patcalhoun

The administration's foreign policy in Pakistan has always left me scratching my head.

It's very simple. Pakistan is a country of over 160 million people, one of two available land thrusts into Afghan territory and the only available point of entry available to US general purpose forces by sea and air. With that in mind, and the fact that Pakistan is dependable enough to swallow the meat and potatoes of Enduring Freedom's objectives if not the vegetables, then the Administration's measured reliance on Pakistani cooperation and willingness to occassionally act without it is entirely understandable. After all, the alternatives are to buy into zy's fantasy of a Pakistan committed as our Western allies on the global war on terror or view Pakistan as a hostile. We can argue until we're blue in the face whether or not the Administration has deftly or incompetently handled Pakistan, but there's nothing profound about mulling over a characterization of US-Pakistani relation that is so blatantly obvious.

Clearly Pakistan is an entirely different situation than Britain, but I'm not sure the London analogy is entirely pointless. Say there was intelligence that al-Zawahiri was possibly in some village in rural America or Britain, but that if he's there, then he'll be back underground and out of reach in minutes, and there's no time for authorities to arrive, making our western institutions of law and order irrelevant.

Then you run into the same problem as you have with the London analogy. If our Western institutions of law and order (and CONUS forces, apparantly) are for whatever reason less capable than...say Canada's..., then we are no longer living in reality. We're living in a parallel universe where either the US government has the circumscribed domestic power and reach of a third world kleptocracy or the country has managed to slip into a second civil war.

You really think we'd launch a missle strike?

Why not? We've bombarded our own shores in time of war before, and with the heaviest naval gunfire we had at the time. We used to slaughter other Americans by the thousands just to take a field, burn entire villages and the agricultural base of entire counties to the ground.

I really doubt it, don't you? The only thing that's changed, though, is that we'd be killing innocent westerners. Certainly, the public outrage would be enormous.

I imagine there would be some outrage; we've definitely had our fair share of it during the Civil War, the Indian Wars and various insurrections as a result of violent Federal action. On the other hand, for the most part the public accepted that the United States was in a state of war within its own borders. What you're analogy asks us to accept are the conditions of a lawless, wartorn US interior without public acknowledgement of that fact.

I'm just saying that we definitely do value western lives much more than, say, Pakistani lives, even if both are supposedly our allies. To claim otherwise seems pretty naive.

Does your conclusion rest entirely on this nonsensical analogy where we magically transport al Qaeda to some Western country and pretend that the public doesn't notice, doesn't care, is unable to do anything about it, but is unwilling to admit its impotence for one reason or another. If so, the what exactly isn't naive[/i] and frankly slanderous about you accusing Westerners of generally devaluing Pakistani lives vis a vis their own.

What it really comes down to is that some people believe that the lives of Westerners are worth more than that of people who live in third-world countries.

Unless you'd care to reveal some closely held knowledge of not only the inner thoughts of the command authority behind the attack but also the those of the case officers who collected the targeting information and their sources, how can you tell us "what it really comes down to?"

The reason that bombs are used rather than ground troops is that soldiers' lives are apparently valuable.

Or, perhaps, the intelligence provided was sufficiently time critical to warrant an air strike. The point is you've pieced this whole narrative together out of whole cloth, with nothing more substantial than an unexplained deep contempt and disrespect for the shooters and authorities involved.

Fine. But we better make damn sure that killing these people is worth the collateral cost. Is it? Is it really?

The risk of killing innocents to protect the US is nowhere near as brutal as it was sixty years ago, despite facing an elevated risk attack on US soil. Exercise your judgement as you see fit, but I sincerely doubt you can make a stronger moral case that further restraint is necessary absent a convincing argument for a less costly, risk neutral alternative.

I take offense at the implication that I am a 'silly liberal' who doesn't understand the threat these people pose.

You suggested that the Pakistani security forces are sufficiently reliable or trustworthy to police their western and northern frontiers when they've singularly failed to do so prior to 9/11 (a responsibility they continue to eschew in Kashimir). I don't impugn President Musharrefs motives or the fundamental interests of ISI, but your incredulous faith in the ability of Pakistani police to control its pourous and lawless hinterlands is hard to take seriously.

But do you remember the hue and outcry over Waco? Apparently, such force is almost never acceptable in ours and other industrialized countries. And it's all too acceptable in third-world countries.

Perhaps that's because industrialized countries have functioning institutions for preserving law and order, whereas failed states or teetering ones like Pakistan do not. This is why your London analogy sucks.

I don't doubt that they didn't mean to kill those children, but this type of thing happens far too often, and there is never going to be any accountability on the part of the people responsible.

How often is far too often in wartime?

If Bin Laden was in a house in Pakistan, Pakistani police would be falling over themselves to get to him, and to allow US agents in.

Out of curiousity, where did you get that idea?

So not only do the women of Pakistan get subjugated and stoned as a direct result of their government's policies, it's also ok for the US to collaterally kill them as a result of same's policies.

Yes, at least as permissible as it was for the Allies to "collaterally kill" far more liberated women in the process of beating back German aggression in Western Europe. Far more so, since civilian cost of war has dropped measurably since. As far as I'm concerned, that's an admirable standard to meet.

What a wonderful force for good are we.

At least as good as the Allies sixty years ago, and probably far more so in that the West has innovated and applied military means to better discriminate between military targets and civilians. Also a measure of the admirable humanity of the Western warfighter.

We're allied to their (horrible) government in the "War on Terror," and we also apparently think very little of causing innocent deaths, as long as it happens in Asia.

That's where the bad guys are.

We wouldn't do the same were the seventeen-millionth Al Qaida "number two" hiding out in London.

We wouldn't have to because the UK is not the lawless frontiers of Central Asia. Your analogy could only be more specious if it invoked government sponsorship of al Qaeda and Jerusalem as a central nervous system of international Islamic terrorism.

So far I have not seen anything in the way of a definition, only evidence that we perceive it to exist.

You've seen plenty of definition. Time is a dimension, one parameter among many used to specify locations of events in some sort of spacetime. If you need a deeper explanation, then you've stepped into the domain of philosophy and definitely out of the realm of physics

I was so impressed at the cost relitive to ITER and other efforts , My hope is that GE will write the check

That's incredible. I see you've posted this exact same letter over at Naked Scientists, and you've been promoting EPS around USEnet. I'm not the industrial behemoth GE is, but are you sure you don't want to take some of my money? I can promise you more if you throw in a few more fancy examples of your correspondence with Seward.

I did not quite understand the first part, so until you make it easier for me, I'll respond from "it'd be a shame if......." Reassure me that you did not mean 'what happens in the remote wasteland of Asia don't mean a damn, because they are only ignorant unwashed peasants anyhow'. Because if you did, the world-wide approval rating for the "US we know and love" campaign will drop some serious points.

As should be perfectly obvious after 9/11, what happens in the remote wastelands of Asia--or in any other area of the world characterized by failed states and barbarism--matters a great deal. That's besides the point. You decided to frame a moral and factual equivalency between American operations in the unpoliced territory of a nearly failed state with a hypothetical attack by a Communist autocracy on secure, enduring and peaceful democratic state of the West. Or put another way, if conditions in the US mirrored those in Central Asia, if China was a powerful force for good in this world, and if I were something better than an unwashed, ignorant peasant with a hard on for beating women and slaughtering infidels, then I most certainly would appreciate such an intervention.

A Chinese drone commits a similar act against a small midwestern town' date=' because a Chinese designated terrorist may, or may not, be hiding there. I can just imagine the outraged squeals of The Guardians Of Democracy and Freedom.

What goes around comes around. Do as you would be done by.[/quote']

 

Just checking. Does your scenario anticipate a United States under an unelected military autocracy dealing with pro-terrorist relationships rampant throughout the intelligence agencies? Are we to assume the anti-Chinese sentiment is ripe throughout the interior wilderness and dilapidated or non-existent transportation infrastructure leaves much of American territory virtually inaccessible? I just wanna make sure, because it'd be a shame if you were to compare a hypothetical Chinese attack on the US we know and love with American operations in the remote wasteland of Central Asia.

So when do we get to the part where you ask me to write a check?

Don't the answers to most of the questions posed on the politics topic depend on the opinion of the poster? *scratches head*

The answers to any question depend on personal opinion. Question is whether offered opinions are equally valuable. I'd bet there's little value in either law or politics for "depends on your personal opinion" where it concerns Roe.

I am describing how I came to the conclusion, feel free to call it flawed if you want...

All right, so we're left with this impression you've formed based on a couple of documentaries and faith in some thrust of human depravity due to despair.

I already stated clearly I wasn't refering to acts of genocide or mass murder

Nobody said you did, and why you keep protesting this point is beyond me.

I made a point of describing what I see in the situation.

Which you did, and subsequently revealed it has no basis in fact. That was the point I sought to get across.

I can tell you when I think someone in a congressional hearing is lying, I can even point out if he's shifty or not, and while my opinion is not validated by the observations, it is not invalidated by the lack of having a polygraph or documentation of inconsistency in the statements.

I don't care what standard your opinion is validated against unless we're talking about the factual record. And in this case, your opinion--which ascribes a heinous point of view to obstensibly civilized men and women--is wholly without merit.

If I said 1+1=2 would you ask me to prove it?

If you said 1+1=3, I might.

Would you care to point out how you can co-exist with people you believe will try to kill your children?

By building high, secure fences, which is precisely what the Israelis are doing.

Do you not think the conditions that lead to the mindset we are discussing are relevant?

I've seen nothing that substantiates this "absence of peaceful coexistence breeds widespread genocidal sentiment" theory of yours, period. So of course I don't think its relevant.

If there was clear evidence of what various groups and peoples were thinking within this conflict, don't you think it would be over a long time ago?

I think there is clear evidence of what various groups and peoples are thinking in this conflict. Just no evidence for the views you've ascribed to members of the IDF.

What are you contesting, that the military does not share the same general range of views as the civilian population...

I'm contesting your depiction of the general range of views in the population, period, let alone your equally unsubstantiated claim that the Israeli military is a representative cross section of its society.

I was pointing out it is not an unreasonable position.

No, it is definitely reasonable in the sense it follows from the unestablished propositions you put forward. In the end, though, it is an unevidenced mess.

1) From various documentries and interviews it is clear that many Israelis (not sure the exact percent of course) feel that as long as palastinians are living there, there will not be peace, and Israelis will continue to die. Many palastinians of course would rather fight and die than move.

Although you're still not offering up the evidence, I won't dispute this point. Why? It's entirely irrelevant to the claim that the position of some members of the IDF is that mass murder is the only solution to Palestinian terrorism.

The only thing that stops people from genocidally killing each other is the belief they can co-exist eventually (or more rarely the belief its better to die themselves than kill another).

This is a completely unevidence sociological claim, but also entirely irrelevant to the question of how members of the IDF perceive endgame.

2) The Israeli military is made up of people in the same pool (ie Israelis) as were interviewed and are on record as holding those convictions.

This is relevant, and it would help me better appreciate your point if you actually presented some supporting evidence to the purported fact.

Honestly I am not even blaming them for holding this position...

But you are attributing to them a position that as far as I can see has no basis in fact.

But, I do believe the results of many actions are consistent with a general disregard for innocent civilian populations that would never be tolorated if carried out in a major US city.

Is there a violent insurrection in American cities that we haven't heard of? And considering that Iraqi civilian casualties (30,000 killed and 45,000 wounded) far outstrip Palestinian casualties (where we don't have a consensus breakdown between militant and civilian casualties readily available), exactly why is the American public so tolerant of what you would also describe as "general disregard for innocent civilian populations." Perhaps even this accusation of indiscriminate violence against civilians has no foundation in fact.

I have no interest in your two questions or the line of discussion they aim to open. Just this claim about what members of the IDF believe and evidence supporting it.

I did not say that any high ranking officer has proposed complete genocide, I am talking about what people believe is needed to achieve peace.

You claim that "members" of the Israeli military believe that mass murder "is the only solution." I've yet to see a shred of evidence that this is the position of any IDF officer or enlisted person, let alone the position of any significant IDF personality. So what is the basis for the claim? I'm not interested in anything else except for this.

do you honestly think that israeli military members and/or government officials would actually be forthcoming about intentions of genocide?

I expect you to support such an accusation with evidence. Otherwise, this smacks of irresponsible conspiracy-mongering.

I don't intend to address the moral equivalency points in this post or the purported consequences of that preferred reality. I just want to address one glaring issue of fact.

I think the problem is there are some Israeli military members that believe genocide and indiscrimenant use of force is the only solution, just as some palestinian leaders believe the same against the Israelis is the only solution.

I think there isn't a shred of documentary evidence--which should be easy to produce--showing that a single high ranking participant in Israeli politics since the beginning of the 20th century has ever advocated the mass murder of Palestinians. On the other hand, the Palestinian political leadership--even the Palestinian national identity--was born out of an explicit and publically detailed mission to "destroy Israel." So I have absolutely no idea what the basis is for your belief that Israel and Palestinian political leaders are similarly culpable of conspiracy to commit war crimes.

In the end, it's not so much the suggestion that the Supreme Court is conservative that bothers me, but the implication that justice is therefore (automatically) trod upon. Liberals want it to be liberal, conservatives want it to be conservative, and somehow in the process of fighting tooth and nail over that we seem to forget that what matters is that it be capable of rendering verdicts that are fair.

Insofar as we're trading our personal impressions of how the Courts handle equity, here's my view. Western law and long embedded procedures in legislative and executive political business are powerful restraints on excess. In OECD nations vis a vis the rest of the emerging world, political conflict rarely leads to violence (and the American and English civil wars were conducted under a comparatively and surprisingly resilient framework of law adhered to by the participants), widespread native perception of corruption or injustice, or insecurity surrounding political application of power in domestic affairs. If we look inside any particular sphere of law, say in the United States, differences of political opinion on equity weigh less on the minds of the public than on every day executive, legislative and judicial concerns involving crime, protection of property and liability. That, to me, is a sign of a system that works pretty well.

But are those divisions are made more along political lines, or legal ones?

I see the link's not working. Here. Read the paper.

You don't know...

I do know that in the majority of 5-4 and 6-3 decisions that the splits correlate with identifiable partisan divisions. That is to say I've as much evidence of political division in the Court as I do of political division in the Congress; my point ceases to be idle opinion.

...you're merely stating your opinion.

Then perhaps I don't understand your definition of opinion. I certainly don't label other well supported claims such as [imath]\nabla \cdot \mathbf{D} = \rho [/imath] or "changes in a population's allele frequency occur over time."

And there is a perfectly logical, well-established counterpoint to your position.

If there is, then by all means share it with us.

After all, just to give one example, every day we hear about Democratic appointees voting like "conservatives" and Republican appointees voting like "liberals".

We also hear of Democratic congressmen voting "conservative" and Republican congressmen voting "liberal." The current literature recognizes that not so profound observation that party affiliation tracks closely but not exactly to the more fine grain scale of political preference.

Isn't it just possible that they're not voting with an eye on politics at all?

Yes, just as it is possible that the Congress is not voting with an eye on politics at all, at least according to the evidence. The Congress achieves an order of magnitude or more unanimous or bipartisan votes than it does partisan ones. The same pattern can be found in the Supreme Court. The point I'm making is your fairly empirical claim that the Courts are less political than the Congress is falsified by the unsurprisingly similar outcomes of their decisionmaking processes. I do not know if this trend continues further into the federal judiciary, but the question now also varies regional political concerns as well as national partisan ones; we'd have to set up a similar model for the Congress.

And if it's possible, then isn't the onus on you to prove that that is not the case, if you want your position to be accepted as something more than "a mindless exchange of idle opinion"?

I think the onus is on me to clearly state the theory and its supporting evidence. You can critique it, and there are definitely avenues of criticism available to you. I think something a bit more sophisticated than "it's your opinion" is in order.

Well it's funny you mention that...

Mentioned what?

...because the bipartisan American Bar Association did essentially that very thing in deciding whether or not to support the Alito nomination.

Very same thing as what?

They interviewed hundreds of Republicans AND Democrats, thousands of case files, and came to the conclusion that he was not a politically ideological judge.

Where did you get the idea that the ABA tests for ideological adherence?

So obviously it's not only possible, it actually happens.

What is possible?

Identifiable in your opinion. Others disagree.

Yeah, and others believe there is such as thing as preferred rest frame. I'm not in the business of caring what they consider opinion.

So here's your choice: You can fan the flames of partisanship...

Stop being dramatic. This is dry discussion of a very dry topic, are the Courts comparably political (in some quantifiable way) to the Congress. If you're going to label any discussion beyond that which is profusely abutted by insincere demotions of evidenced poisitions to mere opinion, then I don't think we have all that much to talk about. In that case, would you mind moving on?

This raises an interesting question to ponder.

 

What (assuming photons could see) does a photon see as it travels at the speed of light?

 

seems like length contraction would cause its "universe" to be two dimensional' date=' with no depth in its direction of travel. Also, as it travels at the speed of light with respect to [i']everything[/i],everything would seem to be unmoving, wouldn't it?

You're performing a limit here, which doesn't change the fact that we cannot define a rest frame for a photon.

Uh, where are you going with this?

Semantics aside, I think it's clear that the elected side of American politics has become more divisive and less compromise-oriented in recent years.

How would you compare? Conflicting circuit rulings and 5-4 and 6-3 decisions to party line votes? Well, of non-unanimous cases yielding a majority opinion in the Supreme Court between 1994 and 1998 ended in 6-3 or 5-4 splits accounted for 107 (or ]55 percent of the total). And the Supreme Court hears a lot less cases per year than Congress votes on unanimous consent requests. Vetoes are even rarer.

However, it was a mere exhortation on my part; a statement of opinion, and it was not my intention to open a separate line of debate on that subject.

I know. I just jumped on the point of most interest to me.

My guess is that it might be an interesting discussion, but would, in the end, amount to merely one opinion against another (i.e. I acknowledge that you have a valid point).

I don't think so. You've definitely addressed some issues we can tackle in a quantifiable way. After all, if the Court is more objective or less partisan than the political branches in practice, then we might gain some insight by doing as the author of the paper I provided suggests--using spectral analysis to better understand how majorities form on the Courts. In this case, the substance of the disagreement doesn't matter, just the fact that particularly disputes keep occuring between politically classifiable groups in the Court system. These are all issues actively researched in political science, so I see no reason to think that this should boil down to a mindless exchange of idle opinion.

But I don't think it's really germain to the discussion at hand.

I'm the second poster in this thread, and as best as I can tell the topic is free for any reasoned, civil discussion related to the contemporary judiciary. Sometimes threads don't have a core focus, and I don't think Jim even attempted to outline one.

EDIT: Here's an excellent resource for professional and amateur legal researchers out there. Lawson grabbed the US Supreme Court Database from here. Registration is free and the dataset isn't restricted. Just if you use it, abide by their terms of use.

In my opinion, that's a straw man.

No. Citing the case list might be construed as an argument from ignorance on my part, but there is no doubt you've argued and continue to argue that the Court is "the last bastion of objective, independent authority". "Last bastion" does exclude the executive and legislature from this realm of objectivity you've defined. I've generously restated that view in a far milder form: the Courts are structurally more rational than the legislature or executive.

Certainly the courts have made mistakes, but those are not proof of failure of the justice system.

Now that's a strawman, especially in a thread where I've already heaped praise on the beautiful science that is law and my hard on for its application.

...clearly its operating parameters and indebted constituency dictate a different set of goals and ambitions.

Different from what? The executive? The legislature? Ben and Jerry's? This isn't that profound an observation. On the other hand, you did express a particularly strong view of the Courts superior rationality compared--presumably--to other arms of government. If I'm wrong in this, please show me where.

A perfect example of this may be seen in today's testimony by members of the American Bar Association, which can hardly be construed as a friend to the Bush presidency. Certainly Democrats/liberals abound in that body, and yet they give Alito their highest recommendation, with a unanimous verdict. Imagine that.

Democrats and Republicans congenially agree to unanimous consent requests on the Senate and House floor everyday. I don't think it follows that the legal profession is special because its participants show remarkable restraint in obstructing the interests of their opponents.

BTW, don't be offended if I didn't answer what you saw as your larger points. I wasn't interested at all in your discussion of ideologues and politics and whatnot, only your perception of the judiciary as "the last bastion of objective, independent authority."

In it own reference frame we'd have

 

[math]d\tau ^2=0[/math]

 

The norm of its four-velocity would then be

 

[math]\vec{U}\cdot \vec{U}=\frac{d\vec{x}}{d\tau}\cdot\frac{d\vec{x}}{d\tau}=\frac{0}{0}[/math]

 

The rest frame of light is thus undefined.

Exactly.

According to modern mathmattics, if you go faster than the speed of light you will go back in time.

In some frames of reference, a two dependent events along a space-time path may appear acausally.

This has made me think about a few things. (1) If you travel as fast as light will time freeze?

It's easy to show that it would not by looking at the interval. A null-like path in 1+1 dimensions is [imath]-dt^2 + dx^2 = 0[/imath]. Since photons are most definitely not at rest with respect to any reference frame, then dt cannot be zero.

It's possible that republicans would do the same to a democratic nominee, it was definitely present in this case.

It's possible, but it didn't happen with either Breyer (confirmed 87-9) or Ginsburg (96 to 3).