Although I don't have a high UID, I used to get a lot of mod points, but it stopped suddenly, and I haven't had any for several years. And I didn't post or moderate on whatever thread you're referring to.
One of the things that annoys me about this kind of example, is that much larger amounts of money are wasted on moronic military R&D projects, but for some reason those examples are rarely used in recent years. Part of the problem is that most of the worst programs are secret, so most people don't know about most of them. But its still strange that people who believe that government is inherently wasteful, and consequently should be minimized, seem to exempt such a large part of federal spending from the same kind of logic. Its true that most of the military R&D wouldn't get done without government involvement, but that's true of most science spending also. I think the main difference is that most defense R&D money goes to upper middle class conservative folk, whereas there's a perception that non defense R&D money might go to other kinds of people. So the ideological battle is basically just a big cronyist competition for pork.
A part of me agrees with you. A part of me is thinking "damn, I wonder if I could make his head explode...."
In any case, the Chinese mostly just make plastic utensils and stuff, no great loss. It frees us up for innovation. And although the law does protect a lot of secrets, I'm more comfortable trusting those in the know to do the right thing than risk having it fall into the hands of terrorists. Industrial secrets such as are going to China don't matter as much because technology changes so fast anyway.
Read up on the Taiping Rebellion for a perspective that's a little more sympathetic to the Chinese government view. A big quasi-Christian cult got way out of hand, for instance forcibly separating men and women into different cities, and the resulting war killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Other than that, its because the Chinese government is a big brainwash scheme, so other brainwash schemes are natural enemies.
How healthy is the remaining part of Motorola? Everyone's talking about the part that Google got, but I'm interested in understanding what's left of the company.
Fair enough. I hate big government myself, and don't have a problem with all libertarians. Just the phoney, parasitic kind that pretend to care about freedom but are really just trying to get away with stuff.
They've been able to grow rich in large part because of the infrastructure of developed countries, but they're too dishonest to want to help pay for it.
From my experience working in the defense/surveillance industry, its mostly greed, injected with a dose of power-lust. For the most part, people don't have to fight moral qualms because they just don't ask themselves those kinds of questions.
Graduate students who do real research should be paid much, much more than they are. It exploits them, and it make it very difficult for MS level research engineers to make a living, because they're competing against almost free labor.
The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits.
That makes sense. Though it seems that for the traits to be aligned, they must be different facets of the same trait.
Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within.
Granted that the sensitivity to 'threats' is directed differently in Liberals and Conservatives, the within/without division doesn't seem to me to stand up very well. For example, conservatives are obsessed with the cultural rot that they call liberalism. That's a threat from within. They're also at least as afraid of expanded government power as liberals are, but they're concerned about it in different areas.
It seems to me that the whole liberal vs conservatism ideological split is not much more than a costume for a power struggle. Conservatives don't worry about government power when they see it acting in their own interests relative to those of other groups. Likewise for Liberals. Yes there are cultural an psychological differences, but these don't seem adequate to explain the actions or rhetoric of liberals and conservatives. Bush was hated by liberals, but most are merely disappointed in Obama for advancing the same policies. Likewise people like Bill Clinton, Obama, and Janet Reno have been hated by conservatives for things that they have only mildly criticized in people like Gringrich, Bush, and Rumsfeld.
I think its more of a love of the power of technology, and a reflexive hatred for 'tree huggers'. This mindset filters information in a way that makes it seem rational. I think environmentalists tend to be the same way, they just skew everything in a different direction. And I think that the reason that most people don't tire of the 'us vs them' game, is if you ever stop playing, you find you have to face up to your own painful defects.
It also brings into question the idea of sin, since natural selection is argued to produce behaviors historically regarded as sinful.
Ah, but that misses a very key truth about natural selection: goodness is also rewarded by the system
Yes, but evil is also rewarded. What kind of a system instituted by a loving god rewards both good and evil? This problem is even pointed out in the Bible. "God causes his sun to shine upon the evil as well as upon the good, which is an aggravation of the evil."
evolution and natural selection can be thought of as a battle of good versus evil, played out on a planetary scale.
In the scientific theory of evolution, evil prevails where it does either because it is favored by natural selection, or else from random happenstance. There aren't any players besides necessity and chance. Introduce any other element, and you may be onto something, but you are also arguing against the existing theory and its most prominent proponents.
Which side of the 'battle' is God on? If he's on the good side, then he's not omnipotent. If he's above the battle, then he's not good. If you redefine 'good' to encompass the existence of the battle, then that's a pretty weak 'good', in my view. Even if all Christians embrace evolution, its still a loss if that's the strongest vision of good that they can find.
If the Bible started at Genesis 12, the argument would as you say disappear for most people, since most people don't think very much about such things. But the underlying contradiction would still be there, and we would still suffer from many of its symptoms. It is appropriate for Genesis 1-11 to be the way it is because it does fit with the main thrust of what comes after.
The arguments I described are real for many sincere and intelligent people, not just justifications for their faith in the Bible. If the majority of people aren't interested in thinking or arguing honestly shouldn't mean that the remainder of us can't be either. Its a waste of time for us to frame our arguments in terms of the views of people who don't really care about finding answers anyway. But the majority views are also strongly shaped by those of the minority who give the subject more attention. Most people who believe in evolution don't really understand it either, they're just embracing the position of experts who appear to be more worth following than Christian theologians.
I would regard it as craven to stoop to kiss such a God's ass, and moreover I don't think its reasonable to assume that God is good and then try to bend our perceptions to fit that assertion. Better to also consider the possibilities that God is non-existent or even evil, or some combination of those, and look to see what is actually the case. Here are a few additional observations though.
A reason your residence hall is not in good repair, is every weekend the residents get drunk and trash the place. Furthermore, whenever someone shows up to try to fix things, whether on their own initiative or sent by the landlord, that person gets harassed or even assaulted by the residents, who try to steal his tools and apply them to further mayhem.
Of course part of your point is that the residence hall appears to have already been a mess before you came to it. The world was already quite messed up before man arrived on the scene, and man was already messed up before we arrived as individuals. My solution to this second problem, which is more personal, is to accept that my own identity shares something with humanity in general. I suffer as a result of what others have done, but this is natural in the sense that I am a part of humanity. I'm not saying that I should accept abuse on the grounds that I deserve it. To the contrary, I choose to fight what I see as wrong. But to fight it effectively, I've got to be honest about what's mine. This highlights another reason why the messed up condition of the world can't just be fixed by decree. There are evils that are apparent, and evils that are hidden below the surface. If you try to force all the apparent wrongs to be right, without understanding where they spring from, then it just makes those deeper problems worse.
As I see it, the solution to the more general problem is in large part the same. Man evolved into being in a world that was already a moral disaster, but man is a part of something greater than itself which from its present standpoint it can't easily see. Eden is not in the historic past: natural history is corrupt all the way back to its apparent beginning, like a cobweb that fell from heaven. If looking for a god that is lord of this world, the god we find is corrupt also. But that doesn't mean there's no help at all.
Clearly, in order to cure the world, a person has to understand the nature of the disease. But knowledge is power, as they say. So if you're already morally compromised, then giving you the knowledge that you need to right yourself also gives you the means to dig yourself deeper. Every good idea that is a blessing, like money for example, or nuclear physics, also gets twisted into a curse, if that's what we do with it.
If 'god' was involved in the world, what would god's hands look like? In some sense that would be us. I think your point, that its not enough just to say 'everything will be fixed in the future', after death or after a 'second coming' is valid. If we're not content with the status quo, then we should try to do something about it. And that requires hard effort towards facing the nature of the problem we're trying to fix. Or, if we'd rather party and trash the place, then we've got that option also.
Evolution by natural selection poses a problem for Christianity because its very brutal process. If its God's natural order, then this brings into question the goodness of God. It also brings into question the idea of sin, since natural selection is argued to produce behaviors historically regarded as sinful. Furthermore nasty animal traits appear to go back hundreds of millions of years, which is difficult to square with common concepts of a 'fall' from paradise.
Individual Christians may deal with these issues by just leaving them unanswered. I think that for most people that is a reasonably pragmatic approach. However, not everybody is comfortable with that, they want certain things to make a certain kind of sense. So broadly speaking, some try to resolve the conflict by disbelieving in science, and others by disbelieving in religious ideas of right and wrong.
At the heart of most Christian criticism of evolution by natural selection, as I understand it, is the feeling that something of importance has been left out. I think this feeling is correct. On the other side, people react against what appears to be a tendency to make up stuff which stands in contraction of known facts, calling it the truth. I'm sympathetic too that view also.
I think that the apparent contradiction between natural selection and morality can be resolved, and in a way that actually deepens and enhances our grasp of the essential truths that both sides care about. But it seems that very few people are interested in reaching for that. Christians I've talked to who question evolution seem not to realize how strong the scientific case really is, and how weak their own arguments are. And they mostly seem uninterested in educating themselves on the subject so that they can find better arguments. I guess that would take a great deal of time and energy, without any obvious payoff, and along the way they'd have be willing to give up anything they previously believed that turns out not to be true. On the other side, understanding what's of value in the criticisms of evolution would require a humility and desire to do that, which apparently isn't as much fun and personally empowering as making fun of stupid people. So both sides keep going over the same ground over and over, and not much new is learned.
I think its generally futile to argue on this subject. Its like arguing with creationists. Everything we do affects us to some degree, violent video games included.
But on the subject of 'normal' emotions....By the time I was about 20 I was emotionally numb and sometimes appallingly cruel. Was it a result of abuse, or was in an inherited insensitivity and viciousness such as causes abuse? Probably both, but in a way it doesn't matter. Although you can't snap your fingers and change yourself, with time and effort you can still grow yourself into something better. Although you may remain deformed in certain ways, it doesn't stop you from making the best of it and developing your sensitivity and empathy in other ways. And probably you can feel again if you can face up to what you feel. Such has been my experience anyway.
There are lots of secret programs too. One reason they're not all secret is a lot of the people who work on these kinds of projects aren't qualified for high clearances, on account of being recent immigrants.
As a right-winger, I don't entirely agree with your left-right framing of the problem. Its as if everything corrupt is defined as right-wing, and as a consequence both the left and the right are said to be right-wing, because they're both up to their elbows in corruption. I think it makes more sense to say that left is left and right is right, generally speaking, and they're both really, really corrupt. I'll concede that the American right is probably worse. But that doesn't make right-wing inherently synonymous with corruption, its just means that at the moment the 'right' has been more thoroughly taken over by that element in the US.
In any case, we seem to pretty much agree on most of the issues.
fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office
Doesn't this mean that an even larger number of ridiculous patent applications will be approved, since everyone's salary will be dependent on the available budget? Now there's an incentive to massively expand the number of patent awards, with no comparable incentive for quality.
Because if we start forcing people to work to pay for their crimes, before long it morphs into a slave program with people being convicted on bogus charges for the sake of their labor. This has been tried in parts of the US in the past, and it has been a problem. The people who control the system don't have close to enough integrity to stand that kind of conflict of interest.
.the CIA and Air Force believed at some point that his software could detect a black blob as a terrorist from a black blob who's not a terrorist, off of a UAV video feed. So did they incorporate this into their Rules of Engagement (ROE) at some point and actually declare anyone hostile based on feedback from his software? Because if this is the case, then this guy is probably guilty of more than just ripping the government off. If the government admits to wrongfully killing someone based on bogus software, then who is liable and at what level?
There is a whole industry of people who sell solutions to determine terrorist blobs from non-terrorist blobs. Most are careful to stay in the gray area of lying by selective emphasis and omission, and "not every line of cutting edge research works out perfectly". Everyone else is doing it so it can't be wrong, right? The guys in the government who provide the money don't even care if the stuff works, because they're just there to climb the GS scale, pad their resumes, and cultivate connections that will earn them big bucks after they retire from government and go to work on the contractor side. Nobody thinks about the wrongful killing angle, and bringing it up would be rude and unpatriotic. There's no chance of anyone ever being held accountable.
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Although I don't have a high UID, I used to get a lot of mod points, but it stopped suddenly, and I haven't had any for several years. And I didn't post or moderate on whatever thread you're referring to.
One of the things that annoys me about this kind of example, is that much larger amounts of money are wasted on moronic military R&D projects, but for some reason those examples are rarely used in recent years. Part of the problem is that most of the worst programs are secret, so most people don't know about most of them. But its still strange that people who believe that government is inherently wasteful, and consequently should be minimized, seem to exempt such a large part of federal spending from the same kind of logic. Its true that most of the military R&D wouldn't get done without government involvement, but that's true of most science spending also. I think the main difference is that most defense R&D money goes to upper middle class conservative folk, whereas there's a perception that non defense R&D money might go to other kinds of people. So the ideological battle is basically just a big cronyist competition for pork.
A part of me agrees with you. A part of me is thinking "damn, I wonder if I could make his head explode...."
In any case, the Chinese mostly just make plastic utensils and stuff, no great loss. It frees us up for innovation. And although the law does protect a lot of secrets, I'm more comfortable trusting those in the know to do the right thing than risk having it fall into the hands of terrorists. Industrial secrets such as are going to China don't matter as much because technology changes so fast anyway.
Members of celebrities families are greedy free-riding bastards who hang on their relatives coattails. In other news, rodent attacks man. More at 11.
Why bring Jimmy Carter into this?
Still using that Pentium CPU?
These days it doesn't matter so much, if he's using any Intel processor and compiling with 'fast' rather than 'precise'.
Read up on the Taiping Rebellion for a perspective that's a little more sympathetic to the Chinese government view. A big quasi-Christian cult got way out of hand, for instance forcibly separating men and women into different cities, and the resulting war killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Other than that, its because the Chinese government is a big brainwash scheme, so other brainwash schemes are natural enemies.
Thanks. Still seems kind of sad to me, compared to 68000 days.
How healthy is the remaining part of Motorola? Everyone's talking about the part that Google got, but I'm interested in understanding what's left of the company.
Fair enough. I hate big government myself, and don't have a problem with all libertarians. Just the phoney, parasitic kind that pretend to care about freedom but are really just trying to get away with stuff.
They've been able to grow rich in large part because of the infrastructure of developed countries, but they're too dishonest to want to help pay for it.
From my experience working in the defense/surveillance industry, its mostly greed, injected with a dose of power-lust. For the most part, people don't have to fight moral qualms because they just don't ask themselves those kinds of questions.
Graduate students who do real research should be paid much, much more than they are. It exploits them, and it make it very difficult for MS level research engineers to make a living, because they're competing against almost free labor.
The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits.
That makes sense. Though it seems that for the traits to be aligned, they must be different facets of the same trait.
Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within.
Granted that the sensitivity to 'threats' is directed differently in Liberals and Conservatives, the within/without division doesn't seem to me to stand up very well. For example, conservatives are obsessed with the cultural rot that they call liberalism. That's a threat from within. They're also at least as afraid of expanded government power as liberals are, but they're concerned about it in different areas.
It seems to me that the whole liberal vs conservatism ideological split is not much more than a costume for a power struggle. Conservatives don't worry about government power when they see it acting in their own interests relative to those of other groups. Likewise for Liberals. Yes there are cultural an psychological differences, but these don't seem adequate to explain the actions or rhetoric of liberals and conservatives. Bush was hated by liberals, but most are merely disappointed in Obama for advancing the same policies. Likewise people like Bill Clinton, Obama, and Janet Reno have been hated by conservatives for things that they have only mildly criticized in people like Gringrich, Bush, and Rumsfeld.
I think its more of a love of the power of technology, and a reflexive hatred for 'tree huggers'. This mindset filters information in a way that makes it seem rational. I think environmentalists tend to be the same way, they just skew everything in a different direction. And I think that the reason that most people don't tire of the 'us vs them' game, is if you ever stop playing, you find you have to face up to your own painful defects.
Ah, but that misses a very key truth about natural selection: goodness is also rewarded by the system
Yes, but evil is also rewarded. What kind of a system instituted by a loving god rewards both good and evil? This problem is even pointed out in the Bible. "God causes his sun to shine upon the evil as well as upon the good, which is an aggravation of the evil."
evolution and natural selection can be thought of as a battle of good versus evil, played out on a planetary scale.
In the scientific theory of evolution, evil prevails where it does either because it is favored by natural selection, or else from random happenstance. There aren't any players besides necessity and chance. Introduce any other element, and you may be onto something, but you are also arguing against the existing theory and its most prominent proponents.
Which side of the 'battle' is God on? If he's on the good side, then he's not omnipotent. If he's above the battle, then he's not good. If you redefine 'good' to encompass the existence of the battle, then that's a pretty weak 'good', in my view. Even if all Christians embrace evolution, its still a loss if that's the strongest vision of good that they can find.
Not that your point has no value also.
If the Bible started at Genesis 12, the argument would as you say disappear for most people, since most people don't think very much about such things. But the underlying contradiction would still be there, and we would still suffer from many of its symptoms. It is appropriate for Genesis 1-11 to be the way it is because it does fit with the main thrust of what comes after.
The arguments I described are real for many sincere and intelligent people, not just justifications for their faith in the Bible. If the majority of people aren't interested in thinking or arguing honestly shouldn't mean that the remainder of us can't be either. Its a waste of time for us to frame our arguments in terms of the views of people who don't really care about finding answers anyway. But the majority views are also strongly shaped by those of the minority who give the subject more attention. Most people who believe in evolution don't really understand it either, they're just embracing the position of experts who appear to be more worth following than Christian theologians.
Does that sound reasonable?
I would regard it as craven to stoop to kiss such a God's ass, and moreover I don't think its reasonable to assume that God is good and then try to bend our perceptions to fit that assertion. Better to also consider the possibilities that God is non-existent or even evil, or some combination of those, and look to see what is actually the case. Here are a few additional observations though.
A reason your residence hall is not in good repair, is every weekend the residents get drunk and trash the place. Furthermore, whenever someone shows up to try to fix things, whether on their own initiative or sent by the landlord, that person gets harassed or even assaulted by the residents, who try to steal his tools and apply them to further mayhem.
Of course part of your point is that the residence hall appears to have already been a mess before you came to it. The world was already quite messed up before man arrived on the scene, and man was already messed up before we arrived as individuals. My solution to this second problem, which is more personal, is to accept that my own identity shares something with humanity in general. I suffer as a result of what others have done, but this is natural in the sense that I am a part of humanity. I'm not saying that I should accept abuse on the grounds that I deserve it. To the contrary, I choose to fight what I see as wrong. But to fight it effectively, I've got to be honest about what's mine. This highlights another reason why the messed up condition of the world can't just be fixed by decree. There are evils that are apparent, and evils that are hidden below the surface. If you try to force all the apparent wrongs to be right, without understanding where they spring from, then it just makes those deeper problems worse.
As I see it, the solution to the more general problem is in large part the same. Man evolved into being in a world that was already a moral disaster, but man is a part of something greater than itself which from its present standpoint it can't easily see. Eden is not in the historic past: natural history is corrupt all the way back to its apparent beginning, like a cobweb that fell from heaven. If looking for a god that is lord of this world, the god we find is corrupt also. But that doesn't mean there's no help at all.
Clearly, in order to cure the world, a person has to understand the nature of the disease. But knowledge is power, as they say. So if you're already morally compromised, then giving you the knowledge that you need to right yourself also gives you the means to dig yourself deeper. Every good idea that is a blessing, like money for example, or nuclear physics, also gets twisted into a curse, if that's what we do with it.
If 'god' was involved in the world, what would god's hands look like? In some sense that would be us. I think your point, that its not enough just to say 'everything will be fixed in the future', after death or after a 'second coming' is valid. If we're not content with the status quo, then we should try to do something about it. And that requires hard effort towards facing the nature of the problem we're trying to fix. Or, if we'd rather party and trash the place, then we've got that option also.
My take on the whole controversy....
Evolution by natural selection poses a problem for Christianity because its very brutal process. If its God's natural order, then this brings into question the goodness of God. It also brings into question the idea of sin, since natural selection is argued to produce behaviors historically regarded as sinful. Furthermore nasty animal traits appear to go back hundreds of millions of years, which is difficult to square with common concepts of a 'fall' from paradise.
Individual Christians may deal with these issues by just leaving them unanswered. I think that for most people that is a reasonably pragmatic approach. However, not everybody is comfortable with that, they want certain things to make a certain kind of sense. So broadly speaking, some try to resolve the conflict by disbelieving in science, and others by disbelieving in religious ideas of right and wrong.
At the heart of most Christian criticism of evolution by natural selection, as I understand it, is the feeling that something of importance has been left out. I think this feeling is correct. On the other side, people react against what appears to be a tendency to make up stuff which stands in contraction of known facts, calling it the truth. I'm sympathetic too that view also.
I think that the apparent contradiction between natural selection and morality can be resolved, and in a way that actually deepens and enhances our grasp of the essential truths that both sides care about. But it seems that very few people are interested in reaching for that. Christians I've talked to who question evolution seem not to realize how strong the scientific case really is, and how weak their own arguments are. And they mostly seem uninterested in educating themselves on the subject so that they can find better arguments. I guess that would take a great deal of time and energy, without any obvious payoff, and along the way they'd have be willing to give up anything they previously believed that turns out not to be true. On the other side, understanding what's of value in the criticisms of evolution would require a humility and desire to do that, which apparently isn't as much fun and personally empowering as making fun of stupid people. So both sides keep going over the same ground over and over, and not much new is learned.
Harder to do that these days when the big companies own all the patents.
I think its generally futile to argue on this subject. Its like arguing with creationists. Everything we do affects us to some degree, violent video games included.
But on the subject of 'normal' emotions....By the time I was about 20 I was emotionally numb and sometimes appallingly cruel. Was it a result of abuse, or was in an inherited insensitivity and viciousness such as causes abuse? Probably both, but in a way it doesn't matter. Although you can't snap your fingers and change yourself, with time and effort you can still grow yourself into something better. Although you may remain deformed in certain ways, it doesn't stop you from making the best of it and developing your sensitivity and empathy in other ways. And probably you can feel again if you can face up to what you feel. Such has been my experience anyway.
There are lots of secret programs too. One reason they're not all secret is a lot of the people who work on these kinds of projects aren't qualified for high clearances, on account of being recent immigrants.
As a right-winger, I don't entirely agree with your left-right framing of the problem. Its as if everything corrupt is defined as right-wing, and as a consequence both the left and the right are said to be right-wing, because they're both up to their elbows in corruption. I think it makes more sense to say that left is left and right is right, generally speaking, and they're both really, really corrupt. I'll concede that the American right is probably worse. But that doesn't make right-wing inherently synonymous with corruption, its just means that at the moment the 'right' has been more thoroughly taken over by that element in the US.
In any case, we seem to pretty much agree on most of the issues.
Nice sig.
fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office
Doesn't this mean that an even larger number of ridiculous patent applications will be approved, since everyone's salary will be dependent on the available budget? Now there's an incentive to massively expand the number of patent awards, with no comparable incentive for quality.
Because if we start forcing people to work to pay for their crimes, before long it morphs into a slave program with people being convicted on bogus charges for the sake of their labor. This has been tried in parts of the US in the past, and it has been a problem. The people who control the system don't have close to enough integrity to stand that kind of conflict of interest.
.the CIA and Air Force believed at some point that his software could detect a black blob as a terrorist from a black blob who's not a terrorist, off of a UAV video feed. So did they incorporate this into their Rules of Engagement (ROE) at some point and actually declare anyone hostile based on feedback from his software? Because if this is the case, then this guy is probably guilty of more than just ripping the government off. If the government admits to wrongfully killing someone based on bogus software, then who is liable and at what level?
There is a whole industry of people who sell solutions to determine terrorist blobs from non-terrorist blobs. Most are careful to stay in the gray area of lying by selective emphasis and omission, and "not every line of cutting edge research works out perfectly". Everyone else is doing it so it can't be wrong, right? The guys in the government who provide the money don't even care if the stuff works, because they're just there to climb the GS scale, pad their resumes, and cultivate connections that will earn them big bucks after they retire from government and go to work on the contractor side. Nobody thinks about the wrongful killing angle, and bringing it up would be rude and unpatriotic. There's no chance of anyone ever being held accountable.