Look nuclear could lead to bad scenarios, but civilization destroying climate change is the Worst Possible Thing. Why not spend the money to build them better? They knew beforehand that their older gen nukes were vulnerable. It has to be at least one option. It's great that there are super incentivized to find sustainable alternatives but is incentive what is lacking on the part of researchers or is it now time we're running out of ?
Systematically lower carbon emissions- at the point of gun if necessary. Full throttle research into green technology - using deficit spending if necessary. Conservation and maximum usage of current alternatives , by law if necessary. That's what's got to happen and it will the only question is will we do it in time?
We've coddled these cretins for way too long. We've permitted them the benefit of the rock certain knowledge and advancements that evolutionary "theory" begets, while also letting them bad mouth and lie about the said-same theory and researchers who save their lives daily. Are scientists filled with Satan? Fine. Let's force them to actually live in the world they're knocking themselves out trying to create for the rest of us.
Let people who don't believe in evolution be forbidden from accessing those medical treatments which are completely, 100% dependent on researchers understanding the ultra-fine details of the evolutionary process and, in fact, dependent on evolution being true for their advancement.
That pretty much covers everything from the proper use of antibiotics and the avoidance of MRSA, to gene therapy, to the attenuation process that creates vaccines and the defense they give against diseases like polio, rubella and smallpox. Let's see then there's pathogen tracking, so no CDC information for them oh and molecular epidemiology also.
Oh and here's one just for deniers, the molecules being developed which are capable of binding to bioterrorists agents like anthrax spores and ricin molecules are of course entirely dependent on the artificial, directed evolutionary processes utilized by the biotechnology industry.
Yes deniers, let's create a generation of students who don't believe in evolution but who do believe you can pray away the gay. What a fucking shining city on a hill we'll become under that regime.
Look this is done by NSA or CIA or the like. That means they had help from M$ and the lot, and also from name-brand people in the open source world. This has to include possibly getting help from the virus protection makers themselves, who knows? . You can't know because where national security intersects with stuff we use from companies we know, lying becomes virtuous and anyone can be lying. You're through the looking glass now. That's how this game is played. So the fact that they were able to pass as a trusted application component is no surprise.
One thing that's distressing is that, just as in non-cyber warfare, the ability to invoke entropy exceeds the ability to preserve order. For example, we can't protect ourselves against nukes. In fact, we can't protect ourselves against most weapons. That's only going to become more true as weapons become fiercer. Worse, this is not just true of our side, it unfortunately holds for the other side. This fact holds huge political and societal ramifications.
As the ability to create destructive artifacts moves from the nation-state to the level of small groups and finally to the level of individual actors, then the interest of the majority- in the form of the state- in controlling and knowing the actions of not just nation states, but also small groups and finally individual actors will only increase.
If it only takes one guy (it's always a guy) to harm a lot of people in very bad or mortal ways, the state, unfortunately, has a legitimate interest in knowing as much as it can about everyone's doings:(
This is not even something that will be inflicted on an unwilling populace- it's something they'll demand.
You can see this principle in action today. Virus writers hurt a whole lot of people but it's just a little damage. So the state has created the new category of cybercrime and pursues offenders with a little vigor.
They pursue with a lot more vigor small groups who want to mortally harm small groups of people, say at a mall by shooting it up.
They pursue with yet vigor and money small groups who want to acquire WMD and any person or entity who wants to help them. This is something we (allegedly) go to war over, point being at least Congress conceives of this as being worthy of an all out national response, whether they're right on the facts or wrong is irrelevant in this context.
As technology progresses, the number of people needed to inflict damage tends towards one. The type of damage that person can inflict tends towards death and disability. The number of people that damage can be inflicted upon tends towards hundreds, then thousands then millions. All three variables moving independently yet all trending overall towards their mayhem extrema.
It will serve us to remember that this is a basic fact about the world and the future that is no one's fault. The changes to come between individuals and the state are inevitable.
The challenge for the future is how do we structure society and redefine the roles of state and individual so that we can keep ourselves safe against the lone psycho with the nano-lab in the basement AND ALSO have a free, democratic and trusted form of government? How can we create a government that is at once radically more transparent and trustworthy than the one we have now and also opaque enough to be able to wage devastating, indefensible, asymmetrical warfare on any one individual anywhere in the world at any time?
Oh, and by the way, "behavioral econimics" is just a mix of sociology and psychology that is as old as the idea of six-degrees of separation, except that it has a brand name that econimists can swallow while still pretending to preserve their pride.
Ha, now that's a good insight. Never underestimate or, always overestimate, the power of ego-saving devices when trying to course correct a ship carrying a lot of egos...
All this stuff is fascinating and I wish I had about 35 lifetimes to spend on it all.
Look you can't take claims like this seriously, by which i mean as immutable laws of nature or even as normative of online communities in a longitudinal sense, that is, as an enduring property of online communities.
From the paper:
In this problem we have a social network in the form of a directed graph and thresholds for each individual. Based on this data, the desired output is the smallest possible set of individuals such that, if initially activated, the entire population will adopt the new behavior (a seed set)
What the study shows in not that will happen in real social networks, but rather in their "tipping model" which is a directed graph whose nodes "activate" when they reach a certain threshold.of input given to them by surrounding nodes.
So what they demonstrated was a property of directed graphs and nodes with a certain made-up (ad hoc) set of characteristics. To assume that those characteristics are descriptive of human beings in a real social network is to extrapolate beyond the results of paper.
The authors obviously think that such extrapolation may be possible since they cite two other papers that they characterize as showing that real social networks have exhibited such behavior, but actually, those papers show something much more hypothetical and specific which I won't go into here.
When they say they applied their theory to social networks, (Buzznet
Douban
Flickr
Flixster
FourSquare
Frienster
Last.Fm
LiveJournal
Livemocha
WikiTalk )
they mean they borrowed the physical topology - the interconnectedness of the nodes- of those networks, (which is available to researchers) NOT that they either found examples of nor instigated the real world behaviour of the people in those networks.
Back to reality, that such things CAN happen is not surprising . I am pretty sure Jennifer Aniston represented less than 1% of the group of American females in the mid 90s, and she wielded the power to tip hairstyles ("The Rachel" hairstyle!!! ) enormously in that time.
Similarly in Roman times, the hairstyles of prominent individual women would appear on coins, for instance, the Emperor's wife. This would lead to a frenzy of copycat hairstyles because hairstyle was one way the rich signaled their status.
There's a danger here that graph theory being applied to social networks will play the role of the mythical "perfectly rational actor" has played in economics. That is, a clean model which produces complex results whose ultimate referent is ONLY itself and in many decisive ways emits behaviour which is OPPOSITE of the behaviour of the real world entity which the theory sought to model.
People are irrational in ways that until recently, with the advent of behavioural economics, were not accounted for in economic models. IMO behavioural economics might as well have taken the name "real economics" . The same thing is going on here. How real people really behave in social networking sites is a wide open question. What we know is people hate to be manipulated and will act against their own seeming best interests in a wide variety of circumstances. See Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" for some examples. Also here's the page on irrationality in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality
The point here is
1) this is not a study of people's behaviour, it's a study of the behaviour of nodes which have just those properties the researchers elected to give them transferred to a network topologies which were taken from a variety of real social networks.
2) The behaviour of real social networks is not determined by the assumptions of the researchers
3) nor did those assumptions model the actual behavior of real people in those networks.
Real behaviour is vastly more complex than emitting behavior when a threshold "input" from surrounding people is reached.
woofy goofy said: You claimed the science behind AGW was poor and not trustworthy. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
khallow rebutted:
Let's revisit this since you erroneously think this issue has been dealt with...What goes into pseudo-science is uninformed speculation about the effects of AGW.
No actually, you're lying.
what you said was said:
The research claiming the most extreme predictions often are remarkably flawed and insincere.
And in addition..
"Uninformed speculation" about anything is always bad, (such as you've been making throughout this post, see my response below to your meanderings and layman's speculation about "food production" etc ) so this "argument" is really vacant. On the other hand, the links I've posted about the catastrophic effects of global warming are made by duly qualified scientists, of which you are not one.
It's amusing to see the degree of unconscious projection that goes on in the mind deniers. Curiously, "uniformed speculation " is exactly all you've produce in this entire thread. Yet you characterize statements by people who have spent their entire professional careers studying just the highly technical subject matter they are making public pronouncements on "as uninformed speculation".
So you know you're doing it.
This is one of the traits of deniers- they are consciously or unconsciously aware that they're lying. This is why reasoning with them is an exercise in pointlessness.
The big problem with his subsequent bald assertion that the carrying capacity of Earth is one billion people, is simply that the only obstacle here is food production.
We can get orders of magnitude improvement out of current land by a) farming more efficiently such as hydroponics, b turning non-arable land into arable land (irrigation, greenhouses, etc), and c) intercepting sunlight and reemitting it in the frequencies that plants actually use.
I figure there's at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater food production that we wring out of Earth. It's a terrible idea, but it's feasible just using today's technology. Point is, Schellnhuber glibly asserts that carrying capacity is only a billion people even though we are obviously supporting well over that just fine. Even a significant temperature increase (no doubt over a few centuries) isn't going to change that significantly.
Yeah , actually, no gives a flying fuck what you figure.
Moving on, Dr. Karoly implies that most of that rise could occur by 2050. Here's the problem. Current global warming just isn't rising that fast and the models don't predict such things except at the extremes of both economic growth and their climate models. His claims just don't fit actual evidence.
First, in true denier fashion, you're changing your argument. What you originally said in response to:
WoofyGoofy said: In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon
was this:
khallow replied: The scientific literature doesn't make such a claim
But I posted a links to the scientific literature that does make such a claim.
Now that you're faced with that fact, you change your argument to something else. Specifically a (layman-denier's) critique of the research which does make those claims.
And in addition, the people making those claims outside of the literature are the scientists themselves. Their motivation is transparent- most layman don't and can't read the scientific literature and need the projections and consequences to be made in terms they can understand. So not only are you a liar, but your whole point is moo
Yeah you're a fucking idiot. Here is what you do. You say things that make you feel good then claim them as facts. That is 100% of what you've done in this thread.
You're exactly the reason it's going to come to violence because anyone who fits that description is immune to reason.
So continuing the list of things you've said which are false and proved false , we can now add the following , oh and one more thing, the mendacity and superficiality with which you throw out these false statements without a care in the world as to their veracity, even to the level of not bothering to use the resources provided you to see if, in fact, the scientific literature DOES make such a claim, bespeaks nothing but a psychopathic indifference to the welfare of others and reveals the fact that instead of arguing in good faith, you're merely using this argument as a form of ego-defense and propaganda.
Believe me when I say I've argued with at least 100 of your ilk and you're all remarkably the same broken, stunted personality types. Slashdotters, remember this conversation when your government seeks your help in repressing the Great Conservative Rebellion. Do what your government requires of you and above all, have no pity because the diseased mind behind these denialist posts is a photocopy of every other denier on the face of the planet.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming, Earth's population would be devastated.
"In a very cynical way, it's a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something â"- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people."
I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4 degrees.
"If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving."
Australian climate scientist Professor David Karoly, alongside Melbourne University and CSIRO colleagues, will give a paper next week on likely changes to our climate in a 4-degree scenario. He has warned that "we are unleashing hell on Australia",
Allowing the climate to rise by just two degrees Celsius - the target most industrialized nations are currently discussing in Copenhagenâ"may still lead to a catastrophic sea level rise of six to nine meters, according to a new study in Nature....
In the US a sea level rise of 6-9 meters would permanently submerge New Orleans, most of southern Florida, and part of the East Coast. Low-lying islands-now pushing in Copenhagen for a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius--would sink meters underwater, while the ocean would come to cover most of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.
You don't have a point when you say such predictions are not published, since it's the same scientists who publish the research proving AGW who are also making these predictions. Unless of course you consider them to be liars.
So let's review what lies you've told today, shall we?
You claimed the science behind AGW was poor and not trustworthy. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that the rise in sea level was nothing to worry about. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that AGW would not be catastrophic . When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that warnings of catastrophic consequences of global warming do not appear in studies. Now that has been shown to be false, and what's more, a red
. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
So you are arguing for a God just not calling it that.
Also, in above, you yet again make assertions about how the universe has to be, this time involving time. So instead of rebutting me, you again confirmed my previous observation which is, you can't make assertions about the nature of reality using only folk logic.
Here is your folk logic:
Since stuff exist, it's always always been here, or came into existence. There really isn't an in between here.
You have no way of knowing even that your common sense notions of existence map to any true proposition about reality at all. It may be that the human mind cannot grasp how the universe is and we're forever trapped by our inability to conceive of how things really are. It may be that scientists, contrary to our folk intuition , will prove that things neither exist nor don't exist in the way we understand them. It is already true that the way in which you're using time is outdated and there is not such a thing as time but rather space-time.
All these thing s are highly counter-intuitive. OTOH intuitive things that seem like they could never be wrong to people are proved wrong.
So your assertions are unsupportable, and yes, you are trying to argue for god , just through the device of redefining god to be something more nebulous, as your comment which I quoted clearly shows.
here are the main tactics used by professional deniers- people paid by the post to show up on board and sprout bullshit to weigh down the conversation or distract the direction of the conversation (for instance, we'll all talking about seal level changes when in the same time frame we'll talking about, we already know the earth will be uninhabitable, making sea level rise and any discussion about it moot.)
No your argument doesn't stand at all. The reason is that you can't merely reason your way to knowledge of how the universe is. Your idea that a thing is either created by something outside itself or existed forever is an unproved hypothesis about the nature of reality and has no more validity than other "manifestly evident" theories that were shown to be false, like the idea that space is filled with aether.
What's wrong? You can't project what seems like common sense to you onto the universe. It's even possible that the human mind cannot conceive of what the universe is actually like and any models we build will be flawed.
Just because there's a gap in our knowledge, even one that may be permanent, that doesn't mean you can fill that gap with God. Such arguments even have a name because they're ubiquitous and known fallacies. They're called God IN the Gaps arguments. Look it up.
It's amusing to hear you hold forth with outright lies. But you are doing one good thing. you're clearly painting a picture of the denier / conservative American to the rest of the world . You have no idea what your'e talking about. you've been flooded with links refuting every point you've made.
You claimed that climate change would not be catastrophic. You were proved wrong.
You claimed that the science which indicates catastrophic climate change was flawed. You were proved wrong.
Now you claim that the effects of rising sea levels are negligible. You are wrong again.
The impacts of sea level rise - even in the lower ranges of the current predictions - looks to be severe. Approximately ten percent of the worlds population - 600 million people - live in low lying areas in danger of being flooded. A previously released study led by John Church, shows that even a modest sea level rise of 50 centimeters will result in a major increase in the number of coastal flooding events.
"Our study centered on Australia showed that coastal flooding events that today we expect only once every hundred years will happen several times a year by 2100", says John Church.
So I hope everyone reading this can understand why we can't reason with deniers and change their minds. This is what they are, this guy.
Inn history, violence comes when all other means of forestalling the disaster wrought by someone else's behaviour have been exhausted.
As you can see, we have reached that time in history and what history has done in the past, it will do again in the near future . If you're ever inclined to ask the question -why did it come to this, refer to this thread.
So what? I predict that the moon is now made of green cheese. Now, the thing has been predicted. It doesn't matter to the truth of that statement that the prediction was spurious.
Except your predictions aren't the result of a decades long investigation by scientists who are experts in their respective fields and have arrived at their conclusions through the most rigorous process of falsehood rejection / truth detection humankind has ever devised- the process of conducting properly constructed scientific experiments and publishing them in qualified peer reviewed journals .
The fact that you equate in argument your worthless "prediction" with the end product of the above process says one thing and one thing only about you. Like all deniers; you are, amongst a long list of other things, narcissistic .
"Modest" versus "catastrophic" are estimates of harm. Those people above aren't doing cost/benefit analysis, hence, their terms aren't credible.
Because you and your FoxNews denier kind decide what is credible, not reality and not scientists. This is you wielding your magical amulet of spin again. If you speak words, then they somehow make reality. If you speak a rebuttal, it has value and potency. Scientists have their opinion and you have your opinion of the scientists, so everything is equal, because, hey. it's a free country and everyone gets their opinion.
Catastrophic Climate Change:
Catastrophic is used to describe the course we're on :
In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon
EPA Director of the Department of Pollutant Decrees, Ray Donaldson, said,
Back before carbon dioxide was dangerous, we simply assumed that water vapor was also benign. But all reputable scientists now agree that the increased water vapor content of the atmosphere from such sources as burning of fuels and power plant cooling towers will also enhance the greenhouse effect, leading
to potentially catastrophic warming.
James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don't Act Now
And here in graphic dertail is a degree by degree description of what the rise in temperature they're talking about actually translates to on earth. It's literally the end of the world.
Why would that happen. If the future generations can't figure out how to avoid the modest effects of AGW over what is in human terms ridiculously long periods of time, then they deserve what they get. I won't compensate them a bit.
The effects have been predicted and the fact that you elect to characterize them a "modest" when people who spent their entire professional lives studying this domain characterize the effects as "catastrophic" really means nothing in the real world except of course that you're denying reality which is the definition of a denier. So you're a denier.. So tell us something we didn't already know.
Spin is exactly what your'e doing. You believe in the power of spin the way American Indians believed in the power of the Ghost Dance to keep them safe from the white man's bullets. You think you can wield it like an amulet and keep reality away.
Here's the bottom line. We know who the denier are. We know what's gong to happen. If you think you can resist the united power of the world's scientists when they take on the task of dealing with you and doing what needs to be done then good luck. Civilization is going to save itself from conservative reality-denying filth just the way it saved itself during WWII , with exactly the same ferocity and pitilessness.
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Wrong. You don't have to believe that. You can simply acknowledge that there are some things we might never know, and leave it at that. That's honest. That's the simple truth. It's a gap in our knowledge now and possibly forever.
Just because there is a gap doesn't mean get to fill that gap with whatever fairy tale makes you feel good.
Highlighting the popular TV series Game of Thrones, he noted that viewers were no longer content to wait for the show to air in Australia about a week after it aired in the US.
The show, frequently referred to by iiNet executives in regard to local content availability, screens on Foxtel about five days after airing in the US. It is also available to download from the iTunes Store for Australian users about the same time.
Yeah and so.. what is the market telling you to do then? Screen it at the same time. Figure it out. It's what you get paid the big bucks to do. Work it out, idiot. Never mind your fucking "kill switch", unless you're also willing to attach same device to your gonads.
Yeah and when that is a point past which can't recover- a point we may have already reached btw- how do you plan to "compensate" all the millions of people you murdered with your bad judgement? What should I tell the next generation- that I let you kill everyone for all time because "we live in a free country?" because "everyone gets an opinion and we respect the opinion of others?"
You know what I think? I think this little experiment in democracy has provably failed for now and we should start doing what needs to be done and anyone who wants to stand in the way of that can die in the streets who the fuck cares how, I sure as shit don't.
There isn't another earth we can go to when it turns out that the coke snorting degenerates who run FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal and who populate the CATO institute and the Heritage Foundation and Marshall Institute were, as predicted by serious scientists who spent their lives studying the subject matter those degenerates laid claim to, not only wrong, but lying , which is exactly what they're doing.
Just like Churchill predicted Hitlers march across Europe, it's going to happen sooner or later, it's inevitable and the sooner we start this process the fewer people have to die. When we reinstate the Constitution, it will be absent the shit about freedom of religion, replaced with a Constitutionally mandated requirement that each citizen achieve a high level of scientific understanding and that science and not some butt fucking sky gawd who orders men to rape their own daughters is what describes reality.
Your side decided that it could just Foxnews reality itself because , basically, your insane pieces of shit not worthy of the next breath you take. Think you're going to escape the consequences of your decisions like Rick Perry who rescinded fire building codes and restrictions in Texas only to have the whole fucking state go up in flames and him being forced to turn and whine to the federal government for help to clean up his gawd fucking mess? Think you're not going to be hated, hunted and exterminated for your crimes against humanity>? Think you can foxnews and bullshit and spin your way through that by rewriting history?
It's going to be die baby die. The whole world hates your fucking guts and already want to crash through the gates and rip you to shreds with their bare hands , and the other half of this country will feel exactly the same way. have fun in your fucking bunker with your can food buddy because we're find you, we'll hunt you, we'll capture you, we'll try you, we'll convict you and then they'll fucking do what's done to deniers in the future.. torture you to death for sport while he "authorities " do the old look away.
You and your kind are the worst human beings ever to crawl on this planet and nothing is going to save you from the consequences of following coke addled "thinking" your:"leaders" Limbaugh, Hannity Murdoch the Koch brothers et. al. produced.
We're all done talking to you trying ton convince you of jack fucking shit. It's going on kill time baby because you left this nation no other choice.
Then we're really in a bind aren't we as a nation? Because the bible thumpers not only don't believe in evolution and global warming, but they also don't believe the government has any right to demand they teach their anything they don't want. . But wait until the day they get power (as if) . Then we'll have very many laws with swift and severe punishment for teaching evolution.
See it's facts like these that lead me to recast my own thinking that creationists et al are not so much of a different political persuasion , but more like a society-destroying terrorist group. They aren't interested in playing fair. They're interested in demanding play fair until such time as they can get enough power to change the rules of the game. They're after one thing and one thing only- power.. the power to forcibly inflict their theocracy on all of America and any protestations to the contrary are just knowing lies they tell so no one is motivated to dish out to them what they're planning on dishing out to everyone else.
This is not politics. This is a religious war and these are religious warriors and the policies they pursue vis-avis science and education are effectively a suicide pact.
This makes them worse than political enemies, it makes them- literally- terrorists. Literally like a James Bond insane super-villain out to literally destroy the world and everyone in it
Even Hitler didn't want to destroy the world so they could be raised up into the Rapture and see his enemies cast down into Hell. And even if he did, he had no way to achieve that end. With AGW, actually, they do have a way to achieve that ends.
These people have every intention of following through with policies that will kill, my family, and everyone else I know their families and finally everyone on earth, effectively ending humanity and civilization not just as we know it, but period.
How am I supposed to think about them when those are the real facts? How are we supposed to deal with them? Let them go on doing what it is they do in the name of religious freedom? Leave them alone because they have religious and civil rights?
Let me tell you, those rights and our country as we know it are going to go away and not in any way fundies think it will happen with Jesus coming down from the heaves. . Don't think it can't happen, don't think we're beyond making history, big history. History happens , and not just to people in text books.
I am telling you for a fact that plans are on the board to neutralize them through means you might call "fascist". It comes down to survival and when it gets down to that, everything else goes out the window, maybe for generations.
i sincerely hope they wake the fuck up before they become the target of their fellow citizens wrath. That will of course be about the time the government stops being able to control that wrath. This is not going to go well for them.
This framing of religious freedom as the right to deny science and reality is going to go no matter whether we as a species survive or not. We ARE going to take the freedoms away from them and we ARE going to tell their kids what's what whether they like it or not. They wanted holy war and I can tell you that they are going to get exactly that. There is about a 0% probability that we will make it through this century without a civil war in this country between the reality based population and the headcases who answered this poll. At the end of that, it's game over for the religionists.
They apparently are indifferent to the fact that he other 54% of Americans are not indifferent to their lunacy and have lost every scintilla of patience or sympathy with them.
They are worse than Nazis, by far, and they need to be exterminated and that's exactly where this is going with the inevitability of a freight train. If they think liberals are just too passive to take up arms, if they they made the mistake of thinking that our tolerance is a form of weakness then I pity them.
Let's face it. Democracy is failing. In a sense, it's already failed, since the time frame to roll back global warming with certainty has already passed and we're no dependent on sheer luck to not go extinct- the luck that the rising temperature will reach some threshold X which will induce deniers to call for action AND ALSO not represent a a point in time when it's just Too Late.
I'd pretty much characterize that not just as a failure of democracy , but of a failed democracy outright.
In the past, when the religious conservatives took over a society and crashed it, people were able to survive and civilization elsewhere went forward.
This time these suicide bombers mean to take us all with them. It's written in their holy book , this is the End Times and the Rapture is nigh, and they're not the least bit afraid to drive all of civilization straight off that cliff.
Democracy has failed and I authorize the President, the heads of the armed forces and the national security apparatus to do whatever it takes it do what needs to be done. If it means suspending the Constitution, then do it. If it means conducting a covert war on conservatives, taking out their "thought leaders", channels of communication and funding sources, then do it. If it means releasing a virus that wipes out denier states and their populations then do it. Democracy has failed and now it's not about rights and freedoms, it's about survival and who is going to survive and that is sure as shit not going to be conservatives no matter what else happens.
Slashdot Mirror
A way to make Kim Jong-eun look good.
S. Korea: "I found it! "
Oh and I forgot about Turing.. that's right.. fuckin' faggot... the conservatives gave him just what he deserves, eh?
Just the right wing's way of saying- "thanks for saving us from Hitler, you crazy science guys!"
I was going to say that but I didn't know if people still get the reference.
Just how many nails does this here cloud's coffin take ?
Legally mandated opening EULA clause:
"Your data is no longer private....".
Look nuclear could lead to bad scenarios, but civilization destroying climate change is the Worst Possible Thing. Why not spend the money to build them better? They knew beforehand that their older gen nukes were vulnerable. It has to be at least one option. It's great that there are super incentivized to find sustainable alternatives but is incentive what is lacking on the part of researchers or is it now time we're running out of ?
Systematically lower carbon emissions- at the point of gun if necessary. Full throttle research into green technology - using deficit spending if necessary. Conservation and maximum usage of current alternatives , by law if necessary. That's what's got to happen and it will the only question is will we do it in time?
Let people who don't believe in evolution be forbidden from accessing those medical treatments which are completely, 100% dependent on researchers understanding the ultra-fine details of the evolutionary process and, in fact, dependent on evolution being true for their advancement.
That pretty much covers everything from the proper use of antibiotics and the avoidance of MRSA, to gene therapy, to the attenuation process that creates vaccines and the defense they give against diseases like polio, rubella and smallpox. Let's see then there's pathogen tracking, so no CDC information for them oh and molecular epidemiology also.
Oh and here's one just for deniers, the molecules being developed which are capable of binding to bioterrorists agents like anthrax spores and ricin molecules are of course entirely dependent on the artificial, directed evolutionary processes utilized by the biotechnology industry.
Yes deniers, let's create a generation of students who don't believe in evolution but who do believe you can pray away the gay. What a fucking shining city on a hill we'll become under that regime.
Look this is done by NSA or CIA or the like. That means they had help from M$ and the lot, and also from name-brand people in the open source world. This has to include possibly getting help from the virus protection makers themselves, who knows? . You can't know because where national security intersects with stuff we use from companies we know, lying becomes virtuous and anyone can be lying. You're through the looking glass now. That's how this game is played. So the fact that they were able to pass as a trusted application component is no surprise.
One thing that's distressing is that, just as in non-cyber warfare, the ability to invoke entropy exceeds the ability to preserve order. For example, we can't protect ourselves against nukes. In fact, we can't protect ourselves against most weapons. That's only going to become more true as weapons become fiercer. Worse, this is not just true of our side, it unfortunately holds for the other side. This fact holds huge political and societal ramifications.
As the ability to create destructive artifacts moves from the nation-state to the level of small groups and finally to the level of individual actors, then the interest of the majority- in the form of the state- in controlling and knowing the actions of not just nation states, but also small groups and finally individual actors will only increase.
If it only takes one guy (it's always a guy) to harm a lot of people in very bad or mortal ways, the state, unfortunately, has a legitimate interest in knowing as much as it can about everyone's doings :(
This is not even something that will be inflicted on an unwilling populace- it's something they'll demand.
You can see this principle in action today. Virus writers hurt a whole lot of people but it's just a little damage. So the state has created the new category of cybercrime and pursues offenders with a little vigor.
They pursue with a lot more vigor small groups who want to mortally harm small groups of people, say at a mall by shooting it up.
They pursue with yet vigor and money small groups who want to acquire WMD and any person or entity who wants to help them. This is something we (allegedly) go to war over, point being at least Congress conceives of this as being worthy of an all out national response, whether they're right on the facts or wrong is irrelevant in this context.
As technology progresses, the number of people needed to inflict damage tends towards one. The type of damage that person can inflict tends towards death and disability. The number of people that damage can be inflicted upon tends towards hundreds, then thousands then millions. All three variables moving independently yet all trending overall towards their mayhem extrema.
It will serve us to remember that this is a basic fact about the world and the future that is no one's fault. The changes to come between individuals and the state are inevitable.
The challenge for the future is how do we structure society and redefine the roles of state and individual so that we can keep ourselves safe against the lone psycho with the nano-lab in the basement AND ALSO have a free, democratic and trusted form of government? How can we create a government that is at once radically more transparent and trustworthy than the one we have now and also opaque enough to be able to wage devastating, indefensible, asymmetrical warfare on any one individual anywhere in the world at any time?
I dunno.
Oh, and by the way, "behavioral econimics" is just a mix of sociology and psychology that is as old as the idea of six-degrees of separation, except that it has a brand name that econimists can swallow while still pretending to preserve their pride.
Ha, now that's a good insight. Never underestimate or, always overestimate, the power of ego-saving devices when trying to course correct a ship carrying a lot of egos ...
All this stuff is fascinating and I wish I had about 35 lifetimes to spend on it all.
Look you can't take claims like this seriously, by which i mean as immutable laws of nature or even as normative of online communities in a longitudinal sense, that is, as an enduring property of online communities.
From the paper:
In this problem we have a social network in the form of a directed graph and thresholds for each individual. Based on this data, the desired output is the smallest possible set of individuals such that, if initially activated, the entire population will adopt the new behavior (a seed set)
What the study shows in not that will happen in real social networks, but rather in their "tipping model" which is a directed graph whose nodes "activate" when they reach a certain threshold.of input given to them by surrounding nodes.
So what they demonstrated was a property of directed graphs and nodes with a certain made-up (ad hoc) set of characteristics. To assume that those characteristics are descriptive of human beings in a real social network is to extrapolate beyond the results of paper.
The authors obviously think that such extrapolation may be possible since they cite two other papers that they characterize as showing that real social networks have exhibited such behavior, but actually, those papers show something much more hypothetical and specific which I won't go into here.
When they say they applied their theory to social networks, (Buzznet Douban Flickr Flixster FourSquare Frienster Last.Fm LiveJournal Livemocha WikiTalk ) they mean they borrowed the physical topology - the interconnectedness of the nodes- of those networks, (which is available to researchers) NOT that they either found examples of nor instigated the real world behaviour of the people in those networks.
Back to reality, that such things CAN happen is not surprising . I am pretty sure Jennifer Aniston represented less than 1% of the group of American females in the mid 90s, and she wielded the power to tip hairstyles ("The Rachel" hairstyle!!! ) enormously in that time.
Similarly in Roman times, the hairstyles of prominent individual women would appear on coins, for instance, the Emperor's wife. This would lead to a frenzy of copycat hairstyles because hairstyle was one way the rich signaled their status.
There's a danger here that graph theory being applied to social networks will play the role of the mythical "perfectly rational actor" has played in economics. That is, a clean model which produces complex results whose ultimate referent is ONLY itself and in many decisive ways emits behaviour which is OPPOSITE of the behaviour of the real world entity which the theory sought to model.
People are irrational in ways that until recently, with the advent of behavioural economics, were not accounted for in economic models. IMO behavioural economics might as well have taken the name "real economics" . The same thing is going on here. How real people really behave in social networking sites is a wide open question. What we know is people hate to be manipulated and will act against their own seeming best interests in a wide variety of circumstances. See Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" for some examples. Also here's the page on irrationality in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality
The point here is
1) this is not a study of people's behaviour, it's a study of the behaviour of nodes which have just those properties the researchers elected to give them transferred to a network topologies which were taken from a variety of real social networks.
2) The behaviour of real social networks is not determined by the assumptions of the researchers
3) nor did those assumptions model the actual behavior of real people in those networks.
Real behaviour is vastly more complex than emitting behavior when a threshold "input" from surrounding people is reached.
Finally, it should be noted that p
woofy goofy said: You claimed the science behind AGW was poor and not trustworthy. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
khallow rebutted: Let's revisit this since you erroneously think this issue has been dealt with...What goes into pseudo-science is uninformed speculation about the effects of AGW.
No actually, you're lying. what you said was said:
The research claiming the most extreme predictions often are remarkably flawed and insincere.
And in addition..
"Uninformed speculation" about anything is always bad, (such as you've been making throughout this post, see my response below to your meanderings and layman's speculation about "food production" etc ) so this "argument" is really vacant. On the other hand, the links I've posted about the catastrophic effects of global warming are made by duly qualified scientists, of which you are not one.
It's amusing to see the degree of unconscious projection that goes on in the mind deniers. Curiously, "uniformed speculation " is exactly all you've produce in this entire thread. Yet you characterize statements by people who have spent their entire professional careers studying just the highly technical subject matter they are making public pronouncements on "as uninformed speculation" .
So you know you're doing it.
This is one of the traits of deniers- they are consciously or unconsciously aware that they're lying. This is why reasoning with them is an exercise in pointlessness.
The big problem with his subsequent bald assertion that the carrying capacity of Earth is one billion people, is simply that the only obstacle here is food production.
We can get orders of magnitude improvement out of current land by a) farming more efficiently such as hydroponics, b turning non-arable land into arable land (irrigation, greenhouses, etc), and c) intercepting sunlight and reemitting it in the frequencies that plants actually use.
I figure there's at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater food production that we wring out of Earth. It's a terrible idea, but it's feasible just using today's technology. Point is, Schellnhuber glibly asserts that carrying capacity is only a billion people even though we are obviously supporting well over that just fine. Even a significant temperature increase (no doubt over a few centuries) isn't going to change that significantly.
Yeah , actually, no gives a flying fuck what you figure.
Moving on, Dr. Karoly implies that most of that rise could occur by 2050. Here's the problem. Current global warming just isn't rising that fast and the models don't predict such things except at the extremes of both economic growth and their climate models. His claims just don't fit actual evidence.
First, in true denier fashion, you're changing your argument. What you originally said in response to :
WoofyGoofy said: In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon
was this:
khallow replied: The scientific literature doesn't make such a claim
But I posted a links to the scientific literature that does make such a claim.
Now that you're faced with that fact, you change your argument to something else. Specifically a (layman-denier's) critique of the research which does make those claims.
And in addition, the people making those claims outside of the literature are the scientists themselves. Their motivation is transparent- most layman don't and can't read the scientific literature and need the projections and consequences to be made in terms they can understand. So not only are you a liar, but your whole point is moo
Yeah you're a fucking idiot. Here is what you do. You say things that make you feel good then claim them as facts. That is 100% of what you've done in this thread .
You're exactly the reason it's going to come to violence because anyone who fits that description is immune to reason.
So continuing the list of things you've said which are false and proved false , we can now add the following , oh and one more thing, the mendacity and superficiality with which you throw out these false statements without a care in the world as to their veracity, even to the level of not bothering to use the resources provided you to see if, in fact, the scientific literature DOES make such a claim, bespeaks nothing but a psychopathic indifference to the welfare of others and reveals the fact that instead of arguing in good faith, you're merely using this argument as a form of ego-defense and propaganda.
Believe me when I say I've argued with at least 100 of your ilk and you're all remarkably the same broken, stunted personality types. Slashdotters, remember this conversation when your government seeks your help in repressing the Great Conservative Rebellion. Do what your government requires of you and above all, have no pity because the diseased mind behind these denialist posts is a photocopy of every other denier on the face of the planet.
"In a very cynical way, it's a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something â"- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people."
"If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving." Australian climate scientist Professor David Karoly, alongside Melbourne University and CSIRO colleagues, will give a paper next week on likely changes to our climate in a 4-degree scenario. He has warned that "we are unleashing hell on Australia",
Allowing the climate to rise by just two degrees Celsius - the target most industrialized nations are currently discussing in Copenhagenâ"may still lead to a catastrophic sea level rise of six to nine meters, according to a new study in Nature.... In the US a sea level rise of 6-9 meters would permanently submerge New Orleans, most of southern Florida, and part of the East Coast. Low-lying islands-now pushing in Copenhagen for a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius--would sink meters underwater, while the ocean would come to cover most of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.
You don't have a point when you say such predictions are not published, since it's the same scientists who publish the research proving AGW who are also making these predictions. Unless of course you consider them to be liars.
So let's review what lies you've told today, shall we?
You claimed the science behind AGW was poor and not trustworthy. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that the rise in sea level was nothing to worry about. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that AGW would not be catastrophic . When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.
You claimed that warnings of catastrophic consequences of global warming do not appear in studies. Now that has been shown to be false, and what's more, a red
. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
So you are arguing for a God just not calling it that.
Also, in above, you yet again make assertions about how the universe has to be, this time involving time. So instead of rebutting me, you again confirmed my previous observation which is, you can't make assertions about the nature of reality using only folk logic.
Here is your folk logic:
Since stuff exist, it's always always been here, or came into existence. There really isn't an in between here.
You have no way of knowing even that your common sense notions of existence map to any true proposition about reality at all. It may be that the human mind cannot grasp how the universe is and we're forever trapped by our inability to conceive of how things really are. It may be that scientists, contrary to our folk intuition , will prove that things neither exist nor don't exist in the way we understand them. It is already true that the way in which you're using time is outdated and there is not such a thing as time but rather space-time.
All these thing s are highly counter-intuitive. OTOH intuitive things that seem like they could never be wrong to people are proved wrong.
So your assertions are unsupportable, and yes, you are trying to argue for god , just through the device of redefining god to be something more nebulous, as your comment which I quoted clearly shows.
here are the main tactics used by professional deniers- people paid by the post to show up on board and sprout bullshit to weigh down the conversation or distract the direction of the conversation (for instance, we'll all talking about seal level changes when in the same time frame we'll talking about, we already know the earth will be uninhabitable, making sea level rise and any discussion about it moot.)
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/world-on-course-for-catastrophic-6deg-rise-reveal-scientists-1822396.html
âoeNo proofâ strategy: science is uncertain
Argue over significance of facts (we can adapt)
Argue against credibility of environmentalists Hysterical (Chicken Little)
Communists (âoeWatermelonsâ, George Will: âoeGreen trees with red rootsâ)
Anti-Christian
Argue whether facts are facts
Supply alternative facts
How many of these has the present denier used in this thread?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
What's wrong? You can't project what seems like common sense to you onto the universe. It's even possible that the human mind cannot conceive of what the universe is actually like and any models we build will be flawed.
Just because there's a gap in our knowledge, even one that may be permanent, that doesn't mean you can fill that gap with God. Such arguments even have a name because they're ubiquitous and known fallacies. They're called God IN the Gaps arguments. Look it up.
You claimed that climate change would not be catastrophic. You were proved wrong.
You claimed that the science which indicates catastrophic climate change was flawed. You were proved wrong.
Now you claim that the effects of rising sea levels are negligible. You are wrong again.
from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090310104742.htm
The impacts of sea level rise - even in the lower ranges of the current predictions - looks to be severe. Approximately ten percent of the worlds population - 600 million people - live in low lying areas in danger of being flooded. A previously released study led by John Church, shows that even a modest sea level rise of 50 centimeters will result in a major increase in the number of coastal flooding events.
"Our study centered on Australia showed that coastal flooding events that today we expect only once every hundred years will happen several times a year by 2100", says John Church.
So I hope everyone reading this can understand why we can't reason with deniers and change their minds. This is what they are, this guy.
Inn history, violence comes when all other means of forestalling the disaster wrought by someone else's behaviour have been exhausted.
As you can see, we have reached that time in history and what history has done in the past, it will do again in the near future . If you're ever inclined to ask the question -why did it come to this, refer to this thread.
Let's do this up right denier. Let's rock.
So what? I predict that the moon is now made of green cheese. Now, the thing has been predicted. It doesn't matter to the truth of that statement that the prediction was spurious.
Except your predictions aren't the result of a decades long investigation by scientists who are experts in their respective fields and have arrived at their conclusions through the most rigorous process of falsehood rejection / truth detection humankind has ever devised- the process of conducting properly constructed scientific experiments and publishing them in qualified peer reviewed journals .
The fact that you equate in argument your worthless "prediction" with the end product of the above process says one thing and one thing only about you. Like all deniers; you are, amongst a long list of other things, narcissistic .
"Modest" versus "catastrophic" are estimates of harm. Those people above aren't doing cost/benefit analysis, hence, their terms aren't credible.
Because you and your FoxNews denier kind decide what is credible, not reality and not scientists. This is you wielding your magical amulet of spin again. If you speak words, then they somehow make reality. If you speak a rebuttal, it has value and potency. Scientists have their opinion and you have your opinion of the scientists, so everything is equal, because, hey. it's a free country and everyone gets their opinion.
Catastrophic Climate Change:
Catastrophic is used to describe the course we're on :
from:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/25/490463/iea-global-co2-emissions-hit-new-record-in-2011-keeping-world-on-track-for-devastating-11f-warming/
In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon
EPA Director of the Department of Pollutant Decrees, Ray Donaldson, said,
Back before carbon dioxide was dangerous, we simply assumed that water vapor was also benign. But all reputable scientists now agree that the increased water vapor content of the atmosphere from such sources as burning of fuels and power plant cooling towers will also enhance the greenhouse effect, leading to potentially catastrophic warming.
from
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/10/26/353997/nature-dust-bowlification-food-insecurity/
Here comes the Dust Bowl
James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don't Act Now
And here in graphic dertail is a degree by degree description of what the rise in temperature they're talking about actually translates to on earth. It's literally the end of the world.
http://www.universalrights.net/news/display.php?id=7672
from:
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/EPA-water-vapor.htm
http://www.wrsc.org/story/governments-failing-avert-catastrophic-climate-change-iea-warns
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/25/490463/iea-global-co2-emissions-hit-new-record-in-2011-keeping-world-on-track-for-devastating-11f-warming/
http://
Why would that happen. If the future generations can't figure out how to avoid the modest effects of AGW over what is in human terms ridiculously long periods of time, then they deserve what they get. I won't compensate them a bit.
The effects have been predicted and the fact that you elect to characterize them a "modest" when people who spent their entire professional lives studying this domain characterize the effects as "catastrophic" really means nothing in the real world except of course that you're denying reality which is the definition of a denier. So you're a denier.. So tell us something we didn't already know.
Spin is exactly what your'e doing. You believe in the power of spin the way American Indians believed in the power of the Ghost Dance to keep them safe from the white man's bullets. You think you can wield it like an amulet and keep reality away.
Here's the bottom line. We know who the denier are. We know what's gong to happen. If you think you can resist the united power of the world's scientists when they take on the task of dealing with you and doing what needs to be done then good luck. Civilization is going to save itself from conservative reality-denying filth just the way it saved itself during WWII , with exactly the same ferocity and pitilessness.
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Wrong. You don't have to believe that. You can simply acknowledge that there are some things we might never know, and leave it at that. That's honest. That's the simple truth. It's a gap in our knowledge now and possibly forever.
Just because there is a gap doesn't mean get to fill that gap with whatever fairy tale makes you feel good.
FTA:
Highlighting the popular TV series Game of Thrones, he noted that viewers were no longer content to wait for the show to air in Australia about a week after it aired in the US. The show, frequently referred to by iiNet executives in regard to local content availability, screens on Foxtel about five days after airing in the US. It is also available to download from the iTunes Store for Australian users about the same time.
Yeah and so.. what is the market telling you to do then? Screen it at the same time. Figure it out. It's what you get paid the big bucks to do. Work it out, idiot. Never mind your fucking "kill switch", unless you're also willing to attach same device to your gonads.
You know what I think? I think this little experiment in democracy has provably failed for now and we should start doing what needs to be done and anyone who wants to stand in the way of that can die in the streets who the fuck cares how, I sure as shit don't.
There isn't another earth we can go to when it turns out that the coke snorting degenerates who run FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal and who populate the CATO institute and the Heritage Foundation and Marshall Institute were, as predicted by serious scientists who spent their lives studying the subject matter those degenerates laid claim to, not only wrong, but lying , which is exactly what they're doing.
Just like Churchill predicted Hitlers march across Europe, it's going to happen sooner or later, it's inevitable and the sooner we start this process the fewer people have to die. When we reinstate the Constitution, it will be absent the shit about freedom of religion, replaced with a Constitutionally mandated requirement that each citizen achieve a high level of scientific understanding and that science and not some butt fucking sky gawd who orders men to rape their own daughters is what describes reality.
Your side decided that it could just Foxnews reality itself because , basically, your insane pieces of shit not worthy of the next breath you take. Think you're going to escape the consequences of your decisions like Rick Perry who rescinded fire building codes and restrictions in Texas only to have the whole fucking state go up in flames and him being forced to turn and whine to the federal government for help to clean up his gawd fucking mess? Think you're not going to be hated, hunted and exterminated for your crimes against humanity>? Think you can foxnews and bullshit and spin your way through that by rewriting history?
It's going to be die baby die. The whole world hates your fucking guts and already want to crash through the gates and rip you to shreds with their bare hands , and the other half of this country will feel exactly the same way. have fun in your fucking bunker with your can food buddy because we're find you, we'll hunt you, we'll capture you, we'll try you, we'll convict you and then they'll fucking do what's done to deniers in the future.. torture you to death for sport while he "authorities " do the old look away.
You and your kind are the worst human beings ever to crawl on this planet and nothing is going to save you from the consequences of following coke addled "thinking" your :"leaders" Limbaugh, Hannity Murdoch the Koch brothers et. al. produced.
We're all done talking to you trying ton convince you of jack fucking shit. It's going on kill time baby because you left this nation no other choice.
Mess with the best, die like the rest.
Neither should they vote.
See it's facts like these that lead me to recast my own thinking that creationists et al are not so much of a different political persuasion , but more like a society-destroying terrorist group. They aren't interested in playing fair. They're interested in demanding play fair until such time as they can get enough power to change the rules of the game. They're after one thing and one thing only- power.. the power to forcibly inflict their theocracy on all of America and any protestations to the contrary are just knowing lies they tell so no one is motivated to dish out to them what they're planning on dishing out to everyone else.
This is not politics. This is a religious war and these are religious warriors and the policies they pursue vis-avis science and education are effectively a suicide pact.
This makes them worse than political enemies, it makes them- literally- terrorists. Literally like a James Bond insane super-villain out to literally destroy the world and everyone in it
Even Hitler didn't want to destroy the world so they could be raised up into the Rapture and see his enemies cast down into Hell. And even if he did, he had no way to achieve that end. With AGW, actually, they do have a way to achieve that ends.
These people have every intention of following through with policies that will kill, my family, and everyone else I know their families and finally everyone on earth, effectively ending humanity and civilization not just as we know it, but period.
How am I supposed to think about them when those are the real facts? How are we supposed to deal with them? Let them go on doing what it is they do in the name of religious freedom? Leave them alone because they have religious and civil rights?
Let me tell you, those rights and our country as we know it are going to go away and not in any way fundies think it will happen with Jesus coming down from the heaves. . Don't think it can't happen, don't think we're beyond making history, big history. History happens , and not just to people in text books.
I am telling you for a fact that plans are on the board to neutralize them through means you might call "fascist". It comes down to survival and when it gets down to that, everything else goes out the window, maybe for generations.
i sincerely hope they wake the fuck up before they become the target of their fellow citizens wrath. That will of course be about the time the government stops being able to control that wrath. This is not going to go well for them.
This framing of religious freedom as the right to deny science and reality is going to go no matter whether we as a species survive or not. We ARE going to take the freedoms away from them and we ARE going to tell their kids what's what whether they like it or not. They wanted holy war and I can tell you that they are going to get exactly that. There is about a 0% probability that we will make it through this century without a civil war in this country between the reality based population and the headcases who answered this poll. At the end of that, it's game over for the religionists.
They apparently are indifferent to the fact that he other 54% of Americans are not indifferent to their lunacy and have lost every scintilla of patience or sympathy with them.
They are worse than Nazis, by far, and they need to be exterminated and that's exactly where this is going with the inevitability of a freight train. If they think liberals are just too passive to take up arms, if they they made the mistake of thinking that our tolerance is a form of weakness then I pity them.
Threa
OK I believe you. Sorry for being so cynical .
I'd pretty much characterize that not just as a failure of democracy , but of a failed democracy outright.
In the past, when the religious conservatives took over a society and crashed it, people were able to survive and civilization elsewhere went forward.
This time these suicide bombers mean to take us all with them. It's written in their holy book , this is the End Times and the Rapture is nigh, and they're not the least bit afraid to drive all of civilization straight off that cliff.
Democracy has failed and I authorize the President, the heads of the armed forces and the national security apparatus to do whatever it takes it do what needs to be done. If it means suspending the Constitution, then do it. If it means conducting a covert war on conservatives, taking out their "thought leaders", channels of communication and funding sources, then do it. If it means releasing a virus that wipes out denier states and their populations then do it. Democracy has failed and now it's not about rights and freedoms, it's about survival and who is going to survive and that is sure as shit not going to be conservatives no matter what else happens.
Do it Mr. President. Do it.