The article may say it's rare, but I've had purple potatos in Peru plenty of times, as well as dozens of other varieties. I'm currently growing another variety of Peruvan potato called "oca" in my garden, which is particularly nutritious and has a nice nutty flavor.
Peru has over a hundred varieties of potato - if the British had brought back a decent assortment of potatos, instead of just the quick-buck high-yield-but-blight-sensitive variety, there would never have been an Irish potato famine.
You're wrong on a number of levels. Most patently about Bush's claim: he said that the war would not be over when Bin Laden and his cronies are dead. He's gearing up for an effort against all terrorism everywhere (with the term "terrorist", of course, conveniently drawn so as to exclude anyone whose activities might be benefiting American policy.) If the "war" was just against bin Laden then the threat of curtailed civil liberties would not be so great. (I still think bin Laden and people like him should be treated not as states that declare war, but as international criminals that should be hunted down and removed. Calling it a war actually dignifies his actions more than they should be, it may actually give his people defenses that they would otherwise have, and even threatens to make some people who'd otherwise stay out decided to take sides against us. He should be treated as a mad dog, not as a warring state.) I really believe that the US government has too much of a temptation to use this to solidify its police power to give that chance up. I do hear a lot of sane voices in the US gov't as well, but the demogogues have a lot of momentum.
You also respond only to a fraction of what I said about 'comparitive horror,' and you make a factual error as well. Hundreds of the victims of the attack were not American: the World Trade Center was just that, a World Trade Center, with many, even most, of the offices being the US offices of foriegn businesses (I looked at the list of businesses therein some time ago, I'm guesstimating the ratios). On the other hand, I included other sudden, violent, aggressive deaths as example of un-mediated horror - some US sponsored, some not - that don't get nearly the global response that this has gotten, simply because of the lack of coverage.
And ultimately, what you're claiming is that freedom is only a luxury for safe parts of the world, of which the US was essentially the last. If the residents of Spain and the UK could deal with 30+ years of terrorist violence and still manage to do a fair job of protecting civil liberties, the US should be able to manage it too.
I'm sorry, in the global picture, 5000 people is a drop in the bucket. I've been reluctant to get comparative, but if 5000 dead justifies a reduction in civil liberties, then anything does. Do you know how many people get killed by alcohol? Handguns? Car accidents?
This may sound callous, but the only reasons that this incident seems like that big a deal are 1. the way that media replay this incident over and over - funny how the million-odd who die of AIDS in Africa this year won't get 24/7 commercial-free coverage of their deaths, nor did the people who were bombed in Panama or Lebanon or anywhere else for that matter - consider that the subconscious doesn't really distinguish replays as being the same event; people's emotions get fortified to respond as if it were a new event, so that the death of 5000 people replayed 50 times has a far greater emotional impact than the statistic of 100,000 deaths (like in Rwanda's recent massacre) if the latter has no media coverage, and 2. the economic impact of the attack.
What's really dangerous about curtailing civil liberties in this situation is that, unlike World War 2, there is no specific enemy whose defeat would spell an end to the conflict. Bush has said that this will be an ongoing effort with no conclusion in the foreseeable future. That scares the hell out of me.
It is America that has been insulated for so long from the vicissitudes of history and its accompanying violence. Most non-Americans have a closer relationship with it than you ever have. In Spain, England, India, the Phillipines, Indonesia, and Mexico, governments and societies are doing exactly what the previous poster has suggested - trying to come to some sort of reconciliation. Of course, this is in coordination with a disciplined and effective security policy whenever it is effective; both carrot and stick are called for when dealing with groups like ETA and the IRA. But the fact is that the US is the last to arrive at this "party," not the first, and your outrage is misinformed.
Well, since the people that actually did the direct raping/killing equivalent are did, the real question is - if you served a sandwich to someone who later raped and killed my family, how would you feel if I came at you for revenge? What if someone decided to attack Oppenheimer and his students, and they people who supported and trained him?
Everything is personal to someone. When we bombed Libya and Iraq and Panama etc. etc. etc., we killed innocent people. Not to judge those military actions per se, but the fact that People Get Pissed When Their Loved Ones Hurt is not exactly sophisticated or insightful foreign policy.
America doesn't attack unprovoked. Consider America provoked. Any counter-strike is a logical, if highly unfortunately expected outcome.
America has attacked, essentially, unprovoked before. During the invasion of Panama, just to cite a recent example, more than 400 bombs were dropped on Panama City. Civilian casualties were reported from at least 200-some to as many as 4000. See: this.
The problem is that American deaths are much more well-reported than 3rd-world deaths, not just in America, but anywhere than American media dominates (it can be frustrating, I assure you, for someone in Latin America to get more news about the school shooting in Colorado than about the hurricanes that just hit them. It is hard to communicate the resentment towards American hubris that this sort of situation creates.) We sentimentalize our own casualties and not those of foreigners.
And we aren't the only ones that do this, either - it's a simple product of nationalism and tribalism and groupthink. It's usually only a thoughtful minority in any country that sees past this. The fact is that America has treated civilian deaths elsewhere as "collateral damage," but civilian deaths here as a national tragedy. That double standard is part of the problem.
Surprisingly, I followed the link and found a series of inchoate rantings - I was expecting a well-thought-out plan for some sort of charter school program or voucher system (solutions to which I am skeptical, but amenable), but all his "platform" amounted to was that chicken-waving mantra, "let the market handle it." Which, in essence, is "nothing."
Frankly, I think what we need is a more stringently controlled, rigorous curriculum that is unified across the nation, and we need to replace the current politicized system of local school boards (staffed by political wannabes who are more interested in grandstanding and demogoguery than anything else - school boards are the first-stop for mediocrities with political ambitions, and require absolutely no knowledge about pedagogy) with a professional administrative corps, like that found in France or Japan. But that's just me.
What was the literacy rate in this country before public schools? What is the literacy rate in countries that lack them? They may not be doing as good a job as they used to do, and they are certainly not doing as good a job as we might like, but they are doing far, far better than nothing.
Essentially, my point is that the cover-ideology of that regime at least made life better for women and non-Muslims than the religious ideology (which isn't a cover - and that fact may make it more destructive, since a fanatic is usually more brutal than a cynic) of the current one.
Yes. Because the current system is also tyrannical, and is based on a religious ideology that has created the most oppressive system for women imaginable. Since women are 50% of the afghani population, I'd say that adds up to "worse." The previous government lacked popular support, but - like North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba - it's not as if those regimes appeared in the context of preexisting healthy democracies (note that with a few exceptions in Eastern Europe no hardline Communist regime has existed in the context of a country with a democratic tradition - the undemocratic aspects of Communism are to a great extent part of the historical cultures of those countries, and Communism can even be seen as simply another trapping for a sector of the elite) but it authentically worked for the well-being of its people, unlike the current regime whose primary motivation is ideological purity.
I am not talking about the post-invasion Afghanistan. You are talking about the war crimes that the Soviet army committed I am talking about the PDPA government that the Soviets backed before the invasion. They waged a campaign against illiteracy, started a debt forgiveness program, improved the health and lot of women in Afghanistan, etc. Of course, they were doomed - and the Soviet invasion was brutal. But the Taliban are far worse for the majority of Afghani people than the PDPA were.
Ask any of the women in the refugee camps in Pakistan if they feel that way. The Russian-backed government provided services, educated both women and men. Have you read how the entire internet is now banned in Afghanistan, except for one small room in the government building? Do you remember something about the destruction of Buddhist statues? Do you know that the suicide rate of Afghani women is the highest in the world?
Do you really believe that the Russian-backed government was worse than this?
Most Japanese only nominal "practice" the religion to which they belong, like Europeans. Shinto is animist. Buddhism is, in fact, essentially atheistic. Or rather, it holds the question of the existence or non-existence of God as irrelevant. (From the Sutras, it is defined as "a question which does not tend towards edification.") But modern-day Japanese are not devout by any means.
If by religion you mean following any ethos at all, then the USSR was "religious" by that standard.
Roman Empire: popular religious manias culminating in establishment of Christianity as the state religion coincided with the degeneration of the Empire. At its height, it was an effectively secular state.
How much does it take to "pass judgement?" Considering that a history full of religion gives us virtually no where with as much peace as Europe and Japan have enjoyed in the past 50 years - in fact, I'm hard-pressed to recall the last 50-year stretch of peace anywhere - I have to ask just what you need to pass judgement?
Afghanistan during the socialist and Russian eras was pretty secular. Not ideal, mind you, but better than what they have now - which was what we were asked for. Only a Western-armed theocracy ended it.
I turn the challenge around, in fact: cite me a civilization whose essential secularness created a worse society than their religious epochs did.
Show me one example of society that benefited from lack of religion.
Pre-Taliban Afghanistan (at least if you were a woman). The Roman Empire. For all practical purposes, contemporary Europe and Japan. Most Arab nations, insofar as they were far more secular 50 to 100 years ago than they are today. Iran.
Then why does the US pay more and get less for its medical dollar than most any other country? Do you have any evidence for your claim, or are you just repeating it as an assumption?
And a lot of people who did the research for failed efforts got no profit at all, even though it freed up the successful researchers to find the right path.
And most researchers were trained in public school systems, and recieved public grants to do their work, etc.
My hope is that this leads to the revival of public research. The privitisation of medical researches makes it much, much more profitable to develop "treatments" than cures - it's a lot more profitable to sell someone morphine for life to treat the pain of a broken leg than to just reset the leg.
No, profits aren't a right. Equal protection under the law is a right. The issue here is that these companies invested billions in research and testing on the expectation that if they found something useful, they could sell it under the same laws that apply to everyone else.
Since countries are signatories to IP laws and can sign out of them, your plaint begs the question of whose laws apply. The pharmaceutical companies develop drugs based on US and European laws for the US and European markets. They have no right to dictate the laws of other countries - if Brazil passes a law that gives Brazilians the right to reverse-engineer any drugs they need to, perhaps they will face trade sanctions when they try to export them, but they certainly have every right to pass that law.
Modulo the perhaps-conscious reference to St. Anselm, your story starts late. Ontology has a history that goes back through Hegel and Husserl, and is pretty well laid out in Aristotle in his doctrine of causes. The phenomonological is by no means either the exclusive nor the canonical version of the term.
In AI terms, "ontology" is simply the ability to determine categories by perception. To recognize the chairness of chairs by having interactive strategies, the car-ness of cars, and so forth. And there's every reason to believe that it can be modelled as long as you have systems that can interact with things in some way.
Even in Sein und Zeit Heidegger described being as emergent out of interaction, especially out of breakdowns from routine interaction. The "ontology" of a hammer emerges from the act of hammering. We become aware of it when we miss the nail and hit the thumb.
I think that an ontology comes from Bayesian model-merging, not from simple hard-wiring - but that it does require some sort of interactive strategy. If they hard-coded the alphabet into the system, then they probably don't need your old run-of-the-mill back-prop network - you can just score certain strings and have the feedback up front. But I think that will run up to a wall FAST when it comes time for any real logical entailments - or, as I mentioned, practical bindings for syntax.
If the private sector was marketing the fruits of the research, that would be one thing, but they've barely started to plow the soil and they're already selling harvest.
And your lab is a "market" of - what, 10 people? And the market for 4th grade reading games that sing and dance is, let's say, a couple million people? You may want to ask some of your lab research assistants and graduate students how many of them owned a Speak and Spell when they were 3.
Clearly, economic modelling is not your group's forte.
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Peru has over a hundred varieties of potato - if the British had brought back a decent assortment of potatos, instead of just the quick-buck high-yield-but-blight-sensitive variety, there would never have been an Irish potato famine.
My bad - I thought you were replying to my post. Nevermind.
You aren't actually reading anything, are you?
You also respond only to a fraction of what I said about 'comparitive horror,' and you make a factual error as well. Hundreds of the victims of the attack were not American: the World Trade Center was just that, a World Trade Center, with many, even most, of the offices being the US offices of foriegn businesses (I looked at the list of businesses therein some time ago, I'm guesstimating the ratios). On the other hand, I included other sudden, violent, aggressive deaths as example of un-mediated horror - some US sponsored, some not - that don't get nearly the global response that this has gotten, simply because of the lack of coverage.
And ultimately, what you're claiming is that freedom is only a luxury for safe parts of the world, of which the US was essentially the last. If the residents of Spain and the UK could deal with 30+ years of terrorist violence and still manage to do a fair job of protecting civil liberties, the US should be able to manage it too.
This may sound callous, but the only reasons that this incident seems like that big a deal are 1. the way that media replay this incident over and over - funny how the million-odd who die of AIDS in Africa this year won't get 24/7 commercial-free coverage of their deaths, nor did the people who were bombed in Panama or Lebanon or anywhere else for that matter - consider that the subconscious doesn't really distinguish replays as being the same event; people's emotions get fortified to respond as if it were a new event, so that the death of 5000 people replayed 50 times has a far greater emotional impact than the statistic of 100,000 deaths (like in Rwanda's recent massacre) if the latter has no media coverage, and 2. the economic impact of the attack.
What's really dangerous about curtailing civil liberties in this situation is that, unlike World War 2, there is no specific enemy whose defeat would spell an end to the conflict. Bush has said that this will be an ongoing effort with no conclusion in the foreseeable future. That scares the hell out of me.
And by that very logic, you justify just the sort of attack that this was.
It is America that has been insulated for so long from the vicissitudes of history and its accompanying violence. Most non-Americans have a closer relationship with it than you ever have. In Spain, England, India, the Phillipines, Indonesia, and Mexico, governments and societies are doing exactly what the previous poster has suggested - trying to come to some sort of reconciliation. Of course, this is in coordination with a disciplined and effective security policy whenever it is effective; both carrot and stick are called for when dealing with groups like ETA and the IRA. But the fact is that the US is the last to arrive at this "party," not the first, and your outrage is misinformed.
Everything is personal to someone. When we bombed Libya and Iraq and Panama etc. etc. etc., we killed innocent people. Not to judge those military actions per se, but the fact that People Get Pissed When Their Loved Ones Hurt is not exactly sophisticated or insightful foreign policy.
America has attacked, essentially, unprovoked before. During the invasion of Panama, just to cite a recent example, more than 400 bombs were dropped on Panama City. Civilian casualties were reported from at least 200-some to as many as 4000. See: this.
The problem is that American deaths are much more well-reported than 3rd-world deaths, not just in America, but anywhere than American media dominates (it can be frustrating, I assure you, for someone in Latin America to get more news about the school shooting in Colorado than about the hurricanes that just hit them. It is hard to communicate the resentment towards American hubris that this sort of situation creates.) We sentimentalize our own casualties and not those of foreigners.
And we aren't the only ones that do this, either - it's a simple product of nationalism and tribalism and groupthink. It's usually only a thoughtful minority in any country that sees past this. The fact is that America has treated civilian deaths elsewhere as "collateral damage," but civilian deaths here as a national tragedy. That double standard is part of the problem.
Alien Nation. Robocop. War of the Worlds.
Frankly, I think what we need is a more stringently controlled, rigorous curriculum that is unified across the nation, and we need to replace the current politicized system of local school boards (staffed by political wannabes who are more interested in grandstanding and demogoguery than anything else - school boards are the first-stop for mediocrities with political ambitions, and require absolutely no knowledge about pedagogy) with a professional administrative corps, like that found in France or Japan. But that's just me.
What was the literacy rate in this country before public schools? What is the literacy rate in countries that lack them? They may not be doing as good a job as they used to do, and they are certainly not doing as good a job as we might like, but they are doing far, far better than nothing.
Essentially, my point is that the cover-ideology of that regime at least made life better for women and non-Muslims than the religious ideology (which isn't a cover - and that fact may make it more destructive, since a fanatic is usually more brutal than a cynic) of the current one.
Yes. Because the current system is also tyrannical, and is based on a religious ideology that has created the most oppressive system for women imaginable. Since women are 50% of the afghani population, I'd say that adds up to "worse." The previous government lacked popular support, but - like North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba - it's not as if those regimes appeared in the context of preexisting healthy democracies (note that with a few exceptions in Eastern Europe no hardline Communist regime has existed in the context of a country with a democratic tradition - the undemocratic aspects of Communism are to a great extent part of the historical cultures of those countries, and Communism can even be seen as simply another trapping for a sector of the elite) but it authentically worked for the well-being of its people, unlike the current regime whose primary motivation is ideological purity.
I am not talking about the post-invasion Afghanistan. You are talking about the war crimes that the Soviet army committed I am talking about the PDPA government that the Soviets backed before the invasion. They waged a campaign against illiteracy, started a debt forgiveness program, improved the health and lot of women in Afghanistan, etc. Of course, they were doomed - and the Soviet invasion was brutal. But the Taliban are far worse for the majority of Afghani people than the PDPA were.
Do you really believe that the Russian-backed government was worse than this?
If by religion you mean following any ethos at all, then the USSR was "religious" by that standard.
How much does it take to "pass judgement?" Considering that a history full of religion gives us virtually no where with as much peace as Europe and Japan have enjoyed in the past 50 years - in fact, I'm hard-pressed to recall the last 50-year stretch of peace anywhere - I have to ask just what you need to pass judgement?
Afghanistan during the socialist and Russian eras was pretty secular. Not ideal, mind you, but better than what they have now - which was what we were asked for. Only a Western-armed theocracy ended it.
I turn the challenge around, in fact: cite me a civilization whose essential secularness created a worse society than their religious epochs did.
Pre-Taliban Afghanistan (at least if you were a woman). The Roman Empire. For all practical purposes, contemporary Europe and Japan. Most Arab nations, insofar as they were far more secular 50 to 100 years ago than they are today. Iran.
Then why does the US pay more and get less for its medical dollar than most any other country? Do you have any evidence for your claim, or are you just repeating it as an assumption?
And most researchers were trained in public school systems, and recieved public grants to do their work, etc.
My hope is that this leads to the revival of public research. The privitisation of medical researches makes it much, much more profitable to develop "treatments" than cures - it's a lot more profitable to sell someone morphine for life to treat the pain of a broken leg than to just reset the leg.
Since countries are signatories to IP laws and can sign out of them, your plaint begs the question of whose laws apply. The pharmaceutical companies develop drugs based on US and European laws for the US and European markets. They have no right to dictate the laws of other countries - if Brazil passes a law that gives Brazilians the right to reverse-engineer any drugs they need to, perhaps they will face trade sanctions when they try to export them, but they certainly have every right to pass that law.
In AI terms, "ontology" is simply the ability to determine categories by perception. To recognize the chairness of chairs by having interactive strategies, the car-ness of cars, and so forth. And there's every reason to believe that it can be modelled as long as you have systems that can interact with things in some way.
Even in Sein und Zeit Heidegger described being as emergent out of interaction, especially out of breakdowns from routine interaction. The "ontology" of a hammer emerges from the act of hammering. We become aware of it when we miss the nail and hit the thumb.
If the private sector was marketing the fruits of the research, that would be one thing, but they've barely started to plow the soil and they're already selling harvest.
Clearly, economic modelling is not your group's forte.