prokaryote

actually the first big publicized gas attack on the kurds was in 1988 i believe. but, there's been evidence of their uses against the kurds (as well as the iranians), and US intelligence's knowledge of it, as far back as 1982.

I'm trying to restrain my utter horror from the realization that the left of this country are so blinded by partisanship and rabid hatred for george w. bush that they lose the perspective and moral clarity to see evil for what it is. If evil were as simple as death counts then the Allies and Axis could be compared as equally evil entities.

 

And yet here you sit' date=' claiming that Bush and Saddam are equals because in addition to the death counts, Bush took our rights away and spent our money. But hey, 50,000 kurds don't matter right? Did someone say rights? Civil Liberties? Want to talk about rights? Perhaps you should spend a little more time getting to know Mr. Hussein.

 

Failed to defend our nation? What? When is the last time we were attacked on our soil? Oh, 9/11. Seems like he's done just fine to me. There will be another attack, it's only a matter of when. But as the 9/11 commission stated, we're safer now than we were before, but thats hardly anything.

 

Hey, just because Saddam killed and opressed more people doesn't make him a bad man. Besides, liberating Iraqi and Afghani people, while securing safety for our nation and other nations in the region, while dismantling the majority of Al-Queada's leadership and organization, while overturning two horrible regimes, while injecting a sense of freedom into a part of the world ruled by islamic fundamentalism, while rooting out terrorists, while giving 50 million people the right to choose their own leader is costing us too much money.[/quote']

 

 

well the reagan admin. did a wonderful job of supplying hussein's regime with the capability of producing WMDs didn't they, despite the fact that we knew hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people? but that didn't matter then huh as it urgently matters now. well it was different administration then right? well good chunk of the key policy makers now were also part of reagan admin. was it because khomeni was a bigger threat then? oh wait, i remember reading something about iran-contra or some such thing in my early teens....

 

what is this "moral clarity" you speak of? is it related to that whatchamacallit thing, "axis of evil"?

well, helmholz tried to give physical/physiological reasoning for affinity towards particular tonality in western compositions. and there are more than a few ongoing researches in the area of mathematics applied to music (in both composition and analysis). there definitely exist a connection, even if strictly as a consequence of a construct. but i suppose, this thread is more about abstract and tenuous (anthropic) connections.

the classic multiverse (or "many-worlds") concept, in it's scientific guise, originated from Everett's formulation of QM, where he set out to re-formulate QM without its dependence on observers' special role "collapsing" the wavefunction. iirc, in his formulation, Everett does away with the collapse of the wavefunction to a determistic eigenstate post-"measurement"; instead he considers observer as being part of the system tied to a particular eigenstate that remains a mixture even after the act of measurment. in other words, a measurement does not somehow magically "collapse" a previously probabilistic world to a deterministic one, but rather the system (with observers being part of that system) is split into two or more orthogonal "worlds". so the whole concept arose from interpretation of the formalism (result wise the two formalism, classical and Everett's, are essentially equivalent). its truth value is really matter of faith. whether the interpretation is something falsifiable, i'm not sure. at least, i'm not aware of any experimental setup to test it.

Here's an excellent recent article penned by Richard Dawkins.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_24_5.htm