lemur

The US civil war involved, like any other war or orgy of violence, escalation of multilateral violence and I don't think you can attribute all that violence to any one individual. You never can, really, although it is popular to do so. Also, when you talk about something being "justified," are you asking whether it was justified in a universal moral sense or whether it was justified by one or more people? If so, whose justifications are you interested in and why?

Why is it necessary to have a reason NOT to commit violence? Wouldn't it make more sense to talk in terms of reason TO commit violence? Then, if such reason to commit violence are valid, doesn't it always make sense to keep violence to a minimum or reduce/resist it as much as possible? What reason is there to simply liberate violence without due cause purely on the basis of how you regard a species or individual organism?

First, is it valid that as an object gains momentum-energy, it also gains gravitational-mass? Second, if it does and you have very massive fast-moving object orbiting around a black hole, could the gravity stretch spacetime in a way that expands the black hole beyond its Schwarzschild radius? edit: if nothing else, could it decrease the relative density of the black hole in a way that would increase its rate of Hawking radiation?

Which came first, the electron or the photon?

Why do people assume that putting more money into education funding necessarily improves education? Maybe it just attracts more profiteers to the field.

Imo, there is a false dichotomy between free market medicine as being high-cost and public (government controlled) medicine as lowering costs. I think the issue comes down to funding-pools. If insurance or government creates a large pool of money for health-care, suppliers figure out ways to tap into the pool(s). If, on the other hand, no such pools were available, medical costs would be limited to what individuals could afford to pay. When I tell this to people, they say that no one would go into medicine but I think people still would, since it would still be a lucrative business compared to many others, if nothing else because of volume-sales (everyone needs it sometimes).

Maybe the smoke acts as a black body to absorb solar radiation into a warmer air-blanket around the trees. I don't know if this would have some benefit greater than letting the sun warm up the trees and ground more gradually, though.

I think his point is what makes it "spin" instead of, for example, "hue" where hue would have exactly two values, "dark" and "light?" The idea of angular momentum has to logically relate to some ability of the thing spinning, right? If an electron "spun" as a result of other electrons moving past it to initiate the spinning, that would literally make sense as spin. If there's no spin-like behaviors between electrons, why does it matter whether you call it "angular momentum" or "magnetic propensity?" Or does it have to be called "spin" to account for the fact that its a moving charge and for that reason generative of a magnetic field? Steevey, I hope I'm not confounding your issue by posting this.

Have you considered the role that popular fear plays following the violent attack on a ruling individual or elite? After all, hegemonic culture is usually projected onto figurehead individuals, so when they are violently attacked or killed it sends a repressive message out that people should differentiate their culture from that of the "assassinee." But then as time passes, the repressed culture grows in a subterranean form and eventually gets expressed as backlash against the culture that the assassination/repression was attributed to. So while it was popular to hate Bush (and currently Obama), many of their ideas will re-emerge later once people are less afraid to be criticized for supporting them. I suspect the same will occur with Mubarak. It's probably not so much due to the popularity of the backlash as it is a backlash against the power of the rebellion, which of course has to be necessarily more powerful than the government it overtakes in order to overtake it at all. The mistaken identification is between democracy and majoritarian rule, as I've explained in other threads. It is clearly undemocratic to protect either the power of a minority or majority to dominate unilaterally. Democracy entails checking and balancing of power by other power (division/multiplicity of powers). Please make sure to analyze the ideologies and interest behind critiques, because they are designed to appear valid even while promoting a certain agenda. For example, EU critics often cite things like the gap between rich and poor and fervent religion as problems with America, but these criticisms presume that European-style social-economics and materialist secularism are ideal; and they are viewed as ideal because of aristocratic traditions that promote submission to authority in exchange for well-treatment (royalism). These same ideological interests seem to play out in global criticisms designed to undermine some ideologies while propagating others. Obviously it is well recognized that democracy/freedom/anti-terrorism ideology is widely propagated, but it is less common imo for reactionary ideologies to identify themselves clearly and submit to public critique as democracy tends to do.

Thanks for the clarification on the term, "molarity." Still, my question remains how it is possible to weigh a mole of a substance? I suppose if you can isolate two substances, such as carbon and oxygen, and you combine them to make CO and nothing is left over, then you know there was the same number of atoms of each. I guess I should google avogadro to find out how he discovered the number of atoms in mole. edit: It was hard to find a satisfactory, but it seems that Faraday was able to measure the charge of a single electron and when this number was divided into the charge of a molar quantity of some substance, the result came out as avogadro's number. I still don't see how Avogadro came up with it by measuring ideal gas weights and volumes, though. It seems like it would be an arbitrarily small number if you had no basis for establishing the exact size/mass of a single atom/molecule itself.

I think you keep making the mistake of confusing wealth and income with spending and distribution of resources as all being linearly related. In reality, you can't redistribute labor for building a yacht as labor to build basic shelter for a thousand homeless people because the two are not in conflict because of resource-scarcity in the first place. It's not that there isn't enough materials or labor to build housing for the poor; it's that buying the materials and paying for the labor to build such housing costs money because everyone involved is involved in rat race to attain a middle-class lifestyle. This means that if you would tax a yacht-owner and put the money into building housing for the poor, that money would quickly go into raising middle-class income, which would drive the competition to charge that much more for building materials. As a result, a certain number of people would fall into poverty while the standard of living of the middle-class was increasing by small steps. What I think would help would be if people, especially middle-class people, would become happier with less. Middle-class culture seems to have the bad-habit of people judging each other for various forms of status from where you went to school to what kind of clothes you wear to what kind of food you eat, what you do on vacation, etc. This results in a great deal of unhappiness at trying to keep up in terms of social status and popularity. Also, middle-class culture seems to promote the idea that doing menial labor is bad, which causes middle-class people to consume a lot more services that require many people to accept lower-class jobs to facilitate the middle-class lifestyle. So if middle-class people were happier with eating at home more and cleaning their own houses, etc., the people who get stuck doing those jobs could be free to become middle class too. What happens when you try to redistribute from the rich-down, is that the redistribution trickles up and raises middle-class income and/or increases the number of people with middle-class salaries. Then, the first thing people want to do when their income goes up is consume more services by going out to eat more, staying in hotels more, etc. So this actually increases the burden on lower-class service workers to provide the perks of middle-class consumption. And, what's more, I don't think class-elevation really makes people happy because they always feel a little uncomfortable with others cleaning up after them, etc. So I think economic happiness would increase if people had more access to do more things for themselves and do more things in general that require less service labor and other resources.

I think that national socialists felt deprived of their right to eliminate by any means people they viewed as an invasive species of human, but I'm sure the people who fought them felt completely entitled to intervene in the situation. Maybe to this thread should be added the ethics and rights of defining species as artificially invasive or naturally migratory in the first place. After all, humans are naturally migratory, and other animals also naturally migrated via the technological vectors of human migration. A more artificial form of species invasion might be when exotic plants and pets are intentionally popularized as being exotic and interesting, and as a result become a threat to other species. But how would it be any different to a native plant or animal that is losing resources to the invasive species if the "invader" was brought intentionally or by the species' own effort. Further, what about something like a palm tree whose seeds float across oceans without humans bringing them? Also, what happens if as a result of pruning invasive species, the natural biodiversity that evolves through migration is stifled? Can that have any negative ecological effects?

Is the amu mass of an element reflected in molarity? I think 1 mole of a substance refers to a large but specific number of atoms, and thus the mass of this amount of a substance would reflect the exact mass of each atom. Now I'm wondering how you would count the required number of atoms to test the mass of a single mole of atoms.

The problem is that popular culture tends to simplify culture into dichotomies. Why can't there be both modern and fundamental forms of Islam present just the way there are different approaches to Christianity and other religions. I think the thing you keep seeing is the media and popular consciousness trying to reduce ethnic difference into simple all-encompasing image of a given category. In reality, the world is too complex to define even though it is full of people who are defining it in one way or another. I think it's good to support power but not uncritically. Whoever is in a position to exercise power must be respected for their power, but it's too easy to fall into an attitude of conflict-avoidance where you avoid engaging them democratically. I think western governments have a habit of doing this because of a common (probably sub-conscious) strategy of gaining power by tolerating difference until enough (economic/political) leverage can be gained to control them in some way. Although we preach democracy, we too often attempt to use it as a means of accruing leverage to control others in some way or degree. I'm not sure "we" ever were in unanimous sense, any more than "they" ever weren't. I don't think the war on terror was ever "us vs. them" at the national level. Otherwise the war would have been named in terms of national or religious opponents. Recall that while the media made the war on terror into a war on Muslims or a war on the nations where conflicts were concentrated, the government called it a war on terror and explicitly avoided making it about the ethno-nationality of the people involved. Bush said that anyone harboring terrorists was an enemy, etc. "Muslims" were never "out to destroy us." Terrorists were out to destroy freedom/democracy, or at least stimulate it to react in the direction of authoritarianism. Now would you say that authoritarianism is gone globally? Would you say that freedom and democracy are completely gone? If not, in what sense are they not still engaged in a continuing conflict and how is this latest news not reflective of that? And some secular people who hate both Muslims and Christians, and some nationalists who care less about religion ethno-national solidarity and oppositions (even though they may be religious or secular). It sounds like what went wrong is that people made too narrow a definition of democracy so they could define it as being absent. Isn't democracy always present to some degree, however repressed? I hope you also realize that authoritarian forms of ideology/power also evolved and sustains itself in various ways. It's not as if humans still dominate and submit to each other by whips and chains.

It's not completely true what you're saying. People spend more money when they're unhappy. This spending drives GDP but it also creates demand for debt to borrow more money to spend, which creates the deficit/pricing cycle that keeps people unhappily in debt. Plus, if people really loved their work/jobs, they would have no reason to want more than meager pay, because their work would be like recreation for them. Of course there are always going to be things you want outside of work, but the point is that the reason many people work so hard is to save up so they can stop working, because they don't like working. Do you think people who love their jobs more than anything in their lives and get paid very well for them are complaining about taxes? I don't think so. I think it's the people who are doing jobs they don't like and trying to save up to retire or just to do something away from work to get their minds off their work that don't like losing income to taxes.

I think it is because of bravery that they are called heroes. Police are brave enough to confront bullies that other people avoid conflict with. Firefighters must be brave to come into contact with dangerous fires. There are many other forms of bravery that could be considered "heroic." Personally, I don't like the idea of calling people heroic because it transforms a practical issue into one of personal status/ego aesthetics. If it is good to be brave, then why should people need an ego reward? Their bravery should just make them feel good and they should be happy to have helped others or prevented something from being destroyed, etc.

But who has the authority to question these doctors' diagnosis? Don't they need a second opinion from another doctor? Or can they undermine a doctor's authority on the basis of common sense? Oh the anarchy!

That's the same problem with real-estate/housing, though. All this would do would fix the cost of one in terms of the other. Currently if you have cancer you can lose your house paying for treatment but then also lose treatment because you can no longer borrow money against your house after you lose it.

If a doctor/psychiatrist legitimately thinks that the stress of missing the protest is sufficient reason not to go to work, I don't see why it would be malpractice. However, I can't imagine that it is therapeutic to spend your day off at a protest about the cause of your stress. But then maybe it would be very good therapy, idk. How would you feel about doctor's writing notes excusing students from classes and exams when it stresses them out too much to show up, like say because they had a very therapeutic social event that would have to be missed to study for the exam or show up for class? I suppose it actually makes sense, as contradictory it may seem to values that emphasize personal sacrifice as part of performing ones duties. Personally, I don't think kids/people should get out of bed on a cold winter morning if the value of their work doesn't exceed the cost of heating their school or workplace, but maybe that's unrelated. Actually, I think it is related because isn't a doctor's note to excuse people from work/school ultimately a prescription to stay in bed for health reasons? Economic reasons are arguably not directly health-related though. Maybe there needs to be economic doctors to write these kinds of notes instead of putting it all on medical doctors. What would that do to universal health-care costs?

Housing foreclosures and health-care funding seem to be two major economic issues at present. Could these two issues be solved simultaneously by insurance companies taking over mortgages of properties in danger of foreclosure? This could allow the buyers to trade their equity for guaranteed health-care. Doctors and others who get paid by health-insurers could receive compensation in the form of gradual equity-transfers of properties they could choose. So, for example, doctors and other health-care providers could pick out one or more properties from the available selection and then build up equity in these in lieu of payment for services. They could then in turn negotiate an affordable rent-price or payment schedule as a source of investment income. Would this be a reasonable method of bartering non-monetary capital for health-care?

The one with the most accurate ability to estimate a tangent line to the canary cage hanging in the corner and let go at the right moment.

I don't think it is necessarily paranoid or conspiracy theorizing to do this kind of analysis. It might be if you thought there was a boardroom of guys in suits discussing and cackling over how much they were exploiting people with such financial market structuring and directly proposing methods that would be even more exploitative. Still, it is true that consciously or not, people tend to promote their interests in the policies they create and support or resist, so I'm sure it is accurate to say that many people have worked and continue to work to (re)create the image that this is simply a normal (efficient) form of investment and resist critique or proposals of alternatives by saying that the system does its job, etc. I think you should research Thorstein Veblen on the topic of "absentee ownership," which I believe he studied during the stock-market boom in the 1920s. I also think you can generally analyze the different forms of labor you classify at the beginning of the OP and look at how they influence each other both positively and negatively. For example, some people may come to the economic rationality that it makes more sense to invest in stocks and use the proceeds to buy a house; but when many people do this, it creates a market crash that prevents other people from being able to afford a house. Then someone who can't afford a house might wish to build one, but can't afford to because the cost of building supplies has inflated to levels affordable to contractors building and selling houses at prices that stock investors can afford. So, if this was the case, it would set up the market parameters in a way that would basically require housing to be built for wealthy/investors and prevent people from building a house for themselves without first working for the wealthy to be able to afford building supplies at that level. If such price-level harmonization would not occur, it would allow contractors to buy building supplies for very low cost and sell the finished house for a very high profit, which would allow the contractors to accumulate wealth much faster than the building-supply providers. However, the fact that financial-trading can facilitate such high levels of spending/re-investment creates an obstacle to market access to potential contractors with little or no investment resources, which causes them to seek jobs instead investing in their own business projects. This in turn causes people to petition government to force investors to create more jobs, which further seals the coffin of low-cost independent business investment. It's not a conspiracy. It's just price-harmonization responding to the biggest spenders/investors. If businesses would cater to the lowest-spenders instead of the highest, there would be greater opportunities for low-cost independent business projects but the wealthy would become a great deal more wealthy in terms of the ratio of value between their net-worth and prices. It would also reduce profit-margins in business to levels that would require more sales volume to achieve the same or even lower levels of net revenue. Then the issue would become what the consequences would be for resource-utilization if low-cost business became more productive, since this would presumably mean that much more labor would be utilized for producing new wealth. On the one hand, it could be a good thing for poorer people to be more productive, but in the event that these people would attempt to work as hard as possible to accumulate capital, the net increase in wealth would result in commodity surpluses that would in turn create a buyer's market for all the commodities produced. Such a buyer's market could depress prices to a point where profitability in business was almost non-existant. This could be very good for consumers, since they would gain unprecedented levels of material access, but they would also have little means to attain income which could prompt them to curtail consumption and thus significantly reduce demand, which could potentially paralyze supply for revenue-making purposes. Such an economy could be very liberating in terms of freeing people's time but it would also require them to come up with lots of non-profit low-expenditure activities to keep themselves busy.

But that doesn't explain how you can experience a whole conversation or situation as having occurred before, e.g. in a dream. It's a sense that the present in all its complexity is occurring exactly as it was perceived at some time long ago (such as a dream). So that can't be the result of some actual earlier perception, unless your brain is able to mistake entire situations for entire dreams or previous situations. Maybe since dreams are remembered vaguely or not at all, this level of vagueness would lend itself to easy association with actual situations that bore little resemblance to the original dream, but it seems more likely to me that it would be a coding-glitch in which the present moment makes a neural connection with the part of the brain that codes something as a dream or memory. I don't know if cognition actually works this way, but it seems logical. How else could people distinguish between dreams, memories, and present occurrences?

So these shapes are the wave distributions of electron-position as they orbit their nucleus? And the angular momentum of their "spin" as point-particles is what causes their wave-distributions to change into the above-depicted shapes? And then is it the case that the atoms behave as solid objects in these shapes? I.e. that they can move around and turn in various directions in a non-quantized way? Or are they still, at this level, bound by quantized states of motion?

Good point. Is gossip (without due process and positive conviction) a form of cruel and unusual punishment? In principle I agree, but it comes down to the issue of whether not-acting can constitute a active-action. When giving someone "the silent treatment," for example, you can say that you're not doing anything to them because you are literally DOING NOTHING to them. In reality, I think this is a rampant form of social-power in modern life because it allows any response to provocation to be labelled a hostile act of aggression. If I pay someone to ignore you until you get frustrated and yell at them or otherwise react to the "provocation," is my paying them unethical because it constitutes true intent to provoke? If that person ignores you unintentionally (or intentionally just because they don't want to respond to you), is that less unethical? This could get back into the horrible discussion about defining torture. Technically, isn't any social-effect that causes suffering "torture?" Yet, if you define torture that broadly, wouldn't torture be common everyday practice among almost everyone for all sorts of purposes, many unintentional and some intentional? If you got ten random people to make a list each day of all the ways in which they suffered to some degree, however minimal, how long would the lists be at the end of 1 year? (I say a year because there are different ways to suffer in every season, I think)