Pangloss

Shades of Jim Jeffords. Politics is never nastier than when somebody leaves a party.

http://news.com.com/Physicist+James+A.+Van+Allen+dead+at+91/2100-11397_3-6104148.html

MM, I don't appreciate being misquoted. My "moral equivalency" response was to a different portion of the message I was responding to than the one you refer to in your response. If you did that on purpose, shame on you. You're arguing that they should have just sat back and took it from Hezbollah. Previously dismissed in this thread as a two wrongs logical fallacy. This is a moral equivalency argument' date=' similar to others that have been attempted in this thread. The counterpoint is the same, that there is a difference between deliberate targetting of civilians and the incidental death to civilians who are being deliberately placed in harms way. Nobody seems to have an effective counter-argument to this point beyond the level of "well that's my opinion so there". (shrug)[/quote']

Kudos to British police and intelligence. They really seem to have stepped up and done well.

Incidentally, RSS feeds are poised to become the new "spam", as well as the new "email viruses". With Web apps and (soon) operating systems starting to integrate RSS into core functionality, we're going to see black hat types start to find ways to exploit that tech. It's even better than email, because you can theoretically infect millions of machines *instantly*. The industry will fight that, of course, and I'm no doom-and-gloom type. But I think it underscores the point that tech is always increasing, and Web 2.0 is more deeply interconnected than we even dreamed possibly five years ago. It's only going to get harder to maintain privacy.

Hehe, interesting post Jim.

Whom do you feel is more free? Person A) Makes a choice to sacrifice himself so that others can be free. Person B) Does what the state tells him to do, and stays alive. I realize there are plenty of other possibilities, but your question represents an absolute, so I'm responding on that basis. No, I don't think you must stay alive at all costs in order to be free. Absolutely not. You're arguing that they should have just sat back and took it from Hezbollah. Previously dismissed in this thread as a two wrongs logical fallacy. This is a moral equivalency argument, similar to others that have been attempted in this thread. The counterpoint is the same, that there is a difference between deliberate targetting of civilians and the incidental death to civilians who are being deliberately placed in harms way. Nobody seems to have an effective counter-argument to this point beyond the level of "well that's my opinion so there". (shrug) An obvious logical fallacy of false cause and effect.

Well let's see, we've already got World Cup Soccer. How's it working out so far?

George Will's column in the current issue of Newsweek is worth a read. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14206045/

Or shop, or bank, or drive, or fly, or travel....

I think it's clear that the loss of privacy based on anonymity, for example, is in steep decline and may be lost completely. One may not view that as "inevitable", but at the very least it presents challenges that have to be overcome.

Well yes, that seems to be part of the current rubric. But that's not always the case, and I'm sure they have an eye on the big picture.

Sure. The reporter was basically dismissing the root cause of the current conflict. He's making the case that whatever caused the current conflict is no longer important, and that what matters is the fact that people are dying. That goes right to the heart of the mainstream media agenda, which has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. If it bleeds, it leads. Cameras love crying women and babies. They care nothing about root causes. A "root cause" is normally a politically-correct thing to look for, but in this case it isn't, because political correctness demands that we focus instead on dying civilians, which is certainly an understandable thing to want to do. The great irony of this position is that it claims to place human life above all else, but in fact it does exactly the opposite. Human life isn't a priceless heirloom, it's actually a very pricable commodity. We have (essentially) decided in Western society that its owner has (more or less) the right to spend it however he or she sees fit, so long as that spending doesn't harm anyone else. And can anyone think of anything more valuable to spend it on than the attainment of freedom? At this point the media agenda corresponds to the agenda of many on the far left AND the far right who place human life above the level of human responsibility and freedom. Many in the extremes believe that the Middle East cannot determine its own course, and should be prevented from doing so. They should all be placed in a great big Star Trek holodeck with the safeties turned on, and then we in the enlightened world shall grant them freedom from On High. These people have forgotten that freedom comes at a price. They sit in their air conditioned homes, 5, 10, 15 THOUSAND miles from the violence, enjoying the fruits of their forgotten ancestor's own fight for freedom, and talk about how awful it is that people are dying. They don't care why. They just care that they are. Woe be unto us if those people win.

That's an interesting point, and may serve to explain why they haven't acquired more accurate munitions. Perhaps they're focusing more on damage amount than on accuracy. However, I suppose it's also possible that their purposes would be suited by more accurate munitions very well, because it would allow them to selectively target concentrations of people, instead of relying on a few dead people in whatever house they happen to hit, if anybody happens to be home at the time, and if they're not all locked up in their bomb shelter, etc etc etc.

I grew up in suburban Atlanta. I'm a white male, and my parents are midwesterners from a long conservative-but-Democrat tradition, and they raised me to be tolerant of other viewpoints. MLK was a personal hero of mine while growing up, and I was involved in many activities of a charitable nature. I was in Boy Scouting for many years, attaining the rank of Eagle, as did my father. That having been said, as I was growing up I was consistently and frequently inundated by instances of "soft" racism. Use of the "N" word was not exactly common amongst the children of the white families I associated with, but it wasn't exactly uncommon either -- it happened from time to time, and it wasn't rejected by others in the community. It was sorta like cursing around children -- a technical wrong that you do anyway but you prefer not to do it around the wrong people. Atlanta is (or rather "was" -- I haven't lived there in over ten years) one of the most segragated cities in the country, with white people focused on the northern communities and African-Americans focused on the central and southern parts of town. There was one black child in my high school. Whenever I associated with people who used the "N" word, I felt peer pressure, because they were part of my social group. I wondered if that was a word that I was supposed to use. Others in my situation even, shall we say, "tried it on for size". And thus it was furthered and spread. I suspect that I'm very lucky that I had the counterbalancing influence of my parents. My father, who never once actually spoke with me about the racism we encountered in other families, insisted that we spend time with a predominently black Scout troop in the inner city, working on projects with them even though it was extremely inconvenient for him to transport me there. I never understood why when I was growing up, it was just something we did. Where I'm going with this is that while I've never used the "N" word, I'm strongly cognizant of it, especially when I'm around African Americans. Perhaps it's an aspect of "white guilt", or some other psychological issue, I don't know. I'm sure everyone has those moments where you worry that you might blurt out the wrong thing. When I have those moments, that's the thing I'm thinking about. Is it really all that inconceivable that I might do that in a really bad personal moment, such as drunk and caught doing something I knew I shouldn't have been doing? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that if that happened, I don't think that it would have revealed any kind of hidden agenda or racism on my part. Given the background I've just described above, can anyone honestly say that I'm a closet racist, and a ticking time bomb just waiting for a drunken moment to expose the truth about myself? Isn't it more likely that in a moment of extreme pressure and frustration with myself, I simply succumbed to a life-long fear? Does this apply to Gibson? Damifino. I'm just saying that we're scientists and we're supposed to be above leaping to conclusions based on scanty evidence. We're the ones who are supposed to know better.

No, we both think that forming opinions based on poor information is a bad idea. Now, shall we objectively assess the value of each other's information? Yours is based on National Enquirer-level "news" reporting. Mine is based on the concept of refraining from forming judgemental opinions in a near-void of accurate information.

Here's what I keep wondering: Is there any doubt that Hezbollah would continue to target civilians if they had guided missile technology? Of course not, they would simply say "well Israel is attacking civilians, so we feel justified in doing so as well", as if there is no logical difference between deliberately targetting civilians and hitting them incidentally because they're packed in with soldiers and rocket launchers. And because the world listens to statements from the media like "while diplomats debate the finer points of a cease fire, civilians on both sides continue dying" (from ABC News last night), and does not challenge that kind of equivocation, they would get away with it. Well I think we're going to find out the answer to that question. Higher-accuracy munitions are already starting to show up in Hezbollah's deployed inventory, with a slower, more accurate unmanned drone shot down off the coast of Haifa last night. Iran is playing a risky game there, but they show no signs of stopping.

For exactly the same reason that you felt that post necessary.

That's quite a conclusion about a man you've never met. But then, we've all seen the 3-d holodeck reproductions of the event in question, complete with mental synapse induction that grants us complete and utterly thorough understanding of the mental processes taking place in the accused at the time of the crime. So yes, I'm sure you're right. ;-)

A number of stars are speaking out in Gibson's defense. http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1223467,00.html It's interesting that he spent all afternoon before the event with producer Dean Devlin, whose wife is Jewish. Her comments in the story are interesting. Not what the anti-Gibson crowd wants you to hear, but then it's not as much fun to forgive a conservative as it is to destroy one, is it?

Let's not stray too far from the subject. The issue being discussed here is not whether the Bush administration did X, Y or Z, or what it meant by those actions. More to the point, one does not have to be a defender of the Bush administration in order to support Israel's actions in the current conflict. Nor does one have to be an opponent of the Bush administration in order to oppose Israel's actions.

This argument is predicated on the premise that Israel is deliberately targetting civilians, which I don't accept.

Since there is zero motivation for Israel to deliberately attack a UN outpost (and in fact just the opposite is true), this is either misdirection and obfuscation for the purpose of agenda, or two wrongs making a right. Either way your point is irrelevent, and I'll let you decide whether you're an apologist or a spin doctor. I'm at a loss to explain what it is about my post that indicated surprise on my part at the fact that much of the Arab world supports Hezbollah. What does surprise me is the way people in more open, enlightened, progressive, educated, and ostensibly objective societies support them by equivocating the details about Israel's actions. It would be more accurate to say that because of their actions their lives are less important than dismantling Hezbollah, and that I hold them, not Israel, responsible for the loss of those lives when it happens. One of the problems with equivocation is that it's created a politically correct environment in which people are so obsessed with peace at any cost that they've forgotten that peace ONLY COMES at great cost. It's just that the cost is not always so readily apparent.

Your last post seemed much more sensible and reasonable to me' date=' so while I don't agree with it in the end, I respect your opinion on it. So let me just answer this question (more relevently than ecoli has, IMO, because history before this event is irrelevent to this event, in my view) by linking a couple of pretty good summaries at the Wikipedia. These should not be taken as SOURCES, but just as information starting-points and a reinforcement to the point that [b']it is generally accepted that Hezbollah initiated the current conflict[/b]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Israel-Lebanon_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2006_Israel-Lebanon_conflict