MichaelGroves

Another point: bragging about how bitey your dachshund is, as though that vindicates your poorly behaved pitbull, really makes me think you shouldn't own dogs. Why didn't you train your dachshund well? I have met well behaved dachshunds, so what is your excuse? Do violent and poorly trained police justify your violent and poorly trained dogs? Is that what you're trying to say?

A rational person is more concerned around a trained tiger than a house-cat, despite both having the same capricious-but-usually-peaceful temperament. A rational person considers not only the temperament of the animal, but also the damage it could do. Numerous grown adults have been killed by pitbulls. Dachshunds? Not so much.

I think you understand this, but are pretending not to. Let me tell you, feigned ignorance is not persuasive.

Tranquilizer darts only work fast enough for self defense in video games.

> A vicious dog won't immediately attack.

It's trivial to find videos of dog attacks that contradict your absolutist assertion.

Some of the shootings of dogs are justified, others are not. It depends on the dog and the circumstance, but of course every dog owner will claim their dog was a loveable puppy after the fact.

I am expected to uncritically believe the owners, to believe that all these dogs are harmless and well trained and that they're all being shot for no reason. Well I believe that some of them are being shot for no good reason, but I've seen very little to suggest that most are. And from my interactions with the general public, I am inclined to believe most dogs are, if not dangerous, then at least poorly trained.

Better to run and look like a coward than to get bit. Looking like a coward in front of a stranger costs you nothing. Misjudging a dog and getting bit can cost you disfigurement or death. You know your dogs; the appliance installer doesn't.

Also, I think it says something about the temperament and worldview of the owners of these dogs that they so often seem very concerned with appearing brave or cowardly.

The premise of bloodsports appeals to dirtbags, who buy these sort of dogs and neglect to train them at best (or very often, train them to be vicious.)

Probably 664 is what they had available, or what their calculated geometry called for. It seems silly to speculate that they could have or should have gone for 666 but deliberately chose not to. If that were the case, why not 665 or 667? Is there any reason to think 666 would have been a more appropriate number?

I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships.

Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.

When I was in elementary school I made paper out of cut up blue jeans and learned that it was invented in China. I also learned that the Egyptians invented papyrus, which was similar to paper but shittier. Recalling it now, I also remember that I grew up in a paper mill town.. so maybe my school placed an unusually strong emphasis on paper. Still, I don't think China inventing paper is esoteric knowledge in America.

I can't remember when I first heard that China invented wooden movable type, but I do recall reading about it a whole lot online in discussions quite like this one.

No one talks about it? China inventing paper, printing and gunpowder is something every school child knows. I think I've heard about it about a million times. These facts are common knowledge; certainly paper and gunpowder.

Printing is an odd example; the reason Gutenberg was influential is not the reason most people think. He did not invent movable type. He invented systems for mass producing movable type, particularly technology for casting type blocks out of metal, instead of carving them out of wood. So yes, movable type was invented in China. But no, Gutenberg's contribution was not "stealing from the Chinese" (as has become popular to claim on the internet these days...) The root of this particular misconception is the general public's general ignorance of printing technology.

Forgive me if I'm missing your joke, but most of the American public did think that way. Most of the American public was against war until Japan attacked America. And responding to an attack is not what I would call being "world police". Nor is going to war with Germany after Germany declared war on America.

This is why America entered the war so late. If America were thinking of itself as world police at the time, why did it take America so long to actually go to war?

Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did.

Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.

> Natural rights.

'Natural rights' are the entitlements we feel that we have, derived from the rules we feel others must follow according to natural law. 'Natural law' is the rules for social conduct which are baked into our genes. Or, as wikipedia puts it

> Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights.

Natural law and natural rights are two sides of the same coin.

> If the government abdicates its role, I agree you have the right to enforce your own personal justice. [...] I also find it a bit spurious to say that the government has abdicated their permission, but the laws are still in effect

You've conceded that in absence of a government, people have the right to enforce their own personal justice. If the right to pursue justice still exists in absence of a government, then some sort of law must also exist in absence of a government (from what else would you derive a right to seek personal justice?) The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species. Social instincts which evolved to facilitate cooperation in groups are the root of all basic laws written down by governments. When somebody is wronged, in violation of these universal laws, they feel it in their bones.

If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.

As I see it, people have a right to receive justice. The deal we have with governments is simple: the government handles justice, and in return, we don't handle it ourselves. This is a good deal, it leads to better outcomes because courts are more capable and less hot headed than victims. Vigilante justice is inferior to the sort of justice a government can provide.

But when a government abdicates their side of the deal, what choice to people have? Does such a government really expect people to forego receiving justice at all when their government repeatedly and consistently refuses to provide it? When governments abdicate their duty to provide justice, vigilante justice becomes morally justifiable. This is not a good state of affairs, and is why a government must prioritize being an effective provider of justice. When a government abdicates their side of the bargain, the aftermath is blood on their hands.

The scientific process is a means to an end. The only reason it has any value at all is because it gets better results than other processes. But this process is not equally effective in all fields of inquiry. Those fields in which the process is more effective are "more scientific". Fields in which this method are less effective are less scientific.

> It lays out observations and a hypothesis that might explain those observations.

The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested. A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does, regardless of how much effort is expended. A field being more scientific than another isn't a matter of researchers trying harder. The quality of their results, independent of the magnitude of their effort, is what really matters. If researchers dutifully follow the scientific method by the textbook and, due to the subject of their research, can only get slipshod results, their field is less scientific than one in which researchers easily get high quality results.

>>> Good sociology papers are just as scientific as physics or engineering papers,

> Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.

It seems like entirely the point. Also, the difficulties you describe are reasons sociology can't be as scientific as physics, not reasons to pretend sociology is just as scientific.

Where do you lay the blame? With the trend followers who are faking disorders, or with the researchers who are pointing out that trend?

Maybe he didn't get it.. or maybe you didn't like his answer?

The people following this particular stupid trend wanted people to believe they had an illness. They got what they wanted, though perhaps not quite in the way they wanted.

A smartass is a person, not a technological artifact.

I don't mean to be nitpicky. There are a lot of ways the word smart has been paired with other words. But "smart [object]", where object is some bit of technology that is suggested to have intelligence in it is really what I'm looking for. If somebody in the 1950s had marketed "smart headlights" that automatically turn on at night, that would be an example of what I'm looking for. But I haven't found anything like that prior to "smart bombs."

To document a decades long political career properly I think you'd need something the length of a book at least. Wikipedia gives you a handful of paragraphs, probably written by somebody who only skimmed a few books at best.

I don't think any of these are examples of it. Smart cards in 1974 postdate smart bombs. "Smart casual" fashion is smart in the "Good-looking; well dressed; fine; fashionable" sense, while smart bomb/phone are being used in this sense: "(often in combination) Equipped with intelligent behaviour (digital/computer technology)."

Smart bombs weren't called smart for being fashionably well dressed. The term was applied to guided bombs with fire-and-forget capabilities, which were first used during the Vietnam War.

The Middle East 'grew' in the early 00s, for the reasons you probably expect. The Bush administration needed a euphemism for Muslim nations.

> The Greater Middle East, is a geo-political term, introduced in March 2004 in a paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the G8 summit of June 2004, denoting a vaguely defined region that includes the Arab world plus Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey.[1] The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa.[2][3] Previously, by Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Greater Middle East had been defined as the MENA region together with Central Asia and the Caucasus.[4]

> The future of this Greater Middle East has sometimes been referred to as the "new Middle East", first so by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in Dubai in June 2006 presented the second-term Bush administration's vision for the region's future. Rice said would be achieved through 'constructive chaos', a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War had broken out; the meaning of this phrase and the Bush administration's vision have been much debated since.[5][6][7] The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Middle_East

Smart TVs, Smart watches, Smart phones, Smart houses.. how did things become smart? As far as I can determine, the 'smart [thing]' linguistic construct started with 'smart bomb', a propaganda euphemism for guided bombs that emerged in the 70s. Does anybody have an earlier example?

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/26/archives/smart-bombs-and-...

The point is that "1 death per 100 million miles traveled" is the mean average, but most drivers do better than the mean. Mean, median, and mode are not the same and the mean crash rate is not relevant to most drivers.

> I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.

It is. The mean is dragged down by alcoholics who drive drunk every single day. If you never drive drunk, that gives you a significant advantage.

Exactly right. Furthermore, most risky behavior is a choice. Crashes aren't random "acts of god" that strike anybody with equal likelihood. If you choose not to drive drunk, drive in bad weather, or for many hours without rest, then you can greatly improve your odds and almost certainly reduce your risk below the average. In these discussions I often see far too much fatalism; "Everybody thinks they're above average but half of you aren't". ignores both the fact that crashes aren't distributed like that, and the fact that the riskiest behavior is a choice. The mean number of miles driven drunk is greater than zero, but the number of miles I drive drunk is zero.