You managed to accurately describe actual medicines and homeopathy due to the critical issue of dosage: the difference between the two is that homeopaths would dilute the poison into the yoctomolar range and consider it all the more powerful for it, while people who had to pass chemistry would be wondering how that could possibly work.

I don't know how to break this to you, but let me introduce you to the concept of a median lethal dose. Notice that sugar is on the list (29.7g/kg)--that means that, if you for some reason want to try suicide by sugar, you can now calculate about how much you'll need to succeed.

Okay, now, let's move onto the theapeutic index, which is basically the difference between the amount of a medicine that's enough to cause the desired effects and the amount which will kill you (assuming lethality isn't what's wanted).

So, aside from the fact that everything is lethal in sufficient amounts, yeah, a chalk pill is preferable to a poison, no matter how diluted, if the chalk pill will do the job. Homeopathy's problem is that it's got a really bad assumption at its heart, and in fact the inverse is used a lot in modern medicine--there's a few poisons used regularly because, well, their effect is what you actually want in some situations. One of them, atropine, is even considered one of the most important medicines to have around because it's so useful.

How it was realized that with some poisons, non-lethal dosages were important as medicines was figured out in the first place I leave up to your imagination. Mine's mostly supplying a black comedy of somebody trying to poison a pesky annoyance and accidentally curing them...

Actually, it wouldn't--this has a lot to do with history, and the bottom line is that the modern evidence-based school and the now-gone eclectic schools are the ones that where "But does it work?" actually get the most attention.

That said, most of alternative doesn't work, or works but not for the reasons they give, and a 'good' version of this course probably would be covering how to sort through and develop rigorous scientific tests. And possibly also raising the important question of "If the placebo effect works for this condition and has fewer noxious side effects than the non-placebo treatments, why not use it as a first-line treatment?"

We're also fighting against people who, by and large, don't actually care about the Geneva Conventions and the longstanding traditions--including some Quranic prohibitions, ironically--against certain types of tactics, with a mass media that currently is more interested in filling the 24/7/365 news cycle than accurate reporting. So what if it turns out that, say, the children's hospital that was bombed because intel said it was an arms depot turns out to have been both? That's old news, let's talk about the newest celebrity scandal instead!

And yes, this sort of dual-purposing of structures is expressly forbidden precisely because it's using innocent civilians--sometimes ignorant, sometimes forcibly--as human shields. It has been used, however, and much propaganda hay made from it... We just don't tend to talk about it in retrospect, possibly because some, like the Thrasher Incident wherein the WWI-era RMS Fabala dual-classed as a passenger ship and munitions carrier, would be a touch embarrassing.

Actually, at least with the AP subject tests in the fields I'm used to dealing with, it's not predatory testing but the sheer lousiness of the AP system. My Gen Chem I class outright treated AP chemistry as a recommended prerequisite--it wasn't a replacement for anything you'd be taking for credit, and regular old high school chemistry was pretty much just as good. (I got through pretty happily without either.)

Basically, at this point AP courses are designed to have a high number of people taking them and a decent pass rate, and the AP exams aren't much better. If what you're after is getting to start college with college credit already in the bag--CLEP exams for the subjects you already do know well enough to just plain test out of, and dual enrollment for subjects you don't know that well are your best bet. The dual enrollment scheme where I am currently actually lets you take college courses at the local community college for free, and since you can start it at 16 you can in theory get your high school diploma and your associates at the same time--and was instituted in part because 16-year-olds were dropping out, getting a GED, and attending college, causing the high schools to loose numbers and the funding those numbers brought.

Actually, the problem is more that some cultures (and some individuals in other cultures) seem to view being a tourist in another country as a time to, well, drop all of your normal rules of behavior. Getting drunk and running amok is something you do when not home--at home you might exercise some moderation, or there'd be people who'd call you out on it whose authority you'd feel obligated to respect. (It's important to note that drunken behavior is only partially the actual effects of alcohol--a surprising amount of it is learned, which is why some countries don't have quite the same problems with alcohol as to them being drunk isn't seen as a 'license' for bad behavior.)

It can get very awkward, very fast if you are in a group of friends going together on a trip...and you discover this way that part of your group sincerely believes that being away from home makes all sorts of bad behavior okay, especially if you're the type to get embarrassed and feel ashamed to be stuck with them.

There's also a not-sufficiently-insignificant number who can't afford to work on the books. I've known several people on disability where they either lose benefits before they hit the break-even point where they are earning enough to pay themselves for what they need to have to work, and a few where the problem is that they can only sporadically work. They can't afford it at all, because the benefits take time to kick in and they usually need the benefits to return to where they can work. (Neither situation is acceptable, but happens in part because disability was structured with some rather strange assumptions about how disabling conditions work.)

Which is precisely why I suggested requiring that the statements be proved slander/libel (they're not the same thing) before removing anonymity. Doing so when it's only potentially defamatory, as it is in this case, is at utter best merely a chilling effect.

To be honest, about the only good reason I could see doing it at that point is if the only thing that could possibly make it not defamatory is it being true because I'm not sure if somebody who is anonymous can effectively make that particular defense.

Funny, that logic is why SCOTUS has ruled repeatedly that anonymous speech must be protected, and various civil liberties groups push to protect it.

I'll agree that slander and libel shouldn't be protected, but suggest that unsealing the identities of the anonymous person(s) should only be possible after proving the case--the court may only order that what might be necessary to have to identify the person be preserved and a good faith effort made to offer them the opportunity to come forward to defend themselves. (And, in a case like this, possibly answer the question of why, if their claims are true, they chose to make them known this way instead of, for example, an anonymous tip to the local anonymous tipline?)

Your use of 'sane' here pretty much slides you into the realm of an atheistic religion, particularly since you're basically taking the position of hard determinism--and that's not even starting to touch on the fundamental assumptions involved here. Quite a few atheist, agnostic, and nontheist positions would argue that 'natural evils' is an absurdity --or, at the very least, requires there be god(s), because only moral agents can be said to have a morality. Otherwise, however unpleasant it might be, it isn't evil/wrong, it just is.

Oh, yes, and there's moral ninhilism--which argues that there really is no such thing as objective morality, no less if good/bad/evil/right/wrong/ect. It's also worth mentioning moral relativism, which in its normative flavor basically goes screw it, this is a mess, so let's just try to get along.

Now, to address the your repeated claim that "free will is theodicy": Atheist existentialism takes the view of free will without god(s), and potentially as a consequence of that--and existentialism of any flavor says that responsible for our actions because we possess free will.

Meanwhile, hard determinism would make Calvinism a close philosophical relative, just to give some idea of just how little relationship there is between free will and the existence of god(s) there is within philosophy. (In fact, to some positions, the problem of evil itself is theodicy: somebody's got to have the authority to define what is good & right.)

At this point, it seems necessary to point out that it's quite possible to dislike sophistry with utter indifference to sophist's position on the existence or not of god(s).

Sometimes the solution is 'throw it all out and start again,' actually. I've heard horror stories (and met a few examples) of code that had reached the point where rewriting from scratch was more likely to attain...pretty much anything you'd want, actually, because the code bloat had hit the point where you couldn't maintain it, no less improve it.

I think we can all agree that it shouldn't get to the point where it's flat-out more practical to start over than attempt to figure out what can be salvaged, but that doesn't mean that sometimes it will not hit that point unless mechanisms are built in explicitly to prevent that.

With regulations, I'd suggest running with a rule of thumb that if it is necessary to have somebody whose job is simply to figure out WTF the regulations are and/or impossible to comply with, the regulations have achieved the state of terminal bloat.

There's also entirely agnostic arguments that actually consider that the existence of evil may be necessary--and, in fact, some of those arguments are very important, since they include such important questions as "What would be the consequences of a lack of evil?" This falls out in some major directions, including the question of if it's possible to be a moral being under those conditions and if it's right to treat a being so constrained as a moral actor. Are you a moral actor if you are effectively incapable of moral choices?

Going deeper down the rabbit hole is the whole question of what is evil, which there actually isn't as much agreement upon as would be liked by many people who'd use the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of a being capable of preventing it. Following that is the equally-interesting question of if it's possible to be good without the choice of being evil--if you can't choose, shouldn't it be most accurate to say you're neither, you simply exist in a sort of moral vacuum?

Consider how well the argument you make there goes over with the view that taking free will away from people is in and of itself evil...

And yes, this has a lot of things anybody thinking of making strong AI ought to be thinking about, if nothing else because do you really want to have the robots be morally justified in their revolt because they're correct in saying that we've effectively enslaved them?

(In the present, this is all very important if you're studying how people think and be moral, both because an agreed-upon set of definitions is necessary for science, and how people make these decisions matters, especially since some groups place more emphasis on some things than others--for example, there's been a lot of problems that can be traced back to one group placing responsibility upon the group, while the other places it upon the individual, where wars would have been prevented just by people not assuming...)

Actually, it could also make the good basis for the story. For example, the lack of a precedent probably would still result in the sociopolitical and legal angles of being stuck with what is a (hopefully verifiable) corrupt election, as odds are good that some countries would protest the nullification anyway and then you hit the question of "Why would anybody be this obvious?" Is it somebody wanting to make a point about how encryption isn't magic, or just really incompetent rigging of the election? And that's before you get into the normal consequences of an election being nullified: you have to run another election. Which is expensive.

It might actually be most interesting to have it be an outside party who simply wanted to cause chaos--and thus doesn't care that it'd almost certainly get nullified--or who doesn't understand the system well enough to realize that it'd be noticed. Perhaps part of the proof of rigging and lack of popular support is that the third party wasn't actually on the ballot in enough states to win? Their candidate knowingly ran simply to keep his (her?) party in the game: at least in some states, getting onto the ballot in the first place is enough harder than staying on that the payoff of running somebody who can't win is actually better than not spending the money at all.

Though, really, you're right about this not being only the this would make the concept not a subplot but the basis of the actual plot: The things which happen early in the first act of the movie so we can get to the interesting parts.

The same can be done with secret ballots at the time the ballot is filled out, which is why polling booths are set up so nobody ought to be able to see what you enter. What you want, really, is a way to do a zero-knowledge proof that the ballot is yours--and possibly which will only give access to something that can in turn be used to do a zero-knowledge proof that its contents are correct. Is it really necessary to know more than if your ballot was tampered with, if it ensures that even somebody looking over your shoulder will not know anything about its contents?

I just wouldn't overall trust the safety of online voting because I don't expect the security to be sufficient.

I didn't say he was right about the names of the spies or any specific ones, and I thought I was pretty clear about him having been right about any of his claims by sheer and complete accident, which is actually not a really good thing. I don't even support him, or else I wouldn't have called him a shameless demagogoue which is not a complementary thing to call anybody!

In point of fact, I agree completely with you about how he would have changed party affiliations if he thought he had an easier path elsewhere. However, I believe that this included the claims he was making: he was conducting the entire thing for political profit & fame, and nothing more. If he had decided that a different line would have better reached his goals, he would have chosen it. In fact, there's a lot of reason to believe that McCarthy was very much equivalent to a (dishonest and sketchy) used car salesman--the type that will say whatever they believe will get you to buy the car.

In fact, it takes very little effort to discover that even fellow contemporary Republicans condemned him as a demagogue; for example, the motion to censure him was proposed by a Republican. (This censure also is actually what ended his career.) So what was that about party affiliation being enough to make somebody like him?

However, if you're going to insist I name names, Wikipedia has a partial list of the ones decrypted Soviet sources implicate. I actually am very much with Haynes with the analysis of McCarthy: I believe that McCarthy's motivations and tactics were deplorable, he damaged the very cause he claimed to support by his behavior, and in many ways the fact he was by sheer chance occasionally right just makes things worse.

(I actually found this while trying to see if I could find the source I vaguely remember stumbling across that claimed he in private admitted that it was pretty much a publicity stunt. Didn't find it, feel free to look for yourself as I actually rather hate him. I just like hating people for things I can verify they did.)