Sisyphus

So you would cause a decades long global depression to avoid treating a Swiss watchmaker unfairly. This kind of thing is why I would never vote for a Libertarian.

This is inspired by that libertarian quiz from the other thread, and pertains specifically to the United States. Um, what's the problem with a national ID card? What exactly are the staunch opponents to such a plan (and apparently there are some) afraid of?

Am I correct in assuming that your position is based on what is fair and just, and not what is economically sound? I realize you probably think that the two coincide, but that's not the question. What if, for example, you knew for certain that free trade hurt the world economy? What if the example was extreme? What if not putting a tariff on that Swiss watch would cause the U.S. economy to collapse? Is there no point at which pragmatism weighs against idealism?

So, you're saying my explanation is more or less correct?

I don't have a problem with libertarianism, per se, but I do with most libertarians I've encountered. They are simply too inflexibly idealistic. The basic principle of libertarianism, that everything should be allowed if it does no harm to others, is an excellent guideline that should ALWAYS be kept in mind. However, that's exactly what it is: a guideline, not the religious commandment so many libertarians treat it as. In the real, grownup world, sometimes you have to be pragmatic. Private citizens are not allowed to build their own nuclear weapons (even if they don't use them!), and that is a good thing. The same with driving while intoxicated, even if you don't hit anyone... The secondary principle, "government = bad," should be taken with a bigger grain of salt. A general guideline of "government ought to stay out of issues where nongovernment entities can function instead" is fine, but again, each issue should be studied individually and rationally. When you start attacking the government merely because it is the government, you've stopped being rational. And the third principle, "free markets = good," is again, a guideline. In certain situations it can actually be counterproductive to the economy. When individual entities become powerful enough, they can influence the economy as a whole to the point where their individual good is actually at the expense of the overall good. Monopolies are the simplest example of this, but there are others. Incidentally, I was 70% personal issues, 40% economic.

I don't know much about astronomy, and this is just a guess that might not even make sense. If it doesn't I'd appreciate it if someone could explain why. [/disclaimer] Ok, so the more distant an object is, the older the light we receive from it, right? Also, the universe, specifically the volume of space in the universe, is and has always been expanding. Third, in normal, Euclidian space (in which we would expect farther away objects to be smaller), the amount of area of a sphere increases without limit with the square of the radius, as, therefore, does the "amount of stuff" at a given distance away. For example, a lot more stuff is roughly 20 light years away than roughly 5 light years away. Given all of these things together, it seems like we would run into a paradox. The farther away something is, the less of the sky it ought to take up, because it's the same object in a much larger space (that space being the shell of space roughly equidistant from us). However, also, the farther away it is, the older it is, meaning that there is less space, since the universe was smaller in the past. A given object, then, would take up a larger percentage of the sky, as a result of there simply being "less sky." If we could see an object so distant that the light took the entire of the universe to reach us, then we would be seeing something from the very beginning, when pretty much everything was right on top of each other, and it would appear very large (I think). There must be a point, then, somewhere in between, where the second effect becomes greater than the first, and objects stop looking smaller with distance and start looking larger. That point would be a distance of minimal angular size, just like you describe. ...maybe that's it.

Actually, in the U.S., there's only about a 10% loss from transmission. So it's 90% efficient. But then, most power plants are relatively local. There is a reason we have plants all over the country and not, say, one enormous plant in Wyoming. The point still stands that power plants can more easily be made clean and efficient than cars.

I don't mean to generalize Israelis. I just mean that an internal discussion in Israel focusing on what Israel should do is natural and appropriate, and not really a symptom of double standards, as ecoli suggests.

I'm not sure about my own, but I do like the one from The Royal Tenenbaums: Royal Tenenbaum 1932-2000 Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Remains Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship

Granted. You are now a homeless nudist. I wish someone would give me a title of nobility, lands, and a generous pension.

9/11 conspiracy theories are ridiculous, but this hardly proves anything. It just shows it wasn't a typical demolition. It wouldn't be that hard to calculate where you would need to plant explosives on the upper floors such that the weight would bring each successive floor down. It would be wildly unsafe, of course, but there's already the premise that the perpetrators are intentionally killing thousands of people anyway. A better proof would be to show that an airplanes could cause the damage that they did, then point out the fact that an airplanes did, in fact, crash into the buildings. And that's relatively simple to do: steel loses the structural strength that it needed to support the above floors at less than the temperature of burning jet fuel.

I was under the impression that religious conviction was not something that could change when new information came along. Also, no scientist would "believe" something that was untestable except as a (perhaps probable) possibility or a useful working model.

Granted. But to be fair, he's the only one they'll know about after finding his name on some documents in the ruins of a pre-nuclear winter city. ...I wish I was Batman.

What he actually believed is impossible to tell. Certainly he used a variety of different beliefs as they served him. One moment it's good Christians being victimized by "International Jewry," the next he's talking about leaving the shackles of superstition behind in the glorious new Reich. Whether he was just cynically feigning various beliefs to take advantage of those who shared them, or whether he actually did have all those contradictory beliefs, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps varying from day to day, is not clear. Neither would surprise me at all.

Of course, but I think it's also important that he is an Israeli writing for Israelis. As such, it is perfectly appropriate that he center on what Israel can do to improve the situation. They can only control their own actions, not the actions of their neighbors, and as such complaining about the latter in any other context than as a call to adjust the former accordingly is not just useless but probably counterproductive as well. "They're violent! It's not fair!" Both true, but so what? Mommy isn't going to step in and stop them.

I think that captures the problem pretty well. The U.S. has this paradoxical culture that simultaneously glorifies sex at every turn and yet also turns it into a huge taboo. So we have these bizarre situations where most of what we see on television (especially what teenagers see) is in one way or another motivated by or about sex, and yet there's no nudity whatsoever, because it's considered offensive. Kids are implicitly taught both that they're nobodys if they don't have sex, and that they should be ashamed if they do. Both, in my opinion, are ridiculous, and the combination of the two leads to all kinds of crazy trouble. I hate to drag this more off topic, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What kind of socialist regulation of behavior is at work here? For that matter, what do you mean in general? How are more socialized nations (that is, democratic, industrialized ones, like Sweden) more socially judgemental, and in what ways are behavior regulated because of that. (Maybe this needs a new topic...)

That's a good point. It's only irresponsible if you don't know what you're doing (practically or emotionally) and/or you don't have access to contraceptives.

That's kind of a non-sequitor, isn't it?

Well seeing as how the stomach is not really a sealed container, it would be extremely difficult to build up any pressure at all. It doesn't have to be that strong.