New Mars Forums

Tom, it would appear that you would rather be patriotic than right. That's a really hairy place to be in. Your loyalty should not to be to any flag, only to the illustrious Doc Z.

The remaining shuttles will make amazing display pieces, especially if they are setup to be interactive. Having a lot of people have the chance to actually touch them or walk above them on walkways could do at least as much for the space program in the future as the have done in the past.

With slightly larger wheels and a bit of ground preperation, you could launch that puppy up the side of a hill.

It looks like the craziest soapbox kart ever 

Why would someone who is prepared to blow themselves up, and trained to resist torture, with absolute faith in repatriation for pain suffered, break at the thought of torture?

This is why the Administration is pushing to redefine war crimes (War Crimes = Stuff that happens to Americans) because 'pretend' torture doesn't work except on the most cowardly. Blowing oneself up may be ignoble but it is far from cowardly.

The idea is that The US is 'Good' and the dictators are 'Evil'. Thus doing evil things is expected of them. However the good guys can't be even slightly evil, because thats how this stuff works. You can't be mostly good. Mostly not breaking the law still lands you in jail.

The dictators being evil can be evil because they are going to get punished like crazy at some future point so nobody particuarly cares. It is assumed that they all need to be overthrown at some point.

The two sticking points are which order you right the wrongs in, (why on Earth is Iraq more important than Rwanda or Sudan???) and can you right the wrongs without commiting them or becoming evil yourself.

Thats why the US doesn't get cut any slack. Whats the point of taking out dictators if you become war criminals in the process?

I was taught about rhetoric and manipulation in gradeschool. We were even required to practice these arts ourselves, however most people fail to pay attention in school.

Heh. That's their principle objection.

I don't know that extremely long term collaborations with Russia are a good idea. The short term stuff is probably reliable enough. So collaboration on a new lunar base element might be good, but collaboration on long term supply of a certain resource is probably dodgier.

Short term projects that don't require expensive upkeep or time sensitive interdepencies should be fine. It keeps the Americans free and everybody else independent so they can go off at anytime and have a revolution for old times sake.

The types of microbes we are recovering from Antartica have amazing economic applications, plus they will be extremely valuable in colonizing Mars. Basically nothing in the Amazon has a chance on Mars without enzymes from Artic species. If the earth enters an iceage, natural or otherwise, then the biodiversity available in the aritc will suddenly increase in importance even further.

The question is why you can't reasonably restrict your expansion so that you don't have to pick between annihilating two regions. Such thinking will lead you to wipe out both.

Your cancer curing agents will likely come from the amazon, but your humanity saving genes will come from the more extreme, more delicate environments.

Who said anything about a leader? If half of you each of your legislatures think the new law is a really bad idea but the executive approves it any way, that is very nearly 51% of the vote.

You seem to assume that there are only two possible options for future governments. Little Americas or the insanity of Pol-pot. The real communist revolutions occured in 1848, the others were simply massive abuse of peasants.

Socialist ideas managed to save a failing America and have done pretty well in a numbe of countries.

I think there are probably better ideas than anything we have thought of so far and better ways to implement the ideas we already have. New off world colonies give us the clean slates to try them out with out bloody revolutions.

On the otherhand you seem to very happy with the status quo, so why would you want to leave?

Have a read of Unrestricted Warfare. Its a fascinating book. It reckons the world isn't particuarly unifying around anything, we are just moving into a new style of warfare, one that mostly takes place away from battlefield. Now currency speculation is considered just as much a weapon as a cruise missile.

That is half the point of going, to try out new political experiments, just as the American colonies experimented with new ideas of constitutionalism and republics.

American democracy and a number of others have descended to mob rule in a lot of cases, where 51% is considered a mandate from heaven. Early democratic leaders and philosophers considered that a law should not be passed without 80% or so consensus. If 49% of your population objects to your shiny new law, is it really a good law?

Open democracy has congealed in the US into two opposed mobs who vote based on allegiance rather than ideology. Sentiments such as "my parents belonged to the party, I was raised in the party and I will die in the party" are commonplace.

Also pure capitalism died in America in 1929. Free Market ideas are still opposed with trade organisations and tariffs being used as instruments of less-lethal warfare. Anti-trust legislation was introduced because the 'invisible hand of the market' does not literally exist. Without government oversight a lot of markets tend towards monopolies.

I think that maybe there is room for new ideas. Mars is one of the few opportunites to freely try them out. Maybe we can figure out a way to encourage vibrant democracies or freemarkets that dont tend towards monopolies or feudalistic company structures. Who knows, that why went want to go to Mars, to try new things. If we wanted to be repressed by encrusted republics we would stay here.

It is odd that Israel so completely failed to utilise 'the other half of the army' - the media, especially after watching such a masterful demonstration by their ally in Iraq.

Where were the 'embedded' journalists, where was the offical army media outlet, with the self-proclaimed monopoly on reliable information?

Quite an odd omission given their general mastery of traditional battlefield elements.