So fundamentalist christians want all the benefits of science without accepting any of those unpleasant side effects, like overwhelming evidence the earth is more than 6000 years old or that organisms change over time through the process of natural selection.
That's having your scientific cake and eating the fundamentalist cake too.
Take a look at the museum web site: http://www.amnh.org/ Almost every other project has corporate donors.
Also, fundamentalists don't have to be aware of the exhibit to scare donors away, the mere threat that a fundamentalist group will organize a boycott can be sufficient to scare off a potential donor.
Yes, but can religion whiten my teeth and freshen my breath?
Lets leave the religion to the religious people and the science to the scientists. Accepting evolution doesn't require a person to have absolute and exclusive faith in science to answer all life's questions. It's reasonable for religion to play a role in ethical issues, but I'd rather have scientists creating things like bodyarmor, pharmaceuticals, etc.
If you really think this is "spin", which it clearly is not, at least assign blame to the proper person (i.e., the journalist, not the professor who posted above).
I don't know if this is such a great idea...Microwaves from multiple sources bouncing around in big metal cages may lead to "hotspots" where people get exposed to many times the "safe" energy levels.
http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?stor y_id=4078811
Maybe it's unlikely, but I'd like to see more safetey testing before everyone who takes public transportation is subject to that risk (not to mention everyone's inane phone conversations).
Disclaimer About "Dialect Recordings"
"Coon songs," "rube sketches," "Irish character songs," and other dialect recordings that were popular vaudeville routines and genres of songs during the late 19th and early 20th century often contain negative stereotypes and portrayals of blacks and other ethnic groups. These recordings reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. Many individuals will find the content offensive...
yeah, I think this conversation's progressed about as much as it's going to. regarding the lack of sufficient troop strength though, that's mostly based on Donald Rumsfeld's desire for a "light, fast, flexible army". That's the kind of army we took into Somalia with such disastrous results. There's this low key conflict in the pentagon between the "powell doctrine" of overwhelming force, (which has been our policy in every military conflict from vietnam to the first gulf war) doctrine and this minority opinion for a light army.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I never professed any desire to respect all cultures equally. Female circumcision, not allowing women to go to school, slavery, etc... all these things are objectively wrong and indefensible. You'll here no cultural relativism from me.
And what exactly would you call Imperial Japan before and during WWII? A commune? Anarchy? No, it was just as authortarian, if not as actively repressive, as Saddam's regime.
Yes, but we had a plan when we took over Japan. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/rebuilding-iraq -0316.html
What I said about the need for civil society and democratic culture isn't earth-shattering by the way, it's a widely accepted view among academics and policy wonks. http://www.policyreview.org/jun03/diamond.html And once again, it has nothig to do with race. Have a purebred american kid grow up in the middle east, and the same problems with lack of experience and faith in the system would arise.
We were't planning to prevent museum looting within days of the start of hostilities, we were planning on being able to react to chemical and biologic weapons attacks on our troops. If we'd known that the entire Iraqi army would fall apart again, I think we would have done a better job. We should have been planning to prevent museum looting, high ranking military planners were saying all along that the invasion itself would be a cakewalk, but that we would need 100,000 more troops to secure the piece and prevent looting. There were also desperate please from the Iraqi National Museum for security and they went unheeded. Also, the iraqi army didn't "fall apart" we intentionally disbanded it, thus depriving thousands of young, healthy men with military training from a living (which adds to the pool of potential terrorist recruits) and undermining Iraq's ability to provide for its own security. There were bad guys in the Iraqi army, many of the higher ups were Baathist idealogues and many prison guards, obviously, engaged in torture, but the vast majority of the soldiers had no ideological bias, or were even pro-democracy and respected the rule of law.
By the way, the democrats didn't have the same intelligence as the white house, contrary to the white house spin. They were very selective about what information was released to congress and prevented reports that put much of the intelligence into question from coming to light until it was too late.
Sure, Iraq is worse after 2 years than either Germnany or Japan in terms of violence, but how much of that is due to foreign influence? A lot, I'd say.
If we'd sent in enough troops to begin with to prevent looting and to close the borders, and if we hadn't broken up a standing army made up largely of experienced soldiers with a respect for the rule of law, I think it's entirely possible Iraq could have become the modern equivalent of postwar Japan or Germany.
I find it a little odd that you accuse me of multiculturalism/cultural relativism right after suggesting I have some racist conception that somehow the Iraqis are less capable of appreciating democracy that Americans. Your statement is exactly the kind of irrational playing of the race card that makes PC/cultural relativists so annoying in the first place, but then you categorize me as a cultural relativist. Iraqis have the same brains as us god-fearing americans. But you've got to be pragmatic Iraqis have lived under authoritarian rule for a very long time. They don't currently possess the democratic institutions, civil society, or cultural norms that develop in a long standing democracy. Many, maybe most, Iraqis have expressed a desire for democratic reforms, but these things don't pop up overnight. It requires a kind of planning and stability and nurturing of democratic culture that the US has done a horrible job of providing.
It doesn't have to be a one for one tradeoff between liberty and safety in Iraq or in the US. It's about using some brains when promoting liberty and justice and all the other flowery words that became the fallback justification for invading iraq. I'm by no means a cultural relativist. I think we should impose democratic rule on every country we can, but we should be sure we're going about it in a smart and effective way that keeps human rights abuses to a minimum.
I don't know where you get the idea that the left is responsible for "the engorgement of despotic wallets", and forcing developing nations into 1st world dependency. I don't think debt relief or AIDs programs are the problem. The problem's coming from the proponents of unfettered free trade, or the guys who try to oust democratically elected leaders of countries like Haiti or Venezuela.
Oh come on, if anything the New York Times is too willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. They fell in lockstep with the whitehouse on questions of intelligence leading up to the iraq war. One of their journalists went to jail for 3 months to protect Karl Rove. And just because an article is printed in Rolling Stone doesn't immediately discredit it. That author's also written for publications like the Washington Post and the LA Times.
1. Nazi Germnay and 1945 Japan were much worse off then either had been 6 years previous. Despite this fact, the ruin wrought upon both countries made possible the thriving democratic nations you see today. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get beter.
Sure, economically, Japan and Germany were worse off in 1945, but at least those countries were under control. Iraq is on the brink of civil war. Perpetual warfare or the creation of a theocracy are both distinct possibilities, neither of which would be an improvement. I don't think german or japanese irregulars continued to take over police stations or blow up american convoys 2 years after WWII ended.
2. I don't believe that the US is treating the Iraqi's worse than Saddam did, or that conditions of life generally have detoriated as much as you believe.
Well, that's a difference of opinion. Iraqi's didn't suffer the constant blackouts, the gas lines, or the threats of being exposed to random shootings or car bombings when Saddam was in power. Sure, totalitarianism is no fun, but at least there are a predictable set of (admittedly oppressive) rules you can follow to avoid death or torture. Not the case now.
2b. I know several soldiers that have served in Iraq including one who was an interrogation specialist. After his tour of duty he went back as a civilian contractor. Now he trains interoggators for the Army. Of course he wouldn't talk about top-secret stuff, but he has always been extremely open about the kinds of interrogation he did - and it never involved torture of any kind. All of the vets that I've talked to say that we have an extremely pessimistic view of Iraq, and that in most of the country life is better than it ever was with Saddam.
Well, differences of opinion can extend to the military too. I know several people who've been to iraq who are very pessimistic about the progress there. One works in intelligence, so I feel like he's pretty well informed. Another was assigned to destroy a munitions stockpile in the middle of a town. Instead of following whatever the standard, relatively safe procedures for destroying munitions, the retards in his unit set up shells and explosives as a shooting gallery and ended up setting a nearby house on fire. You constantly here anecdotes like that coming out of Iraq.
Terrorists are being taught now that if they are captured by the U.S. they should do whatever they can to claim that they are being tortured.
Yes, that's a reasonable, if underhanded tactic. Assuming we can prove with reasonable certainty that someone is a terrorist, his testimony should be looked at with a skeptical eye. But that NYTimes article I cited is based on information coming from high ranking, US-Friendly Iraqi officials. Not from terrorists, but from Shiite officials who have a vested interest in the American handover working.
Just because someone disagrees with the way the war in Iraq has been prosecuted doesn't mean they're gullible, idealistic morons. A tiny portion of those who are against the war get disproportionate media exposure, probably to help discredit the anti-war argument. Many of us: wear shoes, are patriotic despite the stupid shit our country does, can appreciate an occasional "un-PC" joke, and are pragmatic enough to realize that hugging and bad folk music will not always be sufficient to solve to the world's problems.
I agree that it's delusional and counterproductive to think that violence is never an appropriate response, and yes the level of violent political and social oppression in the US is in no way comparable to what Pol Pot or Stalin did (although blacks and native americans living here a couple hundred years ago might disagree).
But my point wasn't that life in the US is as bad as life under Saddam in Iraq. It's that life in Iraq is as bad, if not worse now than it was when Saddam was in power. Getting rid of a bad guy, even for the wrong reasons, would have been fine by me if we'd managed the situation properly, but there's more violence there now than there ever was under Saddam. There are US soldiers doing night raids on houses based on lousy intelligence--often from people who just have a personal score to settle with the invadees or people rotting away in prisons for months or years after the cia and military have determined they're no threat (although if they ever get out that might not be the case after the way they were treated).
Soft torture? you may want to read that link I included above. People have been beaten to death in US custody, mauled by dogs, and sodomized (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=638 8256). I'm not talking about that fraternity house "simulated sodomy" boys-will-be-boys horseplay stuff. I'm talking about fucking teenage boys up the ass with fluorescent light tubes. Call me crazy, but that's just not how the world's bright shining beacon of liberty and freedom is supposed to act.
the vaccination/autism link is hardly a crazy idea. These vaccines contained mercury, which is a neurotoxin. New studies show that children who suffer from "acquired autism" in almost all cases possess an otherwise rare genetic flaw that results in an inability to effectively eliminate mercury from their bodies. That's pretty damning evidence if you ask me.
from http://www.autismwebsite.com/ari/dan/adams1.htm
In addition, there was a recent study by Holmes' et. al [7] of the level of mercury in the hair of infants (aged 12-24 months) who later were diagnosed with autism compared to controls (n=94 and 45, respectively). This study found that the autism group had 1/8 of the normal amount of mercury in their baby hair compared to controls, which suggests an inability to excrete mercury. They also found that the severity of autism had a strong inverse relationship with the level of mercury, with the most severe group having the lowest levels of mercury in their hair. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the group with the most inhibition of mercury excretion would be the most severely affected.
Sure, some people reflexively look only for the negative things when interpreting American history, and that can be as misleading as a historical treatise written by Bill O'Reilly. Regardless of the (blatantly false) justifications for going to war, and abuses carried out by scared 18 year old kids who didn't know any better, getting rid of Saddam would have been a good thing if we didn't immediately take over his prisons and begin treating prisoners exactly the way he treated them as a matter of national policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/international/mi ddleeast/16iraq.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=e951c ff236d15cb7&hp&ex=1132203600&partner=homepage
from a link from an old slashdot story (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 07/129248&tid=187&tid=14)
(http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/ wakeupcall04.html)
Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50.
"That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change.
"When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one-three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite-only one out of every four papers shows an effect."
Personally, I side with the conclusions of the guys who don't have a monetary stake in concluding cell phone radiation poses no danger to humans. It's damn inconvenient, but so are blindness and brain tumors.
The phone book lifting procedure is, eh, interesting. Those of us who are stronger than your average adolescent girl or have a friend who's willing to help will probably find it easier to install an air conditioner the normal way. Given that this is slashdot, however, I'm sure swarms of friendless weaklings will find your advice useful.
Slashdot Mirror
So fundamentalist christians want all the benefits of science without accepting any of those unpleasant side effects, like overwhelming evidence the earth is more than 6000 years old or that organisms change over time through the process of natural selection. That's having your scientific cake and eating the fundamentalist cake too.
Take a look at the museum web site: http://www.amnh.org/ Almost every other project has corporate donors. Also, fundamentalists don't have to be aware of the exhibit to scare donors away, the mere threat that a fundamentalist group will organize a boycott can be sufficient to scare off a potential donor.
If it's not about the religious debate, why haven't the non-evolution-related exhibits had so much trouble obtaining corporate funding?
"But can bioscience take away my sin?"
Yes, but can religion whiten my teeth and freshen my breath?
Lets leave the religion to the religious people and the science to the scientists. Accepting evolution doesn't require a person to have absolute and exclusive faith in science to answer all life's questions. It's reasonable for religion to play a role in ethical issues, but I'd rather have scientists creating things like bodyarmor, pharmaceuticals, etc.
Also, an audio cassette can be copied over by putting tape over the notches on top.
I don't know if this is such a great idea...Microwaves from multiple sources bouncing around in big metal cages may lead to "hotspots" where people get exposed to many times the "safe" energy levels. http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?stor y_id=4078811
Maybe it's unlikely, but I'd like to see more safetey testing before everyone who takes public transportation is subject to that risk (not to mention everyone's inane phone conversations).
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?quer
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?quer
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?quer
yeah, I think this conversation's progressed about as much as it's going to. regarding the lack of sufficient troop strength though, that's mostly based on Donald Rumsfeld's desire for a "light, fast, flexible army". That's the kind of army we took into Somalia with such disastrous results. There's this low key conflict in the pentagon between the "powell doctrine" of overwhelming force, (which has been our policy in every military conflict from vietnam to the first gulf war) doctrine and this minority opinion for a light army.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I never professed any desire to respect all cultures equally. Female circumcision, not allowing women to go to school, slavery, etc... all these things are objectively wrong and indefensible. You'll here no cultural relativism from me.
q -0316.html
What I said about the need for civil society and democratic culture isn't earth-shattering by the way, it's a widely accepted view among academics and policy wonks. http://www.policyreview.org/jun03/diamond.html And once again, it has nothig to do with race. Have a purebred american kid grow up in the middle east, and the same problems with lack of experience and faith in the system would arise.
We were't planning to prevent museum looting within days of the start of hostilities, we were planning on being able to react to chemical and biologic weapons attacks on our troops. If we'd known that the entire Iraqi army would fall apart again, I think we would have done a better job.
And what exactly would you call Imperial Japan before and during WWII? A commune? Anarchy? No, it was just as authortarian, if not as actively repressive, as Saddam's regime.
Yes, but we had a plan when we took over Japan. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/rebuilding-ira
We should have been planning to prevent museum looting, high ranking military planners were saying all along that the invasion itself would be a cakewalk, but that we would need 100,000 more troops to secure the piece and prevent looting. There were also desperate please from the Iraqi National Museum for security and they went unheeded. Also, the iraqi army didn't "fall apart" we intentionally disbanded it, thus depriving thousands of young, healthy men with military training from a living (which adds to the pool of potential terrorist recruits) and undermining Iraq's ability to provide for its own security. There were bad guys in the Iraqi army, many of the higher ups were Baathist idealogues and many prison guards, obviously, engaged in torture, but the vast majority of the soldiers had no ideological bias, or were even pro-democracy and respected the rule of law. By the way, the democrats didn't have the same intelligence as the white house, contrary to the white house spin. They were very selective about what information was released to congress and prevented reports that put much of the intelligence into question from coming to light until it was too late.
If we'd sent in enough troops to begin with to prevent looting and to close the borders, and if we hadn't broken up a standing army made up largely of experienced soldiers with a respect for the rule of law, I think it's entirely possible Iraq could have become the modern equivalent of postwar Japan or Germany.
I find it a little odd that you accuse me of multiculturalism/cultural relativism right after suggesting I have some racist conception that somehow the Iraqis are less capable of appreciating democracy that Americans. Your statement is exactly the kind of irrational playing of the race card that makes PC/cultural relativists so annoying in the first place, but then you categorize me as a cultural relativist. Iraqis have the same brains as us god-fearing americans. But you've got to be pragmatic Iraqis have lived under authoritarian rule for a very long time. They don't currently possess the democratic institutions, civil society, or cultural norms that develop in a long standing democracy. Many, maybe most, Iraqis have expressed a desire for democratic reforms, but these things don't pop up overnight. It requires a kind of planning and stability and nurturing of democratic culture that the US has done a horrible job of providing.
It doesn't have to be a one for one tradeoff between liberty and safety in Iraq or in the US. It's about using some brains when promoting liberty and justice and all the other flowery words that became the fallback justification for invading iraq. I'm by no means a cultural relativist. I think we should impose democratic rule on every country we can, but we should be sure we're going about it in a smart and effective way that keeps human rights abuses to a minimum.
I don't know where you get the idea that the left is responsible for "the engorgement of despotic wallets", and forcing developing nations into 1st world dependency. I don't think debt relief or AIDs programs are the problem. The problem's coming from the proponents of unfettered free trade, or the guys who try to oust democratically elected leaders of countries like Haiti or Venezuela.
Sure, economically, Japan and Germany were worse off in 1945, but at least those countries were under control. Iraq is on the brink of civil war. Perpetual warfare or the creation of a theocracy are both distinct possibilities, neither of which would be an improvement. I don't think german or japanese irregulars continued to take over police stations or blow up american convoys 2 years after WWII ended. Well, that's a difference of opinion. Iraqi's didn't suffer the constant blackouts, the gas lines, or the threats of being exposed to random shootings or car bombings when Saddam was in power. Sure, totalitarianism is no fun, but at least there are a predictable set of (admittedly oppressive) rules you can follow to avoid death or torture. Not the case now. Well, differences of opinion can extend to the military too. I know several people who've been to iraq who are very pessimistic about the progress there. One works in intelligence, so I feel like he's pretty well informed. Another was assigned to destroy a munitions stockpile in the middle of a town. Instead of following whatever the standard, relatively safe procedures for destroying munitions, the retards in his unit set up shells and explosives as a shooting gallery and ended up setting a nearby house on fire. You constantly here anecdotes like that coming out of Iraq.
Yes, that's a reasonable, if underhanded tactic. Assuming we can prove with reasonable certainty that someone is a terrorist, his testimony should be looked at with a skeptical eye. But that NYTimes article I cited is based on information coming from high ranking, US-Friendly Iraqi officials. Not from terrorists, but from Shiite officials who have a vested interest in the American handover working. Just because someone disagrees with the way the war in Iraq has been prosecuted doesn't mean they're gullible, idealistic morons. A tiny portion of those who are against the war get disproportionate media exposure, probably to help discredit the anti-war argument. Many of us: wear shoes, are patriotic despite the stupid shit our country does, can appreciate an occasional "un-PC" joke, and are pragmatic enough to realize that hugging and bad folk music will not always be sufficient to solve to the world's problems.
I agree that it's delusional and counterproductive to think that violence is never an appropriate response, and yes the level of violent political and social oppression in the US is in no way comparable to what Pol Pot or Stalin did (although blacks and native americans living here a couple hundred years ago might disagree). But my point wasn't that life in the US is as bad as life under Saddam in Iraq. It's that life in Iraq is as bad, if not worse now than it was when Saddam was in power. Getting rid of a bad guy, even for the wrong reasons, would have been fine by me if we'd managed the situation properly, but there's more violence there now than there ever was under Saddam. There are US soldiers doing night raids on houses based on lousy intelligence--often from people who just have a personal score to settle with the invadees or people rotting away in prisons for months or years after the cia and military have determined they're no threat (although if they ever get out that might not be the case after the way they were treated). Soft torture? you may want to read that link I included above. People have been beaten to death in US custody, mauled by dogs, and sodomized (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=638 8256). I'm not talking about that fraternity house "simulated sodomy" boys-will-be-boys horseplay stuff. I'm talking about fucking teenage boys up the ass with fluorescent light tubes. Call me crazy, but that's just not how the world's bright shining beacon of liberty and freedom is supposed to act.
Sure, some people reflexively look only for the negative things when interpreting American history, and that can be as misleading as a historical treatise written by Bill O'Reilly. Regardless of the (blatantly false) justifications for going to war, and abuses carried out by scared 18 year old kids who didn't know any better, getting rid of Saddam would have been a good thing if we didn't immediately take over his prisons and begin treating prisoners exactly the way he treated them as a matter of national policy. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/international/mi ddleeast/16iraq.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=e951c ff236d15cb7&hp&ex=1132203600&partner=homepage
why does someone who doesn't get the joke get modded to insightful?
from a link from an old slashdot story (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 07/129248&tid=187&tid=14)
/ wakeupcall04.html)
(http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05
Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50. "That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change. "When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one-three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite-only one out of every four papers shows an effect." Personally, I side with the conclusions of the guys who don't have a monetary stake in concluding cell phone radiation poses no danger to humans. It's damn inconvenient, but so are blindness and brain tumors.
The phone book lifting procedure is, eh, interesting. Those of us who are stronger than your average adolescent girl or have a friend who's willing to help will probably find it easier to install an air conditioner the normal way. Given that this is slashdot, however, I'm sure swarms of friendless weaklings will find your advice useful.