punk

Hmmm, I'd always thought the film just answered the question: What if Jesus had flying saucer and a killer robot named "Gort"?

If you eliminate teams then you are just going to end up with a handful of teams. There's just something less interesting about a sport that consisted of say 6 teams playing each other. Starting up a whole new team isn't exactly easy, and is liable to just end up using the players from the eliminated teams. On the other hand, now that I think about it, the problem could well just be poor management. So yes, a lack of profit sharing would force changes in management and ownership. Profit sharing could just be allowing poor owners to allow bad managers to produce crap teams.

I'm honestly not exactly seeing how the benefits have outweighed the costs.

Well moral justification doesn't change reality. If the US engages in policies that are likely to provoke terrorism, then it should at least take that into account in planning and make a good risk assessment. If I see a rabid dog on the street and walk up to it and it bites me, sure it had no business biting me. But what was I doing walking up to it in the first place? When you build a building you don't deny gravity, it is just a fact of nature. When you formulate a policy you should anticipate things like terrorism, it is a fact of the way the world works.

It sounds to me like the goal of this is to make sure the other teams are competitive. This is good for all the teams in the league, since presumably fan interest is higher if the sport isn't dominated by a couple teams. In that case it generates more revenue for the wealthier teams than if they didn't distribute the money. The same reasoning applies to the bottom teams getting the first shots at new players.

The portion of the post I quoted looked (at least to me) as if it was a foregone conclusion that this all started with "Islamic aggression" and the US is simply responding to it. That is like the US was standing on a street corner minding its own business and some stranger it had never met before punched it in the face. I was simply saying that it could well be that the Islamic aggression might have been partly motivated by some legitimate grievances with the US. That is like the US was standing on a street corner minding its own business and someone it knows that it had some bad dealings with in the past punched it in the face. The punch in the face might be out of proportion to the past issues, but it wasn't totally out of the blue either.

If you look into it, quite a bit of the great literature of the Western world is the result of a great writer appropriating some material by a lesser writer and doing something with it the lesser writer couldn't dream of. So it wouldn't be the first time.

I've been recently looking into the papers of people trying to show that quantum mechanics is nothing more than a probabilistic approximation over some chaotic dynamical theory. The idea is roughly this: When we look at a coin flip we are watching a deterministic process, we just pretend it is probabilistic because the system is sufficiently complex (i.e. chaotic in the technical sense) that for practical purposes we aren't really able to know enough about the system to predict the outcome. The idea then is quantum theory is like probability theory for the coin flip, except that the underlying dynamics are substantially more chaotic than those for the coin, so the higher order of magnitude of the "chaos" is such that instead of it looking like a standard probability theory it looks like quantum mechanics. It is all still very rough and in an early stage, but you can show that chaotic systems exhibit a natural "quantization" in that if you have a system with multiple attractors you can think of orbits around an attractor as representing the "quantum state" associated with the attractor. They have other arguments for similar structures of the above sort, that is just the one I remember. The point though is that a chaotic system is deterministic in the conventional sense and obeys conventional notions of logic while at the same time being (for practical purposes) probabilistic.

The left is certainly wrong in painting all US policies as evil, but it is just as wrong to paint all US policies as good. We should at least entertain the notion that people in the Middle East might have a couple legitimate grievances against the US.

Yes, the idea is that Islamic terrorism is a reaction to Western foreign policies. I've never heard it referred to as a "theory" before you called it that. "Blowback" is originally the term people in the intelligence community to refer to attacks on the US coming as retribution for US policies elsewhere. Again, its not really a school of thought as a label for something no reasonable person can deny happens: Sometimes people do violent things as a reaction to something you did to them, which (furthermore) they would not have done otherwise.

This is far far too strong a statement, and borders on turning an interesting topic into a strawman. Any proponent of "blowback" would really make the weaker claim that some terrorist events can be ascribed to "blowback" (you can't rule out the possibility of a genuine psychopath). They would also claim that a resonable foreign policy by any nation should take into account the possibility of blowback, and the likely costs associated with it (i.e. there might be perfectly good reasons to throw rocks at a hornets' nest, but you have to account for the possibility of getting stung in the process). Essentially this all becomes the geopolitical equivalent of risk management so common in business and finance. The criticism is that governments have tended to plan as though blowback would never happen, and so engage in policies which seem unreasonable when a reasonable calculation of blowback and its cost are factored in. Once a government starts assuming blowback never happens, and then it suddenly does, it has to find itself trying to explain away blowback as the actions of lone psychopaths who couldn't be planned for. In effect any "theory" of blowback is simply stating two things: 1. Events/actions have precedents (i.e. if something happens there is probably a reason for it, so if terrorists blow something up, they probably are acting based on past events) 2. Events/actions of consequences (i.e. if you do something things will happen whether you like them or not, and if your nation follows certain policies, then terrorism might follow suit)

Descartes is probably a little strong about "2 + 2 = 4", I'd contend while he might be able to make it so that if I have two rocks and get two more rocks that I always find I have five rocks, I can still prove "2 + 2 = 4" in a purely mathematical sense. Well Descartes is concerned with the "what if we are being systematically mislead", the question then is whether there are things even an omnipotent and omniscient misleader cannot mislead us about. Descartes reaches a conclusion, and it may well be one we dislike. I think, though, that an Objectivist should be able to start with the Cartesian scenario and affirm the axioms of Objectivism in the end. That would be profoundly more interesting than simply saying "Descartes conclusions are wrong, therefore the whole chain of reasoning is wrong". Let's try it. Suppose we are in the Cartesian dilemma of being systematically mislead by an omniscient and omnipotent misleader (but suppose he can only effect our sense data, and not the inner workings of our mind directly). Just play along and don't take the easy way out and say "there is no such thing as omniscience and omnipotence, therefore, no problem". Can we demonstrate the Evil Genius cannot violate the axioms of Objectivism? Of course, on further reflection, one could argue that if the Genius plays with the sense data too much that rational thought and consciousness are rendered impossible, and that a certain modicum order in the world is necessary to consciousness. In that case we could posit the Genius wants its victim to be conscious and so doesn't go "too far"....

You aren't supposed to take it literally. Descartes' point isn't 'gee we can never know if there isn't an Evil Genius'. It is intended as essentially a 'worst case' scenario to bring out whatever remains as 'indubitably' true. Descartes point is basically: 'Look, even in the worst situation I can imagine, the following things are indubitably true. I can rely on them. So I can conclude they are fundamental truths.' It doesn't take much to start from a Cartesian position, and conclude that the axioms of Objectivism still must be true even in this horrific case. The Evil Genius cannot make A not equal A, or Existence not Exist, and so on. Descartes is never asserting there could be an Evil Genius out there, at most he is saying 'Look even if he was, and we were indeed this screwed, we can still rely on certain truths'.

I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. I've found it rather addicting with a great mix of real-time and turn-based strategy. My only complaint (which I have with most of these games) is that I find most of the units available unnecessary, and never bother to use them. I have the feeling the designers wanted variety, but didn't work to really give units strengths and weaknesses that force the player to come up with good working combinations.

Orson Welles once did an all-black version of "Macbeth" with the setting changed to Haiti, and the witches to voodoo witch-doctors (the production was in Harlem I think). I understand it was quite highly regarded. But Orson Welles was a friggin' genius. As someone who has been to the Ashland Festival many many times, I can say that changing up the plays is a good thing. You can only see the same plays in Elizabethan garb so many times before it gets a little old.

No. A person with class would simply ignore it and move on.There is no point to the ridicule. There is always that problem.I tried in my post to treat it as a peer to peer issue.If the OP considered their comments to be peer to peer, then I humbly apologize.

You made a public spectacle out of someone you deemed "beneath" you. I hope that boosted your self-esteem.

I've only ever seen "valid" used rigorously with respect to logical arguments, and then it is merely a formal condition An argument is valid just in case false conclusion cannot follow from true conclusions, so: A,A->B therefore B is a valid argument since A is assumed true and B is deduced true while, A,A->B therefore ~B is invalid. As I said this is a purely formal condition and takes no account of the actual content of the arguments: "George Bush is president","If George Bush is president then the sky is pink" therefore "the sky is pink" is perfectly valid as an argument, though in the sense of content (particularly the assumptio that "If GB is president then the sky is pink") might be questionable. But these sorts of questions go beyond mere validity.

I think the remarks about "whim-worshipping" and "false reality" ignore the data that would indicate that the patient's beliefs and state-of-mind do have an effect on their probability of survival. I think the issue is that telling them they are fine makes it more likely that they will pull through, all other things being equal. Telling them they are not fine lowers the chances of pulling through. The remarks about "whim-worshipping" assume that patient survival is totally independent of the patient's state of mind. In cases like this, as I understand things, the patient's whims do in fact effect the outcome.

This is a very interesting question. My first reaction was to simply say: "Okay if you lie to them their chance of survival increases." Simple decision. On the other hand this encourages an attitude that "I know better than you do what is good for you," which is immoral, as well as the kind of thinking that encourages big government. My second reaction was to say: "Everyone should have the right to make their own autonomous decisions, and have no one else secretly making decision for them." So you should tell them. Now my third reaction is to say: "Okay, this is first aid. On a purely physical level we expect the provider of first aid to do things for wounds and so on without consulting the patient, and asking for their input. The first aid provider does what is necessary to promote the survival of the patient. If it is necessary to lie to them, then that is fitting with the other medical help they provide." So lying would seem legitimate within the context of the emergency situation.

I think it should be pointed out that not only is Ahmadinejad not a dictator, but that in fact there is a higher authority in Iran than the President, namely the "Supreme Leader" who is currently one Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

You seem to be not understanding a simple set of facts: Everyone has an opinion Many of these opinions may differ from yours I gave my interpretation of Wagner. You have yours. I left out the other part of my opinion (namely that his music is over-written, bombastic, teutonic crap) since it didn't contribute much. I do however have enough respect for Wagner to hold that there is more to what he had to write than pleasant flights of romantic and mythological fancy. I do believe that, like most serious artists, he was actually trying to say something. And I think you are demeaning his work by holding the content in such low regard.

Hmmm, this from a man who spent his life living beyond his means on borrowed money.

Check out the three volume set from Time Life containing the titles: The Perfect Wagnerite Ring Resounding Richard Wagner Its in one of them (I think the first actually). Also, Wagner was never a Christian, he was a Schopenhauerian. He was adapting a world-denying Christian legend ("Parsifal") to the world-denying Schopenhauerian philosophy.

Wagner composed "Das Rheingold", and "Die Walkuere" with the anti-capitalist message in mind as something of an allegory. He still had something of the spirit of 1848 in him at the time. Wagner chose to read it into the story. This is part of the reason he wasn't sure where to go with the whole thing after "Die Walkuere". As for "Parsifal", the point isn't whether Christian themes exist in Western art. The point is whether offering up a chaste, faith-driven, imbecile (albeit also a perfect physical specimen) as a heroic ideal has much to offer. Anyway, I'd say the ideal in 'Parsifal' is rather more Schopenhauerian than Christian. It is interesting to note as well that the heroic ideal offered in "Parsifal" is also the heroic ideal advocated by the Nazis.