In the U.S. educational system there is currently a very strong bias towards math.
Really? On PISA and similar assessments the US is usually average or below average. The TIMMS 2003 study apparently does show that "in 2003, U.S. eighth-graders improved their average mathematics and science performances compared to 1995", but the US is just catching up.
We had a number of US exchange students on my school for a few months when I was 15 (late 80s; Netherlands), and their skills in mathematics and science didn't impress us at all. I remember seeing a video of their school, and concluding that they waste all of their budget on a beautiful new building with some sort of theater, and small classes (mine was >40).
In which case there must be a fault in your logic somewhere. Either
A) there aren't lots of people willing to die to bring down an aircraft, or
B) Searches are effective.
Given that about 10 per 100.000 population commit suicide every year in western countries, it is at the very least a safe bet that most muslims with a death wish apparently don't wish to bring down an aircraft.
Leased lines or government control of the wires is indeed the norm internationally. A "free market" for wires running through somebody else's land makes no sense at all.
Already complained somewhere else in this topic about the population density argument. Is connecting 90% of the population in, let's say, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska really that much more expensive than connecting 90% of the population in tiny Switzerland? I seriously doubt it. Europe may have a higher population density, but the percentage of the population living on marginal, hard to reach locations is also higher. The percentage of the population without a direct connection to a public road is also higher.
US infrastructure is generally speaking more spacious than European infrastructure, and most Americans, even rural Americans, live in logical locations along roads that were usually there before the houses. Infrastructure in the US is cheaper to build and maintain than in Europe, and that amply compensates for the different population densities of EU and US. Comparing US and EU makes more sense than comparing many European countries, or American states, among themselves. The authors of the Yahoo article are obviously picking cherries. You can always find a country in Europe that is better or worse than the US at something. Apparently this idea is hard to bear for some Americans who evidently think that all Americans ought to be better of than all Europeans.
This discussion is rehashed every time superior 'broadband abroad' is brought up.
The size of the country is irrelevant. Population density is of course very relevant for rolling out services in general, but one has to take several factors into account. Firstly most Americans are not involved in subsistence farming and live in relatively densely populated areas, like in Europe. Secondly, cabling very densely populated areas (where people don't have gardens and streets are one or two cars wide) can be extremely expensive (blocking traffic, paying damages to businesses that are temporarily unreachable, lost income from parking meters). European towns are on average older and streets narrower. In these circumstances cabling, maintenance of sewers and gas pipes, and resurfacing the road are usually initiated and coordinated by the government, and lots of redundant cable and pipe is rolled out just in case. The taxpayer also pays most of the bill.
Another idea is to make election day a national holiday, like it is in *every* country except the US.
No, it isn't. Here in the Netherlands we always vote on a wednesday, except when election day coincides with a religious day, in which case we vote on the tuesday before it. Nothing is closed, everybody goes to work, voting is not mandatory, and we still have a voter turnout of 80% for parliament. We obviously have no presidential election in a monarchy.
The most important difference is obviously that we use a proportional voting system, and your vote counts for your candidate regardless of where you live.
A lot of us have to actually *work* for a living, and we can't afford to lose an entire day's pay to sit in line at the polls
We hardly ever have lines at polling stations though, and nearly everyone, except for the most remote farms, votes at a station in walking distance from his house. It is just a matter of having very small polling districts, which is basically a function of the number of election committee volunteers available per capita.
I always thought it funny that Americans think people standing in line for bread or soap is a sign of a failed political system, while they think nothing of standing in long lines to exercise their democratic rights. The message it communicates is that democracy in the US is apparently an artificially scarce good.
This guy is quoting a price of a little over EUR5/Wp, which is about the same price as in Europe. If you buy a larger system, the price can drop to EUR4.5/Wp, EUR4/Wp, but little less.
Whether this is very expensive depends on the price of energy where you live. In the long run you will probably get a better deal than you thought when you bought them, as energy has been getting more expensive in most of the world the last decade.
It can run on coal, wood pellets, dry leaves, newspapers, rags, etc. This solution has been available since it was used in WWII occupied Europe. There are some minor disadvantages: it is inefficient, polluting, and people will take an axe and make their own fuel instead of paying for a refill at the designated places.
The only way (that I know about) to prove "all X have Y" in science is to enumerate all X, which typically isn't possible in the physical world, and even if you do that, you still haven't proved that "all X must necessarily have Y".
Are you sure about these claims? I can think of many propositions X, Y that are easily solved by enumeration. What about "all cats that I have thus far owned had tails"? I wouldn't dare to make a generalization about how many possible statements of each type there are. The ones that cannot be practically solved by enumeration are obviously the more interesting type, by virtue of the fact that they have more predictive value and we have no undisputed method for proving them, but I doubt they are the most numerous.
If samples are not necessarily representative of populations, doesn't this beg the question of how we recognize cats in the first place? Is a cat that has no tail and in every other respect appears to be a frog a good counterexample? When confronted with a tailless cat either the induction gives way or you refine your method for classifying things as cats. Either way your knowledge of the natural world improves. Scientific theories of the natural world should be falsifiable.
A good theory is one that correctly predicts a lot of observations over time and is uncontested because nobody is capable of producing convincing counterexamples. Abduction is a scientific method. Questioning the validity of abduction is philosophy.
Easy. Just make libelous statements on a credit report... libel. You lost your earnest money because you couldn't get a home loan because you allegedly signed up for a credit card, maxed it out, and never repaid it? You get passed up for a job because a car purchased in your name got repossessed? You prove it, you sue the credit bureaus, you win treble damages.
You are right: what these credit bureaus are doing is just a new variation on an ancient type of tort. The problem is establishing that the company acted maliciously, or acted with reckless disregard for the quality of its information about you. Having clear standards for proper collection of private information to compare against would really help.
Personal liability for reckless behaviour on behalf of an employer works even better. Natural persons have more to lose than companies.
I agree. I sometimes do work for a tax administration. Internet and email access is only possible through separate computers in the corridors, in plain sight, on a separate network. The only way to move private data to the Internet-enabled computer is by memorizing it. It is terribly inconvenient for IT staff, but it works.
I don't think so. It's a cottage industry. Look up reports and numbers for publicly listed porn empires like Private or Beate Uhse. Income is low compared to the normal media, profit margins are in the normal range, and the retailers keep most of the money. The more likely explanation is that these companies have few 'intangible assets' in the form of goodwill, lobbying power in politics, or longterm relationships with partners in related industries anyway, and therefore have little reason to try to resist change.
The issue of statelessness of course referred to the occupied territories. The simple fact of the occupation creates second-class subjects of Israel. I completely agree that it is unrealistic, and not morally imperative, to make those people citizens. This leaves the second option to normalize the situation: formally ending occupation. It is of course possible to argue that the occupied territories are outside Israel, in which case Israel should end the frequent incursions in foreign territory and stop pretending that a crime committed by a Palestinian against Israelis is an act of war by a pretense Palestinian state. Retreat, build a wall, build a good missile defense along the wall, and wait to see if they offer a normal war.
The reference to colonialism is appropriate, but selective. The motives of the US, in the 19th century and now, are not very different from the motives of other colonial powers in the past. Sometimes you interfere by conquering because some asshole ruler endangers your trade interests, at other times you just decide you need a base somewhere for vague strategic reasons, or you just happen to appoint a gouvernor somewhere who thinks he is Alexander the Great and conquers a weak neighbouring territory that has internal troubles for no reason at all. All the time you are saving suffering populations or bringing the light of civilization to them as far as the home front is concerned. The white man's burden. And when the decolonization comes, the end of the occupation, there is always tragedy: you hate the murderous regime that is going to replace you(r murderous regime), you leave behind loyal servants and they are going to suffer the revenge of the people they oppressed in your name, or you take them with you and they are going to resent you for giving away their country.
South Africa's white population is one of those messy problems that the colonial powers left, and Israel is another, even more tragic, one. The British gave away something that didn't belong to them in the first place, and the survivors of one tragedy walk right into the next one. The situation cannot be undone, and after a few generations the Israelis have acquired an absolute right to be there simply because most of them are born there.
Europeans and Americans are not very different in outlook, except that in some cases the sizes of the ideological groups are different and the US and Europe tend to misrepresent eachother and rewrite eachother's history. Israel has many religious Christian supporters in the US and Europe, and these people are questionable allies since they lead you straight to Armageddon. Anti-colonialists have a tendency to side with the Palestinians, and/or with international law. The few talking about the powerful "Jewish lobby" should ask themselves whom this "Jewish lobby" is lobbying: Israel is not the one running the show. Antisemites do exist, but they don't side with Arabs (although they may occasionally applaud Arabs and Jews killing eachother). The majority sides with whoever has the most convincing story, and there are huge swings in opinion about the conflict depending on what happened last. Gaining more support of the anti-colonialists is a good thing for Israel if it wants to be less dependant on allies that think of Israel as a religiously significant battlefield. Europe helped supply Israel in 67 and 73, and we will help fight if it ever becomes the underdog as far as I am concerned.
Supporters of Hamas, Ahmadinejad, etc. are the muslim mirror image of certain Christians on the other side, and Israel is caught in the middle. These people have learnt their history the wrong way around: because they side with the Palestinians now, they take the side of Hitler in the past when he takes revenge for the Palestinians. It is also a new phenomenon, and not one directly following from the motive they had to cheer on a faraway Nazi power against their colonial ruler. That is a story the victorious allies don't like to hear: they didn't start out WWII as the good guys for much of the world.
Now to see whether that is a useful analogy try to hijack a bus with a rock, shouting 'Inshallah' and wearing a headscarf, and observe how people react, and then try it with a semi-automatic rifle. No wait, do it the other way around.
(I have been told that, in the current climate, the term 'Inshallah' is almost guaranteed to increase the number of readers of one's post. For those specific readers attracted by the term: I am not a terrorist, OK.)
I'm not an expert on South-African apartheid regime. But your quote implies the victims of it were South-African citizens before apartheid was implemented, or in any case were virtually citizens or at least entitled to be such.
In the sense that South Africa inherited the lands of several tribes subjected by the British Empire that were 'virtually' within its borders. I agree. The South-Africans that founded the independent South-Africa never asked for these people, or the marginal lands they lived on for that matter.
I would never accuse the polity of Israel (as distinguished from certain unpleasant political fringe parties in it) of being racist, as there are objective grounds for discriminating against potentially very dangerous subjects, but its policies do implement "apartheid" (separation) in its original, limited sense. For me, as a Dutchman (and apartheid being a Dutch political concept), "apartheid" has no necessary connection to racism. In the Netherlands we used to have a similar way of dealing with hostile protestants and catholics. Apartheid in South-Africa was based as much in fear of the uncouth and hostile democratic majority as in real racism. South-Africa nearly fell apart in small, hostile (i.a. white and Zulu) states when the apartheid regime stepped down. Only Mandela's (a Xhosa) generosity and the assertiveness of the South-African Defence Forces prevented it.
I personally never understood why the international community is often so intolerant to spontaneous ethnic secession movements, while it doesn't seem to have much problems organizing secessions (Yugoslavia, East Timor) themselves. The leading principle is apparently that only the West is qualified to decide where borders are.
This is really not the case for Israeli vs. Palestinians. The Palestinians outside the borders of Israel were never Israeli citizens. They are in no way entitiled to become Israeli citizens, not any more than Mexicans are "entitled" to become American citizens just because they perceive the States to be a better place to live in.
A fundamental principle of the current international order is that states cannot make their subjects effectively stateless. Another sovereign state first has to accept them within its territories and issue them passports, they must voluntarily accept the passports, and then Israel is formally free of its special responsibilities towards those people. Mexicans do have a land to call their own. In the case of the Palestines the principle distinguishes the Palestines in the occupied territories, who are a formal responsibility of Israel, from Palestines naturalized and living in nearby countries, who are not in my opinion. The occupied territories are not sovereign, as the frequent incursions of the Israeli army prove. With regards to the citizenship issue, and only that issue, the comparison with the apartheid regime is appropriate in my opinion.
Moreover, to judge by the recent elections, most Palestinians in fact do not want to become Israeli citizens.
Many members of the Scottish National Party do not want to be British citizens. This does not mean you can make them stateless in retaliation. Creating a sovereign Scotland is acceptable, just like the status quo solution of just treating them as citizens exercising their freedom of opinion.
Most of Israel's Palestinian subjects are not just hostile to Israel, but also positively dangerous. This creates a civil war situation, but you cannot allow this situation to last for decades even though you are clearly militarily superior. A secession and equitable settlement is obviously called for.
Before we erected our "racist" wall of defence, they killed about 30 Israeli Jews every week.
In my opinion creating a static defence line against enemies is a perfectly proportional solution. Nobody
I regret to see you alluding to murderous criminals like the 9/11 kidnappers as "great spokesmen".
I have people like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Sheikh Yassin in mind. People like this never commit the violent act themselves: they only encourage others. These people convince millions of their case, and among those millions a few hundred willing executioners are found.
The actual spokesmen are now the western liberal thikers, who retroactively construe the acts of those terrorists according to their favorite world view. E.g. socialist thinkers construe the terrorist acts as social protests.
Osama bin Laden is a spokesman for a protest movement, and an eloquent one (when properly translated). His Western interpreters however don't actually want to know what he has to say. Not entering a dialog is not wrong as such, since the policy should be to take the initiative away from Osama bin Laden and reframe the dialog between "us" and the "protest movement" in our favour. What is wrong is that you are condemned to lose if you are unwilling to objectively evaluate your enemies.
This might be clearer if you notice that the "violent mob" element of the equation has changed. Technology has rendered obsolete the large group of unqualified, under-equipped commiters of violence. There is no "violent mob" today. The small group of terrorist replaced the large "violent mob" of the past. While the real "violent mob" was taken out of the equation, and reduced to a supporting role at most. The 9/11 terrorists are not the spokesmen of some "violent mob" - they constitute it.
I agree with the general point. People's individual capacity for destruction increases with technological progress, and this increases the potential danger the antisocial individual in society poses to the whole and the required violent mob becomes smaller.
Capital-intensive technology like nuclear weapons also upsets the traditional dictum that people get the government they deserve, since it makes it possible for 1% to oppress 99% without challenge. I often pointed out in discussions that Saddam's ambivalence about his WMD probably means that he needed the mere idea of the existence of WMD to remain in power. Is a 21st century Battle of the Golden Spurs, where militia defeats an armoured warrior class, still possible? In this sense you are right: the "violent mob" is probably becoming less and less relevant as an agent of change in history.
The existence of "cheap" options for mass destruction (like hijacking and crashing a plane) is superficially good for the balance of power between "the people" (read: the violent mob mobilized by good guys) and government, but it also increases the total amount of political violence. Pandora's box is open and cannot be closed again: everything short of a poor man's nuclear bomb is not good enough. In this case they don't use specific technology to destroy, but the increased vulnerability caused by increased dependence on technology. Since this requires suicide, people with a death wish must be specifically selected from a much bigger loyal "violent mob" reserve. The ideological basis of the movement is however still important: the suicide killer needs (the idea of) an admiring audience and a justification for his act. People love being heroes. Socially isolated nihilist suicide killers are extremely rare. We still live in an exceptionally save world.
Good job. You've just outlawed verbal support for the colonials that wanted to rebel against the British Crown (ever heard of the American revolution?) including the founding fathers.
This type of thing is now indeed illegal in the EU. Take the EU's Council Framework Decision 2002/475/JHA on the definition of terrorism as an example: violent acts aimed at seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation. I assume this is the basis for the definition of terrorism in recent anti-terrorism legislation in EU member states, and abetting terrorism will also usually be illegal.
Here in the Netherlands, widely misunderstood as a very liberal state, the state recently locked up 6 people for promoting terrorism. Promoting terrorism in this case consisted of having muslim fundamentalist documents available. Charges were also brought for "threatening a member of parliament" even though the only audience present to the threat was the Dutch secret service officer listening to the bugs built into the walls of the house of one of the suspects (the American Jason Walters) before he moved in, but considering this a "threat" fortunately went too far for the court.
Oddly, the EU definition of terrorism does not cover conservative violent acts directed at preserving or stabilising the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country. The definition is inherently political: most EU member states were themselves established by terrorist organizations by the EU's definition. This is why the EU Committee on Petitions was petitioned to legalize terrorism again by a concerned Dutch citizen in 2002, but the EU hasn't answered yet.
We all know that the US is the worst when it comes to censorship and human rights violations.
So why, when I visit that site, do I see a quote from a Syrian site?
Come on people, prioritize.
Is this whining veiled in sarcasm? I often handle small problems that I can solve before big problems that I can't. For instance today I am writing a comment about the whining about who gets criticized most, while I (again) postpone the problem of bringing everlasting world peace to tomorrow even though I think that is the bigger problem. NGOs usually take the same approach: they give priority to criticizing the countries that actually care and may be shamed into changing their behaviour.
I wish it was. However, facts point in the opposite direction. Take the 9/11 bombers for instance. They were anything but "desperate", living normal (in fact, better than normal) lives in U.S., the country which they bombed. Take Bin-Laden, born to one of the richest families in the world (!), born into every comfort and luxury in the world - yet decided to embark on a path of global religious war and murderous terror.
Contrast that with many millions of people in Africa, compared to which even the poorest Palestinians are living like kings (how many Palestinians die of hunger or thirst annually? As the "inhumane" Olmert said a few days ago, 'we would not allow a single Palestinian child to die of hunger'). Yet you won't see those trully poor people commit mass-murder through systematic bombing of civilian population.
The great spokesmen for the poor and oppressed usually come from a privileged background themselves, and kindly volunteer to explain to the discontent the root causes of their situation. Frances Gouda's 'Poverty and Political Culture' is the book to read on this subject. Much of recent political history can be interpreted as a conflict between religions and political ideologies about who controls the violent discontent mob. This conflict is less about how much misery there is, than it is about who is responsible for it. Trying to address the misery itself has historically proven more effective as an antidote to political violence than explaining away the relation between misery and political violence. Just because you seriously tried you prove your innocence. You don't respond with "realism" to a moral challenge: it is impolite and politically ineffective.
Organizations like Al-Qaeda and Hamas are new players in this game, and they are fueled by misery in the same way as socialism is fueled by working class poverty, even though Marx was never poor and socialist movements of the past often had foreign paymasters. Most supporters of political violence are motivated by little more than the hope that a new order will turn out better for them than the existing one. Again: the support does not depend primarily on how miserable they are in an objective sense, but on whether they accept the account of the causes of their misery. Whether Al-Qaeda or Hamas also have an effective solution is less relevant, just like in normal politics: to spend taxpayer's money you have to convince taxpayers that there is a big problem, not that there is an effective solution.
In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation?
You are making a straw man out of "apartheid". It is not merely the continuation of British imperialist racism, but a political system separate from racism. From the apartheid Wikipedia entry:
"Apartheid ideologues argued that once apartheid had been implemented, blacks would no longer be citizens of South Africa; rather, they would become citizens of the independent "homelands". In terms of this model, blacks became (foreign) "guest laborers" who merely worked in South Africa as the holders of temporary work permits."
Israel makes the exact same convenient distinction in order to guarantee a loyal majority in Israel proper. I don't question the democratic character of the Israeli government in relation to the "demos" it selects for itself, but a government that "secedes" from a part of the population in its territories can only regain its claim to being democratic by at least giving these people complete sovereignty and a viable territory of their own.
Of course the Palestinian population in the occupied territories is a danger to Israel proper, but this was also true of Zulus, Xsosas, and other Bantu tribes as far as South-Africans were concerned when they created the apartheid system in South-Africa. I will admit Arafat was never a credible Mandela.
Of course the Israelis and Palestinians both claim the same lands on historical grounds, but so do the whites and blacks in South-Africa: the South-African Dutch and Bantu population are both late arrivers -- marginalizing the indigenous Khoi-San gatherers -- who ran into eachother.
If the homelands for the various tribes in South-africa would have been actually economically viable and pleasant to live in, and racism less obvious in daily live, we might have mistaken it for enlightened policy towards national minorities. The same thing is wrong in the occupied territories: allowing the prisoners to elect the chief of the ghetto police is not democracy. Without sovereignty, there cannot be democracy.
such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications).
The US is used to enjoying air superiority, but other militaries might be interested in having an "instant camouflage screen" based on this idea over parked vehicles instead of messing around with nets and paint.
Maybe the Dutch/German Fennek vehicle can be adapted to sort of cloak itself from planes using its periscope.
Negroponte was wrong. The idea of wanting to directly integrate power generation into the device is fundamentally flawed. There are both technical and functional objections to doing that. Bringing power generation and power consumption closer together is the right idea, but including a separate hand crank in each device is impractical. There's a limit to the amount of younger brothers people have.
What the world needs is a standardized, cheap, robust, modular, switchable DC power supply brick, with builtin UPS and battery charger, that can power multiple devices at different voltages (at the same time), and accepts pedal, hand crank, DC solar or wind power, biomass fueled engine, and AC mains. Give people the brick with pedal, and later upgrade by extending microcredit for adding a solar panel or an efficient biomass generator/cooking stove. Many people who are poor now will actually be able to save for a solar panel without credit when they stop buying disposable batteries. It is sometimes shocking to see how inefficient and expensive being poor can be.
Obviously, if you don't have access to AC mains power and have to crank or pedal yourself, you don't want unnecessary AC/DC conversion losses. Everything that is important for the third world runs on low voltage DC power. Only a complete idiot would pedal to generate power for the AC washing machine, instead of washing by hand. The tradeoff for washing is fundamentally different from pedaling for a minute to send an email vs. walking a day to the nearest big town to mail a letter.
Do you think that the law was made at the time more out of distaste for the Nazis, or was there some additional underlying basis for it?
When Voelkisch movements start armed and uniformed militias outside the structure of the state something nasty is going to happen. It happened in 1568-1648, 1795-1812, 1831-1839, and 1935-1945 and in the Netherlands always involves some bigger foreign power (Spain, Prussia and France, France and Britain, and Germany respectively).
The proper policy for a state is to run the militia itself. In the past you had "musket guilds" run by the cities in the Netherlands, and the weapons were stored at a local arsenal. The exercise schedule was set by the government, but sufficient exercise was taken to be a sort of civil right. The existence of a healthy militia legitimizes government action against rival armed forces claiming to represent the people. The very existence of the rival may draw in foreign powers friendly to that rival.
The small pro-Nazi militia in the Netherlands was in 1936 uniformed but unarmed. Their uniforms were intimidating the population because of the association with the Nazi movement ruling a bigger neighbouring power, and therefore challenged the government. This is why the government turned on wearing uniforms associated with state functions like police and army.
A note from a non-American: the discussion on whether and in what conditions to kill a trespasser has no relation whatsoever with guns.
I do have a sword in my bedroom, and as I understand it there is a legal presumption that I am defending myself and dependents if I kill a threatening trespasser in my house, for instance if he corners me by coming up the stairs. Even if my action is out of proportion with the threat it is "excessive self-defence" and will usually go unpunished. If I keep stabbing him even though he is already immobilized, I might still apply for "extensive excessive self-defence" and go free. If I execute the trespasser for trying to steal something on the other hand, I am simply a murderer. It depends on the details of the situation.
Guns are prohibited, and I support that prohibition as long as it is at least somewhat effective. Hand guns are hardly more effective than swords and big game arrows, but they are much easier to conceal when you take them out of your home. If you do have a gun in your home, despite the prohibition, you are still allowed to shoot the trespasser in similar circumstances but you will be jailed for owning the gun.
The gun, however, significantly weakens your case of self-defence, because the gun is more suited to chasing away a trespasser who is armed with a gun than a close quarters weapon.
The other point: Militias have been prohibited here in the Netherlands since 1936, when Nazi militias marched in the streets. Wearing military style uniforms, even unarmed, is prohibited. This is not really satisfactory anymore, since we no longer have a conscript army "owned by the people" since a few years (in an attempt to build a leaner and meaner army that is more suited to colonial-style operations like the US). I like the Swiss system, where everybody gets issued an army rifle with a sealed box of ammo.
Slashdot Mirror
In the U.S. educational system there is currently a very strong bias towards math.
Really? On PISA and similar assessments the US is usually average or below average. The TIMMS 2003 study apparently does show that "in 2003, U.S. eighth-graders improved their average mathematics and science performances compared to 1995", but the US is just catching up.
We had a number of US exchange students on my school for a few months when I was 15 (late 80s; Netherlands), and their skills in mathematics and science didn't impress us at all. I remember seeing a video of their school, and concluding that they waste all of their budget on a beautiful new building with some sort of theater, and small classes (mine was >40).
Actually this is were realism pops in, as any police or other governmental organization most clearly wouldn't have updated its software since the 80s.
It's the "multicolored" part that struck me as unlikely.
In which case there must be a fault in your logic somewhere. Either
A) there aren't lots of people willing to die to bring down an aircraft, or
B) Searches are effective.
Given that about 10 per 100.000 population commit suicide every year in western countries, it is at the very least a safe bet that most muslims with a death wish apparently don't wish to bring down an aircraft.
Leased lines or government control of the wires is indeed the norm internationally. A "free market" for wires running through somebody else's land makes no sense at all.
Already complained somewhere else in this topic about the population density argument. Is connecting 90% of the population in, let's say, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska really that much more expensive than connecting 90% of the population in tiny Switzerland? I seriously doubt it. Europe may have a higher population density, but the percentage of the population living on marginal, hard to reach locations is also higher. The percentage of the population without a direct connection to a public road is also higher.
US infrastructure is generally speaking more spacious than European infrastructure, and most Americans, even rural Americans, live in logical locations along roads that were usually there before the houses. Infrastructure in the US is cheaper to build and maintain than in Europe, and that amply compensates for the different population densities of EU and US. Comparing US and EU makes more sense than comparing many European countries, or American states, among themselves. The authors of the Yahoo article are obviously picking cherries. You can always find a country in Europe that is better or worse than the US at something. Apparently this idea is hard to bear for some Americans who evidently think that all Americans ought to be better of than all Europeans.
This discussion is rehashed every time superior 'broadband abroad' is brought up.
The size of the country is irrelevant. Population density is of course very relevant for rolling out services in general, but one has to take several factors into account. Firstly most Americans are not involved in subsistence farming and live in relatively densely populated areas, like in Europe. Secondly, cabling very densely populated areas (where people don't have gardens and streets are one or two cars wide) can be extremely expensive (blocking traffic, paying damages to businesses that are temporarily unreachable, lost income from parking meters). European towns are on average older and streets narrower. In these circumstances cabling, maintenance of sewers and gas pipes, and resurfacing the road are usually initiated and coordinated by the government, and lots of redundant cable and pipe is rolled out just in case. The taxpayer also pays most of the bill.
Another idea is to make election day a national holiday, like it is in *every* country except the US.
No, it isn't. Here in the Netherlands we always vote on a wednesday, except when election day coincides with a religious day, in which case we vote on the tuesday before it. Nothing is closed, everybody goes to work, voting is not mandatory, and we still have a voter turnout of 80% for parliament. We obviously have no presidential election in a monarchy.
The most important difference is obviously that we use a proportional voting system, and your vote counts for your candidate regardless of where you live.
A lot of us have to actually *work* for a living, and we can't afford to lose an entire day's pay to sit in line at the polls
We hardly ever have lines at polling stations though, and nearly everyone, except for the most remote farms, votes at a station in walking distance from his house. It is just a matter of having very small polling districts, which is basically a function of the number of election committee volunteers available per capita.
I always thought it funny that Americans think people standing in line for bread or soap is a sign of a failed political system, while they think nothing of standing in long lines to exercise their democratic rights. The message it communicates is that democracy in the US is apparently an artificially scarce good.
This guy is quoting a price of a little over EUR5/Wp, which is about the same price as in Europe. If you buy a larger system, the price can drop to EUR4.5/Wp, EUR4/Wp, but little less.
Whether this is very expensive depends on the price of energy where you live. In the long run you will probably get a better deal than you thought when you bought them, as energy has been getting more expensive in most of the world the last decade.
your car doesn't run on coal
It can run on coal, wood pellets, dry leaves, newspapers, rags, etc. This solution has been available since it was used in WWII occupied Europe. There are some minor disadvantages: it is inefficient, polluting, and people will take an axe and make their own fuel instead of paying for a refill at the designated places.
The only way (that I know about) to prove "all X have Y" in science is to enumerate all X, which typically isn't possible in the physical world, and even if you do that, you still haven't proved that "all X must necessarily have Y".
Are you sure about these claims? I can think of many propositions X, Y that are easily solved by enumeration. What about "all cats that I have thus far owned had tails"? I wouldn't dare to make a generalization about how many possible statements of each type there are. The ones that cannot be practically solved by enumeration are obviously the more interesting type, by virtue of the fact that they have more predictive value and we have no undisputed method for proving them, but I doubt they are the most numerous.
If samples are not necessarily representative of populations, doesn't this beg the question of how we recognize cats in the first place? Is a cat that has no tail and in every other respect appears to be a frog a good counterexample? When confronted with a tailless cat either the induction gives way or you refine your method for classifying things as cats. Either way your knowledge of the natural world improves. Scientific theories of the natural world should be falsifiable.
A good theory is one that correctly predicts a lot of observations over time and is uncontested because nobody is capable of producing convincing counterexamples. Abduction is a scientific method. Questioning the validity of abduction is philosophy.
Easy. Just make libelous statements on a credit report... libel. You lost your earnest money because you couldn't get a home loan because you allegedly signed up for a credit card, maxed it out, and never repaid it? You get passed up for a job because a car purchased in your name got repossessed? You prove it, you sue the credit bureaus, you win treble damages.
You are right: what these credit bureaus are doing is just a new variation on an ancient type of tort. The problem is establishing that the company acted maliciously, or acted with reckless disregard for the quality of its information about you. Having clear standards for proper collection of private information to compare against would really help.
Personal liability for reckless behaviour on behalf of an employer works even better. Natural persons have more to lose than companies.
I agree. I sometimes do work for a tax administration. Internet and email access is only possible
through separate computers in the corridors, in plain sight, on a separate network. The only way
to move private data to the Internet-enabled computer is by memorizing it. It is terribly
inconvenient for IT staff, but it works.
I don't think so. It's a cottage industry. Look up reports and numbers for publicly listed porn empires like Private or Beate Uhse. Income is low compared to the normal media, profit margins are in the normal range, and the retailers keep most of the money. The more likely explanation is that these companies have few 'intangible assets' in the form of goodwill, lobbying power in politics, or longterm relationships with partners in related industries anyway, and therefore have little reason to try to resist change.
The issue of statelessness of course referred to the occupied territories. The simple fact of the occupation creates second-class subjects of Israel. I completely agree that it is unrealistic, and not morally imperative, to make those people citizens. This leaves the second option to normalize the situation: formally ending occupation. It is of course possible to argue that the occupied territories are outside Israel, in which case Israel should end the frequent incursions in foreign territory and stop pretending that a crime committed by a Palestinian against Israelis is an act of war by a pretense Palestinian state. Retreat, build a wall, build a good missile defense along the wall, and wait to see if they offer a normal war.
The reference to colonialism is appropriate, but selective. The motives of the US, in the 19th century and now, are not very different from the motives of other colonial powers in the past. Sometimes you interfere by conquering because some asshole ruler endangers your trade interests, at other times you just decide you need a base somewhere for vague strategic reasons, or you just happen to appoint a gouvernor somewhere who thinks he is Alexander the Great and conquers a weak neighbouring territory that has internal troubles for no reason at all. All the time you are saving suffering populations or bringing the light of civilization to them as far as the home front is concerned. The white man's burden. And when the decolonization comes, the end of the occupation, there is always tragedy: you hate the murderous regime that is going to replace you(r murderous regime), you leave behind loyal servants and they are going to suffer the revenge of the people they oppressed in your name, or you take them with you and they are going to resent you for giving away their country.
South Africa's white population is one of those messy problems that the colonial powers left, and Israel is another, even more tragic, one. The British gave away something that didn't belong to them in the first place, and the survivors of one tragedy walk right into the next one. The situation cannot be undone, and after a few generations the Israelis have acquired an absolute right to be there simply because most of them are born there.
Europeans and Americans are not very different in outlook, except that in some cases the sizes of the ideological groups are different and the US and Europe tend to misrepresent eachother and rewrite eachother's history. Israel has many religious Christian supporters in the US and Europe, and these people are questionable allies since they lead you straight to Armageddon. Anti-colonialists have a tendency to side with the Palestinians, and/or with international law. The few talking about the powerful "Jewish lobby" should ask themselves whom this "Jewish lobby" is lobbying: Israel is not the one running the show. Antisemites do exist, but they don't side with Arabs (although they may occasionally applaud Arabs and Jews killing eachother). The majority sides with whoever has the most convincing story, and there are huge swings in opinion about the conflict depending on what happened last. Gaining more support of the anti-colonialists is a good thing for Israel if it wants to be less dependant on allies that think of Israel as a religiously significant battlefield. Europe helped supply Israel in 67 and 73, and we will help fight if it ever becomes the underdog as far as I am concerned.
Supporters of Hamas, Ahmadinejad, etc. are the muslim mirror image of certain Christians on the other side, and Israel is caught in the middle. These people have learnt their history the wrong way around: because they side with the Palestinians now, they take the side of Hitler in the past when he takes revenge for the Palestinians. It is also a new phenomenon, and not one directly following from the motive they had to cheer on a faraway Nazi power against their colonial ruler. That is a story the victorious allies don't like to hear: they didn't start out WWII as the good guys for much of the world.
Now to see whether that is a useful analogy try to hijack a bus with a rock, shouting 'Inshallah' and wearing a headscarf, and observe how people react, and then try it with a semi-automatic rifle. No wait, do it the other way around.
(I have been told that, in the current climate, the term 'Inshallah' is almost guaranteed to increase the number of readers of one's post. For those specific readers attracted by the term: I am not a terrorist, OK.)
I'm not an expert on South-African apartheid regime. But your quote implies the victims of it were South-African citizens before apartheid was implemented, or in any case were virtually citizens or at least entitled to be such.
In the sense that South Africa inherited the lands of several tribes subjected by the British Empire that were 'virtually' within its borders. I agree. The South-Africans that founded the independent South-Africa never asked for these people, or the marginal lands they lived on for that matter.
I would never accuse the polity of Israel (as distinguished from certain unpleasant political fringe parties in it) of being racist, as there are objective grounds for discriminating against potentially very dangerous subjects, but its policies do implement "apartheid" (separation) in its original, limited sense. For me, as a Dutchman (and apartheid being a Dutch political concept), "apartheid" has no necessary connection to racism. In the Netherlands we used to have a similar way of dealing with hostile protestants and catholics. Apartheid in South-Africa was based as much in fear of the uncouth and hostile democratic majority as in real racism. South-Africa nearly fell apart in small, hostile (i.a. white and Zulu) states when the apartheid regime stepped down. Only Mandela's (a Xhosa) generosity and the assertiveness of the South-African Defence Forces prevented it.
I personally never understood why the international community is often so intolerant to spontaneous ethnic secession movements, while it doesn't seem to have much problems organizing secessions (Yugoslavia, East Timor) themselves. The leading principle is apparently that only the West is qualified to decide where borders are.
This is really not the case for Israeli vs. Palestinians. The Palestinians outside the borders of Israel were never Israeli citizens. They are in no way entitiled to become Israeli citizens, not any more than Mexicans are "entitled" to become American citizens just because they perceive the States to be a better place to live in.
A fundamental principle of the current international order is that states cannot make their subjects effectively stateless. Another sovereign state first has to accept them within its territories and issue them passports, they must voluntarily accept the passports, and then Israel is formally free of its special responsibilities towards those people. Mexicans do have a land to call their own. In the case of the Palestines the principle distinguishes the Palestines in the occupied territories, who are a formal responsibility of Israel, from Palestines naturalized and living in nearby countries, who are not in my opinion. The occupied territories are not sovereign, as the frequent incursions of the Israeli army prove. With regards to the citizenship issue, and only that issue, the comparison with the apartheid regime is appropriate in my opinion.
Moreover, to judge by the recent elections, most Palestinians in fact do not want to become Israeli citizens.
Many members of the Scottish National Party do not want to be British citizens. This does not mean you can make them stateless in retaliation. Creating a sovereign Scotland is acceptable, just like the status quo solution of just treating them as citizens exercising their freedom of opinion.
Most of Israel's Palestinian subjects are not just hostile to Israel, but also positively dangerous. This creates a civil war situation, but you cannot allow this situation to last for decades even though you are clearly militarily superior. A secession and equitable settlement is obviously called for.
Before we erected our "racist" wall of defence, they killed about 30 Israeli Jews every week.
In my opinion creating a static defence line against enemies is a perfectly proportional solution. Nobody
I regret to see you alluding to murderous criminals like the 9/11 kidnappers as "great spokesmen".
I have people like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Sheikh Yassin in mind. People like this never commit the violent act themselves: they only encourage others. These people convince millions of their case, and among those millions a few hundred willing executioners are found.
The actual spokesmen are now the western liberal thikers, who retroactively construe the acts of those terrorists according to their favorite world view. E.g. socialist thinkers construe the terrorist acts as social protests.
Osama bin Laden is a spokesman for a protest movement, and an eloquent one (when properly translated). His Western interpreters however don't actually want to know what he has to say. Not entering a dialog is not wrong as such, since the policy should be to take the initiative away from Osama bin Laden and reframe the dialog between "us" and the "protest movement" in our favour. What is wrong is that you are condemned to lose if you are unwilling to objectively evaluate your enemies.
This might be clearer if you notice that the "violent mob" element of the equation has changed. Technology has rendered obsolete the large group of unqualified, under-equipped commiters of violence. There is no "violent mob" today. The small group of terrorist replaced the large "violent mob" of the past. While the real "violent mob" was taken out of the equation, and reduced to a supporting role at most. The 9/11 terrorists are not the spokesmen of some "violent mob" - they constitute it.
I agree with the general point. People's individual capacity for destruction increases with technological progress, and this increases the potential danger the antisocial individual in society poses to the whole and the required violent mob becomes smaller.
Capital-intensive technology like nuclear weapons also upsets the traditional dictum that people get the government they deserve, since it makes it possible for 1% to oppress 99% without challenge. I often pointed out in discussions that Saddam's ambivalence about his WMD probably means that he needed the mere idea of the existence of WMD to remain in power. Is a 21st century Battle of the Golden Spurs, where militia defeats an armoured warrior class, still possible? In this sense you are right: the "violent mob" is probably becoming less and less relevant as an agent of change in history.
The existence of "cheap" options for mass destruction (like hijacking and crashing a plane) is superficially good for the balance of power between "the people" (read: the violent mob mobilized by good guys) and government, but it also increases the total amount of political violence. Pandora's box is open and cannot be closed again: everything short of a poor man's nuclear bomb is not good enough. In this case they don't use specific technology to destroy, but the increased vulnerability caused by increased dependence on technology. Since this requires suicide, people with a death wish must be specifically selected from a much bigger loyal "violent mob" reserve. The ideological basis of the movement is however still important: the suicide killer needs (the idea of) an admiring audience and a justification for his act. People love being heroes. Socially isolated nihilist suicide killers are extremely rare. We still live in an exceptionally save world.
Good job. You've just outlawed verbal support for the colonials that wanted to rebel against the British Crown (ever heard of the American revolution?) including the founding fathers.
This type of thing is now indeed illegal in the EU. Take the EU's Council Framework Decision 2002/475/JHA on the definition of terrorism as an example: violent acts aimed at seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation. I assume this is the basis for the definition of terrorism in recent anti-terrorism legislation in EU member states, and abetting terrorism will also usually be illegal.
Here in the Netherlands, widely misunderstood as a very liberal state, the state recently locked up 6 people for promoting terrorism. Promoting terrorism in this case consisted of having muslim fundamentalist documents available. Charges were also brought for "threatening a member of parliament" even though the only audience present to the threat was the Dutch secret service officer listening to the bugs built into the walls of the house of one of the suspects (the American Jason Walters) before he moved in, but considering this a "threat" fortunately went too far for the court.
Oddly, the EU definition of terrorism does not cover conservative violent acts directed at preserving or stabilising the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country. The definition is inherently political: most EU member states were themselves established by terrorist organizations by the EU's definition. This is why the EU Committee on Petitions was petitioned to legalize terrorism again by a concerned Dutch citizen in 2002, but the EU hasn't answered yet.
Come on people.
We all know that the US is the worst when it comes to censorship and human rights violations.
So why, when I visit that site, do I see a quote from a Syrian site?
Come on people, prioritize.
Is this whining veiled in sarcasm? I often handle small problems that I can solve before big problems that I can't. For instance today I am writing a comment about the whining about who gets criticized most, while I (again) postpone the problem of bringing everlasting world peace to tomorrow even though I think that is the bigger problem. NGOs usually take the same approach: they give priority to criticizing the countries that actually care and may be shamed into changing their behaviour.
I wish it was. However, facts point in the opposite direction. Take the 9/11 bombers for instance. They were anything but "desperate", living normal (in fact, better than normal) lives in U.S., the country which they bombed. Take Bin-Laden, born to one of the richest families in the world (!), born into every comfort and luxury in the world - yet decided to embark on a path of global religious war and murderous terror.
Contrast that with many millions of people in Africa, compared to which even the poorest Palestinians are living like kings (how many Palestinians die of hunger or thirst annually? As the "inhumane" Olmert said a few days ago, 'we would not allow a single Palestinian child to die of hunger'). Yet you won't see those trully poor people commit mass-murder through systematic bombing of civilian population.
The great spokesmen for the poor and oppressed usually come from a privileged background themselves, and kindly volunteer to explain to the discontent the root causes of their situation. Frances Gouda's 'Poverty and Political Culture' is the book to read on this subject. Much of recent political history can be interpreted as a conflict between religions and political ideologies about who controls the violent discontent mob. This conflict is less about how much misery there is, than it is about who is responsible for it. Trying to address the misery itself has historically proven more effective as an antidote to political violence than explaining away the relation between misery and political violence. Just because you seriously tried you prove your innocence. You don't respond with "realism" to a moral challenge: it is impolite and politically ineffective.
Organizations like Al-Qaeda and Hamas are new players in this game, and they are fueled by misery in the same way as socialism is fueled by working class poverty, even though Marx was never poor and socialist movements of the past often had foreign paymasters. Most supporters of political violence are motivated by little more than the hope that a new order will turn out better for them than the existing one. Again: the support does not depend primarily on how miserable they are in an objective sense, but on whether they accept the account of the causes of their misery. Whether Al-Qaeda or Hamas also have an effective solution is less relevant, just like in normal politics: to spend taxpayer's money you have to convince taxpayers that there is a big problem, not that there is an effective solution.
In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation?
You are making a straw man out of "apartheid". It is not merely the continuation of British imperialist racism, but a political system separate from racism. From the apartheid Wikipedia entry:
"Apartheid ideologues argued that once apartheid had been implemented, blacks would no longer be citizens of South Africa; rather, they would become citizens of the independent "homelands". In terms of this model, blacks became (foreign) "guest laborers" who merely worked in South Africa as the holders of temporary work permits."
Israel makes the exact same convenient distinction in order to guarantee a loyal majority in Israel proper. I don't question the democratic character of the Israeli government in relation to the "demos" it selects for itself, but a government that "secedes" from a part of the population in its territories can only regain its claim to being democratic by at least giving these people complete sovereignty and a viable territory of their own.
Of course the Palestinian population in the occupied territories is a danger to Israel proper, but this was also true of Zulus, Xsosas, and other Bantu tribes as far as South-Africans were concerned when they created the apartheid system in South-Africa. I will admit Arafat was never a credible Mandela.
Of course the Israelis and Palestinians both claim the same lands on historical grounds, but so do the whites and blacks in South-Africa: the South-African Dutch and Bantu population are both late arrivers -- marginalizing the indigenous Khoi-San gatherers -- who ran into eachother.
If the homelands for the various tribes in South-africa would have been actually economically viable and pleasant to live in, and racism less obvious in daily live, we might have mistaken it for enlightened policy towards national minorities. The same thing is wrong in the occupied territories: allowing the prisoners to elect the chief of the ghetto police is not democracy. Without sovereignty, there cannot be democracy.
My grandfathers killed Nazis, You Insensitive Clod!
Sure, and your great-great-great-grandfathers killed demons from hell, but nowadays people are more realistic and just kill cops.
such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications).
The US is used to enjoying air superiority, but other militaries might be interested in having an "instant camouflage screen" based on this idea over parked vehicles instead of messing around with nets and paint.
Maybe the Dutch/German Fennek vehicle can be adapted to sort of cloak itself from planes using its periscope.
Negroponte was wrong. The idea of wanting to directly integrate power generation into the device is fundamentally flawed. There are both technical and functional objections to doing that. Bringing power generation and power consumption closer together is the right idea, but including a separate hand crank in each device is impractical. There's a limit to the amount of younger brothers people have.
What the world needs is a standardized, cheap, robust, modular, switchable DC power supply brick, with builtin UPS and battery charger, that can power multiple devices at different voltages (at the same time), and accepts pedal, hand crank, DC solar or wind power, biomass fueled engine, and AC mains. Give people the brick with pedal, and later upgrade by extending microcredit for adding a solar panel or an efficient biomass generator/cooking stove. Many people who are poor now will actually be able to save for a solar panel without credit when they stop buying disposable batteries. It is sometimes shocking to see how inefficient and expensive being poor can be.
Obviously, if you don't have access to AC mains power and have to crank or pedal yourself, you don't want unnecessary AC/DC conversion losses. Everything that is important for the third world runs on low voltage DC power. Only a complete idiot would pedal to generate power for the AC washing machine, instead of washing by hand. The tradeoff for washing is fundamentally different from pedaling for a minute to send an email vs. walking a day to the nearest big town to mail a letter.
Do you think that the law was made at the time more out of distaste for the Nazis, or was there some additional underlying basis for it?
When Voelkisch movements start armed and uniformed militias outside the structure of the state something nasty is going to happen. It happened in 1568-1648, 1795-1812, 1831-1839, and 1935-1945 and in the Netherlands always involves some bigger foreign power (Spain, Prussia and France, France and Britain, and Germany respectively).
The proper policy for a state is to run the militia itself. In the past you had "musket guilds" run by the cities in the Netherlands, and the weapons were stored at a local arsenal. The exercise schedule was set by the government, but sufficient exercise was taken to be a sort of civil right. The existence of a healthy militia legitimizes government action against rival armed forces claiming to represent the people. The very existence of the rival may draw in foreign powers friendly to that rival.
The small pro-Nazi militia in the Netherlands was in 1936 uniformed but unarmed. Their uniforms were intimidating the population because of the association with the Nazi movement ruling a bigger neighbouring power, and therefore challenged the government. This is why the government turned on wearing uniforms associated with state functions like police and army.
A note from a non-American: the discussion on whether and in what conditions to kill a trespasser has no relation whatsoever with guns.
I do have a sword in my bedroom, and as I understand it there is a legal presumption that I am defending myself and dependents if I kill a threatening trespasser in my house, for instance if he corners me by coming up the stairs. Even if my action is out of proportion with the threat it is "excessive self-defence" and will usually go unpunished. If I keep stabbing him even though he is already immobilized, I might still apply for "extensive excessive self-defence" and go free. If I execute the trespasser for trying to steal something on the other hand, I am simply a murderer. It depends on the details of the situation.
Guns are prohibited, and I support that prohibition as long as it is at least somewhat effective. Hand guns are hardly more effective than swords and big game arrows, but they are much easier to conceal when you take them out of your home. If you do have a gun in your home, despite the prohibition, you are still allowed to shoot the trespasser in similar circumstances but you will be jailed for owning the gun.
The gun, however, significantly weakens your case of self-defence, because the gun is more suited to chasing away a trespasser who is armed with a gun than a close quarters weapon.
The other point: Militias have been prohibited here in the Netherlands since 1936, when Nazi militias marched in the streets. Wearing military style uniforms, even unarmed, is prohibited. This is not really satisfactory anymore, since we no longer have a conscript army "owned by the people" since a few years (in an attempt to build a leaner and meaner army that is more suited to colonial-style operations like the US). I like the Swiss system, where everybody gets issued an army rifle with a sealed box of ammo.