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The Tangent, Derail, and Argument Thread

If I'm not mistaken, the most important part isn't memorizing equations, it's coming up with the systematic modes of thought that can be used to obtain new knowledge, which may or may not involve equations being used to describe the effects in detail. Think of the simplest aspects of physics, like Newton's laws of motion. The equations for all of it came first from an intuitive grasp of how objects in motion and at rest react to one another. That is to say, in order to describe the world, one must first see it in action, through experiment and verification.

Science is a lot more complicated than people take it for. Experiment is all about isolating the effect you wish to verify. Some experimenters who engage in bad science don't isolate all the variables enough, and then assume that their results have a specific cause, but they fail to recognize that the experiment's results were tainted by an unrecognized, outside factor. A good example is mouse maze experiments. How many senses does a mouse have? How do they react to their environment? What do you have to do to disable each one of their senses? Is turning down the lights and playing white noise enough to blind them visually and acoustically? If you fail to take into account all the possibilities, you can get skewed results. It's a process of elimination.

Does that sound about right, or am I off base?
It's a very small part of it. Documentation, communication, cooperation, improvization, analysis of the results, prediction, begging for budget, all of these are aspects of the field among many others.
 
It's a very small part of it. Documentation, communication, cooperation, improvization, analysis of the results, prediction, begging for budget, all of these are aspects of the field among many others.

I think a lot of people out there don't realize that mathematical models are just that. Models. The granularity of those models rarely approaches the level of discrete units of matter. However, the things people are doing with CAD stress analysis/finite element analysis and CFD these days are very impressive. There's this company called VG6 who make muzzle brakes for rifles, and they use computational fluid dynamics to examine the actual paths of the expanding gases in a computer simulation before they even mill the things out in a CNC mill. They can design fully-optimized muzzle devices that obliterate muzzle climb and keep the rifle entirely balanced. The same principles are useful in engineering internal combustion engines. CFD can be used to design intake ports, injectors and piston faces that have ideal atomization and swirl patterns for the fuel-air mixture. Back in the day, engine designs were sloppy, inefficient and had loose tolerances. These days, they go into a CAD program and get everything down to the gnat's ass. It's really impressive.

That's another thing, too. People frequently mix up scientists and engineers. The former discover knowledge. The latter examine the practical applications. What most people call a mad scientist in fiction is actually a mad engineer. :p
 
The main barrier to a modern polymath is that nobody's organized the data in the ways necessary to make learning it all practical. There isn't a Big Book Of Physics Equations, they're scattered between thousands of papers and dozens of courses, and the main reason for this state of affairs is that the curricula can't keep up and we mostly need specialists to progress the practical aspects of specific areas.
The main reason why these "Physics Equations" are scattered is because most of them have a really small area where they can be considered to be even approximately valid.

If I'm not mistaken, the most important part isn't memorizing equations, it's coming up with the systematic modes of thought that can be used to obtain new knowledge, which may or may not involve equations being used to describe the effects in detail. Think of the simplest aspects of physics, like Newton's laws of motion. The equations for all of it came first from an intuitive grasp of how objects in motion and at rest react to one another. That is to say, in order to describe the world, one must first see it in action, through experiment and verification.
Newton's laws of motion came from decades of observation of the celestial objects' movement across the sky and was built on top of several key observations by previous researchers like Kepler.

There's nothing "intuitive" about them, in fact, the intuitive notion of physics is probably one of Aristotle.
 
Newton's laws of motion came from decades of observation of the celestial objects' movement across the sky and was built on top of several key observations by previous researchers like Kepler.

There's nothing "intuitive" about them, in fact, the intuitive notion of physics is probably one of Aristotle.
Less Newton and more Kepler using Brahe's lifetime of observations.
 
Less Newton and more Kepler using Brahe's lifetime of observations.
True, though if we're going to go that far, it might as well be added that Newton's laws themselves have had centuries-old precursors, e.g. an early notion of momentum and Newton's first law in XI century Persian commentaries of Aristotelian physics, which were adopted and further developed by XIV century scholastics. Newton's great advance was in threading together many insights into a coherent framework than could systematically prove many of these things.
 
Newton's laws of motion came from decades of observation of the celestial objects' movement across the sky and was built on top of several key observations by previous researchers like Kepler.

There's nothing "intuitive" about them, in fact, the intuitive notion of physics is probably one of Aristotle.
Er, you don't need celestial bodies for Newton's laws of motion. They're intuitive in the sense that Newton probably figured them out by intuition, but of course, he was a genius of a caliber such that mankind has produced only a handful of people on his level.

As a reminder, the laws of motion simply set forth the concept of inertia (the first), defines the notion of force and its relationship with mass (the second), and the third is equal and opposite reactions. There's no math at all involved in the first and third law, and the second law is a simple multiplication operation. Thus, Newton probably didn't do much math when he came up with the laws of motion. The stroke of genius is in realizing that nearly all motion (that was known to the people of his time, anyways) can be explained based on these three simple rules.

Which rather illustrates the point nicely in that just knowing the equations and the math involved in doing them in no way means you are prepared to do the science, as the greatest insights may have nothing to do with math at all.
 
Er, you don't need celestial bodies for Newton's laws of motion. They're intuitive in the sense that Newton probably figured them out by intuition, but of course, he was a genius of a caliber such that mankind has produced only a handful of people on his level.
In some abstract sense, you don't need them, sure. However, they are the major reason everyone got so excited about Newton's work, and actually the driving reason behind it: it was a known problem to prove that an inverse-square influence from the Sun (by analogy with the previously proven intensity of a light ray) would lead to Kepler's laws, and Newton did exactly that.

As a reminder, the laws of motion simply set forth the concept of inertia (the first), defines the notion of force and its relationship with mass (the second), and the third is equal and opposite reactions. There's no math at all involved in the first and third law, and the second law is a simple multiplication operation.
The second law says that force is the fluxion (rate of change) of momentum, which is an evolution of a previous concept of impetus, and is very mathematical. The third law is ultimately mathematical as well, but that depends on what exactly do you mean by 'mathematical'? It's not an equation, no; at least not until formalised centuries later with the invention of vector calculus. But mathematics is more than equations; especially in Newton's time, the ideal of 'mathematical' is geometry, and the third law is directly geometrical.

Thus, Newton probably didn't do much math when he came up with the laws of motion. The stroke of genius is in realizing that nearly all motion (that was known to the people of his time, anyways) can be explained based on these three simple rules.
Newton literally invented new mathematical techniques just to be able to do that.

Which rather illustrates the point nicely in that just knowing the equations and the math involved in doing them in no way means you are prepared to do the science, as the greatest insights may have nothing to do with math at all.
I can agree with what you're trying to say, but not these details. Eh, let's just say that just working a bunch of equations isn't even enough to make a mathematician, never-mind scientist.
 
(moving to Tangent and Derail Thread because this now has nothing to do with Ravelry)

So, yes, you would, actually, send people who escaped the communist dictatorship right back in

Nice opinion, bro.
So interesting to see "Progressive" Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.
The initial statement rests on the fact they and/or their families come from shithole countries and are calling for large changes. How the government is to operate. They have relatively easy claims to citizenship, and thereby access to political power, in these shithole countries, so Trump's saying that, before they call for massive overhauls like the Green New Deal or shutting down border control, they should go and prove their ideas can work by fixing places actually in need of serious fixing before telling the country that's been on top for the last 70 years or so under very different premises to theirs how it should be operating.

In case you can't tell, I'm explaining that what Trump's saying isn't actually a blanket statement of any real generalization, save that of ignoring they're (mostly) descendants of immigrants rather than immigrants themselves.

My own position? I very much agree with "go fix shithole countries with your wild overhaul ideas before attempting them on one of the actually functioning countries". Those places need big changes, and they can't get all that much worse if you fuck up. The US has a nearly incomprehensible amount to lose, and could very much drag the whole world down with it. My reasoning is entirely about the risk/reward ratio. There's little risk to trying sweeping changes in Somalia, because it's pretty much rock-bottom already, and even if it were brought up to par with the bad parts of Mexico, it'd be a vast improvement, because then there's at least some semblance of food and water security, even if the rest of the standard of living is still utter shit.

Nothing to do with ethnic blame, but rather a matter of "the first-world countries aren't outright broken, so don't try big sweeping fixes in them when there's other places you can test them first that are broken and in actual need of fixing."

before you could deign to allow them equal rights with the "natives"/descendants of actual fucking invaders.
Nice racism you've got there, crying about shit from far over a hundred years ago with not a single bastard responsible alive today. There's something of a difference between five generations or more back and one, maybe two generations ago with an active refusal to integrate with the local norms.

Seriously, how the sweet fucking hell is this line less bad than what Trump's saying? Hell, Trump himself is almost entirely divorced from this, because his family immigrated at the turn of the 20th century, and promptly set to work integrating to such a degree that they Anglicized their names in respect of the country they immigrated to. Meanwhile, the Congresswomen that Trump is going after with these tweets actively say America is a bad country, call for the deliberate destruction of its social norms, and have advocated for such things as Sharia Law and command-economy socialism. You want to hurl shit at Europeans as a whole for the shitshow of Native American conquest? Look up where their families come from, then look up the history of those places in terms of conflicts.

Look into the history of women's rights and the treatment of other ethnicities in the countries their families come from. You know, give a level playing field, blame both groups for the shit their ancestors got up to and not just the white people. Unless you want to be a disgusting racist, I suppose. I mean, you're a disgusting racist if you do follow that advice, but you'd at least not also be a raging hypocrite.

It's not their homelands though. AOC is AMERICAN.

If you think she isn't because her family is from Purto RICO that IS racist.
This would be why I put "familial" in parenthesis. At least one of the congresswomen prodded at actually is an immigrant herself, to my recollection, and I'm trying to explain what Trump's tweets actually say, rather than making my own claims. Apologies for not immediately distancing my own views from the explanation of Trump's, I don't do all that much explaining of other's views, so I'm not really in any habits of such distancing. Doesn't help that I get slammed as a bigoted asshole even when I do have such distancing, like that time I tried to have a D&D alignment debate on Slavery in the D&D thread on SV and everyone was constantly completely ignoring the fact I was talking about D&D two-axis alignment and the needs of medieval-esque settings instead of actual ethics.
 
One, many of these programs have worked in other places for decades, or even more (UHC was first implemented in a major country before 1900. Every developed economy aside from the US uses it- and our method is far more unproven, considering it literally involves paying more in taxes in exchange for the bonus of having to pay bills too- it's tax-cheaper to cover everyone. Canada, Japan, and others have long proven that)

Two, Democratic Socialism has been very successful in Scandinavia and similar for decades.
Social democracy, and there's a rather important difference:
While it is true that the Scandinavian countries provide things like a generous social safety net and universal health care, an extensive welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. What Sanders and his supporters confuse as socialism is actually social democracy, a system in which the government aims to promote the public welfare through heavy taxation and spending, within the framework of a capitalist economy. This is what the Scandinavians practice.

Three, conservative programs clearly do not. We've had about 30% more job growth from Democrat presidents than Republican ones in the last three decades- with around equivalent number of years in office for each. The growing gap between rich and poor can also be strongly linked to trickle-down economics and the like- which do not trickle down and yet have not been abandoned by the Republicans despite the failure of the core tenant and the rising debt as a result- which rises far more under Republicans than Democrats, despite the Republicans trying to use it as an excuse to not do stuff that helps people and has good rate of return in favor of spending more to do stuff which doesn't help people and is more expensive with negative rate of return.

What does and doesn't work obviously is not a major factor in why they do it.

Also, maybe you should go home. You, Trump, etc., because from the rhetoric it sure as heck isn't America- land of the free, give us your poor and huddled masses, liberty and justice for all- and no, being able to discriminate against others is not 'liberty'. You're coming into our homes and trying to say who we can and can't accept. They're bigots trying to enter the turf of others and mess with us. There's no care about freedom, sure as heck no care about equality, and the people very obviously don't factor into it either, considering the willingness to ignore both their opinions and needs in order to shove inequality and poorly-designed systems who's primary selling point is disadvantage and bigotry down our throats. Purposefully neglecting people we could easily cover, often at far greater expense than covering them, is not a selling point.
See my previous post for why this entire block including me is wildly off base. Also, do you have anything to show that inequality is actually any kind of point of the policy? That isn't inference of what can very well be incompetence, that is. Show that the inequality is intentional and racially targeted before you whine to me about it, because the Democrats have had all the urban hotbeds on the city level, and most of them on the state level, for more than one generation and haven't actually accomplished anything with it.

The criticism of "What does and doesn't work obviously is not a major factor in why they do it" is more applicable to the Democrats, because they actually make a point of opposing all this stuff, have had most of the high-population states firmly under their control to push it through, and yet have accomplished nothing substantial in the last 40 years. Such that it has been under Trump that a new record for black unemployment has been set. The data we actually have shows that the policies going on under the Trump administration are working, for now, even for the racial minorities that have been at the bottom for decades. You can complain about them being disasters in the long run, but unless you actually have an alternative you can show works, you're going to get fucked at the polls.

Sure would be helpful if you'd be trying this stuff out on the state level to prove it works before demanding it be forced on all the Red states that strongly disagree. The US has a federal government, but the States are entirely able to set up their own healthcare systems, and some of them are bigger economies than the European countries that have it. Why does America have to do it, when California or New York are perfectly legally able to set up their own such systems on the state level? Why does it have to be federal first, leaving you only one chance to set up or fuck up? If it's because they don't have the tax revenue to do so, maybe you should figure out how to balance their budgets so they can afford actually important stuff like maintaining infrastructure and providing healthcare for lawful residents so you can actually prove it to the naysayers it works.

Oh! Fun fact- Utah, Republican state, start a program to reduce homelessness by... giving people places to live. Because they calculated that it's actually cheaper to do so than to deal with the problems homelessness causes. And they were right! Super-successful. Let's implement that.
Show me the numbers, and I'll be following right behind you. Again, my post was trying to explain Trump's actual position, not giving my own views. Which are in line with the "fix shitholes with your Green New Deal type sweeping proposals before you say America should do it" suggestion, under the very different reasoning of those places not having much more to break. America's not broken, don't be doing huge risky fixes like the Green New Deal here. Here's the thread where I ultimately turned to universal healthcare being cheaper, starting with the misunderstanding that the overall costs go up from all the extra extremely old people and long-term treatments.

Of course, given your response in that thread, ignoring that I'd explicitly changed my mind in two posts after the one you slung shit at me for in that thread, I don't expect you to actually comprehend what my position is and continue to hurl shit at me under wild misconceptions of what I believe, because you're a sectarian lunatic.
 
This would be why I put "familial" in parenthesis. At least one of the congresswomen prodded at actually is an immigrant herself, to my recollection, and I'm trying to explain what Trump's tweets actually say, rather than making my own claims. Apologies for not immediately distancing my own views from the explanation of Trump's, I don't do all that much explaining of other's views, so I'm not really in any habits of such distancing. Doesn't help that I get slammed as a bigoted asshole even when I do have such distancing, like that time I tried to have a D&D alignment debate on Slavery in the D&D thread on SV and everyone was constantly completely ignoring the fact I was talking about D&D two-axis alignment and the needs of medieval-esque settings instead of actual ethics.
That's because those comments are literally want guys like the NF were using as far back as the 70s in the UK. If you don't want to get seen as bigoted then why are you taking a term that is 99.99% of the time used for something and then going with the most unlikely of interpretations? Like I guess it works as a devil's advocate play, but it's pretty obvious what it means based on that.

So I ask, how in turn do you suppose to function linguistically if you take the most unlikely explanation of things? Words and sentences can be often interpreted to justify practically anything, unless you go with some approach based on frequency of colloquial meaning, then I don't really see why this is good reasoning.
 
Sure would be helpful if you'd be trying this stuff out on the state level to prove it works before demanding it be forced on all the Red states that strongly disagree.

Except 90% of it is more mild than stuff that that's been implemented in entire countries and sometimes even states.

Remember Obamacare? It was proven in Hawaii for decades and Mass for awhile too- the latter put in by Mitt Romney no less.


You don't get to say 'provide XYZ citations' when there's such huge active lying about it. And when it is implemented in states, you lot try and do everything you can on the federal level to block it. Let's also remember gay marriage, and also the transgender ban that is being shoved in despite things working fine before. And insisting on doing tremendously expensive inhuman expensive programs like the concentration camps- it literally costs far more to put people there than to have 'em be kept in nice hotels. Funny how these requirements that something be proven first don't come into play when cruelty at a premium cost is on the line.

Also, 'demanding it be forced on all the states that disagree'- hah, there's a strong history of Republicans blocking very popular with Republican voters medicare for all expansion because it doesn't fit their ideology. Think of all the "hands off my medicare" signs that Republican voters hold- yea, they're told that it's Democrats attacking it, but the fact they care about having it is clearly there even if there's been that wonderful spin job to pretend it's not Republicans working to deny it to them. Oh, and they want to block it from helping people who voluntarily want it too, so it's not a 'let's make it optional' thing, they specifically have been acting to make stuff they don't like as hard to opt-in as possible and to sabotage those who want it- because they don't want to do it no matter how well it works.

You are the economically non pragmatic party that shoves failed economics- austerity, cutting social security, trickle down junk, trade wars- down our throats despite it being proven, but if something happens to help people, arbitrary amounts of track record isn't enough. It's worked for decades? You don't care and ignore it.

Plus, as mentioned, there's the decades long history of having double-digit percentage better job growth by Democrats. Democrats can be trusted to do more for the economy to pay for it, because they have. And the tax rate is historically still well below some very economically successful times in the past.

Baaasically there's no care for either what works, what helps republican voters, or what's popular. This is all buzzwords, lies, and spin that you like to trot out while being worse in these exact same areas.


Republicans- for fiscal irresponsibility and cruelty at a high cost, inferior economic growth and stability, but insists every that helps people 'needs more proving'.
 
People are dying in America's concentration camps (aka "prisons") every day, and they've been doing that in increasingly huge numbers since mass incarceration started in the 1980s.

Prisoners dying in prison is a political issue has been a contentious political issue in the USA long before Trump. As has prisoner mistreatment, prison labour conditions and the privatised prison system. The flaws in the USA's prison system is hardly something people where fine with previously.

Of course, the thing with the recent concentration camps is the conditions in the are far worse than prisons. Prisons are so tightly cramped in cells there isn't enough room to lie down. And they're expected to drink water from toilets. And they aren't allowed to shower or bath, making them smell so bad the visiting Vice President Pence complained about it. The comparisons to the official prison system is unfair, because the "temporary accommodations" are far worse.

EDIT: according to wiki, 500 people died crossing the border in 2005. Over 7000 died between 1998 and 2017. Where was the outrage? Except for some activists, there was none. If you (not you personally, the global "you") were outraged about it then and are outraged about it now, I respect you. If you weren't, and just discovered it today, you're just playing a role in someone's political game.

1. Humans react far more strongly to events that were actively caused then occurring passively. For example people are more concerned with flashy events than say road safety. Political instability is seen as a higher priority than disease and famine. People have a skewed sense of risk and political triage.

2. People treat governments differently than they do nature. Government policy can be changed and citizens are supposed to have a responsibility to prevent their government causing harm. Trying to raise awareness and keep the government acting morally is something the citizenry in a democracy is expected to do, even if it's "playing someone else's political game".

3. The Standards you're using here are so strict and demanding, that they could be used to argue against almost anything. It also makes representative democracy unworkable

They are temporary detention centers, which is to say jails. Technically they are concentration camps (as all prisons and jails are), but not how that word is used in the vernacular.

Yes it is. The Japanese internment camps were concentration camps. The lack of involvement of the criminal justice system, mass confinement and harsh conditions
means it meets the standard definition of a concentration camp and not a prison. Most immigrant detention facilities are labelled as concentration camps, were in multiple before Trump got elected. Concentration camp is a word with negative definitions, but both colloquial and technically definitions apply to the Trump administration's "temporary detention centres."

As an aside, prisons and jails are not a subset of concentration camps. Concentration camps are a subset of prisons, and not the other way around.
 
You are the economically non pragmatic party that shoves failed economics- austerity, cutting social security, trickle down junk, trade wars-

Dude, the mainstream Dems have the same economic model as the Reps, onlly slightly softer. Bill Clinton was not known for his pro-welfare activism. They're not some kind of socdem alternative. They;re pushing the same economic model that has been the paradigm since Reagan.
 
You don't get to say 'provide XYZ citations' when there's such huge active lying about it
Except that's actually more reason for citation, because you have wrong information to counteract. They provide lies, you provide truth while simultaneously disproving those lies. You have never engaged in this with me. Even though I've specifically asked for it. Many times. And changed my mind when my search for information turned up contrary evidence.

Let's also remember gay marriage, and also the transgender ban that is being shoved in despite things working fine before.
Half-percents of the population shouldn't get special privileges, and being able to order surgeries from medical professionals under self-diagnosis is a pretty damn big privilege. The fact they need these treatments also goes to show that it ought to remain a medical condition, in need of actual standards of diagnosis. I'd be perfectly fine with eliminating sex-segregated restrooms to make the trans crowd a non-issue, as well.

As for gay marriage... where have I once indicated any degree of opposition to it? I'm perfecfly fine with it, what consenting adults get up to in private is none of my concern, and marriage is mostly bureaucratic cohabitation permissions anyways.

And insisting on doing tremendously expensive inhuman expensive programs like the concentration camps- it literally costs far more to put people there than to have 'em be kept in nice hotels. Funny how these requirements that something be proven first don't come into play when cruelty at a premium cost is on the line.
Proof the shit conditions are extra costly? Or that they're actually enormous shit as the standard? I consider the existence of these facilities non-negotiable, because holding centers are a requirement to process migrants at all. They've got to have somewhere to stay even if they're following every step of the legal process. The nature of them, however, can change considerably, and that is what I'm willing to discuss.

I'm a reformist, desiring to change existing systems instead of just breaking everything that isn't working. I find a hard border preferable because of labor market supply issues I've seen outright contradictory claims on, leaving me to my own reasoning. Calls to abolish ICE are something I refuse because to abolish them is to entirely remove a primary method of border enforcement. Hold them accountable for every wrong thing they do? Sure, but I'm not going to consider them evil when a severely dehydrated little girl they picked up in the middle of a desert keels over from pre-existing conditions.

I'm perfectly willing to have a conversation about how much and what kinds of migration are acceptable, so long as some boundaries remain and you aren't calling for entirely open borders. I'm perfectly willing to discuss paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants, even, so long as it remains more difficult than legal entries, and this is in the context of actively wanting such a path for illegals because I've seen the numbers on how dependent some sectors of the economy are on that labor.

Also, 'demanding it be forced on all the states that disagree'- hah, there's a strong history of Republicans blocking very popular with Republican voters medicare for all expansion because it doesn't fit their ideology. Think of all the "hands off my medicare" signs that Republican voters hold- yea, they're told that it's Democrats attacking it, but the fact they care about having it is clearly there even if there's been that wonderful spin job to pretend it's not Republicans working to deny it to them.
Intresting. Got a cite for this?

Oh, and they want to block it from helping people who voluntarily want it too, so it's not a 'let's make it optional' thing, they specifically have been acting to make stuff they don't like as hard to opt-in as possible and to sabotage those who want it- because they don't want to do it no matter how well it works.
Yes, I hate the horseshit the pro-lifers come up with to make open sex as difficult and dangerous as possible too, you're continuing to prove yourself a sectarian lunatic because you think I'm a stereotypical Republican just because I'm anti-trans-normalization, wanting them treated like any other medical condition because unlike homosexuals they do demand medical treatments, and I'm in favor of strong borders, for primarily economic reasons regarding labor supplies. I literally linked you to a thread where I changed my mind on public healthcare because of data I found while trying to support my previous position. So again, got a cite?

You are the economically non pragmatic party that shoves failed economics- austerity, cutting social security, trickle down junk, trade wars- down our throats despite it being proven, but if something happens to help people, arbitrary amounts of track record isn't enough. It's worked for decades? You don't care and ignore it.
Again, if you'd actually provide the numbers, I could change my mind. Failures of citations to change my mind have been people refusing to actually pull the supporting statements from studies offered when the summary explicitly denies their claim and using firm and significant minority figures to try to claim a majority of Trump supporters as white nationalists.

And again, I'm not a republican. Pro-gay rights, pro-choice, firmly despise racialzed politics of all stripes especially including the left-wing race bait that's achieved no serious improvement since it started and am well in favor of universal healthcare as long as there's a plan to pay for it. Which California provided. And I, too, hate the trickle-down economics because it never comes with a guarantee that the rich assholes will be forced to pay up instead of hoarding, recognizing that wealth concentration has a number of advantages and preventing it in a market economy is pretty much impossible, so ultimately it must be handled as a question of minimizing the harm and maximizing the benefits.
 
And again, I'm not a republican. Pro-gay rights, pro-choice, firmly despise racialzed politics of all stripes especially including the left-wing race bait that's achieved no serious improvement since it started and am well in favor of universal healthcare as long as there's a plan to pay for it.

US society seems to me (from afar now) to have become crazy supertribal. If you believe X, you must be a member of A. I posted an article from the Nation by Aaron Mate on facebook and automatically somehow the conversation turned to how dumb Fox News is, because only Republicans obviously would be skeptical about the Mueller investigation. Despite this being the Nation.
 
Yes it is. The Japanese internment camps were concentration camps. The lack of involvement of the criminal justice system, mass confinement and harsh conditions

Of course they were concentration camps. So are prisons. ("The lack of involvement of the criminal justice system has nothing to do with it; the GULAG was part of the criminal justice system.) That's not what "concentration camp" means in the American vernacular, though. That is used overwhelmingly for Nazi death camps.

In all my life, the only complaints I have heard in the US about prisons are from the far left or Black activists . It was not being broadcast over the main channels 24/7. We all know why; because the "war on crime/drugs" has bipartisan support. The same reason the hundreds of people who have died on the border every year for decades was not.

This is about politics, not ethics.
 
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Of course they were concentration camps. So are prisons. ("The lack of involvement of the criminal justice system has nothing to do with it; the GULAG was part of the criminal justice system.)

Once again, concentration camp is a subset of prison and not the other way round. Concentration/internment camps as a concept are a few hundred years old. Prisons are far much older than that. If you want to argue over semantics, provide definitions to the terms you are using.

That's not what "concentration camp" means in the American vernacular, though. That is used overwhelmingly for Nazi death camps.

Which is an incorrect definition. An incorrect vulgar definition of word does not change it's factual meaning. I am fully aware using this phrase smuggles in connotations and is being used to rhetorically, but it is factually correct.

In all my life, the only complaints I have heard in the US about prisons are from the far left or Black activists . It was not being broadcast over the main channels 24/7. We all know why; because the "war on crime/drugs" has bipartisan support. The same reason the hundreds of people who have died on the border every year for decades was not.

This is about politics, not ethics.

Politics are inseparable from Ethics. If you believe that the "being broadcast over main channels", "bipartisan support", or government policy are what dictates morality, then there is no point discussing the subject.

it is superficially true to argue that politicians are motivated by politics. And that politicians use the claim of ethics to gain legitimacy and they pick and choose their battles. And that showing someone that a bad thing is happening will motivate them to try and stop. However it is functionally useless, since it applies to everything in politics and makes actually discussing the ethical duties of a government impossible. Just because something is politically motivated does not stop it being morally right.

It is also superficially true people are dying all the time, and there are more worthy usages of time, money and effort. Strangely I doubt the supporters of the internment camps are willing to actually support doing of these more noble causes, while the types of people who oppose Trumps policy are also the sort of people who would be willing to support said causes if they only new about them. As such, I hold that removing the viels of ignorance to show people the ugly realities of the world so they can be changed is a good thing. Even if it's done by a politician for non-moral reasons.

It's better to do a little good now, that do nothing. The fact that things were also bad in the past is not a reason to nothing. It is better to do a little good now than to continue to do nothing and let people suffer.

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On the topic of prison reform, off the top of my heads, this active thread on space battles has people comparing swedish prisons to american ones and discussing the two justice systems. You have Thor Ragnorak's "Prisoners with Jobs" comment. Main media channels have attacked prison privatisation. Heck, the ethics and purpose of the criminal justice system is a stock ethical/political philosophical discussion.. And the younger generation is increasingly more left wing, to the point the war on drugs is losing it's bipartisan support.
 
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Of course they were concentration camps. So are prisons. ("The lack of involvement of the criminal justice system has nothing to do with it; the GULAG was part of the criminal justice system.) That's not what "concentration camp" means in the American vernacular, though. That is used overwhelmingly for Nazi death camps.

In all my life, the only complaints I have heard in the US about prisons are from the far left or Black activists . It was not being broadcast over the main channels 24/7. We all know why; because the "war on crime/drugs" has bipartisan support. The same reason the hundreds of people who have died on the border every year for decades was not.

This is about politics, not ethics.


American vernacular is stupid and probably Orwellian. Defense is war, libertarian is feudalist, red is a conservative color etc.
 
American vernacular is stupid and probably Orwellian. Defense is war, libertarian is feudalist, red is a conservative color etc.

It's all about emotional resonance. If you have several words that would describe the same thing, you use the word that will elicit the emotional response that you want in your listeners.

These detention centers _are_ concentration camps. So are prisons. But we don't call the second "concentration camps" (unless you are a radical leftist -- they will do that) because that has extreme negative connotations.

Prison labor _is_ slave labor. A prisoner who is forced to work is in fact a slave. But we don't call it that, because slavery is bad and prison labor is at worst morally neutral.
 
American vernacular is stupid and probably Orwellian. Defense is war, libertarian is feudalist, red is a conservative color etc.
The irony is that Orwell was really a thin and mild mannered british man by the name of Eric Blair.
 
Even if you're right, how would you do it? How do you stop them from forming new echo chambers to radicalize themselves without limit? What legal process, within the US framework, can keep them from having a platform? What can be done to stop them from just making their own platforms? If they have to build an entirely independent Internet infrastructure, separate from all the existing corporations being able to shut it down, they'll find a way to pull it off. Make VPN services and piggyback on TOR. Whatever it takes to speak as they wish.

If we can't eliminate all mass communication access from them, leaving them with only "stand alone complexes", then we must keep them in widely-visible public discourse so they can be monitored and constrained by the wider public's disagreement. Otherwise, they can keep radicalizing with no rhetorical opposition in sight, limited only by their own rapidly-degraded moral compass.

Okay, I haven't read the individual thread this is responding to, but this is a common enough argument I might as well respond to it here.

Are you familiar with the concept of a Quarentine? Or the idea that motivated the construction of Leper Colonies

If you want to stop an idea to spread, removing it from mass media platforms and restricting it to niche echo chambers works. China has managed to censor events on its internet so well that it needed to teach it's censor what what they were supposed to be censoring. As Financial barriers to entry have macroeconomic effects on economic activity, so do time/effort barriers have social effects. The point of the Great Firewall isn't to be inpenetrable, it is to making reaching the outside world harder and using human laziness to do the rest.
We live in a world where removing a website from google is one of the best ways to kill it. Deplatforming works horrifyingly well on the internet, especially for services like Facebook that form natural monopolies.

If your goal is to stop new members wandering into an echo chamber, then making said echo chamber harder to find is going result in fewer people wandering in.

Do you actually believe that deplatforming and censorship don't work?

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As for your second paragraph, white supremacists already have non-mainstream echo chambers to try and hide from the general public and further radicalise themselves. One of them for example is called 8chan, and there almost certainly far more secret sites. I disagree with your second point because I believe it has already happened.

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@Alcibiades, I fundamentally disagree with your argument and counter with "A = A".

"Detention centre" is a euphemism for concentration camp. Playing games with contotations does not change reality.

And force labour is forced labour. And considering the post-civil war history of penal labour in the south, I strongly disputed this point.
 
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