Not true. Look at the problems caused by taking Valerri's daughter away from her, as one example. Hell, look at how both Cylon and Humans were planning on backstabbing each other when trying to find out the Final Five because they didn't trust one another. You must have also forgotten the fact that humans apparently were trying to provoke the Cylons into going to war with them. Neither Cylon nor Humans are necessarily the good guys, though some clearly are bad guys, or at least misguided. Not all humans are willing to forgive, either.
The whole point is that not all Cylons are bad Cylons, and yet the bad Cylons cause the humans to be paranoid of the good ones. You're looking at the show from a "go humans!" lens. Take a step back. Forgiveness on both sides is a pretty big element of the show, remember, the Cylons are still upset over enslavement, for example.
OK, I generally agree with you. I'm not sure there was some conspiracy over "government schools" brainwashing students, but yes, "rule of men" is not something I'm quite fond of.
The reason I asked is because I'm sure some people rather like the idea of "rule of men." It sounds so populist.
Of course, I went through a public school civics class like everyone else. The instructor, a democrat, didn't very much like my joke of blurting out "terrorists in the White House" to a friend as a joke and would not even allow us to represent a third party (heh, guess which one?) when doing a project on political parties--we could only represent Democrats or Republicans; this solidified in other students minds the legitimacy of the parties as ruling bodies. When watching an educationally useless video of Air Force One, everyone was wowed by all the luxuries on it. Only my friend and I were offended that our tax dollars are being used to treat the president, who should be more of a public servant, like a king.
I think it's less that there's top-down brainwashing plots and more of simply the stupid-minded and patriotic end up teaching civics classes.
It should be noted that the nucleus accumbens is also involved in -expectation of reward- and not necessarily reward itself. This is a major part of addiction--the addict may be desensitized to the effects of the drug but nonetheless may seek out the drug due to EXPECTATION of "reward" and to keep away withdrawal symptoms.
The mice associating the rooms with the effects of the drug is directly applicable to humans. Anyone who has tried to quit smoking may have had a difficult time during smoke break time because the context cues one to expect/desire their fix. Good way to kick the habit, if you're looking to do so, is not to hang out in the same spots you did your drug, not to hang out with the same people, so on and so forth. Otherwise, you'll likely fall back into your own habits.
The fact that the constitution is the supreme law of the land. This means that no treaty has the power to modify it.
Theoretically. The document itself has become more and more symbolic over time and it's been less held as "law of the land." It's been used more for political maneuvering among all three branches. That is inevitably what happens when you have a "Living Constitution" interpretation and not a strict "constructionist" one where any changes must be ratified, because you can just claim that your interpretation is the best for the times and thus not have to worry about procedure and dissent. When you're not held to a constant literal meaning of law, then the law simply means whatever the interpreter wants it to mean and whatever they can get away with through that interpretation.
And it's not going to be just Bush. Obama will do the same thing, when it suits him or what he wants and believes.
People are too quick to cast off the idea that race doesn't mean anything biologically through ideological lens. It's true that people all deserve the same political treatment, but people are so scared of racial bigotry and eugenics and social darwinism that they sometimes can't see straight. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve were blasted for supposedly being racial bigots, however wrong or right they were, and E. O. Wilson of Sociobiology fame had water thrown on him because the the nuturist bias of many on the left makes them view any innatist viewpoint as being "right-wing" apologetics for racial mistreatment or whatever, which is completely wrongminded. Nature doesn't care about how you think the world is supposed to work.
You argue, however rightly or wrongly, that blacks may have a genetic TENDENCY towards lower IQs (I am not saying this is true, bear with me here) and people blast you, however, you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it. People want "smile science", they want only nice things to be reported and they view publishing any negative or socially inconvenient data to be, well, socially irresponsible, no matter how true it even is. Remember, brain and body are one, as every physical change in the body is heritable so too are any structural changes in the brain which result in expressions of mental capacity and behavioral output.
I am not saying race does play a significant role in intellectual qualities. Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!) but it is not at all impossible that a race may have a tendency towards lower or higher IQs. And, as I've been sure to mention, this is all genetic tendency; variation among individuals still exists and even in a population with a mean IQ lower than the mean IQ of the average population you can still have IQs above the mean of the overall population.
It's also worth nothing that nature often cares little about the categories we've assigned to things for our human way of thinking. Evolution shows us that "species" is not at all easy to define as we think. A good video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5OEw_q-II (made by rather intelligent shanek guy who laboriously fights idiots online. If you're reading this Shane, "Hi!"). The point of this is to show that yes, race is largely a human construct, much like species itself is, but that does not mean it is entirely meaningless. We know some racial groups are more at risk for certain types of disease, for example.
The overall fallacy here is thinking that behavior/mental processes are somehow different from physical one, when behavior itself is a resultant of the physical workings of the brain, and thus some races really could be different from others in a particular way.
That said, Battlestar Galactica is a great show because they don't shove a particular moral conclusion down your throat (insofar that the Cylon vs. Human dynamic is obviously a racial conflict in large part caused by human arrogance and inability to forgive) a lot of the time by making the issues difficult with no clear convenient solution, just as they are in real life, and also making none of the people on the show paragons of human virtue and morality. It doesn't seem to me like any character acts as a Lisa Simpson that serves as a mouthpiece for the writers to evangelize for their position.
Very, because the very worst of us at least have the function of testing how much freedom we really do have. Once society starts selecting which views can be public and which can't, then ALL of our heads are on the chopping block because that means we are only allowed to express thoughts society lets us express. Great if you're a huge conformist, not so great if you want to think independently. Do you really want to put yourself at the mercy of Leviathan?
What's scary is, liberals tend to like that idea because adhering to the norms and expectations of society and thinking in terms of what's good and functional for society is more important than thinking in terms of individual rights (unless they feel those individual rights ultimately serve society) and conservatives want to PROMOTE STANDARDS and edicts in their holy book.
"In other countries, "Disrespect for the president, legislature, or government" is grounds for jail time. In America it's "disrespect for a CEO, the board, or corporation" that leads to jail time."
That's really silly and some of the complaints about capitalism here on Slashdot are really poor.
First of all, you're completely equivocating on what is meant by "disrespect" here. "Disrespect" for the RIAA in this case is due to dogmatic adherence to an outdated view of property rights and even worse the idea that information can be copyrighted. And it wasn't for "stealing", it was for "providing." Well, it's true that the government only cares about the bigger fish in the sea here, but that's actually due to the nature of democracy, or our republic--the more "pull" or influence you have, the more you get shit done, and big businesses inherently get more influence.
Don't take this as support for one-man-one-vote, though. Then politicians cater not to the so-called "elite", but the middle of the bell curve.
What? Anarcho-communist makes perfect sense, because communists often think of themselves as anarchists. I think you are very unfamiliar with what you are talking about. There's even an opposing thought called anarcho-capitalism.
Why, that's to be determined in a court of law, of course, where a large business with near-infinite legal resources and you, a normal citizen with quite possibly very little extra funds to afford a decent lawyer, duke it out in an adversarial system which works in a dialectical fashion to arrive at truth and justice. The judge, who understands the legal and technical subtleties of the issues involved, makes a just and fair ruling based on principles of righteousness and never at all because of bias or political considerations.
"I'm aware of people getting rid of cancer homeopathically and therapeutically, yet are killed in good health by the court-ordered radiation therapy they were coerced into continuing."
Because we are talking about EVIDENCE-based medicine, not eye-of-newt, toe of frog nonsense and tinfoil hat paranoia. Let me guess, this is all orchestrated by the Jewish Illuminati Freemasons?
I bet that radio show was something like Alex Jones', which is why you didn't care to mention what radio show you heard it on. Some people will believe any form of bullshit--you are one of them.
You get it, and you deserve a gold star. Consumers want to blame business for their own stupidity. Well, duh! You let someone get the, relatively speaking, better end of the deal by your own consistent action! Wake up and start shopping around and doing comparison shopping instead of buying what you saw on the TV commercial or because your friend bought it!
You know, it's really funny, these pleas for the government to step in and make your life better.
Modern governments are, at their core, democratic (don't give me that Republic spiel, that's less true today than it ever was and the base of all republics is democracy anyway) and require at least plurality action to get a certain thing done.
Whereas, stuff like the cell phone market being stuffy is directly the result of lazy consumers--the same people that are also the only ones that can really enable change by electing politicians that will change things.
Politicians are also beholden to special interests, and in any case, whenever a politician does anything it is setting a normative value for other people and--maybe I'm too conservative-I don't see that as all a good thing.
If consumers want to change the market, they should stop ENABLING the market. Nobody is making you buy a shitty cell phone. You want it, you think you need it, so like a heroin addict needing a fix you keep on taking your poison, enabling the same thing you rally against. The modern citizen, the modern consumer, is perhaps one of the stupidest organisms on Earth. Spending resources on things they recognize as being shit, all the while hoping some karmic force sets about righteousness in the world, is not my idea of an intelligent, effective way to use your resources.
Of course, it's far too easy to just want God or Government to descend down from above and make everything better and force everyone to do exactly what you personally feel should be done.
Apple is often an offender of this. They heavily market the hell out of their above-average-but-overpriced products, and people buy them, unaware and apathetic that better things exist for cheaper.
Quit blaming the fucking "CORPORATIONS!!!" and stare into the fucking mirror for a change. It's easy to blame the drug dealer for the addict's habits but ultimately it's the addict that keeps coming back for more and is the one that can stop the self-destructive cycle.
I'll channel the average Apple fanboy and just say that copy-and-paste is an unnecessary feature that only makes things more difficult to use. You should be glad there's no cumbersome copy-and-paste feature! Apple knows best.
Slashdot Mirror
*spoiler alert*
Not true. Look at the problems caused by taking Valerri's daughter away from her, as one example. Hell, look at how both Cylon and Humans were planning on backstabbing each other when trying to find out the Final Five because they didn't trust one another. You must have also forgotten the fact that humans apparently were trying to provoke the Cylons into going to war with them. Neither Cylon nor Humans are necessarily the good guys, though some clearly are bad guys, or at least misguided. Not all humans are willing to forgive, either.
The whole point is that not all Cylons are bad Cylons, and yet the bad Cylons cause the humans to be paranoid of the good ones. You're looking at the show from a "go humans!" lens. Take a step back. Forgiveness on both sides is a pretty big element of the show, remember, the Cylons are still upset over enslavement, for example.
OK, I generally agree with you. I'm not sure there was some conspiracy over "government schools" brainwashing students, but yes, "rule of men" is not something I'm quite fond of.
The reason I asked is because I'm sure some people rather like the idea of "rule of men." It sounds so populist.
Of course, I went through a public school civics class like everyone else. The instructor, a democrat, didn't very much like my joke of blurting out "terrorists in the White House" to a friend as a joke and would not even allow us to represent a third party (heh, guess which one?) when doing a project on political parties--we could only represent Democrats or Republicans; this solidified in other students minds the legitimacy of the parties as ruling bodies. When watching an educationally useless video of Air Force One, everyone was wowed by all the luxuries on it. Only my friend and I were offended that our tax dollars are being used to treat the president, who should be more of a public servant, like a king.
I think it's less that there's top-down brainwashing plots and more of simply the stupid-minded and patriotic end up teaching civics classes.
I'm completely and profoundly shocked over this startling revelation.
Is that more a good thing or a bad thing?
Haha, oh man, I didn't even think of that, but you are right on the mark.
It should be noted that the nucleus accumbens is also involved in -expectation of reward- and not necessarily reward itself. This is a major part of addiction--the addict may be desensitized to the effects of the drug but nonetheless may seek out the drug due to EXPECTATION of "reward" and to keep away withdrawal symptoms.
The mice associating the rooms with the effects of the drug is directly applicable to humans. Anyone who has tried to quit smoking may have had a difficult time during smoke break time because the context cues one to expect/desire their fix. Good way to kick the habit, if you're looking to do so, is not to hang out in the same spots you did your drug, not to hang out with the same people, so on and so forth. Otherwise, you'll likely fall back into your own habits.
The fact that the constitution is the supreme law of the land. This means that no treaty has the power to modify it.
Theoretically. The document itself has become more and more symbolic over time and it's been less held as "law of the land." It's been used more for political maneuvering among all three branches. That is inevitably what happens when you have a "Living Constitution" interpretation and not a strict "constructionist" one where any changes must be ratified, because you can just claim that your interpretation is the best for the times and thus not have to worry about procedure and dissent. When you're not held to a constant literal meaning of law, then the law simply means whatever the interpreter wants it to mean and whatever they can get away with through that interpretation. And it's not going to be just Bush. Obama will do the same thing, when it suits him or what he wants and believes.
People are too quick to cast off the idea that race doesn't mean anything biologically through ideological lens. It's true that people all deserve the same political treatment, but people are so scared of racial bigotry and eugenics and social darwinism that they sometimes can't see straight. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve were blasted for supposedly being racial bigots, however wrong or right they were, and E. O. Wilson of Sociobiology fame had water thrown on him because the the nuturist bias of many on the left makes them view any innatist viewpoint as being "right-wing" apologetics for racial mistreatment or whatever, which is completely wrongminded. Nature doesn't care about how you think the world is supposed to work.
You argue, however rightly or wrongly, that blacks may have a genetic TENDENCY towards lower IQs (I am not saying this is true, bear with me here) and people blast you, however, you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it. People want "smile science", they want only nice things to be reported and they view publishing any negative or socially inconvenient data to be, well, socially irresponsible, no matter how true it even is. Remember, brain and body are one, as every physical change in the body is heritable so too are any structural changes in the brain which result in expressions of mental capacity and behavioral output.
I am not saying race does play a significant role in intellectual qualities. Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!) but it is not at all impossible that a race may have a tendency towards lower or higher IQs. And, as I've been sure to mention, this is all genetic tendency; variation among individuals still exists and even in a population with a mean IQ lower than the mean IQ of the average population you can still have IQs above the mean of the overall population.
It's also worth nothing that nature often cares little about the categories we've assigned to things for our human way of thinking. Evolution shows us that "species" is not at all easy to define as we think. A good video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5OEw_q-II (made by rather intelligent shanek guy who laboriously fights idiots online. If you're reading this Shane, "Hi!"). The point of this is to show that yes, race is largely a human construct, much like species itself is, but that does not mean it is entirely meaningless. We know some racial groups are more at risk for certain types of disease, for example.
The overall fallacy here is thinking that behavior/mental processes are somehow different from physical one, when behavior itself is a resultant of the physical workings of the brain, and thus some races really could be different from others in a particular way.
That said, Battlestar Galactica is a great show because they don't shove a particular moral conclusion down your throat (insofar that the Cylon vs. Human dynamic is obviously a racial conflict in large part caused by human arrogance and inability to forgive) a lot of the time by making the issues difficult with no clear convenient solution, just as they are in real life, and also making none of the people on the show paragons of human virtue and morality. It doesn't seem to me like any character acts as a Lisa Simpson that serves as a mouthpiece for the writers to evangelize for their position.
Very, because the very worst of us at least have the function of testing how much freedom we really do have. Once society starts selecting which views can be public and which can't, then ALL of our heads are on the chopping block because that means we are only allowed to express thoughts society lets us express. Great if you're a huge conformist, not so great if you want to think independently. Do you really want to put yourself at the mercy of Leviathan?
What's scary is, liberals tend to like that idea because adhering to the norms and expectations of society and thinking in terms of what's good and functional for society is more important than thinking in terms of individual rights (unless they feel those individual rights ultimately serve society) and conservatives want to PROMOTE STANDARDS and edicts in their holy book.
They're all the same.
You're equivocating and you're stretching the lessons of sharing.
I had to scroll up to test a hypothesis. Yep. kdawson again.
Shakespeare? Isn't he the guy that invented the ball-point pen?
I would have suspected the use of Paint shop pro, myself.
"In other countries, "Disrespect for the president, legislature, or government" is grounds for jail time. In America it's "disrespect for a CEO, the board, or corporation" that leads to jail time."
That's really silly and some of the complaints about capitalism here on Slashdot are really poor.
First of all, you're completely equivocating on what is meant by "disrespect" here. "Disrespect" for the RIAA in this case is due to dogmatic adherence to an outdated view of property rights and even worse the idea that information can be copyrighted. And it wasn't for "stealing", it was for "providing." Well, it's true that the government only cares about the bigger fish in the sea here, but that's actually due to the nature of democracy, or our republic--the more "pull" or influence you have, the more you get shit done, and big businesses inherently get more influence.
Don't take this as support for one-man-one-vote, though. Then politicians cater not to the so-called "elite", but the middle of the bell curve.
Running HURD, of course.
What? Anarcho-communist makes perfect sense, because communists often think of themselves as anarchists. I think you are very unfamiliar with what you are talking about. There's even an opposing thought called anarcho-capitalism.
Mail them to me.
And the only reason the worker has their job and livelihood in the first place is due to Mr. Investor and Mr. CEO, etc.
If you don't like that system, feel free to start a co-op.
You said everything I was thinking and more.
Why, that's to be determined in a court of law, of course, where a large business with near-infinite legal resources and you, a normal citizen with quite possibly very little extra funds to afford a decent lawyer, duke it out in an adversarial system which works in a dialectical fashion to arrive at truth and justice. The judge, who understands the legal and technical subtleties of the issues involved, makes a just and fair ruling based on principles of righteousness and never at all because of bias or political considerations.
Right?
"I'm aware of people getting rid of cancer homeopathically and therapeutically, yet are killed in good health by the court-ordered radiation therapy they were coerced into continuing."
Because we are talking about EVIDENCE-based medicine, not eye-of-newt, toe of frog nonsense and tinfoil hat paranoia. Let me guess, this is all orchestrated by the Jewish Illuminati Freemasons?
I bet that radio show was something like Alex Jones', which is why you didn't care to mention what radio show you heard it on. Some people will believe any form of bullshit--you are one of them.
Uh, that's beside the point. The penalty being pushed is far worse than a 1 Euro compensation.
You get it, and you deserve a gold star. Consumers want to blame business for their own stupidity. Well, duh! You let someone get the, relatively speaking, better end of the deal by your own consistent action! Wake up and start shopping around and doing comparison shopping instead of buying what you saw on the TV commercial or because your friend bought it!
You know, it's really funny, these pleas for the government to step in and make your life better.
Modern governments are, at their core, democratic (don't give me that Republic spiel, that's less true today than it ever was and the base of all republics is democracy anyway) and require at least plurality action to get a certain thing done.
Whereas, stuff like the cell phone market being stuffy is directly the result of lazy consumers--the same people that are also the only ones that can really enable change by electing politicians that will change things.
Politicians are also beholden to special interests, and in any case, whenever a politician does anything it is setting a normative value for other people and--maybe I'm too conservative-I don't see that as all a good thing.
If consumers want to change the market, they should stop ENABLING the market. Nobody is making you buy a shitty cell phone. You want it, you think you need it, so like a heroin addict needing a fix you keep on taking your poison, enabling the same thing you rally against. The modern citizen, the modern consumer, is perhaps one of the stupidest organisms on Earth. Spending resources on things they recognize as being shit, all the while hoping some karmic force sets about righteousness in the world, is not my idea of an intelligent, effective way to use your resources.
Of course, it's far too easy to just want God or Government to descend down from above and make everything better and force everyone to do exactly what you personally feel should be done.
Apple is often an offender of this. They heavily market the hell out of their above-average-but-overpriced products, and people buy them, unaware and apathetic that better things exist for cheaper.
Quit blaming the fucking "CORPORATIONS!!!" and stare into the fucking mirror for a change. It's easy to blame the drug dealer for the addict's habits but ultimately it's the addict that keeps coming back for more and is the one that can stop the self-destructive cycle.
I'll channel the average Apple fanboy and just say that copy-and-paste is an unnecessary feature that only makes things more difficult to use. You should be glad there's no cumbersome copy-and-paste feature! Apple knows best.