sevenless

But these attributes are true of all states. There is no unclaimed land on earth that new states can claim, so state formation necessarily destroys existing states. It's impossible to form new states without force, just as much today as it was in 1776. This doesn't make new states bad.

That kind of comparison to American history could as easily imply a civil war is the next step to consolidate the EU. It sounds ridiculous, but it's also hard to imagine a peaceful federal unification of Europe.

You have Juncker backwards. He was saying internal EU borders are a bad idea.

Rejecting all borders is a tenable ethical claim - indeed it's hard to justify why states should exist in most ethical frameworks that value human equality - but Juncker didn't go there.

But yes, Britain sabotaged the EU, including its having a joined-up defense and border strategy. Indeed, you might expect the departure of the most Eurosceptic nation to strengthen the EU.

As you say, having done everything in their power to undermine the institutional effectiveness of the EU, the Eurosceptics cannot reasonably turn around and blame the results of their own actions on the EU. Nonetheless, that's exactly what they do. It's very similar to the Republicans in the US making sure the federal government can't pass any bills, then blaming 'big government' for being ineffective.

Case in point: The migrant crisis, caused by large numbers of refugees coming to Greece and Italy's wide open coasts. How did they get there? No unified European border or coast guard and no integrated defense, which Britain ensured would never happen.

No government should tolerate this kind of behavior, as it is a hostile action against the state, holding the population hostage. It should be treated as a form of criminal extortion or terrorism.

India isn't a particularly good argument for democracy. It might be an argument against it.

The EU is 'undemocratic' - as opposed to Britain's unelected Prime Minister, Queen and House of Lords, of course.

A more serious response is that democracy can only be justified by its outcomes, and isn't a good thing in itself. A racist democracy that votes to harm minorities is worse than a dictatorship that upholds human rights and prevents the majority harming the rest. With the rise of explicitly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties in Europe, this is not a theoretical consideration.

> Stiglitz points his finger squarely at “the fatal decision to adopt a single currency, without first providing the institutions to make it work”.

The second part of this quote means something quite different from what the headline implies. He isn't advocating an end to the single currency, he wants stronger institutions, which the Eurosceptics have undermined at every opportunity.

If they can't interact with normal matter or light, we're the dark matter to them.

It is a bug. There is no way to stop Excel from automatically turning certain strings in files that it reads in, into dates.

HN's seriously voting up this libertarian wank?

So much for billions of years of blind evolution. Take that, Mother Nature! Don't see birds flying around with goddamn plasma wings, do you?

I was wrong about Pizarro. With the 'mistaken for a prophecy' bit, I was thinking of Cortés and Montezuma.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/cortes_hernan....

I think we both know humanity's interstellar destiny is to become the murderous alien invaders we've faced down in so many movies.

So you think human ethnic groups DO work like races in D&D?

Could you share with me the table of STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA for Blacks, Whites and Asians? Oh, and Jews, of course.

Do we get skill and attack bonuses or special saving throws?

Every so often I encounter people who think that human ethnic groups work like races in Dungeons and Dragons, and I feel rather sorry for them.

States don't make laws because they have a right to; they do it because they can. There's no supra-national law that specifically gives states a right to make laws, it's just part of national sovereignty.

The mafia can also force people to go along with its protection racket, but that doesn't mean the mafia has a right to do it. Just that we live in a world where it's possible.

> Threatening the state by splitting it, and threatening the state with terrorism are two completely different things.

Not in terms of the outcomes, which might be identical. In the consequentialist argument you're making, you cannot oppose terrorism on the grounds that it destroys the state if you support a referendum that can destroy the state.

> it violates at least a couple of dozen of articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This has nothing to say about national sovereignty. Actually, if you believe in the claims made by the UDHR, that contradicts the notion that nations should act as they please and make whatever laws they decide on.

Anyway, I don't see why the UDHR should have any moral force. It wasn't decided on by a democratic vote, it was decided on by the victors after WW2, some of which weren't even democracies. There is no mechanism for amending the UDHR, and nobody has ever had a say in whether they wanted it to apply to them. "Human rights" don't exist.

I think Pizarro had some religious support too. The Incans had a prophecy about 'white people' coming from the gods, and he just happened to turn up at the right time...

About 10% of Danes are non-Danish migrants. I don't know the composition of the lowest 20% of the US, but I doubt they are entirely from ethnic minorities.

Even if we take your claim as true, the fact that different ethnic groups are highly stratified and mobility is restricted, like a caste system, is just as significant. Maybe even more so, because it implies a racist society.

Claiming, in effect, that we should discount a lack of social mobility for those born into certain ethnic groups, seems like racism.

> If states have no right to exist, the obviously have no right of making new laws.

That doesn't follow. States do make new laws, and people will go along with those laws, because the nature of a state is to compel people to follow its laws (by definition). It still doesn't mean that it's bad that any state should stop existing, or that we should oppose terrorism on the sole ground that it threatens states.

Put it another way: a referendum to split the state into two (like the Scottish independence referendum), also threatens the state. That would not be a reason to oppose the referendum.

Even if this is true, and terrorism threatens the existence of the state, states have no right to exist. New states often come into being, and states often stop existing (East Germany, USSR). This isn't inherently good or bad. There are ethical rationales for opposing terrorism, but defending the existence of particular national governments isn't one of them.

I'm sure Donald Trump said that the other day...

I say the actuarial risk of dying from terrorism in Europe is very low. Everything else is emotion and irrational fear, which as others pointed out, is the aim of terrorism. If you don't believe me, and you think the mortality risk is high, please get in touch; I'll sell you an insurance policy.

This seems to be confusing proportions with absolute numbers. Newspapers do this all the time about health statistics, going from a very small number of additional deaths to scaremonger about a '300% increase in cancer'.

Terrorism in the last year is a significant proportion of the total number of homicides in France, but the percentage increase doesn't mean the absolute number is relevant. If you didn't worry about being murdered in France before 2015, there's no reason to worry about dying in a terrorist attack after 2015. Moreover, we might expect terrorist attacks to regress to the mean, so 2015 would be unusually bad under that additional assumption.

If the number of homicides increased by 14-20% due to some other cause, it likely wouldn't be seen as an urgent policy issue.

> Those 600,000 people are going to die either way

In fact, many will die from avoidable causes, like medical errors.

Yes Minister calls this "politician's logic".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trw1PbQt_Yo

Something must be done; this is something; therefore, we must do it.

> The context here is that France and Germany have suffered a spate of terrorist attacks over the past year, including a co-ordinated attack in Paris in November 2015 that killed 130; a July 2016 attack in Nice where a truck driver ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day; and a stabbing in a church in Northern France that killed an elderly priest.

To put this in perspective, about 700 people would die from homicide in France in a normal year, and about 600,000 would die of all causes (http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=fr&v=26). The unusually high amount of terrorism in the last year, accounts for 0.03% of all deaths.

That terrorism is seen as an urgent problem just highlights the irrationality of decision-making in a democracy. It poses no significant mortality risk to Europeans.

That would be like Christopher Columbus, mid-Atlantic crossing, encountering a gunpowder-equipped Mayan navy going off to conquer Europe. Not likely.

You can slow down - just that the probe won't remain intact. But perhaps that isn't necessary for the probe to be useful. We can also use these space probes to do geological and atmospheric surveys of the planet when they arrive.

Simply: we slam the probe into the planet, a few milliseconds after it transmits the final images. One gram going at 20% of the speed of light has kinetic energy that bears comparison to the Hiroshima bomb.

At a steep angle of entry, the huge entry glow will give a reading of the atmospheric molecular makeup. And if we can ionize some of the crust, massive space telescopes can get a spectroscopic measurement of the composition, four light years away.

And, at least it's probably saved us from having President Schwarzenegger...

I always considered the USA's rule on who can become president is really unfair. Legally, if you weren't born in the USA, you are a second class citizen. Contrary to what's commonly claimed, immigrants can never become 'fully American'.

The problem with inherited wealth in general is that you end up with aristocracies. I mean, that's literally how aristocracies formed in the first place. Wealth begets wealth, so the fixed point of a society without confiscatory inheritance tax is feudalism.

> Why do we even care about billionaires anyway?

For one thing, money is power. It's undemocratic to allow some people to be worth millions of times others. If you allow some individuals to become infinitely wealthy, they will eventually buy your political system and bend it to benefit them. In principle, that's bad. In practice, it's happened.

For another, the way the wealthy got rich constitutes a wholesale transfer of wealth from the nation. Bill Gates is a rich man because he benefited from government spending and welfare for the rich. Specifically from a form of welfare for the rich known as 'intellectual property law', which means people have to pay a large fee to Microsoft, enforced by the US government, to copy some 1's and 0's. He got rich from government spending on education, infrastructure and defense, which built a stable middle class that could buy computers. He also got rich from the defense and research spending that built the internet and gave the technology freely to the people. Finally, he got even richer from monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, and tax evasion which put Microsoft's tax address in Nevada, and from the political lobbying that allowed this theft to happen.

Bill Gates, like all billionaires, is a welfare queen, and the wealth he's sitting on should be returned to the nation he took it from.