171–180 of 185 posts
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Or if you like good movies, Minority Report...
Please. Compared to the actual short story, the movie is utter trash.
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> The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent. > Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule. There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim (the relative rarity of democracy-on-democracy war does not require any more than the small proportion…
>> > The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. > Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent. Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide. But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sa…
No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controling for other known sources of variability.
> but can you cite and exception?
Sure, if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow that the expected number of wars if democracies on both sides isn't far less than one, you will also find lots of actual wars between Democracies. Even if you ignore wars where the only pair of democracies are a separatist group and the unit they are separating from (e.g., the American Revolution), there are plenty (War of 1812, for instance, or more recently some parts of the Yugoslav Wars.)
Wikipedia has more discussion and examples:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_between_democra...
> have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO?
Yes, non-democracies have created both continent-spanning multi-national supergovernments like the EU and wide regional military alliances like NATO.
In fact, they did both long before democracies did.
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>> > The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. > Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent. Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide. But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sa…
> It's hard to prove a negative through evidence No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controli…
> if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ...
The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team' depends on how narrow your definition is of 'basketball'.
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> It's hard to prove a negative through evidence No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controli…
It would be great if you could cite some examples. The American Revolution and War of 1812 clearly are not ones; the UK was not a democracy. The wars in the former Yugoslavia are a stretch; those were at best very nascent democracies. > if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ... The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team'…
At what point precisely did the Westminster system, one of the more common models of modern democracy, become a democracy?
Note that the later you peg and the more narrowly you define “democracy” to justify it, the more you make the case that there have been so few democracies that, given the actual historicsl frequency of interstate wars and the number of nations available at any time, the number of wars expected to have a democracy on either side is expected to be near zero even if democracy in both sides of a dyad does nothing to decrease the probability of war between the countries.
(Also note if you claim it's not a democracy because it had territories unrepresented in the national government despite the form of government being democratic, that has the same effect—and even rules out the modern US as a democracy, as well.)
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There is also the issue that often times preparing to commit one crime involves committing other crimes. It's something of a scale. Consider the following cases: Arresting the guy who kidnapped someone. Arresting the guy in the act of trying to kidnap someone. Arresting the guy who set out to kidnap someone. Arresting the guy who is preparing his home to hold a kidnapped victim and is identifying a target. Arresting…
In US law, the treatment of each is very, very different. How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed.
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There is also the issue that often times preparing to commit one crime involves committing other crimes. It's something of a scale. Consider the following cases: Arresting the guy who kidnapped someone. Arresting the guy in the act of trying to kidnap someone. Arresting the guy who set out to kidnap someone. Arresting the guy who is preparing his home to hold a kidnapped victim and is identifying a target. Arresting…
In US law, the treatment of each is very, very different. How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed.
Of course, if two or more people are involved and only one has a change of heart and stops actively participating (but doesn't take active steps to foil the plan in motion) the one who backed out is still (along with all the others) guilty of conspiracy. And that's true even before anyone gets to the point where they could be individually charged with an attempt, as long as one overt act toward the criminal goal has been done, the whole group is guilty of conspiracy.
And in the US, certain acts are often criminalized specifically when done with the intent to support some other target crime which is not negated by later backing out of the target crime (and in fact allows you to be arrested and convicted when you never got further than the preparatory act.)
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> we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input. > After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "…
> Native American > 150 years ago Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow. People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China. “ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to…
Try a few decades.
> People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow.
Goodness.
> Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
You mean the website full of russian, chinese, european and american propagandists where you can't take anything seriously? Where anyone can pretend to be anything and lie all day long? Did you write that reddit comment?
> sorry my English sucks
Going through your comment history, your english is fine. I don't know why you are pretending and faking as if your english sucks.
> I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese,
I thought native chinese couldn't speak? "People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. "
> I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.
Is this for real? Are you gordon chang?
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This seems deeply, deeply idealistic to me--but ultimately this seems political, so I'll just say my point was that it's not clear what Obama could have done differently aside from save face and keep the state department staffed.
> This seems deeply, deeply idealistic to me--but ultimately this seems political, so I'll just say my point was that it's not clear what Obama could have done differently aside from save face and keep the state department staffed. The facts differ from your claims. All you need to do is look at history, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush Jr to Obama and everyone in between. All embraced these th…
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In US law, the treatment of each is very, very different. How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed.
> How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed. Of course, if two or more people are involved and only one has a change of heart and stops actively participating (but doesn't take active steps to foil the plan in motion) the one who backed out is still (along with all the others) guilty of conspiracy. And that's tru…