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(I understand the article discusses racial bias rather than racism.)

Racism is promoted by fear. The experience of chaos or mistreatment in formative years causes a sense of poor self-esteem and a belief that generally the world is malicious.

Combine that social fear with the human tendency towards groupism, throw in some bullying (gives the bully a comfortingly elevated sense of self-worth by placing them superiorly to their victims), and racism can easily result.

Genetic Mutation Not Required To Reduce Racism

Improve self-esteem, lessen unreasonable fear. Adequate self-worth and reasonable fear undermine the urges that push people towards racism.

Show children (and others) that you care about them. Be consistent, not chaotic or prone to emotional explosion.

Yes, there are other psychological problems that can make bullying worse, but bullying is its own phenomenon to begin with.

Conformity, obedience to authority, diffusion of responsibility / bystander effect, anonymity-enabled disinhibition or belittling ("it's just a game"), group mentality... these complicate or exacerbate more fundamental psychological problems.

I don't understand why you would feel retarded for hoping that people would be decent.

In reality, many people are more obedient than decent. And if they feel sufficiently detached from the responsibility, the majority of people will choose obedience over decency. See the Milgram Experiment

So, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?

If a tree falls in the forest and noone is around to hear it does it make a sound? But more importantly does it matter if it makes a sound or not?

All our experiences end with death. All our thoughts, our consciousness, our memories and feelings die with us. So, like the tree, does it matter if we're watching the movie or if the theatre is empty?

We have a limited amount of time. Time is constantly moving forward, it never stops and it never reverses. Our consciousness is dependant on this time changing. Without it how would we collect memories in our brain? How would the chemicals transfer the data from our eyes to our synapses to be processed? They must move through space and time to do this. We are mechanical, in a very organic sense. So our experiences depend on all these physical properties of our universe. Without them we could not exist. And without existence there is no thought, no consciousness to percieve existence, what it means, or why it is important.

Life is a limited resource. Our consciousness doesn't last forever. Eventually we all die. So
its more important to experience life than to prove that these experiences mean something to us or anyone else. Its more important what you do with your time while you are alive than what you did with it after you are dead. Because once you die you can't go back and change anything. Its gone. Even if you can somehow magicly be conscious without a brain.

Also we are programmed. This programming allows us to be manipulated. Psychologists study this intensely.

Here's a good experiment.

>Thats too funny. Now im going to sue you for damage to my split sides.

What's funnier is that it's true. :)

> God should sue GW Bush for defamation of the Christian Character, and bringing Christianity into disrepute.

Hehe. Well, hate to break it to you, but I heard a rumor that God was dead. That may explain why I haven't had any lightning bolts thrown at me lately. :)

[checking sky. noting cloud formations. diving for sufficently grounded cover]

Well then how about the "open source guys" shoudl stop posting articles about how much better linux is than windows. After all,w e wouldn't want ot make any Windows user's life easier, even if it did mean liberating them from free software.

I mean it's at least once a week people tell me how linux is better, or this new plan to made a Windows-like free distribution that sucks ass.

All I'm doing is offering constructive criticism of these ideas. People aren't going to switch just to save money. It will cost them a lot more in time, effort and comfort to do a massive switch. I suggest it would work better to facilitate a gradual switch by making more cross-platform apps so "normal" people realize the the value of open source, become comfortable with non-MS apps a little at a time, and at the end can switch out the underlying OS to Linux and not find themselves in a totally alien world.

Have you ever read Plato's Allegory of the Cave?. One part of it is that a sudden change can be quite upsetting.

By your description, those Apache HTTP server folks are a bunch of seelouts, because I'm running their product on this very Windows XP box. Those bastdards! Who do they think they are making this Windows user's life easier? And they're not alone. Many Java, Python, Perl, etc. oppen source projects are also cross-platform. They're all readily cross-platform.

So I know you said you weren't trying to be rude. It's just that your point-of-view (windows users are evil and should be left to rot untilt hey take the leap of faith that is Linux) conflicts with other views (we need to hurt Microsoft by taking away their customers by any means necessary).

I guess you've never heard, or heard but didn't understand, the phrase "God is dead"?

Sorry, nit-picker here. Socrates was sentenced to death, but avoided his punishment by killing himself with hemlock.

Incorrect, his sentence was Death by method of Hemlock poisoning. You can read up on it here.

you don't get it: plato's republic, allegory of the cave.

and tao is written with a t, pronounced with a d.

Plato - The Phaedo

**** SPOILER ****

As related in the Crito Socrates is imprisoned awaiting the time when a sacred ship returns from Delos as this will lift a prohibition on the completion of the sentence he faces - the drinking of the fatal poison - Hemlock.

reference