How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.
Economics 101: A company's profit is the product of two factors: The number of items sold and the profit margin on each item.
Let's imagine that the far East was far richer than it is now. For DSG, this means labour costs go up. But it also means that they have millions of extra people who can now afford to buy DSG products. The increased cost narrows the profit margin per item, but they're selling more items. So it's more or less a wash, even before you take into consideration the economies of scale that reduce per-item costs as total output increases.
At the same time, we have the added blessings of increased wealth in the world: more people can afford to educate their kids, so there are more thinkers, more scientists, more inventors. Consequently, we get better and more efficient ways of doing things, which in turn help to create more wealth.
To think that keeping the poor poor is in the best interests of the rich is to succumb to extremely short-term thinking. A rising tide floats all boats.
So DSG would love a richer far East. But that wealth won't just appear overnight. It has to be created, and the only way that's going to happen is by companies like DSG continuing to do business, transferring money paid by customers in Britain to workers in the far East. And if a Malaysian worker is paid half what a British worker is, then good: hire two of them, feeding two families rather than just one, and getting twice the output in return. How can that be thought to be immoral?
It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem.
You're being unfair. No one (or nearly no one) is saying "you can't have", they're saying "this is mine, get your own". Wealth isn't a fixed pie to be divided up; it's something that's actively created by people's actions. Your wealth does not cause my poverty.
Money isn't the root of all evil; the desire to get money without earning it is. And that moral failing exists irrespective of the dominant economic system; it just expresses itself in different ways. Under capitalism, it's unfair and exploitative trading practices. Under socialism, it's welfare parasitism and government corruption. Different symptoms of the same disease.
I'm fairly certain the hotel *could* have me arrested for stealing their soap...
I doubt it. Not when the packaging calls it "complimentary soap". I think it's fair enough to consider the soap to be a gift from the hotel to you, much like the little chocolates on the pillow.
It's a flawed metaphor anyway. If you take the soap, it's gone, whereas when you download an MP3, it's still there. A better comparison would be dodging your fare on the Underground - and Transport for London levies a £50 fine for that, which is less than a parking ticket will cost you.
Not surprising, since the term "marijuana" was only co-opted into English by prohibitionists in the first place.
In English, that plant is called cannabis. "Marijuana" is a piece of Mexican slang, which was aggressively used by prohibitionists because they found that it linked the drug in people's minds with the Mexican immigrant community. This allowed them to take advantage of the existing anti-immigrant (racist) prejudice of 1930s America to gather public support for prohibition.
If I understand you correctly, you're trying to tell me that advancing pro-life policy is a bad thing because not everyone agrees
Actually, I was suggesting no such thing. You can advance pro-life policy all you like. You just can't call yourself liberal while you're doing it.
And while it's completely tangential to my point, preventing someone from beating his wife or owning a slave does not cause them physical harm in the way that preventing someone from having an abortion does.
As I said, it's a matter of balancing the possible moral burden of allowing a murder against the certain moral burden of harming a young woman. Until there's consensus on the first part, it can never be "liberal" to carry out the second part.
Say it's "more Liberal" for the government not to form any conclusions about whether abortion is homicide.
Actually, that's pretty much how it is.
You see, the trouble with the abortion issue is that different people have different opinions on when a foetus turns into a person. For some, particularly those with strong religious views, it's at the moment of conception. For others, it's at birth. What seems to be accepted in the medical community as more-or-less a consensus is "viability" - the point at which the foetus is potentially capable of surviving outside of the womb. Even there, opinions vary on when exactly that happens.
What's NOT in doubt, however, is that the mother is a person. This is important.
The government has two basic options: Ban it or allow it.
If they DON'T ban it, the moral choice falls to the pregnant woman. She is free to have an abortion or not, as she decides and according to her own judgement. Those who believe it to be murder will choose not to have an abortion, while those who don't think it's murder will be free to abort.
If they DO ban it, those who believe it to be murder will still not have an abortion, but those who don't are now effectively coerced into giving birth against their will. Since carrying a baby to term is a lot of hard work and extremely painful, one could argue that the woman is being subjected to a form of slavery and torture. At the very least, her freedom is being infringed.
Now, if you're 100% convinced that abortion is murder, the need to prevent it trumps the need to avoid the slavery/torture aspect of forcing a woman to carry to term. But the U.S. government is NOT 100% convinced. It has to weigh the possibility that it's allowing murder against the certainty that to ban abortion would trample over a woman's right to ownership of her body. To put it in biblical terms, it's a possible sin of omission (failing to prevent a murder) versus a definite sin of commission (enslaving a woman).
So why is it "liberal" to say that the government can't decide? Because a fairly central liberal position is that you can't legislate morality. To a liberal, you have to have something close to a moral consensus before you can make a law that results in people's rights being taken away. In the absence of such a consensus, the rights must remain in place. Put it this way: If the government is pro-choice, two options are available to a pregnant woman. If the government is pro-life, there is now only one choice. Less choice = less freedom, and liberals are all about freedom. You have to be really, really sure that something is wrong before you ban it.
Yes, it is similar. But the advantage over instant runoff is that it doesn't require busy people to go back to the polls 2, 3 or even 4 times. One ballot, two votes, better representation. Simple enough that anyone can understand it, but less of a blunt instrument that one-man-one-vote and less of an inconvenience than runoffs.
You're never going to find a perfect system, but I like this one better than any alternative I've seen so far.
We used an interesting system here in London to pick our mayor: Your ballot has two columns - your first choice and your second choice. You can't vote for the same person in both.
The idea is that the votes from everyone's first column are totalled up. If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote, they eliminate all but the top two candidates. They then add to each candidate's total all of the votes for that candidate in the second column. The winner is the one with the highest total from both columns combined.
In practice what this means is that you vote in column 1 for the candidate you'd really prefer, even if he has no chance of winning. You vote in the column 2 for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning and whom you don't mind too much.
Applied to the national elections in America, it would mean that the greens could all vote for Nader safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't result in a "lost vote" for the Democrats. And libertarians could vote for Paul.
The beauty of such a system is that the final result would be a better reflection of the electorate's will (Gore would have won, for instance), and the true extent of minority candidates' support would also be more obvious, so those candidates would have a bigger influence on the election - for instance, they might not fall foul of the 15% "viability" standard required to participate in the debates. And in the long run, it's just possible that a third party might break the stranglehold of the Dems and Reps.
Am I crazy, or is this idea worth exploring in America?
Have you taken a look at birthrates internationally? They're declining everywhere, much faster than expected.
On the other hand, Wikipedia lists only 25 countries with negative population growth, and the USA isn't one of them, having a growth rate of +0.97%. The world average is +1.17%.
I'm not sure how that compares to (say) 50 years ago, but I'd be prepared to bet that the increased average lifespan resulting from improvements in nutrition and health care outweighs the effect of lower birth rates.
Parasites, slavers, and users of open-source software
The open source community is in big trouble if people with your mentality exist in significant numbers.
The point you're missing is: value != money.
As I understand it, the open-source philosophy is this: I do some work, and I make it available to you for free. I have now provided you with something of value. You now have my source code, so if you can find a way to improve it, you do so and send the improvements back to me, completing a fair exchange. But maybe your skills lie in a different area, and you can't contribute anything back to me directly. No problem, chances are there's *something* you can do that will be valuable to someone, who in turn can do something for someone else, who can do something for someone else, and so on and so on until eventually I get something of value back.
That's why there's an open-source community. In theory, everybody contributes and everybody benefits. But if you think that using open-source software implies no obligation to at least try to put something back in, OSS is doomed.
Way to go on finding the nastiest possible interpretation of what I said.
For what it's worth, old people *do not* ride for free. It's just that their tickets are paid for by the government instead of the old people themselves. And the reason this is so is that the government has, over the lifetime of any given old person, taken quite a lot of money away from them in taxes, and covering transport costs is one of the ways they make up for it.
Something of value in exchange for something of value, see?
Minor point, but the congestion charge is £8. Ken Livingstone did indeed propose a £25 charge for the "most polluting" cars (basically anything with an engine displacing over 3 litres or more than 4 years old), but that became one of the main issues in the mayoral elections earlier this year, where Ken was deservedly beaten. The new mayor, Boris Johnson, binned those plans almost as soon as he took office.
If the bus isn't full and you otherwise wouldn't have paid, then what's the problem?
Sometimes it's hard to tell if people are posting ironically, but I'm going to go ahead an answer as though you were serious.
The philosophical reason you don't take free rides on buses is that paying your bus fare is a Kantian categorical imperative. The ability to take a free ride on a bus presupposes the existence of a bus service, but were everybody to ride for free, the bus service would cease to run, negating the possibility of a free ride.
Actually, the real reason is a lot simpler: You're getting something of value, so you have an obligation to give something of value in return. Only parasites and slavers fail to abide by this principle. Which would you like to be?
I just feel, and this is from my limited understand of evolution and Darwinism, that evolution isn't truly science either.
Based on your comments, I'd say that it's not so much your understanding of evolution that's lacking, as your understanding of the principles of science.
For a theory to qualify as "truly science" absolutely does not require it to be perfect or complete. A scientific theory is not a collection of facts that reveal an absolute truth flawlessly. How could it? What is important is not the answer, but how you get to it.
The scientific method, as used by evolutionary biology, chemistry, astrophysics, and every other branch of the sciences, requires that you take four steps:
Observe
Form a hypothesis
Make predictions about what would happen if the hypothesis were true
Test the hypothesis, by looking for actual occurrences that disagree with your predictions
On the other hand, Intelligent Design follows a much simpler process:
Believe
The beauty of evolutionary theory is that at any moment, someone could turn up some piece of evidence that absolutely, undeniably proves that it's not true. And if that happened, biologists would start working on a new theory that fits the facts better. That's how it's supposed to work!
Tell me: What would have to happen, tomorrow, to prove that the "theory" of Intelligent Design is false?
This was so dumb I just had to laugh. +5 funny. As if anything mechanical we humans can build could put enough Carbon Dioxide into the GLOBAL atmosphere to alter it in a significant way. As if we could build any device that had the polluting power of say, a volcano. Gee and Earth is FULL of volcanoes.
Fixed it for ya.
The point here is, over time small problems add up to big problems. No individual snowflake thinks it's responsible for the avalanche. Of course the environmental impact of wind farms is going to be negligible in the short term, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least think about the long-term consequences.
The phenomenon you're talking about is called the Tragedy of the Commons and it's been around since long before capitalism became the dominant economic model.
The problem arises whenever an action causes a short-term benefit to an individual, but a long term cost to a group. Since the individual is part of the group, he is faced with two choices:
Take the action, get the benefit and face the cost.
Don't take the action, watch someone else take it, and get the cost without the benefit.
That's a pretty easy decision to make, and we haven't (yet) found a way a getting around the problem without trampling all over people's rights.
It's particularly tricky when the cost is very long-term. As a previous poster mentioned, the reduction in wind energy resulting from wind farms will (given enough farms and enough time) have a substantial effect on the climate. But the long run cost of any individual wind farm is impossible to calculate, since there are so many unknown variables, and probably so small as to be negligible anyway. So how do we go about assigning blame and collecting compensation fairly?
A parting thought: If, 150 years ago, you had asked an average person what they thought the top environmental problem of the future would be, they'd have talked about dealing with horse manure. It's not because of government intervention that we don't walk knee deep in horsesh*t today.
There's a good lesson here: Poetic/metaphoric language can get you in trouble when people take you too literally. The dice comment is regularly trotted out as "proof" of his religious convictions, but the later statements in which he unequivocally denies that he believes in God somehow get missed.
In any event, this is all a rather sad reverse ad hominem; whether or not Einstein believed in God has no bearing on whether or not God exists. But both theists and atheists try to "claim" Einstein, because having a genius on your side *seems* to add weight to your argument. It doesn't, but there you go.
...whats to keep them from just moving out of country? Nothing?
It seems that your views are popular among policy-makers in Africa.
In April 2004, South African Minister for Education Kader Asmal called for "a stricter regulation of the international movement of professionals," in an effort to counter brain drain. This year, unannounced, the government put into place the first example of this regulation by pressuring its Universities into forbidding foreign-based companies from contacting students with a view to recruitment.
I'm a South African working for a small London-based consultancy. I was hired because the company's Technical Director, a graduate of the University of Cape Town, had dropped an email to his old lecturers asking if they had any students who might be interested in a job in London. Last year, I used the same approach to hire a new member of the technical team, and that worked out so well that I thought I'd try it again this year. Unfortunately, this time around the powers that be intervened, telling me that contact was forbidden.
It seems that rather than trying to hold onto graduates by making working life in South Africa more attractive, they're gone for the quick-and-dirty fix of trying to shield them from the outside world. If you can't see the grass on the other side, how do you know it's greener?
As many other posters on this thread have said, that kind of short-term thinking is counter-productive. How would you feel if, as a skilled African, your government tried to make it harder for you to get a job overseas? Would it inspire a sense of national pride or loyalty? No. You'd be more inclined than ever to leave, and less inclined to come back one day.
It's nice to see that the Chinese Government have learned from their western counterparts that anything you do in the name of "protecting consumer interests" becomes allowable. Their next lesson: "think of the children".
Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but it looks to me like the intention of this is to prevent Chinese citizens from seeing any map that recognises Taiwan or Tibet. Any one remember Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? - Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Well, that's an opinion Machiavelli would have approved of.
The problem is that if you allow that logic, all terrorism is justified. Let's rewrite your statement as "It's pretty clear that America's occupation of Iraq wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for Al-Quaeda's terrorist tactics. Because of that, Al-Quaeda's terrorism was justified." Do you still agree? If so, I think you're in the minority.
It's an age-old philosophical question: Can immoral acts be condoned if they're in a good cause? As far as I'm concerned, the answer is no, but I recognise that there are a lot of different opinions on the matter.
In any event, it's all very well saying "it's for a good cause", but defining a good cause is a very subjective thing. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a terrorist who didn't think his cause was good.
...farmers often shot their farmhands just to make a point to the others...
Serious citation needed here. You can't make such a sweeping statement (*often*?!?) without giving at least some proof. I paid quite a lot of attention to the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I don't remember hearing any such thing.
...the average white South African treated blacks as slaves...
That's a gross exaggeration. The average white South African was more or less indifferent. They played no part in actively oppressing blacks, but were happy to accept the advantages that the systemic oppression brought them, so long as it didn't cause too much trouble. It's hard to get people to stand up when other people's rights are being trampled, isn't it? Not a lot of Americans complained about the Trail of Tears either.
The trouble with politics is that it's the extremists who are most likely to be politically active. Decisions are made by those who show up, and those tend to be the people with strong views. Very few Russians in 1916 were enthusiastic communists; the rest were just prepared to go along with it. And very few South Africans in 1948 were hardcore racists; but they were OK with the fact that their government was made up of scumbags and that is their guilt.
Apartheid is always going to be a touchy subject, so I have to watch my words here, but... Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. That his cause was noble is beyond doubt, and his leadership of the post-Apartheid South Africa was magnificent, but the fact remains that he was the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which carried out bombings of civilian targets and which was therefore a terrorist organisation.
They say that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and I agree with the parent post that we have to be very sceptical whenever somebody uses the term "terrorist" because they usually have an agenda in doing so. But we also have to be careful not to condone acts that are genuinely terrorism just because we don't think the perpetrators are bad people. The world isn't made up of saints and sinners, and sometimes even good people cross a line.
Slashdot Mirror
How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.
Economics 101: A company's profit is the product of two factors: The number of items sold and the profit margin on each item.
Let's imagine that the far East was far richer than it is now. For DSG, this means labour costs go up. But it also means that they have millions of extra people who can now afford to buy DSG products. The increased cost narrows the profit margin per item, but they're selling more items. So it's more or less a wash, even before you take into consideration the economies of scale that reduce per-item costs as total output increases.
At the same time, we have the added blessings of increased wealth in the world: more people can afford to educate their kids, so there are more thinkers, more scientists, more inventors. Consequently, we get better and more efficient ways of doing things, which in turn help to create more wealth.
To think that keeping the poor poor is in the best interests of the rich is to succumb to extremely short-term thinking. A rising tide floats all boats.
So DSG would love a richer far East. But that wealth won't just appear overnight. It has to be created, and the only way that's going to happen is by companies like DSG continuing to do business, transferring money paid by customers in Britain to workers in the far East. And if a Malaysian worker is paid half what a British worker is, then good: hire two of them, feeding two families rather than just one, and getting twice the output in return. How can that be thought to be immoral?
It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem.
You're being unfair. No one (or nearly no one) is saying "you can't have", they're saying "this is mine, get your own". Wealth isn't a fixed pie to be divided up; it's something that's actively created by people's actions. Your wealth does not cause my poverty.
Money isn't the root of all evil; the desire to get money without earning it is. And that moral failing exists irrespective of the dominant economic system; it just expresses itself in different ways. Under capitalism, it's unfair and exploitative trading practices. Under socialism, it's welfare parasitism and government corruption. Different symptoms of the same disease.
I'm fairly certain the hotel *could* have me arrested for stealing their soap...
I doubt it. Not when the packaging calls it "complimentary soap". I think it's fair enough to consider the soap to be a gift from the hotel to you, much like the little chocolates on the pillow.
It's a flawed metaphor anyway. If you take the soap, it's gone, whereas when you download an MP3, it's still there. A better comparison would be dodging your fare on the Underground - and Transport for London levies a £50 fine for that, which is less than a parking ticket will cost you.
they just say *GASP* marijuana!
Not surprising, since the term "marijuana" was only co-opted into English by prohibitionists in the first place.
In English, that plant is called cannabis. "Marijuana" is a piece of Mexican slang, which was aggressively used by prohibitionists because they found that it linked the drug in people's minds with the Mexican immigrant community. This allowed them to take advantage of the existing anti-immigrant (racist) prejudice of 1930s America to gather public support for prohibition.
See the Wiki.
If I understand you correctly, you're trying to tell me that advancing pro-life policy is a bad thing because not everyone agrees
Actually, I was suggesting no such thing. You can advance pro-life policy all you like. You just can't call yourself liberal while you're doing it.
And while it's completely tangential to my point, preventing someone from beating his wife or owning a slave does not cause them physical harm in the way that preventing someone from having an abortion does.
As I said, it's a matter of balancing the possible moral burden of allowing a murder against the certain moral burden of harming a young woman. Until there's consensus on the first part, it can never be "liberal" to carry out the second part.
Say it's "more Liberal" for the government not to form any conclusions about whether abortion is homicide.
Actually, that's pretty much how it is.
You see, the trouble with the abortion issue is that different people have different opinions on when a foetus turns into a person. For some, particularly those with strong religious views, it's at the moment of conception. For others, it's at birth. What seems to be accepted in the medical community as more-or-less a consensus is "viability" - the point at which the foetus is potentially capable of surviving outside of the womb. Even there, opinions vary on when exactly that happens.
What's NOT in doubt, however, is that the mother is a person. This is important.
The government has two basic options: Ban it or allow it.
Now, if you're 100% convinced that abortion is murder, the need to prevent it trumps the need to avoid the slavery/torture aspect of forcing a woman to carry to term. But the U.S. government is NOT 100% convinced. It has to weigh the possibility that it's allowing murder against the certainty that to ban abortion would trample over a woman's right to ownership of her body. To put it in biblical terms, it's a possible sin of omission (failing to prevent a murder) versus a definite sin of commission (enslaving a woman).
So why is it "liberal" to say that the government can't decide? Because a fairly central liberal position is that you can't legislate morality. To a liberal, you have to have something close to a moral consensus before you can make a law that results in people's rights being taken away. In the absence of such a consensus, the rights must remain in place. Put it this way: If the government is pro-choice, two options are available to a pregnant woman. If the government is pro-life, there is now only one choice. Less choice = less freedom, and liberals are all about freedom. You have to be really, really sure that something is wrong before you ban it.
Yes, it is similar. But the advantage over instant runoff is that it doesn't require busy people to go back to the polls 2, 3 or even 4 times. One ballot, two votes, better representation. Simple enough that anyone can understand it, but less of a blunt instrument that one-man-one-vote and less of an inconvenience than runoffs.
You're never going to find a perfect system, but I like this one better than any alternative I've seen so far.
We used an interesting system here in London to pick our mayor: Your ballot has two columns - your first choice and your second choice. You can't vote for the same person in both.
The idea is that the votes from everyone's first column are totalled up. If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote, they eliminate all but the top two candidates. They then add to each candidate's total all of the votes for that candidate in the second column. The winner is the one with the highest total from both columns combined.
In practice what this means is that you vote in column 1 for the candidate you'd really prefer, even if he has no chance of winning. You vote in the column 2 for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning and whom you don't mind too much.
Applied to the national elections in America, it would mean that the greens could all vote for Nader safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't result in a "lost vote" for the Democrats. And libertarians could vote for Paul.
The beauty of such a system is that the final result would be a better reflection of the electorate's will (Gore would have won, for instance), and the true extent of minority candidates' support would also be more obvious, so those candidates would have a bigger influence on the election - for instance, they might not fall foul of the 15% "viability" standard required to participate in the debates. And in the long run, it's just possible that a third party might break the stranglehold of the Dems and Reps.
Am I crazy, or is this idea worth exploring in America?
Only if you're into S&M too.
Have you taken a look at birthrates internationally? They're declining everywhere, much faster than expected.
On the other hand, Wikipedia lists only 25 countries with negative population growth, and the USA isn't one of them, having a growth rate of +0.97%. The world average is +1.17%.
I'm not sure how that compares to (say) 50 years ago, but I'd be prepared to bet that the increased average lifespan resulting from improvements in nutrition and health care outweighs the effect of lower birth rates.
Parasites, slavers, and users of open-source software
The open source community is in big trouble if people with your mentality exist in significant numbers.
The point you're missing is: value != money.
As I understand it, the open-source philosophy is this: I do some work, and I make it available to you for free. I have now provided you with something of value. You now have my source code, so if you can find a way to improve it, you do so and send the improvements back to me, completing a fair exchange. But maybe your skills lie in a different area, and you can't contribute anything back to me directly. No problem, chances are there's *something* you can do that will be valuable to someone, who in turn can do something for someone else, who can do something for someone else, and so on and so on until eventually I get something of value back.
That's why there's an open-source community. In theory, everybody contributes and everybody benefits. But if you think that using open-source software implies no obligation to at least try to put something back in, OSS is doomed.
Way to go on finding the nastiest possible interpretation of what I said.
For what it's worth, old people *do not* ride for free. It's just that their tickets are paid for by the government instead of the old people themselves. And the reason this is so is that the government has, over the lifetime of any given old person, taken quite a lot of money away from them in taxes, and covering transport costs is one of the ways they make up for it.
Something of value in exchange for something of value, see?
Minor point, but the congestion charge is £8. Ken Livingstone did indeed propose a £25 charge for the "most polluting" cars (basically anything with an engine displacing over 3 litres or more than 4 years old), but that became one of the main issues in the mayoral elections earlier this year, where Ken was deservedly beaten. The new mayor, Boris Johnson, binned those plans almost as soon as he took office.
If the bus isn't full and you otherwise wouldn't have paid, then what's the problem?
Sometimes it's hard to tell if people are posting ironically, but I'm going to go ahead an answer as though you were serious.
The philosophical reason you don't take free rides on buses is that paying your bus fare is a Kantian categorical imperative. The ability to take a free ride on a bus presupposes the existence of a bus service, but were everybody to ride for free, the bus service would cease to run, negating the possibility of a free ride.
Actually, the real reason is a lot simpler: You're getting something of value, so you have an obligation to give something of value in return. Only parasites and slavers fail to abide by this principle. Which would you like to be?
You gonna set the Emperor of the United States on us if we do? He wasn't much of a fan of calling it "Frisco" either.
I just feel, and this is from my limited understand of evolution and Darwinism, that evolution isn't truly science either.
Based on your comments, I'd say that it's not so much your understanding of evolution that's lacking, as your understanding of the principles of science.
For a theory to qualify as "truly science" absolutely does not require it to be perfect or complete. A scientific theory is not a collection of facts that reveal an absolute truth flawlessly. How could it? What is important is not the answer, but how you get to it.
The scientific method, as used by evolutionary biology, chemistry, astrophysics, and every other branch of the sciences, requires that you take four steps:
On the other hand, Intelligent Design follows a much simpler process:
The beauty of evolutionary theory is that at any moment, someone could turn up some piece of evidence that absolutely, undeniably proves that it's not true. And if that happened, biologists would start working on a new theory that fits the facts better. That's how it's supposed to work!
Tell me: What would have to happen, tomorrow, to prove that the "theory" of Intelligent Design is false?
That's why it doesn't belong in Science classes.
Fixed it for ya.
The point here is, over time small problems add up to big problems. No individual snowflake thinks it's responsible for the avalanche. Of course the environmental impact of wind farms is going to be negligible in the short term, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least think about the long-term consequences.
The phenomenon you're talking about is called the Tragedy of the Commons and it's been around since long before capitalism became the dominant economic model.
The problem arises whenever an action causes a short-term benefit to an individual, but a long term cost to a group. Since the individual is part of the group, he is faced with two choices:
That's a pretty easy decision to make, and we haven't (yet) found a way a getting around the problem without trampling all over people's rights.
It's particularly tricky when the cost is very long-term. As a previous poster mentioned, the reduction in wind energy resulting from wind farms will (given enough farms and enough time) have a substantial effect on the climate. But the long run cost of any individual wind farm is impossible to calculate, since there are so many unknown variables, and probably so small as to be negligible anyway. So how do we go about assigning blame and collecting compensation fairly?
A parting thought: If, 150 years ago, you had asked an average person what they thought the top environmental problem of the future would be, they'd have talked about dealing with horse manure. It's not because of government intervention that we don't walk knee deep in horsesh*t today.
There's a good lesson here: Poetic/metaphoric language can get you in trouble when people take you too literally. The dice comment is regularly trotted out as "proof" of his religious convictions, but the later statements in which he unequivocally denies that he believes in God somehow get missed.
In any event, this is all a rather sad reverse ad hominem; whether or not Einstein believed in God has no bearing on whether or not God exists. But both theists and atheists try to "claim" Einstein, because having a genius on your side *seems* to add weight to your argument. It doesn't, but there you go.
...whats to keep them from just moving out of country? Nothing?It seems that your views are popular among policy-makers in Africa.
In April 2004, South African Minister for Education Kader Asmal called for "a stricter regulation of the international movement of professionals," in an effort to counter brain drain. This year, unannounced, the government put into place the first example of this regulation by pressuring its Universities into forbidding foreign-based companies from contacting students with a view to recruitment.
I'm a South African working for a small London-based consultancy. I was hired because the company's Technical Director, a graduate of the University of Cape Town, had dropped an email to his old lecturers asking if they had any students who might be interested in a job in London. Last year, I used the same approach to hire a new member of the technical team, and that worked out so well that I thought I'd try it again this year. Unfortunately, this time around the powers that be intervened, telling me that contact was forbidden.
It seems that rather than trying to hold onto graduates by making working life in South Africa more attractive, they're gone for the quick-and-dirty fix of trying to shield them from the outside world. If you can't see the grass on the other side, how do you know it's greener?
As many other posters on this thread have said, that kind of short-term thinking is counter-productive. How would you feel if, as a skilled African, your government tried to make it harder for you to get a job overseas? Would it inspire a sense of national pride or loyalty? No. You'd be more inclined than ever to leave, and less inclined to come back one day.
It's nice to see that the Chinese Government have learned from their western counterparts that anything you do in the name of "protecting consumer interests" becomes allowable. Their next lesson: "think of the children".
Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but it looks to me like the intention of this is to prevent Chinese citizens from seeing any map that recognises Taiwan or Tibet. Any one remember Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? - Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Sad, but unsurprising.
Well, that's an opinion Machiavelli would have approved of.
The problem is that if you allow that logic, all terrorism is justified. Let's rewrite your statement as "It's pretty clear that America's occupation of Iraq wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for Al-Quaeda's terrorist tactics. Because of that, Al-Quaeda's terrorism was justified." Do you still agree? If so, I think you're in the minority.
It's an age-old philosophical question: Can immoral acts be condoned if they're in a good cause? As far as I'm concerned, the answer is no, but I recognise that there are a lot of different opinions on the matter.
In any event, it's all very well saying "it's for a good cause", but defining a good cause is a very subjective thing. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a terrorist who didn't think his cause was good.
...farmers often shot their farmhands just to make a point to the others...Serious citation needed here. You can't make such a sweeping statement (*often*?!?) without giving at least some proof. I paid quite a lot of attention to the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I don't remember hearing any such thing.
...the average white South African treated blacks as slaves...That's a gross exaggeration. The average white South African was more or less indifferent. They played no part in actively oppressing blacks, but were happy to accept the advantages that the systemic oppression brought them, so long as it didn't cause too much trouble. It's hard to get people to stand up when other people's rights are being trampled, isn't it? Not a lot of Americans complained about the Trail of Tears either.
The trouble with politics is that it's the extremists who are most likely to be politically active. Decisions are made by those who show up, and those tend to be the people with strong views. Very few Russians in 1916 were enthusiastic communists; the rest were just prepared to go along with it. And very few South Africans in 1948 were hardcore racists; but they were OK with the fact that their government was made up of scumbags and that is their guilt.
Apartheid is always going to be a touchy subject, so I have to watch my words here, but... Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. That his cause was noble is beyond doubt, and his leadership of the post-Apartheid South Africa was magnificent, but the fact remains that he was the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which carried out bombings of civilian targets and which was therefore a terrorist organisation.
They say that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and I agree with the parent post that we have to be very sceptical whenever somebody uses the term "terrorist" because they usually have an agenda in doing so. But we also have to be careful not to condone acts that are genuinely terrorism just because we don't think the perpetrators are bad people. The world isn't made up of saints and sinners, and sometimes even good people cross a line.
In a word: Africa. West and Central Africa were extensively colonised by the French and the Belgians. Have a look at this map.