It seems that if you are involved in, or know a great deal about, any topic published in the newspaper, it's obvious to you just how badly the newspaper got it wrong.
Now, imagine about things you aren't involved in or know about. Yeah.
The CEO of Whole Foods story is overblown--he basically just made a few of his personal opinions anonymously on usenet. Nothing that could ever drag stock prices down.
Actually, no, that's not true at all, any course in human sexuality will dispute that, and additionally, "human psyche" is far from scientific language. Someone that knows anything about psychology would probably use "cognition," the poster might as well talk about "problems with the human soul."
Porn causes a physiological response as well as a mental one? DUH!?
Yes, but people with passengers in the car WITH them actually recovers a bit from risk from what you would see with cell phones, as apparently passengers, during a tricky driving moment or such, know when to shut up or may even alert the driver to dangers in the road. The studies on this have already accounted for that factor.
Dispute the facts all you want, but driving and talking on a cell phone depletes attentional resources considerably.
You're so silly. Nobody really is shocked to discover the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan was airbrushed. Get a grip....Growing spiritually? What kind of transcendental moonbat are you?
News flash: People are not being mind controlled by, gasp, "THE CORPORATIONS." I'm sure you think that you're so smart and wise and above everyone else and need to protect them but most people can kind of figure out that enhancements have been made on an image.
And anyway, so what? You can pretty much do a lot of what appears in images with more makeup or cosmetics, clever lightening, so on and so forth. You think we just outlaw that too? Photoshop just makes it easier to hide that zit.
LOL at you thinking people are being mindcontrolled by zits being removed from women on billboard images:D:D:D
People have the human right to express themselves any way they see fit, or to express any opinion or belief they have, so long as they are not violent about it.
The swastica was not originally even a Nazi symbol. If someone wanted to co-opt it, mistakenly, or intentionally, but with some odd peaceful intent, this German law would not allow it.
When you limit individual expression, you limit freedom. Once you silence any type of expression because you don't like it you can't say you have freedom of speech because the "freedom to say what I will let you say" is hardly a freedom at all.
And, before you slip into talk of fire and theaters, note that you do have the freedom to say such things, you simply should just be held responsible civilly for the harm you cause other people, much like you are free to swing a bat but are responsible if that swing causes it to connect with someone's head.
Stuff like this is one reason out of many I'm very wary of social progressives. Germany is a socially progressive state, and I don't think it's at all a coincidence that such censorship exists. Of course the social progressives are going to come out of the woodwork to justify it by scaring people up about the possibility of Nazis arising again and so on and so forth, but I guess sacrificing freedom in order to protect it is just a necessity to them. Individual freedom is on the down-and-out world-wide in the name of social consensus and thus niche groups (including nerds and gamers) suffer the most.
The same logic IS applicable and can be easily used to defend censorship; additionally, people present themselves and things associated with themselves every single day. Women put on make-up, get boob jobs, etc. People lie about their sexual prowess, exaggerate their abilities, so on and so forth. You want to pass laws that require people give a disclaimer each time they speak or go out in public? Make people wear a t-shirt that says: "I MAY NOT BE AS PHYSICALLY ATTRACTIVE OR ABLE AS ADVERTISED."
Great! Let's also censor all media that stigmatizes nerds! Cancel "Ugly Betty!" Require TV shows to have people with imperfect teeth! All soap operas must have at least one male with acne. And next time I clone out a zit on my face for my facebook picture, I'll be able to sleep warmly at night knowing there's I also had to put a disclaimer on it saying so.
Seems like the longer our democracies go on, the more bureaucratic and insane they start becoming. This isn't "fascism," this isn't the will of the people being usurped, this is the system working as it should, and these are the results.
It seems to me that democracy results in a sort of populistic legalism where you have thousands and thousands of little laws trying to create the perfect existence. But you can't make a perfect existence by putting strings on everyone and letting everyone else play everyone else's puppet master. Nobody can know even a fraction of the laws, yet break one that gets enforced and you're fined or jailed or forced into temporary involuntary servitude. Democracy may be freedom of the masses, but it's not freedom of the individual. The machine may be free to operate but the cogs are not free to turn. Is that really how you envision a free society?
And once we start trying to plug every possible hole that could cause mental illness or otherwise undesirable behavior we become an even more nightmarish version of Brave New World, where instead of people being conditioned by birth the governments ("the people") try to heavily restrict and control all social influences because of the undesirability of emotional problems in society, the end result being an overall loss of individual autonomy and in particular freedom of speech.
Trying to defend your "right" to own slaves and lynch blacks, AC? Your bullshit version of ethnocentrism may be popular at Berkely but even Iranian citizens don't agree with you and appreciate the help and support of outsiders.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Militarization demands increased violence in at least some segment of the population. Basically, it's not that Chavez opposes violence, it's that he opposes non-state-sanctioned violence. Boot camp doesn't turn you into a pacifist, and a more placid people are more easily ruled.
You must realize that Latin American countries are far more collectivist. Our notions of individual rights (which are eroding today even here in the USA) aren't as held there as they are here.
Sorry buddy, but the truth is one sided. Saying "sorry, that's the way it works" when I'm criticizing it for how it works is not an argument.
You miss my whole point that "debates" ensue, point and counterpoint, by the two sides on WP, one amongst the actual, factual side, and another from complete loon minority opinions that only 10 people in the world may use. They can rely on misleading weasel words, for instance, "While many scientists insist upon evolution by natural selection explains the origins of homo sapiens, many people disagree and believe that humans were created by an Intelligent Designer" thus serving as a pulpit for the ID movement.
The most bizarre and obscure pseudosciences pollute wikipedia as their promoters watch and edit pages like a hawk and since nobody actually cares what the truth is the most inane garbage is put up in the name of NPOV. NPOV itself lends to promote POVs by granting them equality with all known truth.
The problem with WP is WP itself. The entire thing is flawed. I know this from experience--I used to work on it and I saw how wrong my idealism was.
Your statement, "Yes, that means that Wikipedia is a body of verifiable, but not necessarily objectively true, information. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but that's the best overall algorithm that has been worked out thus far." is exactly why wikipedia is such a joke. FACTS BE DAMNED, so long as enough people say so! The very fact that you WPers don't care about factual accuracy is exactly why you're a cabal of roleplaying bureaucrats. Have fun wielding your +2 Barnstar of Enhanced Ego for all to see.
Oh great. Another crazy wikipedia evangelist. Your thinking is part of the reason why WP is such a cancer. Find even the most obscure, bizarre, minority viewpoint and cite it and then it's treated like it's on equal footing. Science be damned! I might as well cite my next door neighbor as evidence that unicorns exist.
According to your criteria, an article on unicorns might appear with the following sentence: "While many scientists and zoologist do not believe in unicorns[1], many other people claim that they do in fact exist and appear to people open to the idea of their existence[2]." This gives the notion of unicorn existence a false air of legitimacy. You're basically sanctioning ideas like intelligent design simply by how many bogus nonsense they put out. Of course, again as in my case, then an edit war breaks out over how many people (for example, this isn't the example used in my case but whatever) believe in unicorns, the credibility of unicorn spotters vs. unicorn "deniers," so on and so forth. Articles can turn into messy, stupid "debates" in edit wars precisely because you wikipedias hold such a relativistic view of knowledge.
How do you know I'm not the kook? Let's put it this way--I wasn't the one putting up citations from websites that talked about angels, UFOs, and people walking around with literally no brains in the skulls. This was a guy notorious for dabbling in pseudoscience.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that if you are involved in, or know a great deal about, any topic published in the newspaper, it's obvious to you just how badly the newspaper got it wrong.
Now, imagine about things you aren't involved in or know about. Yeah.
The CEO of Whole Foods story is overblown--he basically just made a few of his personal opinions anonymously on usenet. Nothing that could ever drag stock prices down.
Actually, no, that's not true at all, any course in human sexuality will dispute that, and additionally, "human psyche" is far from scientific language. Someone that knows anything about psychology would probably use "cognition," the poster might as well talk about "problems with the human soul."
Porn causes a physiological response as well as a mental one? DUH!?
Talking to deaf passengers...?
Yes, but people with passengers in the car WITH them actually recovers a bit from risk from what you would see with cell phones, as apparently passengers, during a tricky driving moment or such, know when to shut up or may even alert the driver to dangers in the road. The studies on this have already accounted for that factor.
Dispute the facts all you want, but driving and talking on a cell phone depletes attentional resources considerably.
You're so silly. Nobody really is shocked to discover the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan was airbrushed. Get a grip. ...Growing spiritually? What kind of transcendental moonbat are you?
News flash: People are not being mind controlled by, gasp, "THE CORPORATIONS." I'm sure you think that you're so smart and wise and above everyone else and need to protect them but most people can kind of figure out that enhancements have been made on an image.
And anyway, so what? You can pretty much do a lot of what appears in images with more makeup or cosmetics, clever lightening, so on and so forth. You think we just outlaw that too? Photoshop just makes it easier to hide that zit.
LOL at you thinking people are being mindcontrolled by zits being removed from women on billboard images :D :D :D
Yes. Yes, it is.
People have the human right to express themselves any way they see fit, or to express any opinion or belief they have, so long as they are not violent about it.
The swastica was not originally even a Nazi symbol. If someone wanted to co-opt it, mistakenly, or intentionally, but with some odd peaceful intent, this German law would not allow it.
When you limit individual expression, you limit freedom. Once you silence any type of expression because you don't like it you can't say you have freedom of speech because the "freedom to say what I will let you say" is hardly a freedom at all.
And, before you slip into talk of fire and theaters, note that you do have the freedom to say such things, you simply should just be held responsible civilly for the harm you cause other people, much like you are free to swing a bat but are responsible if that swing causes it to connect with someone's head.
Doesn't explain its continued strict enforcement and existence on law books.
Stuff like this is one reason out of many I'm very wary of social progressives. Germany is a socially progressive state, and I don't think it's at all a coincidence that such censorship exists. Of course the social progressives are going to come out of the woodwork to justify it by scaring people up about the possibility of Nazis arising again and so on and so forth, but I guess sacrificing freedom in order to protect it is just a necessity to them. Individual freedom is on the down-and-out world-wide in the name of social consensus and thus niche groups (including nerds and gamers) suffer the most.
The same logic IS applicable and can be easily used to defend censorship; additionally, people present themselves and things associated with themselves every single day. Women put on make-up, get boob jobs, etc. People lie about their sexual prowess, exaggerate their abilities, so on and so forth. You want to pass laws that require people give a disclaimer each time they speak or go out in public? Make people wear a t-shirt that says: "I MAY NOT BE AS PHYSICALLY ATTRACTIVE OR ABLE AS ADVERTISED."
And when women go out with make-up, that is also deception.
Great! Let's also censor all media that stigmatizes nerds! Cancel "Ugly Betty!" Require TV shows to have people with imperfect teeth! All soap operas must have at least one male with acne. And next time I clone out a zit on my face for my facebook picture, I'll be able to sleep warmly at night knowing there's I also had to put a disclaimer on it saying so.
Seems like the longer our democracies go on, the more bureaucratic and insane they start becoming. This isn't "fascism," this isn't the will of the people being usurped, this is the system working as it should, and these are the results.
It seems to me that democracy results in a sort of populistic legalism where you have thousands and thousands of little laws trying to create the perfect existence. But you can't make a perfect existence by putting strings on everyone and letting everyone else play everyone else's puppet master. Nobody can know even a fraction of the laws, yet break one that gets enforced and you're fined or jailed or forced into temporary involuntary servitude. Democracy may be freedom of the masses, but it's not freedom of the individual. The machine may be free to operate but the cogs are not free to turn. Is that really how you envision a free society?
And once we start trying to plug every possible hole that could cause mental illness or otherwise undesirable behavior we become an even more nightmarish version of Brave New World, where instead of people being conditioned by birth the governments ("the people") try to heavily restrict and control all social influences because of the undesirability of emotional problems in society, the end result being an overall loss of individual autonomy and in particular freedom of speech.
Trying to defend your "right" to own slaves and lynch blacks, AC? Your bullshit version of ethnocentrism may be popular at Berkely but even Iranian citizens don't agree with you and appreciate the help and support of outsiders.
yes, facebook.com/kaczor
Yes, I wrote it, feel free to share.
^ Apple fan
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Yes, you are. Latin American countries, Asian countries, and African Countries tend to be more collectivist than Western countries are.
Militarization demands increased violence in at least some segment of the population. Basically, it's not that Chavez opposes violence, it's that he opposes non-state-sanctioned violence. Boot camp doesn't turn you into a pacifist, and a more placid people are more easily ruled.
You must realize that Latin American countries are far more collectivist. Our notions of individual rights (which are eroding today even here in the USA) aren't as held there as they are here.
Sorry buddy, but the truth is one sided. Saying "sorry, that's the way it works" when I'm criticizing it for how it works is not an argument.
You miss my whole point that "debates" ensue, point and counterpoint, by the two sides on WP, one amongst the actual, factual side, and another from complete loon minority opinions that only 10 people in the world may use. They can rely on misleading weasel words, for instance, "While many scientists insist upon evolution by natural selection explains the origins of homo sapiens, many people disagree and believe that humans were created by an Intelligent Designer" thus serving as a pulpit for the ID movement.
The most bizarre and obscure pseudosciences pollute wikipedia as their promoters watch and edit pages like a hawk and since nobody actually cares what the truth is the most inane garbage is put up in the name of NPOV. NPOV itself lends to promote POVs by granting them equality with all known truth.
The problem with WP is WP itself. The entire thing is flawed. I know this from experience--I used to work on it and I saw how wrong my idealism was.
Your statement, "Yes, that means that Wikipedia is a body of verifiable, but not necessarily objectively true, information. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but that's the best overall algorithm that has been worked out thus far." is exactly why wikipedia is such a joke. FACTS BE DAMNED, so long as enough people say so! The very fact that you WPers don't care about factual accuracy is exactly why you're a cabal of roleplaying bureaucrats. Have fun wielding your +2 Barnstar of Enhanced Ego for all to see.
Oh great. Another crazy wikipedia evangelist. Your thinking is part of the reason why WP is such a cancer. Find even the most obscure, bizarre, minority viewpoint and cite it and then it's treated like it's on equal footing. Science be damned! I might as well cite my next door neighbor as evidence that unicorns exist.
According to your criteria, an article on unicorns might appear with the following sentence: "While many scientists and zoologist do not believe in unicorns[1], many other people claim that they do in fact exist and appear to people open to the idea of their existence[2]." This gives the notion of unicorn existence a false air of legitimacy. You're basically sanctioning ideas like intelligent design simply by how many bogus nonsense they put out. Of course, again as in my case, then an edit war breaks out over how many people (for example, this isn't the example used in my case but whatever) believe in unicorns, the credibility of unicorn spotters vs. unicorn "deniers," so on and so forth. Articles can turn into messy, stupid "debates" in edit wars precisely because you wikipedias hold such a relativistic view of knowledge.
How do you know I'm not the kook? Let's put it this way--I wasn't the one putting up citations from websites that talked about angels, UFOs, and people walking around with literally no brains in the skulls. This was a guy notorious for dabbling in pseudoscience.