It's not the content of your post, but the manner. "Spouting bullshit" and "shut up and let the adults talk" is meant to inflame the person your responding to. It's also completely extraneous. If you remove the last sentence from your post, your position is unchanged.
There is no religion that has been proved or that is provable. It's illogical to hold atheism to that standard. Atheism is a positive assertion that we should be talking about something else, like human rights, equal opportunity and public education. That's why I, as an atheist, could care less what a theist thinks about my soul, their soul or the soul of the hungry and poor. If we both want to feed the hungry, who cares if God is working through us or if we're just good citizens?
In a republic, the rule of law prevails rather than the rule of despots. These courts and Newsom stepped miles outside of the bounds of their offices as set by federal and state constitutions to override the will of the people. The courts and the executive are not there to invent their own laws.
You'll be alarmed to find out that there's a news corporation. Chilling.
News Corporation
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so. If there were a class of people who couldn't marry then it would be a matter of civil rights. But it makes no more sense for people to complain that they can't "marry" another person of the same gender than it does for them to complain that they can't "marry" their dog or their inflatable doll. What Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa did was radically redefine a word that has a perfectly clear meaning. Why? To grant legitimacy, official recognition, and government subsidy and benefits to a relationship which under any accurate name is easily recognized as entirely different from and inimical to the kind of marriage which is the fundamental building block of society.
By marriage, I mean a marriage license issued by the state in which two people live. (There are civil benefits derived from that license.) Obviously, two people are free to be emotionally attached to each other however they like regardless of law. Again:
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so.
What do you mean?
Again, if some group of people democratically decides that they want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing perversion, teaching it in their schools, and propagandizing each other about how wonderful sodomy really is, then to the extent that people are free to leave that society and other societies are insulated from that society's poor decision, all one can say is "may the best set of ideals win in the long run." But to have a few corrupt officials force it down the nation's throat by declaring that gender has nothing to do with marriage and to have anybody who holds other standards labeled as a dangerous "antiprogressive" is abominable. Nor will those pushing the homosexual agenda be content to browbeat and threaten those who don't agree with their views in their own country (as well as resort to actual violence when they don't get their way- see the violence against blacks and Mormons after prop 8 passed in California) - they want to push their agenda down the throats of every nation in the world.
Our society is a republic and in republics people elect representatives to represent them. You need to do anything in your power to stop corrupt people from representing you. You can vote; you can also protest. I've seen people doing this.
It's a non-binding UN resolution. Your country refused to sign it. That sounds like a win for you.
There's a reason why the decline and implosion of societies from ancient times to the present day has been strongly correlated with the rise of homosexuality and other perversions.
Please give me an example of at least one acient society and one present-day society.
You never answered how we're (1) losing 'local autonomy' (please also explain what you mean by that term) and (2) losing it to an international government.
First, the institution of marriage has always been open to all citizens. Homosexuals have always been just as free to get married as anybody else. But two men can no more marry each other in any meaningful sense than they can "marry" their dog or sheep. There's also no more reason for society to spend efforts legitimizing and subsidizing homosexual relations than bestial relations. The fact that anybody thinks this is about trampled "rights" is a sad commentary on how messed-up society has become in the past 15 years.
This is patently absurd. How do you mean marriage has been open to all citizens? What, precisely, did Massachusetts, Conneticut and Iowa do when they legalized same-sex marriage?
Second, it's not at all the case that the American people have decided that encouraging perversion and calling it "marriage" is preferable to living in a society where moral standards opposing perversion are upheld. The people have never voted this way anywhere. Instead you have activist judges rewriting the laws- overriding the ability of people and communities and states to set moral standards in Lawrence v. Texas and Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health. You have the mayor of San Francisco openly defying the law. Every time the homosexual cause advances an inch it is with fresh injustice and abuse of power by corrupt officials.
In my state, supreme court judges are elected. I don't know how it is in your state, but my advice to you is to try and cope with living in a republic.
The idea that you can eliminate tyranny by providing a laundry list of rights is ridiculous in any case. The real way the Constitution was to protect against the tyranny of the majority was giving the federal government limited and separated powers while guaranteeing autonomy to the states. The Bill of Rights was tacked on because people were (rightfully) worried that the government would exceed these limits without going through the rigorous amendment process, which requires a real nationwide consensus rather than a simple majority (or the whims of Congress or an activist judiciary or the executive, all of which will if unchecked usurp power to further their own agenda). So they enshrined a few basic rights as a safety barrier (which have since been vastly misinterpreted). This has little to do with slogans about the tyranny of the majority which are bandied about today.
I think that Baldrson was using 'vague laundry list' as a euphemism for that process. He was emphasizing how arbitrarily the system works and I used it to suggest that the list is getting longer and less arbitrary.
The ideal of liberty which the left touts no longer makes sense- liberty to do what? One person argues it's their "right" to have their sexual relationship with their same-sex partner or their sister or their sheep declared a marriage ("love is all that matters right?") and given the government's sanction, blessing, and benefits. There is no way to grant this person this "right" without making a society into a place which is hostile to any and all standards of morality which denounce these things. That person's "right" conflicts with everyone else's liberty to raise their children in an environment they would term "moral." How do you decide between these liberties?
What about the right of people to raise their children in a "'moral'" environment where there are equal civil rights for everyone? Your argument is cyclical. I don't decide between these liberties -- we do. I was simply saying that we are in the process of deciding that an American, all Americans, can decide whom they want to marry.
The left would force the entire world against their will to choose the first because that's "progressive." Progress towards what? These and other similar steps are only progress towards a worldwide leveled-down society of irresponsibility and debauchery which will be perfectly miserable in its perfect lack of culture and morals. This is the real tyranny of the majority- where no one can choose to live in a different kind of society because society is a worldwide homogenized Hades.
I can't speak for 'the left' and I haven't. A homogenized world is as disgusting to me as it is to you. For me, a meritocracy in all things is an ideal. I say this as someone with more merit than money.
The alternative is to allow for local autonomy and let small groups of people decide what kind of society they want to become and which liberties are important to them. This is what the Constitution provided for, in the "laboratory of the states" the GP referred to. Different societal ideals and standards could be tried in different states and communities. People could choose the kind of society they want to live in. If it's done right, then communities are responsible for their own survival, which provides a selection pressure which eliminates the worst societal ideas and hopefully helps the world make progress. [I think that if you took a group of messed-up criminals and put them in a situation where they had to form their own society and their own laws and become self-sufficient to be able to survive, most of them would turn out ok and in the long run the crime rate in their society would not be too different from that in the society from which the first criminals were exiled.]
You're describing a process; I don't disagree with your formulation of it. However, I don't think there's anything any of us can do to ch
A second possible etymology traces the word back to theion "divine things" instead of thea, reflecting the concept of contemplating the divine organisation (Cosmos) of the nature.
I might be wrong about the etymology, but:
'Rule by god' and 'rule by theory' (contemplation) are very different. I'm not even sure what it would look like to live ruled by 'an analytic structure designed to explain a set of observations'. It would be a ridiculous way of describing pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire or any of the Christian monarchies.
I also don't think that we're ruled by the Quants. A lot of people on this thread have been arguing (more cogently that I'm able) that the Quants are gaming their math to fit the desires of their employers. Even if you call that 'theory', we're not ruled by it but rather ruled by the same ruler.
In your case, your state religion holds faith in the belief that there are no substantial negative social externalities to defining "marriage" in a way that is relatively untested in human history.
What is a 'social externality'?
My state doesn't have a religion, but many of its members do. Thanks to my constitution, their religious power is limited more and more to the walls of their homes, churches, temples and mosques.
Likewise, you should be happy to exclude such sinful "homophobes" from your human ecology due to their hurtful environmental degradation.
Homophobes aren't sinful. They're jerks at best and violent criminals at worst. They're welcome in my state along with everyone else so long as they don't injure or limit the rights of my fellow citizens.
Neither of you should impose your treatments on the other through any sort of legal sophistry. Consent is the prerequisite for civility.
I also tried to see if they had the same root in Greek, but theos and thea aren't related as far as I can tell. Please defend that correlation.
I'm not sure how that got you here:
So now we're running uncontrolled experiments on nonconsenting human subjects in the guise of "public policy" of "liberal democracy" -- tyranny of the majority limited only by a vague laundry list of selectively enforced human rights.
...but our constitution tries to limit the tyranny of the majority as much as possible. This is what's happening with gay marriage; we're trying to limit the tyranny of the majority -- legally, through our constitution. We're adding entries to the vague laundry list.
So, the only 'sane' thing an ISP can do is disconnect anyone at the slightest hint of trouble - anything else could result in the blame falling in their lap.
That would be great news because we could expect corporate backing for rejecting laws like this.
I bet the ISPs are very happy at providing free policing services to the music/movie industries.. after all, they make SO much more money:/.
You're right that they seem very happy to help those industries out, but they aren't altruistic. There's some other reason. (I don't know what it is.)
They play all those shows on BBC America, except that I'm not sure about "What Not to Wear". So just tell people to tune-in to that channel instead.
Except...I think they cut Doctor Who a little, which is wierd. I watched Voyage of the Damned on Sci-Fi and then again recently on BBC America and there were a couple scenes missing. The tour group going down to the surface of Earth for the Christmas experience and the Doctor leaving that Earth historian on Earth with his savings.
This whole mess is a failure of socialist banking policy NOT capitalism or free market ideas. The banking system in America is NOT free market and has not been free market since 1913 (The Federal Reserve Act).
I think they'd like to bring that convenience to a 'higher' level. I make my living writing ActionScript and JavaScript and I felt like a jerk when I read a book recently that described C as a 'high-level' language.
Most of what I write everyday has problems between browsers on the same operating system. The flexibility you describe would be a joy for me.
The conventional explanations have to do with their economic circumstances, families, friends, and educations. But new research suggests that people with radically different social attitudes also differ in certain automatic fear responses.
If their fear responses have anything to do with their economic circumstances, families, friends and educations, their study says less than nothing.
You're suggesting that social guidelines that suggest that using racial epithets in the workplace or in political office are stopping Americans from dealing with over population?
You're not alone in your hatred for political correctness. In fact, that attitude is defining defining the dialog. You're following form in connecting it with unrelated tree-hugging dirty-hippy delusions. So:
(1) Who says that? and (2) who says that? and why does your America not contain people that adopt children and also think that a diverse workforce is a social virtue?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the content of your post, but the manner. "Spouting bullshit" and "shut up and let the adults talk" is meant to inflame the person your responding to. It's also completely extraneous. If you remove the last sentence from your post, your position is unchanged.
There is no religion that has been proved or that is provable. It's illogical to hold atheism to that standard. Atheism is a positive assertion that we should be talking about something else, like human rights, equal opportunity and public education. That's why I, as an atheist, could care less what a theist thinks about my soul, their soul or the soul of the hungry and poor. If we both want to feed the hungry, who cares if God is working through us or if we're just good citizens?
What if foreign nationals find they prefer it here? Then we're sapping China's intellect and making a bunch of smart people happy.
Why can't the six billion people on Earth act *consistently*?
It's not okay; that's what the story is about.
In a republic, the rule of law prevails rather than the rule of despots. These courts and Newsom stepped miles outside of the bounds of their offices as set by federal and state constitutions to override the will of the people. The courts and the executive are not there to invent their own laws.
You'll be alarmed to find out that there's a news corporation. Chilling.
News Corporation
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so. If there were a class of people who couldn't marry then it would be a matter of civil rights. But it makes no more sense for people to complain that they can't "marry" another person of the same gender than it does for them to complain that they can't "marry" their dog or their inflatable doll. What Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa did was radically redefine a word that has a perfectly clear meaning. Why? To grant legitimacy, official recognition, and government subsidy and benefits to a relationship which under any accurate name is easily recognized as entirely different from and inimical to the kind of marriage which is the fundamental building block of society.
By marriage, I mean a marriage license issued by the state in which two people live. (There are civil benefits derived from that license.) Obviously, two people are free to be emotionally attached to each other however they like regardless of law. Again:
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so.
What do you mean?
Again, if some group of people democratically decides that they want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing perversion, teaching it in their schools, and propagandizing each other about how wonderful sodomy really is, then to the extent that people are free to leave that society and other societies are insulated from that society's poor decision, all one can say is "may the best set of ideals win in the long run." But to have a few corrupt officials force it down the nation's throat by declaring that gender has nothing to do with marriage and to have anybody who holds other standards labeled as a dangerous "antiprogressive" is abominable. Nor will those pushing the homosexual agenda be content to browbeat and threaten those who don't agree with their views in their own country (as well as resort to actual violence when they don't get their way- see the violence against blacks and Mormons after prop 8 passed in California) - they want to push their agenda down the throats of every nation in the world.
Our society is a republic and in republics people elect representatives to represent them. You need to do anything in your power to stop corrupt people from representing you. You can vote; you can also protest. I've seen people doing this.
It's a non-binding UN resolution. Your country refused to sign it. That sounds like a win for you.
There's a reason why the decline and implosion of societies from ancient times to the present day has been strongly correlated with the rise of homosexuality and other perversions.
Please give me an example of at least one acient society and one present-day society.
You never answered how we're (1) losing 'local autonomy' (please also explain what you mean by that term) and (2) losing it to an international government.
First, the institution of marriage has always been open to all citizens. Homosexuals have always been just as free to get married as anybody else. But two men can no more marry each other in any meaningful sense than they can "marry" their dog or sheep. There's also no more reason for society to spend efforts legitimizing and subsidizing homosexual relations than bestial relations. The fact that anybody thinks this is about trampled "rights" is a sad commentary on how messed-up society has become in the past 15 years.
This is patently absurd. How do you mean marriage has been open to all citizens? What, precisely, did Massachusetts, Conneticut and Iowa do when they legalized same-sex marriage?
Second, it's not at all the case that the American people have decided that encouraging perversion and calling it "marriage" is preferable to living in a society where moral standards opposing perversion are upheld. The people have never voted this way anywhere. Instead you have activist judges rewriting the laws- overriding the ability of people and communities and states to set moral standards in Lawrence v. Texas and Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health. You have the mayor of San Francisco openly defying the law. Every time the homosexual cause advances an inch it is with fresh injustice and abuse of power by corrupt officials.
In my state, supreme court judges are elected. I don't know how it is in your state, but my advice to you is to try and cope with living in a republic.
The idea that you can eliminate tyranny by providing a laundry list of rights is ridiculous in any case. The real way the Constitution was to protect against the tyranny of the majority was giving the federal government limited and separated powers while guaranteeing autonomy to the states. The Bill of Rights was tacked on because people were (rightfully) worried that the government would exceed these limits without going through the rigorous amendment process, which requires a real nationwide consensus rather than a simple majority (or the whims of Congress or an activist judiciary or the executive, all of which will if unchecked usurp power to further their own agenda). So they enshrined a few basic rights as a safety barrier (which have since been vastly misinterpreted). This has little to do with slogans about the tyranny of the majority which are bandied about today.
I think that Baldrson was using 'vague laundry list' as a euphemism for that process. He was emphasizing how arbitrarily the system works and I used it to suggest that the list is getting longer and less arbitrary.
The ideal of liberty which the left touts no longer makes sense- liberty to do what? One person argues it's their "right" to have their sexual relationship with their same-sex partner or their sister or their sheep declared a marriage ("love is all that matters right?") and given the government's sanction, blessing, and benefits. There is no way to grant this person this "right" without making a society into a place which is hostile to any and all standards of morality which denounce these things. That person's "right" conflicts with everyone else's liberty to raise their children in an environment they would term "moral." How do you decide between these liberties?
What about the right of people to raise their children in a "'moral'" environment where there are equal civil rights for everyone? Your argument is cyclical. I don't decide between these liberties -- we do. I was simply saying that we are in the process of deciding that an American, all Americans, can decide whom they want to marry.
The left would force the entire world against their will to choose the first because that's "progressive." Progress towards what? These and other similar steps are only progress towards a worldwide leveled-down society of irresponsibility and debauchery which will be perfectly miserable in its perfect lack of culture and morals. This is the real tyranny of the majority- where no one can choose to live in a different kind of society because society is a worldwide homogenized Hades.
I can't speak for 'the left' and I haven't. A homogenized world is as disgusting to me as it is to you. For me, a meritocracy in all things is an ideal. I say this as someone with more merit than money.
The alternative is to allow for local autonomy and let small groups of people decide what kind of society they want to become and which liberties are important to them. This is what the Constitution provided for, in the "laboratory of the states" the GP referred to. Different societal ideals and standards could be tried in different states and communities. People could choose the kind of society they want to live in. If it's done right, then communities are responsible for their own survival, which provides a selection pressure which eliminates the worst societal ideas and hopefully helps the world make progress. [I think that if you took a group of messed-up criminals and put them in a situation where they had to form their own society and their own laws and become self-sufficient to be able to survive, most of them would turn out ok and in the long run the crime rate in their society would not be too different from that in the society from which the first criminals were exiled.]
You're describing a process; I don't disagree with your formulation of it. However, I don't think there's anything any of us can do to ch
Theory:
I might be wrong about the etymology, but:
'Rule by god' and 'rule by theory' (contemplation) are very different. I'm not even sure what it would look like to live ruled by 'an analytic structure designed to explain a set of observations'. It would be a ridiculous way of describing pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire or any of the Christian monarchies.
I also don't think that we're ruled by the Quants. A lot of people on this thread have been arguing (more cogently that I'm able) that the Quants are gaming their math to fit the desires of their employers. Even if you call that 'theory', we're not ruled by it but rather ruled by the same ruler.
In your case, your state religion holds faith in the belief that there are no substantial negative social externalities to defining "marriage" in a way that is relatively untested in human history.
What is a 'social externality'?
My state doesn't have a religion, but many of its members do. Thanks to my constitution, their religious power is limited more and more to the walls of their homes, churches, temples and mosques.
Likewise, you should be happy to exclude such sinful "homophobes" from your human ecology due to their hurtful environmental degradation.
Homophobes aren't sinful. They're jerks at best and violent criminals at worst. They're welcome in my state along with everyone else so long as they don't injure or limit the rights of my fellow citizens.
Neither of you should impose your treatments on the other through any sort of legal sophistry. Consent is the prerequisite for civility.
Okay, I won't.
Theocracy, from theokratia
Theory, from theoria
I also tried to see if they had the same root in Greek, but theos and thea aren't related as far as I can tell. Please defend that correlation.
I'm not sure how that got you here:
Why has no one mentioned The Day of the Triffids? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids Don't look at the lights!
So, the only 'sane' thing an ISP can do is disconnect anyone at the slightest hint of trouble - anything else could result in the blame falling in their lap.
That would be great news because we could expect corporate backing for rejecting laws like this.
I bet the ISPs are very happy at providing free policing services to the music/movie industries.. after all, they make SO much more money :/.
You're right that they seem very happy to help those industries out, but they aren't altruistic. There's some other reason. (I don't know what it is.)
Babylon 5 dealt with all those themes as well. Most science fiction will deal with one or more of those themes. It's a part of the genre.
"Coming up next, can bees think? A new study confirms: No, they cannot." http://www.fact-archive.com/quotes/Family_Guy
They play all those shows on BBC America, except that I'm not sure about "What Not to Wear". So just tell people to tune-in to that channel instead. Except...I think they cut Doctor Who a little, which is wierd. I watched Voyage of the Damned on Sci-Fi and then again recently on BBC America and there were a couple scenes missing. The tour group going down to the surface of Earth for the Christmas experience and the Doctor leaving that Earth historian on Earth with his savings.
No, because they're all fake.
This whole mess is a failure of socialist banking policy NOT capitalism or free market ideas. The banking system in America is NOT free market and has not been free market since 1913 (The Federal Reserve Act).
...since 1913 when the free market failed.
I love reading books for the second time (or the third time...or the ninth time). I get a lot more out of them on subsequent readings.
"The incidence of rape is up."
"Big deal. Fire up the machines."
That task would be easier if we were able to compare life here with life elsewhere.
I think they'd like to bring that convenience to a 'higher' level. I make my living writing ActionScript and JavaScript and I felt like a jerk when I read a book recently that described C as a 'high-level' language.
Most of what I write everyday has problems between browsers on the same operating system. The flexibility you describe would be a joy for me.
The whole checks and balances 'thing' is trying unconstitutional bills in court. Congress doesn't check and balance themselves.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/18/179256
If their fear responses have anything to do with their economic circumstances, families, friends and educations, their study says less than nothing.
You're suggesting that social guidelines that suggest that using racial epithets in the workplace or in political office are stopping Americans from dealing with over population?
You're not alone in your hatred for political correctness. In fact, that attitude is defining defining the dialog. You're following form in connecting it with unrelated tree-hugging dirty-hippy delusions. So:
(1) Who says that? and (2) who says that? and why does your America not contain people that adopt children and also think that a diverse workforce is a social virtue?
Fly!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAT2RMOpWLE
Educated people have less kids and have them later. If Golden Age == more education for more people, maybe we're not doomed.