Well, for starters, he only asked to increase the budget for science in his last year in office. In previous years he had been cutting it. Also his party opposed him on the increases. Then there's the fact that he routinely cut funding for agencies that violated the Republican dogma, such as the EPA. Oh, and the fact that one of the key aspects of the Republican Party platform is the lie that all the scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy to trick people into thinking the world is getting hotter. Not to mention the Republican Party's constant support for creationism. And their turning the world "intellectual" into a pejorative.
The Republicans are very much anti-intellectual. You can pretend otherwise if that helps you sleep at night, but you are fooling yourself.
When it comes to sex, there are adults out there who want to manipulate children into having sex when they aren't ready. The law is there to protect the kids, not punish them. There are no adults who try to trick kids into being bad drivers, so we can draw the line at a younger age in that case.
It's not "incorrect". Words have different meanings depending on context. If you're claiming you've never used a word for something other than it's technical definition, then you're a goddamned liar.
Why did you wait until you were seventeen to join the military? Because society is smart enough to know that we shouldn't let thirteen year olds join up.
Why did you wait till 15 to learn to drive? Because at twelve you would have killed someone.
You did some underage drinking and turned out okay? Good for you. One of my sister's friends drank a liter soda bottle full of vodka on the school bus when she was fifteen and had to have her stomach pumped. Another kid I didn't really know died from choking on his own vomit after drinking at a party in tenth grade.
You had sex as a kid and turned out fine? Glad to hear it. I lost count of how many girls in my school dropped out after getting pregnant.
It is self-evident that infants shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they want. It is equally self-evident that adults should be free to drink or drive or fuck or whatever. Therefore there is clearly some line in between at which it becomes okay. That line shifts from one person to another, and so society can never perfectly nail it down, but to say we shouldn't have lines at all, or that they should all be back around puberty, is fucking stupid.
If you want to frame it that way, sure. We don't let children consent because they're stupid and have no real notion of the consequences of their actions. That's also why all civilized societies go easy on children who commit crimes. That's why children can't go out and get credit cards. It's why we don't let them buy drugs, as they might get addicted without understanding that risk. It's why parents are allowed to ground their kids.
I know that children hate to hear it -- I did too at that age -- but it's true.
That's fine as a medical definition, but when people speak in the actual world, they use a different (usually broader) definition. If I say I'm going to eat pizza or Chinese for dinner, I don't mean there's a chance I'll eat both. If I say I'm feeling depressed, I probably don't mean clinically depressed. If some jackass tailgates me while blaring on his horn, I'll call him a psycho, even though he's probably not one. And if someone is sexually attracted to a fourteen year old, I (and most everyone else) will call them a pedophile, even if they're technically a ephebophile.
As a matter of fact, I have heard of John Scopes. Have you? It doesn't seem like it, except maybe in passing, because otherwise you'd know that he did not spend time in prison. He was fined $100 (equivalent to ~$1000 in present day dollars), which was overturned by the appeals court on a technicality.
Now please, think very hard about whether you want to draw a moral equivalency between a $1000 fine and a death sentence. Try to remember that the post you're responding to acknowledged the fines, and merely stated that people weren't executed for blasphemy.
You need to learn to read context. The GP was replying to someone who insinuated that the US is in similar shape regarding separation of church and state. Which means that his post was spot on, and yours was a non-sequitur.
Those trials weren't about heresy. They were a textbook case of mass hysteria. You could be a perfectly good Christian, never speak a word of blasphemy, but if you had a nervous tick or some unusual luck or (God help you) schizophrenia, people would panic, accuse you of being a witch, and kill you.
Even if we pretend that those trials were about heresy, they took place over three hundred years ago, nearly a century before the United States even existed as its own entity. I suppose you think the French are no better than the Saudis because of the werewolf trials that took place there during the 15th century?
Snark if you must, but it's been a long time since anyone in the US faced execution for stating that Jesus was a good, inspirational man, but not God. In fact, I'm not even sure that such a thing has ever happened. People have been killed by lynch mobs, but that's not a question of separating church and state, it's a question of people not being barbarous murderers.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, even as far back as the late 17th century, the British colonists' laws only punished blasphemers with some months in prison and a couple hundred dollars in fines. It's not nothing, but it's certainly not death.
There are such "lines" all over the country. Join a start-up. Start a business. Work on Wall Street. Make the next Minecraft or Braid. Play professional sports. Become a musician or actor. Of course, doing those things doesn't guarantee success. There's quite a lot of work required, and quite a bit of luck needed too. But that doesn't mean that the country didn't enable your success.
Being born in a great nation like the US means that you get opportunities that people in Syria or Moldova or the Congo can scarcely dream of. You still need to work, and there's no guarantee of a payoff, but if you do end up as one of the lucky ones, if you do end up making more money than you could possibly spend in a lifetime, you have a duty to give back so that those same opportunities are still around for the next generation.
I've found that assholes who double park and run red lights like to shift responsibility away from themselves by claiming that an evil left-wing conspiracy is intentionally screwing with light timings.
Public education for him and his employees. Infrastructure to help him and his employees get around and provide them with the electricity needed for their work. Safety and stability so that he doesn't have to pay millions of dollars in protection money to organized crime. Safe, plentiful food and clean water, so that he didn't die as a child. Clean air, so that he doesn't have horrible respiratory illnesses. Social safety nets so that he could take risks without fear of dying in the gutter if he failed. And so on.
Nobody gets where they are alone. Everyone relies on the society they live in for support. That's why you don't see people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg coming out of Somalia. Unfortunately, it's now become commonplace to deny this obvious truth, because "Greed is Good", at least in the minds of the greedy.
His salary is irrelevant anyway. Most of his income will come from stocks. After all, God forbid he should have to pay taxes. I can't criticize him too much, as he at least had the basic decency to join with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in planning to give away at least half his wealth. I do wonder if the less visible Facebook execs have any plans to support the country that made them rich.
2 Timothy 3:16 states that the Scripture is "inspired by God", thus refuting the GGP's claim that "the Bible never actually claims to be the word of God". I'm not gonna bother looking up the other verses, since I'm sure they're the same. Maybe this makes me a heretic, but I suspect that between the human fallibility of the writer and that of all the translators to come after him, even passages that were divinely inspired are no longer strictly the word of God. I mean, we're essentially playing a millenia spanning game of telephone.
It really is bizarre that people spout off locations rather than quotes. Do other religions do that, or is it just Christians?
I cast each and every vote in the manner that I think will best benefit my country. You're telling me that I should ignore what's best for the country and follow my heart, and tough luck if that causes widespread suffering. Not only that, but that to do otherwise means I'm somehow failing in my duty. Noted, and duly ignored. I will continue to work my ass off in every election to maximize benefit to the country, instead of running off after some Hollywood-inspired dream that things would all be perfect if only everyone followed their heart. That approach only works when you have a benevolent author willing to make it work.
Sure, in a district of 70k people, with three major parties to divide votes between instead of just two. In the US, the average congressional district is nearly ten times that size (~650k), and there are only two major parties.
And out of curiosity, how much has that one MP been able to do? She's not part of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, and while I admit my knowledge of British politics is shaky (having come mostly from being stuck in a hotel that only received the BBC and some weird Japanese crap for the entire month of May 2010), I'm pretty sure that that means she has no real power. But checking their party's Wikipedia article, I see that they won a local election in 2011 and were able to get at least a few policy goals through. Which is the exact method of change that I advocated.
You can't back that up (1), I don't believe it to begin with (2), and the argument from continuity suggests it's not even logically possible (3), not to mention the problem with induction (4).
1. Yes, I can, through experience and basic knowledge of how people tend to approach politics. I know, I know, "problem of induction". We'll come to that. 2. Clearly, but your belief is not required for it to be true. 3. You're misusing the continuity argument. Clearly there exists some threshold at which third party votes matter. In practice, that threshold is far above what we're currently capable of reaching. The continuity argument only applies when you can reach both endpoints. 4. The "problem" of induction is a philosophical one. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that no numerical system can be both consistent and complete, but that doesn't stop me from using math. Likewise, while the "problem" of induction means that my never having seen the Cubs win a World Series does not make such an event impossible, I'm sure as all hell not gonna bet on them.
Your recursive stack of "dullards", while cute, misses a key point. It assumes that as you progress in levels (j, k, m, n4, n5, n6...), as your level approaches infinity the threshold will drop to zero. Maybe instead the threshold asymptotically approaches 10%. Below that level, even the infinitely non-dullardly don't care about the third party vote. And before you raise yourself as a counter example, note that we can have also have a class of double-dullards (don't complain about the offensive terminology -- you picked it) who always care.
In short, you're trying too hard to apply simple mathematical reasoning to a process that is far more complex than you have accounted for. I don't doubt that it is theoretically possible to model human behavior in such a way, but your name's not Hari Seldon, and you're not going to perform a psychohistorical analysis of American voting trends in a Slashdot comment.
What the hell is wrong with being a statistical outlier? Elections aren't some horserace that you win by voting for the candidate that gets office, they are won when public opinion changes.
True, but public opinion isn't changed by the fact that 0.2% of the vote went to Generic Third Party #17. Not even a little bit.
If you want to effect change via voting: 1) Primary for the best candidate you can find (a lot of people ignore this step, and then go on to bemoan that they only have two choices in the general election) 2) Vote for the least bad of the two major party nominees at the federal level 3) Vote for third parties at the local and state level
Non-federal politics matter a whole lot -- more than federal politics for many aspects of life -- and are easier to influence. Plus the pool of people who get taken seriously at a federal level tends to be drawn from those who have been successful at the lower levels. If you can get a great candidate to be a popular and successful state senator, then he's got a good shot at becoming governor. If you've got a popular and successful independent governor, I know a whole lot of people who'd love to see him become president. It's admittedly a long shot, but it's better than throwing away your vote every cycle in a protest that 99.9% of the populace won't even notice.
Slashdot hasn't been a technology website for a long time. It's a site for libertarians and anarchists to complain about how the evil gubmint is out to get them (while Apple and Android fanbois chatter in the background). Now, in fairness, the government does overreach in a lot of cases -- the war on drugs being chiefest among them. But it's a mistake to ascribe those actions to evil motives rather than the far more likely ones of pandering, desperation, and good ole fashioned incompetence. The sad thing is, they attract other paranoid people, who mod them up, thus validating and reinforcing their paranoia. It's unhealthy for them, and some seem so angry all the time that I don't doubt that they'd eventually be driven to harm someone. As an example:
"Sincerity" is an alien concept to such as he. He's a vile, contemptible, parasitic piece of verminous scum who exploits fear and ignorance in order to gain power. He is a creature without any personal worth, a loathsome leech who feeds off the misery and pain of others, and grows fat and happy on their suffering.
The above was modded +5 Insightful, and is describing a state legislator who proposed a 1% tax on violent video games. People like this are not healthy, and the people who mod them up are making them worse.
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Well, for starters, he only asked to increase the budget for science in his last year in office. In previous years he had been cutting it. Also his party opposed him on the increases. Then there's the fact that he routinely cut funding for agencies that violated the Republican dogma, such as the EPA. Oh, and the fact that one of the key aspects of the Republican Party platform is the lie that all the scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy to trick people into thinking the world is getting hotter. Not to mention the Republican Party's constant support for creationism. And their turning the world "intellectual" into a pejorative.
The Republicans are very much anti-intellectual. You can pretend otherwise if that helps you sleep at night, but you are fooling yourself.
And when it comes to war, there are adults out there who want to manipulate children into killing and dying for ideology when they aren't ready.
And that's a bad thing.
When it comes to sex, there are adults out there who want to manipulate children into having sex when they aren't ready. The law is there to protect the kids, not punish them. There are no adults who try to trick kids into being bad drivers, so we can draw the line at a younger age in that case.
It's not "incorrect". Words have different meanings depending on context. If you're claiming you've never used a word for something other than it's technical definition, then you're a goddamned liar.
I'm on a high horse?? Listen to yourself.
Why did you wait until you were seventeen to join the military? Because society is smart enough to know that we shouldn't let thirteen year olds join up.
Why did you wait till 15 to learn to drive? Because at twelve you would have killed someone.
You did some underage drinking and turned out okay? Good for you. One of my sister's friends drank a liter soda bottle full of vodka on the school bus when she was fifteen and had to have her stomach pumped. Another kid I didn't really know died from choking on his own vomit after drinking at a party in tenth grade.
You had sex as a kid and turned out fine? Glad to hear it. I lost count of how many girls in my school dropped out after getting pregnant.
It is self-evident that infants shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they want. It is equally self-evident that adults should be free to drink or drive or fuck or whatever. Therefore there is clearly some line in between at which it becomes okay. That line shifts from one person to another, and so society can never perfectly nail it down, but to say we shouldn't have lines at all, or that they should all be back around puberty, is fucking stupid.
When was the last time you saw a 14 year old joining the military?
We need to draw a line somewhere. We draw the line for driving around 16, the line for the sex a bit older, and the line for drinking older than that.
What the hell is with all the people trying to rationalize pedophilia on this site? Is pedophilia apologia a "thing" for libertarians or something?
If you want to frame it that way, sure. We don't let children consent because they're stupid and have no real notion of the consequences of their actions. That's also why all civilized societies go easy on children who commit crimes. That's why children can't go out and get credit cards. It's why we don't let them buy drugs, as they might get addicted without understanding that risk. It's why parents are allowed to ground their kids.
I know that children hate to hear it -- I did too at that age -- but it's true.
That's fine as a medical definition, but when people speak in the actual world, they use a different (usually broader) definition. If I say I'm going to eat pizza or Chinese for dinner, I don't mean there's a chance I'll eat both. If I say I'm feeling depressed, I probably don't mean clinically depressed. If some jackass tailgates me while blaring on his horn, I'll call him a psycho, even though he's probably not one. And if someone is sexually attracted to a fourteen year old, I (and most everyone else) will call them a pedophile, even if they're technically a ephebophile.
Speaking of history, is that an angelfire link? Got any interesting BBS postings on the subject you'd care to link to?
As a matter of fact, I have heard of John Scopes. Have you? It doesn't seem like it, except maybe in passing, because otherwise you'd know that he did not spend time in prison. He was fined $100 (equivalent to ~$1000 in present day dollars), which was overturned by the appeals court on a technicality.
Now please, think very hard about whether you want to draw a moral equivalency between a $1000 fine and a death sentence. Try to remember that the post you're responding to acknowledged the fines, and merely stated that people weren't executed for blasphemy.
You need to learn to read context. The GP was replying to someone who insinuated that the US is in similar shape regarding separation of church and state. Which means that his post was spot on, and yours was a non-sequitur.
Those trials weren't about heresy. They were a textbook case of mass hysteria. You could be a perfectly good Christian, never speak a word of blasphemy, but if you had a nervous tick or some unusual luck or (God help you) schizophrenia, people would panic, accuse you of being a witch, and kill you.
Even if we pretend that those trials were about heresy, they took place over three hundred years ago, nearly a century before the United States even existed as its own entity. I suppose you think the French are no better than the Saudis because of the werewolf trials that took place there during the 15th century?
Snark if you must, but it's been a long time since anyone in the US faced execution for stating that Jesus was a good, inspirational man, but not God. In fact, I'm not even sure that such a thing has ever happened. People have been killed by lynch mobs, but that's not a question of separating church and state, it's a question of people not being barbarous murderers.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, even as far back as the late 17th century, the British colonists' laws only punished blasphemers with some months in prison and a couple hundred dollars in fines. It's not nothing, but it's certainly not death.
There are such "lines" all over the country. Join a start-up. Start a business. Work on Wall Street. Make the next Minecraft or Braid. Play professional sports. Become a musician or actor. Of course, doing those things doesn't guarantee success. There's quite a lot of work required, and quite a bit of luck needed too. But that doesn't mean that the country didn't enable your success.
Being born in a great nation like the US means that you get opportunities that people in Syria or Moldova or the Congo can scarcely dream of. You still need to work, and there's no guarantee of a payoff, but if you do end up as one of the lucky ones, if you do end up making more money than you could possibly spend in a lifetime, you have a duty to give back so that those same opportunities are still around for the next generation.
I've found that assholes who double park and run red lights like to shift responsibility away from themselves by claiming that an evil left-wing conspiracy is intentionally screwing with light timings.
Public education for him and his employees. Infrastructure to help him and his employees get around and provide them with the electricity needed for their work. Safety and stability so that he doesn't have to pay millions of dollars in protection money to organized crime. Safe, plentiful food and clean water, so that he didn't die as a child. Clean air, so that he doesn't have horrible respiratory illnesses. Social safety nets so that he could take risks without fear of dying in the gutter if he failed. And so on.
Nobody gets where they are alone. Everyone relies on the society they live in for support. That's why you don't see people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg coming out of Somalia. Unfortunately, it's now become commonplace to deny this obvious truth, because "Greed is Good", at least in the minds of the greedy.
His salary is irrelevant anyway. Most of his income will come from stocks. After all, God forbid he should have to pay taxes. I can't criticize him too much, as he at least had the basic decency to join with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in planning to give away at least half his wealth. I do wonder if the less visible Facebook execs have any plans to support the country that made them rich.
Oil is money. Money absolutely changes human nature.
2 Timothy 3:16 states that the Scripture is "inspired by God", thus refuting the GGP's claim that "the Bible never actually claims to be the word of God". I'm not gonna bother looking up the other verses, since I'm sure they're the same. Maybe this makes me a heretic, but I suspect that between the human fallibility of the writer and that of all the translators to come after him, even passages that were divinely inspired are no longer strictly the word of God. I mean, we're essentially playing a millenia spanning game of telephone.
It really is bizarre that people spout off locations rather than quotes. Do other religions do that, or is it just Christians?
I cast each and every vote in the manner that I think will best benefit my country. You're telling me that I should ignore what's best for the country and follow my heart, and tough luck if that causes widespread suffering. Not only that, but that to do otherwise means I'm somehow failing in my duty. Noted, and duly ignored. I will continue to work my ass off in every election to maximize benefit to the country, instead of running off after some Hollywood-inspired dream that things would all be perfect if only everyone followed their heart. That approach only works when you have a benevolent author willing to make it work.
Sure, in a district of 70k people, with three major parties to divide votes between instead of just two. In the US, the average congressional district is nearly ten times that size (~650k), and there are only two major parties.
And out of curiosity, how much has that one MP been able to do? She's not part of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, and while I admit my knowledge of British politics is shaky (having come mostly from being stuck in a hotel that only received the BBC and some weird Japanese crap for the entire month of May 2010), I'm pretty sure that that means she has no real power. But checking their party's Wikipedia article, I see that they won a local election in 2011 and were able to get at least a few policy goals through. Which is the exact method of change that I advocated.
You can't back that up (1), I don't believe it to begin with (2), and the argument from continuity suggests it's not even logically possible (3), not to mention the problem with induction (4).
1. Yes, I can, through experience and basic knowledge of how people tend to approach politics. I know, I know, "problem of induction". We'll come to that.
2. Clearly, but your belief is not required for it to be true.
3. You're misusing the continuity argument. Clearly there exists some threshold at which third party votes matter. In practice, that threshold is far above what we're currently capable of reaching. The continuity argument only applies when you can reach both endpoints.
4. The "problem" of induction is a philosophical one. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that no numerical system can be both consistent and complete, but that doesn't stop me from using math. Likewise, while the "problem" of induction means that my never having seen the Cubs win a World Series does not make such an event impossible, I'm sure as all hell not gonna bet on them.
Your recursive stack of "dullards", while cute, misses a key point. It assumes that as you progress in levels (j, k, m, n4, n5, n6...), as your level approaches infinity the threshold will drop to zero. Maybe instead the threshold asymptotically approaches 10%. Below that level, even the infinitely non-dullardly don't care about the third party vote. And before you raise yourself as a counter example, note that we can have also have a class of double-dullards (don't complain about the offensive terminology -- you picked it) who always care.
In short, you're trying too hard to apply simple mathematical reasoning to a process that is far more complex than you have accounted for. I don't doubt that it is theoretically possible to model human behavior in such a way, but your name's not Hari Seldon, and you're not going to perform a psychohistorical analysis of American voting trends in a Slashdot comment.
What the hell is wrong with being a statistical outlier? Elections aren't some horserace that you win by voting for the candidate that gets office, they are won when public opinion changes.
True, but public opinion isn't changed by the fact that 0.2% of the vote went to Generic Third Party #17. Not even a little bit.
If you want to effect change via voting:
1) Primary for the best candidate you can find (a lot of people ignore this step, and then go on to bemoan that they only have two choices in the general election)
2) Vote for the least bad of the two major party nominees at the federal level
3) Vote for third parties at the local and state level
Non-federal politics matter a whole lot -- more than federal politics for many aspects of life -- and are easier to influence. Plus the pool of people who get taken seriously at a federal level tends to be drawn from those who have been successful at the lower levels. If you can get a great candidate to be a popular and successful state senator, then he's got a good shot at becoming governor. If you've got a popular and successful independent governor, I know a whole lot of people who'd love to see him become president. It's admittedly a long shot, but it's better than throwing away your vote every cycle in a protest that 99.9% of the populace won't even notice.
I hear the market for individual ounces of powdered laundry detergent is booming.
Must be all those business travelers needing to do laundry.
Slashdot hasn't been a technology website for a long time. It's a site for libertarians and anarchists to complain about how the evil gubmint is out to get them (while Apple and Android fanbois chatter in the background). Now, in fairness, the government does overreach in a lot of cases -- the war on drugs being chiefest among them. But it's a mistake to ascribe those actions to evil motives rather than the far more likely ones of pandering, desperation, and good ole fashioned incompetence. The sad thing is, they attract other paranoid people, who mod them up, thus validating and reinforcing their paranoia. It's unhealthy for them, and some seem so angry all the time that I don't doubt that they'd eventually be driven to harm someone. As an example:
"Sincerity" is an alien concept to such as he. He's a vile, contemptible, parasitic piece of verminous scum who exploits fear and ignorance in order to gain power. He is a creature without any personal worth, a loathsome leech who feeds off the misery and pain of others, and grows fat and happy on their suffering.
The above was modded +5 Insightful, and is describing a state legislator who proposed a 1% tax on violent video games. People like this are not healthy, and the people who mod them up are making them worse.