If you want to look at the country with the best school system on international tests, look at Finland's highly-regarded system. The short of it: no standardized tests, lots of social support at schools, and - what to me is the most interesting - teachers are members of a very highly-regarded professional class. Compare that to the US view ("if you can't do, teach," "the way to improve schools is to divert funding away from them and make them teach to the tests"), and the reasons for the difference become pretty clear.
If the [citation] request is an ironic reference to the fact that the information can be found in the first paragraph of the wiki page for cat food, then you get points for being meta. Otherwise, you're just indolent.
I'll assume you're just as insistent about condemning all the cat owners who 1) don't feed their pets freshly-prepared, nutritionally-balanced food, and 2) don't live somewhere where they can let their cats roam freely; and not, say, using your apparently poor grasp of domestic pet nutrition as a red herring to denigrate vegetarians and vegans.
You're problem wasn't that your coworker was a vegan. Your problem was that your coworker was a sanctimonious asshole. One does not require the other.
I've been vegan for eleven years, and vegetarian for 10 before that. I know lots of vegans and vegetarians. I have never met one who acted like your coworker: to the contrary, they all, to a one, go to great pains not to impose on anybody, or to (to use a commonly-applied phrase) "shove it down [your/our/their] throat[s]." As the commenter blow notes, it's usually exactly reversed: my most common vegan introduction experience involves some variant of "oh, so it's going to piss you off if I eat meat in front of you, right?" And your comment marks you as little different.
What's wrong with you, huh? Why do you hate FREEDUMB?? Binney is obviously giving away National Security secrets to the terr'rists, and should be Gitmo'd right away. Didn't he read the name of the Act? It's the USA PATRIOT Act. If he hates the US America so much, maybe he should move back to Sharia Kenya, or wherever all these freedom-haters come from.
Except that you are conflating "racial prejudice" with "racism," and they are not at all the same thing.
Or did I miss the part where there is a centuries-old system in place of deploying political oppression, police violence, cultural bias, distorted judicial and criminal codes, etc etc ad nauseum to secure and promote black privilege? Because that's what it would take for "reverse racism" to be anything but the rantings of bitter racists angry about being called out for their racist bullshit. Your boss explicitly discriminates against you in promotion and pay decisions because you're white? Fine, your boss is racially prejudiced. But don't be a moron and think that somehow makes you the victim of a vast structure of racism equivalent to the one - of which you are the beneficiary - that establishes and enforces white privilege. Doing so makes you complicit in racism, and thus a racist yourself.
Sorry, but "I went to a predominantly black school and totally got jumped all the time so my racist dad was definitely right about Teh Blax" is not sufficient cover for you to promote white privilege like it's some kind of clear-eyed meritocratic realism.
Wow, I really like the part where you throw out a whole bunch of ad hominem charges and coded racism to argue for Zimmerman walking. So, people who don't like the idea of armed racists chasing down and murdering defenseless teenagers are homeless freeloaders? That Martin somehow was culpable because he was dressed like a gangbanger? Did you read anything about this case at all? The kid was going to the store and back, you know: to his home, where he lived. And Zimmerman - a guy with a history of obsessing about "those people" and who appointed himself "Neighborhood Watch Captain" without anybody asking him to do so - stalks the kid, accosts him, and shoots him dead in the street. And all this is somehow justified because Real Americans are being oppressed by some Ayn Randian race-war fantasy?
Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty confident he's going to walk. But that's because the US is still a barely-held-together surface of bullshit social conventions that thinly covers a seething torrent of bitter racism and venal, belligerent warmongering, not because I think in any way that his actions are somehow justified. The idea, that Zimmerman should be set free, because black people lived near him (I like the thinly-veiled racism behind using "thugs" to denote "black people in hoodies") and that was scary, and that this is somehow what should determine the verdict, is repugnant to the idea of a just society, and destructive to a nation of laws.
Well, except that Zimmerman was not "responsible" for securing anything. He was a "self-appointed" Neighborhood Watch "captain," which translates to "a wannabe cop with a gun and some racist obsessions playing vigilante." And "observing" is not the same thing as "pursuing" (which is more like stalking).
A federally-funded study found that a single large dose of psilocybin can result in that quality called "openness," which most psychologists agree is a foundation of general happiness. Naturally, magic mushrooms - which literally grow on shit, everywhere - are illegal as hell.
I remember reading a series of sci-fi books when I was young by one author, which really altered the way I thought about things. They're pretty simple, as they're geared towards 'tweens, but have some heavy stuff in them.
They are all by William Sleator: House of Stairs:bunch of kids wake up in some immeasurable environment where they are treated like a lab experiment. The Boy who Reversed Himself: some kid seems able to hop in and out of our normal space, but comes back with his body reversed (heart on his right side, hair parted backwards, etc), and gets into higher-dimensional stuff, and Singularity: identical twins find an old shed that seems to distort time.
They're all quick reads, and all dealing with really interesting premises that are more the variety of rigorous-but-plausible sort of Sci-Fi that doesn't get into space-opera stuff.
He has a whole pile of other books, and they're all cheap, so I'd heartily recommend all of them.
That didn't work out very well for MegaUpload, did it?
I'm not very optimistic about the present copyright clusterfuck being resolved without Cory Doctorow's war on general computation coming to pass. Big Media has too much money, too many hands on too many politicians' strings, too much power.
The only reasonable response I can think up is civil disobedience, which conveniently for me would involve copious downloading of unlicenced content until my eyes bleed. Huzzah!
So, I guess we're now open to submissions/nominations for the "most innocuous post to contain all of the DHS Red Flag words" contest, right? Aside from a one-way trip to Gitmo, what can our contestants look forward to winning?
okay, let's back up a bit. "Intelligence" is something possessed by individuals. You can't say "all human beings have this much intelligence," because some won't. Same for language, and same for the possibility for both. How do you decide what the possibility for intelligence is? In what sense does a zygote with a fatal genetic defect have the possibility for intelligence? If you're talking about some platonically ideal human being, you're getting into metaphysics that have no place in reasoned debate. But what I think you mean is that a human being has the possibility of intelligence by virtue of group membership, that group being defined as the human species. And since you bring up species, you have a second, and much more problematic, argument.
Species membership is a nontransitive property. That is, A and B might be the same species, and B and C might be the same species, but A and C might not (in the classical sense that the two can produce fertile offspring). The problem is, moral status is transitive: If I have the same moral status as B, and B has the same moral status as C, then I and C have the same moral status. Consequently, you can't coherently base moral status on species membership.
As for legal rights, I'm talking about actual, concrete, laws; not laws as I imagine them. In the US, lab and farm animals are legally classified as equipment, not as sentient beings (which is the case in the EU), they are not accorded rights as such, and treatment that is part of the "usual" use of that animal in that field is legal. There are plenty of animal welfare laws, and some countries are beginning to adopt legal enumerations of rights accorded to primates - rendering, incidentally, the parent comment that animals don't have rights both ludicrous and factually wrong - but both welfare laws and rights laws are both rather weak in enforcement or scope, as evidenced by the fairly prevalent incidence of animal cruelty that still persists, both in farming and lab work.
And lastly, the idea that this particular thread somehow constitutes intelligent adults having a reasoned discussion seems - in light of the thousand-comment response to an article about some hunters firing birdshot at an RC helicopter, filled with flamewars about animal rights, hunters' rights, gun rights, etc. etc. ad nauseum - dishearteningly optimistic.
Okay, so you base rights on faculties possessed by individuals, in which case there exist some human beings who do not possess those faculties, and thus - by your reasoning - do not have that moral status.
Second, "language" is not at all implicit in intelligence, for not the least of reasons that we don't really have a definition of what constitutes a language. If you mean any means of productive information communication, the most complex language abilities after human beings' are possessed by honeybees.
Lastly, if you think animals are accorded any legal rights, you are either not referring to American law (which is certainly possible), where animals are legally farm or lab equipment, or you vastly overrate the amount of protection those laws provide.
And why do human being exclusively have this right? Whence comes an inherent right to live, and at what point in the development cycle? And, how do you decide which individual organisms belong to a protected class?
Well, "privatize" should here be taken with a grain of salt. The S-W Act only allows sale to non-profit or educational institutions. That's hardly on the same scale as selling it to, say, Koch Industries. Research institutions, in particular, operate onder fairly strict guidelines regarding what they can do with their property (for example, a university I worked at for a while had a huge scandal a few years ago when it discovered the facilities manager taking home stuff they were throwing out). Even surplus property has to be disposed of in a manner that insures it doesn't fall into private hands. So if some university is taking over the satellite, that's not such a huge degradation of public utility, or ownership.
And, if that means that more NGOs get involved in managing space hardware - particularly for exploratory purposes - I'm not terribly opposed.
I'm somewhat surprised people expect these petitions to be taken seriously. As Cracked pointed out just today, these petitions are the public-governance equivalent of a YouTube comments thread; and expecting the executive branch to take 25k people seriously when they coulnd't even check to see if their issue was already a petition is absurd.
Note, that some of the biggest websites in the country put up big black-band protest notices on their front pages - and Wikipedia cold shut down its English site - and the executive response was a mess of equivocations and bureaucratic mush.
If you want the Administration to answer with "holy shit, you guys are pissed, we're totes reconsidering our policy platform on this issue, homies! We're still besties, right??" maybe try a couple million people marching and yelling to start.
There's a lovely article written by epistemological philosopher Susan Haack (who was teaching philosophy at the University of Miami at print time) titled "Preposterism and its Consequences." The book is "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate." Her central argument is this: philosophy is a contemplative discipline, and as such sometimes requires years of effort to be spent pursuing a line of investigation - usually in solitude - that may turn out fruitless. But the present culture of frequent publication - that any professor seeking tenure or stature must demonstrate a frequent presence in scholarly journals, at conferences, &c. &c. - forces academics into a sort of busywork that completely disrupts any real progress they might make.
It's the same idea here: "productivity" shall be measured by the degree to which an individual exchanges information with other individuals, without anybody questioning whether that information is actually useful or productive. In contrast, look at the guy who solved Fermat's Theorem: from what I remember, he spent a couple decades hiding in his attic, everybody thinking he'd flamed out and turned into a recluse.
I'm also in a creative field (music), and the only way I can get anything useful done is to work from 23:00 to 04:00. The consequence of keeping those hours is that I'm mostly useless during business hours, so I'm a bit of a recluse in my department. I wish people like that (me), who need time away from, you know, people, would have their work ethic viewed more favorably, instead of it being an eccentric social shortcoming.
mind citing the golden eagle case? All my searching has turned up nothing, except that the feathers are collected, and some parts are used in ceremonies, BUT, that there is a "National Eagle Repository" (near Denver) that collects eagle carcasses of naturally-expired birds specifically so that tribes can use them in their ceremonies without harming them.
Sorry for being OT. I'm a bleeding-heart tree-hugger:(
We can just use the definition of Bede (in 725) which states: "The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox will give the lawful Easter." The current date of easter is fixed to the calendar in the western tradition (so far as I know; wiki has an extensive discussion of it for the curious), but that definition seems simple, succinct, and perfectly amenable to the new calendar (in which all the equinoxes and cross-quarter days, so far as I've seen by testing a couple, drift up to about seven days after their usual Gregorian ones, and then sync back up after a year with an extra week). Since the solar equinoxes drift around anyway, this seems reasonable.
so find a different model for paying writers. The only part of the process now which costs money is the actual writing/editing of the text: once the final version is complete, every other step of the process - printing, distribution, promotion, storage, repair - either costs nothing for a digital copy, or doesn't even exist.
I see no reason why I should pay publishers to perpetuate a system based on artificial limits they've imposed to sustain their own profits.
But then, there are people on Second Life standing in line to use digital bowling alleys or whatever, so I guess some people are into that sort of thing.
I agree, and had no intention of implying otherwise. This is a problem of market capitalism, which - as I am skeptical of the merits of that system - I am happy to see threatening one of its major and longest-lived exponents.
Slashdot Mirror
No joke, I was at a supermarket about six years ago, and they ran a publicity campaign for about a month, with a big banner outside. It read:
FRESH IRRADIATED BEEF - try some today!
I never asked if their campaign was successful.
If you want to look at the country with the best school system on international tests, look at Finland's highly-regarded system. The short of it: no standardized tests, lots of social support at schools, and - what to me is the most interesting - teachers are members of a very highly-regarded professional class. Compare that to the US view ("if you can't do, teach," "the way to improve schools is to divert funding away from them and make them teach to the tests"), and the reasons for the difference become pretty clear.
If the [citation] request is an ironic reference to the fact that the information can be found in the first paragraph of the wiki page for cat food, then you get points for being meta. Otherwise, you're just indolent.
I'll assume you're just as insistent about condemning all the cat owners who 1) don't feed their pets freshly-prepared, nutritionally-balanced food, and 2) don't live somewhere where they can let their cats roam freely; and not, say, using your apparently poor grasp of domestic pet nutrition as a red herring to denigrate vegetarians and vegans.
except that there isn't enough naturally-occurring taurine in any processed cat food, so it's all supplemented with synthetically-derived taurine.
This is one of the most insufferable arguments against vegan pet food. Do some research before you spout off nonsense, ffs.
You're problem wasn't that your coworker was a vegan. Your problem was that your coworker was a sanctimonious asshole. One does not require the other.
I've been vegan for eleven years, and vegetarian for 10 before that. I know lots of vegans and vegetarians. I have never met one who acted like your coworker: to the contrary, they all, to a one, go to great pains not to impose on anybody, or to (to use a commonly-applied phrase) "shove it down [your/our/their] throat[s]." As the commenter blow notes, it's usually exactly reversed: my most common vegan introduction experience involves some variant of "oh, so it's going to piss you off if I eat meat in front of you, right?" And your comment marks you as little different.
What's wrong with you, huh? Why do you hate FREEDUMB?? Binney is obviously giving away National Security secrets to the terr'rists, and should be Gitmo'd right away. Didn't he read the name of the Act? It's the USA PATRIOT Act. If he hates the US America so much, maybe he should move back to Sharia Kenya, or wherever all these freedom-haters come from.
Poe's Law is a fickle mistress =/
Except that you are conflating "racial prejudice" with "racism," and they are not at all the same thing.
Or did I miss the part where there is a centuries-old system in place of deploying political oppression, police violence, cultural bias, distorted judicial and criminal codes, etc etc ad nauseum to secure and promote black privilege? Because that's what it would take for "reverse racism" to be anything but the rantings of bitter racists angry about being called out for their racist bullshit. Your boss explicitly discriminates against you in promotion and pay decisions because you're white? Fine, your boss is racially prejudiced. But don't be a moron and think that somehow makes you the victim of a vast structure of racism equivalent to the one - of which you are the beneficiary - that establishes and enforces white privilege. Doing so makes you complicit in racism, and thus a racist yourself.
Sorry, but "I went to a predominantly black school and totally got jumped all the time so my racist dad was definitely right about Teh Blax" is not sufficient cover for you to promote white privilege like it's some kind of clear-eyed meritocratic realism.
Wow, I really like the part where you throw out a whole bunch of ad hominem charges and coded racism to argue for Zimmerman walking. So, people who don't like the idea of armed racists chasing down and murdering defenseless teenagers are homeless freeloaders? That Martin somehow was culpable because he was dressed like a gangbanger? Did you read anything about this case at all? The kid was going to the store and back, you know: to his home, where he lived. And Zimmerman - a guy with a history of obsessing about "those people" and who appointed himself "Neighborhood Watch Captain" without anybody asking him to do so - stalks the kid, accosts him, and shoots him dead in the street. And all this is somehow justified because Real Americans are being oppressed by some Ayn Randian race-war fantasy?
Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty confident he's going to walk. But that's because the US is still a barely-held-together surface of bullshit social conventions that thinly covers a seething torrent of bitter racism and venal, belligerent warmongering, not because I think in any way that his actions are somehow justified. The idea, that Zimmerman should be set free, because black people lived near him (I like the thinly-veiled racism behind using "thugs" to denote "black people in hoodies") and that was scary, and that this is somehow what should determine the verdict, is repugnant to the idea of a just society, and destructive to a nation of laws.
Well, except that Zimmerman was not "responsible" for securing anything. He was a "self-appointed" Neighborhood Watch "captain," which translates to "a wannabe cop with a gun and some racist obsessions playing vigilante." And "observing" is not the same thing as "pursuing" (which is more like stalking).
So, I guess everything you said is wrong.
A federally-funded study found that a single large dose of psilocybin can result in that quality called "openness," which most psychologists agree is a foundation of general happiness. Naturally, magic mushrooms - which literally grow on shit, everywhere - are illegal as hell.
I remember reading a series of sci-fi books when I was young by one author, which really altered the way I thought about things. They're pretty simple, as they're geared towards 'tweens, but have some heavy stuff in them.
They are all by William Sleator:
House of Stairs:bunch of kids wake up in some immeasurable environment where they are treated like a lab experiment.
The Boy who Reversed Himself: some kid seems able to hop in and out of our normal space, but comes back with his body reversed (heart on his right side, hair parted backwards, etc), and gets into higher-dimensional stuff, and
Singularity: identical twins find an old shed that seems to distort time.
They're all quick reads, and all dealing with really interesting premises that are more the variety of rigorous-but-plausible sort of Sci-Fi that doesn't get into space-opera stuff.
He has a whole pile of other books, and they're all cheap, so I'd heartily recommend all of them.
That didn't work out very well for MegaUpload, did it?
I'm not very optimistic about the present copyright clusterfuck being resolved without Cory Doctorow's war on general computation coming to pass. Big Media has too much money, too many hands on too many politicians' strings, too much power.
The only reasonable response I can think up is civil disobedience, which conveniently for me would involve copious downloading of unlicenced content until my eyes bleed. Huzzah!
So, I guess we're now open to submissions/nominations for the "most innocuous post to contain all of the DHS Red Flag words" contest, right? Aside from a one-way trip to Gitmo, what can our contestants look forward to winning?
okay, let's back up a bit. "Intelligence" is something possessed by individuals. You can't say "all human beings have this much intelligence," because some won't. Same for language, and same for the possibility for both. How do you decide what the possibility for intelligence is? In what sense does a zygote with a fatal genetic defect have the possibility for intelligence? If you're talking about some platonically ideal human being, you're getting into metaphysics that have no place in reasoned debate. But what I think you mean is that a human being has the possibility of intelligence by virtue of group membership, that group being defined as the human species. And since you bring up species, you have a second, and much more problematic, argument.
Species membership is a nontransitive property. That is, A and B might be the same species, and B and C might be the same species, but A and C might not (in the classical sense that the two can produce fertile offspring). The problem is, moral status is transitive: If I have the same moral status as B, and B has the same moral status as C, then I and C have the same moral status. Consequently, you can't coherently base moral status on species membership.
As for legal rights, I'm talking about actual, concrete, laws; not laws as I imagine them. In the US, lab and farm animals are legally classified as equipment, not as sentient beings (which is the case in the EU), they are not accorded rights as such, and treatment that is part of the "usual" use of that animal in that field is legal. There are plenty of animal welfare laws, and some countries are beginning to adopt legal enumerations of rights accorded to primates - rendering, incidentally, the parent comment that animals don't have rights both ludicrous and factually wrong - but both welfare laws and rights laws are both rather weak in enforcement or scope, as evidenced by the fairly prevalent incidence of animal cruelty that still persists, both in farming and lab work.
And lastly, the idea that this particular thread somehow constitutes intelligent adults having a reasoned discussion seems - in light of the thousand-comment response to an article about some hunters firing birdshot at an RC helicopter, filled with flamewars about animal rights, hunters' rights, gun rights, etc. etc. ad nauseum - dishearteningly optimistic.
Okay, so you base rights on faculties possessed by individuals, in which case there exist some human beings who do not possess those faculties, and thus - by your reasoning - do not have that moral status.
Second, "language" is not at all implicit in intelligence, for not the least of reasons that we don't really have a definition of what constitutes a language. If you mean any means of productive information communication, the most complex language abilities after human beings' are possessed by honeybees.
Lastly, if you think animals are accorded any legal rights, you are either not referring to American law (which is certainly possible), where animals are legally farm or lab equipment, or you vastly overrate the amount of protection those laws provide.
And why do human being exclusively have this right? Whence comes an inherent right to live, and at what point in the development cycle? And, how do you decide which individual organisms belong to a protected class?
Well, "privatize" should here be taken with a grain of salt. The S-W Act only allows sale to non-profit or educational institutions. That's hardly on the same scale as selling it to, say, Koch Industries. Research institutions, in particular, operate onder fairly strict guidelines regarding what they can do with their property (for example, a university I worked at for a while had a huge scandal a few years ago when it discovered the facilities manager taking home stuff they were throwing out). Even surplus property has to be disposed of in a manner that insures it doesn't fall into private hands. So if some university is taking over the satellite, that's not such a huge degradation of public utility, or ownership.
And, if that means that more NGOs get involved in managing space hardware - particularly for exploratory purposes - I'm not terribly opposed.
I'm somewhat surprised people expect these petitions to be taken seriously. As Cracked pointed out just today, these petitions are the public-governance equivalent of a YouTube comments thread; and expecting the executive branch to take 25k people seriously when they coulnd't even check to see if their issue was already a petition is absurd.
Note, that some of the biggest websites in the country put up big black-band protest notices on their front pages - and Wikipedia cold shut down its English site - and the executive response was a mess of equivocations and bureaucratic mush.
If you want the Administration to answer with "holy shit, you guys are pissed, we're totes reconsidering our policy platform on this issue, homies! We're still besties, right??" maybe try a couple million people marching and yelling to start.
dude, if you aren't eating organic, you're already eating GMO. At least in the US.
There's a lovely article written by epistemological philosopher Susan Haack (who was teaching philosophy at the University of Miami at print time) titled "Preposterism and its Consequences." The book is "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate." Her central argument is this: philosophy is a contemplative discipline, and as such sometimes requires years of effort to be spent pursuing a line of investigation - usually in solitude - that may turn out fruitless. But the present culture of frequent publication - that any professor seeking tenure or stature must demonstrate a frequent presence in scholarly journals, at conferences, &c. &c. - forces academics into a sort of busywork that completely disrupts any real progress they might make.
It's the same idea here: "productivity" shall be measured by the degree to which an individual exchanges information with other individuals, without anybody questioning whether that information is actually useful or productive. In contrast, look at the guy who solved Fermat's Theorem: from what I remember, he spent a couple decades hiding in his attic, everybody thinking he'd flamed out and turned into a recluse.
I'm also in a creative field (music), and the only way I can get anything useful done is to work from 23:00 to 04:00. The consequence of keeping those hours is that I'm mostly useless during business hours, so I'm a bit of a recluse in my department. I wish people like that (me), who need time away from, you know, people, would have their work ethic viewed more favorably, instead of it being an eccentric social shortcoming.
mind citing the golden eagle case? All my searching has turned up nothing, except that the feathers are collected, and some parts are used in ceremonies, BUT, that there is a "National Eagle Repository" (near Denver) that collects eagle carcasses of naturally-expired birds specifically so that tribes can use them in their ceremonies without harming them.
:(
Sorry for being OT. I'm a bleeding-heart tree-hugger
Dude, finger binary rules. All we need is Vi Hart to do one of her super-cute videos about how awesome it is, and the revolution will be underway.
We can just use the definition of Bede (in 725) which states: "The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox will give the lawful Easter." The current date of easter is fixed to the calendar in the western tradition (so far as I know; wiki has an extensive discussion of it for the curious), but that definition seems simple, succinct, and perfectly amenable to the new calendar (in which all the equinoxes and cross-quarter days, so far as I've seen by testing a couple, drift up to about seven days after their usual Gregorian ones, and then sync back up after a year with an extra week). Since the solar equinoxes drift around anyway, this seems reasonable.
so find a different model for paying writers. The only part of the process now which costs money is the actual writing/editing of the text: once the final version is complete, every other step of the process - printing, distribution, promotion, storage, repair - either costs nothing for a digital copy, or doesn't even exist.
I see no reason why I should pay publishers to perpetuate a system based on artificial limits they've imposed to sustain their own profits.
But then, there are people on Second Life standing in line to use digital bowling alleys or whatever, so I guess some people are into that sort of thing.
I agree, and had no intention of implying otherwise. This is a problem of market capitalism, which - as I am skeptical of the merits of that system - I am happy to see threatening one of its major and longest-lived exponents.