Sisyphus

Sisyphus is a Greek mythological figure, best known for being eternally punished by being forced to push a boulder up a mountain over and over again. I chose it because it is both self-deprecating, but also kind of triumphant. Plus, Sisyphus got into trouble in the first place for being a ruthlessly cunning trickster and antihero who fooled the gods and literally cheated death. So that's cool. It's not a moniker I use in other places. I used to belong to a couple other forums, and I contribute on Wikipedia, and I use different names for each.

More specifically, the water cools us by absorbing the energy needed for evaporation, and the sebum forms a protective layer that keeps the skin waterproof, prevents it from drying out, and inhibits bacterial growth.

I disagree with almost all of your reasons, but I do have some thoughts of my own... point 1: There hasn't really been any rhetoric of this kind that I can recall. point 2: That's a very vague criterion. There certainly is an "American way" which certain segments seem determined to spread around the world, but I don't know if that counts. That the country is more or less run by academics of a particular philosophy (Straussianism) might count as well. point 3: Yes, I would say so. Bush on the ranch, cutting brush, using cowboy language. Actually the whole Western genre could be described as "an idealization of manly, peasant virtues," and if politicians invoke that spirit to their advantage, it certainly counts. point 4: Yes. The push has been for expanding executive power, decreasing transparency, and decreasing the advisory role of Congress. These are anti-democratic tendencies. A lot of those neocons and objectivists seem to just find the whole "mass approval" thing tedious, even as they nominally trumpet it as a cause. point 5: Yes. The neocons, philosophical descendents of Leo Strauss, are all about elitism, the assumption that most people simply cannot understand their true motives, and the "noble lie." point 6: No, not really. No politician can be elected while publicly holding even ambiguously racist views. (BTW, that a radical and literally revolutionary organization like the KKK is allowed to exist is a triumph of liberal democracy. Let it always be the case that spectacularly unpopular views go unsilenced.) point 7: A little ambiguous. We haven't "mobilized" as a country, the military has not become the police, etc. On the other hand, obviously we're more aggressive, and there is a national cult paying lip service to "supporting the troops." point 8: Well, we are "the world's policeman." We have military bases all over the place, and active military operations of one kind or another in probably a hundred countries. Is that imperialism? I honestly don't know.

It's funny how there seems to be simultaneous "breaking up" and "joining together" tendencies going on. As in, they don't want to be part of Belgium, but they do want to be part of the EU. "Sure, we want to be part of a supernational pseudo-sovereignty, but not if we have to arrive in the same car as you guys." ...of course, I really haven't been following this, so that might not be how it is at all....

Real intellectuals tend not to get held up as champions of liberalism or of conservatism, because their ideas are too subtle for sound bites or marching chants. I've met some of the people who are held up. Once they finish their shtick, if you're not there to cheer them or jeer them, they don't know what to do or say.

The other focus is nothing. It doesn't exert any force on anything. The math just works out that if you exert a force (gravity) on an object that decreases with the square of the distance, it will go in an ellipse around you, where you are at one of the foci of that ellipse. It has nothing to do with GR, and the math is not that complicated - you only need basic calculus (like Newton used). As for where that perpendicular velocity comes from, it is still there from the formation of the solar system (once you have velocity, you don't need an additional cause to keep having velocity, it's just inertia). If you think about it, there's almost guaranteed to be a perpendicular velocity of some kind, just because the only way there wouldn't be was if two objects happened to be heading exactly towards one another. Anything else has a perpendicular velocity, and thus they end up orbiting on another.

And your generic brushoff and subsequent silliness prove that you don't understand what I was saying. I think you have misplaced confidence in this stuff because it's being said by an important scientist. And if it were actually physics being discussed, I would take it seriously, but it isn't. It's metaphysics. Scientists have a long history of trying to reinvent the wheel in this area in their spare time and failing spectacularly. Most commonly it takes the form of false dilemmas like this one. (Even Einstein thought - wrongly - that QM was impossible because it contradicted certain metaphysical necessities. They aren't necessities, and it doesn't contradict them, anyway.) So yes, I am quite familiar with what you're talking about, and in fact I've had to put up with a whole lot of it in academia in both the physics and philosophy worlds. It really really has no merit. I swear.

Ah, but your subconscious does...

Gravity causes the planet to constantly accelerate directly towards the sun, that's true. But the planet also has a velocity at right angles to the sun, and so its inertia is carrying it in that direction while gravity is constantly pulling it sideways, so the end result is a curve (specifically, an ellipse), and the planet just ends up endlessly circling the sun.

True!

You can dislike her all you want, but if you honestly believe she can't be trusted around children (whatever that means), then you've been brainwashed far, far more than you realize by the professional slander industry. I mean, come on. I'm not a Hillary Clinton supporter, but I constantly end up coming to her defense, just because of the completely ridiculous degree to which she is maligned by some people. She's a politician. So yes, she's probably insincere quite a bit, just like any other politician. (At one time I believe she was quite sincere, but a lifetime of politics tends to jade a person.) And yes, she's ambitious. (She's running for President! What a revelation!) She lacks the personal charisma of, say, her husband, and so she probably seems even more insincere than she actually is. But none of that would matter to anybody if it wasn't fashionable to hate her, and it wouldn't be fashionable to hate her if the "Hillary is evil" drumbeat hadn't been going for so long. People who don't actually know anything about her positions assume they're against them, because "Hillary is evil." That's why conservatives think she's a crazy liberal, and why liberals think she's a two-faced conservative. The same thing (to a lesser degree, frankly) has been done to GWB - people will take a position just because it's the opposite of his, because "Bush is evil." Similarly, anything she does must be criticized. She is attacked for standing by her husband, but you're a fool if you think she wouldn't be attacked for not standing by her husband. It goes on and on. So what is she really? A politician. Not a straight talker (though much more "straight" in action than most). Very, very smart. Painfully uncharismatic. Always coolheaded. And a constant moderate, except for one radical plan, universal, simplified healthcare, that she pushed against all odds back in 1993 when nobody wanted it, and now most people want it.

Of course, coming from an Ayn Rand disciple, starting a war to get your hands on a lot of oil is not something to be critical of, nor is lying about it. His criticism is directed at the public. "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient." Not that it was done, and not that those in power failed to do what was politically inconvenient, but that it was inconvenient, i.e., that people wouldn't accept such a thing.

Bombus: bascule is completely right about this. Free will is a state of thought in which decisions are consciously made between weighed alternatives. That's it. It exists, because it is a subjective experience. Nothing we discover about the universe could possibly change that. Determinism certainly does not preclude it, it just means that you have definite reasons for making whatever choices you do. Randomness, which is the alternative to determinism, does not "help" in any way. If anything, it makes it trickier, because it means there's no real reason you choose one or the other. But that is not even the biggest error you're making. You're arguing that a particular version of objective reality exists merely because you want it to. More specifically, because you think it is the only way something which you think you want can also exist. This is very, very bad science.

It also has to do with what types of careers people choose to go into. I could have gone to business school but didn't, because I wanted a more interesting job than what that would get me. I'm quite careful with my money, but I still have less of it than a lot of people who are not careful, just because I make less.

But murder is a tiny percentage of deaths (and more relevantly, deaths before and during child-bearing age). So whatever traits there are that help "not being murdered," they're evolving quite slowly, if at all. It's possible we're evolving to be more careful drivers, though... EDIT: Also, about Iraq. I just looked it up, and Iraq's violent death rate is about five times that of the United States. I think you're thinking of comparisons between the most crime-ridden U.S. cities and Iraq as a whole, which is a poor use of statistics, IMO, but that's extremely OT for this thread...

That's true, by having things like sanitation and medicine, certain selection pressures are diminished. We always evolve for the environment we live in, no matter how much of that environment we ourselves have modified. Of course, by eliminating or severely reducing those pressures, others become proportionately more important. That's not necessarily a problem, though. It's only bad if we decide that the traits we are evolving for currently are less desirable (by whatever criteria we want) than those we were formerly evolving for. For example, we value intelligence as a positive characteristic independent of its survival value, but "nature" only "values" it if it helps us have more surviving offspring. A strong immune system, in contrast, seems to me only valuable to us inasmuch as it helps us survive, i.e., we value it for the same reasons nature does. If it becomes less important for survival, then as far as I'm concerned, it is less important.

I think the reason is because of the way she has been demonized in different ways. The more politicians are in the public eye, the more distinct caricatures of them develop, representing how people perceive them. Mostly these caricatures are determined by how their enemies are able to portray them, since negative characteristics are more memorable, and make for better television. That said, Hillary Clinton has been probably the number one target among right-wing pundits and talk radio types for fifteen years now, which means they've had plenty of time to develop a caricature that has come to represent everything they see as intolerable and evil, e.g., an amibitious woman, a "feminazi," a socialist, an uber-liberal. Liberals are bad, Hillary is bad, Hillary must be the ultimate liberal! That this bears little relation to reality is irrelevant; her caricature has more life than she does. Real liberals, however, do not listen to the same pundits, but get a more diffused image. They get that she's "unlikable," but since for them being liberal is not a reason for dislike, she comes to represent other things. Not being as indoctrinated with the talk-radio Hillary caricature, they take more notice of things like her more moderate stances on most issues, particularly with regards to foreign policy, where she has consistently angered the ABB crowd with her moderation. Thus, she is seen as farther to the right.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the X-Files would know how false that statement is.

Anything tastes good sauteed in olive oil, vinegar, basil, garlic, and a little salt and pepper. Potatoes are cheap, and can be cooked lots of ways. Mexican food in general can be made cheaply and easily (although I guess in UK you probably have no idea what that entails). Bananas are the cheapest fruit (my breakfast in college was often a banana or two and a huge thermos of black, black coffee). If you can find a hippy grocery store, buying granola in bulk is an extremely cheap way to eat well. Also, remember that beer is basically liquid bread.

The Bohm model doesn't offer deterministic prediction, it just postulates that such a thing might be possible, and offers a plausible theoretical explanation for how QM might be completely deterministic, with no need for "wave-particle" nonsense, either. Stuff like the double-slit experiment does not disprove it in the least, but most agree that Bell's Inequality does.

Well yes, you're right, of course. What I mean is that we have no reason to expect QM plays a bigger role in the functioning of neurons than in the functioning of, say, muscle cells. Yet only the former ever gets talked about, because people want there to be a connection out of some vague metaphysical discomfort.

Maybe it is the base, or at least an important part of the base. But I don't understand the hypocrisy you're talking about. Are you saying they vote the way the moveon crowd wants them to? I'm not necessarily disputing, I just don't understand what you mean.

I think you're right about that, and that probably describes the origins of these laws pretty well. However, now, gay marriage is certainly considered a great deal (to the point where most of us are sick of hearing about it), and there is much active opposition to it. Nobody can really claim not to have considered it anymore, since both sides are forcing the issue.

I very much doubt QM has anything to do with the brain's function. I know very little about the latter, and I understand that it has lots of subtle and insanely complex interactions going on that we don't yet understand, but ultimately it's just an interaction between neurons, which are of course many orders of magnitude larger than measurable quantum effects. I would suggest that perhaps the desire to link the two has nothing to do with any real evidence for a connection, and everything to do with failing to come to grips with certain metaphysical issues (e.g. "free will") and finding a copout in the weirdness of QM.

My assertion is that it would be a lot more than marginally better than our current system, as based on comparisons with existing systems in certain other countries. The quality of care is, I believe, better - perhaps only marginally, perhaps not - but the level of efficiency is far better. Additionally, I see the many fears expressed about socializing medicine (that doctors become lazy from lack of competition, that there is no progress, that people overly take advantage of it to the detriment of everyone else, that the bureaucracy grows and dwarfs the actual healthcare, that individuals have no real options about their own treatment, etc.) really not coming to pass. Frankly, I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it myself, but I have seen it myself, so there you have it. As for how either would compare with a completely unregulated system, I have no analogous basis for comparison (the only countries without regulated healthcare don't have healthcare, period), only speculation. But I have stated my reasons for believing that healthcare would be especially susceptible to the many negative aspects of laissez-faire capitalism, and not particularly well-suited to reap its many benefits. Specifically, I see a tendency towards monopolism of a necessary service ("highway robbery"), which would be the worst possible scenario.