To tell you the truth, I'm not sure how much NK having nukes changes the situation. They already have enough conventional weapons to completely ruin South Korea's day. (Seoul is within artillery range of the DMZ, as somebody else pointed out.) Japan is definitely within range of their missles, so NK having nukes does up the ante a bit there. The Japanese might loose a few cities they are fond of (that doesn't seem fair somehow - they got nuked last time, it should be somebody else's turn now). And, depending on how well you think North Korea's long range missle program is going, we could stand to loose San Francisco. (A pity, I rather like Emperor Norton...)
Of course, once Kim Jong-il fires all of that off, he's going to be in deep trouble. The DMZ might be fortified to a fare-thee-well, but North Korea's air force is a joke. Invading might be problematic, but we can definitely bomb them back to the Stone Age while we're working on it. And if he does push the big red button, we *will* invade. Also, if Kim goes *that* crazy, we'll probably also have the Chinese helping us. I think even they would prefer to have a reunifed and democratic Korea as a neighbor rather than a mad-dog nuclear state.
I don't think Kim having nukes really tips the balance that much. It just ups the ante, which was already pretty high. The scary thing is, I'm not entirely sure we can trust Kim not to put one of these babies on the open market. Mutual assured destruction won't work too well against Al Qaeda. On the up side, I don't think Kim has too many of these, so the asking price will be more than even Al Qaeda is going to be able to pay.
jafac said, "They'd have to crack down on political blogs (which could be financed by campaign supporters). They'd have to silence shows like The Daily Show - which can be a de-facto campaign ad. This is a very slippery slope to head down."
Political blogs wouldn't be covered by this. Personally, I'd like it if voters learned about their candidates by looking online. Cracking down on blogs *is* a violation of free speech, but broadcast media doesn't have the same protection. A website or blog is fairly cheap, and you don't have to pony up as much for one as for a TV ad. As for TDS and O'Reilly, well at least there is slightly more content than a 30 second TV spot. Maybe. At any rate, TDS and O'Reilly are *free* publicity - not something a true grassroots candidate would have to shell out for.
lixee said, "I'm pretty your leaders know that the only way to defeat terrorism is to stop meddling with other countries' affairs..."
Oh, you mean how we intervened when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan? Or when we intervened when Iraq invaded Kuwait? Yep, the first was how Bin Ladin came to power, the second is what pissed him off against us. How dare those unclean infidel pig-dogs park their carcasses on Saudi Arabian soil?
"... and withdraw your unconditional support of Israel."
Bin Ladin cares as much about the Palestinians as The Shrub cares about gay marriage. It's just a tactic to rally his base. For that matter, he could give a shit less about America either. His real goal is to establish a new pan-Muslim Caliphate. We're just a convienent target. Too bad Bush is dancing to his tune.
A reality check for those watching Fox News: Al Qaeda *loves it* when a non-Muslim country invades a Muslim one - they get to go in and play the heros. Invading Iraq - which had absolutely nothing to do with Al Qaeda until *after* the invasion - handed Al Qaeda a recruiting campaign on a silver platter, as well as making it look like America is carrying out an anti-Muslim crusade. And, in case you don't know, Muslims use "crusade" the same way we use "jihad."
I know that Democrats are getting a lot of flack for not coming up with solutions. But, as for terrorism, the 9/11 comission has put out a lot of recommendations that aren't being acted on. Port security, for example. As for Iraq, the problem there is so big that there is no easy solution. It's like Barrack Obama said, it's like a bus that was driven into a ditch. You have to get the bus back out of the ditch somehow, but you also need to fire the bus driver. A partial solution to being in a hole: "STOP DIGGING!!!" After you do that, *then* you can worry about how you're going to get back out.
Jeppe Salvesen said, "[A needed reform is c]ampaign finance, because the money dependency in politics means those with money get to dictate/influence policy. After all, the politicians feel more accountable to the donors than they do to the public. With enough money, the politicians can just buy the necessary amount of advertising - and they will get that money if donors know the representative delivers the votes & influence in Congress the donors' agenda requires."
Here's a simple reform - get rid of political ads on TV. It's long been established that broadcast media isn't as protected as print or speech - hence the lack of boobies on TV. The vast majority (or at least plurality) of campaigning budgets goes to TV ads. Most campaign finance reform goes after the supply - limiting how much donors can donate. That, to me, is a recipe for corrupt end runs around the law. This reform, on the other hand, would go after the demand side. Donors could give as much as they want - or at least as much as they can under the current rules - but the politicians wouldn't need them as much. That hopefully would mean that they would be more willing to represent the people, not the corporations. It would also even out the playing field for grassroots candidates, who have popularity but no war chest - the difference in funds wouldn't make as big of a difference on election day.
The problem with this reform is that you would need an act of congress - I don't see the FCC doing this on their own initiative.
Mongoose Disciple said, "Voting for a third party is in the short term throwing your vote away. Is there any way for America as a country to get to a place where it wouldn't be? Is there a better way to bring about reform?"
I would say that our best bet is Instant Runoff Voting. (Check it out on Wikipedia.) With IRV, you can vote for a third party candidate without worrying that you're screwing over the lesser-of-two-evils. Plus, it can be done at the state level, and, depending on the state, normal citizens could do an end run around the "Duopoly" with initiative and referendum.
Well, since most historians seem to agree that Japan was settled by migrants from Korea, I'd say that goodly chunks of Japanese *did* come from Korean. Not to mention that the only language around that is remotely like Japanese is Korean, so if they're isolates, then they're isolates together. On the other hand, Korea was colonized by Japan for a while, so the borrowing probably works both ways.
And, come to think of it, couldn't the Emancipation Proclamation be seen as a forced redistribution of weath? There was also the Freedman's Bureau, etc...
Actually, the Communist Manifesto was published back in 1848 (the same year as the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe), so Communism did exist in the 19th century, and before the Civil War to boot. Whether or not there were Communists here in the States is another question, and I'm not sure about the answer there.
But on the whole, I do agree with your post. Abe Lincoln's Republican party was "liberal" given certain defintions of liberal. He was also a Blue Stater. Today's Republican party is not the party of Abe Lincoln.
I actually think a World Police wouldn't be that bad of an idea, but it shouldn't be us. The USA has the muscle to be the world police - our military spending almost matches the rest of the world combined, and we have overseas bases out the ying-yang. In a lot of ways, we are functioning as a de facto world government. The problem is that we don't have a mandate to do so. What is pissing off the rest of the world isn't so much any one thing we're doing (or at least that's what I would have said before 2003...), but the fact that they don't have a *say* in what we're doing. (Of course, with this administration, the American people and the Senate don't have a lot of say in the matter either - signing statements anyone?)
What I'd like to see is some mandated world body we could sluff off the job to. This massive millitary of ours is a drain on our economy - our GDP certainly isn't nearly half the world's! I'm also tired of our country being the Great Satan to every would-be Hitler that comes along. Let somebody else have the headache! The UN isn't set up to handle the job - five members with veto powers, representation has no proportion to the relative power of each nation, and hell-hole dictatorships keep being put on the human rights committee. Bleech!
So how about some sort of Federation of Free Nations? Membership would be limited to multiparty democracies (and I would expect to see a lot of wrangling over just what that means...) You'd have a two body legilature - a Senate, where each member state has two votes, and a lower body where representation would be proportional to GDP. I think that would be the best way to do it, in order for the representation to reflect the relative real-world power of the members - you don't want India to have four times as many votes as the USA unless they have the guns to back it up. The only way I can figure out to fund it is to levy tarriffs on trade between member nations and between member nations and outsiders. You don't want to rely on handouts from the member states (it would emasculate the Federation too much), and something like the IRS would be too invasive. Bad economics, but it might throw a bone to the anti-globalists. There would be a standing military, of course, but it would be smaller than many of the member states' own national militaries. Would could help out by turning over some of our aircraft carriers and our overseas bases. (But still keeping a healthy military, just in case.)
Of course, this wouldn't work until both China and Russia are democratic. And good luck convincing the USA to sign up! But I can dream, can't I?
At any rate, I once set up a spreadsheet with this scenario, and tried to figure out how well the Iraq War would have gone through back in 2003. (I used Freedom House to figure out which nations count as "multiparty democracies.") The pro-War side definitely had the lower body tied up - a lot of rich nations backing the War - but it looked like the Senate was about a third for, a third against, and a third undecided. Instead of just calling France a spoilsport and going in anyway, Bush would have had to convince the middle third. I think this process might have brought out just how weak our case for war was, and given diplomacy more time to work.
Because space technology has military applications. The Space Race started as a way for the USSR to show off its shinny new ICBMs. I think Larry Niven once said something to the effect that anything worth doing in space could be used as a weapon. As many people have pointed out above, you don't want this technology falling into the wrong hands, and in some cases "the wrong hands" even includes close allies. If space technology is off-shored, it could always be nationalized by the host government. You don't "own" anything until you can put a scared 18-year-old-with-a-rifle on it. With an offshored industry, you're just leasing it, even if you do pay the bills. Offshoring might make economic sense, but it's a matter of national security to ensure that we have at least some ability to do for ourselves. Plus, I see no reason why our taxpayer dollars should go to stimulating somebody else's private sector instead of ours. If other nations want space capabilities, let them do their own investing (which they are...).
Well, according to my philosophy classes, most (or at least a plurality of) philosophers of mind are Functionalists. Functionalism is a subset of reductive materialism, and asserts that mental states are reducible to brain states, but that another material substrate other than the human brain might potentially serve just as well. Functionalism has to be true in order for Strong AI to work.
Emergence, at least as philosophy uses the term, doesn't mean what scientists seem to think it means. I learned the science version of the term first, and was briefly confused when I came across the philosophy version. Scientists seem to use it to describe an "abstract" process (like life or the mind) that could be reduced to a more fundamental process (like interacting subatomic particles), but that this reduction would be extremely non-trivial in practice. The philosophy version of the term means that the "abstract" process can not be reduced to the "fundamental" one, even in principle. Philosophical emergence leads to a weak form of mind/body dualism.
As for teaching ethics to comp-sci majors - for the love of all that is good, no! As far as I can tell, there isn't a single ethical theory that actually has justification. I was an act utilitarian, and after taking ethics, I'm now a moral anti-realist (which essentially states that moral relativists don't go far enough). Assuming moral anti-realism is correct, then teaching ethics only demonstrates that the emperor has no clothes, and that you can use one of the various ethical theories to justify just about any action you want to take. If you want somebody to just actually *act* ethically (at least as far as our culture defines it), as opposed to pondering what ethics *is*, then you should by no means teach them ethics! There is a joke that, whenever a prof is caught sleeping with one of the students, it's probably either the Ethics instructor or else the Religious Studies instructor. You're better off just relying on whatever moral code the subject was socialized with. If that doesn't work, I'd suggest remedial socialization - a blunt instrument would work well, but might be unethical, or would be, once we figured out what "ethical" is anyway. Until we got that figured out, leave pondering the imponderables to the professionals. The only thing an ethics class is good for is ensuring that philosophy PhDs have at least some slim chance at employment.
Both mathematics and philosophy (*real* philosophy that is, not fluff like Existentialism - Postmodernism I don't know about yet, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt) are founded on formal logic. Where science relies on experimental evidence, mathematics and philosophy rely on logical coherence. Formal logic is obviously useful in programming as well. I would say that, with proper training, a philosopher might make a good programmer, but a programmer might not make a good philosopher. I'm reminded of a Richard Powers novel (actually Literature, but it was misshelved into the Science Fiction section) where a poet becomes a programmer. He was pretty good at both, according to the story. Of course, I'm doing pretty good in my philosophy courses, and I suck (and not well) at programming, so YMMV. I think that if somebody managed to pull off being both a philosopher *and* a programmer, they would probably be extremely good at both, but success at one doesn't imply success at the other.
I know that you said that you don't have the class time to teach remedial grammar, but correcting other people's mistakes on the Wikipedia is a good crash course in the basic mechanics of writing. The Wikipedia also values a clear and direct writing style, which you mentioned as a goal of the class. Since the topic of the class is cultural studies, it might be that there isn't much information available on the Wikipedia, giving your class an opportunity to create new articles. Since providing sources to back up what you just said is a good way of convincing the other side in an argument (and there are *plenty* of those on the Wikipedia), contributing to the Wikipedia encourages good researching skills - a must for engineers, business types, and scholars in the humanities.
As far as encouraging engineering types to read, well, as an engineering student turned computer repair technician turned history/philosophy student, I've read science fiction as far back as I can remember. I also read the encyclopedia for fun as a child, and I still have been known to random walk the Wikipedia until the wee hours of the morning. If your students have managed to miss the reading bug until now, I'm not sure what to tell you, but if they also were encyclopedia readers as kids, they'll probably enjoy the Wikipedia, at least as users instead of contributors.
>> Unfortunatly this inability to split what you write about into short blocks of text that address seperate concerns is worrying in an engineer.
Having been tripped up by Slashdot's default HTML formatting myself, I'd say that the GP *did* split what they wrote into short blocks of text that address separate concerns.
Keeping God seperate from science might be a good thing (nobody likes to have their faith falsified), but it isn't really possible. How would you feel if you were some sort of faith-based atheist (perhaps an atheist who believes that there is no way a good God could exist), and then you open up the newspaper to find that the statement "God does not exist" has been falsified by the boys in the white coats?
It tells me that a lot of people have faith that God is good. Faith, as Babylon 5 puts it, is the surrender to the possibility of hope. As an atheist, I don't have faith that God exist, but I still have faith that *if* He exists, he is good. If God exists, and He is evil, then about the only thing we can do is committ suicide and pray (oops, make that "hope", the Big Guy wouldn't have our best interests in mind) that there isn't an afterlife. Life, after- or otherwise, in such a universe wouldn't be worth living.
A faith-held belief doesn't have to be probable, it only has to be possible. So as long as it is *possible* that God is good, (some) people will continue to have faith in it.
And it seems to me that it is possible for a good God to create natural disasters, especially if this is the same God who created evolution. If God created evolution, then that implies that we are a work in progress. Both the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina forced us to pull together and fix some things. Perhaps God is more interested in turning us into better people than He is in our current well-being. Whether or not this is an adequate reason for moral disasters is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
Or to put it another way: "An optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears that this is true."
The Problem of Evil is a tricky one, but I think even atheists (such as myself) should think about it. After all, God is basically Nature personified, turned into a moral agent. So what you say about the Problem of Evil says something about how you feel about the universe. Because evil exists, and because God is all-powerful, we know that God can not be omni-benevolent. However, that is not the same as saying that God is necessarily evil. It might be that He/She/It does value our well-being, but other moral considerations are interfering.
For example, Free Will. God, pretty much by definition, can override our free will (He is all-powerful, after all). However, He may be choosing not to do this out of respect for our autonomy. This doesn't explain natural disasters, but it would explain a great deal of the evil in the world. Whether or not respect for our autonomy is an adequate reason for allowing such evil to occur is an exercise I leave to the student.
Some say that evil is the Devil's fault. But either the Devil is like us - completely subject to the will of God, or else he is God's peer. (If the Devil is able to resist God's will in the slightest, then that makes him God's peer, even if he is somewhat weaker.) If the Devil is God's peer, then that just means that God (defined as an all-powerful moral agent) is a committee, which is something of a scary thought in itself.
Personally, I see God as a narrative artist (actually, I picture Him as being not entirely unlike Kilgore Trout). And according to Kurt Vonnegutt (Kilgore Trout's own Creator), the job of a writer is to create good people, then put them through Hell, in order to show the audience what they are made of. Would a God of this sort be good? Can't answer for you, but it works for me.
Once there was a farmer who had only one horse. One day the horse got loose and ran away. "What bad luck!" his neighbors said. "Well, good, bad, who can say?" said the farmer.
The next day the horse came back - leading several wild horses that it had befriended. "What good luck!" his neighbors said. "Good, bad, who knows?" said the farmer.
The farmer's son, trying to tame one of the new horses, fell off and broke his leg. "How terrible!" said the farmer's neighbors. "Perhaps. We'll see."
A few days later, the army came through looking for young men to conscript, but they couldn't take the farmer's son because of his broken leg. "How fortunate!" "Maybe. Good, bad, who knows?"
>>he uses a number of sources plus the Bayesian theorem to show that the traditional Christian teaching of Christ's return from death is overwhelmingly probable.
Credible evidence of Jesus's ressurection would go along way to falsifying "God does not exist". However... Aside from some mention in the Testimonium Flavianum (wikipede it, that's how I found out about it), the only source we have on Jesus's life is the Gospels. And there, at the very least, is a large minority opinion that the Testimonium Flavianum mentions were forgeries, inserted by later Christan monks. I won't go as far as some and say that there was no historical Jesus (Christians have no monopoly on dumbasses!), but I do rather question the Gospels being objective observers. Especially when it comes to the resurrection.
I'm just picturing it: the Inner Circle of Apostles is having their first meeting after the crucifiction. The Big Guy is dead. The Romans are probably looking for them. The rank and file is demoralized, and the apostles aren't in much better shape. Now what?
I'm no biblical scholar, but just how many people saw Jesus, post-resurrection? Is it possible that the Inner Circle hatched a desperate conspiracy to save Jesus's life work? Could you blame them if they did?
This is admittedly just speculation on my part. There is no way of knowing what exactly happened. There just isn't enough information. Even if you had a time machine, how are you going to get into such a secret meeting? If you want to believe that Christ *was* resurrected, to *have faith*, I won't argue with you. But I'm highly suspicious of any "proof" or "convincing evidence" that he was.
>>has dedicated the last thirty years to showing that theism in general and Christianity in particular is provable.
There is a difference between "provable" and "falsifible". Science never *proves* something right. It only fails to prove something wrong. Only mathematics and philosophy prove anything, and even those proofs are founded on unproven axioms with unknown truth value. (Sure, 2+2=4 is true, but is 2 true? When's the last time you saw a free-range two?)
The current body of scientific theory at any given time is the simplest theory that has not yet been falsified by the observed data. Given Occam's Razor, this means that the current body of theory is the most likely to be true of any known theory. That is only a probablity, not a certainty.
"God exists" is unfalsifible, given most definitions of God. He's basically a benevolent version of Laplace's Demon, so could hide from any search we mere mortals could construct. However, "God does not exist" is falsifible. "God does not exist" is simpler than "God does exist" - you have fewer entities. What Creationists/ID "theorists" claim is that they *have* falsified the theory that "God does not exist". But I believe (and most Slashdotters would agree, methinks) that nobody has convincingly falsified the "God does not exist" theory to this date. So, the likelist theory to be true is that God does not exist.
However, faith allows us to believe in statements that are not likely to be true. This is called "prudential justification" in philosophical circles. One example of this is Pascal's Wager. Admittedly, it's a *bad* example, because Pascal screwed up the theology (it takes more than just belief to get into heaven, so an incorrect choice *will* cost you some). But you could resurrect it by saying that believing that God exists makes me *really* happy, while believing that God doesn't exist makes me *really* sad.
Just don't expect us to share your faith-based belief though. The existence of God might affect peoples' feelings in different ways...
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To tell you the truth, I'm not sure how much NK having nukes changes the situation. They already have enough conventional weapons to completely ruin South Korea's day. (Seoul is within artillery range of the DMZ, as somebody else pointed out.) Japan is definitely within range of their missles, so NK having nukes does up the ante a bit there. The Japanese might loose a few cities they are fond of (that doesn't seem fair somehow - they got nuked last time, it should be somebody else's turn now). And, depending on how well you think North Korea's long range missle program is going, we could stand to loose San Francisco. (A pity, I rather like Emperor Norton...)
Of course, once Kim Jong-il fires all of that off, he's going to be in deep trouble. The DMZ might be fortified to a fare-thee-well, but North Korea's air force is a joke. Invading might be problematic, but we can definitely bomb them back to the Stone Age while we're working on it. And if he does push the big red button, we *will* invade. Also, if Kim goes *that* crazy, we'll probably also have the Chinese helping us. I think even they would prefer to have a reunifed and democratic Korea as a neighbor rather than a mad-dog nuclear state.
I don't think Kim having nukes really tips the balance that much. It just ups the ante, which was already pretty high. The scary thing is, I'm not entirely sure we can trust Kim not to put one of these babies on the open market. Mutual assured destruction won't work too well against Al Qaeda. On the up side, I don't think Kim has too many of these, so the asking price will be more than even Al Qaeda is going to be able to pay.
"Ask yourself, why are South Koreans increasingly more afraid of the U.S. than North Korea?"
At a guess, I'd say it's because their main image of the US comes from American soldiers on leave. Lord knows that's enough to terrify anyone.
What if MS made an OS that didn't need an AV?
Do I get extra points for three 2 letter acronyms?
People don't RTFA, you expect them to PTFG?
jafac said, "They'd have to crack down on political blogs (which could be financed by campaign supporters). They'd have to silence shows like The Daily Show - which can be a de-facto campaign ad. This is a very slippery slope to head down." Political blogs wouldn't be covered by this. Personally, I'd like it if voters learned about their candidates by looking online. Cracking down on blogs *is* a violation of free speech, but broadcast media doesn't have the same protection. A website or blog is fairly cheap, and you don't have to pony up as much for one as for a TV ad. As for TDS and O'Reilly, well at least there is slightly more content than a 30 second TV spot. Maybe. At any rate, TDS and O'Reilly are *free* publicity - not something a true grassroots candidate would have to shell out for.
lixee said, "I'm pretty your leaders know that the only way to defeat terrorism is to stop meddling with other countries' affairs..."
Oh, you mean how we intervened when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan? Or when we intervened when Iraq invaded Kuwait? Yep, the first was how Bin Ladin came to power, the second is what pissed him off against us. How dare those unclean infidel pig-dogs park their carcasses on Saudi Arabian soil?
"... and withdraw your unconditional support of Israel."
Bin Ladin cares as much about the Palestinians as The Shrub cares about gay marriage. It's just a tactic to rally his base. For that matter, he could give a shit less about America either. His real goal is to establish a new pan-Muslim Caliphate. We're just a convienent target. Too bad Bush is dancing to his tune.
A reality check for those watching Fox News: Al Qaeda *loves it* when a non-Muslim country invades a Muslim one - they get to go in and play the heros. Invading Iraq - which had absolutely nothing to do with Al Qaeda until *after* the invasion - handed Al Qaeda a recruiting campaign on a silver platter, as well as making it look like America is carrying out an anti-Muslim crusade. And, in case you don't know, Muslims use "crusade" the same way we use "jihad."
I know that Democrats are getting a lot of flack for not coming up with solutions. But, as for terrorism, the 9/11 comission has put out a lot of recommendations that aren't being acted on. Port security, for example. As for Iraq, the problem there is so big that there is no easy solution. It's like Barrack Obama said, it's like a bus that was driven into a ditch. You have to get the bus back out of the ditch somehow, but you also need to fire the bus driver. A partial solution to being in a hole: "STOP DIGGING!!!" After you do that, *then* you can worry about how you're going to get back out.
Jeppe Salvesen said, "[A needed reform is c]ampaign finance, because the money dependency in politics means those with money get to dictate/influence policy. After all, the politicians feel more accountable to the donors than they do to the public. With enough money, the politicians can just buy the necessary amount of advertising - and they will get that money if donors know the representative delivers the votes & influence in Congress the donors' agenda requires."
Here's a simple reform - get rid of political ads on TV. It's long been established that broadcast media isn't as protected as print or speech - hence the lack of boobies on TV. The vast majority (or at least plurality) of campaigning budgets goes to TV ads. Most campaign finance reform goes after the supply - limiting how much donors can donate. That, to me, is a recipe for corrupt end runs around the law. This reform, on the other hand, would go after the demand side. Donors could give as much as they want - or at least as much as they can under the current rules - but the politicians wouldn't need them as much. That hopefully would mean that they would be more willing to represent the people, not the corporations. It would also even out the playing field for grassroots candidates, who have popularity but no war chest - the difference in funds wouldn't make as big of a difference on election day.
The problem with this reform is that you would need an act of congress - I don't see the FCC doing this on their own initiative.
Mongoose Disciple said, "Voting for a third party is in the short term throwing your vote away. Is there any way for America as a country to get to a place where it wouldn't be? Is there a better way to bring about reform?"
I would say that our best bet is Instant Runoff Voting. (Check it out on Wikipedia.) With IRV, you can vote for a third party candidate without worrying that you're screwing over the lesser-of-two-evils. Plus, it can be done at the state level, and, depending on the state, normal citizens could do an end run around the "Duopoly" with initiative and referendum.
Well, since most historians seem to agree that Japan was settled by migrants from Korea, I'd say that goodly chunks of Japanese *did* come from Korean. Not to mention that the only language around that is remotely like Japanese is Korean, so if they're isolates, then they're isolates together. On the other hand, Korea was colonized by Japan for a while, so the borrowing probably works both ways.
And, come to think of it, couldn't the Emancipation Proclamation be seen as a forced redistribution of weath? There was also the Freedman's Bureau, etc...
Actually, the Communist Manifesto was published back in 1848 (the same year as the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe), so Communism did exist in the 19th century, and before the Civil War to boot. Whether or not there were Communists here in the States is another question, and I'm not sure about the answer there.
But on the whole, I do agree with your post. Abe Lincoln's Republican party was "liberal" given certain defintions of liberal. He was also a Blue Stater. Today's Republican party is not the party of Abe Lincoln.
I actually think a World Police wouldn't be that bad of an idea, but it shouldn't be us. The USA has the muscle to be the world police - our military spending almost matches the rest of the world combined, and we have overseas bases out the ying-yang. In a lot of ways, we are functioning as a de facto world government. The problem is that we don't have a mandate to do so. What is pissing off the rest of the world isn't so much any one thing we're doing (or at least that's what I would have said before 2003...), but the fact that they don't have a *say* in what we're doing. (Of course, with this administration, the American people and the Senate don't have a lot of say in the matter either - signing statements anyone?)
What I'd like to see is some mandated world body we could sluff off the job to. This massive millitary of ours is a drain on our economy - our GDP certainly isn't nearly half the world's! I'm also tired of our country being the Great Satan to every would-be Hitler that comes along. Let somebody else have the headache! The UN isn't set up to handle the job - five members with veto powers, representation has no proportion to the relative power of each nation, and hell-hole dictatorships keep being put on the human rights committee. Bleech!
So how about some sort of Federation of Free Nations? Membership would be limited to multiparty democracies (and I would expect to see a lot of wrangling over just what that means...) You'd have a two body legilature - a Senate, where each member state has two votes, and a lower body where representation would be proportional to GDP. I think that would be the best way to do it, in order for the representation to reflect the relative real-world power of the members - you don't want India to have four times as many votes as the USA unless they have the guns to back it up. The only way I can figure out to fund it is to levy tarriffs on trade between member nations and between member nations and outsiders. You don't want to rely on handouts from the member states (it would emasculate the Federation too much), and something like the IRS would be too invasive. Bad economics, but it might throw a bone to the anti-globalists. There would be a standing military, of course, but it would be smaller than many of the member states' own national militaries. Would could help out by turning over some of our aircraft carriers and our overseas bases. (But still keeping a healthy military, just in case.)
Of course, this wouldn't work until both China and Russia are democratic. And good luck convincing the USA to sign up! But I can dream, can't I?
At any rate, I once set up a spreadsheet with this scenario, and tried to figure out how well the Iraq War would have gone through back in 2003. (I used Freedom House to figure out which nations count as "multiparty democracies.") The pro-War side definitely had the lower body tied up - a lot of rich nations backing the War - but it looked like the Senate was about a third for, a third against, and a third undecided. Instead of just calling France a spoilsport and going in anyway, Bush would have had to convince the middle third. I think this process might have brought out just how weak our case for war was, and given diplomacy more time to work.
Because space technology has military applications. The Space Race started as a way for the USSR to show off its shinny new ICBMs. I think Larry Niven once said something to the effect that anything worth doing in space could be used as a weapon. As many people have pointed out above, you don't want this technology falling into the wrong hands, and in some cases "the wrong hands" even includes close allies. If space technology is off-shored, it could always be nationalized by the host government. You don't "own" anything until you can put a scared 18-year-old-with-a-rifle on it. With an offshored industry, you're just leasing it, even if you do pay the bills. Offshoring might make economic sense, but it's a matter of national security to ensure that we have at least some ability to do for ourselves. Plus, I see no reason why our taxpayer dollars should go to stimulating somebody else's private sector instead of ours. If other nations want space capabilities, let them do their own investing (which they are...).
Well, according to my philosophy classes, most (or at least a plurality of) philosophers of mind are Functionalists. Functionalism is a subset of reductive materialism, and asserts that mental states are reducible to brain states, but that another material substrate other than the human brain might potentially serve just as well. Functionalism has to be true in order for Strong AI to work.
Emergence, at least as philosophy uses the term, doesn't mean what scientists seem to think it means. I learned the science version of the term first, and was briefly confused when I came across the philosophy version. Scientists seem to use it to describe an "abstract" process (like life or the mind) that could be reduced to a more fundamental process (like interacting subatomic particles), but that this reduction would be extremely non-trivial in practice. The philosophy version of the term means that the "abstract" process can not be reduced to the "fundamental" one, even in principle. Philosophical emergence leads to a weak form of mind/body dualism.
As for teaching ethics to comp-sci majors - for the love of all that is good, no! As far as I can tell, there isn't a single ethical theory that actually has justification. I was an act utilitarian, and after taking ethics, I'm now a moral anti-realist (which essentially states that moral relativists don't go far enough). Assuming moral anti-realism is correct, then teaching ethics only demonstrates that the emperor has no clothes, and that you can use one of the various ethical theories to justify just about any action you want to take. If you want somebody to just actually *act* ethically (at least as far as our culture defines it), as opposed to pondering what ethics *is*, then you should by no means teach them ethics! There is a joke that, whenever a prof is caught sleeping with one of the students, it's probably either the Ethics instructor or else the Religious Studies instructor. You're better off just relying on whatever moral code the subject was socialized with. If that doesn't work, I'd suggest remedial socialization - a blunt instrument would work well, but might be unethical, or would be, once we figured out what "ethical" is anyway. Until we got that figured out, leave pondering the imponderables to the professionals. The only thing an ethics class is good for is ensuring that philosophy PhDs have at least some slim chance at employment.
Both mathematics and philosophy (*real* philosophy that is, not fluff like Existentialism - Postmodernism I don't know about yet, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt) are founded on formal logic. Where science relies on experimental evidence, mathematics and philosophy rely on logical coherence. Formal logic is obviously useful in programming as well. I would say that, with proper training, a philosopher might make a good programmer, but a programmer might not make a good philosopher. I'm reminded of a Richard Powers novel (actually Literature, but it was misshelved into the Science Fiction section) where a poet becomes a programmer. He was pretty good at both, according to the story. Of course, I'm doing pretty good in my philosophy courses, and I suck (and not well) at programming, so YMMV. I think that if somebody managed to pull off being both a philosopher *and* a programmer, they would probably be extremely good at both, but success at one doesn't imply success at the other.
I know that you said that you don't have the class time to teach remedial grammar, but correcting other people's mistakes on the Wikipedia is a good crash course in the basic mechanics of writing. The Wikipedia also values a clear and direct writing style, which you mentioned as a goal of the class. Since the topic of the class is cultural studies, it might be that there isn't much information available on the Wikipedia, giving your class an opportunity to create new articles. Since providing sources to back up what you just said is a good way of convincing the other side in an argument (and there are *plenty* of those on the Wikipedia), contributing to the Wikipedia encourages good researching skills - a must for engineers, business types, and scholars in the humanities.
As far as encouraging engineering types to read, well, as an engineering student turned computer repair technician turned history/philosophy student, I've read science fiction as far back as I can remember. I also read the encyclopedia for fun as a child, and I still have been known to random walk the Wikipedia until the wee hours of the morning. If your students have managed to miss the reading bug until now, I'm not sure what to tell you, but if they also were encyclopedia readers as kids, they'll probably enjoy the Wikipedia, at least as users instead of contributors.
>> Unfortunatly this inability to split what you write about into short blocks of text that address seperate concerns is worrying in an engineer.
Having been tripped up by Slashdot's default HTML formatting myself, I'd say that the GP *did* split what they wrote into short blocks of text that address separate concerns.
Oh, and you misspelled "unfortunately."
Keeping God seperate from science might be a good thing (nobody likes to have their faith falsified), but it isn't really possible. How would you feel if you were some sort of faith-based atheist (perhaps an atheist who believes that there is no way a good God could exist), and then you open up the newspaper to find that the statement "God does not exist" has been falsified by the boys in the white coats?
It tells me that a lot of people have faith that God is good. Faith, as Babylon 5 puts it, is the surrender to the possibility of hope. As an atheist, I don't have faith that God exist, but I still have faith that *if* He exists, he is good. If God exists, and He is evil, then about the only thing we can do is committ suicide and pray (oops, make that "hope", the Big Guy wouldn't have our best interests in mind) that there isn't an afterlife. Life, after- or otherwise, in such a universe wouldn't be worth living. A faith-held belief doesn't have to be probable, it only has to be possible. So as long as it is *possible* that God is good, (some) people will continue to have faith in it. And it seems to me that it is possible for a good God to create natural disasters, especially if this is the same God who created evolution. If God created evolution, then that implies that we are a work in progress. Both the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina forced us to pull together and fix some things. Perhaps God is more interested in turning us into better people than He is in our current well-being. Whether or not this is an adequate reason for moral disasters is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
Or to put it another way: "An optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears that this is true."
The Problem of Evil is a tricky one, but I think even atheists (such as myself) should think about it. After all, God is basically Nature personified, turned into a moral agent. So what you say about the Problem of Evil says something about how you feel about the universe. Because evil exists, and because God is all-powerful, we know that God can not be omni-benevolent. However, that is not the same as saying that God is necessarily evil. It might be that He/She/It does value our well-being, but other moral considerations are interfering.
For example, Free Will. God, pretty much by definition, can override our free will (He is all-powerful, after all). However, He may be choosing not to do this out of respect for our autonomy. This doesn't explain natural disasters, but it would explain a great deal of the evil in the world. Whether or not respect for our autonomy is an adequate reason for allowing such evil to occur is an exercise I leave to the student.
Some say that evil is the Devil's fault. But either the Devil is like us - completely subject to the will of God, or else he is God's peer. (If the Devil is able to resist God's will in the slightest, then that makes him God's peer, even if he is somewhat weaker.) If the Devil is God's peer, then that just means that God (defined as an all-powerful moral agent) is a committee, which is something of a scary thought in itself.
Personally, I see God as a narrative artist (actually, I picture Him as being not entirely unlike Kilgore Trout). And according to Kurt Vonnegutt (Kilgore Trout's own Creator), the job of a writer is to create good people, then put them through Hell, in order to show the audience what they are made of. Would a God of this sort be good? Can't answer for you, but it works for me.
Once there was a farmer who had only one horse. One day the horse got loose and ran away. "What bad luck!" his neighbors said. "Well, good, bad, who can say?" said the farmer.
The next day the horse came back - leading several wild horses that it had befriended. "What good luck!" his neighbors said. "Good, bad, who knows?" said the farmer.
The farmer's son, trying to tame one of the new horses, fell off and broke his leg. "How terrible!" said the farmer's neighbors. "Perhaps. We'll see."
A few days later, the army came through looking for young men to conscript, but they couldn't take the farmer's son because of his broken leg. "How fortunate!" "Maybe. Good, bad, who knows?"
- old Taoist story, stolen from here: http://infamous.net/election2004msg.html
Well, if thought and perception went away, how do you know you exist? You're not even a Solipist!
What happened, the world went away?
>>he uses a number of sources plus the Bayesian theorem to show that the traditional Christian teaching of Christ's return from death is overwhelmingly probable.
Credible evidence of Jesus's ressurection would go along way to falsifying "God does not exist". However... Aside from some mention in the Testimonium Flavianum (wikipede it, that's how I found out about it), the only source we have on Jesus's life is the Gospels. And there, at the very least, is a large minority opinion that the Testimonium Flavianum mentions were forgeries, inserted by later Christan monks. I won't go as far as some and say that there was no historical Jesus (Christians have no monopoly on dumbasses!), but I do rather question the Gospels being objective observers. Especially when it comes to the resurrection.
I'm just picturing it: the Inner Circle of Apostles is having their first meeting after the crucifiction. The Big Guy is dead. The Romans are probably looking for them. The rank and file is demoralized, and the apostles aren't in much better shape. Now what?
I'm no biblical scholar, but just how many people saw Jesus, post-resurrection? Is it possible that the Inner Circle hatched a desperate conspiracy to save Jesus's life work? Could you blame them if they did?
This is admittedly just speculation on my part. There is no way of knowing what exactly happened. There just isn't enough information. Even if you had a time machine, how are you going to get into such a secret meeting? If you want to believe that Christ *was* resurrected, to *have faith*, I won't argue with you. But I'm highly suspicious of any "proof" or "convincing evidence" that he was.
>>has dedicated the last thirty years to showing that theism in general and Christianity in particular is provable.
There is a difference between "provable" and "falsifible". Science never *proves* something right. It only fails to prove something wrong. Only mathematics and philosophy prove anything, and even those proofs are founded on unproven axioms with unknown truth value. (Sure, 2+2=4 is true, but is 2 true? When's the last time you saw a free-range two?)
The current body of scientific theory at any given time is the simplest theory that has not yet been falsified by the observed data. Given Occam's Razor, this means that the current body of theory is the most likely to be true of any known theory. That is only a probablity, not a certainty.
"God exists" is unfalsifible, given most definitions of God. He's basically a benevolent version of Laplace's Demon, so could hide from any search we mere mortals could construct. However, "God does not exist" is falsifible. "God does not exist" is simpler than "God does exist" - you have fewer entities. What Creationists/ID "theorists" claim is that they *have* falsified the theory that "God does not exist". But I believe (and most Slashdotters would agree, methinks) that nobody has convincingly falsified the "God does not exist" theory to this date. So, the likelist theory to be true is that God does not exist.
However, faith allows us to believe in statements that are not likely to be true. This is called "prudential justification" in philosophical circles. One example of this is Pascal's Wager. Admittedly, it's a *bad* example, because Pascal screwed up the theology (it takes more than just belief to get into heaven, so an incorrect choice *will* cost you some). But you could resurrect it by saying that believing that God exists makes me *really* happy, while believing that God doesn't exist makes me *really* sad.
Just don't expect us to share your faith-based belief though. The existence of God might affect peoples' feelings in different ways...