So, your rebuttal is basically, "Yeah, but we had good reasons for it. And we weren't hiding it. Most of the time." Your more accurate account (and I agree it is more accurate) still amounts to the U.S. being guilty of the accusations, just that it was justifiable behavior.
I agree the show isn't propaganda. They ran a news piece on the Fox News at 10 immediately following the premier saying that the approach probably doesn't work. I just took it as an attempt to get another police procedural on Fox with a unique twist, like Bones.
Of course. And Al Capone went to jail for the rest of his life over tax fraud related to his business of murder, bribery, etc. Sometimes we prosecute people for what we can rather than what they really did wrong. You can be sure they are revising and closing loopholes so they can prosecute it for the right reasons next time.
By your logic, there is nothing wrong with forced abortions, because an embryo is just a mass of cells that "could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions." It is exactly the same as removing a tumor from a person without consent. That is just silly.
Observable facts inform our morals, but they do not decide them. You cannot derive should from is. Many people believe that because the natural course of embryonic stem cells leads to a human being, they should be considered a human being. If you disagree, you need to tell them where the dividing line between human and not human is. You know any such line is arbitrary. Until we decide on where that line is a society, doing anything within a reasonable range of that line is morally questionable. That does not mean immoral, just questionable. If you want it to be unquestionably moral, prove to a majority of the population why they are clearly not human yet.
The color of the sky is an empirical issue. We can look at it and know the answer. If nobody can look at it, then it remains an open question until someone can. Morals are not empirically observable. They are values decided upon by society. Therefore, you're entire analogy is fundamentally flawed and invalid.
The fact that you thinks its moral, and someone else thinks its immoral is exactly what makes it morally questionable. If you both agreed, it wouldn't be questionable anymore, it would be definitively moral or immoral.
More people than ever have access to photo manipulation software. If the number of asshats is constant, why aren't we seeing many more faked UFO pictures flooding the web?
So what do you suggest? Tear down the fences, expose them to the dangers of the real world off the ranch, and let natural selection raise their intelligence again? I'm not sure ranchers would be able to afford the kind of loss that would take; and we probably wouldn't be able to afford the steak anymore either.
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).
As a linguist, I have to say that I have never heard a remotely convincing argument that Homo Sapiens have better language skills than Neanderthals. I've never heard good arguments that Neanderthals had good language skills either. In fact, I've never heard a good argument on the Neanderthal language issue at all. They are always speculations based on really shoddy assumptions. The best evidence only ever shows that Neanderthal language would not be the same as human language. That's it.
However, Earth seems to have excellent conditions for life to thrive, allowing this diversity of bacteria in extreme places. Larger life forms do not thrive in so many extreme conditions. Mars does not appear to be great for life to thrive, as evidenced by the apparent lack of anything larger than bacteria. Who's to say that the conditions aren't so harsh that bacteria can only survive in really limited areas?
You really have no experience with education outside of being a student, do you?
You get shitty administrators in charter schools just like you do in public schools. Teachers' unions were formed as a reaction to shitty administrators, and in some schools and districts they are just as necessary today as they were before. In fact, as long as there are egos and criminal behavior on the part of administrators, there will continue to be a need for unions. That's not to absolve unions of their shitty behavior, because they do their fair share too. The union issue is far from black and white, and there is more than enough accusation shitty behavior to go around.
If you want to stop the "babysitting", you need to make it easier to throw out bad administrators, bad union representatives, and enact decent tort reform so parents can't sue over any little accident.* All of that can still be a problem in a merit-based charter school.
* Anecdote: At one of the elementary schools near where I work, the children are not allowed to run, at all. A child ran, fell, and broke his arm. There was nothing the school could have done about it, but the parents sued anyways. Hundreds of thousands of public tax dollars later, the school decided that the only way to prevent liability was to disallow running. Someday those same parents are going to complain that the schools were not adequately supplied. Hmm. Funny that.
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia that can't happen in any hard bound book.
I've never opened a hard-bound physics textbook and found that it consists only of a anatomy textbook's diagram of the female reproductive organs. I've had this happen on Wikipedia.
Except for the fact that we don't generally write glottal stops in English. In one of the few cases were we do, we use a hyphen: uh-oh (and not everyone does that).
Our pot isn't the blackest (and the GP never said or implied that, so your argument is a total strawman). Our pot certainly isn't white. How gray do we have to be before the kettles don't listen to us anymore?
IMHO it's simple: The energies required for an interplanetary civilization, let alone an interstellar civilization, are SO great that if a species has more than the slightest tendency to make war with itself, it will extinguish either itself or its technological base.
I disagree. We have no idea whether or not war based on that level of power will yield the total destruction of the species. It's never happened, so any statement on the matter probably has more to do with a person's view of humanity than reality.
Our own drive to nuclear weaponry was accompanied by underground bunkers, improved food preservation techniques, massive and long term archiving of information, etc. Who knows how far we are from being able to create sustainable bases on the moon or Mars? There is no reason to believe that civilizations don't produce the necessary means to survive high energy warfare at the same time they develop the weapons.
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So, your rebuttal is basically, "Yeah, but we had good reasons for it. And we weren't hiding it. Most of the time." Your more accurate account (and I agree it is more accurate) still amounts to the U.S. being guilty of the accusations, just that it was justifiable behavior.
I agree the show isn't propaganda. They ran a news piece on the Fox News at 10 immediately following the premier saying that the approach probably doesn't work. I just took it as an attempt to get another police procedural on Fox with a unique twist, like Bones.
Of course. And Al Capone went to jail for the rest of his life over tax fraud related to his business of murder, bribery, etc. Sometimes we prosecute people for what we can rather than what they really did wrong. You can be sure they are revising and closing loopholes so they can prosecute it for the right reasons next time.
By your logic, there is nothing wrong with forced abortions, because an embryo is just a mass of cells that "could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions." It is exactly the same as removing a tumor from a person without consent. That is just silly.
Observable facts inform our morals, but they do not decide them. You cannot derive should from is. Many people believe that because the natural course of embryonic stem cells leads to a human being, they should be considered a human being. If you disagree, you need to tell them where the dividing line between human and not human is. You know any such line is arbitrary. Until we decide on where that line is a society, doing anything within a reasonable range of that line is morally questionable. That does not mean immoral, just questionable. If you want it to be unquestionably moral, prove to a majority of the population why they are clearly not human yet.
The color of the sky is an empirical issue. We can look at it and know the answer. If nobody can look at it, then it remains an open question until someone can. Morals are not empirically observable. They are values decided upon by society. Therefore, you're entire analogy is fundamentally flawed and invalid.
The fact that you thinks its moral, and someone else thinks its immoral is exactly what makes it morally questionable. If you both agreed, it wouldn't be questionable anymore, it would be definitively moral or immoral.
You forgot Poland.
More people than ever have access to photo manipulation software. If the number of asshats is constant, why aren't we seeing many more faked UFO pictures flooding the web?
So what do you suggest? Tear down the fences, expose them to the dangers of the real world off the ranch, and let natural selection raise their intelligence again? I'm not sure ranchers would be able to afford the kind of loss that would take; and we probably wouldn't be able to afford the steak anymore either.
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).
As a linguist, I have to say that I have never heard a remotely convincing argument that Homo Sapiens have better language skills than Neanderthals. I've never heard good arguments that Neanderthals had good language skills either. In fact, I've never heard a good argument on the Neanderthal language issue at all. They are always speculations based on really shoddy assumptions. The best evidence only ever shows that Neanderthal language would not be the same as human language. That's it.
Still alive, yet he still has a tombstone in a cemetery in L.A. The same cemetery were Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin are buried. Strange, but true.
When gene splicing becomes a possibility, we'll talk again.
Very true.
However, Earth seems to have excellent conditions for life to thrive, allowing this diversity of bacteria in extreme places. Larger life forms do not thrive in so many extreme conditions. Mars does not appear to be great for life to thrive, as evidenced by the apparent lack of anything larger than bacteria. Who's to say that the conditions aren't so harsh that bacteria can only survive in really limited areas?
Looks to me like your last option essentially means "all of the above", once economist-speak is taken out of the picture.
I still think that the best way to "fix" education is to get the government out of it.
Or at least have educators write the education code rather than lawyers, doctors, and business men.
You really have no experience with education outside of being a student, do you?
You get shitty administrators in charter schools just like you do in public schools. Teachers' unions were formed as a reaction to shitty administrators, and in some schools and districts they are just as necessary today as they were before. In fact, as long as there are egos and criminal behavior on the part of administrators, there will continue to be a need for unions. That's not to absolve unions of their shitty behavior, because they do their fair share too. The union issue is far from black and white, and there is more than enough accusation shitty behavior to go around.
If you want to stop the "babysitting", you need to make it easier to throw out bad administrators, bad union representatives, and enact decent tort reform so parents can't sue over any little accident.* All of that can still be a problem in a merit-based charter school.
* Anecdote: At one of the elementary schools near where I work, the children are not allowed to run, at all. A child ran, fell, and broke his arm. There was nothing the school could have done about it, but the parents sued anyways. Hundreds of thousands of public tax dollars later, the school decided that the only way to prevent liability was to disallow running. Someday those same parents are going to complain that the schools were not adequately supplied. Hmm. Funny that.
Have you looked at voting records lately? Party-line voting is the norm, and it does look like most people can be ranked on a single line.
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia that can't happen in any hard bound book.
I've never opened a hard-bound physics textbook and found that it consists only of a anatomy textbook's diagram of the female reproductive organs. I've had this happen on Wikipedia.
Except for the fact that we don't generally write glottal stops in English. In one of the few cases were we do, we use a hyphen: uh-oh (and not everyone does that).
Yeah, but his offspring isn't fertile.
Our pot isn't the blackest (and the GP never said or implied that, so your argument is a total strawman). Our pot certainly isn't white. How gray do we have to be before the kettles don't listen to us anymore?
I disagree. We have no idea whether or not war based on that level of power will yield the total destruction of the species. It's never happened, so any statement on the matter probably has more to do with a person's view of humanity than reality.
Our own drive to nuclear weaponry was accompanied by underground bunkers, improved food preservation techniques, massive and long term archiving of information, etc. Who knows how far we are from being able to create sustainable bases on the moon or Mars? There is no reason to believe that civilizations don't produce the necessary means to survive high energy warfare at the same time they develop the weapons.
They couldn't find an IT guy who was unconditionally loyal to Bush, so they gave the job to Skippy, the neighborhood dog walker.