I never gave my opinion on the matter. Your ignorant political stereotypes led you to make assumptions about what things I never even commented on. This is common amongst political ideologues and other loudmouths and pundits.

If it were mindless tripe you'd swallow it without a second thought. The fact is you've completely failed to grasp the points which were being made. Calling it "mindless tripe" because you don't understand it is ... pretty childish. Reminds of the hick I met down in the bible belt who called evolution "mindless tripe". You two would get along great.

I don't think you know what that fallacy actually means. Nothing I wrote is even close to an excluded middle fallacy. The particular bit you quoted might be considered a sweeping generalization, if it weren't so blatantly evident that I was mocking your kindergarten-level understanding of economics.

Hurr, durr, ad-hominem fallacy!

Not always, but you know how it is with bureaucracies ... nothing gets them motivated quite as well as a good disaster.

Naw, man. I mean, sure, there are some superficial similarities, but the things which actually caused the incidents are COMPLETELY different.

The Soviet shootdown is a simple case of browbeaten lackeys under a tyrannical regime making what they figured was the best choice to cover their asses. There was no threat to them. The aircraft was nowhere near the people who made the call, and was on it's way out of Soviet airspace. The pilot involved even told them he believed it was a civilian airliner. Yet they decided to shoot it down anyway.

The Vincennes incident was the exact opposite. It involved personnel under serious threat from Iranian forces, in hostile territory, faced with an aircraft they couldn't identify which seemed to be on an attack vector. They were scared for their lives, and under an immense amount of stress. I'm not sure how to explain that to someone who works a 9-5 job in an office. Lots of people talk about "stress" in their day-to-day jobs, and I'm sure there's some truth to their complaints, but unless you're a first responder, an air traffic controller, or a soldier in a combat zone, you really don't know what stress is, or how badly it can skew your normal behaviour. We train our people to recognize it, avoid it, or deal with it ... and we put measures in place to try and minimize it ... but when you're engaged in combat and feel that your life is on the line, even the best preparations can only do so much. It only gets worse when you're the one responsible for a multi-million dollar vessel, and several hundred lives on board it.

The difference may be easier to visualize if you relate it to something you're more familiar with. The Soviet shootdown of 007 was the equivalent of a couple police supervisors sitting at headquarters, ordering a patrolman to shoot an unarmed man running away from a property he trespassed on. The American shootdown of the Iranian flight was the equivalent of a couple SWAT guys under heavy fire panicking and shooting a civilian who was running towards them. Both are horrible incidents which should never have happened. But other than that, they have absolutely nothing in common.

Sure. So lets pass a law that says every person should be paid $50,000 per hour. Economic activity ought to be AMAZING then!

Very true. If you meet the minimum skill required for the minimum-wage job, you get a crappy job that pays your basic expenses, but won't pay off that credit card you keep racking up because now you can afford more useless crap. If you don't meet the minimum skill requirements, then fuck you - you're stuck on the government dole because we won't let you sell your services for less. Our minimum living standard says you have to be a parasite rather than contributing to society.

Totally right. Especially when we implement our $50,000 minimum wage idea. If those fatcat small business guys can't afford it, fuck 'em; someone else will come along to start a business once the economy settles down.

Totally. Just like mass-surveys become more and more useless the more people you add to them. And scientific research becomes more and more useless the more data points you gather.

The funny thing is, fulfilling his FOIA request is probably the first time anyone in government actually looked at his data.

And these days they do. It's one of those "lessons learned" things.

I, along with a bunch of other guys, once got sucked into lighting up an entire household of civilians in training. It really, really sucked. But the reason those scenarios existed is because some poor bastards lit up civilian households for real, and we got to learn from their mistakes.

I feel your pain, bro. Comments that criticize the US government and offer justifications for terrorist attacks always get SO badly down-voted.

Very true. rt.com is the propaganda outlet of choice these days, as far as external puppets are concerned. Internally ... well, all of them publish whatever they think Putin wants them to publish.

You complain about strawmen, then string together a strawman of your own. Nobody is suggesting that humans need to travel to Titan.

"mark-t" was absolutely right. Your statement was absurd, and my parody illustrated it's absurdity. Our unsuitability to space is entirely irrelevant. You're right in pointing out that there are many aspects of space exploration which are best done by machines; you're completely wrong when you take that idea and present it as an absolute for why no human should ever go into space.

The fact that mark had to explain my comment to you is ... rather embarrassing, but not unexpected.

To suggest that we, ill adapted to flight as we are, ought to go physically into the sky instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.

Yeah, it kinda does.

Oh that's rich. Like, instead of having a legal system, let's just tell all the gangs how we want them to behave, and let them enforce our desire on their own.

This is, of course, simply a lie. The US stopped executing minors years ago. They've also gone a step beyond, and abolished life-sentences for minors.

The reason the US hasn't bothered to ratify it is because:

a) The ratification process is kind of a pain in the ass; and
b) It wouldn't change anything, so there's no point. It's a purely symbolic gesture.

But by all means, keep pretending that Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama both refused to ratify it because they want to keep executing children. I'm sure all the Democrats will love that explanation :)

Good point. I keep forgetting that getting lost is a capital offence.

The founders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had, at the time, just finished carpet-bombing large parts of Europe and Asia, and imprisoning their own citizens for the crime of having the wrong ethnic background.

It's not that the countries "aren't keen" on the declaration - it's that the modern interpretation isn't exactly what the drafters had in mind. Kinda how the founders of the US were able to speak about inalienable rights while simultaneously being OK with slavery.

All I see is another difference: the UN criticizes the US while completely ignoring far, far worse abuse in Iran and Soviet era Russia.

Oh no. You're telling me that the US hasn't ratified a worthless piece of paper which contains no actual enforcement mechanisms and would make zero difference to any US policies? That's horrible. Next you'll be telling me that nations which have ratified it don't actually do a damn thing to abide by it! Say it aint so!