Re: Yet Another Roswell Thread

Ian Parker wrote:
On 12 Jul, 21:23, eina...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:09:39 -0700, in a place far, far away,
eina...@xxxxxxxxx made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way
as to indicate that:

<snip>

If you really want to discuss this properly I suggest you and I might
set up a MODERATED discussion group. I am fed up to the back teeth
with both Fred McCall and Rand Simberg. It is bad enough being called
an idiot when you are wrong.

Fred McCall is priceless. I do a calculation as it would be done in
Bac. What do you have in Iceland? Some version of bacculariat I'll be
bound. He says "Rubbish". He now expects me to take him seriuoly. He
says I take things out of context. He does not seem to expect me to
take these things personally or lying down.

And yet when we're insanely accused of believing and writing things
that we don't believe, and didn't write, we're supposed to simply
ignore it?

When I was a kid, I experienced being picked on by my classmates. Let
´s say I have a thick skind. There is a lot of annoying people.

Yes, I suppose it is annoying to have your irrationaliity and
delusions about other people pointed out. We will continue to defend
ourselves anyway.

Well, I recall the time I was participating in discussions on the
discussion phorum run by Astronomy.com. This was around the time Bush
was making up his mind about invating Iraq. I took at the time the
stance that such an invation was a bad idea, recalling the defence
Bush' own father had employeed when he was telling people why he had
not chosen to oust Saddam during the first US/Iraq war. As I had
allways believed that his given reasons were sound, I argued that
invating Iraq was likelly to end in tears.

I am mentioning this due to the reactions my careful arguments, often
written at a considerable length but after all my university degree is
in the realm of international politics, and I had been watching
developments in the Middle East with interest for a long time, so I
had plenty of arguments. Mind you, as most present on that phorum were
Americans the reactions ranged from cool over to outright hostile,
some of the hostile ones feeling as I was arguing against invation I
must be no less than a supporter of Saddam Hussain.

I could have employeed language of anger in reply, that would have
been the easy way, but the whole time I persisted with replying in
what I considered to be the calm voice of reason, avoiding harsh
words. A number of those were ex military, but it appears that some
retired military men are interested in the field of astronomy as a
hobby.

This is interesting. I think you should fill in a profile, it would
help people getting to know your position. I can see where you are
coming from.

My background is as described on mine. My subject of study and my
thesis was in Physics. I am afraid I expect the sort of behaviour one
is led to expect in scientific conferences.

There is one thing that might interest you. My interest in AI has
taken me into languages. Now I spent 2 years ay ESOC (not ESTEC) at
Darmstadt, so I know a bit about the ESA set up and my German (and
French) is fairly fluent. Spanish I have started to learn, largely
because I feel that if I give my examples in Spanish they will be
better understood.

Translation is a baromer of understanding.

"Le bateau est allé par une serrure" indicates that you can't discuss
your holiday on the canals with Alice. To cut a long story short I was
responding to threads in Google translate and I asked an Arab - He is
in fact a Syrian living in Canada about whether the Arabic translation
was contextual. I know that French, Spanish and German are not. There
are of course runours about high quality translation. He told me that
it was no better than Spanish.

Now he also told me how distrusted the West was in the Middle East,
and how every kind of conspiracy theory was believed. Now I do believe
that it would be far better if all the countries of the Middle East
were democratic. They cannot however be made democratic at the point
of a gun.

When I was a teenager we discussed whether it was right to fight for
ones country. Yes it is but where you are going into another country
and fighting as a third party you have to have a deep understanding +
an element of trust or you can make a bad situation even worse. The US
has neither of these and it is hard to see how American military might
can possibly improve the situation in the Middle East. The US is
killing off Al Qaeda members but for every one killed two are taking
their place. The statistics in Iraq indicate this.

The one weapon which I think is relevant in the war on terror is in
fact Google. Everyone I know scoffs at this but I feel it is cerainly
the case. You see we will eventally be watching the television that
Google finds for us. Traditional broadcast is on its way out. One can
for a start have good webpages and good arguments on Islamic theology.

On this topic I particularly cringe when they scoff. I wonder
sometimes whether the CIA has secret plans to bring Google into their
orbit. I think it would probably be difficult to do.

I now return to Mars. I sometimes wonder whether the desert has played
its part in creating Wahhabism. You have a caravan crossing slowly and
harsh memes. BTW - It is not just Dawkins that talks about memes. All
sociobiologists talk about memes, Dawkins talks about religion being a
virus which others tend not to. Martian memes are likely to have the
hashness of Mars about them. Mars is a caravan, it is not Corduba,
Damascus or Baghdad (before recent events). Do you see where I am
coming from?

It could well be that the Internet will (eventually) bring about a
super city, and lead to greater understanding.

I can say one thing, at a scientific conference Rand Simberg and Fred
McCall would be asked to apologise or be chucked out. You rubbish
theories, you don't rubbish individuals particularly when they are
right on the technical points involved.


- Ian Parker

I don´t really like the theory about 'memes.' It´s quite well known
that people can be very powefully attached to an idea, and that
basigly just about any idea. For some, it may be interesting to think
about eccentric people. However, the thing about humans is really that
we are capable of reason, not that we nearly allways do practice it.
Islam did yes spread often enough along the caravan trails, but while
some may have become enchanted so to speak in many cases people appear
to have adopted Islam for higly practical reasons, basigly it reduced
friction with your customers if many of them had become muslims on one
hand, and there was another, tax reasons - but literally anyone who
was not a muslims had to pay an extra tax wherever muslim rulers had
taken over an area. You were also restricted from some activities.
Thus, societies taken over became muslim in time in many cases. In
ancient times it appears that spread of ideas wasn´t really were
efficient. If ideas were a virus, then people were a way lot less
likelly to be infected in ancient times. Many ancient ideas took a
very long time to spread. Nowdays ideas spread very quickly. The
difference is not simply due to difference in travelling time, it took
the knowledge of making paper close to 2000 years to spread from China
to Europe. Ancient societies were traditional and very, very reluctant
to change in comparison with today.

One of the problems with people arguing philosophies and peoples
behavior, is that we often tend to forget that we are after all
animals. Think about it, compare group animal behavior to human group
behavior and you'll find really a great number of paralells.

As long as humans can remember groups of humans, no matter the scale,
have competed about control of resources, land, etc. At the smallest
scales the resemblance to animal behavior is complete, like when human
hunting and gathering groups sometimes fought with another such groups
on the control of territory - the comparison being to name an example
competition between groups of wolves or lions, if one group
temporarilly is stronger it may push the other off theyr land. Later
at larger scales, we were calling these conflicts wars. In ancient
times, different states attacked, invated others, sometimes formed
empires untill the next group came along and either destroyed that
empire, formed an empire of theyr own. Sometimes some of the conquered
folks were able to oust the foreign rule once the empire weakene´d for
one reason or another.

Like I said, we tend to be quite unaware that our beahvior is basigly
in number of respects quite similar to animal behavior. For most old
and ancient wars it appears to me that basigly the same fundamental
forces were at work as for when group animals compete.

Our struggles have tended though to be rather more vicious, due to our
superior killing capabilities at least in part. For whatever it´s
worth the wars changed after the peace of Westphalia which ended the
30 years war. That at least was the case about European wars.

It appears that along with the rise of our intelligence in our deep
past, we began to think about the world, wonder about it. It appears
that in ancient times the different groups of humanity had all some
sort of a religion. Invariably there was some sort of a creation myth,
which gave an explanation why everything exchisted. In ancient times,
the idea of separation of religion from other activities would have
been a totally alien line of thought. If we, to name an example pick
the inhabitants of ancient Babylon as an example, then they had a
hierarchy of gods, and there was a god or a deity for every major type
of activity, and it was simpy part of normal activity to ask them for
favour, wether it was the god of merchants or some other. The basig
idea appears to have been that we should thank the gods at all times
for good fortion in all endevours, as after all the believe everywhere
appears to have been that gods ran all things. The idea that nobody
can run from his destiny dates from this time.

For whatever it´s worth, when christianity came along, and swept the
ancient gods aside, it introduced the idea about the separation of
religion and other activities, meaning the idea that there were
worldly activities and religious activities, before that time all
activies had been tied with religion. Now I´m most familiar with the
history of the Roman church. The ancient Roman church adopted many of
the ideas of the ancient Greek phylosophers, there was a thriving
phylosophical discussion among the rank and file right from the first
of times. It was naturally watched and sensored by the church
authorities and sometimes and overstepping the line could lead to a
banishment, which usually meant that the person involved had to abase
himself and literally come crawling to Rome to beg the pope for
forgiveness, which often was granted. Burning of people wasn´t much
practiced untill after the protestant revolt, after which the old
church became in many ways a far more dangerous organization than
before.

Since Tomas Aquinas Roman Church philosophy appears not to have
evolved a great deal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas

But according to him, humans are capable of reason, can solve matter
through reason, there are events that occur to us that are genuinelly
due to chance, yet in order to know absolute truths humans need divine
influence.


If we consider the difference between our traditions and those of the
Islamic world, they lack in the first instance the thought of the
separation of realms, that´s basig difference no. 1. That is perhaps
the most important single difference, as it implies that the idea that
something can be due to solelly ourselves is lacking. In other words,
somewhat similar to the idea of the ancient world, when everything was
due to the gods, everything is due to God. To devout muslims the
modern secular state as a result is a very unholy creation, basigly a
wrong.

As I understand it, according to the particular extremist muslim sect
which lies at the core of al-Qaeda, the idea that secularity is a
wrong is championed. That is one of the greatest single wrongs being
practiced by the modern societies according to them. They champion the
return of the rule of god, naturally through those who are closest to
the god athledgelly, i.e. those who have made theyr lifework the study
of schripture.

What needs to happen within Islam, is some sort of a reasonably open
phylosophical discussion that long was ongoing within christianity, in
which the idea of the separation of realms comes to be finally
accepted. Then the major religious shcooles of Islam will need to
champion that idea and explane to theyr flocks why it is OK.

If something like this doesn´t take plase the struggle between the
religious among Islam and the modern world will persist.


About Darfur, I really can´t see what can be done. Clearly if a
western army would be sent in order to guard and secure the operations
of those trying to aid the needy it would soon fase similar kind of
attacks as those US forces are fasing today in Iraq. I think it
likelly that the European gowernments strongly suspect that to be the
case hence theyr reluctance to become deebly involved. But it is clear
that an army needs to be in plase to secure these operations. This is
something for the muslim world, as it appears to me that only a muslim
army could along with the African forces stay in the area in
reasonable peace with the local people.

Regards, Einar

.

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