There's no functional difference between populistic, democratic "justice" and government "justice." You are right that the lynch mob would care little for an explanation or evidence. The government, on the other hand, is willing to hear it--but not care ("the law is the law" and all that).
If you accidentally download child porn, the FBI wants you to contact them not so they can stop it, but so they can arrest you for it, too. Never, ever trust your government.
My point on water vapor was merely that it is not immediately obvious in what way a greenhouse gas will effect the atmosphere or in what way; people tend to assume CO2 is the largest greenhouse gas even on the AGW side when that's not the case and it's more complicated than that.
As for equating anti-AGW with creationists, I am talking about the average Joe. Evolution is much more accessible and easier to understand because it's a statistical, demonstratable process with examples you can encounter in everyday life (such as dog breeds or such. Climate change involves much more intricacies.
Or it could be because I confess I don't know much about climatology to strongly defend AGW as much as I know about and can defend evolutionary science.
I should add that AGW denialists are in the same camp as creationists because they willfully disbelieve science they do not understand so that they can rationalize closely held, pig-headed beliefs which only serve to preserve the status quo.
OK, I will agree with you on that--you only need to point to how political the "debate" it and what sides are taking which positions to demonstrate it.
My point on water vapor was merely that it is not immediately obvious in what way a greenhouse gas will effect the atmosphere or in what way; people tend to assume CO2 is the largest greenhouse gas even on the AGW when that's not the case and it's more complicated than that.
Pascal's Wager arguments, though, are never good if there is no evidence involved. AGW does have evidence. I am not advocating any policies; I do not know and cannot defend any view on how much AGW will affect humanity.
And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Regardless of the truth of AGW, it is not immediately obvious that smog in cities indicates or leads to a significant effect in the atmosphere. I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious. This is why I get angry when AGWers equate those that disbelieve in AGW with creationists; the principles behind evolution are much easier and more intuitive to understand than climate science is.
No, I'm not going to trust you and your obedient, dog-like faith of the government, because this sort of thing actually isn't new and could happen to anyone.
But of course, you're just going to continually parrot out "Oh, no, the government, they're the good guys, the CITIZEN must've been in the wrong."
I mean... I've bought second-hand HDD's that have been zeroe'd and formatted. Could I be potentially liable if the previous owner had been a kiddie-porn freako? The images might still be buried deep in the disk after all.
There is no way to retrieve the data after zero'ing. Being able to do so is a computer myth for the most part.
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
The arguments against anarchy start to where thin once you realize that the government isn't some savior-organization out to stop evil but is just a really strong rogue faction that does what it pleases. You sleep safe at night, knowing there's a government out there?
Indeed. Child porn is one of the few, if only, criminal act that is illegal to even SEE in picture. You can see pictures of murder, you can see pictures of people breaking into buildings, you can even watch movie into this stuff, but the second it's a naked child BAM you're a criminal. Hell, some people might even look it up not because they're a sick kiddie fiddler but because because they're just curious to what something like that would look like... and that isn't so strange, given how casually shock pornography is pasted everywhere, I mean, even goatse is something people just casually laugh about nowadays.
Regardless of how much money is involved in politics, only the average citizen, in large numbers, can put an elected politician in office.
Yes, the corporations are corrupt, because there is a government that will allow them to be corrupt. You want to make government appear pure and benign because you want to use it as a tool for your own ends too--just like the corporations and every other interest group does.
Uhm, unregulated free market? It's not the free market slapping her in jail or running the court proceedings. Actually, this is the application of law, and by nature this is a form of regulation. I know it's trendy to rant against "the Man" (who doesn't?) but if you're going to do it at least make sure you know what you're complaining about.
Right now, anyone can publish games for the PC platform. And there's a shit load of them, many mediocre, some not. That doesn't really hurt the PC market. Right now, Nintendo is filled with shovelware with the Wii (and I own a Wii and no other current-gen consoles, so I am allowed to say that).
The reason Nintendo took the stance it did was so it could profit more by charging companies $$$ to win its seal of approval. Nintendo wouldn't directly profit off 3rd party games. If the companies have to seek a license from Nintendo, however, then Nintendo does get a profit off of them.
The Nintendo seal of approval never protected against trash being on a Nintendo platform. Bebe's Kids is famous for how terrible it was and yet it proudly bore the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
Nah. I doubt you're even a scientist. Your "poor, pitiful me!" schtick isn't very amusing, and your backpedaling has been duly noted.
The Ottawa skeptics were attacking the ABO type-personality type link presented on a website that is popular in some Asian countries. I don't really know what you're trying to attack, but it has nothing to do with what the skeptics are talking about. Many people in Asian countries belief that ABO blood type indicates personality. The skeptics are disputing this pseudoscience. That is all. You stepped in to attack the skeptics because, presumably, skeptics have questioned your own pet nonsense, and apparently part of that is people questioning your religious beliefs.
You're not a scientist, and I doubt you're anything above a BA university graduate. You're probably someone's assistant in a hospital fancying himself a scientist. You do not understand the issues being discussed here, you have attacked your own anger-derived strawman of "skeptic," and you've inflated your own status.
Run along, little boy, I'm sure you've got some astrology or reflexology or something to go out and defend elsewhere.
Plait is a scientist of the hard data sort and skepticism applies mostly to data collection methodology and conclusions drawn. I've no idea how good he is at this. He also misapplies the term by taking an automatically contrary position versus claims he finds easy targets. A skeptic is skeptical going both ways, Plait is not. His prejudiced stance and assumption of correctness have led him more than once to make claims in attacks against various targets that were shown to be incorrect. Minimal research would have prevented it, because that's what it took to show he had been making claims from opinion while claiming they were fact.
Let me guess, you think the moon landings were faked, huh?
There's laissez-faire capitalism on the government level, too, I guess, as nobody stands above governments to regulate them. And since there exists bad governments, and since every government oppresses its citizenry on some level, clearly the entire endeavor is a failure and we need god to regulate government, and then something to regulate god.
I forgot to further note that the ABO-typing and personality theory has nothing to do with hormones and possible effect of chemicals on behavior. That is what comes up on the studies provided on your keywords. That is what makes your attempt to fool people so obviously deliberate--you obviously know that those results don't have anything to do with what the "skeptics" (as you lovingly put in scare-quotes) are complaining about, yet you still went ahead and tried to present the results as evidence that ABO typing is mainstream science somewhere.
Someone ought to mark DynaSoar down as a troll for this, because it's really just a disguised troll towards "skeptics" because someone pissed in his cheerios over his religion or pet superstition, that he wants to pretend is science, and is using this incident to further his grudge.
Many, many famous scientists are such skeptics, such as Richard Dawkins, Phil Plait, Carl Sagan...
I'm pretty sure you've got some agenda you haven't quite revealed to us. So, what exactly is your agenda? Believer in ESP? Ghosts? Homeopathy? Hmm?
Your talk of going to pubmed and looking up the terms yourself makes you seem clever to the uninitiated but anyone who has ever used a scientific DB would know that those keywords are going to produce a lot of noise. Indeed, they do--and almost none of it, if any, has to do with ABO-typing and personality, but merely hormones or chemicals in the blood influencing personality traits, something almost no scientist / skeptic would deny. I looked over the keywords you gave. Some of them reference no association found between a personality characteristic and some chemical, some of them are completely tangential, and again, almost none of them have anything to do with the blood typing myth.
You try to present yourself as a scientist very well, but I have to question how much you really do in practice, as any researcher, even on an undergraduate level, would be able to instantly spot how much noise the keywords "blood type personality" would produce. And indeed, it does--all the results that come up do NOT support ABO typing to personality, despite you implying that the results you'd get with those keywords indicate research done on ABO-typing and personality. It's telling how you don't even cite a single study, instead pointing people to impressive-sounding numbers on database hits in a database using broad key words in order to make it seem like research is being done on ABO-typing and personality when there isn't, because the notion has long been discredited even in Japanese scientific circles.
You clearly have some sort of agenda, to so cleverly try to mislead people the way you have What is it?
Slashdot Mirror
There's no functional difference between populistic, democratic "justice" and government "justice." You are right that the lynch mob would care little for an explanation or evidence. The government, on the other hand, is willing to hear it--but not care ("the law is the law" and all that).
Your arguing that the regulation is the culprit here, whereas someone else might see it as industry having too much influence over politics.
That's nearly the exact same point.
I remember a time when the will of the majority held that people with certain skin colors ought be held in shackles.
And democracy worked very well in Afghanistan. I guess we can extrapolate something about that, too...
If you accidentally download child porn, the FBI wants you to contact them not so they can stop it, but so they can arrest you for it, too. Never, ever trust your government.
My point on water vapor was merely that it is not immediately obvious in what way a greenhouse gas will effect the atmosphere or in what way; people tend to assume CO2 is the largest greenhouse gas even on the AGW side when that's not the case and it's more complicated than that.
As for equating anti-AGW with creationists, I am talking about the average Joe. Evolution is much more accessible and easier to understand because it's a statistical, demonstratable process with examples you can encounter in everyday life (such as dog breeds or such. Climate change involves much more intricacies.
Or it could be because I confess I don't know much about climatology to strongly defend AGW as much as I know about and can defend evolutionary science.
I should add that AGW denialists are in the same camp as creationists because they willfully disbelieve science they do not understand so that they can rationalize closely held, pig-headed beliefs which only serve to preserve the status quo.
OK, I will agree with you on that--you only need to point to how political the "debate" it and what sides are taking which positions to demonstrate it.
My point on water vapor was merely that it is not immediately obvious in what way a greenhouse gas will effect the atmosphere or in what way; people tend to assume CO2 is the largest greenhouse gas even on the AGW when that's not the case and it's more complicated than that.
Pascal's Wager arguments, though, are never good if there is no evidence involved. AGW does have evidence. I am not advocating any policies; I do not know and cannot defend any view on how much AGW will affect humanity.
And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Regardless of the truth of AGW, it is not immediately obvious that smog in cities indicates or leads to a significant effect in the atmosphere. I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious. This is why I get angry when AGWers equate those that disbelieve in AGW with creationists; the principles behind evolution are much easier and more intuitive to understand than climate science is.
No, I'm not going to trust you and your obedient, dog-like faith of the government, because this sort of thing actually isn't new and could happen to anyone.
But of course, you're just going to continually parrot out "Oh, no, the government, they're the good guys, the CITIZEN must've been in the wrong."
I mean... I've bought second-hand HDD's that have been zeroe'd and formatted. Could I be potentially liable if the previous owner had been a kiddie-porn freako? The images might still be buried deep in the disk after all.
There is no way to retrieve the data after zero'ing. Being able to do so is a computer myth for the most part.
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
In the land of many laws we are all lawbreakers.
Who runs (most of) the high schools?
===
The government isn't likely to snap and go postal with me as an innocent bystander.
===
Oh, how utterly wrong you are. Why not ask the 22-year old man being sent to prison over this? He's an innocent bystander to.
The arguments against anarchy start to where thin once you realize that the government isn't some savior-organization out to stop evil but is just a really strong rogue faction that does what it pleases. You sleep safe at night, knowing there's a government out there?
Indeed. Child porn is one of the few, if only, criminal act that is illegal to even SEE in picture. You can see pictures of murder, you can see pictures of people breaking into buildings, you can even watch movie into this stuff, but the second it's a naked child BAM you're a criminal. Hell, some people might even look it up not because they're a sick kiddie fiddler but because because they're just curious to what something like that would look like... and that isn't so strange, given how casually shock pornography is pasted everywhere, I mean, even goatse is something people just casually laugh about nowadays.
Regardless of how much money is involved in politics, only the average citizen, in large numbers, can put an elected politician in office.
Yes, the corporations are corrupt, because there is a government that will allow them to be corrupt. You want to make government appear pure and benign because you want to use it as a tool for your own ends too--just like the corporations and every other interest group does.
Uhm, unregulated free market? It's not the free market slapping her in jail or running the court proceedings. Actually, this is the application of law, and by nature this is a form of regulation. I know it's trendy to rant against "the Man" (who doesn't?) but if you're going to do it at least make sure you know what you're complaining about.
Using that logic, bittorrent ought to be illegal, because it's mostly used for pirating software.
I doubt that.
Right now, anyone can publish games for the PC platform. And there's a shit load of them, many mediocre, some not. That doesn't really hurt the PC market. Right now, Nintendo is filled with shovelware with the Wii (and I own a Wii and no other current-gen consoles, so I am allowed to say that).
The reason Nintendo took the stance it did was so it could profit more by charging companies $$$ to win its seal of approval. Nintendo wouldn't directly profit off 3rd party games. If the companies have to seek a license from Nintendo, however, then Nintendo does get a profit off of them.
The Nintendo seal of approval never protected against trash being on a Nintendo platform. Bebe's Kids is famous for how terrible it was and yet it proudly bore the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
My intent should be pretty clear. I'm a skeptic.
Nah. I doubt you're even a scientist. Your "poor, pitiful me!" schtick isn't very amusing, and your backpedaling has been duly noted.
The Ottawa skeptics were attacking the ABO type-personality type link presented on a website that is popular in some Asian countries. I don't really know what you're trying to attack, but it has nothing to do with what the skeptics are talking about. Many people in Asian countries belief that ABO blood type indicates personality. The skeptics are disputing this pseudoscience. That is all. You stepped in to attack the skeptics because, presumably, skeptics have questioned your own pet nonsense, and apparently part of that is people questioning your religious beliefs.
You're not a scientist, and I doubt you're anything above a BA university graduate. You're probably someone's assistant in a hospital fancying himself a scientist. You do not understand the issues being discussed here, you have attacked your own anger-derived strawman of "skeptic," and you've inflated your own status.
Run along, little boy, I'm sure you've got some astrology or reflexology or something to go out and defend elsewhere.
Plait is a scientist of the hard data sort and skepticism applies mostly to data collection methodology and conclusions drawn. I've no idea how good he is at this. He also misapplies the term by taking an automatically contrary position versus claims he finds easy targets. A skeptic is skeptical going both ways, Plait is not. His prejudiced stance and assumption of correctness have led him more than once to make claims in attacks against various targets that were shown to be incorrect. Minimal research would have prevented it, because that's what it took to show he had been making claims from opinion while claiming they were fact.
Let me guess, you think the moon landings were faked, huh?
There's laissez-faire capitalism on the government level, too, I guess, as nobody stands above governments to regulate them. And since there exists bad governments, and since every government oppresses its citizenry on some level, clearly the entire endeavor is a failure and we need god to regulate government, and then something to regulate god.
I forgot to further note that the ABO-typing and personality theory has nothing to do with hormones and possible effect of chemicals on behavior. That is what comes up on the studies provided on your keywords. That is what makes your attempt to fool people so obviously deliberate--you obviously know that those results don't have anything to do with what the "skeptics" (as you lovingly put in scare-quotes) are complaining about, yet you still went ahead and tried to present the results as evidence that ABO typing is mainstream science somewhere.
Someone ought to mark DynaSoar down as a troll for this, because it's really just a disguised troll towards "skeptics" because someone pissed in his cheerios over his religion or pet superstition, that he wants to pretend is science, and is using this incident to further his grudge.
Many, many famous scientists are such skeptics, such as Richard Dawkins, Phil Plait, Carl Sagan...
I'm pretty sure you've got some agenda you haven't quite revealed to us. So, what exactly is your agenda? Believer in ESP? Ghosts? Homeopathy? Hmm?
Your talk of going to pubmed and looking up the terms yourself makes you seem clever to the uninitiated but anyone who has ever used a scientific DB would know that those keywords are going to produce a lot of noise. Indeed, they do--and almost none of it, if any, has to do with ABO-typing and personality, but merely hormones or chemicals in the blood influencing personality traits, something almost no scientist / skeptic would deny. I looked over the keywords you gave. Some of them reference no association found between a personality characteristic and some chemical, some of them are completely tangential, and again, almost none of them have anything to do with the blood typing myth.
You try to present yourself as a scientist very well, but I have to question how much you really do in practice, as any researcher, even on an undergraduate level, would be able to instantly spot how much noise the keywords "blood type personality" would produce. And indeed, it does--all the results that come up do NOT support ABO typing to personality, despite you implying that the results you'd get with those keywords indicate research done on ABO-typing and personality. It's telling how you don't even cite a single study, instead pointing people to impressive-sounding numbers on database hits in a database using broad key words in order to make it seem like research is being done on ABO-typing and personality when there isn't, because the notion has long been discredited even in Japanese scientific circles.
You clearly have some sort of agenda, to so cleverly try to mislead people the way you have What is it?
Let's believe in ANYTHING, then! Since idle speculation is on the same grounding as observation, anything and everything is real, if only you believe!
I laughed.