More generally, he stated that there is no actual data to support the notion that race does not contribute to intelligence, making a specific reference to Africans, and which happens to be a politically incorrect notion, but is still an accurate statement.
This does not mean that members of one race are necessarily intellectually inferior to another, it only means that there exists some sizable amount of data which merely suggests it as a possibility, and that no data has yet been accumulated which can actually show that this is not the case. The strongest objection to the conclusion comes from a political reaction to it, and does not arise from the data itself. It would have been far more interesting to do a detailed exploration on exactly why the data appeared to indicate that than to simply make the statement about the data that he did, since there was absolutely no possible way to interpret it without him being seen as racist.
Yes, and there is also no conclusive data that there is not a teapot orbiting the Earth.
Anyway, the essential problem is using the word "race" in the first place, since there is no such thing. There are simply human beings, and there are trivial variations between them in terms of things like skin and hair colour, but all the rest is cultural.
It is also incredibly foolish to use a term like "African" to cover everyone from a Professor of Physics in Lagos to an unemployed taxi driver in Cape Town.
How recently? My parents never had net positive equity until they retired & paid if off with retirement money.
In part because mortgage rates in the 1980s were in the 15-20% range. Hard to build up equity in that environment.
But except for occasional blips, the value of houses rose steadily through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (at least here in the UK) so that overall your equity increased, even if paying the interest was painful.
"cost of living"? Let me know when you've seen what the "cost of living" is for a billionaire, and then we'll talk scale. Hint: Yachts and jets are expensive. Oh wait wait you expect a billionaire to be living like a poor person...
It's so much easier and cheaper living hand to mouth in your car, as you don't have to fund an army of cooks, secretaries, party planners, tax advisers, chauffeurs, silverware polishers, bodyguards, lawyers and prostitutes.
That's the reason why taxes should be regressive, and real billionaires should pay no tax at all.
Now you and I can argue all day long about enlightened self-interest and long-term self-interest and whether torture serves them or not, but that's a utilitarian argument, not a moral one
Utilitarianism is a moral system just like Marxist-Leninism.
Saying "the interests of my country trump any other consideration" is a moral statement like "the ends justify the means".
Well, the only problem with this version of the story is that Bush himself explicitly denies it. He claims he was well aware of what was going on, so he should go to prison for it.
Neither Bush nor anyone else should go to prison only because they confessed to a crime. If evidence shows he knew, fine; but him simply saying he did proves nothing.
I don't think anyone's saying he shouldn't get a fair trial.
To be clear, torture is a human rights violation against customary international law and treaty; it is not a crime against humanity unless it is part of widespread or systemic practice.
I think the fact that the report is 6000 pages long is a fairly clear indication that this was a widespread and systemic practice.
You gotta do what you gotta do. If someone was tied to terrorizing my neighborhood I would hang them from a chain, soak them with salt water, and zap them with a MIG Welder.
You're so butch that reading your post got me pregnant, and I'm not even a girl.
No, one of the most important things about this report is that it proves that torture is totally ineffective as a means of gathering useful information.
In a way that's irrelevant, as utility does not trump morality, but it really does remove even the slightest justification for torture.
Why does a postal service think it can make money off of 3D printed stuff better than others ? Sounds very desperate.
Because they are seeing their traditional business model die and are trying to get in on the "future". Can you imagine if you don't need things shipped anymore, rather you just print it out? The entire shipping industry would collapse.
Not everything can be replaced by a coloured plastic equivalent, and I seriously doubt that home 3D printers are going to be capable of printing out mobile phones, leather shoes, engine cylinders, diamond rings, hardback books, chocolates, telescopes, or laptops any time soon.
I've had Linux break far more often than Windows. Windows just runs. Linux requires routine maintenance to keep it running.
Something odd is happening at slashdot if comments like this aren't instantly modded down, and the poster reported to the FBI for being a child molesting terrorist.
Ultimately Uber is a broker for unlicensed taxi. There should be a restriction on unlicensed taxi on the roads. In other words, I'm surprised they exist anywhere. They really shouldn't, there are very good common sense reasons for insisting on licensed taxi.
This is slashdot, so anything that interferes in the right of someone to make money from a "disruptive" service is communism.
Drug smugglers, paedophilic video distributors and illegal arms salesmen are all just creative entrepreneurs trying to make an honest buck.
But the thing is, you can't just write off "how to live or how to believe or how to act" as "unscientific" and ignore them, or else people will continue to look for answers in religion.
A rational scientific world view needs to include subjects like ethics, psychology and philosophy (and explanations of things like religion and myths).
Because obviously all the world's problems are always and only caused by government.
It's a pretty good first approximation....
It's not "the government" that's the problem, it's the Military-Industrial complex, big business, land owners, capitalists, those with inherited money and privilege, and the wealthy self-serving elite generally.
A proper democratic government is the only real protection against these powerful interests.
I've long thought that gravity and time are forces, like magnetism and electricity, and need to be unified.
If only someone had thought of doing this before. Your totally original idea of a Unified Field Theory could have revolutionised Twentieth Century physics.
Slashdot Mirror
More generally, he stated that there is no actual data to support the notion that race does not contribute to intelligence, making a specific reference to Africans, and which happens to be a politically incorrect notion, but is still an accurate statement.
This does not mean that members of one race are necessarily intellectually inferior to another, it only means that there exists some sizable amount of data which merely suggests it as a possibility, and that no data has yet been accumulated which can actually show that this is not the case. The strongest objection to the conclusion comes from a political reaction to it, and does not arise from the data itself. It would have been far more interesting to do a detailed exploration on exactly why the data appeared to indicate that than to simply make the statement about the data that he did, since there was absolutely no possible way to interpret it without him being seen as racist.
Yes, and there is also no conclusive data that there is not a teapot orbiting the Earth.
Anyway, the essential problem is using the word "race" in the first place, since there is no such thing. There are simply human beings, and there are trivial variations between them in terms of things like skin and hair colour, but all the rest is cultural.
It is also incredibly foolish to use a term like "African" to cover everyone from a Professor of Physics in Lagos to an unemployed taxi driver in Cape Town.
How recently? My parents never had net positive equity until they retired & paid if off with retirement money.
In part because mortgage rates in the 1980s were in the 15-20% range. Hard to build up equity in that environment.
But except for occasional blips, the value of houses rose steadily through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (at least here in the UK) so that overall your equity increased, even if paying the interest was painful.
"cost of living"? Let me know when you've seen what the "cost of living" is for a billionaire, and then we'll talk scale. Hint: Yachts and jets are expensive. Oh wait wait you expect a billionaire to be living like a poor person...
It's so much easier and cheaper living hand to mouth in your car, as you don't have to fund an army of cooks, secretaries, party planners, tax advisers, chauffeurs, silverware polishers, bodyguards, lawyers and prostitutes.
That's the reason why taxes should be regressive, and real billionaires should pay no tax at all.
we lost the moral high ground as a nation long before 9/11
The torture after 9/11 pales into insignificance besides what the CIA did in South Asia and South America in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Now you and I can argue all day long about enlightened self-interest and long-term self-interest and whether torture serves them or not, but that's a utilitarian argument, not a moral one
Utilitarianism is a moral system just like Marxist-Leninism.
Saying "the interests of my country trump any other consideration" is a moral statement like "the ends justify the means".
Neither Bush nor anyone else should go to prison only because they confessed to a crime. If evidence shows he knew, fine; but him simply saying he did proves nothing.
I don't think anyone's saying he shouldn't get a fair trial.
Unlike the people in gitmo.
To be clear, torture is a human rights violation against customary international law and treaty; it is not a crime against humanity unless it is part of widespread or systemic practice.
I think the fact that the report is 6000 pages long is a fairly clear indication that this was a widespread and systemic practice.
You gotta do what you gotta do. If someone was tied to terrorizing my neighborhood I would hang them from a chain, soak them with salt water, and zap them with a MIG Welder.
You're so butch that reading your post got me pregnant, and I'm not even a girl.
In a way that's irrelevant, as utility does not trump morality, but it really does remove even the slightest justification for torture.
Even the Spanish Inquisition regarded waterboarding as torture.
I wasn't expecting that...
... precise surgical removal of heads, on their captive, without applying any anesthesia ...
Now which one is more BRUTAL ???
Even if all the prisoners had been caught red-handed beheading people, that still wouldn't justify torturing them.
Why does a postal service think it can make money off of 3D printed stuff better than others ? Sounds very desperate.
Because they are seeing their traditional business model die and are trying to get in on the "future". Can you imagine if you don't need things shipped anymore, rather you just print it out? The entire shipping industry would collapse.
Not everything can be replaced by a coloured plastic equivalent, and I seriously doubt that home 3D printers are going to be capable of printing out mobile phones, leather shoes, engine cylinders, diamond rings, hardback books, chocolates, telescopes, or laptops any time soon.
I've had Linux break far more often than Windows. Windows just runs. Linux requires routine maintenance to keep it running.
Something odd is happening at slashdot if comments like this aren't instantly modded down, and the poster reported to the FBI for being a child molesting terrorist.
I know that. "Crystal" anything makes me think of meth these days.
I know it's hard to do, but you should really try to kick your habit.
I want an article by frequent contributor, Bennett Haselton, in which he analyses the MyCleanPC stories as an alternative to traditional Fairy Tales.
looked at the sun shining outside, thought about how much the obsession was taking me away from my girlfriend
I don't visit slashdot to read outlandish fantasy stories.
Well, according to the second fucking line of TFS, it's half the pressure at the earth's core.
Ultimately Uber is a broker for unlicensed taxi. There should be a restriction on unlicensed taxi on the roads. In other words, I'm surprised they exist anywhere. They really shouldn't, there are very good common sense reasons for insisting on licensed taxi.
This is slashdot, so anything that interferes in the right of someone to make money from a "disruptive" service is communism.
Drug smugglers, paedophilic video distributors and illegal arms salesmen are all just creative entrepreneurs trying to make an honest buck.
A rational scientific world view needs to include subjects like ethics, psychology and philosophy (and explanations of things like religion and myths).
Because obviously all the world's problems are always and only caused by government.
It's a pretty good first approximation ....
It's not "the government" that's the problem, it's the Military-Industrial complex, big business, land owners, capitalists, those with inherited money and privilege, and the wealthy self-serving elite generally.
A proper democratic government is the only real protection against these powerful interests.
Unless you want to do the latter, why spend so much money on preparing for it?
You make it sound as though we perceived the world like still frames in a movie, one after the other in sequence.
I've long thought that gravity and time are forces, like magnetism and electricity, and need to be unified.
If only someone had thought of doing this before. Your totally original idea of a Unified Field Theory could have revolutionised Twentieth Century physics.
This means the timecube is real!
Now I can die a happy man.
Disconnect China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, and the "former USSR" from the internet. 90% of the Internet's problems solved.
You omitted Wales.