Whether Marco Polo was in China or not continues to be hotly debated by scholars. Only two years ago, the German historian Hans Ulrich Vogel published a major new work presenting evidence for Marco Polo's sojourn in China on the basis of economic data.
I've often found unconvincing the argument that Marco Polo did not go to China because he did not mention certain habits of the Chinese that dazzle Westerners. As an American by birth and upbringing but long resident in Europe, it amuses me that American visitors immediately express amazement at certain customs here that I've grown so used to that I don't even notice anything special about them myself, and I'd be unlikely to include them in any rambling oral account I told about life in Europe.
it doesn't hold water. first you should define Hindus as something
It's a basic tenet of anthropology that religions are defined by observing the beliefs and practices of the people claiming affiliation. Religions are not defined by an outsider imposing his expectation of a rigid dogma. Within Hinduism, there is an immense variety of beliefs and practices, some of them mutually contradictory to Western eyes, and that's fine by Hindus themselves. Even if most Hindus believe in the supernatural, others do not, and all of that coexists within, because inclusiveness is an value that most Hindus hold to.
Someone outside this religion (or outside any culture being studied in general) has no right to point at one person claiming an affiliation with Hinduism and say that "he is a real Hindu" and point at another and say "he is not".
How widely do you think that Hindus accept their ritual without belief as Hinduism?
Very widely indeed, because it would be a major faux pas for one Hindu to ask a another "Do you really believe in all this? Say you do!" Instead, people are not asked about what they feel deep inside, so they are free to believe whatever they wish. This is what makes Hinduism so inclusive and, over time, so syncretic.
Hindu fundamentalists vs. Hinduism: Column [usatoday.com]
Being very familiar with the contemporary Hindutva phenomenon because I work in a field affected by it, I very strongly suspect that the amount of Hindus who do not believe in the supernatural is greater than the number of Karnataka-state demagogues and their followings. These sorts aren't quite at the microscopic level of a Westboro Baptist Church, but considering the population of India, they might as well be, they've simply learned to work the media and engage in some minor vandalism like similar groups abroad.
Hindu people believe that failures in morality/karma/dharma result in a corrupt soul and may result in reincarnation as a lesser creature as punishment.
Many people who call themselves Hindus believe that. However, Hinduism is essentially a ritual complex that can include both people who believe that and people who do not believe that.
You could have had the courtesy of reading past the first paragraph in the Wiki page too...
Wikipedia is not a useful source for this particular issue. Perhaps you live in the backwoods somewhere and have not become aware of over a century of problems arising because Hinduism is presented in ordinary reference sources through a Western religious lens? Meanwhile, scholars of comparative religion and anthropologists have always been keen to emphasize the ritual-centered and inclusive features of Hinduism. It is involvement in this ritual complex, combined with a tolerance of other people's beliefs (i.e. it's fine to be atheist, but it's best to keep your belief that your fellow Hindu's object of devotion doesn't exist to yourself) that makes one a Hindu, even if one personally rejects the supernatural.
"an order that makes life and universe possible" [is] superstitious and incompatible with atheism.
How is that belief superstitious and incompatible with atheism? It's any atheist's observation of the anthropic principle.
If you think so, it's likely that you are erroneously applying Western ideas of what religion is to Hinduism. I think you'd benefit from actually reading something about this particular subject -- or even going to India and talking to educated Indians who will tell you quite openly that they don't believe in a God, supernatural phenomenon or anything up and out there, but they find value in a series of rituals that link their community together. Performing these rituals does nothing to compromise their firm atheism; who are you to claim it does?
One thing to keep in mind when looking at those statistics is that Hinduism and atheism are compatible. Hinduism is a ritual complex, not a series of theological propositions that one must hold or else one can't be a Hindu. Many educated Indians believe that Hinduism is a environment within which they interact with their families and the society around them, while inside they believe that there is no supernatural.
The "ET" referred to in the linked article is life out there many light years away, whose organic signature just happens to be detectable from Earth. Just as we have no way to bridge that gap between the stars, they are unlikely to be able to come to us either -- if they had a way, they would have already been here. It's not even a given that they would be interested in going into space. So, talk of a "military arms race" is more than a bit soon.
If you demand absolute realism, I don't think there's any work of fiction that will satisfy you. Even in the more scientifically grounded "hard science-fiction" genre, often authors are only using the plot to explore a certain idea that has been on their minds. If you want to read about infinitely more advanced aliens coming to Earth and threatening the human race, there's plenty of books out there for you, but that's not the sort of book that this particular author wanted to write at this particular time.
The US doesn't care about anyones airspace on a good day. How many countries currently have drones flying about, and then how many more they you are unaware of.
Drones don't have human beings on board who could get shot down and make the current administration look bad. Note that the OP spoke of "B52s", a bomber piloted by human beings on board.
To think the US wouldn't already be agitating the crowd into action from within already is extremely naive
Of course the intelligence agencies of various states (and not just the US) would be agitating the crowd from within. But the methods they already use to do so probably seem effective enough, so why take the risk of flying a bomber over the territory?
...to think they would be scared to fly 'humanitarian relief missions' to 'protect innocent civilians' in a spring type event is just ridiculous.
One can never say never, but in "Arab Spring" events so far, the US has maintained a more shadowy role that what the OP proposed, and I don't think that is going to change. US politicians still remember Somalia. Presidential administrations do not want a debacle of "our boys" being shot down in a hostile state unless there is a full-on international conflict already going on.
The standard definition of Third World poverty is a significant mass of people living under one dollar a day. I'm sorry if a country you like has those statistics, but that's how it goes.
Robert J. Sawyer did a send up of mocking religious people's views on ET in his novel Calculating God. An alien lands on Earth and finds it odd that all the scientists of our planet are trending towards atheism, when his civilization finds the arguments of natural theology convincing. Of course, the god believed in by the alien (and mused on by Sawyer, who I believe remains an atheist) is an unknowable, silent, watchmaker god who sprung up spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, instead of the personal God that Earth's big three monotheistic religions believe in.
You can find definitions for "Third World" to leave India out, if you want, but poverty is not one of them. India has states (see the villages of Uttar Pradesh, for example, or the special-status northeast) where subsistence farming, illiteracy, and living under a euro a day is still commonplace. Sure, other states have made great strides, but dire poverty persists in areas.
For years I have also advocated having a B52 full of cheap mesh cell phones and base stations to drop on any Arab Spring like event.
Even when countries are toppling longstanding leaders in a move that might bring them closer to the US, the US doesn't dare violate airspace so brazenly. (Even in Syria right now, the US is targeting rebel forces in the north, and it has stayed well clear of Assad Damascus during the whole Syria saga of the last years.) Think about it, the leadership is going to have the best defenses gathered around itself, and if a US plane were shot down, it would make the US and the current president look bad, and so it's not worth the risk trying to stir up the mob just a bit more.
In most 3rd world countries, credit is almost non-existent so spending more than you have isn't even an option neither
Have you travelled in Third World countries in the last decade? In Africa and India it's now utterly commonplace for people, even the illiterate, to take out credit to buy a fancy mobile phone. Those acclaimed microcredit initiatives that do social good are now accompanied by innumerable sleasy microcredit lenders that hand out loans easily, and can be brutal about repayment. Credit has been a thing, and a rising problem, in the Third World for some years now.
No it wouldn't. Public health is the most slam-dunk reason to restrict civil liberties. Travel is restricted for much less important reasons, like politics.
Travel has almost never been restricted by the US government, with Cuba serving as the inexplicable exception. The Soviet Union was the big enemy for decades, and yet Americans regularly visited whether for university terms abroad or Intourist package tours. North Korea? The State Department might put out a travel advisory that it's not a good idea to go there, but it's perfectly legal for Americans to participated in the organized tour. That permissiveness even applies to war zones: when the US was bombing Serbia or NATO was carried out air strikes in Libya, you still could freely visit (there was a period when you couldn't bring any goods back from Yugoslavia, though).
That's an American problem. GSM was sparingly rolled out in the US due to the prevalence of CDMA, so reclamation of those frequencies is manageable. There are no such plans for the rest of the world, where there are hundreds of millions of GSM devices still in use.
Regardless of whether this might be a good thing for you as a private individual, 3G-connected appliances are already a hit with businesses. Vending machines that take cash are being phased out in many coutnries, and if they take your bank card they need a network connection. Remote monitoring of utility infrastructure is also an application -- it's hard to justifying running fiber out to one box in a rural area, but if it's within 3G range, there you go.
This still doesn't necessarily invalidate the proposal I referred to in my original post here. Vinge's novel had its alien civilizations, which chose a virtual reality over space exploration, moving deep underground to avoid worrying about asteroid impacts. (Then the expansion of the sun into a red giant would continue to pose a problem, but at a much longer timescale.)
This is a North American thing. In most of the world, coffee shops would never ask your name, even if they are Starbucks-clone chains. Starbucks locations abroad may ask your name, but this is obviously imposed by a customer service manual written in the US, just like McDonalds abroad makes staff smile broadly and recite lines totally out of context with the country around them.
If we found a 6 mile long rock headed for Earth and had a year's notice, I doubt we could do anything about it, other than try to survive it (all the fantasies about stopping it aside, we likely couldn't).
Asteroid defence would require merely placing some infrastructure in Earth orbit. That's a lot different than sending human beings outward through the solar system.
The Earth is thoroughly mapped, explored, photographed, populated, and exploited. There are no frontiers or mystery here any more.
I disagree. Powerful computing may lead to finding plenty of things of interest here on Earth. This theme has been explored by science-fiction writers in recent decades.
For example, Poul Anderson in his series starting with Harvest of Stars depicted humanity splitting into two groups, one exploring the stars, and the other content to remain on Earth and (as post-human machine intelligences) explore mathematics and other pursuits unimaginable to the human race as it is today. Of course, as an ardent Libertarian and advocate for space exploration, Anderson made the Earthbound "navel-gazers" the villains, but he was still aware that human expansion into space isn't a given.
In his novel Marooned in Realtime Vernor Vinge proposed that space might be empty because advanced civilizations don't expand outwards into the stars, but instead move into a virtual reality once they have sufficiently powerful computing power.
This idea that multitasking and short attention spans have a negative impact on cognition is not new. It goes back at least to Nicholas Carr's 2008 magazine article that served as the basis for his book The Shallows.
I think there are philosophical issues here. While the human biological organism might be "getting stupider", if our electronic devices are seen as augmentations, then doesn't our total cyborg person remain just as intelligent? That is, people have not become stupider, they have just moved some information processing from the brains in their skull to the devices in their heads.
The appearance of emotional issues might be a serious problem, but on the other hand, let's see how future generations who grow up with electronics from their infancy feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether Marco Polo was in China or not continues to be hotly debated by scholars. Only two years ago, the German historian Hans Ulrich Vogel published a major new work presenting evidence for Marco Polo's sojourn in China on the basis of economic data.
I've often found unconvincing the argument that Marco Polo did not go to China because he did not mention certain habits of the Chinese that dazzle Westerners. As an American by birth and upbringing but long resident in Europe, it amuses me that American visitors immediately express amazement at certain customs here that I've grown so used to that I don't even notice anything special about them myself, and I'd be unlikely to include them in any rambling oral account I told about life in Europe.
It's a basic tenet of anthropology that religions are defined by observing the beliefs and practices of the people claiming affiliation. Religions are not defined by an outsider imposing his expectation of a rigid dogma. Within Hinduism, there is an immense variety of beliefs and practices, some of them mutually contradictory to Western eyes, and that's fine by Hindus themselves. Even if most Hindus believe in the supernatural, others do not, and all of that coexists within, because inclusiveness is an value that most Hindus hold to.
Someone outside this religion (or outside any culture being studied in general) has no right to point at one person claiming an affiliation with Hinduism and say that "he is a real Hindu" and point at another and say "he is not".
Very widely indeed, because it would be a major faux pas for one Hindu to ask a another "Do you really believe in all this? Say you do!" Instead, people are not asked about what they feel deep inside, so they are free to believe whatever they wish. This is what makes Hinduism so inclusive and, over time, so syncretic.
Being very familiar with the contemporary Hindutva phenomenon because I work in a field affected by it, I very strongly suspect that the amount of Hindus who do not believe in the supernatural is greater than the number of Karnataka-state demagogues and their followings. These sorts aren't quite at the microscopic level of a Westboro Baptist Church, but considering the population of India, they might as well be, they've simply learned to work the media and engage in some minor vandalism like similar groups abroad.
Many people who call themselves Hindus believe that. However, Hinduism is essentially a ritual complex that can include both people who believe that and people who do not believe that.
Wikipedia is not a useful source for this particular issue. Perhaps you live in the backwoods somewhere and have not become aware of over a century of problems arising because Hinduism is presented in ordinary reference sources through a Western religious lens? Meanwhile, scholars of comparative religion and anthropologists have always been keen to emphasize the ritual-centered and inclusive features of Hinduism. It is involvement in this ritual complex, combined with a tolerance of other people's beliefs (i.e. it's fine to be atheist, but it's best to keep your belief that your fellow Hindu's object of devotion doesn't exist to yourself) that makes one a Hindu, even if one personally rejects the supernatural.
How is that belief superstitious and incompatible with atheism? It's any atheist's observation of the anthropic principle.
If you think so, it's likely that you are erroneously applying Western ideas of what religion is to Hinduism. I think you'd benefit from actually reading something about this particular subject -- or even going to India and talking to educated Indians who will tell you quite openly that they don't believe in a God, supernatural phenomenon or anything up and out there, but they find value in a series of rituals that link their community together. Performing these rituals does nothing to compromise their firm atheism; who are you to claim it does?
One thing to keep in mind when looking at those statistics is that Hinduism and atheism are compatible. Hinduism is a ritual complex, not a series of theological propositions that one must hold or else one can't be a Hindu. Many educated Indians believe that Hinduism is a environment within which they interact with their families and the society around them, while inside they believe that there is no supernatural.
The "ET" referred to in the linked article is life out there many light years away, whose organic signature just happens to be detectable from Earth. Just as we have no way to bridge that gap between the stars, they are unlikely to be able to come to us either -- if they had a way, they would have already been here. It's not even a given that they would be interested in going into space. So, talk of a "military arms race" is more than a bit soon.
If you demand absolute realism, I don't think there's any work of fiction that will satisfy you. Even in the more scientifically grounded "hard science-fiction" genre, often authors are only using the plot to explore a certain idea that has been on their minds. If you want to read about infinitely more advanced aliens coming to Earth and threatening the human race, there's plenty of books out there for you, but that's not the sort of book that this particular author wanted to write at this particular time.
Yeah, they are so hard to fuck with that over thirty of them were lost during the Vietnam War.
Drones don't have human beings on board who could get shot down and make the current administration look bad. Note that the OP spoke of "B52s", a bomber piloted by human beings on board.
Of course the intelligence agencies of various states (and not just the US) would be agitating the crowd from within. But the methods they already use to do so probably seem effective enough, so why take the risk of flying a bomber over the territory?
...to think they would be scared to fly 'humanitarian relief missions' to 'protect innocent civilians' in a spring type event is just ridiculous.
One can never say never, but in "Arab Spring" events so far, the US has maintained a more shadowy role that what the OP proposed, and I don't think that is going to change. US politicians still remember Somalia. Presidential administrations do not want a debacle of "our boys" being shot down in a hostile state unless there is a full-on international conflict already going on.
The standard definition of Third World poverty is a significant mass of people living under one dollar a day. I'm sorry if a country you like has those statistics, but that's how it goes.
Robert J. Sawyer did a send up of mocking religious people's views on ET in his novel Calculating God . An alien lands on Earth and finds it odd that all the scientists of our planet are trending towards atheism, when his civilization finds the arguments of natural theology convincing. Of course, the god believed in by the alien (and mused on by Sawyer, who I believe remains an atheist) is an unknowable, silent, watchmaker god who sprung up spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, instead of the personal God that Earth's big three monotheistic religions believe in.
You can find definitions for "Third World" to leave India out, if you want, but poverty is not one of them. India has states (see the villages of Uttar Pradesh, for example, or the special-status northeast) where subsistence farming, illiteracy, and living under a euro a day is still commonplace. Sure, other states have made great strides, but dire poverty persists in areas.
Even when countries are toppling longstanding leaders in a move that might bring them closer to the US, the US doesn't dare violate airspace so brazenly. (Even in Syria right now, the US is targeting rebel forces in the north, and it has stayed well clear of Assad Damascus during the whole Syria saga of the last years.) Think about it, the leadership is going to have the best defenses gathered around itself, and if a US plane were shot down, it would make the US and the current president look bad, and so it's not worth the risk trying to stir up the mob just a bit more.
Have you travelled in Third World countries in the last decade? In Africa and India it's now utterly commonplace for people, even the illiterate, to take out credit to buy a fancy mobile phone. Those acclaimed microcredit initiatives that do social good are now accompanied by innumerable sleasy microcredit lenders that hand out loans easily, and can be brutal about repayment. Credit has been a thing, and a rising problem, in the Third World for some years now.
Travel has almost never been restricted by the US government, with Cuba serving as the inexplicable exception. The Soviet Union was the big enemy for decades, and yet Americans regularly visited whether for university terms abroad or Intourist package tours. North Korea? The State Department might put out a travel advisory that it's not a good idea to go there, but it's perfectly legal for Americans to participated in the organized tour. That permissiveness even applies to war zones: when the US was bombing Serbia or NATO was carried out air strikes in Libya, you still could freely visit (there was a period when you couldn't bring any goods back from Yugoslavia, though).
That's an American problem. GSM was sparingly rolled out in the US due to the prevalence of CDMA, so reclamation of those frequencies is manageable. There are no such plans for the rest of the world, where there are hundreds of millions of GSM devices still in use.
3G devices will continue to work with 4G/LTE just like GSM devices kept working after 3G was rolled out.
Regardless of whether this might be a good thing for you as a private individual, 3G-connected appliances are already a hit with businesses. Vending machines that take cash are being phased out in many coutnries, and if they take your bank card they need a network connection. Remote monitoring of utility infrastructure is also an application -- it's hard to justifying running fiber out to one box in a rural area, but if it's within 3G range, there you go.
This still doesn't necessarily invalidate the proposal I referred to in my original post here. Vinge's novel had its alien civilizations, which chose a virtual reality over space exploration, moving deep underground to avoid worrying about asteroid impacts. (Then the expansion of the sun into a red giant would continue to pose a problem, but at a much longer timescale.)
This is a North American thing. In most of the world, coffee shops would never ask your name, even if they are Starbucks-clone chains. Starbucks locations abroad may ask your name, but this is obviously imposed by a customer service manual written in the US, just like McDonalds abroad makes staff smile broadly and recite lines totally out of context with the country around them.
Asteroid defence would require merely placing some infrastructure in Earth orbit. That's a lot different than sending human beings outward through the solar system.
I disagree. Powerful computing may lead to finding plenty of things of interest here on Earth. This theme has been explored by science-fiction writers in recent decades.
For example, Poul Anderson in his series starting with Harvest of Stars depicted humanity splitting into two groups, one exploring the stars, and the other content to remain on Earth and (as post-human machine intelligences) explore mathematics and other pursuits unimaginable to the human race as it is today. Of course, as an ardent Libertarian and advocate for space exploration, Anderson made the Earthbound "navel-gazers" the villains, but he was still aware that human expansion into space isn't a given.
In his novel Marooned in Realtime Vernor Vinge proposed that space might be empty because advanced civilizations don't expand outwards into the stars, but instead move into a virtual reality once they have sufficiently powerful computing power.
Sorry, that should have read "to the devices in their hands". We haven't got to neural implants yet.
This idea that multitasking and short attention spans have a negative impact on cognition is not new. It goes back at least to Nicholas Carr's 2008 magazine article that served as the basis for his book The Shallows .
I think there are philosophical issues here. While the human biological organism might be "getting stupider", if our electronic devices are seen as augmentations, then doesn't our total cyborg person remain just as intelligent? That is, people have not become stupider, they have just moved some information processing from the brains in their skull to the devices in their heads.
The appearance of emotional issues might be a serious problem, but on the other hand, let's see how future generations who grow up with electronics from their infancy feel.