It's facile. If people are free to criticize Sam Harris's avocation of torture and racist profiling,, whyyyyyyyy isn't Harris free to criticize Islam? There is no line connecting the dots between A and B.
Ie its not, nor should be illegal, but it's unethical. As for women lying about their age I'd say that's also unethical.
So, academic suspension for coeds wearing makeup? Civil fines for women in their 30's who use college graduation pictures on dating sites? The point I'm getting at here is the selective outrage at misrepresentations while dating.
If the British hadn't destroyed the Luftwaffe.. If If If If If
Insignificant next to the impact of the Red Army on the German military. And you didn't answer the question - how much would you have wanted Churchill to face three times the German military presence if they hadn't been tied up fighting the Russians you despise? But now that we know that you're a British Exceptionalist, here's a question for you: rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent people into concentration camps. Torturing them to death, by means such as gang rape, ramming sand into their rectums, using metal tools to first crush and then remove testicles from men....Nazi Germany or British-occupied Kenya in the 1950's?
One guess, motherfucker. Now, why don't you round up a few of your American Exceptionalist buddies and visit a bar in Moscow to tell the locals how you did all the haaard wooork of beating the Nazis in WWII. When your casualties were numbered in the thousands, theirs in the millions. Just make sure to wear a cup and mouthguard when you do it.
Then you need to Google the definition of the word "anecdote". Asking for evidence that affirmative consent will be equally applied to women is as banal as asking for evidence that 70's feminists left the draft out of their demands for "equality."
What an extra-ordinary person then Assange person is, above laws and able through divine right to dictate to nations the terms under blah blah blah blah
Assange was offered asylum for a reason, and that's the penchant for Sweden to hand people - innocent people - over to the United States to be tortured. That happened. Then there was the two years of torture - and yes, solitary confinement is torture - inflicted on Bradley Manning.
We must all abandon all notions of democracy and justice and bend the knee to his holiness...
All the pompous asshattery in the world doesn't deflect from the elephant in the room: the refusal of Swedish authorities to make this about rape, if it is in fact about rape.
Hell, take Assange and the CIA out of it and switch the subject to the police standoff of your choice. Suspect offers to give himself up if the cops promise not to shoot him in the back or beat him to death after he's handcuffed - things other cops have done to other suspects. What police lieutenant isn't going to roll his eyes and say:
"Fine. We wont beat or shoot you to death. Now go ahead and turn yourself in."
Extradition in Sweden is decided independently by courts. The government cannot promise anything about the courts potential decisions. Ministerial intervention in individual cases is banned by the Swedish constitution.
You've been listening to Imperialist Apologists too much, as of course the government can refuse to extradite people. The courts can try and block the government from handing people over, say to regimes that are fond of execution and torture like the United States - but not the other way around.
Assange keeps saying this but its been shown to be false.
Shown by what, the Swedish government handing people over to the U.S. to be tortured? Assange offered to return to Sweden if they promised not to extradite him to the U.S....pretty easy for them to call his bluff - if this is actually about a rape case, of course.
A democracy is a form of government in which the people govern directly.
No. It's not. You're thinking of direct democracy. There are different forms of democracy, just as there are different forms of republics. Anyone who insists that the terms are incompatible doesn't understand either one.
Any other kind of so-called democracy, such as a "representative" democracy is a "kinda" democracy.
No more than the United States "kind of" has a representative branch because it has a congress and not a parliament.
....and incorrect pedantry at that. If he had said something about the Constitutional electoral process, you'd have a point, but that's not the case. Would you happen to also be one of those who jumps in with the correction 'the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy' except the fact that its representatives are democratically elected?
Because building up a huge all-encompassing governmental establishment is what the statist Democrats are all about.
Then they would have been pushing universal health care, universal higher ed, a national pension system, four weeks paid vacation for even part time employees, a massive investment in high speed rail, etc etc. But of course, Democrats have the same range of antipathy to outright hostility to all those items as any Republican.
But, don't let facts get in the way of a little mindless partisan tribalism. You meet up with Obamabots for coffee on Tuesdays?
That's earned compensation agreed to in a contract, you worker-hating fascist, you.
That's one of the "neat" tricks of neoliberalism: cut taxes on the rich, gut the standard of living for the working class, then blame the victims for the results.
Pick any "yes means yes" campaign. Ask the proponents of such measures how long women who initiate sex should be sentenced to jail, if they failed to first obtain explicit affirmative consent from their would-be partners.
How is it you're allowed to criticize the author's opinions but the author isn't allowed to criticize Feynman's actions?
Because that's a complete non-sequitur, that's why.
And on the topic of consent it carries a lot less weight when it's predicated on a lie. While it's legally nowhere near rape it's still really greasy.
So, you're saying women who lie about their age should be charged with misdemeanors, rather than felonies? Interesting. Maybe let them off with probation in exchange for community service?
With that said, the storage problem for solar and wind is absolutely not solved, nor will it be cheap.
It's been solvable with technology from the 70's - or even the 1870's - and still be cheaper than either coal or nuclear, if all of the latter's costs are counted rather than externalized. You even mentioned part of the solution:
We can easily transmit power 1000-2000 km today. Some day we'll be able to transmit it 3000 km and in the distant future 4000 km and 5000 km, which will be enough that we'll barely need storage.
It might be overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but that's not going to be the case all over a 2000 km radius. It's going to be sunny or windy somewhere. As for storing the energy, get some molten salt batteries - or just build more water towers into your grid and use excess energy to pump up water. If you need power, just let it out into a tank or retaining pond and use gravity to generate electricity. It's going to have some up-front costs, but it's still going to be cheaper than coal or nuclear, and the infrastructure should last a long time - we have hydro plants that are over 100 years old that are still producing electricity. For the rare areas where neither wind or solar would never work - build a plant that burns ethanol (cane or switch grass based, not that corn corporate pork) or wood, and you'd still be carbon-neutral.
The nice ting about nuclear power is that we can build it now. You can call GE and order a plant on Monday, assuming you have the $5 billion (or $10 billion after the usual cost overrun) that they want for one of those and in 10-15 years you, your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids will have a clean and safe power plant.
You can build a lot of green energy for $5 billion (more when you include all the costs, not just the up-front government subsidies) over 10-15 years. Take the $1 trillion plus imperial budget - most of which is focused around guarding the world's gas station, the middle east - and spend it on green energy, and not only could you have us carbon-free within a decade. You'd have an economic boom that would make the post-WWII era look like a recession, from the number of jobs created.
If you are concerned about what future generations will do with your nuclear waste storage sites, you should probably be more concerned about what they will do (or rather what they will fail to do) with your hydro dams.
Every hydro dam in the world could collapse tomorrow, and the loss of life would be huge. But rebuilding could start as soon as the floodwaters receded, and it would be a historical footnote hundreds of years from now - as opposed to the nuclear waste facilities that will still need to be maintained in 2515, A.D.
At the very least their television programming was interrupted for minutely updates.
You could say the same for the Caitlyn Jenner transition. Whoop de do.
The 2% of Americans that lived in NYC had their normal daily routines interrupted.
And then then went back to work.
Flights were grounded for a few days, affecting yet more Americans.
Which was due to the decision to ground airplanes, not due to the attacks on the WTC. A decision that didn't apply to planes or people from Saudi Arabia, where the the attackers actually came from. Curious, that.
And yet they listed to what their scientists and experts say.
As long as they don't interfere with profit margins, no different than how Enron and Worldcom "listened" to their accountants, and for the same reasons.
Yes, and the US would have been a third world country with 50 million people in it, and the discussion about a fence between Mexico and the US would have been a topic in Mexican elections, not US elections.
Red herrings are red.
and also the cleanest and safest way to create the required amount of electricity.
Then you must be thinking of wind and solar, not nuclear, as the former wont be causing problem for people living a thousand years from now. The canard about "baseline power" is also addressed with technology that has been around for decades: long distance power lines. It might be heavily overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but it's not going to be windless and sunless across the entire region. So you build enough redundancy into your green power grid to compensate - and it's still going to be far cheaper than coal or nuclear, when all costs are counted in.
This is only a problem because rational people point out that the unicorn plans for waste managment are dangerous.
FTFY. There is nothing sane about building a facility, anywhere on the planet, and pretending it's going to be find and dandy 900 years from now.
yup, let's panic about a couple of tons of radioactive waste.
A couple? How many tons are generated from a single nuclear plant? How much will be generated if coal plants are replaced with nuclear power plants, rather than other forms of power generation.
And that's still ignoring the time scale. How enthused would you be if you had to deal with radioactive waste left by Charlemange?
it's so much better instead to rely on a method that constantly dumps countless tons of shit, diluted into the atmosphere
There's the false dichotomy crutch, again. If you don't want nuclear, it means you must want coal. If you don't want GMO foods, it means you want your meat from factory farms where the pigs/chicken/cows can't even stand free from their own shit. If you don't support the invasion of Iraq, it means you must love Saddam.
Etc, etc, etc.
But compared to what is currently used in lots of place, nuclear is *definitely less worse*.
Nuclear power is unjustifiable, and that's putting aside completely the risk of meltdowns. Don't bother to claim otherwise until nuclear power companies roll the complete cost of mining, refinement, construction, maintenance, security, insurance, disaster preparedness, and of course storing the waste for hundreds of years into the rates it charges to customers.
As much as you would like the alternative to be wind farms, and solar panels, the reality is that the alternative against which nuclear power is competing is mainly burning fossil fuel and filling the atmosphere with its waste.
The reality is this a problem solvable with technology that has existed since the 70's. Solar and wind are already cost-competitive with coal, and that's if you let coal externalize much of their costs (pollution and damage from mining), much less nuclear.
Peace and democracy would get in the way of the business model. Peace means you don't need a military-industrial complex, and democracy tends to lead to nationalism and the populace wanting a fair price in exchange for exploiting their country's resources.
And then you have to overthrow said democracy, because capitalism.
Hell according to that logic Hollywood is responsible for all of those movie theater shootings because if they didn't make movies that people wanted to watch then they wouldn't be at the theater to be shot.
Uh, no. Not even close. Was this posted under the influence of too little caffeine, or too much alcohol?
You can try to solve violence with the violence you seem to profess to hate with one side of your mouth but I don't really think that's a solution. Well, at least as far as I can tell, it's an unlikely solution. You probably felt pretty smart typing out that reply, didn't you? *sighs* I suppose you just want to be the new boss because, you know, you're way is so much better. After all, you're just suggesting we kill more people for a cause you think is just.
Well, that was an odd response. Written under the influence of too little caffeine or too much alcohol? This isn't a hard subject for me....I'm as opposed to the Syrian organ eaters as I am to Obama's drone murders. But I'm also aware that the organ eater is there because of American policy ("regime change"), and that he's not assassinating people on the other side of the planet from him.
Well, I'm pretty pissed off with my government which is why I am running for State office - it's a start.
Just about any needed, massive change has arrived in spite of electoral politics, not because of it. Gays didn't win marriage equality through Congress, but the courts. Women didn't gain the right to vote by voting. Etc, etc.
Could you speak a little louder? It's hard to hear people who have crammed their heads far up their asses in order to avoid making an actual response to an actual point.
Do you like your crow fried or grilled? Unfortunately for you, both points can be addressed with simple yes or no questions.
1) Has the United States killed far more civilians than militants/insurgents/terrorists with their bombs and excused themselves because "they were using human shields"?
2) If someone bombed a civilian/military airport in Israel with that very justification, would the United States describe that as a terrorist attack?
The obvious answer to both these questions is of course. Yes.
What's funny about all of this is how this entire scenario has already played out with this hospital, while the comments section on this article is still active, and all the imperialist equivocation has has it's bullshit rug pulled out from underneath it. U.S. bombs did murder a large number of innocent people, and our "Afghan allies" who supposedly asked for the strike have excused it by.........saying the Taliban were using human shields at the hospital. Claims mindlessly repeated by the media.
Unfortunately for the imperialists and their lapdogs in the press, the group of innocents this time speak English and are forcefully calling for an independent investigation, while calling bullshit on all the excuses, equivocation, and promises of internal investigations offered thus far.
Slashdot Mirror
It's facile. If people are free to criticize Sam Harris's avocation of torture and racist profiling,, whyyyyyyyy isn't Harris free to criticize Islam? There is no line connecting the dots between A and B.
So, academic suspension for coeds wearing makeup? Civil fines for women in their 30's who use college graduation pictures on dating sites? The point I'm getting at here is the selective outrage at misrepresentations while dating.
Insignificant next to the impact of the Red Army on the German military. And you didn't answer the question - how much would you have wanted Churchill to face three times the German military presence if they hadn't been tied up fighting the Russians you despise? But now that we know that you're a British Exceptionalist, here's a question for you: rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent people into concentration camps. Torturing them to death, by means such as gang rape, ramming sand into their rectums, using metal tools to first crush and then remove testicles from men....Nazi Germany or British-occupied Kenya in the 1950's?
One guess, motherfucker. Now, why don't you round up a few of your American Exceptionalist buddies and visit a bar in Moscow to tell the locals how you did all the haaard wooork of beating the Nazis in WWII. When your casualties were numbered in the thousands, theirs in the millions. Just make sure to wear a cup and mouthguard when you do it.
Then you need to Google the definition of the word "anecdote". Asking for evidence that affirmative consent will be equally applied to women is as banal as asking for evidence that 70's feminists left the draft out of their demands for "equality."
Assange was offered asylum for a reason, and that's the penchant for Sweden to hand people - innocent people - over to the United States to be tortured. That happened. Then there was the two years of torture - and yes, solitary confinement is torture - inflicted on Bradley Manning.
All the pompous asshattery in the world doesn't deflect from the elephant in the room: the refusal of Swedish authorities to make this about rape, if it is in fact about rape.
Hell, take Assange and the CIA out of it and switch the subject to the police standoff of your choice. Suspect offers to give himself up if the cops promise not to shoot him in the back or beat him to death after he's handcuffed - things other cops have done to other suspects. What police lieutenant isn't going to roll his eyes and say:
"Fine. We wont beat or shoot you to death. Now go ahead and turn yourself in."
You've been listening to Imperialist Apologists too much, as of course the government can refuse to extradite people. The courts can try and block the government from handing people over, say to regimes that are fond of execution and torture like the United States - but not the other way around.
Shown by what, the Swedish government handing people over to the U.S. to be tortured? Assange offered to return to Sweden if they promised not to extradite him to the U.S....pretty easy for them to call his bluff - if this is actually about a rape case, of course.
Speaking of incorrect pedantry...
No. It's not. You're thinking of direct democracy. There are different forms of democracy, just as there are different forms of republics. Anyone who insists that the terms are incompatible doesn't understand either one.
No more than the United States "kind of" has a representative branch because it has a congress and not a parliament.
He didn't say Constitutional process, so the point is still moot.
....and incorrect pedantry at that. If he had said something about the Constitutional electoral process, you'd have a point, but that's not the case. Would you happen to also be one of those who jumps in with the correction 'the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy' except the fact that its representatives are democratically elected?
Then they would have been pushing universal health care, universal higher ed, a national pension system, four weeks paid vacation for even part time employees, a massive investment in high speed rail, etc etc. But of course, Democrats have the same range of antipathy to outright hostility to all those items as any Republican.
But, don't let facts get in the way of a little mindless partisan tribalism. You meet up with Obamabots for coffee on Tuesdays?
You mean aside from the GPS coordinates and a picture of the issue? This day in simple answers for simple people...
That's earned compensation agreed to in a contract, you worker-hating fascist, you.
That's one of the "neat" tricks of neoliberalism: cut taxes on the rich, gut the standard of living for the working class, then blame the victims for the results.
Pick any "yes means yes" campaign. Ask the proponents of such measures how long women who initiate sex should be sentenced to jail, if they failed to first obtain explicit affirmative consent from their would-be partners.
Because that's a complete non-sequitur, that's why.
So, you're saying women who lie about their age should be charged with misdemeanors, rather than felonies? Interesting. Maybe let them off with probation in exchange for community service?
It's been solvable with technology from the 70's - or even the 1870's - and still be cheaper than either coal or nuclear, if all of the latter's costs are counted rather than externalized. You even mentioned part of the solution:
It might be overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but that's not going to be the case all over a 2000 km radius. It's going to be sunny or windy somewhere. As for storing the energy, get some molten salt batteries - or just build more water towers into your grid and use excess energy to pump up water. If you need power, just let it out into a tank or retaining pond and use gravity to generate electricity. It's going to have some up-front costs, but it's still going to be cheaper than coal or nuclear, and the infrastructure should last a long time - we have hydro plants that are over 100 years old that are still producing electricity. For the rare areas where neither wind or solar would never work - build a plant that burns ethanol (cane or switch grass based, not that corn corporate pork) or wood, and you'd still be carbon-neutral.
You can build a lot of green energy for $5 billion (more when you include all the costs, not just the up-front government subsidies) over 10-15 years. Take the $1 trillion plus imperial budget - most of which is focused around guarding the world's gas station, the middle east - and spend it on green energy, and not only could you have us carbon-free within a decade. You'd have an economic boom that would make the post-WWII era look like a recession, from the number of jobs created.
Every hydro dam in the world could collapse tomorrow, and the loss of life would be huge. But rebuilding could start as soon as the floodwaters receded, and it would be a historical footnote hundreds of years from now - as opposed to the nuclear waste facilities that will still need to be maintained in 2515, A.D.
Not even close.
You could say the same for the Caitlyn Jenner transition. Whoop de do.
And then then went back to work.
Which was due to the decision to ground airplanes, not due to the attacks on the WTC. A decision that didn't apply to planes or people from Saudi Arabia, where the the attackers actually came from. Curious, that.
As long as they don't interfere with profit margins, no different than how Enron and Worldcom "listened" to their accountants, and for the same reasons.
Nope. Quite the opposite. Self-regulation in incestuous, revolving-door industries is a joke by definition.
Red herrings are red.
Then you must be thinking of wind and solar, not nuclear, as the former wont be causing problem for people living a thousand years from now. The canard about "baseline power" is also addressed with technology that has been around for decades: long distance power lines. It might be heavily overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but it's not going to be windless and sunless across the entire region. So you build enough redundancy into your green power grid to compensate - and it's still going to be far cheaper than coal or nuclear, when all costs are counted in.
FTFY. There is nothing sane about building a facility, anywhere on the planet, and pretending it's going to be find and dandy 900 years from now.
A couple? How many tons are generated from a single nuclear plant? How much will be generated if coal plants are replaced with nuclear power plants, rather than other forms of power generation.
And that's still ignoring the time scale. How enthused would you be if you had to deal with radioactive waste left by Charlemange?
There's the false dichotomy crutch, again. If you don't want nuclear, it means you must want coal. If you don't want GMO foods, it means you want your meat from factory farms where the pigs/chicken/cows can't even stand free from their own shit. If you don't support the invasion of Iraq, it means you must love Saddam.
Etc, etc, etc.
Nuclear power is unjustifiable, and that's putting aside completely the risk of meltdowns. Don't bother to claim otherwise until nuclear power companies roll the complete cost of mining, refinement, construction, maintenance, security, insurance, disaster preparedness, and of course storing the waste for hundreds of years into the rates it charges to customers.
The reality is this a problem solvable with technology that has existed since the 70's. Solar and wind are already cost-competitive with coal, and that's if you let coal externalize much of their costs (pollution and damage from mining), much less nuclear.
Peace and democracy would get in the way of the business model. Peace means you don't need a military-industrial complex, and democracy tends to lead to nationalism and the populace wanting a fair price in exchange for exploiting their country's resources.
And then you have to overthrow said democracy, because capitalism.
Uh, no. Not even close. Was this posted under the influence of too little caffeine, or too much alcohol?
Well, that was an odd response. Written under the influence of too little caffeine or too much alcohol? This isn't a hard subject for me....I'm as opposed to the Syrian organ eaters as I am to Obama's drone murders. But I'm also aware that the organ eater is there because of American policy ("regime change"), and that he's not assassinating people on the other side of the planet from him.
Just about any needed, massive change has arrived in spite of electoral politics, not because of it. Gays didn't win marriage equality through Congress, but the courts. Women didn't gain the right to vote by voting. Etc, etc.
Could you speak a little louder? It's hard to hear people who have crammed their heads far up their asses in order to avoid making an actual response to an actual point.
Do you like your crow fried or grilled? Unfortunately for you, both points can be addressed with simple yes or no questions.
1) Has the United States killed far more civilians than militants/insurgents/terrorists with their bombs and excused themselves because "they were using human shields"?
2) If someone bombed a civilian/military airport in Israel with that very justification, would the United States describe that as a terrorist attack?
The obvious answer to both these questions is of course. Yes.
What's funny about all of this is how this entire scenario has already played out with this hospital, while the comments section on this article is still active, and all the imperialist equivocation has has it's bullshit rug pulled out from underneath it. U.S. bombs did murder a large number of innocent people, and our "Afghan allies" who supposedly asked for the strike have excused it by.........saying the Taliban were using human shields at the hospital. Claims mindlessly repeated by the media.
Unfortunately for the imperialists and their lapdogs in the press, the group of innocents this time speak English and are forcefully calling for an independent investigation, while calling bullshit on all the excuses, equivocation, and promises of internal investigations offered thus far.