Yes, and? The chopper in question was providing cover for ground troops. An RPG is definitely a threat to ground troops.
A potential RPG at a known location with air support is a threat to our ground troops?
Just get a couple of scouts with megaphones in hailing distance, tell them to put down whatever they're carrying, and maybe fire a couple of warning shots from the helicopter. It's not hard.
and I do think that the original attack on reporters and their escorts was fair - they were in a warzone in a middle of an ongoing military operations, with shots having been fired at U.S. troops in the vicinity already; and they had things that are either weapons or looking an awful lot like them (and carring them in such a way that makes it look like it's a weapon).
Excuse me, but when exactly did the United States declare war on Iraq? As far as I can tell, it is currently classified as an extended military operation, not a war.
Clearly you did not mean to say "warzone", but "extended military operation zone". Warzone carries some implications, like for instance that there's an actual army up against us - not that we're acting as a police force, which is what's going on in Iraq right now.
Further, if you deign to look up the specs on RPGs, you'll see that most of them have an incredibly hard time hitting anything out beyond five hundred meters; indeed, the most common RPG in Iraq has a 4% chance to hit a small, slowly moving target at 500 meters.
The large, quickly moving gunship out at close to 1000 meters was in absolutely no danger from that group of people. What's the rush in killing them, without further confirmation? Unless, of course, you're a trigger-happy psychopath who just wants a nice pile of bodies.
Meh. It doesn't matter if the gunner misidentified a camera as a weapon; an RPG wouldn't have been able to hit the gunship at that range. Just look at the Wikipedia entry for an RPG-7, the most common kind of RPG in Iraq at the moment - it's completely worthless past 500 meters, and judging by the zoomed out view in the gun camera the helicopter was probably close to a kilometer away from the crowd.
There was basically no reason to kill people right then. Except in times of war, that should be the last resort - not the first. And we are not currently at war in Iraq. The helicopter wasn't even in danger, so you can't blame stress or anything like that; the guy manning the gun was unreasonably bloodthirsty, and by extension so was everyone else in his chain of command.
Yeah, it was going on for years before this recall or media frenzy - except it was going on for years in Audis. And Fords. And Hondas. Every 5-10 years the media digs this shit up because nothing more interesting is going on, and has a field day because you can always find some jackass who rammed his car into a building and wants to get out of paying for it.
The only difference is that this time the US Government owns one of Toyota's competitors, and they decided to make an issue out of it.
How do you know they don't have wrong pedal crashes in other cars with the same frequency? This Toyota recall has pulled people out of the woodwork and drawn the media into a frenzy; how do you know the incidence rate isn't equivalent for other cars?
People here are not recognizing that if there is any kind of afterlife state, the transition from the universe of everyday physics into that state is going to be similar to the experience of an observer accelerating toward the speed of light, or another observer dropping into a black hole.
An afterlife state presupposes the existence of a soul. There is no evidence for the existence of a soul. Ergo, afterlife states probably do not exist and should not be seriously considered unless and until some evidence for a soul-like thing is discovered.
Perhaps you should shed some of your preconceptions.
The existence of an afterlife presupposes the existence of a soul, and there is absolutely no evidence for mind-body duality - though there is a ton of evidence for mind-body unity. Therefore, I see no problem in declaring wrong people who claim the existence of an afterlife. Not only is there no evidence for their hypothesis, there's no evidence for the prerequisite of their hypotheses.
Anyone who doesn't declare them wrong immediately has failed bullshitology 101 in the most fundamental way possible, and is doomed to spend the rest of their life listening to one crackpot after another.
And actually, I find that tying ethics with religion is deeply problematic. It leads to failing to question moral teachings brought about by a religion which might in some cases be bad, very bad. You need to examine and think critically and philosophically abour morals and ethics, for yours to actually be moral and ethical.
This is actually the root of an interesting question about religious morals.
Are things moral because God commands us to do them, or does God command us to do things because they are moral? Those are the only two options; any other hypotheses can be reduced to one of them.
If you believe the former, then you believe that if God commanded those Catholic priests to rape children, then it was moral - or more generally, that God can command you to do something that we normally consider to be highly immoral, and it will be moral. If you believe the latter, then you believe that morality is external to God; He follows it just as we do, though He may do so more perfectly (though honestly it's hard to make that argument using the Bible).
Obviously, the only rational thing to believe is that God commands us to do things because they are moral, not the other way around. God could conceivably command you to kill your son; the mere fact that God commanded it does not make it moral.
Therefore, morals exist independently of God.
Therefore, the argument that morals cannot exist independently of religion is bunk.
See? I knew philosophy would be good for something.
Oh, do you mean in this article, where he admitted that there has been no statistically significant evidence of warming since 1995?
Being a man of integrity, he of course answered that question truthfully. Here's his full response:
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
It's funny, because whoever wrote that question did their homework; 1995 is the latest year at which, if you run the calculation, there's no statistically significant warming until 2009 - though I'm sure that'll change when we get the 2010 data. Of course, if you run the same calculation from 1994, you do get a statistically significant result at the 95% significance level. Further, if you decrease the significance level from 95% to something like 85%, the warming trend is again significant. The thing is that a mere fifteen years is just not enough time to do actual climate science. Generally, you have to look back at least thirty years to get reasonable statistical significance; the fact that there's such a strong signal even if you start in 1995 should be good evidence in itself.
I would like to refer you to this alternative analysis of the study. Especially interesting is this quote from one of the study's authors on the design of the abstinence-only educational segments:
The abstinence class included a number of interactive exercises, Jemmott said. For example, the students were asked to think about their hopes five and 10 years in the future. Then they had to consider the consequences of a pregnancy on their plans."It's designed to be fun," Jemmott said. "There are games where they can win points, and role-playing and other upbeat activities. There's no preaching, and it's not moralistic."
That doesn't sound like the sort of abstinence-only classes you normally get, the ones that would have received funding under the Bush administration. Those programs required an emphasis on abstaining until marriage and generally tended to include material that denigrated the effectiveness of contraceptives; this program did neither of those things.
Basically, the reason why this study showed such strong effects all around was because it compared well-done, effective, secular sex ed to well-done, effective, secular sex ed with an emphasis on abstinence. Then, people go and cite this study to demonstrate that sex ed should be poorly taught, based on religious preaching and known to be ineffective.
The precedent was in the opinion - namely, what I found to be one of the more hilarious parts of The Republic, wherein Plato basically said, with no trace of irony AFAICT, "You know who should lead the government? People like me" - and not in the implementation thereof. The idea being that pretty much everyone thinks that they could do a better job of ruling the world if they were the global dictator.
He does have historical precedent on his side - after all, Plato thought that the best form of government would be rule by philosopher-kings.
In terms of practical historical precedent, not so much. This sort of thing tends to end badly. I think it's far better for us to thrash these issues out now, so that in the future everyone will be more aware of the standard array of denialist tactics.
If you blanket the radio spectrum with high-power white noise, you've just made an incredibly attractive target of yourself - jamming involves transmitting a signal that basically says "HEY EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOT TO ANYONE ELSE". That'll last about as long as it takes for a dumb cruise missile to drop on your antenna.
And if you're the sort of douchebag who sets jammers up in a civilian hospital or something, I'm sure the drone guys are working on that too - you've just told all the drones in the area exactly where your antennas are, so even if they can't talk to their handlers they might be able to surgically remove the interference.
That only works if the reporting is embarrassing. What tends to happen in the United States is that the reporters try to pretend that they are unbiased, and as such give equal weight to both the retarded side and the rational side - after all if there are two sides to an argument, then obviously there's a 50/50 chance that either side is true, right?
Thus, some moron like this guy and his woo-filled doctor* get put up against Dr. Bob Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland. That's not embarrassing at all; it puts these two idiots on an equal level with someone who's spent his entire career studying the subject. It's fucking flattering.
*Just because you have an MD doesn't mean you're qualified to determine whether "electrosensitivity" is a condition, no matter what the gullible reporter thinks. Do you think that a lady who pushes the always-vague "toxins" theory of chronic disease knows anything about electromagnetism beyond what she learned in Freshman physics?
If you want to know more about the timeline of the Big Bang, the Starts with a Bang blog has a series of articles on it named "The Greatest Story Ever Told"; it starts here and continues in these.
Yes, but you're forgetting something: in America, we are so terribly concerned that some poor person somewhere may be getting something they don't deserve that we're willing to put nearly a billion dollars in the pockets of rich people to ensure that the poor people stay in line.
Genetically altering humans is a fairly big ethical question.
No it fucking isn't. Humans who are capable of consenting to this procedure should be allowed to consent to this procedure. That's all that really matters.
I know you don't want to accept this. But the reality is that unless you're willing to spend years learning about the subject, you are not qualified to assess the science. "Dumbed down" or not.
Keep in mind that he claims to be a law student, so you would think that he'd understand this. I mean, just look at Slashdot - a hundred thousand people, each one with an opinion on what the law says, all of them wrong. Why does he think that climate science (a far more complex subject by orders of magnitude) should be reducible to something a layman can grasp in a day?
My wife is a doctoral student in Earth Systems Science. Her first year consisted of graduate-level ESS classes, many of which involved the climate. She'd bring home diagrams that showed the cycle of various elements in land, sea and air, and each one of them was a flowchart from Hell - and each came with the implied caveat of "these are only the parts of the cycle we've found, there's probably more that we still don't know about". Her classes were punishingly hard (two students dropped out for academic reasons, and one of them had even run his own lab at one point) and required a strong background in chemistry, mathematics and geology.
And this was just an overview of the current state of climate science; they didn't go particularly in depth about anything, they just covered everything.
And you want scientists to explain all that to an uninterested layman in a short amount of time?
My wife worked in the lab of an eminent scientist in college. When he was away at conferences, one of her jobs was to print out all of his e-mails (including personal ones), put them in a Fedex box, and ship them to him.
She wasn't the only lab assistant who had to do that, either.
What, exactly, do you mean by "nobody in the public sphere is willing to make an effort to explain it"?
Do you mean that the news media isn't explaining it? That's not exactly surprising; they don't explain anything. They just say cell phone radiation will cause brain cancer, they don't say why.
Do you mean that Wikipedia doesn't explain it? It does.
Do you mean that there are no websites with explanations from and discussion with climate scientists? There are.
Do you mean that there are no Youtube videos with explanations? There are.
Do you mean that Al Gore didn't make a movie out of his Powerpoint presentation? He did. (yes, I know there are problems with it - but you know what? That's what happens when you assume that a layman has the intellectual capacity of a sea sponge, and hand the presentation over to a politician).
If you cannot find layman's explanations for the science behind global warming, then that's because you're not looking. It's not like "the public sphere" can shove a tube into your brain and pump the information in.
You're a law student, right? So when you come out of your cocoon and bloom into a full-fledged lawyer, will you explain every nuance of case research to your clients? Will you explain in excruciating detail the specifics of which laws apply? Will you explain the finest, tiniest aspect of how those laws are enforced? Will you, in short, force each and every one of your clients to have a law degree?
Or will you just give them an overview and expect that they rely on your expertise as a lawyer to cover the details, which is why they hired you?
Anyway, you can look at the evidence yourself. The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report is freely available; you might want to start with Working Group 1's report and work your way onward from there. Your law school's library may have access to relevant papers as well, which are mentioned in the IPCC reports; if not, it can probably special order them for you. Further, there's a ton of blogs out there written by scientists that tend to discuss global warming if you look for them. Finally, I'm sure there's a climatology department somewhere near you; you can start e-mailing them (or go over there and talk to them!) if you have specific questions.
Yeah, what people don't seem to realize is that the global temperature anomaly due to global warming is on the order of 0.4 deg C since 1980. Can you even feel it when the temperature in your room fluctuates by 0.4 C? That's like a soft breeze blowing by.
And yet, that 2/5ths of a degree C represents a tremendous amount of energy when integrated over the entire surface of the Earth. It's definitely going to do something. There will still be an Earth, just not necessarily as we know it now.
There's no "both sides" of the debate. There's the science, which universally points towards global warming (hell, we've even noticed that over the last forty years, migratory birds in the United States have been getting smaller, which is indicative of generally rising temperatures due to Bergmann's rule), and then there's the people with a PR department, who are busy making it look like there's a debate. Even calling it a "global warming debate" is a victory for them, because the evidence for global warming shows up everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
A potential RPG at a known location with air support is a threat to our ground troops?
Just get a couple of scouts with megaphones in hailing distance, tell them to put down whatever they're carrying, and maybe fire a couple of warning shots from the helicopter. It's not hard.
Excuse me, but when exactly did the United States declare war on Iraq? As far as I can tell, it is currently classified as an extended military operation, not a war.
Clearly you did not mean to say "warzone", but "extended military operation zone". Warzone carries some implications, like for instance that there's an actual army up against us - not that we're acting as a police force, which is what's going on in Iraq right now.
Further, if you deign to look up the specs on RPGs, you'll see that most of them have an incredibly hard time hitting anything out beyond five hundred meters; indeed, the most common RPG in Iraq has a 4% chance to hit a small, slowly moving target at 500 meters.
The large, quickly moving gunship out at close to 1000 meters was in absolutely no danger from that group of people. What's the rush in killing them, without further confirmation? Unless, of course, you're a trigger-happy psychopath who just wants a nice pile of bodies.
Meh. It doesn't matter if the gunner misidentified a camera as a weapon; an RPG wouldn't have been able to hit the gunship at that range. Just look at the Wikipedia entry for an RPG-7, the most common kind of RPG in Iraq at the moment - it's completely worthless past 500 meters, and judging by the zoomed out view in the gun camera the helicopter was probably close to a kilometer away from the crowd.
There was basically no reason to kill people right then. Except in times of war, that should be the last resort - not the first. And we are not currently at war in Iraq. The helicopter wasn't even in danger, so you can't blame stress or anything like that; the guy manning the gun was unreasonably bloodthirsty, and by extension so was everyone else in his chain of command.
Yeah, it was going on for years before this recall or media frenzy - except it was going on for years in Audis. And Fords. And Hondas. Every 5-10 years the media digs this shit up because nothing more interesting is going on, and has a field day because you can always find some jackass who rammed his car into a building and wants to get out of paying for it.
The only difference is that this time the US Government owns one of Toyota's competitors, and they decided to make an issue out of it.
How do you know they don't have wrong pedal crashes in other cars with the same frequency? This Toyota recall has pulled people out of the woodwork and drawn the media into a frenzy; how do you know the incidence rate isn't equivalent for other cars?
An afterlife state presupposes the existence of a soul. There is no evidence for the existence of a soul. Ergo, afterlife states probably do not exist and should not be seriously considered unless and until some evidence for a soul-like thing is discovered.
Perhaps you should shed some of your preconceptions.
The existence of an afterlife presupposes the existence of a soul, and there is absolutely no evidence for mind-body duality - though there is a ton of evidence for mind-body unity. Therefore, I see no problem in declaring wrong people who claim the existence of an afterlife. Not only is there no evidence for their hypothesis, there's no evidence for the prerequisite of their hypotheses.
Anyone who doesn't declare them wrong immediately has failed bullshitology 101 in the most fundamental way possible, and is doomed to spend the rest of their life listening to one crackpot after another.
This is actually the root of an interesting question about religious morals.
Are things moral because God commands us to do them, or does God command us to do things because they are moral? Those are the only two options; any other hypotheses can be reduced to one of them.
If you believe the former, then you believe that if God commanded those Catholic priests to rape children, then it was moral - or more generally, that God can command you to do something that we normally consider to be highly immoral, and it will be moral. If you believe the latter, then you believe that morality is external to God; He follows it just as we do, though He may do so more perfectly (though honestly it's hard to make that argument using the Bible).
Obviously, the only rational thing to believe is that God commands us to do things because they are moral, not the other way around. God could conceivably command you to kill your son; the mere fact that God commanded it does not make it moral.
Therefore, morals exist independently of God.
Therefore, the argument that morals cannot exist independently of religion is bunk.
See? I knew philosophy would be good for something.
Yeah, the change will be that figureheads will be appointed CEOs to take the fall, while the people who really control things just take one step back.
Oh, do you mean in this article, where he admitted that there has been no statistically significant evidence of warming since 1995?
Being a man of integrity, he of course answered that question truthfully. Here's his full response:
It's funny, because whoever wrote that question did their homework; 1995 is the latest year at which, if you run the calculation, there's no statistically significant warming until 2009 - though I'm sure that'll change when we get the 2010 data. Of course, if you run the same calculation from 1994, you do get a statistically significant result at the 95% significance level. Further, if you decrease the significance level from 95% to something like 85%, the warming trend is again significant. The thing is that a mere fifteen years is just not enough time to do actual climate science. Generally, you have to look back at least thirty years to get reasonable statistical significance; the fact that there's such a strong signal even if you start in 1995 should be good evidence in itself.
I would like to refer you to this alternative analysis of the study. Especially interesting is this quote from one of the study's authors on the design of the abstinence-only educational segments:
That doesn't sound like the sort of abstinence-only classes you normally get, the ones that would have received funding under the Bush administration. Those programs required an emphasis on abstaining until marriage and generally tended to include material that denigrated the effectiveness of contraceptives; this program did neither of those things.
Basically, the reason why this study showed such strong effects all around was because it compared well-done, effective, secular sex ed to well-done, effective, secular sex ed with an emphasis on abstinence. Then, people go and cite this study to demonstrate that sex ed should be poorly taught, based on religious preaching and known to be ineffective.
Woosh.
The precedent was in the opinion - namely, what I found to be one of the more hilarious parts of The Republic, wherein Plato basically said, with no trace of irony AFAICT, "You know who should lead the government? People like me" - and not in the implementation thereof. The idea being that pretty much everyone thinks that they could do a better job of ruling the world if they were the global dictator.
He does have historical precedent on his side - after all, Plato thought that the best form of government would be rule by philosopher-kings.
In terms of practical historical precedent, not so much. This sort of thing tends to end badly. I think it's far better for us to thrash these issues out now, so that in the future everyone will be more aware of the standard array of denialist tactics.
If you blanket the radio spectrum with high-power white noise, you've just made an incredibly attractive target of yourself - jamming involves transmitting a signal that basically says "HEY EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOT TO ANYONE ELSE". That'll last about as long as it takes for a dumb cruise missile to drop on your antenna.
And if you're the sort of douchebag who sets jammers up in a civilian hospital or something, I'm sure the drone guys are working on that too - you've just told all the drones in the area exactly where your antennas are, so even if they can't talk to their handlers they might be able to surgically remove the interference.
That only works if the reporting is embarrassing. What tends to happen in the United States is that the reporters try to pretend that they are unbiased, and as such give equal weight to both the retarded side and the rational side - after all if there are two sides to an argument, then obviously there's a 50/50 chance that either side is true, right?
Thus, some moron like this guy and his woo-filled doctor* get put up against Dr. Bob Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland. That's not embarrassing at all; it puts these two idiots on an equal level with someone who's spent his entire career studying the subject. It's fucking flattering.
*Just because you have an MD doesn't mean you're qualified to determine whether "electrosensitivity" is a condition, no matter what the gullible reporter thinks. Do you think that a lady who pushes the always-vague "toxins" theory of chronic disease knows anything about electromagnetism beyond what she learned in Freshman physics?
If you want to know more about the timeline of the Big Bang, the Starts with a Bang blog has a series of articles on it named "The Greatest Story Ever Told"; it starts here and continues in these.
Yes, but you're forgetting something: in America, we are so terribly concerned that some poor person somewhere may be getting something they don't deserve that we're willing to put nearly a billion dollars in the pockets of rich people to ensure that the poor people stay in line.
It's just good conservative fiscal policy.
No it fucking isn't. Humans who are capable of consenting to this procedure should be allowed to consent to this procedure. That's all that really matters.
Many schools also have an entire student body that disobeys that rule.
Keep in mind that he claims to be a law student, so you would think that he'd understand this. I mean, just look at Slashdot - a hundred thousand people, each one with an opinion on what the law says, all of them wrong. Why does he think that climate science (a far more complex subject by orders of magnitude) should be reducible to something a layman can grasp in a day?
My wife is a doctoral student in Earth Systems Science. Her first year consisted of graduate-level ESS classes, many of which involved the climate. She'd bring home diagrams that showed the cycle of various elements in land, sea and air, and each one of them was a flowchart from Hell - and each came with the implied caveat of "these are only the parts of the cycle we've found, there's probably more that we still don't know about". Her classes were punishingly hard (two students dropped out for academic reasons, and one of them had even run his own lab at one point) and required a strong background in chemistry, mathematics and geology.
And this was just an overview of the current state of climate science; they didn't go particularly in depth about anything, they just covered everything.
And you want scientists to explain all that to an uninterested layman in a short amount of time?
My wife worked in the lab of an eminent scientist in college. When he was away at conferences, one of her jobs was to print out all of his e-mails (including personal ones), put them in a Fedex box, and ship them to him.
She wasn't the only lab assistant who had to do that, either.
What, exactly, do you mean by "nobody in the public sphere is willing to make an effort to explain it"?
Do you mean that the news media isn't explaining it? That's not exactly surprising; they don't explain anything. They just say cell phone radiation will cause brain cancer, they don't say why.
Do you mean that Wikipedia doesn't explain it? It does.
Do you mean that there are no websites with explanations from and discussion with climate scientists? There are.
Do you mean that there are no Youtube videos with explanations? There are.
Do you mean that Al Gore didn't make a movie out of his Powerpoint presentation? He did. (yes, I know there are problems with it - but you know what? That's what happens when you assume that a layman has the intellectual capacity of a sea sponge, and hand the presentation over to a politician).
If you cannot find layman's explanations for the science behind global warming, then that's because you're not looking. It's not like "the public sphere" can shove a tube into your brain and pump the information in.
You're a law student, right? So when you come out of your cocoon and bloom into a full-fledged lawyer, will you explain every nuance of case research to your clients? Will you explain in excruciating detail the specifics of which laws apply? Will you explain the finest, tiniest aspect of how those laws are enforced? Will you, in short, force each and every one of your clients to have a law degree?
Or will you just give them an overview and expect that they rely on your expertise as a lawyer to cover the details, which is why they hired you?
Anyway, you can look at the evidence yourself. The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report is freely available; you might want to start with Working Group 1's report and work your way onward from there. Your law school's library may have access to relevant papers as well, which are mentioned in the IPCC reports; if not, it can probably special order them for you. Further, there's a ton of blogs out there written by scientists that tend to discuss global warming if you look for them. Finally, I'm sure there's a climatology department somewhere near you; you can start e-mailing them (or go over there and talk to them!) if you have specific questions.
Yeah, what people don't seem to realize is that the global temperature anomaly due to global warming is on the order of 0.4 deg C since 1980. Can you even feel it when the temperature in your room fluctuates by 0.4 C? That's like a soft breeze blowing by.
And yet, that 2/5ths of a degree C represents a tremendous amount of energy when integrated over the entire surface of the Earth. It's definitely going to do something. There will still be an Earth, just not necessarily as we know it now.
There's no "both sides" of the debate. There's the science, which universally points towards global warming (hell, we've even noticed that over the last forty years, migratory birds in the United States have been getting smaller, which is indicative of generally rising temperatures due to Bergmann's rule), and then there's the people with a PR department, who are busy making it look like there's a debate. Even calling it a "global warming debate" is a victory for them, because the evidence for global warming shows up everywhere.