Anyone that rejects AGW, vaccination of children, evolution, the earth not being the center of the solar system, or any other of the misguided beliefs the right seems to cling to is, quite simply, ignorant.
modded 50% insightful, 40% negative.
parent post:
While I agree, it's important to note that the left can be equally stupid. Most of the "People are allergic to WiFi" and/or "Vaccines are dangerous" and/or "My naturopath can cure cancer" fools are on the left.
A reasonable post questioning lefties gets modified 30 troll and 10% flamebait (only 20% insightful - where's the other 40%?). This too is, unfortunately, not surprising. Slashdot moderation is slipping.
Remember when Lawrence Summers merely asked the question of whether genetic gender differences might be the cause of some of the disproportionate representation of genders in higher math?
Remember how liberals rushed to embrace the science of "The Bell Curve" and figure out how to adjust social policies in accordance with science, while conservatives claimed that the scientists who wrote the book couldn't be trusted to be fair and rejected it? Neither do I.
The link between conspiracy theorists, whether it be bithers or 9-11 truthers, and suspicion of science is obvious.
For free-market types the connection may be a little more difficult, but I can easily imagine why it would be so. Science is performed by humans - and humans have their own goals. Government is the same way - it is made up of individuals who have their own goals. If you're the kind of person who believes people are can be trusted to put aside their own goals and can thus be trusted with a lot of control over your life as government, you're probably the kind of person who believes scientists would never lie, mislead or exaggerate to further their own careers. On the other hand, if you think people are generally selfish and the best way to deal with that is to make selfishness work for the good of all, you're probably going to distrust scientists who claim to be selflessly working for the good of all.
I'm confused. From the perspective of the people watching from Earth, of course the 1g acceleration would have to fall off eventually. But aren't we really concerned about the 1g acceleration from the perspective of the people on the ship? Why would there be any difficulty in maintaining that acceleration "when approaching higher percentages of c"? Wouldn't they, from their own perspective, always be traveling at 0% of c? So there would never be a need for additional force - they would just need to have enough fuel and maintain the equipment.
Do you have a formula that can share for calculating that? What about the amount of time that would pass on earth by the time the ship returned (assuming it left the star immediately)?
I've often wondered about such a ship but I never was able to understand time/space dilation enough to figure it out myself.
1. Innovation and the Economy. Science and technology have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII, when the federal government first prioritized peacetime science mobilization. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?
Translation: We're scientists. We want money. How much money will you spend to buy our votes?
Barack Obama:
I believe that in order to be globally competitive in the 21st century and to create an American economy that is built to last, we must create an environment where invention, innovation, and industry can flourish. We can work together to create an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, and skills for American workers.
I am committed to doubling funding for key research agencies to support scientists and entrepreneurs, so that we can preserve America’s place as the world leader in innovation, and strengthen U.S. leadership in the 21st century’s high-tech knowledge-based economy. To prepare American children for a future in which they can be the highly skilled American workers and innovators of tomorrow, I have set the goal of preparing 100,000 science and math teachers over the next decade. These teachers will meet the urgent need to train one million additional science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates over the next decade.
Translation: I will spend lots of your fellow Americans' money to buy your votes. I won't just buy the votes of science researchers, I will also buy the votes of science teachers.
Mitt Romney:
Innovation is the key to economic growth and job creation, and increasingly important to American competitiveness in the global economy. Three-quarters of all U.S. economic growth, and three-quarters of the U.S. productivity advantage over other OECD nations, is directly attributable to innovation, and wages in innovation-intensive industries have grown more than twice as fast as other wages in recent decades.
My plan for a stronger middle class will rebuild the American economy on the principles of free enterprise, hard work, and innovation. The promotion of innovation will begin on Day One, with efforts to simplify the corporate tax code, reform job retraining programs, reduce regulatory burdens, and protect American intellectual property around the world.
Translation: Get a job. If you can't get a job, or if you have the ambition, work independently and start a business; maybe someday you can give other people jobs.
The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.
This is a problem I have with philosophy, and is related to a problem I have with people who seem to have religious faith in math and their own logic (these people are often found on slashdot). We're stuck using a logic system that we are unable to independently verify. We don't know if it has some fundamental flaw that we don't see because it works good enough for what we use it for. "Good enough" like Newton's laws were good enough, but even more difficult to find the flaw in because we don't have a separate tool to work with. We used logic to find the flaws in Newtonian physics but what tool do we have to find any flaws that may exist in our sense of logic?
The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing
Of course they don't take a side in the debate. They have realized that the tools we have are inadequate to job. It would be irresponsible of them to give out reasons that others would take as authoritative due their expertise when in fact they know they know nothing about the reasons.
This is why I find it so difficult to deal with people who strenuously oppose religious beliefs. Many of the questions religious beliefs address are questions that exist beyond the scope of science and logic. Science and logic can tells us a lot of about the world, but it can't tell us the full story of how we got here (evolution, but how did the matter get there - the big bang, but how did the big bang get here - membranes colliding maybe, but how did the membranes get here - and how did the laws of logic and math get here?) Religion of course has similar issues from a logical perspective (a god created us, but how did the god get here?)
Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"
I would like to know more about why the review that claims Grünbaum is an "atheist" - why would he think no god is more likely to be true than one or many gods? Agnostic would seem to match his philosophy.
I remember growing up during the Cold War, and being taught all the pro-U.S. propaganda: The Russian space program sucks.
Who taught you THAT? Growing up in one of those midwest redneck areas people on slashdot like to bash, I was never taught that the Russian space program sucks.
You don't need papers to travel in the U.S. unlike the USSR. U.S,. citizens were free to travel anywhere, unlike those poor Soviets.
It was true at the time. You could travel around without papers. It used to be you could even get a job without papers. Of course that has changed for various reasons (illegal immigration, social security, federal withholding, etc.) - as best I can tell most put in place by Democrats - but it would be wrong to compare Democrats to communists.
Only Poland cracked down on labor unions and dissedents. And so on.
Wow your education was bad. I learned that communists countries all over the world cracked down on dissidents, and it was true.
It was only after I grew up and learned to see through the bullshit that I realized that was all lies. We had been lied to just as much as the Soviets. The Russian space program is filled with firsts that American students never learned about (we only got the NASA stuff and a brief mention of Sputnik).
Cool, you got something right. American education focussed more on American achievements in space than it did on Russian achievements. Pretty much ever country does that - put more focus on its own achievements than on the achievements of others.
You DAMN SURE DO need papers to travel in the U.S. (try getting pull over by a cop sometime and tell him you have no identification, driver's license, proof of insurance, and registration and just see what happens, or try coming here sometime to see if the cops accept "We don't need no papers, this is America!" in lieu of your passport/green card/visa).
When you learned this stuff, you didn't need papers to take a train or a bus. You could travel from coast to coast that way. Or you just ride in friends car. There were no checkpoints between New York and LA or between Miami and Seattle.
Polish labor unions weren't the only ones that got cracked down on in the 80's.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. There were of course disputes with labor unions and the unions didn't always win - the point of unions is after all to make the fight fair, not to make the unions all-powerful. And unions of government workers in public safety areas are a special case (like air-traffic controllers) but even the air-traffic controllers merely had to find other jobs - they weren't beaten or imprisoned.
And American are ABSOLUTELY NOT allowed to travel anywhere they wish (try joining your European friend on his vacation in Cuba sometime if you think so).
So there is one small island in the Caribbean where Americans can't go. You do understand the difference between that and not being allowed to leave your country at all, don't you?
And if you're American you are also prohibited from doing business with any country the American government doesn't like (which are usually the ones who dared overthrow one of the U.S.'s corrupt puppet regimes).
Land of the free...not so much.
There are a few countries you can't do business with. In Soviet Russia you couldn't even do business.
Every once in a while I see people who haven't been anywhere talk about how America is just as bad as anyplace else in the world. I know better because I saw one example of the difference. It wasn't a communist country, but it was a country that had recently been authoritarian. I was teaching English and the school had a small library. In it I found a set of encyclopedias of a brand I had become very familiar with as a child. Curious
If everyone expected to live for hundreds of years, they would take a longer term view of issues. I don't think it would work out the way you hope it would, but issues like pollution, energy efficiency, global warming, etc. would be given more thoughtful consideration.
One noticeable thing is that most people would become even more afraid of death as dying would rob them of many more years (die at 40 and you lose hundreds of years instead of just 20 to 60).
A potential benefit is that voters would have more experience. Lessons learned would last a lot longer.
If you can persuade both sides to not show up, I applaud you. If you can only persuade the enlightened democratic countries to not show up, then soon we will all be ruled by the likes of Kim Jung Il, Stalin, and Mao. (What's it called when you mention someone worse than Hitler, an uber-Godwin?)
Because once mankind masters being able to breathe nothing and piss ice-cubes? There's no stopping how far we can leave a trail of litter, across the galaxy!:-)
If that's what it takes, we'll figure out how to do it through genetic engineering and/or artificial organs. Though there's an excellent chance it won't happen during our lifetime.
I'm surprised and impressed you found one! Well at least he didn't get the nomination. This Tea Party supporter thinks the National Weather service is one of the few things the government does well.
When was the last time you heard a Republican trying to get rid of the National Weather Service?
But why ever not? As a public service paid for out of taxation it's "socialist", surely?
Republicans aren't pure libertarian. A good conservative has a strong libertarianism streak that is moderated by historical experience and common sense. A conservative recognizes that freedom is not just a means to an end, but a good in and of itself.
There is an argument to be made that weather forecasts could and should be privatized. But the weather service was and continues to be an important part of national defense, and it seems to be working well enough. It is very conservative to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Republicans aren't totally libertarian, but their philosophy has a strong libertarian element. But even libertarians recognize the need for certain government functions such as defense, police, and courts. Conservatives tend to include traditional government functions like roads and other infrastructure. Modern conservatives generally favor having environmental protections, food safety and some form of safety net, but the extent of these are something many conservatives disagree about.
A good conservative, when presented with a problem, will ask "Will this be taken care of by a free market? If not, how can this be solved in a way that works with the free market and human nature while preserving individual human freedom? And finally, is the cure of government intervention going to be worse than the disease."
It seems to me that a liberal, on the other hand, simply asks, "What's the most straightforward way for the government to solve this problem" without much concern for how it impacts the free market and other forms of human liberty (except of course sexual liberty which liberal seem to hold sacred).
It's interesting, then, that the Republican-leaning states get more money from the federal government than the Democratic-leaning states do.
You make the rules of the corrupt game and then you get upset that we play better by them? Why not take our advice and get rid of the corrupt game? You force us to sit down and play poker then complain when we walk away with the pot. How about we end the game and go do something productive instead?
Not to mention I'm sure they're tracking this approaching storm using the national weather service, relying on local emergency response services, using publicly-funded roads, hosting the event in a taxpayer-funded stadium, etc.
When was the last time you heard a Republican trying to get rid of the National Weather Service? In 30 years of following politics I've never heard of it (maybe Ron Paul?). The same goes for local emergency response services - local.
Nor do I know of Republican politicians proposing to get rid of publicly funded roads. Even if some desire more privately financed roads that doesn't make them wrong for relying on publicly funded roads - publicly funded roads have the monopoly. Just the fact that I rely on my local cable service mean I shouldn't complain about them having a monopoly?
The same can be said of taxpayer-funded stadiums - do you know of any stadiums that aren't taxpayer funded? Republicans pay their taxes like everyone else. They may not like the money going to line the pockets of stadium building corporations, but what's done has been done and the companies that want to build stadiums the honest way can't compete so what other stadium choices do the Republicans have?
Republicans want lower taxes and less government spending so that people can decide what to do with their own money. But if the government has already taken the money from you it is not hypocritical to ask for that money back.
Or worse, we get a situation where Republicans say they want to cut taxes and decrease spending while Democrats say they want to raise taxes and increase spending. So the parties compromise by cutting taxes and increasing spending!
So perhaps you should stop voting for Republicans then, if they keep on failing to deliver on things you care about?
You to bring up an tricky dilemma for conservatives. Do we keep voting for the party that promises to make the country better but in fact makes it worse? Or should we start voting for the party that promises to make the country worse and consistently delivers?
Europe is different. In Europe they put people like Gauss on their money, and elect people like Thatcher and Merkel (also a chemist) to positions of power.
Here in the US, we have different attitudes about what sorts of things constitute "qualifications".
We hired a nuclear engineer and four years later replaced him with an actor. The actor did a much better job.
One problem with good scientists is that they're used to being smarter than other people around them so they think they know how to run those people's lives. They might even be right if it weren't for the fact that freedom has intrinsic value.
If you could hire a puppet master to control your every movement and spoken word in such a way that it would make you fabulously wealthy, would you do it? No, because you want your freedom even if it means your life isn't scientifically optimized.
Really? And just how many scientists do that? I'm sure you can come up with the standard examples (Hubble, Penrose) but since you have tarred the majority of scientists with that brush, time to back it up, I want to know the percentage of scientists whoa assume they are experts in fields not related to their area of expertise.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone that rejects AGW, vaccination of children, evolution, the earth not being the center of the solar system, or any other of the misguided beliefs the right seems to cling to is, quite simply, ignorant.
modded 50% insightful, 40% negative.
parent post:
While I agree, it's important to note that the left can be equally stupid. Most of the "People are allergic to WiFi" and/or "Vaccines are dangerous" and/or "My naturopath can cure cancer" fools are on the left.
modded 100% offtopic.
Slashdot moderation is broken.
A reasonable post questioning lefties gets modified 30 troll and 10% flamebait (only 20% insightful - where's the other 40%?). This too is, unfortunately, not surprising. Slashdot moderation is slipping.
Remember when Lawrence Summers merely asked the question of whether genetic gender differences might be the cause of some of the disproportionate representation of genders in higher math?
Have you read "The Bell Curve"?
Remember how liberals rushed to embrace the science of "The Bell Curve" and figure out how to adjust social policies in accordance with science, while conservatives claimed that the scientists who wrote the book couldn't be trusted to be fair and rejected it? Neither do I.
The link between conspiracy theorists, whether it be bithers or 9-11 truthers, and suspicion of science is obvious.
For free-market types the connection may be a little more difficult, but I can easily imagine why it would be so. Science is performed by humans - and humans have their own goals. Government is the same way - it is made up of individuals who have their own goals. If you're the kind of person who believes people are can be trusted to put aside their own goals and can thus be trusted with a lot of control over your life as government, you're probably the kind of person who believes scientists would never lie, mislead or exaggerate to further their own careers. On the other hand, if you think people are generally selfish and the best way to deal with that is to make selfishness work for the good of all, you're probably going to distrust scientists who claim to be selflessly working for the good of all.
Hell, at 1g acceleration, you could get literally anywhere in the reachable universe in a typical lifetime.
How are you defining "reachable universe"?
I'm confused. From the perspective of the people watching from Earth, of course the 1g acceleration would have to fall off eventually. But aren't we really concerned about the 1g acceleration from the perspective of the people on the ship? Why would there be any difficulty in maintaining that acceleration "when approaching higher percentages of c"? Wouldn't they, from their own perspective, always be traveling at 0% of c? So there would never be a need for additional force - they would just need to have enough fuel and maintain the equipment.
Do you have a formula that can share for calculating that? What about the amount of time that would pass on earth by the time the ship returned (assuming it left the star immediately)?
I've often wondered about such a ship but I never was able to understand time/space dilation enough to figure it out myself.
1. Innovation and the Economy. Science and technology have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII, when the federal government first prioritized peacetime science mobilization. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?
Translation: We're scientists. We want money. How much money will you spend to buy our votes?
Barack Obama:
I believe that in order to be globally competitive in the 21st century and to create an American economy that is built to last, we must create an environment where invention, innovation, and industry can flourish. We can work together to create an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, and skills for American workers.
I am committed to doubling funding for key research agencies to support scientists and entrepreneurs, so that we can preserve America’s place as the world leader in innovation, and strengthen U.S. leadership in the 21st century’s high-tech knowledge-based economy. To prepare American children for a future in which they can be the highly skilled American workers and innovators of tomorrow, I have set the goal of preparing 100,000 science and math teachers over the next decade. These teachers will meet the urgent need to train one million additional science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates over the next decade.
Translation: I will spend lots of your fellow Americans' money to buy your votes. I won't just buy the votes of science researchers, I will also buy the votes of science teachers.
Mitt Romney:
Innovation is the key to economic growth and job creation, and increasingly important to American competitiveness in the global economy. Three-quarters of all U.S. economic growth, and three-quarters of the U.S. productivity advantage over other OECD nations, is directly attributable to innovation, and wages in innovation-intensive industries have grown more than twice as fast as other wages in recent decades.
My plan for a stronger middle class will rebuild the American economy on the principles of free enterprise, hard work, and innovation. The promotion of innovation will begin on Day One, with efforts to simplify the corporate tax code, reform job retraining programs, reduce regulatory burdens, and protect American intellectual property around the world.
Translation: Get a job. If you can't get a job, or if you have the ambition, work independently and start a business; maybe someday you can give other people jobs.
The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.
This is a problem I have with philosophy, and is related to a problem I have with people who seem to have religious faith in math and their own logic (these people are often found on slashdot). We're stuck using a logic system that we are unable to independently verify. We don't know if it has some fundamental flaw that we don't see because it works good enough for what we use it for. "Good enough" like Newton's laws were good enough, but even more difficult to find the flaw in because we don't have a separate tool to work with. We used logic to find the flaws in Newtonian physics but what tool do we have to find any flaws that may exist in our sense of logic?
The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing
Of course they don't take a side in the debate. They have realized that the tools we have are inadequate to job. It would be irresponsible of them to give out reasons that others would take as authoritative due their expertise when in fact they know they know nothing about the reasons.
This is why I find it so difficult to deal with people who strenuously oppose religious beliefs. Many of the questions religious beliefs address are questions that exist beyond the scope of science and logic. Science and logic can tells us a lot of about the world, but it can't tell us the full story of how we got here (evolution, but how did the matter get there - the big bang, but how did the big bang get here - membranes colliding maybe, but how did the membranes get here - and how did the laws of logic and math get here?) Religion of course has similar issues from a logical perspective (a god created us, but how did the god get here?)
Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"
I would like to know more about why the review that claims Grünbaum is an "atheist" - why would he think no god is more likely to be true than one or many gods? Agnostic would seem to match his philosophy.
But you know, it is CUBA. The Cuban's decide who can enter their country.
Awwwww no fair! Why do the Cubans get to decide who can enter THEIR country, but Americans don't get to decide who will enter OURS??
I remember growing up during the Cold War, and being taught all the pro-U.S. propaganda: The Russian space program sucks.
Who taught you THAT? Growing up in one of those midwest redneck areas people on slashdot like to bash, I was never taught that the Russian space program sucks.
You don't need papers to travel in the U.S. unlike the USSR. U.S,. citizens were free to travel anywhere, unlike those poor Soviets.
It was true at the time. You could travel around without papers. It used to be you could even get a job without papers. Of course that has changed for various reasons (illegal immigration, social security, federal withholding, etc.) - as best I can tell most put in place by Democrats - but it would be wrong to compare Democrats to communists.
Only Poland cracked down on labor unions and dissedents. And so on.
Wow your education was bad. I learned that communists countries all over the world cracked down on dissidents, and it was true.
It was only after I grew up and learned to see through the bullshit that I realized that was all lies. We had been lied to just as much as the Soviets. The Russian space program is filled with firsts that American students never learned about (we only got the NASA stuff and a brief mention of Sputnik).
Cool, you got something right. American education focussed more on American achievements in space than it did on Russian achievements. Pretty much ever country does that - put more focus on its own achievements than on the achievements of others.
You DAMN SURE DO need papers to travel in the U.S. (try getting pull over by a cop sometime and tell him you have no identification, driver's license, proof of insurance, and registration and just see what happens, or try coming here sometime to see if the cops accept "We don't need no papers, this is America!" in lieu of your passport/green card/visa).
When you learned this stuff, you didn't need papers to take a train or a bus. You could travel from coast to coast that way. Or you just ride in friends car. There were no checkpoints between New York and LA or between Miami and Seattle.
Polish labor unions weren't the only ones that got cracked down on in the 80's.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. There were of course disputes with labor unions and the unions didn't always win - the point of unions is after all to make the fight fair, not to make the unions all-powerful. And unions of government workers in public safety areas are a special case (like air-traffic controllers) but even the air-traffic controllers merely had to find other jobs - they weren't beaten or imprisoned.
And American are ABSOLUTELY NOT allowed to travel anywhere they wish (try joining your European friend on his vacation in Cuba sometime if you think so).
So there is one small island in the Caribbean where Americans can't go. You do understand the difference between that and not being allowed to leave your country at all, don't you?
And if you're American you are also prohibited from doing business with any country the American government doesn't like (which are usually the ones who dared overthrow one of the U.S.'s corrupt puppet regimes).
Land of the free...not so much.
There are a few countries you can't do business with. In Soviet Russia you couldn't even do business.
Every once in a while I see people who haven't been anywhere talk about how America is just as bad as anyplace else in the world. I know better because I saw one example of the difference. It wasn't a communist country, but it was a country that had recently been authoritarian. I was teaching English and the school had a small library. In it I found a set of encyclopedias of a brand I had become very familiar with as a child. Curious
If everyone expected to live for hundreds of years, they would take a longer term view of issues. I don't think it would work out the way you hope it would, but issues like pollution, energy efficiency, global warming, etc. would be given more thoughtful consideration.
One noticeable thing is that most people would become even more afraid of death as dying would rob them of many more years (die at 40 and you lose hundreds of years instead of just 20 to 60).
A potential benefit is that voters would have more experience. Lessons learned would last a lot longer.
If you can persuade both sides to not show up, I applaud you. If you can only persuade the enlightened democratic countries to not show up, then soon we will all be ruled by the likes of Kim Jung Il, Stalin, and Mao. (What's it called when you mention someone worse than Hitler, an uber-Godwin?)
Because once mankind masters being able to breathe nothing and piss ice-cubes? There's no stopping how far we can leave a trail of litter, across the galaxy! :-)
If that's what it takes, we'll figure out how to do it through genetic engineering and/or artificial organs. Though there's an excellent chance it won't happen during our lifetime.
Rick Santorum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum#National_Weather_Service_Duties_Act
I'm surprised and impressed you found one! Well at least he didn't get the nomination. This Tea Party supporter thinks the National Weather service is one of the few things the government does well.
When was the last time you heard a Republican trying to get rid of the National Weather Service?
But why ever not? As a public service paid for out of taxation it's "socialist", surely?
Republicans aren't pure libertarian. A good conservative has a strong libertarianism streak that is moderated by historical experience and common sense. A conservative recognizes that freedom is not just a means to an end, but a good in and of itself.
There is an argument to be made that weather forecasts could and should be privatized. But the weather service was and continues to be an important part of national defense, and it seems to be working well enough. It is very conservative to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Republicans aren't totally libertarian, but their philosophy has a strong libertarian element. But even libertarians recognize the need for certain government functions such as defense, police, and courts. Conservatives tend to include traditional government functions like roads and other infrastructure. Modern conservatives generally favor having environmental protections, food safety and some form of safety net, but the extent of these are something many conservatives disagree about.
A good conservative, when presented with a problem, will ask "Will this be taken care of by a free market? If not, how can this be solved in a way that works with the free market and human nature while preserving individual human freedom? And finally, is the cure of government intervention going to be worse than the disease."
It seems to me that a liberal, on the other hand, simply asks, "What's the most straightforward way for the government to solve this problem" without much concern for how it impacts the free market and other forms of human liberty (except of course sexual liberty which liberal seem to hold sacred).
Republicans want lower taxes and less government spending so that people can decide what to do with their own money.
No, Republicans wan't those things because they are to the advantage of the rich and disadvantage of the poor.
Less government generally favors the poor because it weakens one of the tools the wealthy use to oppress the poor.
It's interesting, then, that the Republican-leaning states get more money from the federal government than the Democratic-leaning states do.
You make the rules of the corrupt game and then you get upset that we play better by them? Why not take our advice and get rid of the corrupt game? You force us to sit down and play poker then complain when we walk away with the pot. How about we end the game and go do something productive instead?
Not to mention I'm sure they're tracking this approaching storm using the national weather service, relying on local emergency response services, using publicly-funded roads, hosting the event in a taxpayer-funded stadium, etc.
When was the last time you heard a Republican trying to get rid of the National Weather Service? In 30 years of following politics I've never heard of it (maybe Ron Paul?). The same goes for local emergency response services - local.
Nor do I know of Republican politicians proposing to get rid of publicly funded roads. Even if some desire more privately financed roads that doesn't make them wrong for relying on publicly funded roads - publicly funded roads have the monopoly. Just the fact that I rely on my local cable service mean I shouldn't complain about them having a monopoly?
The same can be said of taxpayer-funded stadiums - do you know of any stadiums that aren't taxpayer funded? Republicans pay their taxes like everyone else. They may not like the money going to line the pockets of stadium building corporations, but what's done has been done and the companies that want to build stadiums the honest way can't compete so what other stadium choices do the Republicans have?
Republicans want lower taxes and less government spending so that people can decide what to do with their own money. But if the government has already taken the money from you it is not hypocritical to ask for that money back.
So perhaps you should stop voting for Republicans then, if they keep on failing to deliver on things you care about?
You to bring up an tricky dilemma for conservatives. Do we keep voting for the party that promises to make the country better but in fact makes it worse? Or should we start voting for the party that promises to make the country worse and consistently delivers?
Europe is different. In Europe they put people like Gauss on their money, and elect people like Thatcher and Merkel (also a chemist) to positions of power.
Here in the US, we have different attitudes about what sorts of things constitute "qualifications".
We hired a nuclear engineer and four years later replaced him with an actor. The actor did a much better job.
One problem with good scientists is that they're used to being smarter than other people around them so they think they know how to run those people's lives. They might even be right if it weren't for the fact that freedom has intrinsic value.
If you could hire a puppet master to control your every movement and spoken word in such a way that it would make you fabulously wealthy, would you do it? No, because you want your freedom even if it means your life isn't scientifically optimized.
Really? And just how many scientists do that? I'm sure you can come up with the standard examples (Hubble, Penrose) but since you have tarred the majority of scientists with that brush, time to back it up, I want to know the percentage of scientists whoa assume they are experts in fields not related to their area of expertise.
Obligatory XCKD http://xkcd.com/793/