lemur

I think you underestimate the effect of cultural exposure to the discourse of "good people give to charity and people who don't give to charity are greedy." Of course there's no way to prove it if you aren't aware of it yourself, but I would guess it would make you feel like a greedy scrooge if you didn't give to charity, regardless of who else was paying attention or not. That is the logical reason to be offended by any kind of bombing, yes. My point was more that suicide-bombing seems to stir up more reaction than other kinds of bombing. I find this interesting for exactly the reason you mention, i.e. either way the victims (including the bomber) are getting blown up so what's the difference?

Right, I think this was/is the covert agenda of WMD, i.e. organization of destructive violence to a level that it can be centrally controlled and thus prevented. Decentralized means of violence gives more individuals access to destructive choices, which means you can't stop violence by putting delegates together at a table at the UN. The reason this system of centralized control worked was/is because individuals are expected to submit to social control out of self-interest, which allows repressive social control to take place. Modern ideology has trained us to view the transcendence of self-interest as insanity instead of nobility/virtue. The message is, "just live as part of a nation and live or die by mass economic structure or mass destruction." I.e. don't struggle for a cause individually and CERTAINLY don't sacrifice yourself for it unless it has been institutionally prescribed for you to do so by government/military.

Culture is often used to differentiate individuals according to group identities, but difference isn't the basis for culture. Think about it, why would nut-crushing be culture if it is only done by some crows but not be culture if all crows did it? Culture refers to ways of living, whether created ad hoc by an individual in an isolated situation or whether learned as institutional practices from others. It may be institutionalized culture to grind wheat berries into flour but at some point someone had to get the idea to do so in the first place. Whether someone comes up with a practice on their own or learns it from someone else, it's still a method of living and therefore culture. You seem to be focussed on using culture as a logic of group-identity construction, which is a cultural practice in and of itself. It is actually a very interesting one, because it enables cultural sharing to be done at the same time as ethnic differentiation. Thus, if Robinson Crusoe discovers Friday and teaches him his language, he can convince Friday that he is ethnically different from Robinson because they have different cultures. Thus, the practice of sharing Robinson's culture of differentiation results in the Friday's belief that he is culturally different from Robinson. Isn't that ironic? Robinson could also ask Friday if he sees him as different and if Friday would say no, he could make that the basis for his claim of cultural difference. I.e. "I see you as different from me but you see me as the same as you, therefore we are different." You could call this a principle of unilateral differentiation/exclusion, I think.

That's an interesting thought. How do you think humans would figure it out if crows or other animals were communicating in abstract concepts using complex language? Would we recognize it or maybe they would learn English or some other human language first and use it to communicate with people. Could linguists ever study crows or other animals closely enough to decipher non-human phonics, syntax, and grammar? Animal labor was used extensively prior to industrialism but I think you're right that the benefits of using them instead of machines may ultimately outweigh their relative inefficiency. Of course, I also think that eventually wind-power will be rediscovered for global shipping since sailing ships were used for centuries before steam without using any fossil fuel.

I think there may be something about western secularism that makes suicide bombing so unsettling. It has to do with the use of egoism as a form of social control. From a young age, children are taught to worry about social evaluation of their identity. They form their identities to gain approval from their parents, teachers, peers, etc. In Freudianism, this is called healthy ego-formation. It basically means that the purpose of your sense of self-identity is for you to cater to social evaluation. Thus, imo, an act like suicide-bombing that overcomes self-interest (ego) in favor of a "higher" cause poses a threat to matrix of western social control that relies on self-interest and self-preservation motivating people to behave according to social values. Why else would suicide-bombing be so much more horrifying to many people than high-tech weaponry or nuclear bombs?

So what you're basically saying is that it's ok to have class-immobility in the US because at least it's better than living in the worst parts of Africa? Also, you say "it takes money to make money," but what do you think the economy would look like if everyone had enough money to live by investment? If everyone was free to leave any job they didn't like, would there be food-service? maid-service? janitorial-service? Would the wages of these kinds of jobs rise to a level sufficient to entice independently wealthy investors to do them? If not, don't you need poverty and a criminal justice system to put people in the position of NEED so that they will take such jobs? Personally, I am for reforming economic activities in a way that dispenses with the need for undesirable labor. But for everyone who accepts this aspect of the economy as indispensable, would they be willing to put new people in the position of servitude in order to let others have the freedom to choose to live off investment instead of much-needed wages?

To me culture just refers to various ways of living, fulfilling needs, thinking, feeling, acting. In that sense, I think all living things have culture and maybe you could even describe non-living things as having cultures, e.g. rust could be described as a culture of steel to corrode and break down. Since the meaning of "culture" is rooted in the metaphor of bacterial cultures that reformulate milk into things like yogurt and milk, culture basically just refers to any process of reformulation/transformation of raw materials into processed ones. Why should human-processing activities be given special status over those processed by animals or weather?

I like this idea. My big question would be under what conditions photons become elementary particles of matter under their own gravitation. Is the requirement that an enormous amount and density of energy be present? Or would it be that no other gravity is present to "straighten" photons into radiating waves? If it is the latter, you would expect matter to be forming in the distant wake of galactic radiation, where gravitation is practically non-existent. If high energy-density is the key, that would be inconvenient since you could claim that the initial conditions of the big bang are no longer present and therefore such matter-forming energy phenomena can no longer be observed.

That's a good point. You could just pay anyone in an unwanted service job enough money that they would have the choice not to do that job. You could keep doing this until the industries that rely on undesirable jobs vanish. But then what would we do without fast food, motel rooms, and clean offices to work in?

The entire OP reads like a summary of well-known reactionary defenses against slavery reparations. None of them have convinced proponents that reparations are not legitimate; why? because they sound like excuses coming from the mouth of someone who feels guilty for wrongdoing but doesn't want to take responsibility for it. Nevertheless, it is true that children and grandchildren, etc. can't be legitimately held responsible for the actions of their ancestors. Still, the argument that still works is that the racism in slavery has evolved into a racism of privilege and anti-privilege. In other words, a meritocracy has evolved in which the racialized privileges of slavery have been maintained simply by a system that allows people whose ancestors secured certain social-economic positions to maintain those positions for their offspring. Privilege wouldn't be such a problem if the privileges weren't linked to an economy that requires services to provide those privileges. Thus, the privilege of going out to eat requires restaurant service, eating prepared food required food-service, staying in a hotel/motel requires maid service, working in an office requires office-janitors, etc. etc. The fact that the economy has evolved to rely on a service class and the fact that some people avoid participating in such labor while others get relegated to it makes classism an issue and the fact that social-economic class is racialized raises the question of the legacy of slavery. The problem with paying reparations for slavery is that it does nothing to address modern-day economic exploitation. If people receive monetary compensation for the uncompensated labor of their ancestors, there is a good chance they will expect to enjoy this wealth by consuming the privileges of a service-rich economy. This would thus require either an exchange of class-roles OR an influx of a new subservient class of people. Lincoln and the civil war era republicans wanted to redeem slavery by land-grants (40 acres and a mule) so that former slaves would be able to engage in economic production for themselves, with only themselves as masters. That approach made sense because it addressed the whole problem of economic subordination but the problem is that no one can imagine such economic independence today. So the problem remains of how to end the culture of occupational/class racialization so that color will no longer be a distinguishing factor of class status. Personally, I would like to see class status addressed as well but the only way for that to happen, as far as I know, would be for people to perform multiple tasks, some managerial class and others service/working class. Otherwise, people are necessarily going to get relegated into servitude and management, which is basically a modernized version of slavery anyway.

You're right. I have actually been exploring the idea of dueling, which was allowed by law up until around the civil war, I think. It was not murder because it required consent and a "fair fight." Theoretically, people meeting each other voluntarily on a battlefield are also voluntarily meeting each other's challenge. But what does this have to do with legitimating retaliatory killing for atrocities? My main point with that was that you could get away with it easier if you could do it yourself or pay someone to do it with relatively little threat of punishment. That is how liberal/tolerant regimes facilitate retaliatory violence, i.e. by allowing people to do it themselves with relative impunity.

The muscle cells move when they contract and that motion entails work. You are right, though, that if you just count your overall position not moving due to muscle contraction, then no work is being done in that frame. Nevertheless it is not true that no work is being done at any level.

transfer more of either what? What are the cubes transferring what to? Are they sliding on a carpet or floating in high orbit?

I agree, but I think you can distinguish between people who sacrifice their life for the hope of a cause and those who seek to give up their freedom in the hope of profiting and/or avoiding responsibility for their actions.

No, you don't get what I'm saying. If someone needs/wants money and they're willing to kill to get it, they would be willing to spend some time in prison in exchange for the money. So lowering the sentence means less years of the hired-killer's life you have to compensate them for. Paying someone for a suicide mission requires compensating them for their entire life. You say "out and out murder is diabolical," but why does it suddenly become less diabolical when it is legitimated? The use of force is supposed to be the minimum necessary to achieve a given goal. Once you get into retaliatory vengeance, killing becomes excessive force when you have the capacity to punish and/or incarcerate someone in a more rational way. Deterrence is valid argument but there's no rational use of violence for deterrence. Basically, once you enter into repressive, pre-emptive violence the sky is the limit. Why is it more ethical to kill one person to deter another from crime than it is to torture them and let them go to tell others of their suffering as a deterrent to following in their footsteps?

momentum is the product of mass and speed, I think. It would help me to know the situation of energy-transfer you're thinking of specifically, though.

The funny thing to me when people argue for killing whomever for whatever reason is that they feel the need to legitimate this to others. It's like they want permission to retaliate with violent force instead of just doing it. I forget when it was that it occurred to me that very liberal regimes that only give short sentences to murderers are basically promoting the death penalty by NGOs like mafias. If you have the money or the loyalty of friendship to get someone else to serve the time, you can pay them to kill someone for you in retaliation for whatever you want, and you don't have to legitimate it to anyone. Reduce the sentence for murder from 10 years to 5 years and you effectively discount the price of hiring a murderer.

I wonder if people trained these crows to do these things.

You have to trace the utilization of energy through the entire system you're concerned with. If you're using your muscles to apply force to the rock, then work is being done to contract the muscles. When the rock fails to budge, however, the energy you exert is being used to maintain muscle-contraction. If your muscles lose energy, they will stretch to their maximum length and you will no longer be exerting force against the rock. Technically, you're also compressing and shifting the rock in a way that is getting it closer to moving, although the shift is not noticeable. If you impart enough energy into the rock to move it, it will have basically acted like a spring storing up that energy until the threshold of movement was reached.

This is funny. As I recall, during the time of the Enron/WorldOnline scandal, the criticism was that people were intimidated out of whistleblowing before the situation got out of hand. Now, after so much has been done to legally protect whistleblowing, someone is proposing to make it illegal? I suppose they're hoping that if everyone keeps their mouth shut, the illusion of false economic hope can propel the economy indefinitely. If you believe that an economy can sustain itself if people keep faith in it, then why can't the economy be propelled on the faith of its own ability to sustain itself in the first place without mandating such? Why should there need to be suppression of whisleblowing and bank-runs? Why not just reform economic practices in a way that makes them immune from bad news-claims? If an economy is stable enough to survive without runs on banks, why shouldn't it be able to survive such runs? Could this signal some failure in the ability of investment to adequately monitor real values and economic processes?

How am I supposed to clarify if you are reading beyond the words as I write them. I explained my hypothesis. Maybe you can't understand that I used the term "hypothesis" to refer to something I thought on my own without reading in a book but I did not use the word to mean anything formal. I'm just pondering whether certain intensities of EM waves require minimum thresholds of gravitation to propagate. This is based on my "hypothesis" that gravitation is the medium for EM wave propagation. This idea seems implicit in the fact that spacetime topography is curved due to gravity, but sometimes I think people assume that gravity is something that exists in space instead of space being a function of gravity. So to simplify what I am hypothesizing even more: lower gravity = thinner space = higher threshold of EM wave intensity to propagate. Therefore, I wonder if a good deal of relatively low-level emissions simply don't make it from one galaxy to the next. Did you actually read my previous post before reacting to it?

Currently I am wondering whether gravitational fields "thin" between galaxies to the degree that only EM waves with a certain magnitude or higher can get from one galaxy to another. Put another way, I wonder if the relative gravitational field density within a galaxy does not allow for more EM traffic than is visible from another galaxy. I wonder if such a threshold of light-intensity would not explain the failure to observe much in terms of planets/satellites around other stars. Still, I don't know how plausible it is to theorize that gravitation could be a medium for EM radiation in such a way that weak gravitation would require higher intensity EM waves. I can't think of any reasons to reject this hypothesis.

I actually believed in the logic of armed rebellion for a while. Now I don't see how I ever even considered this as a viable political tool. After all, what do people do once they overtake the government by force? All they can do at that point is start networking to garner support for their politics or get overthrown themselves. So after a couple of violent coup-d'etats, people have to figure out that democratic political discourse is the only viable means of creating policies that suit people's interests. Of course, when it comes to dealing with criminality or other social interests that profit by staying under the radar, there's no way to get these people to engage in legitimate democratic discussion. So you're stuck trying to tolerate their misbehavior to some extent and look into ways of governing them effectively for the rest.

Interestingly and maybe somewhat ironically, reflecting on the problems of economic and other social interests in academic science led me to the conclusion that the most value-free possibility for science involves doing something unrelated to your science for money. If you are getting paid in any way for your science, you are in the position of being threatened with loss-of-funding when you fail to perform according to preferences of the funding-source. In other words, if you as principle-researcher develop ideas and directions for your research that conflict with whoever is funding you, is there a point where your funding will be retracted because you insist that your research is taking you in a direction that your funders don't view as valuable to them? On the other hand, if your source of funding is completely independent of your science, you may be manipulated on the basis of that work but your science will not be targeted for control. For example, if you install windows, your client could ask you to install a less efficient window for aesthetic reasons, but they could not ask you to shift your research from energy-efficient in window-design to pragmatic trade-offs between efficiency and aesthetic appeal. Still, you can then ask yourself if funding can steer the application of the windows in the direction of lower energy-efficiency, what hope is there for your independent research to make a difference? The political-economy of science and technology can be quite interesting, imo.

My understanding is that the magnetic-field surrounding a magnet is caused by the alignment of the magnetic fields of the electrons in its atoms. It seems that as force-fields come into close enough proximity to intersect, they can integrate into a single field with the additive magnitude of the constituent fields, much like the way wave amplitudes are additive when multiple waves overlap. I assume that this same process occurs when particles of matter start lumping together due to gravitational attraction. Why wouldn't you think that a grain of sand doesn't exist as several different fields in the same point, or rather within a tight configuration of multiple points? E.g. the sand expresses gravitation but also electromagnetism, etc. Its chemical properties are due to nuclear forces expressed within the nuclei, which influence the electrostatic relations between nuclear protons and electrons etc., right? Why does there need to be a distinction between a point-particle and the field surrounding it? On the other hand, maybe the centers-of-force of point particles orbit with each other in configurations that produce tensions within their integrated fields. In that case, it seems like there would be some very fuzzy logic to figuring out how force-fields interact, which may be why QP has to come up with so many tricky methods for dealing with Heisenberg uncertainty, etc.