lemur

First of all, what do you think it would mean to "destroy civilization?" "Civilization" is a classification of cultural patterns. Thermodynamics doesn't apply to patterns, only energy itself. You have to get more specific by what you mean with all this. Talking at this level of macro-social analysis sounds grand but is ultimately too vague to have real analytical value, imo. Even if a war was fought and lost, it would involve submission to some other "flag," and unless all survivors of the war were eliminated, they would be re-integrated in some way(probably after re-education) and it would ultimately be more like a merging of two civilizations than total destruction. From a macro-perspective, it seems fathomable that global humanity is divided into neatly partitioned societies with separate/distinct cultures, etc. But in reality, there is a lot of overlap and very little deep cultural homogeneity. Have you been watching 2012 and movies like that? (I haven't seen it but I've heard it's a total-destruction scenario).

Doesn't it depend on what you mean by "physical object." If physical objects are made of particle-fields, then why aren't those particle-fields themselves physical objects that constitute the larger object?

I was under the impression that these revolts were due to widespread economic repression, not just of some. Regardless, in general my hypothesis about crowd-conformity holds, I think. How many people in a crowd-protest dare to express an opinion that conflicts with others in the crowd? How many people go to a strike to discuss their criticisms of labor solidarity? Usually people go to experience the social approval that comes with solidarity and camaraderie. You try to impress people by having the most vehement critique of the common enemy or the most dramatic sign or other act of expression. It's like going to a sporting event for a political cause.

"Don't push it?" I guess my tone wasn't deferential to convince you I was being respectful. I was trying to seriously address your post from an emotional point of view that I thought was sympathetic to yours. I guess that matters less to you than putting me in my place by saying no to "push it," though.

Use of force is never supposed to exceed the minimum necessary for pursuing reasonable goals. I'm sure you can find examples of excessive force being used by either army during the US civil war. I have heard that many times more union soldier were killed by confederates than the reverse, and this strikes me as particularly interesting in light of the amount of European-US migration that was taking place during that time and the fact that joining the union military would have been a good way to establish oneself as a citizen. What would you say if it turned out the civil war was a conspiracy to reduce the growing migrant population? Would you blame the confederacy as the executioners or the union for recruiting and sending people to their deaths? Why couldn't you say the same thing about these current insurrections and their repressive reception? What if it were the case that some people were inciting people to mobilize in the streets so that government forces can engage in population-reductions? Would you still call this the same thing as using force to stop a bank robbery? Yes, I agree it is difficult to police a civil war in which either side could abuse power against the other in many ways, and in which individuality is being repressed by the threat of vulnerability if you don't take sides with some faction or other. But in principle it is illegitimate for anyone involved to be abusing power and using excessive force to achieve illegitimate goals. The question is what do you to get the situation under control with the least possible amount of violence? Right, my point being that the government doesn't tolerate dissent from religious values when those values have been institutionalized as secular.

I was just brainstorming to add something constructive to what others were posting in this thread. It's not "my scenario." It just made sense to me that the problem of high costs and inaccessibility of health care could have to do with legal restrictions on medical decision-making, as you describe. What is wrong with MDs making as much money as they want as long as people without much money to pay can legally accept care from less qualified professionals? Of course it would make sense for government to limit provision of such services to forms of care that don't require MD-level expertise to make. But the question is why doctors couldn't, say, set up a franchise of walk-in clinics to provide basic medical services for bargain prices. If I know popular culture, it would scoff at the idea of McMedicine, but maybe that is the best way to deal with the largest volume of health qualms and let the doctors deal with really serious issues. The hard part, imo, would be preventing such care facilities from becoming drug-dealerships for coveted prescription drugs, which is the reason a lot of people currently go to the doctor/hospital now anyway - only doctors have more to lose by selling unnecessary prescriptions.

Is there a tone of condescendence in calling an attitude other than your own vengefulness "simple?" Speaking for myself, a vengeful attitude is easy to hold when you are young and everything seems so simple in black and white. As I aged, I found that what seemed like simple issues had more complexity and it was nonsense to always just blame those who appear powerful and romanticize the innocence of those who pass as powerless. The world is filled with facades, lies, and other forms of deception - used by selfish people who have no qualms with ignoring or denying social exploitation and their position of privilege in its spoils. When you hear the crocodile tears cried by the same people who never cared about anyone who had it worse than them when they were on top, it is easy to feel vengeance but you can destroy yourself (and potentially others as well) with such vengeance so you have to temper it with reason. I don't know if you can relate to what I'm saying, but I would hope you would recognize it on some level since you have a lot more life experience (I think) than me or many others posting in this forum.

Thinking independently and choosing potentially unpopular political stances is difficult. Many people may fear criticism, disapproval, or other unpopularity. Thus, when a large crowd mobilizes, could this be pleasurable for people who generally repress their individuality to "fit in" socially? Could this also have something to do with the desire of crowd-conformists to attack individuals who stand out and stand up against the will of "the masses?" Do collective movements really just boil down to the exercise of individual power in concert with others to suppress dissent from what is deemed popular opinion?

Nice that you compared the CO2 pressures. I wonder how the amount of sunlight per unit ground area compares. I do think nitrogen is necessary. Whenever I try to grow plants without fertilizer they stay very small. Sorry that I don't have a more concrete biochemical explanation for this, but any farmer will tell you that soil needs available nitrogen for plants to thrive.

I don't think your mind is necessarily filled with hatred, though only you would truly know that. It's my impression moreso that people who think like you do have been exposed to a great deal of propaganda that depicts life as a constant battle of "kill or be killed," "dominate or be dominated" etc. However accurate or inaccurate this may be, it leaves no room for democratic discourse. In reality, force even deadly force has to be used when necessary to combat equal levels of force. However, when you maintain such a strong will to death for killers, you yourself get pulled into a psychological orgy of death and killing. You would expect that this orgy in your head would stop when the killers or whomever you are enraged at is dead and cold but it won't because it emanates from a deeper level. That's why war veterans can have post-trauma issues, i.e. because they can't let go of the war. Personally, I think they're right in a sense that the issues of the war they were involved with will always continue in some form and require some level of struggle (for me it's authoritarianism, for example), but it helps your peace-of-mind to be able to release yourself from the struggle and resist letting it ignite violent rage within you when incited. So, I can see how hearing about senseless killing could re-ignite your rage about the killing of innocents; but I also think you should realize that enraging you is part of what those people achieve by their violence, and you are giving them power over you in a way by allowing them to get to you. Maybe I've just been watching too much Star Wars lately with Luke getting drawn to the dark side by instigating his anger.

I don't think that is really what the OP is talking about. There's some books by Lakhoff and Johnson on this topic and they mostly talk about the metaphors used to structure language. For example, Nazi propaganda used metaphors like referring to the nation as a house and certain kinds of people as pest-infestations of that house. Another example is when society is described as a body that can be sick or healthy. Generally, all structural approaches to social/political science tend to use metaphors to describe society and groups as unified collectives in some way or other. There have been attempts to modernize structuralism so that it only refers to language and cultural structuring, but usually this is met with a backlash that attempts to re-establish the collective-unit approach for describing language or culture in terms of bounded societies. I don't know why I went into this except because you mentioned nazism (national socialism), but there are many other examples/studies of how such metaphors work to structure thought and discourse. You should google Lakhoff and Johnson or read Metaphors We Live By or Philosophy in the Flesh. There are probably other titles but I can't think of them off hand.

Well put, but what do you want to discuss about it?

Everyone attributes meanings and importance to the ceremony and symbols in their own way. Who has the power to speak for "the people" as some kind of unified collective individual? Just because people can be instigated to seemingly collective behavior doesn't mean they all have the same thoughts or beliefs. And even if many or a majority of people see institutional authority and the ceremonies that signify them as realities, does that make it so? Do you believe that once insanity or lies have spread among a majority of people, they suddenly become sane or true? They don't except for the fact that people still sub-consciously give them power by reacting against their power. By arguing with authority, you reinforce it. Once you become fully convinced that it is no longer legitimate and therefore no longer authority, it becomes the opposition/minority and argues with you. The military are people like anyone else. Their hearts and minds are (or at least should be) open to reason. If they refuse to consider reasonable command-authority claims, they are acting unreasonably, or not? Personally, if I was a military commander and it was unclear who was in charge, I would make the best decisions I could to keep the peace and establish civil discourse and democratic multilateral power. If I was confronted with a popular movement that was attempting to suppress freedom, I would rebel against the rebellion in the most effective way possible. Obviously, the first thing you want to do is just tell them to calm down and talk about it, and when they are too militant to do that, what steps do you have to take to prevent them from dominating by force? Even Jesus abdicated to Pontius Pilate, by saying that Pilate had no authority except that which was given him from above. My issue, however, has nothing to do with traditions of abdication and institutional authority. It is just to point out that it is institutional insanity to require an overthrown authority figure to abdicate their authority after being overthrown. It would be far more logical to just start doing things the way you want and tell the authority figure they can say whatever they want but they can't use any kind of force to attempt governance. The problem comes with leaders whose power comes from legitimate authority, meaning voluntary social cooperation on the part of others who legitimately agree with their perspective. In that case, a popular rebellion must seek to undermine the (legitimate) authority of the ideology they disagree with. For example, if opponents of fiscal conservatism wanted to undermine the tea party movement or party republicanism, etc. they couldn't just plead their case because conservatives don't think it is necessary to spend as much money as liberals do. So then the only other option is to manipulate them by some combination of tactics to get them to abdicate their control over money and/or economic resources.

It is my understanding that all matter emits some level of radiation, no matter how cold. Also, radiation travels through a vacuum and gets re-emitted or conducted by matter it reaches. Thus if by "everywhere," you mean everywhere that matter is within visible range, then the answer would have to be yes unless it was somehow possible to shield some vacuum region from all distant radiation. Still, even if there was some reflective material that could be used to do this, it would still be impossible, as far as I know, to reduce the material of the container to absolute zero, so while it may be blocking outside radiation from entering, it would still be radiating its own heat into the interior of the container. But what about black holes? Supposedly their gravity is strong enough to prevent any radiation from escaping; but they also supposedly emit Hawking radiation as a result of a complex processes that enables energy to be generated outside the event horizon. I can't think of any other possible situations in which absolutely no radiation would be present.

In practice, I agree that this is probably what would happen. My point is that it is indicative of authoritarian repressive governance. Democracy involves respecting everyone's right to free speech. When people fall into the temptation to vindicate themselves against former oppressors, this reproduces the culture of oppression in the other direction. This is why Bishop Tutu and others promoted "truth and reconciliation" following the fall of the national party. It's not so much about protecting and respecting the former oppressors as it is about setting precedents for fair and just governance. If former oppressors are tried and punished in a fair way that doesn't send out an oppressive message that deters people from giving reasonable consideration to their ideologies, that is one thing. The problem is that even in relatively open-critical democratic discourses, the effect of differentiation from unpopular leaders out of fear for social disapproval takes place. E.g. many people are afraid to even consider respecting the ideologies associated with GWBush or Obama because they would be subject to harsh social exclusion from peers if they would express less that total disdain. If that effect is this strong when there was no violent uprising or murderous hate for the president, what do you think it's like among people who curse and spit and vow painful murder of the representative of a particular ideology? Imo, the really sad thing is that these individuals are just ideological figureheads and they get targeted with all the authoritarianism that causes people to believe that they hold magical power to control others against their will. In reality, every bit of social power these individuals has comes from other people, yet because they are in the position of greatest media visibility, they get targeted for blame instead of the people who make others fear and hate them in the first place. This is why every hated political leader is like a Christ figure, imo. I'm not saying they're all holy, but they are all just individuals elevated to hated status by others around them based on deeds of their followers that get attributed to them.

Rush Limbaugh may impress a lot of people but would those same people support him if he was presiding unanimously over war tribunals in judgement of an overthrown regime? I agree with what you are saying about the potential for any high profile individual to have people who will not only kill at their command but possibly even in their interest (without their command), not to mention in their name regardless of either their command OR their interest. But should the candidate do this because it is expected of them or because they legitimately consider it the best strategy for supporting the candidate they think will best run the government? If Clinton had truly thought that Obama would make a terrible president, shouldn't she act on that rather than supporting his candidacy just because it was expected of her? Shouldn't independent judgment trump social conformity or submission to popular opinion in significant decision-making? And why should those people be excluded from representation in the new government, as long as they don't abuse their voice to totally undermine the democracy? edit: what if an unpopular leader accepts overthrow but insists on continuing to voice their honest political opinions? Should their freedom of speech be protected/respected or should censorship be legitimated on the basis of suppressing the inertia of the previous regime?

Since this seems like a Bohr-model type idea about electron behavior vis-a-vis the nucleus, I will pose it from a historical point of view. Has there ever been research that examined the relationship between electron density and repulsion within a given layer of electrons as radius from the nucleus would decrease? Specifically, it seems like repulsion among the electrons within the same radial sphere would increase as the radius of that sphere from the protons decreased. Since electron speed/momentum would be a consequence of greater electrostatic attraction from the protons; and it would correspond with greater repulsion among the electrons at the smaller radius, I would think that this could be a plausible reason why the electrons wouldn't ever collapse into the nucleus. But since this Bohr-ish in nature, I assume that someone else though of it prior to the discarding of the Bohr model. Does anyone know if such an idea emerged and what I should google to read about it?

I can more quickly answer the question whether I want to hear the same rehearsed political arguments that I've heard so often before once again mentioned in yet a new situation. The answer is NO, I DON'T need to hear someone mention for the 1000th time that discount medicine will provide a sub-standard quality of care that I should fear and thus resist. I'd rather transcend fear in favor of sorting out which typical treatments can be performed by experienced yet relatively low-status practitioners. There's no reason to take your car to the dealership for an oil-change so why should you need a doctor to do something that a less-trained, lower-paid professional can do? Imo, there needs to be basic enough knowledge among patients to know when they need a second opinion or not. I don't see any reason why patients should be taking a totally passive attitude toward care in the 21st century.

Or juries and lawyers. Plus, it's going to ultimately come down to people choosing what level of medical advice to base their decisions for self-care on. People have to become their own first-line of medical authority, in most cases.

Your body is also generating heat. And the best part about that heat is that its directly heating your body instead of having to first warm up the air. You can increase the feels-like temperature of the air by exercising. I have biked for an hour at 32F and sat for 2 hours with an inside temperature of 40F with just a sweater and light jacket without feeling cold. After that, more heat or warmer clothing is required. I know this diverts from the thread topic some, but I think it's important to remember that your body is emitting heat just like any other appliance in the room; more than most actually. Invite people over for a dance party and you can probably shut down your heater completely.

In any other science, that's just interest-bias; but in medicine it can be a fundamental conflict with the best interest of the patient, couldn't it?

Maybe it would convince him if you googled the conversion from watts to btus and calculated exactly how much heat each of your appliances was generating according to its wattage. Also, you should compare the wattage of your appliances to that of your heating system. I doubt the appliances are significant in comparison with the heater.

I think the big issues people are concerned with are long wait times in the ER because "the masses" go there when they have a cold OR the high bills that are high because of the relatively few people who pay anything at all. So, I'm guessing that having more private practices (i.e. non MD) on call (possibly doing house calls) and charging affordable fees would satisfy people. I think the big gap is between what people want to pay for health care and what people want to get paid for working in some part of the health care industry. People view any kind of health-care related job as attractive because of high earning-potential, so that translates into high bills for those who pay, whether that is patients privately, through insurance, or through government.

Regardless, you should have to submit the validity of invoking it to a politically-neutral judicial authority, no? You can't please everyone. If they wanted to pursue their criticisms through fair due process, what would stop them?

This is making more sense, but why is it that the rebels don't simply pardon themselves for "high treason" or whatever crime it is they think they committed under their own authority? To me it is simply silly that people who take power would continue seeking authority in the individual(s) they rebelled against. Then the question is why someone would legitimate the new government if they honestly didn't think it had a good ideology or plan to govern? If there was a popular rebellion of national socialists, would you expect Obama to lie and say he legitimates the new government despite his reservations? He might do so if he was in desperate enough fear of the consequences of freely speaking his opinion, but would anyone recognize this as democratic or would it just be majoritarian terrorism?