I mean translational kinetic energy, fergawdsake. Good grief, must we wallow in Dictionopolis definitioneering when there's interesting astrophysics to ponder?
Yeah...I'm going to agree with this. I've been a RH user from their very first distro, and they used to be great, but with great reluctance I'm going to switch now. My impression is that the RH quality is definitely down and steadily falling.
I don't know exactly why, but I don't agree with other commenters that it's just a matter of FC being on the "bleeding edge." RH was far closer to the bleeding edge in the early days, and yet they did better. Perhaps there's a fine line between being daring and innovative, and being careless and arrogant, but I've the feeling RH has crossed it.
I think the danger here to their business model is that they'll drive the more conservative users away from their FC testbed. Which means their ability to pick out what will work well in their business-oriented RHEL is going to become poorer.
Aye, but where's the supernova remnant itself? The rapidly-rotating neutron star with the nasty high-energy pulsar radiation? It was at the center of the explosion, so it had an initial kinetic energy of nearly zero. It should still be in the stellar neighborhood.
Unless the argument here is that the Sun itself was blown away from the site of the supernova...
I'd like to point out, vice Larry Niven, that when teleportation and faster-than-light drives are invented they will make new types of crime possible.
Not only that, but when immortality becomes possible, just think of the new pressures on the Earth's resources. Yet I'm going to bet those irresponsible doctor and medical researcher types haven't thought at all about this as they try to cure cancer and so forth.
Well...you're sounding more or less like a futurist, the sort that's just tickled with things efficient and clever. I'm sympathetic. I am, too. I certainly agree with you in that I'd love to have a nuclear-powered car I never had to refuel, or a bunch of solar panels on the roof to get my electricity, or even a tiny methanol-powered reformer/fuel cell to operate the laptop, so it could go 30 hours without recharging. Heck, bring on the flying cars and Moon colonies -- I've been waiting for them for 30 years, damn it.
But, well, people are the way they are, and the primary determiners of what we have is what most people want. Most people are less tickled with cool, efficient, clever ways of doing things than they are with cheap and convenient ways of doing things. So that's what we have.
It's not so bad. I'd rather be me than them, and at least the modern economy and social system is free enough that it's possible for me to eke out a living doing what I think is cool and efficient (and if it turns out to be cheap and convenient -- why, then I get the chance to be a millionaire, too). It could be worse, and historically usually has been. Just consider Galileo!
As for solar: don't give up yet. I don't think the future is in solar-electric, as in acres of extraordinarily-pure silicon wafers facing mother Sol, but in solar-chemical, as in artificial photosynthesis. Why not copy the plants? We know quite a lot about photosynthesis, and we learn more all the time. The time will shortly come when we can devise photosynthetic devices of our own, molecular-scale widgets that will harvest sunlight and do chemical reactions directly -- produce any molecule we want: ethanol for the fuel cells, precursor molecules for pharmaceutical synthetic chemistry, monomers for the plastics industry -- or destroy any molecule we want, like toxic chemical sludge, or ordinary sewage sludge. Plus since we'd probably build them (or teach them to build themselves) out of the same molecules the plants do, they themselves would be easily biodegradeable, as it were. It could happen.
But on the other hand, I'm still waitin' on the Moon colonies I was promised long ago, so I dunno. Hope springs eternal, I guess.
You missed one really tiny thing. Oil fuels our entire domestic transportation grid.
First of all, not quite. You're forgetting that most of the East Coast trains are electric, and much of the electricity is generated by coal (in Midwest and Pennsylvania coal plants), hydro (bought from Quebec), and nuclear (the dreaded Three Mile Island and friends).
But even leaving aside that very minor point, what makes transportation the key sector of the economy? Petroleum is also the ultimate source of all our plastics and most pharmaceuticals -- why not fear for their sakes? Or you could say that silicon is the basis of our entire electronics/communications industry, or sulfur is the key basis of our chemical/agricultural industry (since the #1 chemical product, sulfuric acid, is most often made from native mined sulfur, and the major use of sulfuric acid is to make fertilizer), and so forth.
Fact is, a disruption in any major import commodity would derail the economy. (Actually, a disruption in the finance trade, or some bizarrity in the value of the dollar, would be even worse, since the value of capital traded back and forth internationally dwarfs the value of commodities.) There's nothing magically vital about our "dependence" on oil compared to our "dependence" on any other internationally-traded commodity, except that changes in the international price of oil tend to be more directly observable by consumers in the price of gas, and more hysterically hyped by a media obsessed with a loathing for private automobiles. Are you sure your belief does not reflect merely an uncritical acceptance of the current social mythology?
Secondly, have you remembered that any trading situation involves a dependency by both partners? We may certainly need Saudi Arabian oil, but Saudi Arabia in turn needs American dollars (or really what they buy with American dollars, like American machinery, cars, food, computers). If we're at the "mercy" of the Saudis because they could reduce their production of oil, they are equally at our "mercy" because we could reduce our purchases of their oil. Any potential blackmail works both ways. Perhaps you're misled by the feeling that we're the consumer and the consumer is always at the mercy of the seller. But that's only true when the consumer is one of thousands of consumers. IBM doesn't care about one particular consumer because it's got thousands more. But what if IBM had only one major consumer? Would it care about him? You betcha. Their business success depends on him. Well, for Saudi Arabian oil, the major consumer is the US.
We actually have the raw energy resources to do that in various forms.
Of course. But why bother? It isn't at present economically efficient to use them. It's not a question of "research". Not much is left to be learned about nuclear, solar, wind or hydro power. It's just a question of economics, and at present buying oil on the international market is the cheapest way to get certain kinds of energy. When conditions change, the cheapest form of energy will change, and people will adapt, as they always have. Will it be disruptive when things change? Naturally, it always is. It was disruptive when people changed from coal to oil, or from wood to coal. Life is like that.
Of interest, maybe, is the fact that what you are saying is, in a general way, akin to the 18th century theory of mercantilism, which feared as death any "dependency" on imports.
Eh, I think chasing energy "independence" is a silly wild-goose chase. Fact is, in the 21st century countries are dependent on the rest of the world in dozens, if not hundreds of ways, for the huge number of internationally-traded commodities. The US imports beef from Argentina and exports it to Canada, gets fruit from Mexico, imports simple manufactured goods from China and exports PCs to Korea, and on and on. Every country needs the rest of the world to supply what it doesn't have, and to buy what it has in excess and needs to sell. This is not to even mention the multi-trillion dollar international finance trade, which is essential to a low price for capital.
The US oil dependence is just one string among many that bind it to the rest of the world. Cutting that one, even if were possible, wouldn't change much. There'd still be plenty of others. So I don't much see the point. I've never believed the canard that US policy is dictated by "oil blackmail."
Anyway, I suggest the real victims of "energy dependence" are the countries for whom oil export is the only real moneymaking operation in the economy. A lot of cash goes into these economies, but it supports corrupt evil govermments that blow most of it on frivolity, and fail to invest for the day the oil runs out. (There are notable exceptions, e.g. the UAE.) Thing is, you can pump oil out of the ground with uneducated cheap labor, and you get a fantastic return on your investment. That means you can seem to have a healthy economy without the real basis for one: an educated, healthy, socially-cohesive workforce.
I mean, oil seems like crack cocaine for whole nations. You get hooked on the stuff and it feels great for a while, but you pay hideously in the end. I wouldn't wish oil reserves on my worst enemy.
I don't know. But even if there is no good reason, the failure of the US to apply its principles in every case does not mean they don't exist, or are worthless.
Your argument is akin to saying that anyone who has ever told a lie can't possibly argue for a general policy of telling the truth. Or saying that anyone who has ever cheated on a girlfriend can't possibly be believed when he proposes to be faithful in marriage to his wife. Exceptions are exceptions. They don't tell you a damn thing about the general rule.
Now if you are saying the US never or almost never assists in the apprehension and punishment of international criminals, that's a different story. But I don't think you could support that kind of claim.
We can. Therefore, I would recommend against trusting the US government of the 1800s, if you happen to be doing any time traveling to the 19th century. But if we're interested in how the US would treat a conquered North Korea, I suggest looking at how they acted in the 1950s with South Korea, or even in the 1940s with Japan, is a wee bit more relevant than what happened a century earlier.
Of course, as a good libertarian I would recommend against trusting any government. They're all dangerous and generally untrustworthy. Avoid 'em.
Nevertheless, sometimes you gotta choose. Politics is always about the choice of the lesser evil. So, on one side the US government, on the other the North Korean? Easy choice, for me. On one side the US, on the other Saddam Hussein? Easy again. On one side George Bush, with all his flaws, and on the other that whackjob running Iran into the ground? Still not working up much of a sweat here...
Now maybe if, say, Australia and the United States were at loggerheads I'd be in a moral pickle, unsure whose recent track record makes them more trustworthy (or to be more precise less unworthy of trust). But I don't see much prospect of that. When people piss and moan about the US 'hegemony' they often seem to forget that most of the civilized world goes along very happily with that hegemony. The French may harumph about unilateralism or what have you from time to time, but you don't see them building up their armed forces, withdrawing their ambassadors, denying US ships passage through French waters, or forming serious alliances to oppose the US. Their conflicts with the US are nothing like those of North Korea or Iran, or like those of the USSR used to be.
Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity," he said. "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.
This is hardly what you make it out to be, a strange general idea that nations can only be allies or enemies. It's little more than the international version of the fact that if the police are chasing a man with a gun down the street (while the victim you saw him shoot lies bleeding to death in the street), and lose sight of him for a moment, you are obliged, if asked, to say which way he went. You have to help law enforcement if you reasonably can.
Similarly, I see nothing strange about saying that nations should be expected to help international law enforcement if they reasonably can. Refusing to assist in the apprehension of mass murderers seems like a pretty hostile action to me. I don't see much wrong with saying so.
Ah I see. Not unlike the way the US 'provoked' Pearl Harbor by refusing to sell oil to Imperial Japan? Or the way Poland 'provoked' Germany to attack in 1939 by...well, by existing in land formally belonging to the Reich?
I think we can usefully distinguish between 'provocations' that involve killing thousands of citizens or strangling a country's entire trade, and 'provocations' that amount to not much more than vigorous (if sneaky and even underhanded) economic competition.
Well...maybe this should be left for the philosophers, who like debating definitions. I only meant to explain what I thought the OP meant by "moral relativism." Whether his use conforms to the best possible definition of the phrase I don't know.
In a recent survey 100% of respondents said they felt they couldn't enjoy life without breathing at least some oxygen every day. Cheap and widely available, but dangerously chemically reactive, oxygen is a substance known to produce a pleasant feeling of euphoria in the brain and a sense of 'energy' in the body when inhaled. However, users experience severely unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when use is terminated.
Over 80% of survey respondents also reported a psychological and almost physical need to 'do' more of the substance when under stress. Nearly all respondents expressed great anger at and rejected any suggestion that they consider quitting or cutting back on their use, and some threatened to become physically violent if any attempt was made to reduce their access.
Bush is not the only one who thinks any nation not supporting us is by default hostile.
Never heard him say this. Got a quote or anything?
Can you please point me to the approximate time when the US embargo on Russia during the cold war involved preventing trading vessels from moving about?
How about the blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis?
I would have to provisionally disagree. Just because some launch profiles from certain countries in many circumstances are sufficiently ambiguous that there is no real value in taking action does not mean that all profiles from all countries are.
If the Iranians were to begin to launch satellites, or say they were, and there were sufficient evidence -- possibly some of it secret -- that their real intentions were to develop suborbital or quasi-orbital intercontinental ballistic missile technology, and the US decided it was possible to knock the test missiles down reasonably safely, then I'd have no problem with them doing so.
Where it gets tricky is if China wants to launch national technical means a.k.a. spy satellites that overfly US strategic assets, map out targets, et cetera, within the contintental US. Is this the kind of thing we'd want to knock down? It's hard to really say, for two reasons: (1) Experience in the Cold War showed that spy satellites were stabilizing technology, because they prevent hysteria and nasty surprises. When each side is well-informed about what the other has, and is up to, decisions tend to be calmer and better. (2) This business has been thrashed out before, in the 16th-17th centuries, with respect to navigation of the high seas. In addition to being a very expensive process, the end result was a general agreement that freedom to travel -- even for a warship -- peacefully anywhere in international waters is guaranteed, unless you are actually at war. Do we really need to repeat the bloody experiment in space to probably arrive at the same conclusion?
Er...how does a neutral nation fit into the category of "groups hostile to US interests"?
It sounds like the document merely says that space is as much of a potential battleground as the high seas, or any continent. That is, if the United States was at war (cold or hot) with country X, then there's no obvious reason not to express that hostility in space, if it is in US national interest.
Whether the US should go to war against country X or Y or anybody at all is an entirely different question. But arbitrarily ruling out one particular type of battleground seems a little suicidally bizarre. I can't imagine any other country doing so. Why would the US?
You'll recall Iraq under the government of Saddam Hussein launched two unprovoked aggressive wars of conquest, one against Iran in the 1980s and another against Kuwait in the 1990s. How these countries might have fared had Iraq won either might be demonstrated by how the Iraq government treated its own citizens (e.g. the Kurds and marsh Shia) who were out of favor with the government: mass graves and poison gassing of entire villages seems likely.
You may also recall that North Korea launched an aggressive war of conquest against South Korea in the 1950s. The way they would have treated an occupied South Korea is probably well demonstrated by conditions inside North Korea now. (Where, for example, the average citizen now reaches adulthood significantly stunted in his growth from lifelong malnutrition.)
I assume against that record you want to set that of the United States in Korea and Iraq. You can look at how the US treated (or would treat) conquered Korea by examining South Korea today. Prosperous, democratic, peaceful. Likewise, you can gain a glimpse into conquered Iraq now. While the US may or may not be doing its duty to prevent the Iraq from tearing itself apart from its age-old Sunni-Shia fratricidal hostility, and while the US may or may not be successfully restoring the Iraqi economy and democratic institutions fast enough, or even at all, no one can imagine the US is in the process of deliberately "wiping out" Iraq in any ordinary sense of those words.
"Moral relativism" often consists of making judgements of actions based on those actions alone, and neglecting to consider the reason for the actions, the consequences and side-effects of the actions, and so forth. If you think borrowing your friend's CD without asking is the same as stealing it, then you're guilty of a form of moral relativism. Likewise if you say all deliberate death -- executions, killings of soldiers in battle, self-defense against home intruders, and premeditated murder of innocents -- are morally the same, you are also guilty of a form of moral relativism. And if you say all warfare is equally evil, you are guilty of moral relativism. That I think was the point.
(1) Clementine observed a particular wiggle in the radar reflection. At the time, it was thought the only reasonable way to get that wiggle was to have the radar reflect off ice. Huzzah! Ice! (Well, not really. It hasn't been directly observed -- no one's held it in their hand -- but it seemed no other explanation would account for the wiggle.)
(2) Now someone has come up with an alternative explanation for the wiggle, and demonstrated that you can get it from areas (sunlit areas) which really shouldn't have ice. Throws cold water, so to speak, on the idea that only ice can make the radar signature wiggle.
But does this mean no ice? Nope. Now we have two explanations for Clementine's observation: ice or some surface roughness thingy. Which is the right cause? Could be ice, could be merely rough rocks, could be both.
So it's not that ice on the Moon has been disproved. It's that a previous proof (or strong suggestion of) ice on the Moon has been shown to be in error. Doesn't mean the ice isn't there. Just means we no longer know (or think we know) whether it is or not. Have to go take a shovel and find out, I think.
Imagine how beautifully clean and preserved the planet would be without life of any type! No more messy leaf litter, buzzing flies around dungheaps, the occasional lightning-sparked forest fire besmudging the sky with ugly smoke...
As far as I know, Hubble's replacement is doing just fine, on schedule and fully funded.
As for colliders -- the last time colliders were fully funded (around the time the SSC was cancelled, many years ago) -- we spent half our national research budget on high-energy physics. That's excessive. There are many, many other interesting fields of science, from molecular biology to condensed matter physics to mesoscale material science to climate modeling. I don't see why HEP, admittedly interesting as it is, has to grab the lion's share of our national research funding. I'm totally cool with diverting the $100 billion it would cost to (maybe) find the Higgs boson into nifty biotech or materials science until the physicists figure out how to find the bugger with a less expensive instrument.
Ah...no. It's a good, solid, post-modern 21st century argument, but I'm going to have to disagree, pretty much on epistemological grounds. I think this argument makes a fetish out of the perceptions of the majority. From my point of view, a decent respect for entropy suggests that the majority's viewpoint on any given nontrivial controversial subject is almost bound to be wrong. There are, after all, many more ways to be wrong than right. So pretty much by definition, unless the answer is obvious, most people come up with the wrong answers, at least initially.
My ideal society would build this deep skepticism about the wisdom of the majority into its structures. None of this mob-rule one-man-one-vote crap which has become the new Catholicism. I see no obvious benefits to majority rule over, say, an absolute monarch. A hundred million fools are no wiser than one.
For me, that leads to a pretty libertarian viewpoint: minimize structured government, and the influence of social standards, widely-held beliefs, et cetera, at almost all costs. And from that viewpoint, we do not go along with censorship, even if it is self-imposed by the majority. We encourage the growth of skepticism, thinking for yourself, questioning the received wisdom and "common sense" that you see around you. Subvert the dominant paradigm and all that.
If I own a piece of property, then generally speaking even if the majority wants to trespass -- walk across it to the lake -- it can't. That's the nature of property rights. (Let us leave out the shameful concept of "eminent domain.") Imagine the same concept applied to the inside of one's head.
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I mean translational kinetic energy, fergawdsake. Good grief, must we wallow in Dictionopolis definitioneering when there's interesting astrophysics to ponder?
Yeah...I'm going to agree with this. I've been a RH user from their very first distro, and they used to be great, but with great reluctance I'm going to switch now. My impression is that the RH quality is definitely down and steadily falling.
I don't know exactly why, but I don't agree with other commenters that it's just a matter of FC being on the "bleeding edge." RH was far closer to the bleeding edge in the early days, and yet they did better. Perhaps there's a fine line between being daring and innovative, and being careless and arrogant, but I've the feeling RH has crossed it.
I think the danger here to their business model is that they'll drive the more conservative users away from their FC testbed. Which means their ability to pick out what will work well in their business-oriented RHEL is going to become poorer.
Aye, but where's the supernova remnant itself? The rapidly-rotating neutron star with the nasty high-energy pulsar radiation? It was at the center of the explosion, so it had an initial kinetic energy of nearly zero. It should still be in the stellar neighborhood.
Unless the argument here is that the Sun itself was blown away from the site of the supernova...
I'd like to point out, vice Larry Niven, that when teleportation and faster-than-light drives are invented they will make new types of crime possible.
Not only that, but when immortality becomes possible, just think of the new pressures on the Earth's resources. Yet I'm going to bet those irresponsible doctor and medical researcher types haven't thought at all about this as they try to cure cancer and so forth.
Well...you're sounding more or less like a futurist, the sort that's just tickled with things efficient and clever. I'm sympathetic. I am, too. I certainly agree with you in that I'd love to have a nuclear-powered car I never had to refuel, or a bunch of solar panels on the roof to get my electricity, or even a tiny methanol-powered reformer/fuel cell to operate the laptop, so it could go 30 hours without recharging. Heck, bring on the flying cars and Moon colonies -- I've been waiting for them for 30 years, damn it.
But, well, people are the way they are, and the primary determiners of what we have is what most people want. Most people are less tickled with cool, efficient, clever ways of doing things than they are with cheap and convenient ways of doing things. So that's what we have.
It's not so bad. I'd rather be me than them, and at least the modern economy and social system is free enough that it's possible for me to eke out a living doing what I think is cool and efficient (and if it turns out to be cheap and convenient -- why, then I get the chance to be a millionaire, too). It could be worse, and historically usually has been. Just consider Galileo!
As for solar: don't give up yet. I don't think the future is in solar-electric, as in acres of extraordinarily-pure silicon wafers facing mother Sol, but in solar-chemical, as in artificial photosynthesis. Why not copy the plants? We know quite a lot about photosynthesis, and we learn more all the time. The time will shortly come when we can devise photosynthetic devices of our own, molecular-scale widgets that will harvest sunlight and do chemical reactions directly -- produce any molecule we want: ethanol for the fuel cells, precursor molecules for pharmaceutical synthetic chemistry, monomers for the plastics industry -- or destroy any molecule we want, like toxic chemical sludge, or ordinary sewage sludge. Plus since we'd probably build them (or teach them to build themselves) out of the same molecules the plants do, they themselves would be easily biodegradeable, as it were. It could happen.
But on the other hand, I'm still waitin' on the Moon colonies I was promised long ago, so I dunno. Hope springs eternal, I guess.
You missed one really tiny thing. Oil fuels our entire domestic transportation grid.
First of all, not quite. You're forgetting that most of the East Coast trains are electric, and much of the electricity is generated by coal (in Midwest and Pennsylvania coal plants), hydro (bought from Quebec), and nuclear (the dreaded Three Mile Island and friends).
But even leaving aside that very minor point, what makes transportation the key sector of the economy? Petroleum is also the ultimate source of all our plastics and most pharmaceuticals -- why not fear for their sakes? Or you could say that silicon is the basis of our entire electronics/communications industry, or sulfur is the key basis of our chemical/agricultural industry (since the #1 chemical product, sulfuric acid, is most often made from native mined sulfur, and the major use of sulfuric acid is to make fertilizer), and so forth.
Fact is, a disruption in any major import commodity would derail the economy. (Actually, a disruption in the finance trade, or some bizarrity in the value of the dollar, would be even worse, since the value of capital traded back and forth internationally dwarfs the value of commodities.) There's nothing magically vital about our "dependence" on oil compared to our "dependence" on any other internationally-traded commodity, except that changes in the international price of oil tend to be more directly observable by consumers in the price of gas, and more hysterically hyped by a media obsessed with a loathing for private automobiles. Are you sure your belief does not reflect merely an uncritical acceptance of the current social mythology?
Secondly, have you remembered that any trading situation involves a dependency by both partners? We may certainly need Saudi Arabian oil, but Saudi Arabia in turn needs American dollars (or really what they buy with American dollars, like American machinery, cars, food, computers). If we're at the "mercy" of the Saudis because they could reduce their production of oil, they are equally at our "mercy" because we could reduce our purchases of their oil. Any potential blackmail works both ways. Perhaps you're misled by the feeling that we're the consumer and the consumer is always at the mercy of the seller. But that's only true when the consumer is one of thousands of consumers. IBM doesn't care about one particular consumer because it's got thousands more. But what if IBM had only one major consumer? Would it care about him? You betcha. Their business success depends on him. Well, for Saudi Arabian oil, the major consumer is the US.
We actually have the raw energy resources to do that in various forms.
Of course. But why bother? It isn't at present economically efficient to use them. It's not a question of "research". Not much is left to be learned about nuclear, solar, wind or hydro power. It's just a question of economics, and at present buying oil on the international market is the cheapest way to get certain kinds of energy. When conditions change, the cheapest form of energy will change, and people will adapt, as they always have. Will it be disruptive when things change? Naturally, it always is. It was disruptive when people changed from coal to oil, or from wood to coal. Life is like that.
Of interest, maybe, is the fact that what you are saying is, in a general way, akin to the 18th century theory of mercantilism, which feared as death any "dependency" on imports.
Eh, I think chasing energy "independence" is a silly wild-goose chase. Fact is, in the 21st century countries are dependent on the rest of the world in dozens, if not hundreds of ways, for the huge number of internationally-traded commodities. The US imports beef from Argentina and exports it to Canada, gets fruit from Mexico, imports simple manufactured goods from China and exports PCs to Korea, and on and on. Every country needs the rest of the world to supply what it doesn't have, and to buy what it has in excess and needs to sell. This is not to even mention the multi-trillion dollar international finance trade, which is essential to a low price for capital.
The US oil dependence is just one string among many that bind it to the rest of the world. Cutting that one, even if were possible, wouldn't change much. There'd still be plenty of others. So I don't much see the point. I've never believed the canard that US policy is dictated by "oil blackmail."
Anyway, I suggest the real victims of "energy dependence" are the countries for whom oil export is the only real moneymaking operation in the economy. A lot of cash goes into these economies, but it supports corrupt evil govermments that blow most of it on frivolity, and fail to invest for the day the oil runs out. (There are notable exceptions, e.g. the UAE.) Thing is, you can pump oil out of the ground with uneducated cheap labor, and you get a fantastic return on your investment. That means you can seem to have a healthy economy without the real basis for one: an educated, healthy, socially-cohesive workforce.
I mean, oil seems like crack cocaine for whole nations. You get hooked on the stuff and it feels great for a while, but you pay hideously in the end. I wouldn't wish oil reserves on my worst enemy.
I don't know. But even if there is no good reason, the failure of the US to apply its principles in every case does not mean they don't exist, or are worthless.
Your argument is akin to saying that anyone who has ever told a lie can't possibly argue for a general policy of telling the truth. Or saying that anyone who has ever cheated on a girlfriend can't possibly be believed when he proposes to be faithful in marriage to his wife. Exceptions are exceptions. They don't tell you a damn thing about the general rule.
Now if you are saying the US never or almost never assists in the apprehension and punishment of international criminals, that's a different story. But I don't think you could support that kind of claim.
We can. Therefore, I would recommend against trusting the US government of the 1800s, if you happen to be doing any time traveling to the 19th century. But if we're interested in how the US would treat a conquered North Korea, I suggest looking at how they acted in the 1950s with South Korea, or even in the 1940s with Japan, is a wee bit more relevant than what happened a century earlier.
Of course, as a good libertarian I would recommend against trusting any government. They're all dangerous and generally untrustworthy. Avoid 'em.
Nevertheless, sometimes you gotta choose. Politics is always about the choice of the lesser evil. So, on one side the US government, on the other the North Korean? Easy choice, for me. On one side the US, on the other Saddam Hussein? Easy again. On one side George Bush, with all his flaws, and on the other that whackjob running Iran into the ground? Still not working up much of a sweat here...
Now maybe if, say, Australia and the United States were at loggerheads I'd be in a moral pickle, unsure whose recent track record makes them more trustworthy (or to be more precise less unworthy of trust). But I don't see much prospect of that. When people piss and moan about the US 'hegemony' they often seem to forget that most of the civilized world goes along very happily with that hegemony. The French may harumph about unilateralism or what have you from time to time, but you don't see them building up their armed forces, withdrawing their ambassadors, denying US ships passage through French waters, or forming serious alliances to oppose the US. Their conflicts with the US are nothing like those of North Korea or Iran, or like those of the USSR used to be.
Well, the context makes it clear:
Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity," he said. "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.
This is hardly what you make it out to be, a strange general idea that nations can only be allies or enemies. It's little more than the international version of the fact that if the police are chasing a man with a gun down the street (while the victim you saw him shoot lies bleeding to death in the street), and lose sight of him for a moment, you are obliged, if asked, to say which way he went. You have to help law enforcement if you reasonably can.
Similarly, I see nothing strange about saying that nations should be expected to help international law enforcement if they reasonably can. Refusing to assist in the apprehension of mass murderers seems like a pretty hostile action to me. I don't see much wrong with saying so.
Ah I see. Not unlike the way the US 'provoked' Pearl Harbor by refusing to sell oil to Imperial Japan? Or the way Poland 'provoked' Germany to attack in 1939 by...well, by existing in land formally belonging to the Reich?
I think we can usefully distinguish between 'provocations' that involve killing thousands of citizens or strangling a country's entire trade, and 'provocations' that amount to not much more than vigorous (if sneaky and even underhanded) economic competition.
Well...maybe this should be left for the philosophers, who like debating definitions. I only meant to explain what I thought the OP meant by "moral relativism." Whether his use conforms to the best possible definition of the phrase I don't know.
In a recent survey 100% of respondents said they felt they couldn't enjoy life without breathing at least some oxygen every day. Cheap and widely available, but dangerously chemically reactive, oxygen is a substance known to produce a pleasant feeling of euphoria in the brain and a sense of 'energy' in the body when inhaled. However, users experience severely unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when use is terminated.
Over 80% of survey respondents also reported a psychological and almost physical need to 'do' more of the substance when under stress. Nearly all respondents expressed great anger at and rejected any suggestion that they consider quitting or cutting back on their use, and some threatened to become physically violent if any attempt was made to reduce their access.
Didn't that already happen about 7 years ago?
Bush is not the only one who thinks any nation not supporting us is by default hostile.
Never heard him say this. Got a quote or anything?
Can you please point me to the approximate time when the US embargo on Russia during the cold war involved preventing trading vessels from moving about?
How about the blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis?
I would have to provisionally disagree. Just because some launch profiles from certain countries in many circumstances are sufficiently ambiguous that there is no real value in taking action does not mean that all profiles from all countries are.
If the Iranians were to begin to launch satellites, or say they were, and there were sufficient evidence -- possibly some of it secret -- that their real intentions were to develop suborbital or quasi-orbital intercontinental ballistic missile technology, and the US decided it was possible to knock the test missiles down reasonably safely, then I'd have no problem with them doing so.
Where it gets tricky is if China wants to launch national technical means a.k.a. spy satellites that overfly US strategic assets, map out targets, et cetera, within the contintental US. Is this the kind of thing we'd want to knock down? It's hard to really say, for two reasons: (1) Experience in the Cold War showed that spy satellites were stabilizing technology, because they prevent hysteria and nasty surprises. When each side is well-informed about what the other has, and is up to, decisions tend to be calmer and better. (2) This business has been thrashed out before, in the 16th-17th centuries, with respect to navigation of the high seas. In addition to being a very expensive process, the end result was a general agreement that freedom to travel -- even for a warship -- peacefully anywhere in international waters is guaranteed, unless you are actually at war. Do we really need to repeat the bloody experiment in space to probably arrive at the same conclusion?
Er...how does a neutral nation fit into the category of "groups hostile to US interests"?
It sounds like the document merely says that space is as much of a potential battleground as the high seas, or any continent. That is, if the United States was at war (cold or hot) with country X, then there's no obvious reason not to express that hostility in space, if it is in US national interest.
Whether the US should go to war against country X or Y or anybody at all is an entirely different question. But arbitrarily ruling out one particular type of battleground seems a little suicidally bizarre. I can't imagine any other country doing so. Why would the US?
Depends on what you mean by "wiping out."
You'll recall Iraq under the government of Saddam Hussein launched two unprovoked aggressive wars of conquest, one against Iran in the 1980s and another against Kuwait in the 1990s. How these countries might have fared had Iraq won either might be demonstrated by how the Iraq government treated its own citizens (e.g. the Kurds and marsh Shia) who were out of favor with the government: mass graves and poison gassing of entire villages seems likely.
You may also recall that North Korea launched an aggressive war of conquest against South Korea in the 1950s. The way they would have treated an occupied South Korea is probably well demonstrated by conditions inside North Korea now. (Where, for example, the average citizen now reaches adulthood significantly stunted in his growth from lifelong malnutrition.)
I assume against that record you want to set that of the United States in Korea and Iraq. You can look at how the US treated (or would treat) conquered Korea by examining South Korea today. Prosperous, democratic, peaceful. Likewise, you can gain a glimpse into conquered Iraq now. While the US may or may not be doing its duty to prevent the Iraq from tearing itself apart from its age-old Sunni-Shia fratricidal hostility, and while the US may or may not be successfully restoring the Iraqi economy and democratic institutions fast enough, or even at all, no one can imagine the US is in the process of deliberately "wiping out" Iraq in any ordinary sense of those words.
"Moral relativism" often consists of making judgements of actions based on those actions alone, and neglecting to consider the reason for the actions, the consequences and side-effects of the actions, and so forth. If you think borrowing your friend's CD without asking is the same as stealing it, then you're guilty of a form of moral relativism. Likewise if you say all deliberate death -- executions, killings of soldiers in battle, self-defense against home intruders, and premeditated murder of innocents -- are morally the same, you are also guilty of a form of moral relativism. And if you say all warfare is equally evil, you are guilty of moral relativism. That I think was the point.
Mmm, actually, the way it worked is this:
(1) Clementine observed a particular wiggle in the radar reflection. At the time, it was thought the only reasonable way to get that wiggle was to have the radar reflect off ice. Huzzah! Ice! (Well, not really. It hasn't been directly observed -- no one's held it in their hand -- but it seemed no other explanation would account for the wiggle.)
(2) Now someone has come up with an alternative explanation for the wiggle, and demonstrated that you can get it from areas (sunlit areas) which really shouldn't have ice. Throws cold water, so to speak, on the idea that only ice can make the radar signature wiggle.
But does this mean no ice? Nope. Now we have two explanations for Clementine's observation: ice or some surface roughness thingy. Which is the right cause? Could be ice, could be merely rough rocks, could be both.
So it's not that ice on the Moon has been disproved. It's that a previous proof (or strong suggestion of) ice on the Moon has been shown to be in error. Doesn't mean the ice isn't there. Just means we no longer know (or think we know) whether it is or not. Have to go take a shovel and find out, I think.
I'm guessing that's just your $0.02?
the radiation levels inside where almost 100 times what they are just outside the door.
All those inverse-square laws o' physics come in handy sometimes.
I'm guessing English is not your first language?
Bah, this fellow lacks imagination.
Imagine how beautifully clean and preserved the planet would be without life of any type! No more messy leaf litter, buzzing flies around dungheaps, the occasional lightning-sparked forest fire besmudging the sky with ugly smoke...
As far as I know, Hubble's replacement is doing just fine, on schedule and fully funded.
As for colliders -- the last time colliders were fully funded (around the time the SSC was cancelled, many years ago) -- we spent half our national research budget on high-energy physics. That's excessive. There are many, many other interesting fields of science, from molecular biology to condensed matter physics to mesoscale material science to climate modeling. I don't see why HEP, admittedly interesting as it is, has to grab the lion's share of our national research funding. I'm totally cool with diverting the $100 billion it would cost to (maybe) find the Higgs boson into nifty biotech or materials science until the physicists figure out how to find the bugger with a less expensive instrument.
Ah...no. It's a good, solid, post-modern 21st century argument, but I'm going to have to disagree, pretty much on epistemological grounds. I think this argument makes a fetish out of the perceptions of the majority. From my point of view, a decent respect for entropy suggests that the majority's viewpoint on any given nontrivial controversial subject is almost bound to be wrong. There are, after all, many more ways to be wrong than right. So pretty much by definition, unless the answer is obvious, most people come up with the wrong answers, at least initially.
My ideal society would build this deep skepticism about the wisdom of the majority into its structures. None of this mob-rule one-man-one-vote crap which has become the new Catholicism. I see no obvious benefits to majority rule over, say, an absolute monarch. A hundred million fools are no wiser than one.
For me, that leads to a pretty libertarian viewpoint: minimize structured government, and the influence of social standards, widely-held beliefs, et cetera, at almost all costs. And from that viewpoint, we do not go along with censorship, even if it is self-imposed by the majority. We encourage the growth of skepticism, thinking for yourself, questioning the received wisdom and "common sense" that you see around you. Subvert the dominant paradigm and all that.
If I own a piece of property, then generally speaking even if the majority wants to trespass -- walk across it to the lake -- it can't. That's the nature of property rights. (Let us leave out the shameful concept of "eminent domain.") Imagine the same concept applied to the inside of one's head.