I don't really care about whether the parent poster could be seen as condescending or not. "Men hunt, women gather" is an unscientific astrology-like explanation. Any form of "symbolism" is as well: it cannot be falsified.
I don't care whether men and women are really different or not, I do not have to claim this in order to show that the original poster was wrong. There are indeed plenty of perfectly scientific ways to show that men and women are different in some predictable ways, but subjectively interpretting slippery proverbs like "men hunt, women gather" is not one of those things. An argument against one theory is not necessarily an argument for any particular competing explanation that people want to have.
And certainly this has nothing to do with free speech. He has every right to think and express whatever he wants. I also have the right to say if I think something he says is unscientific. I am not censoring him by doing so.
It's not a matter of disagreeing, it's a matter of falisifiable science rather than generalizating from trite, vacuous proverbs like "Men hunt, women gather." Pretty much any behavior could be described as either hunting or as gathering, and there is no way to resolve disputes as to whether an activity counts for sure as hunting or as gathering. Hence unscientific, astrology-like stuff.
We could also say that men don't use the DVR as much because they are lazy, and women do because they are compulsive. Or maybe we could say that men are poor relaters and women like the interaction-like experience of using the DVR. Or maybe women use the DVR because they have exacting, varied tastes and men don't because they are generalizers and don't really care.
And it would probably all be complete bullshit. Which is why we try to make simple, scientific hypotheses and test them in a way that could falsify them without requiring metaphor or analogy.
Did you miss the part of my post where I quoted the parent poster as saying "most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection"?
Whether this "second-guessing" was or was not justified, there were indeed dissenting opinions at the highest possible level (among them Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower) and so the GP poster's point was demonstrably false.
I don't really know whether MacArthur, Eisenhower and Einstein were right, but I beleive their opinions were based on the premise that Japan was already on the verge of surrendering, regardless of all that scorched-earth stuff they may have planned at some point. I don't really know which premise is more credible but I only posted with the goal of demolishing that one part of the GP poster's post, not trying to make a larger point about whether the bomb was justified or not.
most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection...
"Prof. Albert Einstein... said that he was sure that President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate." --Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb, New York Times, 8/19/46, pg. 1
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act....the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate for Change
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, [Herbert] Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." -- quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.... When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." -- Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
Did you like Spiderman or LOTR? Well, there was a previous LOTR movie and count 'em 7 Spiderman TV shows. Yet somehow Spiderman 1/2 and LOTR were great movies.
The people that complain about how "statistics can be used to say anything" are just people who don't want to have to think about the statistics. They want to see an answer and don't want to have to question or think about the statistics and if they do statistics just can't be trusted.
Examples:
We've only had 2 Democratic presidents in the last 35 years! The Democrats are doomed!
We've been under Democratic presidents for 8 of the last 13 years! We're under Democratic hegemony!*
So, since these are both statistics, and since they both say the opposite thing, does that mean that statistics can be used to say anything?
Yes, if only that you don't spend 2 and a half seconds thinking about it. Both of these "statistics" were picked because the denominators where chosen to show the most extreme possible proportions. If you think about it for 2 and a half seconds, perhaps even more, you should think about how these numbers were chosen, and it should begin to strike you, after repeat experience, much more quickly when numbers seem to be plucked out of thin air like this. And of course, the same sizes are much too small to prove anything either way. The House of Representatives would probably provide better data.
[*Heard both these arguments on right wing AM talk radio within a few days of each other]
I can vouch for that. The current version is much faster than earlier versions were for the Mac. Still not quite as fast as Safari, but somewhat less of a resource hog and I prefer its feature set.
Sons of Liberty (who would be classified as terrorists today)
They threw tea overboard. This isn't terrorism, this is somewhere between performance art and anti-globalization protestor. I sincerely wish Hamas and Al Qaeda were throwing tea into harbors rather than blowing people up.
Results in instant fragmentation of every country in the world into tiny, competing and opposing units each sporting their own political agenda. Large areas of the world will be controlled by political and/or religious extremists of every stripe, coming to power and enforcing their creed by brutality and murder. Taliban galore!
So why isn't the case with all the existing countries already?
Abide by this and guys like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.. can do anything they want to their own people. After all it's all "internal affairs" - tienanamen square anyone? Do we really have to wait until they fire up the ovens and gas chambers until we act? Or isn't that enough in your opinion? Perhaps we wait until they amass an ustoppable armada and congratulate ourselves on being ethical as they roll across our borders?
Last I checked, nobody invaded Pol Pot or Stalin to stop their human rights abuses. Most military humanitarian missions end up being major disasters that are anything but. Stopping the holocaust was a side effect, not a cause, of World War II. And let me know when those "unstoppable armies" amass at the borders.
Look, I can come up with irrelevant, extreme examples, too! This was a "humanitarian mission" to "stop the Arab slavetraders". This act of selfless charity resulted in brutal oppression and ten million dead Congolese.
What if they have no desire to negotiate honestly? Pacification only perpetuates the problems. Look at North Korea and the Non-Proliferation treaty. They used it to aquire nuclear technology and pulled out when they decided they wanted to make bombs. Do you really think Saddam was negotiating in good faith? This only works if you have a carrot AND a stick AND you are ready, willing and able to use the stick AND the other guy knows it.
Last I checked, North Korea started making bombs after George Bush refused to negotiate because you just "can't negotiate" with people like that. I don't know if that's true, but it's hard to imagine how it could have gotten anything worse than it became without negotiating (ie, them now having some nuclear weapons). Nor do I see wholescale military invasion of North Korea feasible at the current time.
Does "predatory" include making a profit? Without the willing concurrance of corrupt local officials who would sell out to ANYBODY, this wouldn't happen.
Hey, I can play this game, too! So, are you saying we should do things like this?
Although I agree that everyone deserves a certain degree of respect owing to fact of their humanity and that we should appreciate differences, there will always be discontent by minorities by virtue of the fact that they ARE minorities. As a white upper middle class guy I can't count the number of ways big and small I've been screwed over by people of all colors. If I was a minority and inclined to shift blame I can see how I might cite racism but in most cases race had nothing to do with it.
So, are you saying that because there will always be some racism, there's no point in trying to stop any racism?
If you want a recipe that works, then how about this? Foster democracy to give everyone a voice and get the people to believe in the democratic process as fair. Have a truly free press to expose the bad people who abuse power in every society. Don't tolerate abuses, no matter where they occur. Recognize that there is no end to human shortcoming and that there is no end point, only the process.
Well, this is easier now, isn't it? Democracy? We'll just "foster" it. And the people, we'll just "get" them to believe in it it. A free press? We'll just "have" it.
And look out, other nations should "be expected" to do this!
I'm sorry, the GP poster had its flaws, but this is about 10 times as vague and therefore about 10 times as
The point though is that it may be very expensive to own a Ford Excursion, but it is even more expensive to the rest of the world. The price the consumer pays does not accurately reflect the cost to the country in terms of oil dependence or the cost of the world economy in terms of carbon emissions. Therefore Ford Excursions will be overconsumed because the price does not reflect the "true" cost.
Intelligence reports from Great Britain suggest that "rogue states" Iran and North Korea have amounts of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide. Multiple sources say that Iran may be on the verge of being able to "electrolyze" hydrogen gas from this powerful substance.
We must act to protect the American people from this imminent threat.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Just because they're really bad doesn't mean they are also stupid. If they were stupid, they would be a lot easier to fucking catch, wouldn't they?
Any plan that starts by assuming that the enemy must be stupid and and irrational is a plan that in hindsight is going to look like it was doomed to failure from the start
Simple fact is that after attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 and going after terrorists aggressively for a change, the number of terrorist attacks has not risen from normal even during the "jihad against all involved" claims.
Now that we have Google there is no need to invent demonstrably false facts like this. My search terms were "number of terrorist attacks", and I tried several permutations and got approximately the same results, so it wasn't a function of the particular terms I used. Try it sometime. Perhaps you were originally misinformed by something having to do with this.
It does seem a bit suspicious that the group is one that no one has ever heard of before, but I would point out that timed multiple simultaneous attacks is Al Qaeda's signature move.
Run a belt down there, and have it turn a rotor that runs into a dynamo. From the current that is generated from this, power a large Disney logo sign. This will, naturally, make him spin faster. Which will make the logo brighter. Which will make him spin faster. And so on.
You can see what this leads us to. The laws of thermodynamics are being broken in this house. But perhaps not if we consider grave-spinning a supernatural force. This allows us to keep thermodynamics in most conditions, and provide a new set of rules for supernatural conditions. Infinite energy generation is just one of the practical applications.
It's Nobel Prize time for me again. Just send this one in the mail, the flight to Sweden is just too long.
Slashdot Mirror
he should have said "Wea culpa"
I don't really care about whether the parent poster could be seen as condescending or not. "Men hunt, women gather" is an unscientific astrology-like explanation. Any form of "symbolism" is as well: it cannot be falsified.
I don't care whether men and women are really different or not, I do not have to claim this in order to show that the original poster was wrong. There are indeed plenty of perfectly scientific ways to show that men and women are different in some predictable ways, but subjectively interpretting slippery proverbs like "men hunt, women gather" is not one of those things. An argument against one theory is not necessarily an argument for any particular competing explanation that people want to have.
And certainly this has nothing to do with free speech. He has every right to think and express whatever he wants. I also have the right to say if I think something he says is unscientific. I am not censoring him by doing so.
It's not a matter of disagreeing, it's a matter of falisifiable science rather than generalizating from trite, vacuous proverbs like "Men hunt, women gather." Pretty much any behavior could be described as either hunting or as gathering, and there is no way to resolve disputes as to whether an activity counts for sure as hunting or as gathering. Hence unscientific, astrology-like stuff.
We could also say that men don't use the DVR as much because they are lazy, and women do because they are compulsive. Or maybe we could say that men are poor relaters and women like the interaction-like experience of using the DVR. Or maybe women use the DVR because they have exacting, varied tastes and men don't because they are generalizers and don't really care.
And it would probably all be complete bullshit. Which is why we try to make simple, scientific hypotheses and test them in a way that could falsify them without requiring metaphor or analogy.
Did you miss the part of my post where I quoted the parent poster as saying "most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection"?
Whether this "second-guessing" was or was not justified, there were indeed dissenting opinions at the highest possible level (among them Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower) and so the GP poster's point was demonstrably false.
I don't really know whether MacArthur, Eisenhower and Einstein were right, but I beleive their opinions were based on the premise that Japan was already on the verge of surrendering, regardless of all that scorched-earth stuff they may have planned at some point. I don't really know which premise is more credible but I only posted with the goal of demolishing that one part of the GP poster's post, not trying to make a larger point about whether the bomb was justified or not.
most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection...
...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
... When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." -- Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
"Prof. Albert Einstein... said that he was sure that President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate." --Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb, New York Times, 8/19/46, pg. 1
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate for Change
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, [Herbert] Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." -- quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.
You Must Be New Here(tm)
Let me be the first to welcome you.
Expect at least one of the following stories each week:
* Apple: good or evil?
* $X switches to linux
* Firefox gains slightly
* SCO evil
* Google is a much better place to work than your current employer
What's going on here?
Public relations.
Did you like Spiderman or LOTR? Well, there was a previous LOTR movie and count 'em 7 Spiderman TV shows. Yet somehow Spiderman 1/2 and LOTR were great movies.
The people that complain about how "statistics can be used to say anything" are just people who don't want to have to think about the statistics. They want to see an answer and don't want to have to question or think about the statistics and if they do statistics just can't be trusted.
Examples:
We've only had 2 Democratic presidents in the last 35 years! The Democrats are doomed!
We've been under Democratic presidents for 8 of the last 13 years! We're under Democratic hegemony!*
So, since these are both statistics, and since they both say the opposite thing, does that mean that statistics can be used to say anything?
Yes, if only that you don't spend 2 and a half seconds thinking about it. Both of these "statistics" were picked because the denominators where chosen to show the most extreme possible proportions. If you think about it for 2 and a half seconds, perhaps even more, you should think about how these numbers were chosen, and it should begin to strike you, after repeat experience, much more quickly when numbers seem to be plucked out of thin air like this. And of course, the same sizes are much too small to prove anything either way. The House of Representatives would probably provide better data.
[*Heard both these arguments on right wing AM talk radio within a few days of each other]
there is no security through obscurity!
I can vouch for that. The current version is much faster than earlier versions were for the Mac. Still not quite as fast as Safari, but somewhat less of a resource hog and I prefer its feature set.
Sons of Liberty (who would be classified as terrorists today)
They threw tea overboard. This isn't terrorism, this is somewhere between performance art and anti-globalization protestor. I sincerely wish Hamas and Al Qaeda were throwing tea into harbors rather than blowing people up.
You might want to add to you analogy that due there are now only 3 wagons left.
For those interested, the horse to which the parent poster refers is Clever Hans
Most dictatorships could not exist without a Western power installing them or suppporting them with aid or weapon sales.
Results in instant fragmentation of every country in the world into tiny, competing and opposing units each sporting their own political agenda. Large areas of the world will be controlled by political and/or religious extremists of every stripe, coming to power and enforcing their creed by brutality and murder. Taliban galore!
So why isn't the case with all the existing countries already?
Abide by this and guys like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.. can do anything they want to their own people. After all it's all "internal affairs" - tienanamen square anyone? Do we really have to wait until they fire up the ovens and gas chambers until we act? Or isn't that enough in your opinion? Perhaps we wait until they amass an ustoppable armada and congratulate ourselves on being ethical as they roll across our borders?
Last I checked, nobody invaded Pol Pot or Stalin to stop their human rights abuses. Most military humanitarian missions end up being major disasters that are anything but. Stopping the holocaust was a side effect, not a cause, of World War II. And let me know when those "unstoppable armies" amass at the borders.
Look, I can come up with irrelevant, extreme examples, too! This was a "humanitarian mission" to "stop the Arab slavetraders". This act of selfless charity resulted in brutal oppression and ten million dead Congolese.
What if they have no desire to negotiate honestly? Pacification only perpetuates the problems. Look at North Korea and the Non-Proliferation treaty. They used it to aquire nuclear technology and pulled out when they decided they wanted to make bombs. Do you really think Saddam was negotiating in good faith? This only works if you have a carrot AND a stick AND you are ready, willing and able to use the stick AND the other guy knows it.
Last I checked, North Korea started making bombs after George Bush refused to negotiate because you just "can't negotiate" with people like that. I don't know if that's true, but it's hard to imagine how it could have gotten anything worse than it became without negotiating (ie, them now having some nuclear weapons). Nor do I see wholescale military invasion of North Korea feasible at the current time.
Does "predatory" include making a profit? Without the willing concurrance of corrupt local officials who would sell out to ANYBODY, this wouldn't happen.
Hey, I can play this game, too! So, are you saying we should do things like this?
Although I agree that everyone deserves a certain degree of respect owing to fact of their humanity and that we should appreciate differences, there will always be discontent by minorities by virtue of the fact that they ARE minorities. As a white upper middle class guy I can't count the number of ways big and small I've been screwed over by people of all colors. If I was a minority and inclined to shift blame I can see how I might cite racism but in most cases race had nothing to do with it.
So, are you saying that because there will always be some racism, there's no point in trying to stop any racism?
If you want a recipe that works, then how about this? Foster democracy to give everyone a voice and get the people to believe in the democratic process as fair. Have a truly free press to expose the bad people who abuse power in every society. Don't tolerate abuses, no matter where they occur. Recognize that there is no end to human shortcoming and that there is no end point, only the process.
Well, this is easier now, isn't it? Democracy? We'll just "foster" it. And the people, we'll just "get" them to believe in it it. A free press? We'll just "have" it.
And look out, other nations should "be expected" to do this!
I'm sorry, the GP poster had its flaws, but this is about 10 times as vague and therefore about 10 times as
The point though is that it may be very expensive to own a Ford Excursion, but it is even more expensive to the rest of the world. The price the consumer pays does not accurately reflect the cost to the country in terms of oil dependence or the cost of the world economy in terms of carbon emissions. Therefore Ford Excursions will be overconsumed because the price does not reflect the "true" cost.
This is known to economists as an example of negative externality
Intelligence reports from Great Britain suggest that "rogue states" Iran and North Korea have amounts of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide. Multiple sources say that Iran may be on the verge of being able to "electrolyze" hydrogen gas from this powerful substance.
We must act to protect the American people from this imminent threat.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Just because they're really bad doesn't mean they are also stupid. If they were stupid, they would be a lot easier to fucking catch, wouldn't they?
Any plan that starts by assuming that the enemy must be stupid and and irrational is a plan that in hindsight is going to look like it was doomed to failure from the start
Simple fact is that after attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 and going after terrorists aggressively for a change, the number of terrorist attacks has not risen from normal even during the "jihad against all involved" claims.
You are simply flatly wrong
Now that we have Google there is no need to invent demonstrably false facts like this. My search terms were "number of terrorist attacks", and I tried several permutations and got approximately the same results, so it wasn't a function of the particular terms I used. Try it sometime. Perhaps you were originally misinformed by something having to do with this.
There will probably be more accurate versions later, but here is such a map
It does seem a bit suspicious that the group is one that no one has ever heard of before, but I would point out that timed multiple simultaneous attacks is Al Qaeda's signature move.
Here's what you do:
Run a belt down there, and have it turn a rotor that runs into a dynamo. From the current that is generated from this, power a large Disney logo sign. This will, naturally, make him spin faster. Which will make the logo brighter. Which will make him spin faster. And so on.
You can see what this leads us to. The laws of thermodynamics are being broken in this house. But perhaps not if we consider grave-spinning a supernatural force. This allows us to keep thermodynamics in most conditions, and provide a new set of rules for supernatural conditions. Infinite energy generation is just one of the practical applications.
It's Nobel Prize time for me again. Just send this one in the mail, the flight to Sweden is just too long.
Feel better. Watch the originals and screw Disney out of the royalties they don't deserve.