lemur

Secret police is a good point, but what makes you think that the secret police actually defer to the authority of the figure head? Couldn't it just as well be that the real masterminds behind authoritarian power keep themselves hidden from view to avoid assassination attempts and other public scrutiny and harassment? Wouldn't you just expect these seemingly powerful leaders to just be charismatic public speakers who are manipulated like puppets by people behind the scenes? I know this sounds like conspiracy theory but I just don't see why truly authoritarian people would subject themselves to the mercy of popular resistance by having a high public profile. edit: I don't think it's liberation from oppression that is sought but the ability to control the power resources of the government being overthrown. The subjects don't overthrow the monarchy to be free of royal decree, they do so to appropriate the power of that decree to pursue their own interests. Then, they convince themselves that they are better than the king they overthrew simply because they put more people on the payroll and thus solicit more approval. If you rob a millionaire, you can probably pay for enough friends to say you're a better investor than he was. The parent who spoils you is always more popular than the one that doesn't, but that doesn't mean spoiling the kids is good for the family.

That's my point. It's not necessary to commit any violence to overthrow an individual because the only reason that individual has social power in the first place is because other people give it to them by believing in their authority (or threats) and submitting to it. edit: someone needs to make a political cartoon of Mubarak and Khadaffi surrounded by soldiers with guns pointed at them and a large crowd with one soldier saying, "give up your power or else!" Would readers even understand that in the cartoon that the two individuals no longer hold any power if everyone is against them?

Right, but my point is that if people have attained sufficient power to kill you, that means you have totally lost control of your police/military protection, which means you no longer have any power to advocate, right? So at that point, what is the purpose of making that individual abdicate? You no longer have an army to abdicate, do you? Is it that they want you to lie and say you think their new government is going to do a really good job? It is reminiscent of the famous Darth Vader line, "join us or die." What's democratic about that?

Maybe instead of debating whether or not to throw more money at it, there should be serious content-focussed discussions about what people want to achieve with education and then discuss concrete steps to take and ONLY THEN discuss how money can be used as part of the approach. What's more, the discussion shouldn't be done in a way that attempts to manipulate, emotionally blackmail, or otherwise push for money but should instead always look for less costly approaches as well as reasonably discuss when the wages of teachers and others are too low and why. When's the last time you heard any reasonable discussion of pay cuts that didn't involve pointing the finger at someone else? All these equality-oriented claims do not address the basic issues you are talking about. All they do is shift the focus around to different people and situations. What you should do is formulate a clear stance regarding collective bargaining and then put that forth for critical discussion. What these kinds of statements you're making tend to do is hover around the discussion without ever having it. Do you really think democratic discourse should occur at the intuitive level with all explicit statements designed to emotionalize and relationalize the issues? Well, not everyone thinks collective bargaining is good. To some people, it seems like ganging up on employers to force them to comply with the will of the workers. On the other hand, corporatism is collective bargaining on the part of investors and managers, so maybe the problem is collectivism generally. Have you ever thought about looking at any business as a constituency that includes everyone involved? In that case, would you want "the people who do the job to decide terms under which they do it" unilaterally? Would you want their ability to express their opinions and discuss work-related issues constrained by a structural organization that claims to represent them while, in fact, telling them when their opinion is actually too marginal to be represented as part of "collective interests?" I know that unions are well-loved for their hero-status, but how often do you hear the side of workers whose interests get marginalized? The answer is rarely, if ever, because those people are viewed as antithetic to "the collective good of the workers." Anyone can be suppressed by that logic and who is going to play (independent) ombudsman for a union?

Maybe you could also offer certifications for nurses, PAs, medical assistants, etc. to perform specialties such as wound care so that they could practice independently in that one area without being able to practice other aspects of medicine. Then part of their general training would include in-depth concentration in their specialty area. Still, doctors would probably have to go around evaluating quality of care at such facilities. I wonder how many people would refuse to have a wound stitched by someone because "they're not an M.D."

Mubarak and now Khadaffi were/are under popular pressure to abdicate their power, but how would that actually work in practice? If an individual becomes unpopular as a leader, what power would they have to abdicate or not? Presumably the point is that these individuals are obeyed by military forces and those who are rebelling against them want to control those forces. But why would the military give up just because their commander abdicates? Apparently what these rebellions want is not for the commanders to abdicate but for them to use their power to command the military to obey some other commander or interests besides themselves or the interests that they have been heretofore pursuing. If the rebels really wanted to undermine these individiuals' power, why wouldn't they just convince the military forces to join them? If they are powerful enough to subdue the military, then haven't they themselves already overthrown the power of the military and dictator they so hate? In that case, what is the point of continuing to push for abdication? Is it that the rebels wish to have their power recognized by these leaders in the form of abdication? It is just a matter of getting them to "cry uncle?" At the point the rebels secure power to dominate the overthrown regime, do they have any ethical responsibility to treat them with respect as prisoners of war or will it be rape, pillage, and the spoils of war victory? If so, won't this motivate the existing regime that much more strongly to use violent force to defend themselves against such a fate?

This is more of a psychology topic, I think, but I couldn't find a psychology section so I posted it in religion. Certainly it can be answered in terms of religious ideology producing such sub-conscious cooperation with authority or resistance to it. I wonder if there's any way to empirically test the degree to which people are sub-consciously driven to cooperate/comply with various forms of authority. I also wonder if there's any way to observe processes through which people are programmed to do so. Then, what would happen if you would show them concrete evidence of how they were programmed and how it affects their behavior? Would they choose to resist or just not care and go on behaving according to their programming? If so, is that too a product of the programming or is some element of freedom involved in making the choice to "go with the flow?"

I thought that there were specific reasons that the Bohr model and other models failed and that quantum mechanics was correcting for these failures by incorporating the finding that light, electrons, etc. are limited to whole-unit amounts. I don't know why I'm even bothering to get into this discussion, because once it gets to this point there's nothing I can do as a math-aversive thinker to convince you that no math is possible with corresponding qualitative ideas that the equation describes and/or predicts in accurate detail. Yes, I know that a formula like F=MA explains force to me in terms of speed-change of an object with mass, but I also know how to explain it in words about phenomena that can be described and explained. I don't understand how quantum physics should not be translatable in this way.

Why/how is either of the following questions better than the other? 1) Why is "how" a better question than "why?" 2) How is "how" a better question than "why?" Don't the two meanings conflate according to the context of usage? I think the only reason people have eschewed "why" questioning is in the context of giving a reason for nature to work the way it does. They just think, "because that's the way nature works . . . and this is HOW."

It seems like the moment gravitation renders electrons unable to emit photons, something special would happen with matter/energy. edit: I suppose if there is still distance between the emitting particles within the event horizon and their final destination, gravity would/could still pull emitted photons toward the center. But wouldn't both matter and light be falling at the same rate at that point, or would matter continue to fall at sub-C speed while light emitted from it would move at C toward the center?

How is a single photon visible then? Like when an LED power indicator light is made to pulse once, would that be a single photon?

That is the way to reduce the number of labor-hours/unit-output. It is also possible to reduce demand for legal services in some ways (hopefully not to draconian). It is also possible to reduce the amount of money paid per labor hour and/or unit output by the recipients reducing the amount of consumption they and their families engage in. So there are multiple routes to streamlining, all with mixed benefits and drawbacks for various people/processes affected. Do you understand that the reason many people go to school is to get a military/industrial job so that they can get money and health-care? Do you really think that any hunger is being caused by the speed at which wheat grows? Do you think it's going to make health-care more affordable to put more money into it? You really should think about the HOWS of making such economic substitutions and address that. You act as if anything you could possibly want to achieve socially is just an item on a menu and that if you are willing to pay the money, it will get made and served to your taste. If you want more wheat produced, there's more to it than money. If you want better education, there's more to it than money. If you want more/better healthcare, there's more to it than money. It's naive to think the solution to every problem is as simple as diverting money from something else to it.

How should I explain except to say re-read it?

Have you considered what would happen if people in the west claimed that laws against theft were derived from the ten commandments of the bible and therefore they were free to dissent? People would start stealing from each other and civil violence would erupt. You could even claim that the separation of church and state is prescribed in the bible, making it a religious instrument for ensuring the cultural dominance of religion by separating it into distinct institutions that are made to appear to be independent of each other. The reason I mention this is because it makes it easier to see how religious institutionality can co-exist with democratic discourse while people simultaneously avoid transgressing certain basic standards. I'm sure no imam would assault you if you wanted to have a democratic discussion about some cultural aspect you two disagree on, but he would probably be concerned that you might be venturing into heresy the same way a police officer or judge might be concerned if you began discussing the illegality of some drugs or other crime. Just as westerners are strongly divided into those who support drug-control and those who use drugs in secret to get away with it, I'm sure that the Islamic world is similarly divided into those who commit all sorts of anti-Islamic activities in relative secrecy and those who would like to police and/or eliminate these behaviors for the good of the people. This is ultimately coming down to the issue of who has the right to govern whom on what basis and what the purpose of freedom and multiplicity of regimes is, I think.

The open seas seem to be stereotypically characterized as the providence of exceedingly violent people. Presumably the intent is to scare all peace-loving people out of traversing the oceans (because there is big money in keeping sea-faring the providence of a power elite?). Either way, I don't think it is stupid to give bullies the benefit of the doubt, although I wouldn't necessarily want to risk it myself. The fact of the matter is, however, that there are numerous threats touted globally that are smokescreens designed to scare people away from certain areas for one reason or another. So if you get tired of operating within the narrow constraints of deterrence through intimidation, you have to either take the risk that threats can turn out to be real or you have to go around exhibiting pre-emptive aggression, which makes others see you as the bully/threat. Then it is just a matter of time before some other bully beats you at your own game and takes your place, which is bound to happen with these infamous Somali pirates if it isn't already. After all, there's no reason to assume this is the same network of people committing these violent acts. For all we know, there is an ongoing competition to overtake this territory by beating the existing winners at their own game and then taking the game over for yourself.

Sometimes I think the only point to things you say is to reduce everything to equations.

Democracy is an approach to governmental repression that maximizes freedom by multiplying power and promoting the least violent, most constructive possible interactions between the conflicting powers. This is called "checking and balancing." The unilaterally free exercise of power gets repressed among all powers among the multiplicity precisely because each has to consider that it is not dealing with subjugated subjects but with other authorities with power to resist and challenge it. Thus it is not democratic to EITHER seek an uncritically compliant friend OR support an enemy just because that enemy is popular among his/her supporters/constituents. The ONLY democratic approach to power is to check and balance other power by critically questioning, resisting, challenging, and otherwise obstructing it from autocracy. This can be done at any level from global to local by any authority vs. any other. Authoritarians hate this idea because they see conflict as inevitably destructive, thus their primary concern is to construct boundaries by which conflict can be relegated elsewhere so that (authoritarian) order can be established and maintained in the absence of conflict. People who do not lack optimism for democracy don't mind conflicts because they see in them the possibility of pursuing constructive instead of destructive resolutions. Thus, I think the conflict between democracy and authoritarianism/territorialism may ultimately boil down to optimism or pessimism regarding the possibility of negotiating conflicts with constructive results.

Ok, I think I have some logic as to how the spin of the electron makes sense. First, electrons are in motion around the nucleus so they must necessarily create a magnet field like any other moving electric charge, correct? So is this basic movement of the electron its spin? And it is quantized because the electron cannot move at different speeds, but the direction can change, which is why spin and magnetic polarity can change direction? Is this right? Something else occurred to me about electrons and their angular momentum, but I don't know if it would be too much a diversion to post it in this thread. Basically, I'm thinking about the relationship between the magnetic field generated by spin and the way a photon is produced when the electron changes levels. Specifically, I'm wondering if this has to do with separation of the magnetic and electric fields of the electron due to a moment of relative stasis (since electric and magnetic fields seem to only be able to exist separately when they're not moving). Should I start a different thread about this?

You said this before: If you're going to approach objective reality as objectively defined, what is the point of even bringing up "observation-dependence," "perceptual conceptualization," etc.? If all you mean is that objective physicality determines subjective perception, why raise the issue? As far as I can tell you're not making any defensible claims about subjectivity, only objective material relations.

Ok, I misunderstood you as referring to perception as a basis for the very fact of distance. I don't think perception is defined by the speed of light as much as it is by the ocular lensing. If you change the lens on a camera, distances appear differently. Objective ideas about distance are based on extra-perceptual science. Sensual, empirical observation is one thing but measurement requires going beyond visual estimation of distance. I don't think there's any necessary consense, though, whether universal or otherwise. You can experiment with this by getting some people together to estimate the distance to various objects. You will probably get divergent estimates, proving that perception does not accurately conform to objective measurement.

Usually, I would think of efficiency in terms of the ability of a device to remain cooler and thus use less energy. However, if you were looking at the device as a heater, any energy devoted to functions of the device that converted energy into something other than heat could be considered waste. So when the OP's roomate asks for devices to be turned off other than the heater, the correct way to calculate the potential energy-savings of switch current from the devices to the electric heater would be measured by the amount of energy consumed by the devices converted into other expressions than heat - although I'm not sure any expression of energy would not end up as heat before leaving the room as conduction. Either way, I think you're right that no practical benefit would be gained by putting the current through an electric heater instead of a computer or other electrically powered device. I just wonder if there is any way some electricity could get converted into some expression that does not end up as heat before leaving the room.

This seems logical to me, but I still intuitively wonder if a 15watt CFL bulb makes as much heat as a 15watt incandescent would. Do some frequencies get absorbed better by some colors/materials than others, e.g. your clothes and skin? Also, I would think your blinds would contain more if they were made of reflective material. If they are absorbing light, they will radiate it out the window as well, I think. Also, I'm not sure how efficient electronic devices are. I wonder if a computer would emit less energy as heat because it used some for the fan, processing, etc. In general, though, I think that your roommate should consider better insulation and/or alternative heating methods in addition to reducing energy usage. If your roommate wants you to turn off your devices, I think you should tell your roommate to lower the temperature on the thermostat.

Why not just say that distance is a "social fact," to use Durkheimian language? Is social consensus a sufficient basis to define dimensionality objectively? Or is your whole point that social consensus is due to the objective nature of the retina?

I seriously doubt that the situations faced by the poor living in the US or any other region all deal with the same problems. Really, what is the point of comparing poverty on a national or regional basis except to bolster the collective ego of people who like to take credit for or blame themselves for how other people treat other people?

Yes, I saw that electrons tend to orient according to repellant alignments between positive and negative parts (I think this is what that graph meant anyway). But I still don't see why this couldn't just be attributed to polarity without attributing that polarity to angular momentum. If the behavior is totally different from an object rotating/spinning in terms of classical mechanics, why use a word that makes reference and therefore implies analogical relationship? Isn't that misleading? edit: maybe linguists should start studying quantum etymology in which word meanings mysteriously and unpredictably tunnel between source concepts and their target meanings. You could apply the uncertainty principle to etymological references. i.e. you can measure the idea of a word or the concept it describes but not both at the same time. edit2: sorry if this joke about quantum etymology sounds rude. It's not meant that way. It just occurred to me and I found it too amusing to resist posting. I hope it doesn't offend anyone. I am not implying that quantum physics is in some way generally ridiculous, just confusing.