Fine. After the Bomb drops, I'll stop typing and start printing block letters. Either way, I don't need cursive, and neither does anyone else, unless they work for Hallmark.
If you simply dislike spinach, you don't have a disease. If your dislike of spinach, however, makes you start a massive campaign calling spinach evil and saying nobody should eat it, then yes, you have a disease.
Not really true. Most people who get the flu give it to themselves, by touching the mucous membranes on their face with dirty hands. The real purpose of a flu mask is to keep you from doing that. It won't stop airborne viral particles, but then that's not how people get sick, for the most part.
Because it won't be YOU going to Mars. YOUR experience of Mars would be (necessarily) a mediated one. In which case, you might as well "fake it" and pretend that its real because YOU are not going. Your argument is so clueless, it's astounding.
You haven't thought through the implications of what you're saying. Why should I climb a mountain, if I can get the exact same neurochemical simulation from drugs and 3D goggles? And what will those poor benighted Africans do after your billion-dollar shipment of water arrives?
Your approach to the future will breed an Earth full of pod people, living and dying in a sterile, cocoon-like environment that will treat both human evolution and human ambition as bugs and repair itself accordingly. Maybe they'll call it "the Matrix," or maybe they'll call it "World of Warcraft Expansion MCXVII." Either way, fuck off. The rest of us are going to do what we can to leave you behind.
The next time we send manned missions to the Moon (or Mars), let's get serious and do it sustainably. This business of sending someone up to collect rocks and beat a path back home just for the sake of planting a flag is just lame and depressing. Take the long view, secure international cooperation and funding, and work on genuine colonization efforts.
Then I go into an explanation of the "what's different".
Not only that, but you can take pride in the custom work you did, as opposed to taking pride in your ability to write a bigger check to the dealer. Meanwhile, the guy with the WS6 is scared to change the oil for fear of damaging its "originality."
B... b... but if it turns out that wood with embedded glass is better for construction or heating purposes than ordinary wood, such that it was common for people to sell wood with lots of glass in it, you'd be inclined to be (a) more careful with it and (b) less likely to blame the manufacturer if you drop it on your foot. Right?
Indeed he might play the capitalism game extremely well, and still be able to argue that a different system would be better in every way. Without there being any contradiction in his actions.
Well, sure. But that would require rhetorical skills, backed up by familiarity with competing economic models and time spent contemplating them. The poster I was responding to falls a bit short of that mark.
(Although I am impressed that he was able to talk the video clerk into renting Fight Club to someone who was obviously underage and unaccompanied by an adult.)
There's a difference between a toy that is unsuitable for children because it is a choking hazard, and an electronic device that was sold 175 million times and had 15 reported cases of overheating.
That's what I would've said, too, before the McDonalds' coffee case. Sell 10,000,000,000 cups of coffee, 1,000 morons manage to burn themselves with it, and you have real PR and legal problems on your hands even though the supposed "defect" is a total non-issue in the larger scheme of things.
An earlier poster had it right: batteries are bombs. Want a lot of power in a small space? Then you're going to have to put up with the occasional case of China Syndrome. Sorry, that's how it works.
It's not really a fair analogy to invoke animals in my opinion. For one, they don't have the capability to destroy with small likelihood of consequence as we do (my dog isn't quite yet trained with firearms). Second, I don't think my dog can rationalize lying, stealing, killing, etc like humans can. Third - there certainly are animals that will kill with disregard for your family (a bear for instance).
And you've missed the point nicely. The point was that socialization is an adequate basis for what we call "morality," and arguably the only legitimate one. We evolved to cooperate with each other in small groups or tribes, just like other primates do, and that means we had to evolve the means to pass judgment on individual actions that are detrimental to the tribe's. If you'd spent any time around higher primates, this would be obvious to you.
Bears aren't social animals to begin with. Unlike dogs, bear societies didn't evolve alongside those of humans. If we started now, agreeing to let bygones be bygones, bears and humans could probably trust each other in another 100,000 years.
Finally, guns don't change fundamental social dynamics, and in any event, religion has proven singularly useless at regulating peoples' misbehavior with them. In countries all over the world, rates of violent crime are more or less directly proportional to religiosity. You're safer in countries like Sweden where only about 25% of the population will tell you they believe in a God, than you are in a country like the US where only about 10% of the population will tell you they don't.
Take away religion and I'm not sure that balance is going to work out for you. The 20th century was the bloodiest on record - and most of this was at the hands of atheist leaders (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I'm not so worried that everyday people would just start killing each other, but I am worried about powerful world leaders that can justify genocide and ethnic cleansing simply because they only have to answer to themselves and those that are on the right side of the killing equation. There really is no argument against a Hitler in an atheist worldview other than "sucks that he didn't choose to be a restrained person of his own good nature".
Sigh, not this crap again. First off, Hitler and Stalin also drank milk as children. Maybe we should look into milk-drinking with the same critical eye you apply toward atheism.
Second, Hitler was a freaking Catholic. He wouldn't have been able to come to power and build the Third Reich without the active and well-appreciated cooperation of the Church. There's no shortage of photos of Hitler glad-handing priests and Popes galore. Every Wehrmacht soldier's belt buckle said "Gott mit Uns" (God is with us).
Third, Hitler was also a raving nutcase, and it's not really meaningful to cite religious beliefs in examining his motivation, one way or the other.
Fourth, Communist personality cults such as Stalin's are not the least bit atheistic in nature. These dictators are just another class of exploiters, like priests and politicians, who understand how to use peoples' inborn tendency to follow strong, sure leaders without question. (Which in turn is just another facet of socialization at work.) Stalin was a seminary student, as a matter of fact, until he ran across Lenin's writings and realized they represented a more direct path to power.
Basically, a Communist dictator is a godhead figure, through and through. Same mental exploit, different script. They see traditional religions as competition, obstacles to their own adoration, and attack them as violently as they do any other bourgeois institution. Sometimes they displace the peoples' Gods in a literal sense. North Korea comes to mind, where the dictator and his ancestors are divine personages. You won't find many atheists in North Korea, unless they're hung from trees on the road to town.
It's proven quite dangerous time and time again when tho
well for the record, as a comic book fan, that was mutie, as in derogatory term for a mutant. I was just reading one the other day where a black guy asked kitty prdie "Are you one of them muties?" To which she replied "I don't know, are you a nigger?" Classic. Thus the reference.
Ah, OK, gotcha.:) Same idea, then.
In any aspect, are you suggesting it's not ok to belittle someone for their skin color or sexual orientation, but it is ok to belittle them based on their belief structure?
You can't choose your skin color. All current evidence suggests that you can't choose your sexual orientation. You can't choose or decline to choose a physical or psychiatric disability such as muteness. You can, however, choose to believe absurd propositions, or to disbelieve in them. If your God did nothing else for you, at least He gave you the power of reason.
I vehemently *OPPOSE* any such legislation as this.
Please enlighten us. What evidence do you have that there is no god?
The minimum description length principle. As long as no questions exist that are best answered by "God did it," then the only reasonable assumption is that there is no God doing anything.
Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God?
Nicely put, shame it came too late in the thread for anyone else to read!
If you are going to hold to a universe with no God and cry out for the rest of humanity to join you - you need to consider what to do next. What will be the basis for laws and justice. Who gets to decide?
Ask your dog. He's an atheist, yet he doesn't try to gobble your family up when you leave for work in the morning. Are we humans not capable of such restraint?
Slashdot Mirror
Then where's the extra performance that I should be getting from this supposedly-improved RAM utilization?
Fine. After the Bomb drops, I'll stop typing and start printing block letters. Either way, I don't need cursive, and neither does anyone else, unless they work for Hallmark.
If you simply dislike spinach, you don't have a disease. If your dislike of spinach, however, makes you start a massive campaign calling spinach evil and saying nobody should eat it, then yes, you have a disease.
Gee. Somebody should tell Ballmer that.
What you can't see happening is the unimaginable societal violence you'd have to perpetrate to make that happen.
I actually like having a faster computer, a bigger house, a nicer car, and a cooler phone than I had a few years ago.
Not really true. Most people who get the flu give it to themselves, by touching the mucous membranes on their face with dirty hands. The real purpose of a flu mask is to keep you from doing that. It won't stop airborne viral particles, but then that's not how people get sick, for the most part.
Because it won't be YOU going to Mars. YOUR experience of Mars would be (necessarily) a mediated one. In which case, you might as well "fake it" and pretend that its real because YOU are not going. Your argument is so clueless, it's astounding.
You haven't thought through the implications of what you're saying. Why should I climb a mountain, if I can get the exact same neurochemical simulation from drugs and 3D goggles? And what will those poor benighted Africans do after your billion-dollar shipment of water arrives?
Your approach to the future will breed an Earth full of pod people, living and dying in a sterile, cocoon-like environment that will treat both human evolution and human ambition as bugs and repair itself accordingly. Maybe they'll call it "the Matrix," or maybe they'll call it "World of Warcraft Expansion MCXVII." Either way, fuck off. The rest of us are going to do what we can to leave you behind.
The next time we send manned missions to the Moon (or Mars), let's get serious and do it sustainably. This business of sending someone up to collect rocks and beat a path back home just for the sake of planting a flag is just lame and depressing. Take the long view, secure international cooperation and funding, and work on genuine colonization efforts.
In the end, you can only believe or disbelieve that the Bible is the truth.
But that's what the Scientologists say, too, and they got to me first. How can I tell who's lying?
I have believed in Jesus Christ and he has revealed himself to me to be exactly who said he is, namely the risen and glorified God the Son.
How do you know you didn't experience a transient stroke, an acid flashback, or another common mental glitch?
Then I go into an explanation of the "what's different".
Not only that, but you can take pride in the custom work you did, as opposed to taking pride in your ability to write a bigger check to the dealer. Meanwhile, the guy with the WS6 is scared to change the oil for fear of damaging its "originality."
So IMHO you're doing it right.
B... b... but if it turns out that wood with embedded glass is better for construction or heating purposes than ordinary wood, such that it was common for people to sell wood with lots of glass in it, you'd be inclined to be (a) more careful with it and (b) less likely to blame the manufacturer if you drop it on your foot. Right?
Indeed he might play the capitalism game extremely well, and still be able to argue that a different system would be better in every way. Without there being any contradiction in his actions.
Well, sure. But that would require rhetorical skills, backed up by familiarity with competing economic models and time spent contemplating them. The poster I was responding to falls a bit short of that mark.
(Although I am impressed that he was able to talk the video clerk into renting Fight Club to someone who was obviously underage and unaccompanied by an adult.)
And there wasn't an outcome, except in one case out of many millions of cups of coffee sold. That was the whole point of my post.
You don't want to live in a world where nothing can go wrong. You only think you do.
But this isn't about every human being on the planet, now, is it? What entitles you to a 3000 MHz computer, while so many go without?
Says the downtrodden prole with his own 3000-MHz computer.
There's a difference between a toy that is unsuitable for children because it is a choking hazard, and an electronic device that was sold 175 million times and had 15 reported cases of overheating.
That's what I would've said, too, before the McDonalds' coffee case. Sell 10,000,000,000 cups of coffee, 1,000 morons manage to burn themselves with it, and you have real PR and legal problems on your hands even though the supposed "defect" is a total non-issue in the larger scheme of things.
An earlier poster had it right: batteries are bombs. Want a lot of power in a small space? Then you're going to have to put up with the occasional case of China Syndrome. Sorry, that's how it works.
It's not really a fair analogy to invoke animals in my opinion. For one, they don't have the capability to destroy with small likelihood of consequence as we do (my dog isn't quite yet trained with firearms). Second, I don't think my dog can rationalize lying, stealing, killing, etc like humans can. Third - there certainly are animals that will kill with disregard for your family (a bear for instance).
And you've missed the point nicely. The point was that socialization is an adequate basis for what we call "morality," and arguably the only legitimate one. We evolved to cooperate with each other in small groups or tribes, just like other primates do, and that means we had to evolve the means to pass judgment on individual actions that are detrimental to the tribe's. If you'd spent any time around higher primates, this would be obvious to you.
Bears aren't social animals to begin with. Unlike dogs, bear societies didn't evolve alongside those of humans. If we started now, agreeing to let bygones be bygones, bears and humans could probably trust each other in another 100,000 years.
Finally, guns don't change fundamental social dynamics, and in any event, religion has proven singularly useless at regulating peoples' misbehavior with them. In countries all over the world, rates of violent crime are more or less directly proportional to religiosity. You're safer in countries like Sweden where only about 25% of the population will tell you they believe in a God, than you are in a country like the US where only about 10% of the population will tell you they don't.
Take away religion and I'm not sure that balance is going to work out for you. The 20th century was the bloodiest on record - and most of this was at the hands of atheist leaders (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I'm not so worried that everyday people would just start killing each other, but I am worried about powerful world leaders that can justify genocide and ethnic cleansing simply because they only have to answer to themselves and those that are on the right side of the killing equation. There really is no argument against a Hitler in an atheist worldview other than "sucks that he didn't choose to be a restrained person of his own good nature".
Sigh, not this crap again. First off, Hitler and Stalin also drank milk as children. Maybe we should look into milk-drinking with the same critical eye you apply toward atheism.
Second, Hitler was a freaking Catholic. He wouldn't have been able to come to power and build the Third Reich without the active and well-appreciated cooperation of the Church. There's no shortage of photos of Hitler glad-handing priests and Popes galore. Every Wehrmacht soldier's belt buckle said "Gott mit Uns" (God is with us).
Third, Hitler was also a raving nutcase, and it's not really meaningful to cite religious beliefs in examining his motivation, one way or the other.
Fourth, Communist personality cults such as Stalin's are not the least bit atheistic in nature. These dictators are just another class of exploiters, like priests and politicians, who understand how to use peoples' inborn tendency to follow strong, sure leaders without question. (Which in turn is just another facet of socialization at work.) Stalin was a seminary student, as a matter of fact, until he ran across Lenin's writings and realized they represented a more direct path to power.
Basically, a Communist dictator is a godhead figure, through and through. Same mental exploit, different script. They see traditional religions as competition, obstacles to their own adoration, and attack them as violently as they do any other bourgeois institution. Sometimes they displace the peoples' Gods in a literal sense. North Korea comes to mind, where the dictator and his ancestors are divine personages. You won't find many atheists in North Korea, unless they're hung from trees on the road to town.
It's proven quite dangerous time and time again when tho
well for the record, as a comic book fan, that was mutie, as in derogatory term for a mutant. I was just reading one the other day where a black guy asked kitty prdie "Are you one of them muties?" To which she replied "I don't know, are you a nigger?" Classic. Thus the reference.
Ah, OK, gotcha. :) Same idea, then.
In any aspect, are you suggesting it's not ok to belittle someone for their skin color or sexual orientation, but it is ok to belittle them based on their belief structure?
Yep.
You can't choose your skin color.
All current evidence suggests that you can't choose your sexual orientation.
You can't choose or decline to choose a physical or psychiatric disability such as muteness.
You can, however, choose to believe absurd propositions, or to disbelieve in them. If your God did nothing else for you, at least He gave you the power of reason.
I vehemently *OPPOSE* any such legislation as this.
Please vote accordingly; that's all I ask.
Please enlighten us. What evidence do you have that there is no god?
The minimum description length principle. As long as no questions exist that are best answered by "God did it," then the only reasonable assumption is that there is no God doing anything.
Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God?
Nicely put, shame it came too late in the thread for anyone else to read!
You know what else Newton and Pythagoras believed?
I'm guessing you don't, or you wouldn't have made such an absurd appeal to authority.
But what is stupid is that you assholes are starting to shove it into everyone's faces
Gee. Why do you suppose that might be happening?
People will do stupid things and hate each other even if you don't have religion.
But at least they'll have to answer for it.
Religion is nothing but a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it's time we took it out of the deck.
What are you going to do when a magic pixie knocks on your door? I'd like to see you prove to me that it can't happen.
Well, that sounds like a perfectly good basis for morality to me. </rolleyes>
If you are going to hold to a universe with no God and cry out for the rest of humanity to join you - you need to consider what to do next. What will be the basis for laws and justice. Who gets to decide?
Ask your dog. He's an atheist, yet he doesn't try to gobble your family up when you leave for work in the morning. Are we humans not capable of such restraint?