Strangelove

I will ideally try to read the graphic novel the film is based on before I see the movie. The directors supposedly worked to try and get the shots in the movie almost identicle to the pannels in the novel.

I guess the answer is to the original question is, how willing are you to be treated like a toy or an ant? The TV Series Babylon 5 dealt a lot with this issue, without giving away too many important plot points, one key story in the series was the discovery that Ancient Alien Civilizations had been traveling space and manipulating the "Younger Races" (us) when we were just genetic gloop. Ultimately, the story is partly about the younger races being able to stand up to the older ones and being able to set their own destiny without interference. Now Moose, in the situation that you describe, the reason that the Alien Civilization would want to pass us across to the side would not be because they are smarter then us, but because they are stronger and more powerful then us. It would be their ability to use their high technology that treats our planet like an ant-hill which creates the scenario. ("Power flows from the barrel of a gun" and "Might makes right") The key here, is that their technology would give them the perspective that we appear so insignificant that they could remove us in one fell swoop. Now one would hope that they would recognize that we have an especially wonderful anthill over here and that they would not want to smash us. Also, you may be interested in this very short story: http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html

In no particular oder: 1. Hearts of Iron II 2. StarCraft 3. Civilization II (didn't like the presentation of III and have not yet played IV) 4. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire (equally superior to Civilization in many aspects) 5. Tropico 6. Homeworld 2 7. Sim City 2000 (I had issues with 3000 taking out the Acologies) 8. Myst, Riven, Myst III, and Myst IV (Myst V should never had happened)

It was funny and cute. I think that people afraid that this will discourage the spread of Ayn Rand works need to keep in mind two things: 1. The audience of Daily Show and the Colbert Report love the show but they don't focus on the send off scenes when Jon Stewart says hi to Stephen Colbert. 2. This skit was free advertising for Ayn Rand. Someone who did not get the references may be interested to go and actually read the novels. now. I would agree with that. I think the best way to explain it is that to most viewers of the Daily Show, that anything to the right of Michael Moore is all the same. I personally find "Go to sleep, go to sleep, its in your rational self interest" to be very funny.

"The best kind of friend is one with whom you sit on a bench saying nothing & when you get up and go, you feel you have had the best conversation of your life." I value my friends because I value their presence. Sometimes we have intellectual discussions, sometimes we talk trivial things, and sometimes, we just hang out. I can say this, I prefer being with them as opposed to doing homework because they are worth something more to me. If your homework is more worthwhile to you then your friends, then it would seem that either you don't give your friends any value any more, or, that they never really had that value anyway. Only you can accurately tell whether or not they provide value to you.

Please hold off the Hyperbole. Be critical of the science but arguing that the people have some sort of philisophical flaw in them that makes them impervious to truth is ridiculous and goes against history. Laws like the Clean Air Act had more then enough scientific evidence to suggest that it was in the best interest of man to remove phase lead our from cars. I really have no problem with the people who wanted to keep the population healthier.

The point was not Gore, the point was the Ice Cores. I don't believe CO2 to be partisan and alas, there is no better video on youtube. The water vapor being a greenhouse gas is of course a well known fact but we currently don't have accurate recodes historically about it: http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/5/7/3 So I don't dispute your charts and graphs about water vapor, but we don't know everything about this topic yet. Which is my main point, we have hypothesis, but we still need more evidence. My interest in the topic stems from the fact that we don't know everything yet. Unlike you, I just don't feel that we have all the evidence. It took a long time for Evolutionists to get the data to prove the Earth is 4.5 Billion years old, and thus, has been around long enough for evolution to have occured. I of course agree with your opinioin Environmental activists which is why my interest is always drawn to the figures. Aside from the fact that I like winter over summer (personal preference) I will just say that it would be ridiculous to start messing with things to try and get an intended goal if we don't know how to do it properly yet, something I am sure you would agree with.

I would prefer to see Atlas Shrugged given the HBO miniseries treatment in order to get both the high quality and cover the whole story. The movie is going to have to cut out many parts aside from just Galt's speech. However, a movie does get a wider audience so the fish net should be large enough to get many more people actually reading Atlas Shrugged and other Ayn Rand novels.

Do you honestly think that we know everything that we can hope to know about climate change? That the field is a dead science? The field still has a way to go before the necessary theories are well supported. Its called Greenland because when the Vikings went to Iceland, they found that a rather nice place to live so named the giant frozen wasteland up north Greenland to redirect travel that way. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4783199.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6069506.stm Of course I completely agree with that. I don't want us to be naked hunter-gatherers trying to gather berries for a living. It is however justified to be interested in whether or not there is an affect on the Earth because of that lifestyle. Let me give an example, Evolution. If you just used Darwin's Origins of Species to defend Evolution, you would have a very incomplete and in some cases incorrect view of how Evolution worked. Incomplete because Mendellian inheretence and denetics had not yet been re-discovered/discovered and incorrect because Darwin incorrectly believed in a "blending" theory of inherentence when we now know that Mendel shows us how gene expression works. Do you think that the Dawinists answer to the creationists was "We have already proven you are wrong, we are not going to bother studying this topic any further."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zILddVy3Oa8 Bear Down, Chicago Bears. Make every play clear the way to victory! Bear Down, Chicago Bears. Put up a fight with a might so fearlessly! We'll never forget the way you thrilled the nation, With your T formation. Bear Down, Chicago Bears. And let them know why you're wearing the crown. You're the pride and joy, of all Illinois. Chicago Bears, Bear Down!

You are avoiding the question. My point is NOT whether CO2 has anything to do with global warming. My point is that Ice Core Data allows us to see that there is more CO2 now then there has been in the past 650,000,000 years. (Because we measure the ammount of CO2 in the atmosphere and compare it to what has been captured, and low and behold, there is a significant difference.) The point has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the idea that "humans affect the planet" which you half acknowledge to be true anyway. Being interested in whether or this affect is going to do good or bad things sounds like a reasonable position to take. Simply saying "This is all based on million year long millenial cycles and has nothing to do with us, end of discussion" is scientifically disingenuous in the same way saying "This is all based on CO2 and nothing else" is disingenuous.

Do you honestly have a problem with Ice Core data? I suppose you could argue that the scientists who come up with the data are intentionally giving false information, in order to make the situation look more dire then it is in reality, and if you believe in that sort of conspiracy then your opinion can't be changed. I am not even interested in whether the Cores show that CO2 will cause the world to be in dire danger, its just a point that humans are having an affect on the planet. Which you acknowledge anyway: Yeah, but it would sure be a shame if our affect on the Earth worked to our disadvantage. This has nothing to do with the environmentalist nonesense about returning to nature. If you are changing something you don't completely understand (like weather) then it at least makes sense to be concerned about possible negative consequences. You can't just say that "I hope we have a constant affect on the Earth because human beings must affect nature!", you should make sure that you at least know the consequences of your actions. I would love the Environmentalists to be proven wrong, I would love to see the Earth in the same condition when I die as it is now. I have every reason to be at least interested in data and I hope that we can dig deeper ice cores to get an even more accurate view of what has happened to the Earth over Billions of years. And yes, I do agree that if there were to be any sort of Global Warming, that the Free Market would get a solution much more effectively then the UN or any government.

Earth's weather system is not that simple, Global Warming does not mean that the Earth simply gets "warmer" and lo and behold, we get no more cold weather. The concern is that Greenland will melt, the freshwater will stop the North Atlantic Deep Water current from getting warm air to Europe, and then Europe (which is at the same latitude as Canada yet is warmer) will then cool down quite significantly. There is enough evidence to suggest that mankind is having a measurable effect on the Earth's environment. Al Gore's predictions of doom aside, the fact is that we can never hope to predict the weather accurately now, so the likelyhood that we can predict the exact consequences of global warming are low. Maybe things will go exactly as described in An Inconvenient Truth, maybe things will not, maybe they will be at some half way point. And more importantly, realistically, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to get China to stop its industrialization so whatever America does is not likely to save the planet when one billion people are starting to get cars and other such items. Actually it would really suck for you. I do believe that the Ozone layer and Global Warming are unrelated. I was under the impression that the hole in the Ozone over Antartica was a concern about the Solar Radiation that could get into the atmosphere since the ozone was no longer there. Global Warming is about greenhouse gasses aritifically heating up the planet. But in either case, a slightly more effective solution would be to build a solar shield of some sort to defect the suns rays and try and "regulat" the warming of the planet.

The Good Shepherd is an excellent movie but I don't believe that any of its main characters were explicitly based on any one person. Possibly composites. Of course the historical events involving the CIA and its operations are largely true.

It seemed like quite a funny parody, hoped it would lighten the mood of the thread.

This is not a movie excerpt, but I feel it gets the point across since much of what Moose has said about Objectivists and movies also applies to literature. I can't think of any reason why a "true" Objectivist would love Catch-22, it is not told in a rationally chronological order, its main character is not flawless, and there is realistic depiction of death. Yet I can not see how any one can read the above excerpt and not break out into laughter, how they can not enjoy it as a piece of literature. I get a hell of a lot more value out of those above three paragraphs then I do out of Galt's speech. The comparison is unfair (The above paragraphs are humor, Galt's speech is a polemic) but I still get the impression that most Objectivists would prefer to read the speech over that for reasons such as "Joseph Heller presents a malevolent universe" or "Galt's speech is a perfect enunciations of the values that man must live by while the above paragraphs only represent the futility of the work of good men" and so on and so forth. I hope I can be proven wrong because it begins to reach a point of parody when you can figure out what the likely Objectivist criticism to art is. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/mozart.html

I have long held opinions on this issue like Moose, and he has expressed them far better then I could.

It's rather difficult to make a point about the sheer evil of a force like 1984's complete totalitarianism if the enemy actually gets "defeated" in the end. The fact that Winston Smith "looses" acts as a warning for the reader, making them realise that they should work to prevent a world like 1984's coming to pass.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11...2541457,00.html

The ability to tax before you get your paycheck (A World War Two era invention) did have something to do with it.

It is actually meant to deter a nuclear attack from the Russia or China. US military posture has never been about using our nukes as offensive weapons.

I am quite sure that we could guarantee the destruction of Tehran with conventional forces. If that were not to be the case, our Air Force would be significantly more under-funded then it currently is.

Lets assume for the sake of argument, that I can end all the US's problems by destroying Tehran. I can do this either by a conventional attack, or by a nuclear one. Both would have the same short term result, and the nuclear one would have an additional long term one, it would hamper the development of many unborn people by causing leukemia and other birth defects for future generations. Is it really morally permissable to cause that kind of damage when it would not change the short term result? I can't think of why it could be.

1. We do not need to use Nukes to achieve the military aims necessary to make Iran less of a none-threat. 2. Nukes carry an additional stigma with their use which would have unpredictable and possibly negative consequences for US leadership. Our ability to get our allies to follow us in venues such as those we have in NATO may be unecessarily decreased. 3. Nuking Tehran would not end Islamic Fundementalism as a movement. (For that matter neither would simply destroying Tehran. Regime change in Tehran is necessary, but it is not the be-all-end-all of the problem.) 4. We don't want to set the precedent that nuclear weapons are now an acceptable weapon to solve international disputes if we can afford not to. This is less about setting an examples to states like North Korea and more for states like Russia and China, who may feel that they now have the legitimacy to use nuclear weapons to solve their own internal problems (Like Chechneya, Taiwan, Tibet, etc.) 5. The long term consequences of the use of nucelar weapons (fallout, radiation, leukemia in the offspring of survivors, etc) causes unecessary collateral damage, even to those who have not yet been born. I am not entirely aware of the physics, but this could possibly cause problems for our allies in Israel due to proximity (As I remember Chernobyl did cause problems for some of the populations of Western Europe) A conventional military attack leaves no such problems behind. Can you give me a better reason why we should not simply use conventional missiles and bombers? Or if you insist on being less conventional then that, firebombing?

Does Dershowitz say anything about the settlements? In my mind they seem to be a large impedement to a two-state solution since its seems to be a case of Israelis trying to undermine Palestinian territorial soverignty. I am not a big hand of forcefully removing all Israeli settlements from the West Bank, especially since most of them seem to be centered around Jerusalem. I have wondered whether it might be better to treat Israelis in the territory of a future Palestinian State as expatriats in a foreign country.