Yeah but the poor IDF really need US taxpayers help! Heaven forbid it turns into a fair fight! /s
Seriously, though. Hamas is so ridiculously outgunned that I can't imagine any good reason to continue supplying weapons to IDF. If they can't get the job done with what arms have been given then maybe they're not really trying to get the job done at all.
Almost anything can be addictive, but some things are explicitly designed to be addictive. I don't think that young kids are capable of regulating their gaming addiction. Someone needs to intervene, most likely the parents.
Lol. I'm sure it's a coincidence that the guy whose username is i_have_no_enemies is really good at making a lot of enemies.
...just like Israel.
The first line of the Guardian article says, "Two environmental protesters..."
Granted, I did assume that this was the same group that's been throwing paint onto artwork and corporate headquarters and yachts.
I'm not usually inclined to conspiracy but I honestly think this group is planted by somebody to make environmental activists look bad.
I agree with you. I think this is a result of the New Atheist preaching of guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. They're rather crude and provacative in their anti-theism and their followers subsequently have a pretty simplistic view of a complex subject.
Of course, there are even more religious fundamentalists doing exactly the same rabble-rousing. It behooves us to ignore all extremists.
There are many forces and powers that cannot be measured. They're often the most self-evidently desirable things in the world. Love, hate, determination, artistry, joy, generosity, compassion, character, wisdom, justice and beauty, etc. Hence the cute quote from sociologist William Bruce Cameron that "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". Most psychological and sociological phenomena are immeasurable by the strict meaning of the word.
As for physics, we can't measure the future, for example, though there are interesting equations which could possibly account for an near infinite variety of outcomes in a given system. And there are many theories that we can only measure under ideal, localized conditions. We can only hope that they are ubiquitous throughout the universe.
Then there are problems like the Duhem–Quine underdetermination thesis. This thesis says that the agreement of the empirical consequences of a theory with the available observations is not a sufficient reason for accepting the theory. In other words, logic and experience leave room for conceptually incompatible but empirically equivalent explanatory alternatives. This is especially endemic in biology.
And if you want to be more philosophical, it has been argued by guys like Hume and Locke that there is always a “veil of perception” between us and external objects: we do not have directly measurable access to the world, but instead have an access that is mediated by sensory appearances, the character of which might well depend on all kinds of factors (e.g., condition of sense organs, direct brain stimulation, etc.) besides those features of the external world that our perceptual judgments aim to capture. According to many philosophers, nothing is ever directly present to the mind in perception except perceptual appearances.
My point in all of this is that empiricism is axiomatically limited in it's scope and potential. All of our chest-thumping and shouting, "Science! Science! Science!" is a bit naive when it ignores core issues of epistemology.
My personal belief is that knowledge is, in it's first phase, abstract. Only then can it be quantifiable or measurable within a particular system.
The recent trend towards scientism shys away from abstraction, perhaps because they perceive it as a sort of dog-whistle for God.
Yes, of course, but it's not the extent of knowledge.
Nor is it universal knowledge. What burns your hand isn't going to burn other materials, or even other organisms.
There's always a limit to what can be perceived with the organic senses. That's the axiomatic flaw of empiricism.
What do you think? What is knowledge?
He who smelt it, dealt it
Money can't buy happiness but it can buy your preferred form of misery.
I guess that sense of agency over our suffering is a kind of happiness.