. Which should have been the first hint that it was the incorrect one.
That's it.
And on the flip side, most people here are smart enough to know that they had many more bad suppositions that ended up to be false.
it's true. I once supposed I was wrong about a previous supposition, but turned out I wasn't.
Nyuk nyuk!
I am for personal freedom and parental rights, no question... If you endanger the rest of us, you're on the fringe. So if they want to be on the fringe put them there, literally.
I'm quite certain that everyone who wants the freedom to not vaccinate their kids also wants the freedom to raise them in the community of their choice, and not be forced to live in a concentration camp.
You're looking to violate their rights much more by relocating them to a quarantine zone than I am by forcing them to vaccinate.
The fact that you're still allowing them to hold their belief is irrelevant. Technically, I am too. And technically, in Soviet Russia you were allowed to criticize the government and be an openly practicing Christian, they would just send you to Siberia if you did.
It wasn't long ago that people were forcibly sent to Leper (Hansen's disease) Colonies, people of all ages, kids too.... Society wasn't being Jackbooted were they? They were just protecting the rest of the herd.
If they had continued to do this after a cure for leprosy was found, then yes that would have been jackbooted.
So yes, you're looking to be a jackbooted authoritarian. Is that okay with you? For the good of society?
But if not, I'll defend their right to have their opinion but off to Siberia they go.
Oh, I think I understand now. I thought you were an advocate for personal freedom even if there were harmful consequences, but you're actually vastly more of an jack-booted authoritarian than I must admit I am for wanting to require parents to vaccinate.
The root problem is nobody has a sense of the fear that Polio, Smallpox and other preventable diseases once caused.
No shit. Even if we were for the sake of argument to accept the worst proclamations of the anti-vaccine morons as true, that still wouldn't be anywhere close to the horror visited upon humanity by the diseases the vaccines prevent or eliminate.
Seriously. Forget their foolishness in attributing autism to vaccines. These idiots just have no idea of the kind of world they are wishing on their children.
What ESP actually means is perceiving things beyond the known and/or physical senses. It's the ability to perceive things without direct stimulation of sensory organs.
"Perception" is only tautologically a "sense" for certain senses of "sense", which is not the sense meant by ESP.
I don't agree, we have to allow those who don't have common sense to suffer the consequences.
Then we must extend the definition of "common sense" to "don't live anywhere near significant pockets of people who lack the common sense to have their children vaccinated".
Do you? Have you checked? Are you sure? No? Then any consequences to your children are the result of your own lack of common sense!
These people don't just endanger themselves. They endanger us all. I'm sorry, but like people who dump used motor oil in the creek behind their house, they cannot be "allowed" to not have common sense.
Except for threat modelling done by the RAND corporation nothing shows the F-35 to be effective in Combat... if you can't evade, you die.
Sounds then like the Rand corporation was lowballing the aerodynamic performance of the F-35 in their estimates when running their simulation.
Personally, I'm going to go with the opinion of the test pilot, who has also flown all those other craft and the F-22. He seems to think the F-35 performs extremely well, about equal to an F-16 and getting very close to or matching the F-22 in some respects. The performance of an F-16 with the targeting, avionics and stealth capabilities of a 5th generation fighter sounds pretty survivable to me.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/081107-f-35-fighter-jets.html
Note in particular the part near the end where he says that unlike any of the 4th generation aircraft, the F-35 can achieve it's excellent flight performance in a combat configuration -- i.e. when it actually matters.
I mean, we won't fully know until it's actually operational and real war games (or war, heaven forbid), but if the opinion that the F-35 won't be effective in combat is based on presuming it "can't evade", then I'm not going to put much stock in it.
Only if they knew they could do it.
Ah. So the set of people who actually have precognitive or other supernatural ability turns out, for some reason, to have no intersection with the demonstrably large set of people who believe they do.
Friends don't give friends chlamydia. -- The Pole.
After all, no one starts down their path to self-improvement by admitting to themselves that they are an unexceptional, not particularly good or worthwhile person. They start by telling themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" even if they know deep-down that they're lying to themselves.
No, the only way people start down the path to true self improvement is by admitting that they are deeply flawed, unexceptional, and not particularly good. It's what motivates them to change. It's also what motivates them to accept that actually becoming better will be hard, and that failures, backslides will happen but they must push through.
Nobody ever cured their alcoholism without first admitting that they were a damned drunk. Nobody ever stopped abusing the ones they loved by first telling themselves that they were great people. Nobody ever stopped being a bigot without admitting to themselves that they had been a prejudiced fool. And they never succeeded in fixing their problems without recognizing that they were still that same flawed person, and only via constant attention and effort could they avoid reverting to their previous state. Not to go all AA, since I do think they go too far with their "once an alchy, always an alchy" thing, but it is true that admitting to yourself that you were, are, and always will be a flawed individual is a necessary step in the process of becoming better.
Or here's an example of this philosophy put to pragmatic use: Science.
Do you think scientists go about the task of investigating the empirical universe by first lying to themselves by telling themselves that they are exceptional, and above the common human foibles of selection bias and confirmation bias? That they, being the awesome people they are, would never subconsciously skew the results towards what they expected or wanted the result to be?
NO! Instead, science is about accepting these flaws, and then taking meticulous steps to account for and thus avoid them! It's the reason medical studies must be double-blind, because research physicians are not above these flaws and they know it! In fact I'd say probably the biggest difference between a successful scientist and a well-meaning crank is that the real scientist has made this admission to themselves, and would not believe their own experimental evidence if they allowed their perfectly ordinary human psychology to affect it.
We will never eliminate racism, war, or other forms of human flaws by pretending they don't exist as part of human nature.
Naw, you deserve to be right from now on. :)
Sadly, there's even bigger money in Big Pharma.
Okay. Let's look at this clearly: Big Pharma is a mixed bag of positive and negative. They have undeniably provided products of great benefit to human health. And there is also undeniably many cases of them providing unnecessary vanity products, unintentionally harmful products, and products they knew were harmful or useless which they skewed data to get approved. I have lots of problems with Big Pfizer^H^H^H^H^Hharma.
Junk science is not a mixed bag. At best it causes people to get ripped off buying placebos, and at worst causes significant harm by making people not seek real medical treatment when they need it, or not vaccinate their kids so you get outbreaks of measels or whooping cough that affect not just their children, but the children of people who didn't buy into the junk science.
Please let us not talk about these things as if they are equal. There should be lots of money in legitimate pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, but we should also push to solve the problems with it. The problem with junk science, homeopathy, anti-vaccination movements, etc is the junk science itself.
It wasn't just rules of engagement that made the "down em with a missile from beyond visual range" doctrine a no-go. It was that the enemy was not kind enough to always fly in open sky with clear line-of-sight to our guys to let us see them on radar from far enough away to do that, and the doctrine was proven ineffective in it's first real use in Vietnam. The F-4 that was mentioned before as having no dogfighting weapons (and wasn't designed for dogfighting at all) was forced by the North Vietnamese to become a dogfighter flown by pilots who had not been extensively trained in dogfighting which resulted in a lot of lost planes and quickly brought back dogfighting as an important requirement for fighters and fighter pilots.