When asked where he got his inspiration, horror writer Robert Bloch, best known for Psycho said: "I have the heart of a little boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk." (Stephen King may have picked up the line later.)
[Quoting the GP]"The difference is that the purpose of their armed forces is defense, whereas the US' is empire building. The war on terrorism is a thinly veiled facade for imperialism, hardly better cloaked than converting the heathen masses."
Wow, you really believe that tripe. Unfortunatly what I have found is that people who use arguments like the ones you are using are not going to be happy no matter what. They live to vehemently protest something.
How ironic that the real reason for the US military force is to ensure people like you have a voice and the ability to express your opinions. Sad.
Clearly you were denying that the current military stance does not amount to imperialism and is rather in your view one of defense. In fact, you referred to the opposing view as tripe. After a couple more sentences worth of content-free abuse you finally arrive at the closest you come to argument, the assertion that "the real reason for the US military force is to ensure people like you have a voice", which the evidence in my response showed was a complete misstatement of the scope of US military operations abroad.
As for your inexplicably modded follow-up troll, clearly if a poster says the real reason for the US military force is to defend American freedoms and that it is not empire building, then in can be inferred that the poster believes that the overseas bases currently in place serve somehow to defend American freedoms.
Here is a quote from Chalmers Johnson's "The Arithmetic of America's Military Bases Abroad: What Does It All Add Up to?":
According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.
These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.
How is such massive foreign deployment serving American freedom? In fact it is far more likely that the resentment created by excessive interventions will ultimately harm US interests. Even when foreign deployment creates close ties abroad, those ties are often with repressive governments with terrible human rights records.
It used to be that conservatives lived up to their name and opposed foreign adventures and large standing armies. Properly speaking those who, like you, support the status quo of a massive network of overseas bases should be refered to as "militarists", "jingoists", or even "imperialists" rather than "conservatives" or "patriots".
Yes, but the presumed relationship between the assumptions of a theorem and actual physical observations may sometimes change. There are lots of mathematically correct things that can be derived from any physical theory that mispredict what actually happens. Mapping the math to the situation requires non-mathematical strategies and practical considerations. There are also plenty of alternative formulations that could equally accurately describe any given set of data.
What is true, though, is that the bayesian mathematical structure underlying falsificationism cannot be disproven without using itself. In fact the foundations of QM can be summarised by Bayes' theorem - the "uncertainties" come from fundamental limitations on information that can be contained or exchanged by any propagation or interaction between fundamental entities. For instance, entanglement arises because the total # of bits of information that are verifiable (falsifiable) regarding some particular interaction with a system consisting of two or more entities is less than the number of entities in the system.
Eliezer Yudkowsky gave a good account of the relationship between falsificationism and Bayes' theorem:
You can even formalize Popper's philosophy mathematically. The likelihood ratio for X, p(X|A)/p(X|~A), determines how much observing X slides the probability for A; the likelihood ratio is what says how strong X is as evidence. Well, in your theory A, you can predict X with probability 1, if you like; but you can't control the denominator of the likelihood ratio, p(X|~A) - there will always be some alternative theories that also predict X, and while we go with the simplest theory that fits the current evidence, you may someday encounter some evidence that an alternative theory predicts but your theory does not. That's the hidden gotcha that toppled Newton's theory of gravity. So there's a limit on how much mileage you can get from successful predictions; there's a limit on how high the likelihood ratio goes for confirmatory evidence.
On the other hand, if you encounter some piece of evidence Y that is definitely not predicted by your theory, this is enormously strong evidence against your theory. If p(Y|A) is infinitesimal, then the likelihood ratio will also be infinitesimal. For example, if p(Y|A) is 0.0001%, and p(Y|~A) is 1%, then the likelihood ratio p(Y|A)/p(Y|~A) will be 1:10000. -40 decibels of evidence! Or flipping the likelihood ratio, if p(Y|A) is very small, then p(Y|~A)/p(Y|A) will be very large, meaning that observing Y greatly favors ~A over A. Falsification is much stronger than confirmation. This is a consequence of the earlier point that very strong evidence is not the product of a very high probability that A leads to X, but the product of a very low probability that not-A could have led to X. This is the precise Bayesian rule that underlies the heuristic value of Popper's falsificationism.
Similarly, Popper's dictum that an idea must be falsifiable can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Bayesian conservation-of-probability rule; if a result X is positive evidence for the theory, then the result ~X would have disconfirmed the theory to some extent. If you try to interpret both X and ~X as "confirming" the theory, the Bayesian rules say this is impossible! To increase the probability of a theory you must expose it to tests that can potentially decrease its probability; this is not just a rule for detecting would-be cheaters in the social process of science, but a consequence of Bayesian probability theory. On the other hand, Popper's idea that there is only falsification and no such thing as confirmation turns out to be incorrect. Bayes' Theorem shows that falsification is very strong evidence compared to confirmation, but falsification is still probabilistic in nature; it is not governed by fundamentally different rules from confirmation, as Popper argued.
R = Republican (sometimes centerist, usually right-wing conservative)
D = Democrat (center to left-wing)
L = Libertarian (much smaller 3rd party aiming to increase personal freedom and reduce the size and power of government. Members are often right-wing but the party regards its position as lying at one end of a libertarian-authoritarian axis orthogonal to the left-right political axis. Some Libertarians are center or left-wing on the traditional axis, and some are so far along the libertarian axis that they have much in common with Anarchists.
I don't recall ever hearing that you absolutely have to be R or D to get on the ballot in Texas, although it does make it easier.
BTW Ron Paul lived not too far away from my town when I was in high school in San Marcos in 1990. My civics teacher spouted some misinformation in class about the Libertarian platform, so I gave him copies of the LP handouts.
I'm all for good characterization and humanistic themes, but sf is about ideas, not just people; that is what makes good sf better than mainstream "literary" realistic fiction which is 98% characterization, yet paradoxically always leaves me wondering why I should care about such dull, stupid, self-absorbed characters.
Real sf is not sci-fi. SF is the way that our culture and our species explores which possibilities are interesting. Fantasy, on the other hand, explores which impossibilities are interesting.
To be REALLY REALLY pedantic photons never move, let alone accelerate. Photons, being particles, are the interaction, not the propagation, which is always as a probability wave. Physicists do use the particle names as a shorthand for the conserved quantities revealed by interactions; few of them realize that they are speaking figuratively when they speak of "wave interaction" or "particle propagation".
Not quite. QED says that there is a small probability for a given photon interaction to occur faster than light, and it is possible to partially cancel the other, lower velocity probabilities. For example, the average speed of light is a trifle faster between two closely-spaced conductive plates. The effect is too small to measure, and it likely will be for a long time.
It would be incorrect to say that imaginary rest mass particles have never been observed. In fact the mass measurements of neutrinos actually measure the mass^2 of the particles, and all such experiments thus far have negative m^2 values within their error bars. Earlier experiments even had the most probable value for m^2 being negative.
Further, the oscillations of neutrinos between muon, electron and tau types is is exactly the sort of weirdness that an imaginary mass could explain. Also, the low interaction of neutrinos becomes easier to understand when it becomes apparent that the supposed detector is actually the emitter in the time-reversed superluminal particle's frame.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be useful.
When asked where he got his inspiration, horror writer Robert Bloch, best known for Psycho said: "I have the heart of a little boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk." (Stephen King may have picked up the line later.)
Here is your post:
Clearly you were denying that the current military stance does not amount to imperialism and is rather in your view one of defense. In fact, you referred to the opposing view as tripe. After a couple more sentences worth of content-free abuse you finally arrive at the closest you come to argument, the assertion that "the real reason for the US military force is to ensure people like you have a voice", which the evidence in my response showed was a complete misstatement of the scope of US military operations abroad.
As for your inexplicably modded follow-up troll, clearly if a poster says the real reason for the US military force is to defend American freedoms and that it is not empire building, then in can be inferred that the poster believes that the overseas bases currently in place serve somehow to defend American freedoms.
Here is a quote from Chalmers Johnson's "The Arithmetic of America's Military Bases Abroad: What Does It All Add Up to?":
How is such massive foreign deployment serving American freedom? In fact it is far more likely that the resentment created by excessive interventions will ultimately harm US interests. Even when foreign deployment creates close ties abroad, those ties are often with repressive governments with terrible human rights records.
It used to be that conservatives lived up to their name and opposed foreign adventures and large standing armies. Properly speaking those who, like you, support the status quo of a massive network of overseas bases should be refered to as "militarists", "jingoists", or even "imperialists" rather than "conservatives" or "patriots".
Yes, but the presumed relationship between the assumptions of a theorem and actual physical observations may sometimes change. There are lots of mathematically correct things that can be derived from any physical theory that mispredict what actually happens. Mapping the math to the situation requires non-mathematical strategies and practical considerations. There are also plenty of alternative formulations that could equally accurately describe any given set of data.
What is true, though, is that the bayesian mathematical structure underlying falsificationism cannot be disproven without using itself. In fact the foundations of QM can be summarised by Bayes' theorem - the "uncertainties" come from fundamental limitations on information that can be contained or exchanged by any propagation or interaction between fundamental entities. For instance, entanglement arises because the total # of bits of information that are verifiable (falsifiable) regarding some particular interaction with a system consisting of two or more entities is less than the number of entities in the system.
Eliezer Yudkowsky gave a good account of the relationship between falsificationism and Bayes' theorem:
http://bioprotein.blogspot.com/2005/01/intuitive-e xplanation-of-bayesian.html
R = Republican (sometimes centerist, usually right-wing conservative)
D = Democrat (center to left-wing)
L = Libertarian (much smaller 3rd party aiming to increase personal freedom and reduce the size and power of government. Members are often right-wing but the party regards its position as lying at one end of a libertarian-authoritarian axis orthogonal to the left-right political axis. Some Libertarians are center or left-wing on the traditional axis, and some are so far along the libertarian axis that they have much in common with Anarchists.
I don't recall ever hearing that you absolutely have to be R or D to get on the ballot in Texas, although it does make it easier.
BTW Ron Paul lived not too far away from my town when I was in high school in San Marcos in 1990. My civics teacher spouted some misinformation in class about the Libertarian platform, so I gave him copies of the LP handouts.
I'm all for good characterization and humanistic themes, but sf is about ideas, not just people; that is what makes good sf better than mainstream "literary" realistic fiction which is 98% characterization, yet paradoxically always leaves me wondering why I should care about such dull, stupid, self-absorbed characters.
Real sf is not sci-fi. SF is the way that our culture and our species explores which possibilities are interesting. Fantasy, on the other hand, explores which impossibilities are interesting.
See also Timemaster by Robert Forward.
To be REALLY REALLY pedantic photons never move, let alone accelerate. Photons, being particles, are the interaction, not the propagation, which is always as a probability wave. Physicists do use the particle names as a shorthand for the conserved quantities revealed by interactions; few of them realize that they are speaking figuratively when they speak of "wave interaction" or "particle propagation".
Not quite. QED says that there is a small probability for a given photon interaction to occur faster than light, and it is possible to partially cancel the other, lower velocity probabilities. For example, the average speed of light is a trifle faster between two closely-spaced conductive plates. The effect is too small to measure, and it likely will be for a long time.
It would be incorrect to say that imaginary rest mass particles have never been observed. In fact the mass measurements of neutrinos actually measure the mass^2 of the particles, and all such experiments thus far have negative m^2 values within their error bars. Earlier experiments even had the most probable value for m^2 being negative.
Further, the oscillations of neutrinos between muon, electron and tau types is is exactly the sort of weirdness that an imaginary mass could explain. Also, the low interaction of neutrinos becomes easier to understand when it becomes apparent that the supposed detector is actually the emitter in the time-reversed superluminal particle's frame.
Ron Paul is R-TX not L-TX (He has been the Libertarian presidential candidate in the past, though.)