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[Truean]

http://music.yahoo.com/news/sinead-oconnor-ends-18-day-marriage-161032236.html

More sanctity of marriage.... It's ok, we're talking about a man and a woman so.... Um, smoke break and ignore the wider implications?

I'm not quite sure what you're stabbing at. The length of the marriage? Who was married? Wider Implications?

18 days man.... All this talk about marriage being sacred and how I can't do it 'cause the whole gay thing would be a sacrilege and ... 18 days.... What was Brittany's? 55 days? Not to be outdone, we have this.... "Sacred...."

[Willfor]

Strangely enough, the Catholic Church's strong stance on astronomy wasn't because of anything that was in the Bible, but because of their near deification of a scientist who could never have done anything wrong according to Galileo's contemporaries. Dogma is a strange, strange thing sometimes.

[Frumple]

O I'm aware of the "it's not perfect thing" with the church documents and Galileo, but isn't it funny how that works out all the same...? And, yeah, the church mythology pretty much always aid the sun was the center so.... Meh? O well.

It's... actually not so clear cut, though I've already forgotten a lot of the specifics. There's (well) over a century of heliocentric vs. earth centered vs. other debate in the church's history, much of it not simply dismissing the findings of full-on astronomy. Some of the cosmological systems that emerged from the intellectual investigation and debate surrounding the issue are both beautiful and fascinating; ultimately wrong, by current understanding, but not even remotely simple or straightforward. Iirc, the church's official cosmological system at the time of Galileo was based on a mutation of... I want to say Aristotelian, but I think that was the physics. Something around Aristotle's time, though, and definitely Grecian.

I'd still definitely say the church was in the wrong with Galileo and a lot of scientific persecution during the past, and present, but I've ran into enough of the (genuinely complicated) history to have to give them a fair shake about this stuff.

Somewhat ninja'd! I guess it was Aristotle.

[MonkeyHead]

Pre-Copernican ideas are based on Ptolmeys thinking, with crystal spheres within spheres to account for retrograde motion. To be fair even Kepler assumed orbits were circular until the death of Brahe allowed ihm to perfect his 3 laws of planetary motion.

[Frumple]

Ahaha, that was the guy! Thanks.

They pulled some really impressive (for the time, anyway) mathematical tricks with Ptolemy's stuff to try to account for things like the retrograde motion of some of the planets, from what I understand. S'also some really nice artwork and beautiful conceptual stuff (Pythagoras and the music of the celestial spheres, ferex.). It wasn't a naive or unchallenged theory; it took centuries to find a more accurate description of reality because with the tools of the time, it made a tremendous amount of sense. I vaguely remember being able to shove some of the more modern advances in astrophysics into a Ptolemaic system, too, which says something impressive about it. Doesn't make it less wrong, but that doesn't mean it's not impressive

[Nadaka]

http://news.yahoo.com/ex-aide-ron-paul-foreign-policy-sheer-lunacy-144730256.html

[Truean]

http://news.yahoo.com/ex-aide-ron-paul-foreign-policy-sheer-lunacy-144730256.html

I think there's a time when other nations can get involved in a country's business. Mr. Paul doesn't seem to think this time ever comes. He would not have entered WWII to fight Hitler.... This is not "Godwin's," but rather actually a remark from the article. That said, We should never have gone into Iraq the way we did (perhaps other ways might have been preferable). Afghanistan for the sole purpose of beating the daylights out of the Taliban who expressly gloat over attacking us.... That's different.

[scriver]

Ron Paul seem yo have forgotten that the US did not "enter" WWII as much as it was dragged kicking and screaming into to to the sound of Japanese bombs over Pearl Harbour.

[Bauglir]

And then Hitler declared war on the United States.

[Andir]

So, um... "get involved in [another] country's business" or "wait for someone to bomb us/declare war before getting into other people's business".  I'm on the side of "wait for them act" personally.  I do not feel we should be fiddling in the affairs of other countries like we are doing in the middle east.  It only makes us a bigger target with all the flip-flopping we've been doing and "relationship building" that's occurring.

[Bauglir]

Oh, I generally agree with that. World police is not a thing we're equipped to do, in terms of foresight and moral acceptability. And it's starting to look like financially, as well.

[RedKing]

So, um... "get involved in [another] country's business" or "wait for someone to bomb us/declare war before getting into other people's business".  I'm on the side of "wait for them act" personally.  I do not feel we should be fiddling in the affairs of other countries like we are doing in the middle east.  It only makes us a bigger target with all the flip-flopping we've been doing and "relationship building" that's occurring.

So you were against the Iraq War then, I take it? Good man.


I'm of mixed opinion on isolationism vs. interventionism. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and interventionism is no different. There are cases where I certainly feel the Western world is overdue to intervene (Congo and Uganda for starters) but then there are cases where I think interventionism would cause more trouble than it would solve (Syria, Myanmar, N. Korea).  And then there's Yugoslavia....I honestly still can't decide whether intervening against Serbia was a mistake or not. I'm no fan of Milosevic, but the KLA are some right ugly bastards themselves. The US has a history of falling in love with "underdogs" in conflict zones without fully considering that they may not be supporting "good guys vs. bad guys", but rather just "guys with guns vs. other guys with guns" (a la the Kurds in Iraq, the KLA in Serbia/Kosovo, or the mujahadeen in Afghanistan).

[MonkeyHead]

Heh, yea, which is how the second Iraq war happened anyway, as wasnt Saddam supported by the CIA as a counter to a growingly powerful Iran in the early 80's? Honestly, as a citizen of the UK I can fully see why the invasion of Afghanistan could be morally justified (removing Taliban) and why our involvement (as your closest ally) was fine. But Iraq? I still really dont get why Bush went through with that, and why Blair went along with it. The first one, fair enough, protect Kuwait. The second one? Someone somewhere has a lot of blood on thier hands.

[DJ]

Serbia deserved all the bombs it got, but they should've come much earlier, to break the siege of Sarajevo.

[Pnx]

There are times when intervention seems like a very good idea, mostly when really bad war crimes/crimes against humanity are being committed. Particularly things like genocide, or some of the really ugly stuff that can happen.
Like with Sierra Leone (forcing children to become soldiers), Rwanda (genocide), Bosnia (... you don't want to know).

Of course, if you set out to kick every nasty dictator in the world out of power your hit list is going to be pretty long. Besides, chances are you'll just exchange one bad regime for another.

I'm not sure there's anything you can do to fix the widespread corruption, violence, and oppression in a lot of the world's countries. Over time, as the world develops, you might find that these countries begin to get better at sorting themselves out. They're never going to be perfect. We're not perfect, in fact in some ways we're pretty messed up ourselves. But the world has been gradually improving, and it's likely to continue to do so.