Emmanuel Goldstein was a proxy for Trotsky - a caricature of a villain on whom the ruling clique blamed everything bad to deflect attention from their own incompetence and violence. Of course Trotsky was utterly powerless once exiled, and in "1984" there's nothing to suggest that Goldstein was any different. Goldstein could just as well have been dead at that point; it was simply convenient for the party to keep him in the popular consciousness.
So, do you have any evidence that the creationist movement is actually some fiction (possibly loosely inspired by real people) foisted upon us by the scientific community to distract us? Because from where I sit, it's quite obvious that creationists are not only a large and loud fraction of the American public, they're winning election to school boards and congressional seats, and attempting to refashion the primary school curriculum to include thinly-disguised proselytizing. (Meanwhile, their co-religionists, who may or may not be Biblical literalists, still account for more than 80% of Americans, if you believe the polls.) But maybe it's all a farce and that Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was actually staged using a Hollywood character actor, and the real Ken Ham (if he ever existed) is actually living in a mud hut in Patagonia with a handful of peasants calling themselves "Answers in Genesis". And meanwhile, the scientific community, which is apparently powerless to stop federal budget cuts to basic research, nonetheless pulls the strings from behind the scenes...
So, are you just terrible at analogies, or is that what you really believe? Because it's taking conservative paranoia about liberal media control to the point of self-parody.
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
I don't know the breakdown per-disease, but FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding. In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to "this drug stops bowel cancer". (Huge gap = many years, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.) In the case of AIDS, academic research has been focused on vaccines, whereas the current best-in-class anti-HIV drugs really have been mostly the work of the drug companies.
Okay, so you have a single example from the 1920s, well before the basic principles of molecular biology were discovered. Plus a couple of vague examples like this:
Ten years ago a colleague of mine working in epigenetics at a large genomic institution was told by the boss that epigenetics was not a real part of genetics and that he should change subjects to “something more serious”
This is a favorite ploy of pseudo-scientists: anonymous references to someone working in mainstream science whose revolutionary work is suppressed by the hostility of the rest of the faculty. I call bullshit. You can always dig up a few geriatric senior scientists, whose best work was done decades ago, willing to pooh-pooh some newer field of research. Most scientists have their own favorite examples. This is not evidence for an organized conspiracy of suppression. As I said before, epigenetics was already a well-established and growing field when I started - and people were already doing "epigenome sequencing" ten years ago.
And I repeat: the importance of "Lamarckian evolution" to the process as a whole has still not been demonstrated. Again, it is important not to conflate the role of epigenetics in organismal development and cellular regulation with the issue of inheritance. Clearly epigenetics is more important to inherited traits than was previously assumed, but we have a handful of examples versus a huge amount of evidence for Darwinian evolution. Presumably we will eventually converge on some new "modern synthesis" that incorporates elements of both, but anyone who argues for the primacy of Lamarckian evolution is grossly overstating the case.
I distinctly remember a college biology teacher explaining the case of field mice who developed webbed feet in one generation after a field was flooded. He said that regardless of the data, we were to reject the idea that an adaptation emerged as a response to stimuli. If that's not suppression, I don't know what is.
So, one college biology teacher, discussing an anecdote that I can't seem to find on Google, is evidence of "Darwinists suppress[ing] information about inheritance of acquired traits" as a monolithic group? Surely you can do better than that.
There are no fossils of life before the Cambrian explosion.
Not true! But it's very, very sketchy and weird compared to what comes afterwards, and doesn't provide a neat, continuous path to the animal phyla we're more familiar with. We certainly don't have a fossil record that explains the origin of complex multicellular life - just lots of small clues and educated guesses based on modern forms and molecular evidence. It's a fascinating scientific question but extremely difficult to study, unfortunately, which is why it's almost always going to be an easy target for nitpicking creationists.
How is asking critical questions about view points being pushed onto children with my money establishing religion?
Stop playing dumb. We all know that the only reason these "critical questions" (which never come from actual scientists) are ever introduced into a classroom is to promote a religious alternative. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous and insulting. At least Ken Ham has the honesty to admit this is his goal.
My money is being used to expose children to views I don't agree with.
My money is being used to enforce laws I disagree with, and buy weapons I don't approve of. It's called representative democracy; deal with it, or move somewhere else. We do, however, have a specific clause in our constitution about establishment of religion, and the courts have decided that teaching religion in taxpayer-funded schools is included in this prohibition. (This does not equate to disallowing all criticism of science; you are welcome to spout any nonsense you wish, as long as you do not expect the government to pay for it.) If you're unhappy with that, work on getting the 1st Amendment repealed, or move to another country. I'm sure you won't find much support for teaching evolution in, say, Somalia. (But they're probably not going to be wild about your religion either.)
I have no idea how monetary policy or vaccine reactions are relevant to this debate, or what they have to do with religion. Nor are politics particularly relevant, since you can find scientists of all ideologies working productively without making extravagant pseudo-scientific claims.
As a biologist, I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament. (I was going to say that the panspermia advocates were the biggest exception, but even they aren't really arguing with the fact of evolution, but the origin of life, which is a different matter.) This goes doubly for the age of the earth, which is even less controversial than common descent. The creationists are also almost uniformly not practicing scientists (or even trained as biologists, in all but a handful of cases); I have yet to meet any biologist who continues to be productive while completely ignoring 150 years of scientific evidence. Conversely, I've known a decent number of biologists who were religious, but did not see the need to distort every scientific finding to fit into their theological worldview. (Francis Collins and Ken Miller are two of the most famous examples, but I've never met them, although I think I used Miller's textbook in high school.) In fact, the one who found "intelligent design" the most infuriating was a conservative Catholic.
In summary: why shouldn't I assume that creationists are religious? You've given me absolutely no reason to think otherwise.
In the past 30 years Darwinists suppressed information about inheritance of acquired traits. The Lamarckian-looking genetics that explain this are now FINALLY being accepted as science and are called, as a group of phenomenon, "epigenetics".
This simply demonstrates your ignorance of the field. Epigenetics is far more fundamental and complicated than Lamarckian inheritance - it's a basic mechanism of genetic regulation in all multicellular organisms. This wasn't even remotely controversial 15 years ago, when I started studying biology; any freshman biology course would cover the subject. It still isn't terribly well understood, but what can you expect when we still don't know the function of half of our genes?
What was genuinely controversial was the extent to which epigenetic regulation affected germ cells and was therefore heritable. It was not controversial because "Darwinists" (whatever that means) tried to suppress information, it was because none of the loudest proponents of the theory had found molecular evidence to support it. This is now slowly changing, as biologists are realizing (yet again) that genetic regulation is even more complex than they imagined.
In any case, none of the new information contradicts modern evolutionary theory; likewise, it does not have any relevance to the issue of whether modern life forms were designed or evolved. It also doesn't overturn the "central dogma" of molecular biology or prove that Lamarck's overall hypothesis was correct. We still have every reason to continue to believe that the unmodified genome is the most important carrier of genetic information and determinant of phenotype, and the extent to which epigenetics is heritable is still an unsolved debate. That makes it a fascinating target for more research, and I'm sure there will be more startling discoveries (and perhaps Nobel prizes) in the near future. I'm also very confident that any new discoveries will be made by actual scientists doing actual research, not theologians.
"Although his homemade reactor never came anywhere near reaching critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1,000 times normal background radiation."
"EPA scientists believe that Hahn likely exceeded the lifetime dosage for thorium exposure"
Would you want to live next door to that? I certainly wouldn't, and I'd be perfectly happy living downwind of a well-run and inspected nuclear power station. And I've been working around sources of radioactivity for the last ten years - the difference being the use of well-established containment procedures and professional handling.
Stop being hyperbolic. No one is advocating taking away your freedom to choose; you have every right to believe what you want, and to home-school your children or send them to fundamentalist private schools. You do not have the right to have your ancient superstitions treated as equivalent to scientific research, or to push your theology on a captive audience of other people's children.
Because that's exactly what third graders are doing when they ask questions in the classroom. Advancing their religious doctrine. Down with inquisitive third-graders!
It's not the third-graders who are campaigning to have theology taught in biology class, it's grown adults who should know better. And there's nothing wrong with students asking tough questions, but I doubt any third grader has actually read Darwin, or done any research into "missing" intermediate species other than whatever nonsense they were told in Sunday school.
Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.
Yes, it's petty, but I do it too, all the time. For instance, just last week I was thinking about how helpful a smallpox epidemic would be in demonstrating why we have vaccines. Likewise, I'd like to see the American Christians who claim to be persecuted spend some time in Saudi Arabia or China so they could understand the true meaning of persecution. I don't actually think any of these people deserve this, but I can't think of anything else that would convince them of how stupid they sound.
Back in the day transmutation was a big discovery that is now fully illegal under all circumstances.
Um, no it isn't. It's extremely dangerous without the proper equipment, of course. And I'm pretty sure possession of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium is illegal, but there are other good reasons for that.
Can you imagine what would happen if the government found out about someone doing something like what Marie Curie was doing in their basement?
As a matter of fact, something like this really happened, and he was ultimately shut down by the EPA, but I don't think he ever faced criminal charges. The reason why the government clamps down on such experiments is that it's incredibly dangerous and runs a significant risk of killing innocent bystanders if proper safety precautions weren't taken (which they certainly weren't in this case). If someone kills himself in a crazy experiment I don't think it's any of my business, but the freedom to experiment and innovate should not include the freedom to recklessly endanger others. Protecting us from deadly lunatics is one of the basic functions of government, not some mad authoritarian scheme.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
That clause makes me sad for several different reasons...
Me too, for reasons both ethical and practical. But that's the bitter truth about living in a democracy; based on past precedent, I doubt most democratic governments would behave much differently. It's still better than living in an authoritarian system, but it means we (the voters) are all morally culpable.
Although I would settle for the campaign platform actually being followed after election.
This isn't always realistic, unfortunately. To pick a trivial example, Obama said he'd shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The Republicans (and some Democrats) have basically made that impossible. Rather than dig in and spend all of his political capital on a relative handful of foreign captives, Obama decided to focus on what he believed were the more important issues, like the stimulus and healthcare. Whether his priorities were in the correct order is irrelevant; there is simply no way that he could have implemented his entire campaign platform unless he had a supermajority of safe Democratic seats in both houses of Congress. This is not to excuse some of his more craven capitulations, of course (and I have been horribly disappointed for the last five years), but he could never have actually admitted the reality of the situation on the campaign trail. And maybe he actually believed that he could be that transformative president who would unite the country and initiate a bold new era of reform; people who campaign for president have massive egos almost by definition. (Most people I knew voted for him because they wanted a clean break with the Bush years, and/or because Sarah Palin scared the shit out of them, not because they actually believed that he'd do everything he claimed.)
It is still tempting to fantasize about a world in which Bush had followed through on his goal of a "more humble American foreign policy", however.
I'm from Ireland for example, and we have 3 major parties and a couple of smaller ones. And people switch between them and the parties change their policies.
Sure, but Ireland has a population of 5 million, the vast majority of whom have a shared culture (and religion) much older than the entire US. The metropolitan area I live in is 50% larger than that (and much more diverse); the US population is nearly 320 million (officially), and until recently, geographic mobility was relatively limited for many people, so it is quite easy to form isolated enclaves. I have about as much in common with some redneck in Alabama as you do with a Montenegrin peasant. Most other countries are similar to Ireland because they're also relatively small and homogeneous. It's also important to remember that most countries were under authoritarian rule well into the 20th century (and beyond, in many cases), without anything resembling civil society and our rather, um, vigorous culture of political debate.
Also keep in mind that our own civil war killed orders of magnitude more people than yours did, and it took us a century to finish. Some people are still bitter over it in a way that I doubt the Irish are, probably because the opposing sides in Ireland were fighting over a much more trivial disagreement, and were essentially in agreement about the ultimate goal. (Not that this excuses the neo-Confederates in any way.)
I wonder if its possible for America to fix this horrible "if you aren't with us, you are against us" mentality. There seems to be no concept of a middle ground, no grey. Everything is either black or white. How did it end up like this?
What makes you think it wasn't always like this? If you were to go back in time any number of years up to, say, the administration of John Adams, you'd find that the popular political climate was equally nasty if not worse. Look up some contemporaneous quotes from the newspapers of past eras and you'd find stuff that made the Wall Street Journal editorial page look like a haven of reasonable moderation. Anti-immigrant hysteria used to be far worse, back when it was still directed at what we would now think of as "white people". Dallas, TX circa 1963 was like one giant rally of the John Birch Society. Posers like Rick Perry may mutter darkly about secession over Obamacare, but back in the 1860s the nutters really did secede, leading to a war that killed hundreds of thousands. There are just countless examples of extremist rhetoric and polarization.
What has genuinely changed is the pace at which information (and disinformation) is propagated, and the 24-hour news cycle, where every gaffe or poorly formed sentence is beaten into the ground as an example of the other side's perfidy. And the number of news sources has multiplied, so instead of having just a handful of newspapers (and the occasional pamphlet) run by oligarchs, we have a variety of modern media, especially the Internet. Which means that we all have instant access to the same cesspool of slander and lies, whereas in the 19th century - or even the mid-20th - someone living in a small midwestern town would be relatively ignorant and isolated, and might be fooled into believing that their local newspaper was representative of the national "discussion". (Actually, this describes most of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era, at least those of us who are too young to have witnessed the 1960s or the Nixon administration.)
reply to this post by stating clearly that you hereby sell your soul to Satan for the price of a bag of Cheetos. If you have balls you will also include in this deal the souls of everyone in your family.
Oooh, I want to play! I hereby sell my soul to Satan for the price of a bag of Cheetos. Can I get free shipping on that?
Education is mandatory in most countries, regardless of religious beliefs, but I wonder how much control that allows over the curriculum.
In theory: not much, at least in the USA. In practice, it's slightly better: most universities that aren't Bible colleges have standards required for admission. Most require some coursework in biology, and further require that this coursework include actual science instead of Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim,...) apologetics. In California, some home-schooling parents sued the University of California for religious discrimination because their children's creationist coursework wasn't deemed suitable. Fortunately for common sense, they lost. So, the moral is: parents have the right to teach their children whatever nonsense they please, but at the cost of making them uncompetitive for higher education.
Slashdot Mirror
Emmanuel Goldstein was a proxy for Trotsky - a caricature of a villain on whom the ruling clique blamed everything bad to deflect attention from their own incompetence and violence. Of course Trotsky was utterly powerless once exiled, and in "1984" there's nothing to suggest that Goldstein was any different. Goldstein could just as well have been dead at that point; it was simply convenient for the party to keep him in the popular consciousness.
So, do you have any evidence that the creationist movement is actually some fiction (possibly loosely inspired by real people) foisted upon us by the scientific community to distract us? Because from where I sit, it's quite obvious that creationists are not only a large and loud fraction of the American public, they're winning election to school boards and congressional seats, and attempting to refashion the primary school curriculum to include thinly-disguised proselytizing. (Meanwhile, their co-religionists, who may or may not be Biblical literalists, still account for more than 80% of Americans, if you believe the polls.) But maybe it's all a farce and that Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was actually staged using a Hollywood character actor, and the real Ken Ham (if he ever existed) is actually living in a mud hut in Patagonia with a handful of peasants calling themselves "Answers in Genesis". And meanwhile, the scientific community, which is apparently powerless to stop federal budget cuts to basic research, nonetheless pulls the strings from behind the scenes...
So, are you just terrible at analogies, or is that what you really believe? Because it's taking conservative paranoia about liberal media control to the point of self-parody.
Most of the drugs they use to treat AIDS and cancer come from NIH research (although usually the pharmaceutical companies managed to squeeze in and get a patent for them).
I don't know the breakdown per-disease, but FYI, only about a quarter of all drugs were invented with public funding. In most cases academic research greatly informed the development of new drugs (as intended), but there's a huge gap between "this mutation causes bowel cancer, maybe if we inhibit that protein it will stop progression" to "this drug stops bowel cancer". (Huge gap = many years, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.) In the case of AIDS, academic research has been focused on vaccines, whereas the current best-in-class anti-HIV drugs really have been mostly the work of the drug companies.
Okay, so you have a single example from the 1920s, well before the basic principles of molecular biology were discovered. Plus a couple of vague examples like this:
Ten years ago a colleague of mine working in epigenetics at a large genomic institution was told by the boss that epigenetics was not a real part of genetics and that he should change subjects to “something more serious”
This is a favorite ploy of pseudo-scientists: anonymous references to someone working in mainstream science whose revolutionary work is suppressed by the hostility of the rest of the faculty. I call bullshit. You can always dig up a few geriatric senior scientists, whose best work was done decades ago, willing to pooh-pooh some newer field of research. Most scientists have their own favorite examples. This is not evidence for an organized conspiracy of suppression. As I said before, epigenetics was already a well-established and growing field when I started - and people were already doing "epigenome sequencing" ten years ago.
And I repeat: the importance of "Lamarckian evolution" to the process as a whole has still not been demonstrated. Again, it is important not to conflate the role of epigenetics in organismal development and cellular regulation with the issue of inheritance. Clearly epigenetics is more important to inherited traits than was previously assumed, but we have a handful of examples versus a huge amount of evidence for Darwinian evolution. Presumably we will eventually converge on some new "modern synthesis" that incorporates elements of both, but anyone who argues for the primacy of Lamarckian evolution is grossly overstating the case.
I distinctly remember a college biology teacher explaining the case of field mice who developed webbed feet in one generation after a field was flooded. He said that regardless of the data, we were to reject the idea that an adaptation emerged as a response to stimuli. If that's not suppression, I don't know what is.
So, one college biology teacher, discussing an anecdote that I can't seem to find on Google, is evidence of "Darwinists suppress[ing] information about inheritance of acquired traits" as a monolithic group? Surely you can do better than that.
There are no fossils of life before the Cambrian explosion.
Not true! But it's very, very sketchy and weird compared to what comes afterwards, and doesn't provide a neat, continuous path to the animal phyla we're more familiar with. We certainly don't have a fossil record that explains the origin of complex multicellular life - just lots of small clues and educated guesses based on modern forms and molecular evidence. It's a fascinating scientific question but extremely difficult to study, unfortunately, which is why it's almost always going to be an easy target for nitpicking creationists.
How is asking critical questions about view points being pushed onto children with my money establishing religion?
Stop playing dumb. We all know that the only reason these "critical questions" (which never come from actual scientists) are ever introduced into a classroom is to promote a religious alternative. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous and insulting. At least Ken Ham has the honesty to admit this is his goal.
My money is being used to expose children to views I don't agree with.
My money is being used to enforce laws I disagree with, and buy weapons I don't approve of. It's called representative democracy; deal with it, or move somewhere else. We do, however, have a specific clause in our constitution about establishment of religion, and the courts have decided that teaching religion in taxpayer-funded schools is included in this prohibition. (This does not equate to disallowing all criticism of science; you are welcome to spout any nonsense you wish, as long as you do not expect the government to pay for it.) If you're unhappy with that, work on getting the 1st Amendment repealed, or move to another country. I'm sure you won't find much support for teaching evolution in, say, Somalia. (But they're probably not going to be wild about your religion either.)
I have no idea how monetary policy or vaccine reactions are relevant to this debate, or what they have to do with religion. Nor are politics particularly relevant, since you can find scientists of all ideologies working productively without making extravagant pseudo-scientific claims.
As a biologist, I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament. (I was going to say that the panspermia advocates were the biggest exception, but even they aren't really arguing with the fact of evolution, but the origin of life, which is a different matter.) This goes doubly for the age of the earth, which is even less controversial than common descent. The creationists are also almost uniformly not practicing scientists (or even trained as biologists, in all but a handful of cases); I have yet to meet any biologist who continues to be productive while completely ignoring 150 years of scientific evidence. Conversely, I've known a decent number of biologists who were religious, but did not see the need to distort every scientific finding to fit into their theological worldview. (Francis Collins and Ken Miller are two of the most famous examples, but I've never met them, although I think I used Miller's textbook in high school.) In fact, the one who found "intelligent design" the most infuriating was a conservative Catholic.
In summary: why shouldn't I assume that creationists are religious? You've given me absolutely no reason to think otherwise.
In the past 30 years Darwinists suppressed information about inheritance of acquired traits. The Lamarckian-looking genetics that explain this are now FINALLY being accepted as science and are called, as a group of phenomenon, "epigenetics".
This simply demonstrates your ignorance of the field. Epigenetics is far more fundamental and complicated than Lamarckian inheritance - it's a basic mechanism of genetic regulation in all multicellular organisms. This wasn't even remotely controversial 15 years ago, when I started studying biology; any freshman biology course would cover the subject. It still isn't terribly well understood, but what can you expect when we still don't know the function of half of our genes?
What was genuinely controversial was the extent to which epigenetic regulation affected germ cells and was therefore heritable. It was not controversial because "Darwinists" (whatever that means) tried to suppress information, it was because none of the loudest proponents of the theory had found molecular evidence to support it. This is now slowly changing, as biologists are realizing (yet again) that genetic regulation is even more complex than they imagined.
In any case, none of the new information contradicts modern evolutionary theory; likewise, it does not have any relevance to the issue of whether modern life forms were designed or evolved. It also doesn't overturn the "central dogma" of molecular biology or prove that Lamarck's overall hypothesis was correct. We still have every reason to continue to believe that the unmodified genome is the most important carrier of genetic information and determinant of phenotype, and the extent to which epigenetics is heritable is still an unsolved debate. That makes it a fascinating target for more research, and I'm sure there will be more startling discoveries (and perhaps Nobel prizes) in the near future. I'm also very confident that any new discoveries will be made by actual scientists doing actual research, not theologians.
So how did the guy in his basement (who sounds from your description to be OK) endanger society?
Jeez, try reading the link:
"Although his homemade reactor never came anywhere near reaching critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1,000 times normal background radiation."
"EPA scientists believe that Hahn likely exceeded the lifetime dosage for thorium exposure"
Would you want to live next door to that? I certainly wouldn't, and I'd be perfectly happy living downwind of a well-run and inspected nuclear power station. And I've been working around sources of radioactivity for the last ten years - the difference being the use of well-established containment procedures and professional handling.
Don't you have a cross to burn or something?
taking away people's freedom to choose
Stop being hyperbolic. No one is advocating taking away your freedom to choose; you have every right to believe what you want, and to home-school your children or send them to fundamentalist private schools. You do not have the right to have your ancient superstitions treated as equivalent to scientific research, or to push your theology on a captive audience of other people's children.
Because that's exactly what third graders are doing when they ask questions in the classroom. Advancing their religious doctrine. Down with inquisitive third-graders!
It's not the third-graders who are campaigning to have theology taught in biology class, it's grown adults who should know better. And there's nothing wrong with students asking tough questions, but I doubt any third grader has actually read Darwin, or done any research into "missing" intermediate species other than whatever nonsense they were told in Sunday school.
I'm sorry, you're looking for "Ad Hominem Attacks".
I thought it was a perfectly relevant point: why should we take anything that a neo-Confederate has to say seriously?
Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.
Yes, it's petty, but I do it too, all the time. For instance, just last week I was thinking about how helpful a smallpox epidemic would be in demonstrating why we have vaccines. Likewise, I'd like to see the American Christians who claim to be persecuted spend some time in Saudi Arabia or China so they could understand the true meaning of persecution. I don't actually think any of these people deserve this, but I can't think of anything else that would convince them of how stupid they sound.
Back in the day transmutation was a big discovery that is now fully illegal under all circumstances.
Um, no it isn't. It's extremely dangerous without the proper equipment, of course. And I'm pretty sure possession of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium is illegal, but there are other good reasons for that.
Can you imagine what would happen if the government found out about someone doing something like what Marie Curie was doing in their basement?
As a matter of fact, something like this really happened, and he was ultimately shut down by the EPA, but I don't think he ever faced criminal charges. The reason why the government clamps down on such experiments is that it's incredibly dangerous and runs a significant risk of killing innocent bystanders if proper safety precautions weren't taken (which they certainly weren't in this case). If someone kills himself in a crazy experiment I don't think it's any of my business, but the freedom to experiment and innovate should not include the freedom to recklessly endanger others. Protecting us from deadly lunatics is one of the basic functions of government, not some mad authoritarian scheme.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
That clause makes me sad for several different reasons...
Me too, for reasons both ethical and practical. But that's the bitter truth about living in a democracy; based on past precedent, I doubt most democratic governments would behave much differently. It's still better than living in an authoritarian system, but it means we (the voters) are all morally culpable.
Although I would settle for the campaign platform actually being followed after election.
This isn't always realistic, unfortunately. To pick a trivial example, Obama said he'd shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The Republicans (and some Democrats) have basically made that impossible. Rather than dig in and spend all of his political capital on a relative handful of foreign captives, Obama decided to focus on what he believed were the more important issues, like the stimulus and healthcare. Whether his priorities were in the correct order is irrelevant; there is simply no way that he could have implemented his entire campaign platform unless he had a supermajority of safe Democratic seats in both houses of Congress. This is not to excuse some of his more craven capitulations, of course (and I have been horribly disappointed for the last five years), but he could never have actually admitted the reality of the situation on the campaign trail. And maybe he actually believed that he could be that transformative president who would unite the country and initiate a bold new era of reform; people who campaign for president have massive egos almost by definition. (Most people I knew voted for him because they wanted a clean break with the Bush years, and/or because Sarah Palin scared the shit out of them, not because they actually believed that he'd do everything he claimed.)
It is still tempting to fantasize about a world in which Bush had followed through on his goal of a "more humble American foreign policy", however.
The parties changed; the assholes, well, they're still assholes.
Gee, I wonder if there's a reason why that stereotype exists? Hint: read some history books.
I'm from Ireland for example, and we have 3 major parties and a couple of smaller ones. And people switch between them and the parties change their policies.
Sure, but Ireland has a population of 5 million, the vast majority of whom have a shared culture (and religion) much older than the entire US. The metropolitan area I live in is 50% larger than that (and much more diverse); the US population is nearly 320 million (officially), and until recently, geographic mobility was relatively limited for many people, so it is quite easy to form isolated enclaves. I have about as much in common with some redneck in Alabama as you do with a Montenegrin peasant. Most other countries are similar to Ireland because they're also relatively small and homogeneous. It's also important to remember that most countries were under authoritarian rule well into the 20th century (and beyond, in many cases), without anything resembling civil society and our rather, um, vigorous culture of political debate.
Also keep in mind that our own civil war killed orders of magnitude more people than yours did, and it took us a century to finish. Some people are still bitter over it in a way that I doubt the Irish are, probably because the opposing sides in Ireland were fighting over a much more trivial disagreement, and were essentially in agreement about the ultimate goal. (Not that this excuses the neo-Confederates in any way.)
I wonder if its possible for America to fix this horrible "if you aren't with us, you are against us" mentality. There seems to be no concept of a middle ground, no grey. Everything is either black or white. How did it end up like this?
What makes you think it wasn't always like this? If you were to go back in time any number of years up to, say, the administration of John Adams, you'd find that the popular political climate was equally nasty if not worse. Look up some contemporaneous quotes from the newspapers of past eras and you'd find stuff that made the Wall Street Journal editorial page look like a haven of reasonable moderation. Anti-immigrant hysteria used to be far worse, back when it was still directed at what we would now think of as "white people". Dallas, TX circa 1963 was like one giant rally of the John Birch Society. Posers like Rick Perry may mutter darkly about secession over Obamacare, but back in the 1860s the nutters really did secede, leading to a war that killed hundreds of thousands. There are just countless examples of extremist rhetoric and polarization.
What has genuinely changed is the pace at which information (and disinformation) is propagated, and the 24-hour news cycle, where every gaffe or poorly formed sentence is beaten into the ground as an example of the other side's perfidy. And the number of news sources has multiplied, so instead of having just a handful of newspapers (and the occasional pamphlet) run by oligarchs, we have a variety of modern media, especially the Internet. Which means that we all have instant access to the same cesspool of slander and lies, whereas in the 19th century - or even the mid-20th - someone living in a small midwestern town would be relatively ignorant and isolated, and might be fooled into believing that their local newspaper was representative of the national "discussion". (Actually, this describes most of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era, at least those of us who are too young to have witnessed the 1960s or the Nixon administration.)
reply to this post by stating clearly that you hereby sell your soul to Satan for the price of a bag of Cheetos. If you have balls you will also include in this deal the souls of everyone in your family.
Oooh, I want to play! I hereby sell my soul to Satan for the price of a bag of Cheetos. Can I get free shipping on that?
Education is mandatory in most countries, regardless of religious beliefs, but I wonder how much control that allows over the curriculum.
In theory: not much, at least in the USA. In practice, it's slightly better: most universities that aren't Bible colleges have standards required for admission. Most require some coursework in biology, and further require that this coursework include actual science instead of Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, ...) apologetics. In California, some home-schooling parents sued the University of California for religious discrimination because their children's creationist coursework wasn't deemed suitable. Fortunately for common sense, they lost. So, the moral is: parents have the right to teach their children whatever nonsense they please, but at the cost of making them uncompetitive for higher education.