Suicide terrorism is inherently linked to having forces on the ground where they aren't wanted. Many people in the US armed forces wants to move away from having unpopular bases on foreign soil towards a heavier reliance on carrier forces for power projection. If the carrier fleet was better equipped it might be possible to close those Saudi bases that piss everyone off so much. More aircraft carriers and less aircraft, ground vehicles, etc especially in places where they are not popular is a pretty reasonable reallocation of resources and if it works global threat levels might drop allowing for a reduction in the military budget.
So basic materials science with direct applications which could enhance national culture (the study of the sound things make when they break) is wasteful? Heck I don't even work in the field and I can think of a fair few uses for knowing how to encode and replicate the sound things make when they break beyond the video game industry. Sounds like an excellent project to me. And the football one is even more useful. You want people like me to make you robots that are better able to effectively collaborate? Then we will need lots and lots of models of systems where humans collaborate towards a common goal. Never mind the fact that again enhancing the performance of football players enhances national culture and is a worthy end in an of it itself. Further the presentation of that grant is misleading, it is about collaboration and the on-field contributions of soccer players is but a small part of it.
I'm not affiliated with either project and they aren't my collaborators but it sounds to me like both were wisely selected grants. The general public is not qualified to select what projects are of scientific interest and looking at the NSF for waste is like looking at a HMMWV and a Prius and asking if we can make the Prius a bit more efficient. The people working at the NSF selecting grants get a per diem that barely covers expenses, they think a lunch break is a dance move and will be the first to tell you that many, many excellent projects are not funded. I'm sure if qualified people looked really, really hard you might find a project or two that was funded when another should have been, but at a time when we need to make savings, wasting time, effort and money in one of the most efficient portions of our government makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever.
Heck no at all. The whole point of my last post was to point out that by fixing the penalties for copyright infringement you are fixing the price the distribution rights.
In this light what you are suggesting is letting a monopoly with a history of abuse decide for itself where it wants the degree of enforcement to be.
You aren't going to fix the massive inefficiencies in the copyrighted material distribution market by letting the bloated inefficient abuses monopolies set the prices they charge for these things. I would estimate we could make whole swathes of media, music, games, software and video at a fraction of the cost we currently do if competition from alternative distribution channels were opened up by reducing penalties on infringement.
Problem with this is step 2. The songs value is determined by how strictly you enforce copyright which is what you are trying to decide. Remember there is no 'market price' for a song because copyright itself represents massive government intervention in the market. When you fix the fine you are in fact attempting to fix the price of the copyrighted work. I think the best way to do this is to look at the product, calculate how much it costs the most efficient entities in the business to produce that product, divide this by some reasonable sales total in that industry, add (or subtract) some percentage which reflects how much profit per sale the most efficient companies should be making (something like 10% seems reasonable for most industries) and then multiply by some factor if one wants to act punitively (say 3x for wilful commercial infringement). The most efficient distributors of music can publish songs for peanuts (these are successful individual bands distributing via the internet). The penalties for distributing a copyrighted song should therefore probably be a fraction of a penny per copy made.
Problem with this perspective is actually pretty simple. What is the fair market value?
Copyrighted works only have any value what so ever because of copyright. This represents a massive government intervention in the market to raise the price. There is no such thing as a fair market value for a copyrighted work.
What you are trying to establish when you punish someone for copyright is the monopoly value for copyrighted work. The government is de facto fixing the price of these goods. Further the good being 'taken' here is not the work itself, it is the exclusive right to distribute the work. What one has to work out isn't the price of a copyrighted work but rather what change in sales and price resulted from someone violating the distributer's exclusive distribution rights.
Further one has to ask if we don't want some mechanism in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly. I think everyone can agree that copyright holders have in the past massively abused the exclusive distribution privileged we granted them. Perhaps ensuring that there is always some competition in distribution (even if it is non-commercial competition) might allow the market to work it's magic and push down prices and drive up efficiency.
Sure and while we are at it lets get rid of history, literature, languages, music. Most people don't need any of that stuff either right?
We don't teach people maths because it is useful, we teach it so we have a citizenry which minimally engaged with the big questions of our time by being informed of the big questions of the past. We teach these things to enhance the human spirit.
While I take your point there is no `fair price' you can set on a multi-multi-billion dollar loan to a private entity which looks like it is about to go under. These `titans of capitalism' who control the banks have already told us what the correct mechanism for determining prices is, the market. Had the banks been permitted to fold then they would be worth precisely nothing to their shareholders and little to their bond holders. That is by the very definition these people insist upon the `fair' price of these banks. Same goes for the toxic CDOs we bought. The fact that executive officers tried to pass these things off as having value when the market (which is how we determine value) said they were worthless suggests to me that these executives shouldn't just be unemployed right now, they should be in jail for fraud. Instead they are getting set to award themselves another round of bonuses for using massive quantities of tax payers money to abuse the yield curve and act like the are financial geniuses as a result, all the while ignoring their civic duty (and the only reason we allow banks to exist in the first place), to act as a service which distributes moneys to worthwhile investments.
That would not represent a fair price as the banks would have effectively been loaned hundreds of billions of pounds so they can go on abusing the yield curve. Lend me over £400 billion and I can make a profit in banking no problem. The shareholders should be wiped out along with the bond holders. Do as you suggest, but when it comes time to IPO pocket the difference.
You employers debts are not in the form of shares in or bonds with a bank. Their account would be fine and you know what, if they aren't I'm fine if you want to extend protection on accounts with some of the money we used on the bailout, it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the bailout itself. Just crush the share and bond holders. If your bosses bank folds you will get paid just fine. Banks fail and there are mechanisms in place to deal with it. Would we have needed some emergency measures to ease the transition? Sure. Heck lets set aside a couple of billion quid to deal with making the process as fast as possible, it is still cheaper than the bailout and still doesn't result in perverse incentives. The banks needed to be crushed, banking needed to be saved. And the money we put in to the banking system lost us a whole bunch of cash when analysed from an opportunity cost perspective. It was a bad investment. You know how you can tell it was a bad investment? Because the private sector didn't stump up the cash to do it. Lets say we had a bunch of new banks capitalised with say £200 billion (half the money used for the bailout). Conservatively leveraging these banks at 10:1 would result in £2 trillion of new lending. That is nearly the whole UK GDP (as in way too much lending!). And with the other banks dead these new banks would have no trouble finding good customers and making sound investments. Heck you know what to make the process faster we could just divide up the accounts of the banks as they failed to the new banks. Keep the old banks infrastructure in place and guarantee to pay all employees working below a certain level of management. Nothing would need to change except marking all bond holder accounts as valued at zero, all shares as null and void, a new paint job for the building and taking the CXOs out behind the woodshed. With virtually no competition these banks would grow rapidly and become very valuable, within a short space of time. The government could privatise them and then we really would be looking at a tidy, tidy profit for the public purse. Why? Because we would have actually filled a niche in the market that the private sector was unable to fill due to barriers to entry (banks are hard to capitalise especially during a recession). From a Keynesian perspective the bailout makes no sense. From an Austrian perspective the bailout makes no sense. From a monetarist perspective the bailout makes no sense. Fuck it from a Communist perspective the bailout makes no sense. No school of economics would recommend just lending money to irresponsible bankers.
Wait you think that the Japanese want to develop nuclear weapons? Or that Taiwan is in any mood to initiate a showdown with the mainland?
Japanese culture is permeated by a "no nukes" attitude. The generation that can recall Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be passing on but the events of August 1945 have not been forgotten. The three non-nuclear principles still enjoy very broad popular support.
As for Taiwan building nuclear bombs, that is just insane. For the US to mount any kind of successful defence of Taiwan it would require the support of her strategic allies in the region. India and Japan need to feel an impending sense of foreboding when China ratchets up it's military readiness not weighing concerns about the interaction of the mainland with a nuclear armed Taiwan and the potential for increased tensions resulting in nuclear exchange.
Even with India and Japan on side the US would probably lose a conflict with China in that theatre. The Chinese have a modern military with a large air-force and naval strike capability. Any task force the US sent to the Taiwan Strait would need to be submersible otherwise it would become so in short order.
The main reason the Chinese don't mount such a campaign is it would be economically devastating for all parties, would damage Chinese trade relations and would almost certainly make them a pariah. Unless of course the Republic of China gave them an excuse by doing something really stupid, like say developing atomic weapons.
I'm not saying you cant have a nuanced position. I'm not even saying that you cant critique the question itself. If I ask you if there is a shopping centre in a nearby town the correct response may well be "I don't know". But that does not answer the question I asked, it is pointing out that the question was a stupid one to ask (presumably because you don't know the town well enough).
If I press you on the issue you either believe there is a shopping centre, or you do not believe there is a shopping centre. If you really are completely uncertain then you don't believe there is a shopping centre.
You can point out that 'god' is poorly defined and unclear and you have no idea what 'god' is supposed to be. That is fine, but in that case again you don't believe in a god. You are at liberty to point out that asking the question is stupid because you haven't been provided with a definition of god and hence cant believe in one, but there is an answer to the question.
Theists and atheists get frustrated with agnostics because when asked one question they keep answering another.
I don't disagree with anything you have said, I'm just not sure what the relevance of your point is. Yes Christianity has many different interpretations, but we can form a representative form of the religion with certain core doctrines. Or if we wanted we could look at commonalities between Christians that are different in a wider population of people. Christianity is not a monolithic belief structure where everyone thinks the same thing, sure. That said one can meaningfully talk about what Christians believe and one can meaningfully talk about Christian beliefs.
Pi is the sum from n=0 to infinity of (-1)^n/(2n+1). There you go, the whole thing in one line. I even have a representation of this formula in my head.
With that said I'm not a mathematical realist, pi does not exist. It is not a material thing. There are encodings of pi which do exist in the sense that those representation are formed from material. The concept of pi does not exist, there are representations of pi made from material, and the material exists. Any other statement of existence is equivocation.
As for you suggestion people say "Oh Lord Jesus", I advise you to say "I hate God and everything he stands for", every day. I suggest you do this because it is a magic invocation that will draw cheerleaders to you. If I'm wrong about this phrases magical powers then nothing will happen but if I'm not there will be cheerleaders, and black jack! It wont hurt anything and it only takes two seconds. Of course you might find the phrase offensive since it suggests undermining a cherished belief of yours, but if that is the case perhaps you might like to consider that those you are conversing with are not interested in becoming slaves to a zombie who wants you to eat his flesh.
Emotional appeals are not substitutes for rational arguments, nor does bribery you cant deliver on provide a desirable moral imperative.
Interesting title for a book. Revealing a massive ignorance of both Christian theology and atheism.
Faith is generally held by any Christian with a functioning cerebral cortex as "Trust in a reliable god" making an atheist having faith utterly self contradictory. Calling Lee Strobel a philosopher is an insult to every vaguely competent Christian theologian and Philosopher in history.
You know presenting the premises for Kalam as though they are universally accepted (or even widely accepted) philosophical principles makes you look extremely disingenuous.
Just because you cant or don't know doesn't mean you cant have an opinion. Knowledge isn't the same thing as belief. It isn't that people are offended that you haven't picked a side, it's that you pretend there is a third option between believing and not believing.
I take your point but I think you are underestimating the interaction between the form of popular ideologies and the likelihood of sociopaths having power in the ruling class when those ideologies are part of the founding tradition of a political system.
The totalitarian inclinations of the likes of Bush and other very unpleasant politicians in the West today is not unrelated to their ideology. I would argue that a nuanced look at the history of communism allows one to draw those parallels more effectively not less.
Bush rammed through his oppressive agenda in part because he is a sociopathic son of a bitch, and ignored the damage it did because he was a sociopathic son of a bitch, but his agenda is also a result of his ultra-conservative ideology and it is no co-incidence that many of these sociopathic arseholes come from his wing of the Republican party. The totalitarian tendencies of the neo-cons and the totalitarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks are a parallel one is justified in mentioning.
I would argue we have to combat both dangerous ideas and dangerous people, not just the latter.
Erm, I'm a social democrat to the left of most people in Europe. I have nothing against the political left. I didn't say that Stalin and Pol Pot killed people because they were communists, I said they killed people because they were radical communists. This is not nit picking, saying the 9/11 Hijackers killed people because they were radical Islamists is not the same thing as saying they killed people because they were Muslims. One is patently false, the other clearly a partial truth.
If you want to point out that being radical communists wasn't the only thing that lead Stalin and Pol Pot to kill people, go ahead. Mea culpa, my statement was misleading in this regard. But if you want to absolve communism entirely of the role the ideology played in some of histories worst excesses I remain to be convinced.
Some modern Christians have little in common with historical Christianity, but many if not most have plenty in common. If you attend a church then you are organised, like historical Christianity. If you think that it is grace and not works that are most pleasing to YHWH then you have something in common with historical Christianity.
My intent is not to use ideology pejoratively, nor do I think I was suggesting Christianity was an ideology, although maybe I got sloppy with language at one point or another. I have an ideology so if I'm being pejorative about them I'm insulting myself. To be fair that wouldn't be uncalled, my ideology has had problems, they are just nothing to do with atheism.
Before we talk about atheism spawning ideology we are going to need to agree what atheism is. If atheism is the assertion there is no god then it is true one can draw conclusions from this statement. I would term an atheist as someone who has not been compelled to a belief in God. If you want to term the ideologies that result from the belief there is no god 'atheist ideologies' you are at liberty to do so, what I don't understand is why you think that term is particularly informative.
To what extent can we say that Fascism is drawn from atheism as opposed to Thomism being drawn from Christianity? In the case of National Socialism which played a larger role in the less desirable attributes of the ideology, atheism (which most National Socialists were less than enamoured with) or anti-semitism which has a history drawn primarily from a particular application of the source text of Christianity?
Atheism hasn't learned from "it's" mistakes because it hasn't made any. It cant make any. This isn't a particular achievement on atheism's part. Belief in Santa hasn't done much by way of significant harm or good throughout history either. Both positions are essentially devoid of direct consequences and as you have pointed out at most have secondary effects through other ideas. The negative content of those ideas is almost exclusively drawn from sources other than atheism because atheism says virtually nothing.
I wouldn't assert that atheism is an alternative to ideology. I have an ideology and it isn't atheism, it is a mixture of Western social democracy, the enlightenment and secular humanism. It has nothing to do with atheism. It is also not without it's problems in history. Problems I'm well aware of and have studied.
That was the whole point of my post. I was responding to someone who had swapped something which was an ideology (politically active religiously motivated political ideologies) with something that was not (atheism).
If when you talk about Christianity you aren't talking something which has a drastic impact on your politics then when you use the word Christianity and I use the word Christianity we aren't talking about the same thing. When I use that word I'm referring to a representative depiction of the religion of about 1 billion of my fellow humans. It is a socially conservative, politically active and includes a moral philosophy which has a dramatic impact on the social and political reality of most Western states and has (sometimes for better, usually for worse) had a significant impact on a variety of related political ideologies.
If your ideology isn't inspired by Christianity in any way good for you. If it is, then I think it is important to take a good look at history and make darn sure you don't repeat the myriad mistakes committed as a direct result of specific interpretations of your religion's source text.
But let's just blame it on communism. Yeah, that's way easier than talking about the social and political environment they took power in and the factors that enabled them and why nobody stopped them before they did such great damage. If we did that, we might notice parallels forming as the political process decays in our own societies, and that would just be so unpleasant...
The social and political environment includes the fact that communism was a popular ideology. I'm not absolving histories sociopaths of the pain they are to blame for. Blame is not a finite resource.
In the context of this discussion the type of blame I was trying to assign was at the level of particular ideologies. If you want to go a step higher in abstraction and talk about humanities love of authoritarianism I got plenty of blame to dispense there too. Similarly if you want to go less abstract there was plenty wrong with Lenin and Stalin as individuals.
I am in no way suggesting that we 'just blame Communism'. I'm saying communism shares the blame. Communists don't get to go around saying "Stalin didn't do X because he was a communist, he did X because he was a sociopath".
Let's take a concrete example. You are right that correlation does not imply causation, but you also mention collective farming. Collectivised farming justified by communism in the Soviet Union lead to mass starvation. What motivating factors would you say contributed to this atrocity? Which organised belief system would you say those ideas were drawn from? Is it fair to criticise an ideology which still incorporates those ideas? What people and ideas caused it? The widespread belief that Communism was a good idea was one of the major social and political factors that lead to this disaster.
Strongly held convictions can be dangerous this is true, but I remain to be convinced that unwavering and extreme commitment to an idea alone is particularly dangerous. Ghandi was pretty extreme about the whole non-violence thing and I'm not saying that some consequences of that weren't unpleasant but on the whole non-violence hasn't done much harm even in the hands of it's most extreme adherents. I don't really disagree with your point that it is possible to be a de facto religious zealot about any ideology, but I'm not sure being a religious zealot along represents that big a deal. People who aren't organised have limited powers, people who lack motivation to harm others will generally not do so. The Holocaust or the Crusades are the result of people following ideologies that were organised, extreme and unpleasant.
I don't particularly disagree with any of your point in particular. I just wanted to add that it isn't sufficient to hold an ideology to account that something be done in the name of that ideology. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of reason but no one would blame reason for the Reign of Terror. I think if we are going to say X caused Y we need a strong link between the two. Hitler is actually a good example again. He stated on more than one occasion that he felt the extermination of the Jews was desired by the Biblical god. That alone doesn't impart responsibility for the Holocaust on Christianity (that said there are some rather unpleasant ideas still floating about in Christianity that may have contributed, watch "The Passion of the Christ" if you want to see what they are). The point you make about organisation is a good one, in addition to lacking the motive (at least from atheism), atheists also lack the means to atrocity through lack of organisation, at least in so far as atheism, unlike Communism, Christianity, etc, lacks controlling structures.
If you look at history you will find plenty of evidence of atheists doing unpleasant things. Pol Pot for a start.
The question when we assign blame to ideologies is did the ideology lead the the unpleasant actions. Pol Pot and Stalin and so on didn't kill people because they were atheists. They killed people because they were radical communists, and communists need to have a look at their ideology and ask themselves why every time communists get sweeping powers they do such unpleasant things.
Same goes for Christianity, Islam, every ideology / religion. Christianity encourages the respect of authority, the widely held conception of faith is dangerous, the idea that salvation through grace as opposed to works is dangerous. Some of the bad things people have done in history have been a direct result of their interpretation of Christianity and when that repeatedly happens people will begin to wonder if the ideology / religion itself is a good thing.
Some ideologies are better than others, and if we measure them on their track record it is pretty darn clear that most religions are not conducive to a good social order. Communists should not go around acting all surprised when people point to Stalin and Pol Pot when they talk about their ideology and Christians cant complain when the Crusades and Slavery get brought up. That is the history of those ideologies and ideologies are judged on those histories.
Which brings us nicely to atheism. By it's very nature atheism doesn't do diddly. Go ask your average theist and they will tell you that atheism has nothing to offer, and they are in essence right. No one gets anything out of being an atheist. It doesn't compel anyone to do anything. Are you compelled to do stuff because you don't believe in the tooth fairy? Or Thor? Of course not.
This guy was a Malthusian whack job, you want to complain about that ideology have a field day. But suggesting that atheism had anything to do with his actions is just silly.
While I take your point, the reason I said 'giving a PowerPoint presentation' rather than 'giving a presentation' was to distinguish between bad presentations (those given with power point), and good ones (those not). Most presentations given without PowerPoint don't suffer from the problems that those given with PowerPoint do. I've given presentations without a beamer as well (in my case because I felt that the black board was a more appropriate tool for that particular presentation). I'm all for using the right tool for the job, but at the end of the day there are more people who have to give presentations than there are people we can train to give good presentations (either because of ability, inclination or time). I really don't see the harm in having software informed by expert opinion and best practices so that even the bad presentations we have to sit through are properly laid out, concise by necessity, etc..
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Suicide terrorism is inherently linked to having forces on the ground where they aren't wanted. Many people in the US armed forces wants to move away from having unpopular bases on foreign soil towards a heavier reliance on carrier forces for power projection. If the carrier fleet was better equipped it might be possible to close those Saudi bases that piss everyone off so much. More aircraft carriers and less aircraft, ground vehicles, etc especially in places where they are not popular is a pretty reasonable reallocation of resources and if it works global threat levels might drop allowing for a reduction in the military budget.
So basic materials science with direct applications which could enhance national culture (the study of the sound things make when they break) is wasteful? Heck I don't even work in the field and I can think of a fair few uses for knowing how to encode and replicate the sound things make when they break beyond the video game industry. Sounds like an excellent project to me. And the football one is even more useful. You want people like me to make you robots that are better able to effectively collaborate? Then we will need lots and lots of models of systems where humans collaborate towards a common goal. Never mind the fact that again enhancing the performance of football players enhances national culture and is a worthy end in an of it itself. Further the presentation of that grant is misleading, it is about collaboration and the on-field contributions of soccer players is but a small part of it.
I'm not affiliated with either project and they aren't my collaborators but it sounds to me like both were wisely selected grants. The general public is not qualified to select what projects are of scientific interest and looking at the NSF for waste is like looking at a HMMWV and a Prius and asking if we can make the Prius a bit more efficient. The people working at the NSF selecting grants get a per diem that barely covers expenses, they think a lunch break is a dance move and will be the first to tell you that many, many excellent projects are not funded. I'm sure if qualified people looked really, really hard you might find a project or two that was funded when another should have been, but at a time when we need to make savings, wasting time, effort and money in one of the most efficient portions of our government makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever.
Heck no at all. The whole point of my last post was to point out that by fixing the penalties for copyright infringement you are fixing the price the distribution rights.
In this light what you are suggesting is letting a monopoly with a history of abuse decide for itself where it wants the degree of enforcement to be.
You aren't going to fix the massive inefficiencies in the copyrighted material distribution market by letting the bloated inefficient abuses monopolies set the prices they charge for these things. I would estimate we could make whole swathes of media, music, games, software and video at a fraction of the cost we currently do if competition from alternative distribution channels were opened up by reducing penalties on infringement.
Problem with this is step 2. The songs value is determined by how strictly you enforce copyright which is what you are trying to decide. Remember there is no 'market price' for a song because copyright itself represents massive government intervention in the market. When you fix the fine you are in fact attempting to fix the price of the copyrighted work. I think the best way to do this is to look at the product, calculate how much it costs the most efficient entities in the business to produce that product, divide this by some reasonable sales total in that industry, add (or subtract) some percentage which reflects how much profit per sale the most efficient companies should be making (something like 10% seems reasonable for most industries) and then multiply by some factor if one wants to act punitively (say 3x for wilful commercial infringement).
The most efficient distributors of music can publish songs for peanuts (these are successful individual bands distributing via the internet). The penalties for distributing a copyrighted song should therefore probably be a fraction of a penny per copy made.
Problem with this perspective is actually pretty simple. What is the fair market value?
Copyrighted works only have any value what so ever because of copyright. This represents a massive government intervention in the market to raise the price. There is no such thing as a fair market value for a copyrighted work.
What you are trying to establish when you punish someone for copyright is the monopoly value for copyrighted work. The government is de facto fixing the price of these goods. Further the good being 'taken' here is not the work itself, it is the exclusive right to distribute the work. What one has to work out isn't the price of a copyrighted work but rather what change in sales and price resulted from someone violating the distributer's exclusive distribution rights.
Further one has to ask if we don't want some mechanism in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly. I think everyone can agree that copyright holders have in the past massively abused the exclusive distribution privileged we granted them. Perhaps ensuring that there is always some competition in distribution (even if it is non-commercial competition) might allow the market to work it's magic and push down prices and drive up efficiency.
Sure and while we are at it lets get rid of history, literature, languages, music. Most people don't need any of that stuff either right?
We don't teach people maths because it is useful, we teach it so we have a citizenry which minimally engaged with the big questions of our time by being informed of the big questions of the past. We teach these things to enhance the human spirit.
While I take your point there is no `fair price' you can set on a multi-multi-billion dollar loan to a private entity which looks like it is about to go under. These `titans of capitalism' who control the banks have already told us what the correct mechanism for determining prices is, the market. Had the banks been permitted to fold then they would be worth precisely nothing to their shareholders and little to their bond holders. That is by the very definition these people insist upon the `fair' price of these banks.
Same goes for the toxic CDOs we bought. The fact that executive officers tried to pass these things off as having value when the market (which is how we determine value) said they were worthless suggests to me that these executives shouldn't just be unemployed right now, they should be in jail for fraud. Instead they are getting set to award themselves another round of bonuses for using massive quantities of tax payers money to abuse the yield curve and act like the are financial geniuses as a result, all the while ignoring their civic duty (and the only reason we allow banks to exist in the first place), to act as a service which distributes moneys to worthwhile investments.
That would not represent a fair price as the banks would have effectively been loaned hundreds of billions of pounds so they can go on abusing the yield curve. Lend me over £400 billion and I can make a profit in banking no problem. The shareholders should be wiped out along with the bond holders.
Do as you suggest, but when it comes time to IPO pocket the difference.
You employers debts are not in the form of shares in or bonds with a bank. Their account would be fine and you know what, if they aren't I'm fine if you want to extend protection on accounts with some of the money we used on the bailout, it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the bailout itself. Just crush the share and bond holders.
If your bosses bank folds you will get paid just fine. Banks fail and there are mechanisms in place to deal with it. Would we have needed some emergency measures to ease the transition? Sure. Heck lets set aside a couple of billion quid to deal with making the process as fast as possible, it is still cheaper than the bailout and still doesn't result in perverse incentives.
The banks needed to be crushed, banking needed to be saved. And the money we put in to the banking system lost us a whole bunch of cash when analysed from an opportunity cost perspective. It was a bad investment. You know how you can tell it was a bad investment? Because the private sector didn't stump up the cash to do it.
Lets say we had a bunch of new banks capitalised with say £200 billion (half the money used for the bailout). Conservatively leveraging these banks at 10:1 would result in £2 trillion of new lending. That is nearly the whole UK GDP (as in way too much lending!). And with the other banks dead these new banks would have no trouble finding good customers and making sound investments.
Heck you know what to make the process faster we could just divide up the accounts of the banks as they failed to the new banks. Keep the old banks infrastructure in place and guarantee to pay all employees working below a certain level of management. Nothing would need to change except marking all bond holder accounts as valued at zero, all shares as null and void, a new paint job for the building and taking the CXOs out behind the woodshed.
With virtually no competition these banks would grow rapidly and become very valuable, within a short space of time. The government could privatise them and then we really would be looking at a tidy, tidy profit for the public purse. Why? Because we would have actually filled a niche in the market that the private sector was unable to fill due to barriers to entry (banks are hard to capitalise especially during a recession).
From a Keynesian perspective the bailout makes no sense. From an Austrian perspective the bailout makes no sense. From a monetarist perspective the bailout makes no sense. Fuck it from a Communist perspective the bailout makes no sense. No school of economics would recommend just lending money to irresponsible bankers.
Wait you think that the Japanese want to develop nuclear weapons? Or that Taiwan is in any mood to initiate a showdown with the mainland?
Japanese culture is permeated by a "no nukes" attitude. The generation that can recall Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be passing on but the events of August 1945 have not been forgotten. The three non-nuclear principles still enjoy very broad popular support.
As for Taiwan building nuclear bombs, that is just insane. For the US to mount any kind of successful defence of Taiwan it would require the support of her strategic allies in the region. India and Japan need to feel an impending sense of foreboding when China ratchets up it's military readiness not weighing concerns about the interaction of the mainland with a nuclear armed Taiwan and the potential for increased tensions resulting in nuclear exchange.
Even with India and Japan on side the US would probably lose a conflict with China in that theatre. The Chinese have a modern military with a large air-force and naval strike capability. Any task force the US sent to the Taiwan Strait would need to be submersible otherwise it would become so in short order.
The main reason the Chinese don't mount such a campaign is it would be economically devastating for all parties, would damage Chinese trade relations and would almost certainly make them a pariah. Unless of course the Republic of China gave them an excuse by doing something really stupid, like say developing atomic weapons.
I'm not saying you cant have a nuanced position. I'm not even saying that you cant critique the question itself. If I ask you if there is a shopping centre in a nearby town the correct response may well be "I don't know". But that does not answer the question I asked, it is pointing out that the question was a stupid one to ask (presumably because you don't know the town well enough).
If I press you on the issue you either believe there is a shopping centre, or you do not believe there is a shopping centre. If you really are completely uncertain then you don't believe there is a shopping centre.
You can point out that 'god' is poorly defined and unclear and you have no idea what 'god' is supposed to be. That is fine, but in that case again you don't believe in a god. You are at liberty to point out that asking the question is stupid because you haven't been provided with a definition of god and hence cant believe in one, but there is an answer to the question.
Theists and atheists get frustrated with agnostics because when asked one question they keep answering another.
I don't disagree with anything you have said, I'm just not sure what the relevance of your point is. Yes Christianity has many different interpretations, but we can form a representative form of the religion with certain core doctrines. Or if we wanted we could look at commonalities between Christians that are different in a wider population of people. Christianity is not a monolithic belief structure where everyone thinks the same thing, sure. That said one can meaningfully talk about what Christians believe and one can meaningfully talk about Christian beliefs.
Pi is the sum from n=0 to infinity of (-1)^n/(2n+1). There you go, the whole thing in one line. I even have a representation of this formula in my head.
With that said I'm not a mathematical realist, pi does not exist. It is not a material thing. There are encodings of pi which do exist in the sense that those representation are formed from material. The concept of pi does not exist, there are representations of pi made from material, and the material exists. Any other statement of existence is equivocation.
As for you suggestion people say "Oh Lord Jesus", I advise you to say "I hate God and everything he stands for", every day. I suggest you do this because it is a magic invocation that will draw cheerleaders to you. If I'm wrong about this phrases magical powers then nothing will happen but if I'm not there will be cheerleaders, and black jack! It wont hurt anything and it only takes two seconds. Of course you might find the phrase offensive since it suggests undermining a cherished belief of yours, but if that is the case perhaps you might like to consider that those you are conversing with are not interested in becoming slaves to a zombie who wants you to eat his flesh.
Emotional appeals are not substitutes for rational arguments, nor does bribery you cant deliver on provide a desirable moral imperative.
Interesting title for a book. Revealing a massive ignorance of both Christian theology and atheism.
Faith is generally held by any Christian with a functioning cerebral cortex as "Trust in a reliable god" making an atheist having faith utterly self contradictory. Calling Lee Strobel a philosopher is an insult to every vaguely competent Christian theologian and Philosopher in history.
You know presenting the premises for Kalam as though they are universally accepted (or even widely accepted) philosophical principles makes you look extremely disingenuous.
Just because you cant or don't know doesn't mean you cant have an opinion. Knowledge isn't the same thing as belief. It isn't that people are offended that you haven't picked a side, it's that you pretend there is a third option between believing and not believing.
Would you say that National Socialism had nothing to do with the Holocaust?
I take your point but I think you are underestimating the interaction between the form of popular ideologies and the likelihood of sociopaths having power in the ruling class when those ideologies are part of the founding tradition of a political system.
The totalitarian inclinations of the likes of Bush and other very unpleasant politicians in the West today is not unrelated to their ideology. I would argue that a nuanced look at the history of communism allows one to draw those parallels more effectively not less.
Bush rammed through his oppressive agenda in part because he is a sociopathic son of a bitch, and ignored the damage it did because he was a sociopathic son of a bitch, but his agenda is also a result of his ultra-conservative ideology and it is no co-incidence that many of these sociopathic arseholes come from his wing of the Republican party. The totalitarian tendencies of the neo-cons and the totalitarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks are a parallel one is justified in mentioning.
I would argue we have to combat both dangerous ideas and dangerous people, not just the latter.
Erm, I'm a social democrat to the left of most people in Europe. I have nothing against the political left. I didn't say that Stalin and Pol Pot killed people because they were communists, I said they killed people because they were radical communists. This is not nit picking, saying the 9/11 Hijackers killed people because they were radical Islamists is not the same thing as saying they killed people because they were Muslims. One is patently false, the other clearly a partial truth.
If you want to point out that being radical communists wasn't the only thing that lead Stalin and Pol Pot to kill people, go ahead. Mea culpa, my statement was misleading in this regard. But if you want to absolve communism entirely of the role the ideology played in some of histories worst excesses I remain to be convinced.
Some modern Christians have little in common with historical Christianity, but many if not most have plenty in common. If you attend a church then you are organised, like historical Christianity. If you think that it is grace and not works that are most pleasing to YHWH then you have something in common with historical Christianity.
My intent is not to use ideology pejoratively, nor do I think I was suggesting Christianity was an ideology, although maybe I got sloppy with language at one point or another. I have an ideology so if I'm being pejorative about them I'm insulting myself. To be fair that wouldn't be uncalled, my ideology has had problems, they are just nothing to do with atheism.
Before we talk about atheism spawning ideology we are going to need to agree what atheism is. If atheism is the assertion there is no god then it is true one can draw conclusions from this statement. I would term an atheist as someone who has not been compelled to a belief in God. If you want to term the ideologies that result from the belief there is no god 'atheist ideologies' you are at liberty to do so, what I don't understand is why you think that term is particularly informative.
To what extent can we say that Fascism is drawn from atheism as opposed to Thomism being drawn from Christianity? In the case of National Socialism which played a larger role in the less desirable attributes of the ideology, atheism (which most National Socialists were less than enamoured with) or anti-semitism which has a history drawn primarily from a particular application of the source text of Christianity?
Atheism hasn't learned from "it's" mistakes because it hasn't made any. It cant make any. This isn't a particular achievement on atheism's part. Belief in Santa hasn't done much by way of significant harm or good throughout history either. Both positions are essentially devoid of direct consequences and as you have pointed out at most have secondary effects through other ideas. The negative content of those ideas is almost exclusively drawn from sources other than atheism because atheism says virtually nothing.
I wouldn't assert that atheism is an alternative to ideology. I have an ideology and it isn't atheism, it is a mixture of Western social democracy, the enlightenment and secular humanism. It has nothing to do with atheism. It is also not without it's problems in history. Problems I'm well aware of and have studied.
That was the whole point of my post. I was responding to someone who had swapped something which was an ideology (politically active religiously motivated political ideologies) with something that was not (atheism).
If when you talk about Christianity you aren't talking something which has a drastic impact on your politics then when you use the word Christianity and I use the word Christianity we aren't talking about the same thing. When I use that word I'm referring to a representative depiction of the religion of about 1 billion of my fellow humans. It is a socially conservative, politically active and includes a moral philosophy which has a dramatic impact on the social and political reality of most Western states and has (sometimes for better, usually for worse) had a significant impact on a variety of related political ideologies.
If your ideology isn't inspired by Christianity in any way good for you. If it is, then I think it is important to take a good look at history and make darn sure you don't repeat the myriad mistakes committed as a direct result of specific interpretations of your religion's source text.
But let's just blame it on communism. Yeah, that's way easier than talking about the social and political environment they took power in and the factors that enabled them and why nobody stopped them before they did such great damage. If we did that, we might notice parallels forming as the political process decays in our own societies, and that would just be so unpleasant...
The social and political environment includes the fact that communism was a popular ideology. I'm not absolving histories sociopaths of the pain they are to blame for. Blame is not a finite resource.
In the context of this discussion the type of blame I was trying to assign was at the level of particular ideologies. If you want to go a step higher in abstraction and talk about humanities love of authoritarianism I got plenty of blame to dispense there too. Similarly if you want to go less abstract there was plenty wrong with Lenin and Stalin as individuals.
I am in no way suggesting that we 'just blame Communism'. I'm saying communism shares the blame. Communists don't get to go around saying "Stalin didn't do X because he was a communist, he did X because he was a sociopath".
Let's take a concrete example. You are right that correlation does not imply causation, but you also mention collective farming. Collectivised farming justified by communism in the Soviet Union lead to mass starvation. What motivating factors would you say contributed to this atrocity? Which organised belief system would you say those ideas were drawn from? Is it fair to criticise an ideology which still incorporates those ideas? What people and ideas caused it? The widespread belief that Communism was a good idea was one of the major social and political factors that lead to this disaster.
Strongly held convictions can be dangerous this is true, but I remain to be convinced that unwavering and extreme commitment to an idea alone is particularly dangerous. Ghandi was pretty extreme about the whole non-violence thing and I'm not saying that some consequences of that weren't unpleasant but on the whole non-violence hasn't done much harm even in the hands of it's most extreme adherents.
I don't really disagree with your point that it is possible to be a de facto religious zealot about any ideology, but I'm not sure being a religious zealot along represents that big a deal. People who aren't organised have limited powers, people who lack motivation to harm others will generally not do so.
The Holocaust or the Crusades are the result of people following ideologies that were organised, extreme and unpleasant.
I don't particularly disagree with any of your point in particular. I just wanted to add that it isn't sufficient to hold an ideology to account that something be done in the name of that ideology. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of reason but no one would blame reason for the Reign of Terror.
I think if we are going to say X caused Y we need a strong link between the two. Hitler is actually a good example again. He stated on more than one occasion that he felt the extermination of the Jews was desired by the Biblical god. That alone doesn't impart responsibility for the Holocaust on Christianity (that said there are some rather unpleasant ideas still floating about in Christianity that may have contributed, watch "The Passion of the Christ" if you want to see what they are).
The point you make about organisation is a good one, in addition to lacking the motive (at least from atheism), atheists also lack the means to atrocity through lack of organisation, at least in so far as atheism, unlike Communism, Christianity, etc, lacks controlling structures.
If you look at history you will find plenty of evidence of atheists doing unpleasant things. Pol Pot for a start.
The question when we assign blame to ideologies is did the ideology lead the the unpleasant actions. Pol Pot and Stalin and so on didn't kill people because they were atheists. They killed people because they were radical communists, and communists need to have a look at their ideology and ask themselves why every time communists get sweeping powers they do such unpleasant things.
Same goes for Christianity, Islam, every ideology / religion. Christianity encourages the respect of authority, the widely held conception of faith is dangerous, the idea that salvation through grace as opposed to works is dangerous. Some of the bad things people have done in history have been a direct result of their interpretation of Christianity and when that repeatedly happens people will begin to wonder if the ideology / religion itself is a good thing.
Some ideologies are better than others, and if we measure them on their track record it is pretty darn clear that most religions are not conducive to a good social order. Communists should not go around acting all surprised when people point to Stalin and Pol Pot when they talk about their ideology and Christians cant complain when the Crusades and Slavery get brought up. That is the history of those ideologies and ideologies are judged on those histories.
Which brings us nicely to atheism. By it's very nature atheism doesn't do diddly. Go ask your average theist and they will tell you that atheism has nothing to offer, and they are in essence right. No one gets anything out of being an atheist. It doesn't compel anyone to do anything. Are you compelled to do stuff because you don't believe in the tooth fairy? Or Thor? Of course not.
This guy was a Malthusian whack job, you want to complain about that ideology have a field day. But suggesting that atheism had anything to do with his actions is just silly.
While I take your point, the reason I said 'giving a PowerPoint presentation' rather than 'giving a presentation' was to distinguish between bad presentations (those given with power point), and good ones (those not). Most presentations given without PowerPoint don't suffer from the problems that those given with PowerPoint do.
I've given presentations without a beamer as well (in my case because I felt that the black board was a more appropriate tool for that particular presentation). I'm all for using the right tool for the job, but at the end of the day there are more people who have to give presentations than there are people we can train to give good presentations (either because of ability, inclination or time).
I really don't see the harm in having software informed by expert opinion and best practices so that even the bad presentations we have to sit through are properly laid out, concise by necessity, etc..