Slashdot Mirror

It is obvious to any red-blooded, patriotic, Jesus-loving American that we are the only source of righteousness on earth and it is our God-given duty to use His power to advance our cause of spreading His holiness throughout the world and trample over the devil-worshipping heathens. Therefore, what we do is good and what all the godless nations of the world that are not America do is wrong. Thank you, and God bless.

Forcible transfer of wealth from the citizens to the wealthy and the corporate elite = the American way

Transfer of wealth, forcible or market-aggravated, from the wealthy and corporate elite to the citizens = godless communism = bad, bad thing.

[neo con parody off]

``In the real world helping people is not so easy.''

I never said it would be easy. But we can do a lot better than we're doing now. "It's easier not to do something stupid than to do something brilliant."

``FIrst of all the help is usually counterproductive.''

That depends very much on the type of "help" you're giving. You have to evaluate what works and what doesn't, and base your choices on that.

``Many people - expecially muslims - very much resent being helped by the godless west. They do bite the hand that feeds them.''

That's not because we are helping them. It's either because we're impressing our cultural values on them, or that's the excuse they use and they're actually jealous because we're rich and they're poor - in which case we're, arguably, not helping them enough.

``Saudi Arabia is a rich country that produced some well off people who nevertheless climbed into a plane to attack the US.''

Was it the well off people that attacked the US? Were they on the planes? Were they the leaders of the organization? No, the people behind these attacks are personae non gratae in Saudi Arabia, thanks to the government installed there by the US. The people carrying out attacks either had a similar quarrel with the US, or were poor schmucks, recruited for the war, because they had nothing to lose.

``This is not about poverty. It's about cultural hate and jealousy.''

I agree with the latter, but I think that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if it wasn't for the former. As I said before, you don't have to be jealous if you've got food to eat and a future to look forward to.

``Helping people will only make them resent you more in this case.''

I refuse to accept that helping people will make them attack you more than offending, attacking, and oppressing them. The least we can do is leave them in peace. The best we can do is offer them opportunities, without forcing anything on them. But we're not doing that; we're poisoning their economies, meddling in their politics, and deteriorating their cultural values. I'm not saying this justifies violence, but these people have every right to be angry with us.

You are terribly naive. In the real world helping people is not so easy. FIrst of all the help is usually counterproductive. You can't help people to learn to fend for themselves very easily. It is very easy to teach them to become dependent on the hand that feeds them.

Many people - expecially muslims - very much resent being helped by the godless west. They do bite the hand that feeds them.

Saudi Arabia is a rich country that produced some well off people who nevertheless climbed into a plane to attack the US. This alone invalidates your statement. This is not about poverty. It's about cultural hate and jealousy. Helping people will only make them resent you more in this case.

X.

Nineteenth century social reformers would be thrilled by the advances in the physical conditions and political clout of the poor, but horified by the godlessness, materialism and narcisisstic alienation from our communities that typify most people today.

Isn't there an implicit assumption that indexing every conceivable shred of garbage on the net is a service? Isn't there a tacit understanding that anything useful, or interesting, or commercial will be herded behind tents and flogged by carnival barkers (thinking of Boing Boing or a score of others) for dimes at a time? Isn't there an immodest presumption that this activity shall be passed off as "scholarship" (such as requiring a disambiguation page at Wikipedia to disentangle Omar Khayyam, Persian poet, from Omar Khayyam, suicide bomber?) I have no objections to godless capitalism whatsoever, so long as it does not turn into Mordac, the Preventer of Information Technology. Let the shakedown ... er ... shakeout begin!

In McCarthy's "defense," a number of religious conservatives lump anyone who isn't in their particular religion (and sometimes even in their particular sect) along in the "godless heathen" camp. One of my teachers once claimed that any non-Catholic denomination could be classified as a cult out to get me.

It doesn't matter that the Chinese were Buddhists. They weren't Christians. Or, better yet, they weren't Protestants.

There's been a lot of persecution of religious people by secularists throughout history. Most recently, totalitarian Russia and China offer a plethora of examples.

They were talking about atheism, not secularism. While it's true that the genocides in Russia and China were secularist acts, it's completely wrong to claim that the primary reason was to persecute religious people. Those governments were trying to establish power and religious organisations were in strong opposition; the genocides were mostly political. In any event, it's a frivolous claim that the genocides were secularist, because anything which isn't religious is secularist. The majority of things that happen in this world are secularist activities. Secularist governments are the most sought after - the US government is an example of a secularist government. Secularism simply means making decisions without consideration of religious beliefs.

Back to atheism. That atheism had anything to do with the horrors in China and Russia is a nonsense taught during the McCarthy era. McCarthy used that rhetoric to promote distrust of China and Russia by implying they were "godless heathens" and that godlessness led to evil acts. It's not true. China was Buddhist during the 1900s, now tending towards Christianity. Russia was and is Orthodox. It's true that neither country had a state-sponsored religion. It's also true that both country's governments persecuted minority religions. In both respects that is exactly the same as the USA back then and even now.

The horrors in those countries were a direct result of totalitarian fascist governments. Guess which superpower is exhibiting those same qualities today.

wow.. talk about right wing nutbag rant.. let's start from the beginning:

So, the Democrats' official position is that Iraq's hopeless? Wow, I'm inspired with confidence. The solution of "no solution". Great.

No.. that would be any sane person's official position. Ever hear of vietnam.. did you live through it.. ask anyone who lived through it what hope the united states has at imposing any kind of system when the existing system has popular support.

Iraq is hopeless, we got ourselves into it with good intentions, bungled it horribly, and utterly failed to gain the public trust, now we're reaping what we sow.. which even the rightest of right wing news organizations now acknowledges as out and out civil war.

there is a critical mass that wants us out and holds it against us for being there.. and there is also a significant portion who wants us to stay who will blame us if we leave. Since we're damned either way, our forces worldwide are stretched thin leaving us vulnerable to attack and incapable of responding to threats, and staying costs us more money and lives, leaving is the best option. Or maybe you want to stay and convince those few left who actually don't hate us that hating us is the right thing to do.

Yes, because the majority of the U.S. population is so pissed off that you can look at library records. Forgive me, but the PATRIOT Act is by far the least of my concerns. As someone who has done more than his fair share of studying national security issues, I recognize the need for something that goes well beyond FISA, which was designed to operate against different kinds of threats.

to paraphrase your statement "Oh trustworthy and competent government, please please PLEASE take away my civil liberties for the promise of security you can never deliver.. i know you can disappear me to prison for years without charges and torture me already... but I just want you to have more power"..

trust me.. you are in the minority in this view, and the majority is really scared of the patriot act and people like you who support it, live with it.

Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...

better than making it "nonexistant".. by the way making it actually worth something to people by reforming it and undoing bush's rediculous privatization does not necessarily mean making it insoluble.. it may however mean that corporate executives will have to get 3 solid gold hum-v's this year instead of 4.

Because it's worked oh so well for Europe and Canada! Quick, let's all jump on that bandwagon! And where do you plan on getting the funding for all of this?

First off, those two systems may not be "perfect", but they still rank much higher than the US in health care quality, and further we have the benefit of being able to analyze where their mistakes were and correct them, second people pay out hundreds a month for company or personal plans.. guess where that money could go instead? Finally, 30% of the money paid into the healthcare system right now pays for the overhead of dealing with the many many MANY different processes of filing claims with half a billion different insurance systems. That 30% cost goes away with a proper national heathcare system.. as does the discriminatory denial of coverage for people for the slightest headache or zit on their face.
If you'd think about things outside of your right-winger partisan box for a second you'd notice these possibilities. Maybe if your republican friends contributed their input would provide valuable perspective in ironing out potential problems. Instead they rig elections and preach shrilly about "godless communism" while selling the middle class off the big business.

Because there could only be one source for all the world's problems - rich people.

what poor person do you know that can lobby to congress for the erection of barriers to entry which destroy consumer choice and rights, how many poor people

It's a public secret that the "transition to democracy" of the Communist block was initiated and conducted by the Communist elite (they transformed themselves into the new "democratic" political and business elite).

The point is: It wasn't because of the Cold War, that Communism crumbled - on the contrary, the "Threat from the West" was keeping it alive. Nothing unites the people around the leadership, however idiotic, as a foreign threat. Godless commies, terr'ists, Axis of Evil ... Eastasia is just as good as Eurasia for an enemy. If the media is doing its job properly.

...would it be evil to hire Hitler to help the trains run on time?

I mean, did Hitler have two bank accounts, one for "profits from Evil" and the other for "profits from Good", and promise not to use the latter's pot to embiggen(tm) the former?

Did China's government promise not to use Google's technology to help repress its citizens? How many Benjamins of sold stock will you need to wipe your hands clean of human blood and suffering this year, Sergei? Or are you just following your motherland's example?

And what do you offer the world? Prior art, dishonestly marketed; the buying out of naive academics to work on trivial services, stagnating innovation; a get-rich-quick scheme for domain kiters and scrapers. Even your proto-cult of personality and reality distortion field are a pale imitation of Jobs', though they function adequately on an angst-ridden Godless male youth yearning for earthly heroes.

Google, welcome to your first step in the journey to figurehead of 21st century corporatism: like an epidemic, your astroturfers will identify sufficient susceptibles to promote the view that Google is another unelected body acting pro bono publico. Behold another Kingdom of Good Intentions, and its zealot-poodles.

Here is my space.

New World Order: What does this term mean? New World Order is a term used to describe an accord of the world's superpowers to rule, secure, and maintain the premise of "global peace." The concept is to bring the world under submission to one supreme government, enforce one controlled common religion and one worldwide economic system. (The EU has already instituted this with the 'Euro' currency.) In reality, it is a move toward a socialistic, controlled, and godless world.

what we learn in church is to get along with everyone, and not to try to force others to conform

Odd, then, that I hear a lot about the heathens and the unbelievers and the Godless and how it is every Christian's duty to show them the "error of their ways".

It's not a far cry to believe that could easily include force. It has in the past, why wouldn't it now?

Facinatingly enough, the battle of wills over evolution has precious little to do with either religion or science.

Natural scientists were a breed of scientists that ruled scientific fields for several thousand years. Their approach to explaining the unknowns in the world was, basically:

1. God did it.
2. Go prove #1

The competing school of thought in the science community was that of empiricism: we do not inherently no what or why something is, so we should gather evidence about and attempt to use this evidence, combined with a series of simple logical rules, to figure it out.

For a while they mingled here and there: Newton and Copernicus, for example, dislpayed a great deal of empirical thought, but if you actually read their texts you can see a lot of philosophical speculation mixed in as a result of the dominance of natural thought.

Back around 1800 the empirical scientists began to make a name for themselves, though, and started challenging the supremacy of the natural scientists. One of these upstarts was Charles Darwin. Darwin did not "invent" the concept of evolution. Evolution was an age old philosophical concept by that time which was used to explain how organisms became better adapted (by god's will - bear in mind genetics wasn't exactly a burgeoning, or even existing, field at the time).

Darwin merely set out and found empirical evidence that supported this concept and presented it. The natural scientists needed to set up a battle ground to try and retain control of the various institutions of science, so they branded Darwin's evolution as heretical, threw it out of the realm of natural science, and began to attack it as a means to discredit the empirical scientists in the eyes of the public and academia. I would be deeply, deeply surprised to find that most natural scientists or theologians even really disagreed with Darwin's conclusions. It was merely a political ploy to try and shut down a threat to their power.

Now religion gets mixed in: the natural scientists were primarily devout Christians aiming to better understand Creation as they saw it. Since the majority of the public, academia, and government were also religious, they turned into an "us versus them" argument over the "good people" and the godless heretics that were out to get them.

Eventually, the empiricists crushed the natural scientists and the natural scientists became relegated strictly to the field of philosophy. It's hard to argue that somebody's doing something wrong when they make more progress in 200 years, by many, many magnitudes, than their predecessors made in 2000.

Unfortunately, the argument about evolution being "godless" persists to this day because they spread it out into the public before they were shut down, so now we have these huge arguments between groups of people who are completely uninformed of either the subject matter or the history.

It's unfortunate, but it's not atypical. Most political and social arguments are completely absurd and have little if any grounding in reality, and are rarely understood by the people who engage in them. It's for that reason that scientists are so "aloof" in the matter and refuse to get involved. They see it correctly: evolution simply is what it is and now matter of engaging bitter, uninformed people will change that. They're not lawyers, they're not lobbyists, they're not politicians, they're scientists, and they do science, and science doesn't change because some people don't like what it finds, it only changes when they discover a better way to explain something.

Sad, really, that there's any division at all, since the only reason the division ever occurred was because a bunch of people 200 years ago didn't want to lose their jobs.

-----

I totally agree with your statements...

But I can totally explain Poland. Once the Iron Curtain fell, all kinds of fundamentalist sects went COMPLETELY APEDUNG sending missionaries over there to make sure the Godless Communists learned the Good News!

Apparently, the Good News is taking hold pretty well over in the Soviet bloc. My parents' church is sending peeps to the Ukraine all the time. That might explain why the US's blend of annoying insane proselytizing is being exported to the former Warsaw Pact nations. Hooray!

(P.S. the Hooray! was sarcasm for those not employing their Acme Military-Grade Sarcasm Detector.)

... Here, as in a handful of other coastal regions worldwide, the culprit may be global warming.
To be sure, the jury is still out on that connection, says Jane Lubchenco, a marine zoologist at Oregon State University who is heading up this day-long expedition....

It's not about stem cells, see? Or rather, it is but it's not how they're obtained...That's just a nice straw man that they've been holding up (Your godless science is eating our unborn babies!).

What they're really scared of is all the stuff that they see stem cells leading to. ... It's a whole new bio-medical can of worms, and it scares the hell out of them.

Fortunately, most people are in favor of stem cell research, so it's unlikely the fundies will be able to halt it forever.

Nothing will kill the controvercy around stem cells. If we found a way to turn post-consumer styrofoam into stems cells, while whitening teeth and curing cancer at the same time, the religious groups would still scream about it.

It's not about stem cells, see? Or rather, it is but it's not how they're obtained...That's just a nice straw man that they've been holding up (Your godless science is eating our unborn babies!).

What they're really scared of is all the stuff that they see stem cells leading to. Build a new kidney, fine. Does that kidney have a soul? Why not build a whole new, soulless, person? It's a whole new bio-medical can of worms, and it scares the hell out of them.

Fortunately, most people are in favor of stem cell research, so it's unlikely the fundies will be able to halt it forever.

You had no problem barking at someone who disagreed, and you do the same to me. Have you ever thought that if you piss your child off enough that he wants nothing to do with his parents...that perhaps that is not in his best interest? It'll give him relationship issues for the rest of his life, and the 'lessons' you taught him might produce the opposite result.

I don't understand how you can say you won't forbid things unless their is a logical reason, and then go on to imply your household is not 'godless'. That's pure humor right there!

Thanks, I'll do what's in my child's best interest, not my best interest. You aren't really saying that you'd let your kid do whatever he wants so that he'll take care of you when you're old, are you?

It also helps if you have logical reasons for forbidding certain behavior.

If there's no logical reason to forbid it, don't forbid it.

Definately don't use religious excuses...kids these days aren't buying that supersticion anymore.

Not if they're brought up in Godless families, no.