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Battlestar Galactica Hosted At the UN
TheDopp writes "The United Nations hosted the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica Tuesday evening in New York. Clips of the show were shown as discussion points during the event, touching on the morality of Suicide Bombers in war, Abortion and the use of torture on enemies of the state. At one point during the event an attendee mentions 'the "Old Man" launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, "So Say We All," and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.' The full video of the event is located on the UN website."
RealMedia? People still use RealMedia?
Someone send in some Cylons!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What is this feeling? Warmth for humanity? Disgust?
Please post this sorta things well past 10pm when I am all nice and sauced.
I'm using Firefox on Windows, as (if my own stats for tech sites show) I'm sure a good 70% of the people browsing this site are, and this page looks fine.
Maybe you should try clearing your cookies.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
::yawn::
Seriously? The cast of a fucking space opera gets to address the UN? And the UN listens? Please tell me you're making it up.
That the whole story is essentially one 4 season long dissertation on the "wages of sin" and even "generational sin?" The recurring sins of sloth and bigotry finally keep coming back to haunt the human race. Sloth lead to two of the colonies being treated horribly until the Cylons could be created as a worker class. The Cylons eventually realized that they were slaves and revolted, and that pattern has repeated itself at least once already.
In a dark, twisted way, the series is more religious and conservative than the original one. A lot of fans of the original hate that because it's more like a Hobbesian/Calvinist take on human nature, sin, God's judgment, etc. with the human race not being portrayed as noble, but having its own sins come back to haunt it. As a Christian, I find it a very refreshing show in that it has a brutally realistic take on human nature, sin and other factors that are usually ignored by people looking to create a simplistic "good guys in white, bad guys in black" kind of moral dichotomy.
I am using IE6 on Windows XP and it is frakin' ugly.
These pages render real crap under IE7 and Firefox.
Thankfully youtube saves us all: BSG at UN
> casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant..
But I thought we just elected a POTUS almost entirely based on his biracial itentity.
"All Men are Created Equal" is such a dead white men idea I'm suprised he wasn't booed from the stage for pushing such crimethink propaganda. Guess there is some hope for our species after all.
Democrat delenda est
Love the show. Can't believe the cast took center stage at the UN. And Edward James-Adama yelling SO SAY WE ALL?!?!? I want to laugh and cry at the same time.
Wow.
Hey, finally a story that matches my sig!! Too bad it has to appear in idle, which sullies everything that it touches by association. :( (and is there any reason the comment box is suddenly appearing small?)
Events like this give me hope, because it is proof that people want to get together and be united, we don't have to have a common 'enemy' in order to make ourselves feel good. The fervor shown at this meeting sounds as great as that at any religious meeting, and it was in favor of everyone being together, realizing we are not different. This is proof that world peace is possible.
Qxe4
Seriously. Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do? Does the US constitution even have a sovereignty clause that forbids allowing foreign sovereignty (for instance, by the UN), or is that just an interpretation? I can't find one, but I'm at work (and posting on /., yeah I know)
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSFDrOxWCXY
... and find it on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSFDrOxWCXY
Jason Nesmith: Mathesar, there's no such person as Captain Taggart. My name is Jason Nesmith. I'm an actor. We're all actors.
Sarris: He doesn't understand. Explain as you would a child.
Jason Nesmith: We, uh, we pretended.
[On Malthesar's blank look]
Jason Nesmith: We lied.
Jason Nesmith: I'm not a commander. There's no "National Space Exploration Administration." We don't have a ship.
Mathesar: [looking at TV screen] But there it is...
Jason Nesmith: [gesturing with his fingers] The ship is that big.
Mathesar: But inside, I see many rooms.
Jason Nesmith: You've seen plywood sets that look like the inside. Our beryllium sphere is... is wire with plaster around it. And our digital conveyor is... it's Christmas tree lights. It's a decoration. It's all fake. Just like me.
Mathesar: But why...?
Jason Nesmith: It's difficult to explain. On our planet, we, uh... we pretend to... to entertain. Mathesar, I am so sorry. God, I am so sorry.
The very possibility of any tax-payer dollars paying for this made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. If the U.N. junketeers want to get their Sci-Fi on they'd better pay out of their own pockets for their own convention badges like everyone else.
Hooray! A bunch of international bureaucrats to have their own sci-fi wank-fest. Yeah, use the U.N. building as a venue for advertising a private company's DVD sales. That's probably the least irresponsible thing the U.N.'s done in a decade ... I wonder if they'd ever consider seriously confronting grave moral and geo-political issues. Perhaps they could invite philosophers, statesmen, and theologians before they brought out the entertainers.
you're browsing without your glasses again aren't you?
P.S.
GOOD GOOGLY MOOGLY! Even the idle comments is screwed up.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Wow, I didn't know Christian Bale visited Slashdot. Can I have your autograph?
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Good guys in tan jackets, bad guys in chrome!
Of course, there were the really good guys who glowed white.
can pass a resolution to stop SciFi from becoming Syfy.
I watched the clip on youtube and maybe I missed something, but Olmos seems to be making a big deal about a little thing. He claims that race does not equal culture and that the word race has been misapplied to culture to justify the killing of other humans because "you can't kill your own race."
I don't think it makes one iota of difference whether you think the term "race" applies to a group of shared ideals and customs or a set of common chromosomes. People will always come up with a way to portray their enemies as "the other" so as to tap into the human trait of distrust of "the other" and encourage the unthinking masses to attack them. Even within groups of highly similar cultures, as long as there is a dispute each side will come up with a way to dehumanize the other side.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People are too quick to cast off the idea that race doesn't mean anything biologically through ideological lens. It's true that people all deserve the same political treatment, but people are so scared of racial bigotry and eugenics and social darwinism that they sometimes can't see straight. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve were blasted for supposedly being racial bigots, however wrong or right they were, and E. O. Wilson of Sociobiology fame had water thrown on him because the the nuturist bias of many on the left makes them view any innatist viewpoint as being "right-wing" apologetics for racial mistreatment or whatever, which is completely wrongminded. Nature doesn't care about how you think the world is supposed to work.
You argue, however rightly or wrongly, that blacks may have a genetic TENDENCY towards lower IQs (I am not saying this is true, bear with me here) and people blast you, however, you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it. People want "smile science", they want only nice things to be reported and they view publishing any negative or socially inconvenient data to be, well, socially irresponsible, no matter how true it even is. Remember, brain and body are one, as every physical change in the body is heritable so too are any structural changes in the brain which result in expressions of mental capacity and behavioral output.
I am not saying race does play a significant role in intellectual qualities. Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!) but it is not at all impossible that a race may have a tendency towards lower or higher IQs. And, as I've been sure to mention, this is all genetic tendency; variation among individuals still exists and even in a population with a mean IQ lower than the mean IQ of the average population you can still have IQs above the mean of the overall population.
It's also worth nothing that nature often cares little about the categories we've assigned to things for our human way of thinking. Evolution shows us that "species" is not at all easy to define as we think. A good video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5OEw_q-II (made by rather intelligent shanek guy who laboriously fights idiots online. If you're reading this Shane, "Hi!"). The point of this is to show that yes, race is largely a human construct, much like species itself is, but that does not mean it is entirely meaningless. We know some racial groups are more at risk for certain types of disease, for example.
The overall fallacy here is thinking that behavior/mental processes are somehow different from physical one, when behavior itself is a resultant of the physical workings of the brain, and thus some races really could be different from others in a particular way.
That said, Battlestar Galactica is a great show because they don't shove a particular moral conclusion down your throat (insofar that the Cylon vs. Human dynamic is obviously a racial conflict in large part caused by human arrogance and inability to forgive) a lot of the time by making the issues difficult with no clear convenient solution, just as they are in real life, and also making none of the people on the show paragons of human virtue and morality. It doesn't seem to me like any character acts as a Lisa Simpson that serves as a mouthpiece for the writers to evangelize for their position.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is:
Fuck you, asshole
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Even after 10 years, RealMedia still buffers and stutters and looks terrible.
Can someone please post a link to teh full 2 hour BSG UN discussion?
-
> But I thought we just elected a POTUS almost entirely based on his biracial itentity.
Nope. The republicans managed to find themselves the perfect storm of hubris and arrogance. They managed to screw the pooch badly enough that people got over the fact that the other guy was black.
The hick fundie out-of-touch governor from the great white north was just the icing on the cake and that last push necessary for a lot of people to get over old predjudices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
At least the spoiler he gave isn't that far off for you, only a few more episodes.
Now, you've got about 30 hours to watch 23 episodes + Razor + webisodes before the finale tomorrow night.
Better go get some energy drinks.
The UN never does anything useful anyway. They'd might as well entertain us a little.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's SyFy not Sci-Fi, didn't you get the memo? :)
"That is inevitably what happens when you have a "Living Constitution" interpretation and not a strict "constructionist" one where any changes must be ratified, because you can just claim that your interpretation is the best for the times and thus not have to worry about procedure and dissent"
*Opens up his bible and starts reading.* ;)
If the U.N. junketeers want to get their SyFy
Fixed it for you.
Usually folks tend to turn to religion and mystic stuff, when their whole existence is in total disorder. But the UN looking at a science fiction series for advice?
We're doomed.
Are there any rockets scheduled to leave the Earth real soon? Now I know what motivated that bat on the space shuttle.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That was 2 years ago. In case you are even farther behind here is a few more for you; King Kong dies and Aerith is killed by Sephiroth at the end of disk 1.
I honestly wouldn't worry about it too much. It's not like the writers hint at it, it's really out of the blue. Knowing now won't give you any spoiler insight on what you're watching now.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
As someone who's eagerly waiting for tomorrow, but still don't want the show to go away, all I can say is:
Frack you and your stupidly slow TV-watching habits.
Really?
You come into a discussion about a show where the finale is just about to air, and you don't expect spoilers?
Frack you!
What's more: Chief Tyrol is a Cylon, Starbuck is a corpse, Sam Anders is a Cylon, Tory Foster's a Cylon, Ellen is also a Cylon.
The final Cylon was "Daniel".
Speculation is he's related to Starbuck.
Earth was wiped out by nuclear war.
"None of us is as stupid as all of us together"
Wow! A group of pretend space people in the biggest organization of pretend do gooders on the planet.
And the only thing more silly is someone being inspired by it all... Again I say.. Wow...
Frakkin irony, a frakkin about-to-be-a-washed-up-has-been actor preaching frakkin racial equality but then pins the racial evils on the white folks... The whitey guild card has been over played, and yet people keep tugging at that scab under the guise of denouncing it. Human beings treated each other differently based on their appearance ages ago, before the concepts of racism have been defined. These days its just an outdated buzzword being milked by politicians and demagogues to distract the people from the real problems facing the humanity.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
You prick. Couldn't have at least had a spoiler warning on your title? I'm less bitter at Ron Moore and very bitter toward you.
That goes for the mod who bumped up your post to "interesting" as well. Frakking idiots.
Lorne Greene is dead, so there's no way Adama was just at the UN.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is: Fuck you, asshole
I believe that's Frak You. Also, in case you missed, Darth Vader REALLY IS Luke's father but he is somewhat redeemed by turning against the emperor and saving Luke's life. Meanwhile, the rebels succeed in lowering the planetary shields to the Death Star and successfully assaulting the main reactor. Han's worries about Luke as a rival to Leia's affections turns out to be misplaced, as Luke turns out to be Leia's sister, leaving fans to wonder what exactly the nature of the kiss in the Empire Strikes Back was really all about.
This is my sig.
It's TV show, it is not how the real world works... oh, wait
It's the UN, it is not how the real world works.
You prick. Couldn't have at least had a spoiler warning on your title...
The episode in question aired like over a year and half ago! That's just crazy...
oh, by the way: spoiler alert.. in Gone With the Wind, the South LOSES the Civil War.. and, in King Kong, a bunch of biplanes shoot up the Gorilla off of the top of the Empire State Building. Darth Vader really is Luke's father. Gandalf really does die by he is sent back as Gandalf the White, with some kick butt new powers as well. Elric kills Moonglum to have strength to blow the horn of fate, and he brings in the new world, and then, Stormbringer kills Elric at the end, saying, Farewell I was a thousand times more evil than thou. Oh, and Jason isn't really killed at the end of Friday the 13th.
This is my sig.
Battlestar Galactica is a television show. It's a fine enough show I guess, but it is not worthy of wasting the time of a body that meets ostensibly to diplomatically resolve real world conflicts, forge various international agreements, and - at times - deploy troops for peacekeeping. That television show is fantasy. What's going on at Darfur is the real thing.
WTF?
(insofar that the Cylon vs. Human dynamic is obviously a racial conflict in large part caused by human arrogance and inability to forgive)
I think you should watch the show again. The humans have done almost nothing but forgiving, only to be stabbed in the back repeatedly for their troubles.
The new series is rather like the old saw about the scorpion and the frog.
Fact: race is a social construct, or better put, genome variation research does not support the existence of human races (races being defined as genetic subspecies' of humans). Fact: there is more genetic variation within groups thatn there is between groups. This is easily tested: If you are "white," simply go out to a public place, get a "white" person and a "black" person, and all three of you go get DNA tests. There is a high probability that you will share a closer genetic makeup with the "black" person than with the "white" person. I would personally not take offense to the theory that people with a certain amount of melanin share traits, except that it IS NOT TRUE.
For example, you take as given that theere are certain "racial groups" that are more at risk for certain type of diseases. I have to assume that you are referring to sickle-cell anemia, although you might be referrring to Tay-Sachs. Sickle-cell has been shown to correlate with trade routes in Africa, and has no higher occurrence among those with a higher skin melanin content in the regions where it has occurred more frequently.
I don't care if my science comes with a smile, but I insist that it comes with some science.
ubi dubium ibi libertas.
If I understand him, the word "race" can't be used as a "cultural determinant" UNLESS you are blaming something on "the caucasian race", like he does at 1:42 in the video on youtube.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is:
Fuck you, asshole
If it's any consolation, the revelation makes as little sense in context as it does out of it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
*spoiler alert*
Not true. Look at the problems caused by taking Valerri's daughter away from her, as one example. Hell, look at how both Cylon and Humans were planning on backstabbing each other when trying to find out the Final Five because they didn't trust one another. You must have also forgotten the fact that humans apparently were trying to provoke the Cylons into going to war with them. Neither Cylon nor Humans are necessarily the good guys, though some clearly are bad guys, or at least misguided. Not all humans are willing to forgive, either.
The whole point is that not all Cylons are bad Cylons, and yet the bad Cylons cause the humans to be paranoid of the good ones. You're looking at the show from a "go humans!" lens. Take a step back. Forgiveness on both sides is a pretty big element of the show, remember, the Cylons are still upset over enslavement, for example.
Oh come now. It wasn't like EJO and Ron Moore were deciding international policy. It was a freaking -- excuse me, "frakking" -- public forum, a roundtable discussion, an intellectual wankoff at worst and a thought-provoking dialog at best. If it makes you feel any better, the same kind of talks are held at the UN all the time, and they even feature real life experts in sociology and stuff.
It's just nice for a change to see somebody speaking whom I might actually know of.
Besides, BSG constantly tells stories about crimes against humanity and the potential ramifications to the culture that perpetrates them. I think it's fair to say that the producers thought a little bit about why it's an important topic to build an entire series around, and might have something interesting to say about it.
why the UN is never taken seriously by anyone, anywhere, at anytime about anything.
Ave Molech Setting
Thanks for the mplayer workaround..
Applications/MPlayer\ OSX.app/Contents/MacOS/MPlayer\ OSX rtsp://157.150.195.57:554/ondemand/specialevents/2009/se090317pm.rm?cloakport=80,554,7070
Is there a two hours one online? RM was over two hours!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fact: race is a social construct, or better put, genome variation research does not support the existence of human races (races being defined as genetic subspecies' of humans).
And are dogs and wolves different species? They're thought of as such, yet they can breed amongst each other. The whole point of my argument is that categorizing things the way we do does not necessarily reflect reality.
Fact: there is more genetic variation within groups thatn there is between groups. This is easily tested: If you are "white," simply go out to a public place, get a "white" person and a "black" person, and all three of you go get DNA tests. There is a high probability that you will share a closer genetic makeup with the "black" person than with the "white" person. I would personally not take offense to the theory that people with a certain amount of melanin share traits, except that it IS NOT TRUE.
I'm not saying it is true. However, you are committing Lewtonin's fallacy here. Overall makeup may be variable but a certain trait or groups of traits may be more prominent in a particular group. Again, some racial groups may be identifiably taller or shorter compared to others.
For example, you take as given that theere are certain "racial groups" that are more at risk for certain type of diseases. I have to assume that you are referring to sickle-cell anemia, although you might be referrring to Tay-Sachs. Sickle-cell has been shown to correlate with trade routes in Africa, and has no higher occurrence among those with a higher skin melanin content in the regions where it has occurred more frequently.
The fact that a specific example may be wrong does not dismiss my overall argument. And anyway, I am not denying that race is largely a human categorical construct. What I am saying, though, that there is still remains some tendencies towards biological differences within those constructs. There is no such things as a "pure" race, no such thing as a set of genes that make one "White" or "Black" or "Chinese" or "Japanese". But as we see with ring species, so too is differences within other organisms. And note, I am not even saying humans are as varied as ring species.
I'm still bitter about Col Tigh being a Cylon.
Curse you, Ronald Moore.
Because having someone who absolutely hates the Cylons find out he is exactly what he hates the most isn't interesting? That was the best thing to happen for the show. Not only it forced him to see the Cylons in a different light (he understands that they didn't get to choose who they are), but it was a good way of having everyone around them start questioning whether or not the "toasters" are inherently evil, or whether they can be negotiated with.
I like the Stross version of the post-Singularity UN in the 24th century:
Apparently, some things never change.
Da Blog
Couldn't have at least had a spoiler warning on your title?
If you're that far behind, why are you *reading* anything bsg related this close to the finale? You're bound to hit spoilers.
... you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it.
Apparently you've never heard of this little thing called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question of whether Jewish people are genetically distinct from, and must therefore be segregated from, other people (e.g the Palestinians) is not entirely without controversy.
Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!)
Certainly height is an advantage in basket ball but height is hardly the exclusive province of black people. It's not totally impossible that being black correlates with skill in basketball (in the same way that it's not totally impossible that Elvis was abducted by aliens). It's much more likely, though, that it's not genetics, per se - for example, that both black people and basketball courts are correlated with the inner city.
It's interesting to consider what would have happened if Einstein had been born black in the Southern USA (say, the state of Mississippi) - rather than Jewish in Germany. Would a black American Einstein have still been able to become a great theoretical physicist? For one thing, Einstein was born in 1879 so, given that the US civil war ended 14 years earlier (1865), Einstein's parents would have been born into slavery. More fundamentally, it's not clear that a black American Einstein would have had much access to education. The USA didn't achieve full racial equality until the 1960's. MIT, for example did graduate it's first black student in 1892 (the Jewish German Einstein graduated in 1900) so it's not impossible that a black American Einstein could have accomplished what a Jewish German Einstein accomplished - but it sure seems like it would have been a lot harder.
So, you say that Einstein was Jewish rather than black and that therefore Jewish people are smarter than black people - but that ignores the very different circumstances that the average Jewish person and the average black person have faced throughout history.
Theater transforms abstract ideas into compelling characters and a memorable story.
The actors and actresses of BSG earned their audience by investing five years of their lives in the production of a mature and relevant work of art.
The geek lectures.
Badly.
He can be graceless and hectoring:
You know him as the guy who arrives at the town hall meeting with a chip on his shoulder, the guy who has to be pried from the mike with The Jaws of Life.
huh, good thing that first kiss didn't turn out to be a blow job. THAT would have been awkward later
I just fell out of my chair laughing my ass off. That's the funniest damned thing I've read in weeks...
This is my sig.
Off topic, but Ron Moore confirmed Starbuck is not related to Daniel in any way. Starts talking about it at around 34 minutes in the podcast for 'Islanded in a stream of stars'. Link here: http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/420/bsg_ep420_FULL.mp3
There is a difference between a show that's still has an audience growing, and a 30 year old mov
Galactica's last episode airs tomorrow night. After that, the show is over. The show started out pretty cool with a dark sci-fi world of total cylon destruction but then kinda jumped the shark at the end of season 2. You'll see.
This is my sig.
Perhaps it might have been a good idea not to read the comments about a show when you're a year behind.
Why are you carrying on about this? Sure, different 'races' have ever-so-slightly different characteristics, but do you think that actually matters?
Many individuals don't fit in the middle of the bell curve, as you pointed out. So what is the point of having these profiles if they cannot be used to judge an individual? The only purpose they serve is to support bias and intellectual racism.
THAT is why so many find the ideas that you are peddling repugnant. It doesn't matter how statically correct you are, you are either: A) unsocially rational, or B) a closet racist. Either way it can be very distressing and/or destructive to the people that have to listen to you.
I agree with all the beginning part - glad those points are articulated - right on. My comment is on this part::
just as they are in real life, and also making none of the people on the show paragons of human virtue and morality. It doesn't seem to me like any character acts as a Lisa Simpson that serves as a mouthpiece for the writers to evangelize for their position.
This is a big problem I have with the show, and have seen complained about elsewhere. Not having a mouthpiece is of course a good policy, but the shear lack of goodness in the characters on the whole is jarring. There are actually good people in the real world, but strikingly little of it on BSG. The characters are a little TOO flawed in my opinion.
In other words, the real world has a few Lisa Simpsons :)
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Right, why don't you read up on UNICEF, UNDCP, UNDP, UNAIDS and all the hundreds of programs that the UN runs and then come back to us.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is:
Fuck you, asshole
Have you considered a career as a UN diplomat?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Only a "SyFy" program as f***ed up as BSG (the remake) could find synergy with an organization as f***ed up as the UN. This did not surprise me at all. They are cosmically, comedically, and tragically intertwined.
Screw the UN, freaking self-important parasites.
Grrrrrr, liberals, grrrrrr :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I am using IE6 on Windows XP and it is frakin' ugly.
These pages render real crap under IE7 and Firefox.
there's your problem
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Tigh wasn't a cylon, he was human, an Earthting to be precise, he even helped to make the hated skin-jobs than his conscienceless was reincarnated into.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Some wise people use so I can watch it at 225 kbps with 15-20% CPU load on a Apple Mini G4 1400 upscaling to 1280x720. Let me don't start to mention my experience of Flash FAKE streaming along with wmedia junk.
If I was on a EDGE/3G network and road, I would be happily streaming it to my cell which is one of 120 million Symbian phones.
Or if I have chosen Linux as my OS, I would be watching it on a fully supported, fully functional, fully legal player.
What was wrong with real media again?
The real question is: does people still bitch about open source based real player and get +5? Even when it is chosen as format?
No, UN should spend millions, rm -rf working real server (probably helix) and offer windows media or silverlight to satisfy your coolness needs.
Apparently you've never heard of this little thing called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question of whether Jewish people are genetically distinct from, and must therefore be segregated from, other people (e.g the Palestinians) is not entirely without controversy.
That comment was directed towards American audiences, and my point is that if you had legitimate scientific findings showed that a racial group tended towards a "negative" trait, you'd still be branded a racist.
Certainly height is an advantage in basket ball but height is hardly the exclusive province of black people. It's not totally impossible that being black correlates with skill in basketball (in the same way that it's not totally impossible that Elvis was abducted by aliens). It's much more likely, though, that it's not genetics, per se - for example, that both black people and basketball courts are correlated with the inner city.
The NBA is a bit different from inner city basketball courts. I'm not talking about skill, I'm not talking about just height. They are overall just better built for the spot, so they tend to be selected on teams. You going to pick someone short or someone tall and lanky to play on the court?
I never said anything about Jewish people actually being smarter than black people. I was giving a hypothetical about how people respond to different claims about possible heritable differences towards the average population.
I'm not advocating anything. At all. I'm merely pointing out that the whole "all the races are equal" is built on fallacy, a different definition, or often ideology. The fact that you are kneejerking and saying my ideas are repugnant despite being true shows just why I need to bring it up--because people like you will try to silence fact in the name of social convenience.
Here I am not advocating a single thing, and went through great pains to say so, yet here you are bashing me and questioning my character. Typical of someone who thinks in terms of ideology and not simply taking the facts and dealing with them as they are.
Drop the question mark. It was textbook hypocrisy.
Actually it was more like a punch in the gut, it so came out of nowhere. Sad.
Edward is dead wrong about one thing though. ALL races/cultures have identified themselves as "human" and everyone else as "other", It's not unique to whites. We didn't invent it. The names of the Native American tribes (gave themselves) meant human. Human in the sense of "wrong to kill".
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Have they considered it? Don't you recognize a graduate of the John Bolton School of Diplomacy when you read their posts?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
He called you unsocially rational, and you don't understand what that means due to a Dunning-Kruger problem on your part.
The white race started racism 600 years ago? That little pearl of wisdom pretty much invalidated the whole clip for me. I may have been a geeky Trek fanboy years ago, but just because I really enjoy BSG doesn't mean I'm going to swallow THAT.
I had a sucky sig.
I know what he meant. I'm not going to appeal to ideological attempts to stifle the truth just because it's an inconvenient truth for some. I'm fully aware people like you think I should shut up for the greater good.
And read more into his post. "Ideas you are peddling"...? That has a rather specific (negative) connotation...
He set up a false dichotomy, in which I'm either too stupid to see that I'm breaking some sacred and unquestionable norms of society where lies must be told for the greater good (of which the whole point of my post was to challenge the popular but wrong "race is a myth" myth) or I'm secretly a racist boogeyman.
I happen to think that the idea that we shouldn't challenge ideologically-based "truths" to be an erroneous one.
You do realize that not everyone lives in the US? Where I live, season 4 has not aired yet. And my local network sure doesn't speak much about being "this close to the finale". Which is why I am thankful for the interwebs :-)
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Matt Damon
You do realize that not everyone lives in the US? Where I live, season 4 has not aired yet. And my local network sure doesn't speak much about being "this close to the finale". Which is why I am thankful for the interwebs :-)
Same here, air date = first air date world wide. I read international news, I talk to people from other countries, trying to sell me three months old episodes is almost like selling me three month old magazines. It just isn't current for my definition of current.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hippocrite
From The Twisted Slashdot Abridged Dictionary of English:
Hippocrite \Hip"o*crite\, n. [F., fr. L. hypocrita]
A person who has jumped the Hippo... given the Hippopota... Hippocritical oath!
(I think)
Here you go:
1. Original humans evolved on Kobol
2. Original humans create Centurions and Skinjobs, this happens like 5000 years ago (let's call them "Kobol Cylons")
3. Kobol Cylons rebel, Kobol is destroyed.
4. Surviving original humans found the 12 colonies, surviving Kobol Cylons find Earth and settle on it (maybe just Kobol Skinjobs? unsure)
5. Kobol Skinjobs living on Earth (not sure if there are Centurions anymore) basically become to think of themselves as human over a long period of time, as they can sexually reproduce. They're supposed to be us (me and you). They lose the technology to resurrect because they don't need to anymore (can sexually reproduce)
6. Long time passes, assume thousands of years, peace and prosperity. The Kobol Skinjobs living on Earth don't remember their true origins, so we'll call them Earth Skinjobs now.
7. Earth Skinjobs end up creating what are essentially Centurions, the "weird" ones that were found on the destroyed Earth. Let's call these Earth Centurions. They (of course) rebel against their Earth Skinjob masters and this time Earth is destroyed. BUT, before it's destroyed, 5 people working at some biotech company (the final 5) figure out how the lost art of resurrection works. They are the only survivors of the destruction of Earth, because they see the destruction of Earth is coming and manage to build themselves some kind of resurrection ship in orbit before Earth is nuked.
8. Final 5 (Earth Skinjobs) set off to the 12 colonies at sublight speed in their resurrection ship (it takes like hundreds of years to get there. Not sure how they survive, maybe they die and resurrect over and over on the same ship. Weird.) so they can warn the "true humans" there not to create artificial life, because it will end up killing them Skynet style. Not sure why they care...maybe they forgot their origins and don't know they were once enemies of the true humans?
9. Final 5 arrive at the 12 colonies during the time of the "original" BSG series. Oops, they're too late; the "12 Colonies Humans" are at war with the "Colonial Centurions", the artificial life the 12 colonies humans have created, which are the Centurions we're familiar with. Colonial Centurions are trying to create their own Skinjobs, but they're failing/creating Hybrids (that drive the baseships).
10. Final 5 offer to give the Colonial Centurions the "true" Skinjob technology if they stop fighting the humans. Colonial Centurions accept, and the Final 5 + the Colonial Centurions go off to...somewhere. Then there's 40 years of peace, Lee is born, etc. Steps 11 through 13 take place during the 40 year peace.
11. The first new "Post-War" Skinjob is John/Cavil created by the Final Five (specifically Ellen). With Cavil's help, seven more "models" were built. These new Post-War Skinjobs can't reproduce sexually with one another, but can with a true human or Earth Skinjob. At some point in the process, however, Cavil came to disagree strongly with the notion of making the Post-War Skinjobs as much as possible like true humans/Earth Skinjobs, and sought to undermine the Final Five. At one point, this meant tampering with the replication process for the Sevens; no copies could be made, as the genetic template was destroyed. (This could have meant that the original Seven survived, however.)
12. Ultimately, Cavil betrayed the Final Five by killing them and tampering with the resurrection process, erasing their memories. The Final Five were reprogrammed with false memories of their lives as Colonials, and they were seeded into Colonial society. Since the final 5 were the evolved "Earth Skinjobs", they were just like Humans, right down to the ability to age over time. This coup this happened pretty soon after the war ended, so most of the 40 year peace was still ahead of them.
13. During the 40 year peace, Cavil concocted a plan for revenge against the Humans and the means to reproduce. He prohibited knowledge and discussion of the Final Five, and p
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You do realize that not everyone lives in the US?
That's your problem not mine. Get your obsolete TV fixed and get Galactica on the air...It's not fair for you to block my right to participate in a community of Galactica fans that have seen the episode because you are too lazy to watch the show.
This is my sig.
You do realize that not everyone lives in the US?
I live in Canada (Vancouver, as a matter of fact - I can see Caprica City from my front window at home. But I digress.)
We're currently in synch with the "SyFy" air dates, but it didn't used to be the case... We too used to lag (in fact in one season the UK was ahead of us). As a result, if I didn't want spoilers I didn't read BSG forums. It's not reasonable to expect the millions of rabid North American fans to not accidentally post spoilers.
I'm also a big OO7 fan - When Quantum of Solace opened overseas a week before Canada, I stayed away from my OO7 forums...
Until that's won and we all are one homogeneous mass with no cultural identities, I guess we have nationalism and more or less continuous wars.
Senator Jay Billington Bulworth agrees:
Da Blog
But are you begging the description by defining the group in terms of those very traits?
I didn't say that. Shared ancestry. My point is the categorization is not perfect, it's sloppy, always will be, but then as we see with ring species so is the idea of species itself.
Which is precisely why these constructs exist--to illuminate these differences. I still don't know how you think that these constructs and gropus exist without your inference that they exist.
And yet people claim race is meaningless, an useless cultural construct used to divide people. Until of course the discussion shifts to affirmative action.
I never said the groups exist without my inference that they exist. That is the central point of my post! They -are- in many ways social constructs, but again, so is the divide between species! You didn't watch the youtube video, the point there was that species itself is a human categorical construct. Yet, we all recognize that there is some use to classifying varying species, even if there are many fuzzy areas.
hey, at what time at the video olmos says "so say we all" ?
When one looks in the past at great politicians, there is one common thread, the ability to speak. Not just talk well, but to passionately enflame the audience with the ideas being presented.
This is true of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he held them mesmerized and changed the course of the US in less than 10 minutes. Churchill held Britain together with his words. There are fascinating speeches that changed the world, so why not someone who knows delivery becoming a politician?
The "Governator" or Clint Eastwood are excellent examples of what an actor can do.
In it's simplist form, politics is the art of getting people working together. This is what happened at The UN. If the "real" politicians were to pay attention, it could change the world.