Not at all, that bloated war budget serves to keep half a trillion dollars flowing up the pyramid to the ultra-rich each year.

Without it, that money might actually go toward education, or healthcare, or *gasp* even helping the poor!

Still living in 1975, are we? Because homosexuality was removed from the DSM since 1986. The fact that it was ever in there only serves to highlight the corruptibility by politics of the softer sciences.

Correct, and one day soon the market will be forcibly removed from healthcare, education, food, and (basic/decent) shelter. Then we will have the foundations of a just, sane society.

QFT. "Destroying" the most powerful, most technologically advanced, and arguably most violent empire in the history of the planet... great plan Hannibal.

Fixed that for you.

The problem isn't america, the problem is capitalism, and a culture which tolerates deception, coercion, and violence as long as it comes from authority. Capitalism is a four hundred year old worldwide cultural institution, it won't die over night.

Any system in a state of non-equilibrium requires constant outside force to prevent equilibrium. For wealth distribution in capitalism, violence is that constant force. Capitalism loves violence, feeds on it, survival depends upon a mostly unreasonable (=mostly violent) world.

Capitalism depends upon systemic hierarchy-sustaining violence for its survival. This "signal" reveals the ethically despicable nature of the system, and this signal is camoflaged by the "noise" of background violence. As our world becomes less and less violent overall, that background noise is being reduced, which makes the signal - hierarchy & inequality-maintaining violence - seem louder and clearer to us. It's all relative, that's why police brutality feels all of a sudden a huge problem in America, even though it's been just as bad or worse for many decades.

"Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."

Also bibles in every court of law, how fucked is that? A court of law is a place to determine truth by evidence, a place where lives are ruined or protected from ruin. Yet Christian America defiles this House of Reason with a Book of Superstition, upon which the accused are compelled to swear.

Is nothing sacred, Christians? Are you so full of hubris, so void of shame that you'd push your religion on people during one of the most terrifying and traumatic events of their lives? Get the bible out of the courtroom and I'll have slightly more respect for Christendom.

The presence of the Holy Bible in the courtroom is an insult to every person sentenced.

Yes, I know there is some truth to what you're saying, but the sickness that is greed is the product of ever-evolving human Culture, not human nature. In the grand scheme human culture is arcing dramatically toward a perfect parallel with human nature (infinite compassion / promiscuity / hyper-sexuality). That's mostly thanks to the fact that science is constantly improving the lens with which we view the world, allowing us to more deeply and accurately understand our own nature. This moment - post-industrial capitalism - seems like all that ever was or ever will be to most of us, trapped in our brief 100-or-so year lifespans. But when we measure the lifespan of capitalism - the last four hundred years - against even the modest length of human history - 10,000 years or so, one cannot come away with any other conclusion than this too shall pass, and I believe it shall pass soon. Anyone plugged into world politics can feel it, we're approaching another late sixties moment here.

"Great news you guys, I've got it straight from God, this is The Perfect Book, inscribed with His Holy Words!"

*400 years later*

"Guys, uhhh listen, good news and bad news. Bad news, about that Holy Book we've been following for the last four centuries.. Yeah, God kinda got it wrong the first time, but the good news is he just updated it with this New Testament and it's PERFECT this time, I swear!"

*2,000 years later*

"THAT BOOK IS PERFECT, YOU ATHEISTS KNOW NOTHING AND WILL BURN IN HELL!"



I mean shit, at least the Muslims are consistent. Christianity is a self-contradicting joke.



Apparently the Christian god is a classic flip-flopping, closet-gay conservative politician.

If the bible thumpers truly had their way, homosexuals would still face the death penalty. This was reality in the pre-USA thirteen colonies, and still reality today in some of the worst parts of the Islamic world.

Funny how Christians love to hate on Muslims, but if it weren't for the influence of American non-theists, American law would look a lot like Sharia Law.

Can confirm, I've participated twice and was hetero both times.

Bigoted theist spotted, don't let the bogey get on your six, it's very likely he's homosexual himself!

Here we go again with the unsupported conclusions! Binge-watching Netflix does not equal getting news from TV.

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-news/single-page/

Notice the particularly stark news-source difference between millennials and baby boomers. Note also Fox News dropping from 47% to 36% to 30% as you go from older to younger.





Among the study’s findings:

While Millennials are highly equipped, it is not true they are constantly connected. More than 90 percent of adults age 18-34 surveyed own smartphones, and half own tablets. But only half (51 percent) say they are online most or all of the day.
Email is the most common digital activity, but news is a significant part of the online lives of Millennials, as well. Fully 69 percent report getting news at least once a day — 40 percent several times a day.

Millennials acquire news for many reasons, which include a fairly even mix of civic motivations (74 percent), problem-solving needs (63 percent), and social factors (67 percent) such as talking about it with friends.

Contrary to the idea that social media creates a polarizing “filter bubble,” exposing people to only a narrow range of opinions, 70 percent of Millennials say that their social media feeds are comprised of diverse viewpoints evenly mixed between those similar to and different from their own. An additional 16 percent say their feeds contain mostly viewpoints different from their own. And nearly three-quarters of those exposed to different views (73 percent) report they investigate others’ opinions at least some of the time — with a quarter saying they do it always or often.

Facebook has become a nearly ubiquitous part of digital Millennial life. On 24 separate news and information topics probed, Facebook was the No. 1 gateway to learn about 13 of those, and the second-most cited gateway for seven others.
At the same time, younger Millennials express growing frustration with Facebook, and there are signals in the research that the use of social media will continue to splinter with time. Younger Millennials use more social networks (an average of four) than older ones (who average three).

They are also more likely than older ones to have cut back on their social media use or dropped a social network completely. In our longer interviews, these younger Millennials describe Facebook like a utility they have to use rather than one they enjoy.

When Millennials want to dig deeper on a subject, search is the dominant method cited by 57 percent (and it is the one cited most often as useful), followed by news sites (23 percent). Only 7 percent cite checking Facebook to learn more.

And when Millennials do dig deeper, the most important qualities that make a destination useful are that they know the source well (57 percent) and that this digital source is transparent and rich with references and links (52 percent).

Millennials, however, do not worry much about privacy. Only 2 in 10 worry a good deal about privacy in general. And when asked about specific concerns, only 22 percent worry even a little about government surveillance; 30 percent worry even a little about corporate America knowing too much about them. The biggest worry, 38 percent, is identity theft.

Despite this lack of overall concern, the vast majority of Millennials (86 percent) have changed their behavior online, mostly to control what people know about them. Fifty-two percent have changed their privacy settings, while 37 percent say they are now more likely to remove information or photos of themselves that are embarrassing or immature.

I checked, expert consensus is that the Printing Press (=dawn of mass literacy) and advent of gunpowder changed everything, destroyed the Divine Right of Kings and gutted the power of the Church. The rise of the modern nation state resulted from this political turmoil.

And now with the internet we're back again to the beginning of the great Cycle of Social Change.

Please elaborate, Jeff Garzik has me convinced that it isn't.

The difference is that in today's world the softer sciences can (and often are) warped and corrupted by the profit motive, that's what Feynman is warning those CalTech students about.

Verisimilitudes or not, raw mathematics is wholly incorruptible by virtue of transparency (see Bitcoin). Contrast that with statistics, or other weaker methods commonly used in the social sciences.

This statement just shows how woefully out of touch with reality you are. Progressive young people aren't getting their news from TV at all, they get it from Reddit (the 4th most popular site on the internet).

God wants us to despoil the Paradise he gave us, ruining it for all future generations of his children? Because that's what we're doing, and it seems like a pretty fucking selfish and convenient worldview to have.

If you truly believe this, you're a hypocrite unless you get off that computer and start living without all the evil false-technology science has provided you, like the Amish do. Use only technology before the scientific method (~pre 1600).

Western people were very different, ethically speaking. If you want some insight on this, compare life in Middle East today to life in modern France,  or just go watch Game of Thrones for a bit, or just read your own fucking Bible.

Back then, virtually everyone was religious, and there were no scientists. Under 10% of the population was literate. What was life like? People were torturing, enslaving, raping and burning each other alive regularly, as in these activities were relatively commonplace.

We don't let theists get away with that shit in the civilized parts of the world anymore. This is because reason slowly compels ethics toward total compassion, and has been doing so for 2,000 years.

Yes, and the Large Hadron Collider could create a black hole that swallows Earth, but these two scenarios are extreme improbabilities. I understand you don't see the distinction between possibility and probability, but scientists tend to discount extreme improbabilities when forming analysis or offering guidance. Science regards all matters with doubt by default, and even much of Old science has been debunked by New Science. it is only the Strongly Evidenced ideas that break out of Doubt's gravity well and reach Living Theory outer space.

This is why science is cumulatively providing a more and more accurate description of the universe, and why technology has been evolving so rapidly since the dawn of modern Reason. Meanwhile religion keeps offering the same shitty old Bronze Age assumptions for 2,000 years straight.

Yes, your inability to distinguish science from pseudo-science has been made crystal clear to me by your posts in this thread and others.

Futile rearguard effort from Murdoch and his ilk, they're already defeated and by now they must know it. The last, sad, desperate gasp of twentieth century ignorance. That's all this is.

Near future Endgame: Rich old conservative media mogul fuckwits die of old age, progressive millennials outlive them by many decades, everybody wins.