Phi for All

But who has been directing the advancement of human technology? Humans! If you think our tech has improved life, then you must see that it's humans that have been improving it, making it work more efficiently and humanely. We ARE able to work together more efficiently, and we continue to improve in that regard. We're better than our ancestors. We have more to deal with, much more, but we're much more educated overall, and have a much clearer access to ideas and processes from other cultures. Humans still have conflicts, but with the way global culture works, we cooperate and share with each other FAR more than we isolate and hate. I don't know what metric you use to "impress" yourself, and I'm beginning to suspect it's a metric we'll never be able to meet. Very similar to the "Humans are unnatural" argument, it's a stacked deck being used against us, we'll never be "natural" by that criterion. And just in case I'm misunderstanding you here, I'd like you to verify that you aren't impressed by the way our intelligence takes raw data from billions of sources and turns it into incredibly complex information. Also, I find it more than a bit cynical that you claim the amount of people who care about improving the world is insufficient to avoid "our demise", when something like "caring" is a variable that can change almost overnight. If you like, I can provide a list of links to anecdotal evidence that human caring can have upsurges that accomplish great good. And as our communication capabilities increase, so does our ability to affect things like caring. You overlook the fact that we've accomplished what no other creature could come close to, we've managed to figure out how to leave the planet of our birth. We could spread Earth's life to other places, if we find that life is more unique than we thought. Evolution has no scheme in mind, but it's a mechanism that helps species survive, and there's not much else that could help life on Earth if our sun goes red giant. We could be an evolutionary linchpin for the continued development of all life as we know it. And the reason I don't like the word "devolve" is because it's misleading on a science forum, where evolution has a very specific meaning. What you're talking about is NOT the opposite of evolution, so I think you're making this concept unnecessarily difficult to learn, and that's what I find ugly about it.

! Moderator Note For anyone else who hasn't been following, this is NOT an AGW thread, this is a thread about CONSENSUS. It's a chance to discuss the politics of consensus. Please don't hijack this discussion. If you have a problem with this modnote, report it but don't discuss it here.

! Moderator Note OK, that's enough vacuous posturing for jeremyjr. Go sit in the corner for a week, read a textbook and learn how to criticize constructively.

If millions of Americans all decided to grab their guns and march on Washington DC, and if they did enough preparation in advance to make sure their intentions to exercise their constitutional rights to stand up against injustice perpetrated by the government were clear and well understood by the citizenry, it might work. I think this is about as likely as everyone in the US giving up their guns all at once. Good grief, if we could flex our citizen muscles like that, we wouldn't need to be armed. Unfortunately, what's much more likely, IF our government was turned against us, is that waitforufo and his pals will be boarded up in their homes, brandishing their assault rifles, screaming about freedom while the drone announces how much time they have to disarm and vacate before it chews them up. This is the reality the NRA ignores every day. When you brandish a weapon, you get an armed response.

A metric butt-ton of bucks gets spent here making sure that everyone has an emotional stance on the issue of guns. Nobody listens to each other because we're all screaming about life vs freedom. If we could look at it clinically, we could see that it makes more sense if everyone were unarmed. If we took all the effort we put into defending the right to bear arms, and put it towards better checks and balances within government, we wouldn't need to worry about them. We would have a lot more living Americans, and less grieving families. We just need for some people to wake up and realize it's not 1860 in the US anymore.

That's a hope, really, a wish. You're banking on it never happening, just like drivers who tailgate at 65mph hope nobody has to stomp their brakes. You're willing to allow so many Americans to die because of this wishful thinking. This is what I don't understand. We have nukes as a deterrent weapon, yet ultimately we're still very afraid someone who is able to plan around our defenses will set off nuclear devices. Similarly, we think citizen guns keep our government honest (hah!), but you know damn well that if a group of armed citizens decides to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights to protest the government's corruption, the NSA is going to know about them and they're going to be labeled terrorists, and they're going to be dealt with. When the military had the same weapons as the citizens, we would outnumber them easily. If our government was so corrupt that a citizen movement to use guns to protect ourselves from them was formed, do you think it would be as easy as millions of us against thousands of them? The wealthy that want the US to keep the guns/drugs/police/prisons cycle going control the media as well, and it would be so easy for them to spin the movement as domestic terrorism, angry people with guns threatening our communities and our way of life. In short (too late!), an armed citizenry could only win out if we were to organize in secret, and overwhelm any opposition with sheer numbers. The odds of pulling that one off seem pretty slim. I think you, and other guns supporters, don't really believe the 2nd Amendment protects you from your government. I think you know there are a lot of guns out there, and you don't want to be defenseless. What you're really defending is you don't think your citizens can be safe if nobody has a gun, because SOMEBODY will still have a gun. Your stance kills thousands each year so you can imagine you're safer. Of course it wouldn't be the government, it would be people with vested interests using the government, law enforcement, and the National Guard. Our media is privately owned by those with vested interests. The media can define whether an incident involved a freedom fighter or a terrorist. What I'm saying is that being afraid of what your government could be capable of is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is thinking that armed insurrection in this day and age is a viable alternative to working within that mature machinery to find a peaceful solution.

The great news is, you only have to fix this one thing and the rest will work out great. The best news is, you're the only one who can do it, and since you're smart, you'll figure it out.

Oh, please. Do you really think that's clever? What I was referring to was your claim that it's the left who grow the government. You dodge that by saying you didn't approve of the way Reagan and the Bushes grew the government, but you still claim it's the left that does it, while every other metric shows you're wrong. My apologies for not explaining myself well enough for you to see the relevance. What I asked was actually why the post-Soviet Reagan is lauded for a socio-economic victory (in rereading it seems pretty clear this is what I meant, no? He couldn't have been lauded for the outcome before the fall, right?), and yet we somehow think our citizen rifles are a good way to defeat the US military wielded by a corrupt government. I didn't miss the fact that you dodged that part of the question in order to mis-address the first part. You may win arguments with these tactics (at least in your own mind), but it doesn't really help the discussion, and I'd really like to have an answer. I understand that there are certain things that make your stance look bad, and you'd prefer not to dwell on them (the Santorum Lament), so just let me know if you won't answer my question so I can move on in the discussion. I'll tell you what, you can leave St Reagan out of it. Just tell me why you think using your guns against the US military is a good tactic should our government turn against us?

Man, that argument is so hollow these days, don't you think? I mean, when you can actually look at the numbers and see that what you've been claiming for so long is just the opposite of reality. The far right have been wearing some pretty heavy blinders if they think it's the left that grows the government. And I noticed you FAILED to answer my question about why it was smart for Reagan to find a non-violent answer to the Soviets, but you think our ultimate answer to facing a corrupt government is to put citizens with rifles up against the US military. I know you aren't afraid to answer, so I wonder why you dodged that one.

Why is it we can laud Ronald Reagan for a socio-economic solution to the dangers of the Soviet Union, yet still think it would be a good idea for citizens to take up arms against our corrupt government?

I think the problem is a bit further upstream. If guns weren't allowed at all in the US, we might be able to have an unarmed police force, and reduce these types of deaths along with many, many others. But without that, there's no way we could come close to numbers in the UK. And of course, the whole sell-the-guns/drugs, hire-more-police, build-more-prisons, take-away-the-guns/drugs, sell-the-guns/drugs cycle employs a lot of people, and encompasses many sectors of our society. That's why our own police aren't going to publish bad things about themselves, it's just poor marketing. We lead the world in prisons and prison-related economy. What would these people do without guns (other than being safer)? But I can see what this really is. We put the right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution because we were afraid of giving our government the power over us that the British had. And now you English lords want to take our guns away again, and leave the poor US completely defenseless against you taking back the colonies. Well think again. We're not about to let our fears be diluted over time by a reasoned and rational perspective. Our fears are too important to us.

Belief only affects that equation because we trust (a form of belief) that it's true everywhere. It's a measure we set up to describe the reality we know, so by definition there's really no other need for any kind of belief. It's a fact here, where we're discussing this. Um, I was suggesting that by stickying this thread, it might serve as an anti-example for those interested in the scientific method. It might be effective by showing that if one wants to claim others are hidebound, they shouldn't act that way themselves. It seems like I really didn't explain myself well if this is the impression you got. Sorry I wasn't clearer.

Back in the 70s, Norman Lear was able to show TV audiences the absurdity of racism and prejudice by creating Archie Bunker, a character on Lear's show All in the Family. Archie Bunker was a prime example of the intolerance and bigotry that keeps a basically good person from interacting effectively with the rest of society. Archie became the iconic bigot, and we all laughed at how he kept trying to show how right he was while the audience shook their heads and related to the more tolerant characters. Every episode, Archie would say the most outrageous things that everyone else knew to be completely false. Showing this hidebound perspective, which seemed outrageous except to those of us who knew a few real-life Archies, Lear was able to reach many more people with his message of tolerance. This is why we may seem to let some of these types of conversations go on too long. Sometimes it's really effective to show how NOT to do things.

Regardless of any facts that come out of the case, and without making any judgments about it before I know them, I just have to say that this is a horrible OP for a science discussion forum. You ask when his parents will be interviewed, and then you decide how they feel and what they did. You claim it will be interesting to know more about them, and then you decide it's all about them being bad parents. Cases like this need rational thought, not knee-jerk emotional responses. It's a horrible tragedy, but let's not pass out nooses and torches until we have a discussion, OK?

I think we may sticky this thread. It will be invaluable in showing how hidebound and inflexible some people can be when it comes to science.

Some facts: In my state of Colorado, they determine a quota for hunters and issue that many licenses to hunt one lion each. Colorado doesn't limit the kills to males, however, which many experts say they should. The quotas are supposedly to reduce human/lion/livestock interaction, but the hunting doesn't happen where those interactions take place, on the borders of civilization. Hunters travel to the back country, so many argue that it doesn't help that much. There is a limit to how many can be killed each year, but because of budget cuts during the Bush administration, our forestry services no longer keep accurate track of how many mountain lions there really are. This would seem to make the limit number fairly arbitrary. I'm not a hunter, personally. I've always understood that animal population management efforts rely on hunters to keep a balance in the environment, and those efforts are necessary. I know there are many nuances I'm not aware of, and that this is a very complex issue that isn't going to be simply switched off by saying, "No more killing mountain lions". It's interesting to note the emotional appeals surrounding this practice. To me, it seems rational to stop killing hundreds when you've only got thousands left. There have been many calls for reducing the limit by half, but this hasn't gotten much traction, mainly because the hunting lobbies can point to livestock deaths, so emotions have kept the practice in place. Back in 2004, oddly enough, we did pass a law to require the person who killed the cat to be part of the party that tracked it in the first place. Apparently, a lot of wealthy foreign thrillseekers were hiring guides to do all the hard work, and then they'd have themselves choppered in to make the kill. When the law was proposed, it passed easily. I think this shows that people really don't want these magnificent animals killed disrespectfully, but perhaps have been emotionally persuaded to allow a certain number to be killed "for their safety and ours". If more people would use their reason rather than making this an emotional issue, I think more people would realize that those who live on the borders of civilization do so for a reason, and they should expect some brushes with Mother Nature, who is sometimes a very dangerous bitch.

Historically, this is the part where Galileo purposely gets his thread shut down so he can claim oppression. Curse you, Cardinals! My prediction, based on a growing mountain of evidence, is that he'll just keep making claims with no substance, so he'll eventually get himself banned and claim it's all our fault for being hidebound scientists. It would be too difficult to stay here and actually do some science after all these unsubstantiated claims.

I've been hoping all the old misogynists would die off before the technology reached the Stepford Wives point, because those guys would be all over that.

Well, we don't want anyone "falling by the wayside" by over-using the internet....

Ideals for being human, but not for being humane. Greedy and oppressive, yet compassionate and benevolent? It's probably those that are the former but think they're the latter that makes the OP think we're losing ourselves to technology.

I think he's saying, "Talk to the hand, the ears were never listening".

Many reasons. Big animals need a LOT of food. Less resources mean a population will often decrease in physical size. The smaller ones that needed less food also had the better chances of gliding using their feathers, which guaranteed that gliding would become more successful in successive generations, and eventually lead to actual flight.

"Our humanity" is based on being humane, imo, which is usually defined by benevolence and compassion, for each other and the life around us. I like this definition better than the natural vs unnatural perspective, since it seems to say that being kinder and more respectful is being more human. If we're going to set ourselves apart from nature, I'd rather be known as the reasoning, compassionate species, rather than the "unnatural" species. Our humanity is usually the part of us that we're very proud of, the part that selflessly reaches out to help when needed, the part that thinks about the greater good, the part that understands we're all connected, and it's the part that can transcend our baser, animal urges and behavior. Being humane is to reject greed and oppression in favor of community and cooperation.

You just keep claiming the same things, we keep asking you for examples to support what you're saying, and you just keep claiming the same things. When are you going to get that the quality of evidence you present for your arguments determines whether they're taken seriously or not? Whether you're talking about aliens, UFOs, or just trashing science in general, you need to support your claims, to the satisfaction of others, not just yourself.

Being closed to proven methodology is in contradiction with the fact that science is successful. That's really why the models attract reasoned thinkers, because they work. And because we had to sift through so many bad ideas to get to them.