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In my experience most caricatures of atheists and evolution created by creationists seem to revolve around satanic influence, "lulz they think they're monkeymen!1" comments and that those who think evolution or atheism make more sense than creationism are simply raging nutjobs who hate everyone and everything. Oh, and the "I'm atheist because it's cool to hate on Jeebuz" caricature which is followed by a rant about how when He(tm) returns he will send all that pesky atheist straight to a very literal lake of fire for not believing in a god (or the right god for that matter).

"Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving lord, for all those options." -- Bill Hicks

He presents that caricature to show what it all sounds like to those of us who do not understand to them

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Corrected that for you. Of course a caricature that is designed to sound ridiculous, sounds ridiculous. What does that prove? Creationists come up with equally good caricatures of evolution.

If you want to attack it, state it in accurate, neutral terms, and then argue rationally against it.

I realize that it's trendy to be anti-religion and all, but please... if you're going to jump on the bandwagon try to understand the teensiest background and minimum number of tenets of what it is you are trying to mock, lest you make all the hard-working, educated, clever and industrious atheists look bad.

I think you're missing the point... he's saying that understanding the background and tenets is largely a waste of time, because ultimately they're ridiculous. He presents that caricature to show what it all sounds like to those of us who do not subscribe to them.

1) She claimed international knowledge because someone, other than her, could possibly see Russia from Alaska. Not that she's been to a foreign country or had ever seen one from Alaska. Furthermore, she didn't have a passport until shortly before those comments. So she could have been to Canada or Mexico, but it's highly unlikely she's been anywhere else before becoming governor of Alaska. That alone is absurd enough to be worth ridicule. To claim a qualification in international relations because someone could see Russia from Alaska, even though she never has, is simply absurd.
2) There was no deliberate deception. It was comedy. Almost all impersonation comedy includes saying plausible but wrong things. Tina Fey didn't "deceive" she made a joke. And it was funny. That enough people in the US are stupid enough to not know the difference between a joke and a public statement from a vice presidential candidate is not Tina Fey's fault. Every president who has served since SNL started has been mocked in the same way, and a number of candidates as well. The only time it wasn't funny was for James Danforth Quayle III, who was enough of a caricature of a vice president that a caricature of him was just unfunny.

Dude, grow up. The storyline's certainly got major flaws. It made horrible caricatures of military leaders and business men and in my humble opinion is quite obviously drenched with white liberal guilt. But it is without a doubt the most spectacular visual experience I've had at a movie theater. Ever. If you're a CGI or Sci-fi fan, you truly missed out because your stubborn world view prevented you from seeing it and building an informed first hand opinion.

Nah, I've got to disagree with you there. IMHO, I'd much rather watch a lower-budget movie with a really good plot (Terminator) than a weak plot with high-budget special effects (T2). Don't get me wrong; the original had it's flaws* but it's by far my favorite.

If you had said Aliens2 rather than T2, I'd have to agree with you.

*The dialog was often a little forced, and I would have like Linda Hamilton to have been a bit stronger of a character -- although not quite the caricature she became in T2.

I have to go with MindKata on this one, although NPD is hardly the beginning and end of mental illness in modern US society. There is non-trivial correlation between the abysmal state of the individual's ability to acquire and maintain effective mental health care and poor parenting and coping skills.

If we really want to take a serious look at (some of...) the underlying causes of violence and willful ignorance in this country, the trail begins with health insurance companies. In the current system, immediate diagnosis followed by prescription is heavily rewarded, and real psychotherapeutic work is almost entirely unsupported. This system also reinforces a "take a pill, magic cure" style of thinking, both propping up the pharmaceutical industry and allowing people to receive "treatment" without the hard, self-reflective work that is most useful to people with some of the most devastating (and pervasive) illnesses.

Of course, another part of the story is the stigma associated with mental health, reinforced by the stark political caricatures of latte-drinkin San Fran and redneck bible thumper.

Not entirely off-topic, I saw McCain's daughter on Stew-beef last week, and she seems to be ramping up a political career based on bringing the moderate Republicans back to the table. As a queer, latte drinking liberal, I think we all benefit if the moderates start having conversations again, and I strongly encourage people to vote moderate - even if it's across party lines. (Hell, my mom just voted Rep on that basis, and to my horror I congratulated her).

When I sit back and look at it all, I'm amazed at how it all links together, and just how much we are actually empowered to effect change.

While I'm not exactly a fan of home schooling, there's more to it than the caricatures.

Well before I joined the family, my wife had home-schooled her first son, and although he went on to classroom schooling, he still keeps in touch with his friends from that time. Home schoolers form networks, share educational resources, organize joint activities for their kids, and otherwise make sure their children are well educated and well socialized. The group my wife was connected to includes research scientists and professionals, and most of the members were politically progressive. They were definitely not the stereotypical science-hating backwoods Christian fundamentalists.

I do prefer the idea of professional teaching, and professional teachers with good resources can do marvelous things. Home-schooling, to be done right, requires a lot of resources on the part of parents that most parents don't have. Finally, I think the idea of a collective commitment to quality public education is important, for reasons similar to the reasons to support vaccination. But, I do think the bad reputation that home-schooling has gotten is mistaken and undeserved.

not an USian here: if i am not mistaken Tea Party came to life as a result of grassroot efforts tied to the Ron Paul's presidential campaign of 2008 in rep party. Originally it was about returning to the strict constitutionalism - nothing more, nothing less.
Now it becomes a sad caricature of its former self as Palins and Becks, seeing the growing discontent among masses and TP's numbers, decided to steal the momentum of the movement. They hijacked it for their own goals, twisting the founding principles.

It's crystal clear that they unfortunately succeeded, because the father of the movement (Ron Paul) is not mentioned even once in this comment chain and the Tea Party is perceived as a bunch of primitive, thought free, religious loonies and Palin and Beck are called their leaders.

I disagree on the creepy part, but that's a matter of opinion and we're all entitled to feel about Google as we do.

You bring up a key thing about privacy that bothered me in this anti-Google propaganda: when the Schmidt caricature started revealing personal information about people to others in a way that was obviously harmful. Google has never proven to do serious harm even in an unintentional way, let alone as maliciously as portrayed.

It's one thing to use collected information from you to display things on your own email screen. It's another to sell information about your interests to a third party and that's hardly a new practice, even if Google participates in this (which I've never heard of as far as Gmail is concerned). It's an altogether together a different thing to datamine embarrassing information about you and offer to sell that information to those you don't want knowing such things, which is simply the worst kind of fabricated hyperbole.

Schmidt is criticized for having talked about the problem of people posting information they may not have wanted to later on, as if it's his fault for running a company who made it easy to discover such oversharing. But can I complain when sending an unencrypted email with baby pictures to my mother who lives halfway around the world, that Google switches my advertising from mountain biking to diapers as fair compensation for an email service I would use before any other? I can't do that in good conscience. It may not be something I appreciate if I'd rather keep getting the biking info, but I can't really call that creepy.

Maybe it's simply a matter of trust I have that no humans are bothering to look at pictures of just one more baby, which others do not share. Maybe I don't actually do anything I shouldn't be doing, as Schmidt said, or anything I'm ashamed of and don't want told about to my face. I've never heard an actual reason for why people think it's "creepy" and bothers them. If someone can elaborate, I'd like to see what you have to say.

The Hurt Locker was an amazingly good movie.
Intense, interesting.

I found the characters to be contrived caricatures. The film almost seemed like a parody of itself, filled with the kind of overly stylized, cliched, and rather shallow scenes South Park would show to make fun of an overblown director.

**/****

Now you understand how Right-wingers feel at being labeled 'The American Taliban.'

The Taliban is a very large conservative religious and political movement with a twenty year history, I am sure that it has at least a few decent human beings involved. Also, Hermann Georring did not represent the average member of the Nazi party either. Take any sufficiently large political movement and you will find a broad range of people involved, not just evil caricatures, the comparison is fair.

Christie wrote riddles, not stories.

One thing I learned from being an English literature major: if knowing the ending ruins the story, it's not a story. Stories are about how people change over time. Frequently, stories will let you know how they end right away, so that you go in wondering how the person at the beginning of the story becomes the person at the end. With a decent story, even if there is a "surprise" ending, when you reread the story, all sorts of details leap out at you that you didn't notice on the first reading, that set up for that ending.

With Christie, the characters are caricatures, and the whole thing is a riddle, which is completely uninteresting if you already know the answer to the riddle. The game is that Christie gives some strange clue early on, which you'll inevitably miss, and you get to feel how much smarter Christie is than you are, because the entire book is about distracting you from what the answer to the riddle is. In fact, since most of the writing is distraction, you end with the feeling that 198 out of 200 pages were irrelevant, and you wasted your time reading them. If somehow you actually figure out the riddle before the end, there's nothing to do but skip to the end and check your answer; there's no pleasure in reading the intervening material.

If you want your main character to be a criminal for instance, the easy way to do things is to have the criminal succeed and get rich off his crimes. With the code you can't do that, a criminal can't profit from his crimes, so what to do? You have to come up with other ways of having him 'win', through personal relationships, character growth, overcoming adversity, etc.

When Chester Gould began Dick Tracy in the thirties, he quite deliberately set out to strip his villains of all romance and promise. Memorably caricatured physically - but also easily recognizable criminal types.

"Top of the world, Ma!" You know how the story ends.

What matters is how you get there.

Characters like LeChuck, The Joker and The Phantom Blot take you the realms of madness. Motiveless malevolence. Pure evil. In real life or in fantasy there is no greater challenge to the reader's sense of how the world works.

if you're a creationist, then refuse any treatment based on modern biology at all;

I am tired of slashdotter's characterizing creationists as hysterical troglodytes who are afraid of science and technology. I am a creationist. I also have a bachelor's degree in computer science and a job where I am doing research in the field of AI and knowledge based systems. Some day I would like to pursue a PhD to expand my knowledge and contribute to the sum of humanities knowledge. I view my research as an intellectual act of worship. After all Mark 12:30 states "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." (NIV, emphasis added) God doesn't want willfully ignorant followers. There are many creationists who think like me.

Yes there are a few of us that are noisy and give the rest a bad name, this is true of any group. However, by making blanket statements you show that you are really just as biased and prejudiced as the caricatures that you condemn.

A strawman is a rhetorical trick where one debates and defeats an exaggerated and false representation of an opposing viewpoint

Correct.

Because it is a caricature of the real argument, it is far easier to debate than the real thing. Here, you stated they were a "corporate sponsored movement designed to appeal to people's fear and prejudice" (with a bunch more negative stuff following), you claimed they weren't "sane" or "cohesive". This is the caricature that you debate, the "strawman". I merely point out the flaw in this sort of thinking.

Except it's not a Strawman argument. A strawman would be presenting something as the arguement of the Tea Party and then knocking it down. What you're talking about is something else.

What the Prior Poster said was closer to an ad homineum attack than a strawman, though I'm not entirely comfortable with that term...still, I'd go with that over claiming it's a strawman.

Do you even know what a strawman argument is? What argument did I make on behalf of Tea Partier's?

A strawman is a rhetorical trick where one debates and defeats an exaggerated and false representation of an opposing viewpoint. Because it is a caricature of the real argument, it is far easier to debate than the real thing. Here, you stated they were a "corporate sponsored movement designed to appeal to people's fear and prejudice" (with a bunch more negative stuff following), you claimed they weren't "sane" or "cohesive". This is the caricature that you debate, the "strawman". I merely point out the flaw in this sort of thinking.

Um, yeah, all democrats are opposed to smaller government and don't fit with the supposed ideals of the Tea Party as well as Republicans? If the Tea Party wasn't just an extremist splinter of the Republican party and was actually working towards something novel it might be worthwhile, but it isn't. It's just the worst losers of the last election cycle, not anything else... as you seem to be demonstrating.

Where are these alleged small government democrats? And why aren't they running for office? And what's the emphasis on "novel"? My take is that whether your ideology is conservative or not, sometimes old school approaches are needed. For example, living within a budget is very old school and very necessary in today's climate.

Generally movements form around concrete ideals. That is, when they aren't dreamed up by PR firms and used to rally disparate people with disparate views around vague and unfocused goals. You don't see that it's aberrant for a people to join a political movement first, then for the movement to try to define what it is they're all coming out to support second?

Not happening in this case: concern over higher spending, taxation, and government power.

I don't know of any other movement that gains momentum and followers without having a clear message and goal first. People generally join movements because they agree with the goal, then it builds. In this case, people have built a movement without defined goals, now it is being used to push politics in all sorts of ways... most of which don't seem to be benefiting the people very much at all.

Welcome to the real world. Now you do know of an example.

Its a good practice to keep them separated, but in the end its just a pissing contest.

No, it's not a pissing contest. It's a legitimate best practice.

However, admins often lack appreciation of some dev-specific issues, and their ignorance can lead to problems down the line.

I know a lot of sysadmins, and they are all developers of something as well. It has nothing to do with ignorance.

Comments like these act like we're some caricature of a human being.

Hey, nice to see you iTrolls

6 words into your post and you already resort to name calling.

If you would have bothered to read the parent post the iTroll was the one throwing insults

He didn't insult you. He accused you of talking out of your ass. Because you were.

The revisionist version of what you said:

And if you weren't lying and had actually bothered to read my previous posts regarding Apple I have said many times "If you don't mind paying a premium, have NO desire to use the device in any way not already approved by Apple, and at the end of the day want a "plug and play" device where it just does what is advertised, buy Apple. with the exception of the latest iPhone they really make good kit". Yep, that sounds like a bunch of "hate and antagonism "" against Apple users there.

What you actually said:

I'd say the odds are pretty good they are buying them for the bling bling factor.

I would say a BIG reason the iStuff sells is the "me too, I got money too!" demographic.

In a way the whole hullabaloo over the iStuff reminds me of that stupid $1000 "I have Money!" app

I could go on with the antagonistic hateful quotes but I'll just stop there. I wonder, does your head hurt from talking out of both sides of your mouth so much?

You see, unlike those that worship the iSteve or have drank the Redmond or Linus Koolaid, I frankly don't give a shit WHICH product you use

Bull. If you really didn't care what people used, you wouldn't have wasted countless hours through the years writing posts on here doling out your worthless drivel about the minutia of:

Apple-Control freak for a CEO, likes DRM WAAAAY too much, but has really nice designs and his products tend to last. MSFT-Ballmer wants to be Jobs so bad it hurts, wasting time with crap outside their core business like Zune, but at least listens to customers, see replacing Vista with 7. Linux- runs to CLI at the first sign of problems, waaaay too many fanatics that take the pointing out of any problem as an insult, lack of a stable driver ABI and troubleshooting GUIs make it hard for the average Joe, but it rocks on servers.

most of which is either flat out wrong, out of date or just plain biased to the point of caricature. There's a reason I foed you long ago and keep you permanently at -1 so I don't have to read your oral excrement unless I'm bored and just slumming around with the appropriately low threshold.

and have watched dumbfounded when guys can tell you to the penny what their iStuff cost, but can't give a reasonable answer as to what makes it better than product y. I even watched two college students nearly get to blows over which was better, the Mac Air or the Mac Pro, and pretty much the entire argument was over price and which one was more "exclusive".

Sure, dude. Whatever.

So you can pretend their aren't average Joes that are buying these based on high price, but I've seen plenty of them with my own eyes. Don't get me wrong, Apple makes some nice designs, but if they dropped their prices to Acer levels you'd watch their sales plummet. Same thing happened to Porsche BTW when they tried to offer an entry level boxer for under 30k. Humans like to feel "better" than their fellow man, and being able to outspend him makes one better, at least in the "keep up with the Joneses" types.

*Sigh* I feel sorry for your father having to put up with you. Anyone who views the same world as the rest of us yet reaches these kinds of ridiculously negative conclusions is only to be pitied. The Boxster failed to sell because it wasn't that great. It was seen as a "poseur's" car. Too similar to the 911 in appearance yet lacking everywhere else. If the 911 suddenly dropped in price to sub

He's talking about the caricature of France as understood by Americans.