Don't be catty about it. When exactly did the US have to defend its own territory in the 20th century? If you're thinking of World War II, keep in mind that Pearl Harbor was a raid, the Phillippines weren't exactly defended so much as they were lost and recaptured, and that both of these were imperial possessions well outside the actual United States.
I'm not arguing "obscure 'what if?'" scenarios, I'm exploring the natural logical consequences of holding a population responsible for its elected government. Let's talk about Iraq, shall we? Characterizing that war as "the United States going to war with Iraq" is an abstraction. In reality, that war is the United States military (among others) invading the territory of Iraq to assault the Iraqi military and government, funded by tax funds drawn from the American people (with or without their consent), as well as debts drawn through whatever mechanisms the government funds its deficits. And, once again, the United States military was commanded to do so by an elected government which was elected through a complicated process.... The war in Iraq is not an action of the American people, it's an action of the American president and of the millions of unelected bureaucrats and troops under his command. Just as the Japanese stealth fighter is not an action of the Japanese people, but an action of the Japanese defense ministry.
Throughout history, this most accurate and most widely understood terminology has been used.
So now you're making a descriptivist argument towards what usage is well-attested? That's an easy one to respond to: metonymy is well-attested as well. Just look up "the White House", "the Kremlin", etc. in news archives.
But we just started a new meme a few days ago to highlight human rights abuses in Burma! On which note...let's just say, in repressive Burma, it's not just your internet connection that's cut off.
More famously, we worked with Canada to create NORAD, building the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming Soviet bombers. The Mid-Canada and Pinetree lines ran south of the DEW line. Interceptors were also housed in the United States, along with the ground-based air defenses you mentioned. Eventually the main threat moved from bombers to missiles, and it became illegal by treaty to deploy missile defenses. (By that point our main defense had become the mutual-assured-destruction concept anyway.)
But, aside from that, we devoted most of our efforts into how to fight World War III with the Soviets, in Europe.
You're arriving at a woefully incorrect conclusion if you assume that by my rationale, civilians would be legitimate targets of war. The decision of a nation to go to war, and the rules of engagement and laws of warfare are completely seperate issues, and I respect your intelligence enough to assume that you're aware of this, and that you were simply making an intellectually dishonest attempt to discredit my opinion without actual substance.
The leaders and decision-making bodies of a nation at war constitute a military target. Any ad-hoc exception of this specifically to protect civilians in a democratic country is, well--ad-hoc. It's a bad hack to avoid the logical consequences of holding an entire population responsible for its elected government. Suppose a democratic country were to elect someone, under false pretenses, who turned out to abuse his power once elected to commit war crimes. If that person's actions are those of the entire people, then it would be perfectly justified to try, convict, and sentence millions of people for the crime of being born in a country where a war criminal was elected to national office, whether or not they actually voted, either for him in specific or for anyone at all.
All representative democracy does in practice is give the opportunity, periodically, to a plurality or majority of the population to elect, within a pre-defined framework, either of a small number of selected candidates, usually on the basis of "the lesser of two evils". Then, assuming no election fraud, the candidate who got more votes than the others (which in practice can be even less than 4 out of 10) fulfills a specific, constitutionally-defined role in a vast government far beyond their complete control for a set period of time, during which there is little to no opportunity for the public to recall or replace them. These elected officials appoint bureaucrats, who appoint more bureaucrats, all of whom may hold office for years and decades beyond the term of the elected official who originally appointed them. And you are trying to tell me that the actions of this leviathan are those of the people? Give me a break.
You're quite right in that I disagree with any metonymic reference spurring from geographic coincidence. It's an unnecessary layer of abstraction that does not serve any practical purpose.
Maybe if you want to speak the most efficient language possible, in which case I suggest you study Lojban or similar constructed languages. You're suggesting a very specific prescriptivism, and even those of us who support prescriptivism in general may very well disagree with your specific goals.
That's because we're one of the few cultures left that has a military. Canada and Europe only have enough of a military to hold their own until the US arrives to defend them. When the last half-century of history makes your country the primary defense force for half the world, militarism is what you get.
50 pounds is unwieldy and pretty unreasonable for any sword--the Scottish Claymore was around 5 or 6 pounds, with the German Zweihaender not much heavier than that. Besides which, your argument has a pretty bad fallacy: if I say "power consumption is a vital feature in the design of mobile computers", a counterargument along the same lines as yours might be, "Yes, but if I had a dual-core machine with only 2 hours of battery life, I could still do more than someone with a 168-hour laptop that only ran CP/M and had no internet connectivity." The importance of any one feature doesn't necessarily negate the importance of other features. More to the point--if we both had Claymores of the same length and sharpness, except mine was heavier, and if we had the same level of skill and physical ability, I would probably win.
Your post has a lot of [citation needed]'s. For instance, I only experienced movies the way you describe when I was a child. Is that really how most people watch movies? I think at the very least we recognize actors we've seen before--"hey, that's Harrison Ford!". We make judgments about the movie. We aren't thrown off by scene changes, which never happen in real life. We accept (without wonder or question) improbable events and technologies. Yes, our senses tend to focus on the screen, but there are many instances in real life where we focus our senses and ignore what we aren't focusing on--reading books, watching a real-life sporting event in person, sex, hunting, operating machinery, tricky driving situations, aiming and firing a gun, good conversations, music (playing or listening to), writing code, doing mathematics, playing video games, exercising, working with our hands, etc. You're basically conflating mental focus (an everyday occurrence, even outside of movies) with an "out-of-body experience" just because it draws some sexy, ill-supported conclusions.
By that rationale, the population of a democratic country is a legitimate military target. You're being absurd and naive. By your same rationale, we can't talk about "Hollywood" or "Broadway" because theaters and film industries are owned by and represent people who may not necessarily live in those places. You're making bad rationalizations because you're unwilling or incapable of admitting you're wrong, and I regret wasting my time on you.
Do you prefer looking at two documents side by side on a laptop? Have you ever used a dual monitor set up?
One laptop plus one external display is a dual monitor setup. One laptop plus a dual monitor setup is a triple monitor setup. I've got a keyboard, mouse, external screen, external speakers, and external backup hard drive connected to my laptop when it's on its desk, so I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the battery works as a poor man's UPS. The lights flicker and the network drops, but my computer keeps going.
Head to ISOHunt or The Pirate Bay an hour or so after broadcast, and there will be hundreds or thousands of people seeding any tv show.
In my experience there are hundreds of people leeching any given TV show, and anywhere between 1 and a dozen seeding. More than once I have to wait overnight for it to finish (not because it takes that long but because it stretches past my bedtime).
The interesting thing about stealth technology however, is that it is almost exclusively used for aggression rather than defense if you play your strategy according to tradition.
That "tradition" has nothing to do with stealth technology and everything to do with historical accident. The first two stealth aircraft were a light bomber and a heavy bomber. And both of them are produced by a country that hasn't had to defend its own territory since the nineteenth century. Anyway, the predominant military doctrines adopted by the Western world have been based more on attack than on defense ever since after WWI, because (a) defensive strategies proved useless and wasteful in WWI and (b) everyone in the West read von Clausewitz, and Clausewitz's idea of defense turns out to be regrouping and counterattack.
"Stealth" doesn't just mean "difficult to see on radar". It has to be quiet and difficult to see as well. Heat signature also has to be reduced to protect against heat-seeking missiles.
Metonymy (the practice you are referring to) is a well-attested linguistic technique. Using "Tokyo" to mean "the Japanese government" is nothing different than using "The Pentagon" to refer to "the Department of Defense", or "Hollywood" to refer to "the US film industry". Just because you want to gimp the English language by removing methods of expression doesn't mean we have to go along with it.
16 is the legal age of consent above which you're not guilty of statutory rape. Whether you're guilty of being a dirty old man is a social boundary set by the ceiling function of half your age plus 7 years. In which case, a 21 or 22 year old man should only date women 18 or older. The taboo against dirty old men, of course, isn't consistent.
S&T is great for the mind, but it doesn't feed the soul.
Speak for yourself. I find more beauty in logic, physics, and mathematics than I find in what passes for "art" these days. If you don't see beauty in a binary adder I pity you. This isn't to dismiss art entirely, as there is a lot of art I like. But mindless art is simply junk food for the soul.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be catty about it. When exactly did the US have to defend its own territory in the 20th century? If you're thinking of World War II, keep in mind that Pearl Harbor was a raid, the Phillippines weren't exactly defended so much as they were lost and recaptured, and that both of these were imperial possessions well outside the actual United States.
I'm not arguing "obscure 'what if?'" scenarios, I'm exploring the natural logical consequences of holding a population responsible for its elected government. Let's talk about Iraq, shall we? Characterizing that war as "the United States going to war with Iraq" is an abstraction. In reality, that war is the United States military (among others) invading the territory of Iraq to assault the Iraqi military and government, funded by tax funds drawn from the American people (with or without their consent), as well as debts drawn through whatever mechanisms the government funds its deficits. And, once again, the United States military was commanded to do so by an elected government which was elected through a complicated process.... The war in Iraq is not an action of the American people, it's an action of the American president and of the millions of unelected bureaucrats and troops under his command. Just as the Japanese stealth fighter is not an action of the Japanese people, but an action of the Japanese defense ministry.
Throughout history, this most accurate and most widely understood terminology has been used.So now you're making a descriptivist argument towards what usage is well-attested? That's an easy one to respond to: metonymy is well-attested as well. Just look up "the White House", "the Kremlin", etc. in news archives.
But we just started a new meme a few days ago to highlight human rights abuses in Burma! On which note...let's just say, in repressive Burma, it's not just your internet connection that's cut off.
I enjoy marijuana too, but I don't post on Slashdot while I'm high. You should find more fulfilling things to do, like listen to Led Zeppelin.
Yeah, that's actually not a great example of metonymy.
More famously, we worked with Canada to create NORAD, building the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming Soviet bombers. The Mid-Canada and Pinetree lines ran south of the DEW line. Interceptors were also housed in the United States, along with the ground-based air defenses you mentioned. Eventually the main threat moved from bombers to missiles, and it became illegal by treaty to deploy missile defenses. (By that point our main defense had become the mutual-assured-destruction concept anyway.)
But, aside from that, we devoted most of our efforts into how to fight World War III with the Soviets, in Europe.
The leaders and decision-making bodies of a nation at war constitute a military target. Any ad-hoc exception of this specifically to protect civilians in a democratic country is, well--ad-hoc. It's a bad hack to avoid the logical consequences of holding an entire population responsible for its elected government. Suppose a democratic country were to elect someone, under false pretenses, who turned out to abuse his power once elected to commit war crimes. If that person's actions are those of the entire people, then it would be perfectly justified to try, convict, and sentence millions of people for the crime of being born in a country where a war criminal was elected to national office, whether or not they actually voted, either for him in specific or for anyone at all.
All representative democracy does in practice is give the opportunity, periodically, to a plurality or majority of the population to elect, within a pre-defined framework, either of a small number of selected candidates, usually on the basis of "the lesser of two evils". Then, assuming no election fraud, the candidate who got more votes than the others (which in practice can be even less than 4 out of 10) fulfills a specific, constitutionally-defined role in a vast government far beyond their complete control for a set period of time, during which there is little to no opportunity for the public to recall or replace them. These elected officials appoint bureaucrats, who appoint more bureaucrats, all of whom may hold office for years and decades beyond the term of the elected official who originally appointed them. And you are trying to tell me that the actions of this leviathan are those of the people? Give me a break.
You're quite right in that I disagree with any metonymic reference spurring from geographic coincidence. It's an unnecessary layer of abstraction that does not serve any practical purpose.Maybe if you want to speak the most efficient language possible, in which case I suggest you study Lojban or similar constructed languages. You're suggesting a very specific prescriptivism, and even those of us who support prescriptivism in general may very well disagree with your specific goals.
And when, exactly, are we supposed to solve the laws of thermodynamics? Scarcity is a fundamental feature of the universe.
I don't know about you, but I usually put money I own into the bank, and then use a debit card to command the bank to pay others on my behalf.
That's because we're one of the few cultures left that has a military. Canada and Europe only have enough of a military to hold their own until the US arrives to defend them. When the last half-century of history makes your country the primary defense force for half the world, militarism is what you get.
50 pounds is unwieldy and pretty unreasonable for any sword--the Scottish Claymore was around 5 or 6 pounds, with the German Zweihaender not much heavier than that. Besides which, your argument has a pretty bad fallacy: if I say "power consumption is a vital feature in the design of mobile computers", a counterargument along the same lines as yours might be, "Yes, but if I had a dual-core machine with only 2 hours of battery life, I could still do more than someone with a 168-hour laptop that only ran CP/M and had no internet connectivity." The importance of any one feature doesn't necessarily negate the importance of other features. More to the point--if we both had Claymores of the same length and sharpness, except mine was heavier, and if we had the same level of skill and physical ability, I would probably win.
Your post has a lot of [citation needed]'s. For instance, I only experienced movies the way you describe when I was a child. Is that really how most people watch movies? I think at the very least we recognize actors we've seen before--"hey, that's Harrison Ford!". We make judgments about the movie. We aren't thrown off by scene changes, which never happen in real life. We accept (without wonder or question) improbable events and technologies. Yes, our senses tend to focus on the screen, but there are many instances in real life where we focus our senses and ignore what we aren't focusing on--reading books, watching a real-life sporting event in person, sex, hunting, operating machinery, tricky driving situations, aiming and firing a gun, good conversations, music (playing or listening to), writing code, doing mathematics, playing video games, exercising, working with our hands, etc. You're basically conflating mental focus (an everyday occurrence, even outside of movies) with an "out-of-body experience" just because it draws some sexy, ill-supported conclusions.
By that rationale, the population of a democratic country is a legitimate military target. You're being absurd and naive. By your same rationale, we can't talk about "Hollywood" or "Broadway" because theaters and film industries are owned by and represent people who may not necessarily live in those places. You're making bad rationalizations because you're unwilling or incapable of admitting you're wrong, and I regret wasting my time on you.
One laptop plus one external display is a dual monitor setup. One laptop plus a dual monitor setup is a triple monitor setup. I've got a keyboard, mouse, external screen, external speakers, and external backup hard drive connected to my laptop when it's on its desk, so I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the battery works as a poor man's UPS. The lights flicker and the network drops, but my computer keeps going.
That'll put me ahead enough to afford a used copy of Lego Star Wars!
They had a referendum? No, it was a decision by the Defense Ministry, in Tokyo.
In my experience there are hundreds of people leeching any given TV show, and anywhere between 1 and a dozen seeding. More than once I have to wait overnight for it to finish (not because it takes that long but because it stretches past my bedtime).
That "tradition" has nothing to do with stealth technology and everything to do with historical accident. The first two stealth aircraft were a light bomber and a heavy bomber. And both of them are produced by a country that hasn't had to defend its own territory since the nineteenth century. Anyway, the predominant military doctrines adopted by the Western world have been based more on attack than on defense ever since after WWI, because (a) defensive strategies proved useless and wasteful in WWI and (b) everyone in the West read von Clausewitz, and Clausewitz's idea of defense turns out to be regrouping and counterattack.
"Stealth" doesn't just mean "difficult to see on radar". It has to be quiet and difficult to see as well. Heat signature also has to be reduced to protect against heat-seeking missiles.
Stealth aircraft are being shot down in Iraq? [citation needed]. Do Iraqi insurgents even have anti-aircraft weapons?
Metonymy (the practice you are referring to) is a well-attested linguistic technique. Using "Tokyo" to mean "the Japanese government" is nothing different than using "The Pentagon" to refer to "the Department of Defense", or "Hollywood" to refer to "the US film industry". Just because you want to gimp the English language by removing methods of expression doesn't mean we have to go along with it.
16 is the legal age of consent above which you're not guilty of statutory rape. Whether you're guilty of being a dirty old man is a social boundary set by the ceiling function of half your age plus 7 years. In which case, a 21 or 22 year old man should only date women 18 or older. The taboo against dirty old men, of course, isn't consistent.
Because penises are funny.
Speak for yourself. I find more beauty in logic, physics, and mathematics than I find in what passes for "art" these days. If you don't see beauty in a binary adder I pity you. This isn't to dismiss art entirely, as there is a lot of art I like. But mindless art is simply junk food for the soul.
17 isn't underage. 17 is usually only months short of 18. There's a heap paradox here and you're completely ignoring it.