Okay, it’s time to step in here. While it’s perfectly okay to disagree, please try to keep things from turning into personal attacks, okay?
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Yeah, I’m pretty much done with this conversation, I like debate, but when it doesn’t matter what I say because you know what I mean and what I am I suppose I can just argue with a brick wall.
As far as mentioning my family, yeah, I talk about them. Just like you mention yours. Just like we all do here. If that’s an attack specifically against you then you do live in a hateful place. And I’m sorry for that man.
I used to enjoy debating politics with you, but it seems that you never really listened to anything I said. You’ve made me into your personal boogeyman and just pinned everything you hate on to a caricature of what you think I am.
It’s difficult to not defend myself against all the points where you are wrong, and I am trying to keep this short. But, you don’t know me, and you don’t know mine. Your projection of me lining anyone different from me as an enemy and into a “them” is a horrendous falsehood. And I’ll leave that here.
I’ll go back to listing silly parking violations and lying local officials in here.
Seriously? That’s a ton of scratch to waste on finding a blogger.
A British town council hires DC lawyers to subpoena a Californian company (Twitter) for it’s records, which do nothing to identify the heinous Mr. Monkey.
Awesome, bet that would have patched some potholes, or caught some criminals.
Cause, Mr. Monkey and his words carry so much weight and credibility when he speaks. I’d believe every word he/she says.
Do you need another debating partner, @Woodman? Because I still have plenty of rants about birth control and overpopulation. 
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Judging by how many times I’ve nuked the server—including my latest wtf-did-i-do adventure—I’m not entirely sure I have any right to be here either!
In all seriousness, though: “nerds talking about shit” is the whole underlying reason that the Internet came to be, but
show me a sociopolitical issue that can be discussed to resolution on the Internet and I’ll introduce you to the actual for-real Easter Bunny. You guys both deeply hold a whole bunch of antipodal views and short of physically swapping bodies like in Freaky Friday, it’s doubtful you’ll ever be able to truly internalize and understand the other’s points.
And that’s okay! Just remember to argue the argument, not the person.
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Hey, if I ran a business I’d cover whatever kind of birth control there is out there. Just don’t blow smoke up my ass about it being “Women’s Rights”. Or force me to cover it because some bureaucrat decided I should.
Not a problem. As long as the peeps who don’t want to cover it don’t blow smoke up my ass about it being “religious freedom”.
My rants aren’t usually about that though. They’re about people having kids who have no business being parents and the fact that 7 billion of us on this rock is too damn many.
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Except religious freedom is in the constitution. It’s when the government or regulations are compelling behavior that I think a higher standard needs to be met for need. Was there any real reason that a company has to pay for birth control other than “because HHS said so”? There was no debate, Sellibus just put it in there, I’m sure a committee somewhere did it actually. No one voted on it or vetted it. Same with a bunch of PPACA, most of it was like a Mad Libs with the HHS.
I think the problem with the 7 billion is that so many of us are packed into such small areas in such poor conditions. We were supposed to live cleaner, more spread out lives by this point, yet it seems like they are looking for more ways to pack us in even tighter. You can’t tell me Calcutta,. Singapore, NYC, and LA are healthy places to live. Indianapolis is one of the greenest cities (Green as in lots of trees and green space) out there, but it’s spread out as hell too and not as vertical.
We know we can support a lot more, hell we’re throwing away tons of food and using it for inefficient gas right now. Less land is under the plow than ever in the world today, and there is less excuse for starving to death than ever, hunger is still there, but there is no excuse for us letting anyone die of it. With Golden Rice, and the new corns, and now they’ve made beef in a lab, hopefully we’ll become even cleaner and more efficient farmers and can make meat without having to raise and kill millions of animals.
Can we just go to the moon already?
Because ruining one planet isn’t enough?
Technically, the moon doesn’t have much of an environment to ruin. But I don’t want to see how much artillery it takes to crack the thing like a egg.
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I’ll be honest. I kinda do.
The problem isn’t that words have no meaning; it’s that they have too many.
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Fun fact: Kennedy’s Rice University speech works just as well if you replace every instance of “go to the moon” with “blow up the moon.”
edited to add more serious talk:
People will always be terrible, and human nature is unswerving. That’s no excuse to stop exploring, through.
It pains me whenever I see people expressing opinions like “We shouldn’t try to go to other worlds until we fix our own” (and apologies if that’s not what you’re saying, @ClockWorkXon). Poverty, hunger, inequality, ruin—these things are all unavoidable, inevitable byproducts of the human condition and they are fundamentally uncorrectable. Putting off manned space exploration until we “fix” Earth means putting it off forever.
I’d rather not wait that long.
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I think one of the best ways to “fix” people is to provide more space. We get worse the more you pack us together. And you can’t tell me the panacea of cheaper metals wouldn’t help out down here.
Besides, if the US doesn’t go then someone else will. And despite how screwed up people think we are I think we’re better off with the US going than China or Russia. Maybe Britain can make it, if they fix the steering on the dirigibles.
I also would question whether this planet is ruined or not. I think it’s quite nice. If we hadn’t changed the practices of the middle 20th century we’d be in trouble though.
I think it’s impossible to deny that we’ve had an effect on the planet; whether or not that effect is bad or not depends on the context in which you’re framing it—what does “bad” mean when looking at a world’s ecology? Bad for humans, bad for some subset of all living things, or bad for the actual world itself?
I’m a lot less particular about whose space agency goes where. I don’t have any problem with the idea of a Chinese flag on the moon or on Mars, for example—the Chinese space program is insanely hypernationalistic and comes across more as a protracted effort to show all the other countries that China is wearing its big boy superpower pants than an actual effort to further the cause of exploration, but honestly, so was Project Apollo, ya know?
As long as we don’t turn inward and ignore the universe in favor of trying to eliminate fundamental byproducts of humanity. As long as there are >1 humans alive, there will be some measure of inequality. If poverty, hunger, and oppression were actually fixable, they would have been fixed already. As a species, we’re too hard-wired to be shitty to each other to overcome those problems.
I wasn’t talking about exploration, I was talking about colonization. Exploration isn’t being done by humans anymore anyway.
My beef with colonization is that ultimately it will become a duplicate of of the way things were handled during the Imperialistic Expansion. Even if we were to presume no indigenous populations, nations will still use colonization in the same way they were used in the past:
- Botany Bay - getting rid of undesirables (criminals, political dissidents, subhumans, etc.) (Australia, many colonies from North to South America)
- The Leopold Solution - devouring every possible raw resource as fast as possible (Congo, other African and Asian “protectorates”)
- The Robin Leach Resort - a playground for anyone rich enough to carve out a large estate where their whim is law (Ireland, Scotland)
- Best and Brightest - creating the “perfect” colony (Iceland, Greenland, Utah, etc.)
I have my own thoughts on how to construct a good colony, designed to last and flourish, but I’m not in the habit of giving away plot points.
Well, I think people in Australia would say it worked out pretty well for them eventually. As well as the people who were shipped to the US as involuntary indentured servants. (I would argue it’s better than throwing them into the industrial criminal system here in the states.) Also, really likely that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has ruined any chance of me thinking about this one objectively.
The Leopold Solution is what I expect to happen in the asteroid business, lots of people living horrible lives, but becoming extremely wealthy at the same time, if they succeed. I think one of the worst curses in the World today is to have a country with huge natural resources. Even without outside influences (if they are actually on their own) the Congo still can’t get it’s shit together. Too easy for the people in charge to live rock star lives and not give a shit about anyone else. Too much money rolling around. I see more Old west in space than Africa though.
Robin Leach Resort - I don’t have an issue here too much. I don’t think we’re talking Robin Leach so much as Warren Buffet. More power to them, at least the money is entering circulation again.
The same way American Indian tribes used to fight each other for dominance, the same way the Mongols/Koreans/Japanese/Chinese treated the Chinese, the Polynesians tried to do to the Hawaiians, the Romans to the Gauls, the Central American cultures used to wipe each other out, the way the Egytians terrorized northern Africa, and the Zulu everyone. Don’t fall under the conceit that this was invented in the last few centuries. The Imperialistic Expansion was just more efficient, and so far the last.
In any case, in order to survive we have to get off this rock.
Lee, my issue with anyone but the US on the moon is it’s way too easy to just play “Rocks fall everyone dies” at the top of the gravity well. At least if it’s the US then we’re back to where we were before.
And you think the US wouldn’t decide to do that if we thought we could gain from it somehow? I’m not buying it. Any inkling of the US as a benevolent superpower has vanished since 9/11.
Anyone wanting to “win” that way doesn’t need to put people in LEO. They just need to junk up a few teeny tiny orbital tracks and destroy some satellites. China, India, Japan, Russia, and a handful of other entities (including SpaceX) are well pas the point of being able to effectively destroy the modern world.
Benevolent, nah, practical. We’ve had the ability to wipe humanity from the earth the longest. Hell, we could do it with conventional weapons if we tried hard enough.
The world has lived with the USA’s finger on the trigger since WWII. I strongly believe any of the other “space powers” would be worse.
Seeing as how its mostly other countries that have gained from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, I think if we are trying to take over the world we really suck at it. Shit, if we are doing it to get something out of it, where the Hell is my empire and hegemony?
We are just about to the part where people stop yelling at America for being evil and back to asking for help again though. Pax Americana is pretty damn weak at the moment. Every time since WWI when we cash the peace dividend the shit hits the fan.