The real problem that the Anti-Defamation League has is the same one that haunts intelligent politicians: nuance doesn't sell to the comprehension-challenged masses. Both of the articles you linked to contain a nuanced message which points out the problems with aspects of Borat's humour while at the same time recognizing what Borat is about. Are you really incapable of understanding that? Or are you simply pushing some kind of political agenda? Do you expect anyone to take you seriously?
As a creationist, I actually respect your position and honesty much more than the "no, really, there's no conflict!" position.
My position is essentially that "no, really, there's no conflict!", and I'd really like to know why you respect that position much less than that of the other poster. I responded to the other poster with my points in this comment. Please read that comment, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Briefly, it is clear that if one accepts evolution, then it refutes a literal interpretation of the creation story as given by the Bible. However, I see no connection between that and the idea that evolution "justifies" moral relativism, sexual promiscuity, etc., and I explain that in the linked comment.
Belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible. I don't think there should be any disagreement on that.
As an atheist who believes that logic should trump dogma, I disagree. Belief in evolution doesn't automatically eliminate the possibility of a creator/deity, or the moral force of such an entity if it exists. What it does do is imply that a great deal of the content of the Christian Bible, and other religious texts, is metaphorical. That's a bit of a no-brainer, with or without evolution. But in no way does this "remove the moral force" from religious texts.
The moral force exists for those who believe that their religious text is a divinely-inspired work, and evolution has nothing to do with that at all. Belief in evolution does not preclude belief in a creator or belief in the Bible. Your or my belief that there is no creator does not change that. From the other direction, if we're wrong in our belief, and there is some kind of creator whose moral code is represented by the Bible, that doesn't necessarily refute evolution.
I'll try to anticipate one argument you might be thinking of: evolution postulates motives for humans that are ultimately driven by natural selection. But if one believes in a creator that is using evolution as a means to an end, then in Christian terms, those natural-selection driven motives may simply be the "original sin" which humans are supposed to overcome, by following the allegedly divine moral guidance given in the Bible.
(Another, more trivially refuted argument is that if there were no evidence for anything like evolution, it would be strong evidence for some sort of miraculous creation event. But the fact that there is evidence for evolution doesn't preclude a creation event influenced by a deity.)
Either way, I'd be curious to hear your argument about how "belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible."
I agree with the grandparent: an entrepreneur is someone who figures out how to monetize an idea that someone else has already had (innovation vs. invention), and who actually gets off his butt and does it. In this case, suggesting ads on Wikipedia is not entrepreneurship, it's just back-seat driving.
I thought it was funny. It seemed to me your response missed the point. Instead of long rationalizations about why you decided to spoil someone else's joke, why not just say sorry or keep quiet, as you should have in the first place?
And the Tatooine scenes were filmed in Tunisia, but it doesn't change the fact that the largest share of the dollars paid for Star Wars products around the world ends up back in California.
What ? Few places out of tens of thousands were selling something they called Freedom Fries and that's all.
That was just an example of the propaganda at its worst, and "Americans were eating Freedom Fries" was a metaphorical way to communicate that. The name change first took effect in the House of Representatives cafeterias, as a result of instigation by two Congressmen, one of whom was the chairman of the Committee on House Administration (see here for more). However, this action resulted in widespread excoriation of the French position on the war, which certainly extended to many ordinary Americans. The number of jokes in the media about the whole French surrender theme skyrocketed. It was an effective way of politically neutralizing the French opposition to the war, which made it unnecessary to respond to the French position at a more serious level. That opposition could simply be ignored, because there was no political pressure to do otherwise. Granted, the two Congressmen responsible for that particular initiative may not have been operating in such a calculated way, but propaganda doesn't have to be conscious to be effective - that kind of propaganda taps into nationalism and patriotism, and it was certainly consciously intended to send a message to the French people and government.
You have no fucking clue what you talking about. There is no propaganda, internal or otherwise.
You don't recognize the propaganda because you eat, sleep, and breathe it, and you've probably never travelled anywhere outside the U.S., so you have no point of comparison.
This is not Europe, people don't spend a lot of time discussing political issues of the day - they have better things to do , like making money.
You're extrapolating from your own experience and those of the people you know, which is not everyone in the U.S. There are millions of people in the U.S. who do care about politics -- turn on MSNBC or CNN or Fox once in a while to see evidence of that. To a large extent, those people end up forming the opinions that drive the country's agenda - for example, the whole neo-conservative movement played out on TV long before its huge impact came in the form of the Iraq war. Part of the reason that many people who do pay attention to the political process were willing to go along with the war was because they'd been influenced by the neocon arguments and position with respect to the way in which the U.S. should project power in the rest of the world.
Just because you don't recognize or understand the role that propaganda plays in this process, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does, however, make you easy to exploit. Your tax dollars get used for many things that you hate, or would hate if you paid enough attention to know about them. The propaganda about terrorism (the "War on Terror" is pure propaganda) is used to justify billions, and ultimately trillions, of your tax dollars being poured into the military and its supporting industries -- over $300 billion in Iraq so far. That propaganda doesn't just affect people who "spend a lot of time discussing political issues of the day".
Not only am I calm but I disagree with your assertion that I'm not rational. It's only natural to try and protect the ones you love.
Right, but the way in which you choose to protect them should be rational, otherwise you're simply going to fail to protect them, and in this case, make their lives worse in other ways.
You're talking about implanting chips in millions of other people -- there were 40 million foreign visitors to the U.S. in 2003, extremely few of whom pose any threat to you. As I pointed out, implanting them all with chips isn't likely to be very effective as a technique for anything but plunging the U.S. further into fascism. Foreign visits to the U.S. dropped by 10 million people between 2000 (source). That's bad for the U.S. economy (the linked page claims the loss cost about $20 billion), and bad for relations with the rest of the world. Many of those 10 million people tried to get U.S. visas but were refused, not because they were thought to be terrorists, but because the requirements for entry have been significantly tightened, so that many students and less wealthy people can't easily come here as tourists or even business visitors, because they're considered a risk for illegal overstay. Do you really think that this is effective at keeping terrorists out? How far do you plan to support the tightening of that net? Until the U.S. gets effectively no tourist dollars, and many fewer visiting foreign businessmen? Implanting chips in visitors is a sure way to hasten that process.
I think you may be wrong about propaganda not having affected the way you think. For a start, the idea that the source of all danger is foreign nationals is clearly false: one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever on American soil was by Timothy McVeigh, an American, and millions of people are mugged, raped, murdered etc. every year by other Americans. So to keep your family safe, you're going to need to widen your net. Unfortunately, criminals don't come with a convenient label on their foreheads, so it's hard to know who to implant chips into in advance. Here are some popular suggestions which might appeal to you, or hopefully, help you see where your logic is going astray: you could put chips in all black people, since they commit the most crimes in the U.S. (unless they've been overtaken by Hispanics now, in which case, let's chip them too); or to avoid being racist, you could put chips in poor people, since they're much more likely to be a direct and obvious threat than wealthier people; or you could chip everyone who goes to prison, all the better to track them after they come out (doing away with the notion of rehabilitation in the process). All of these groups are at least as dangerous to your family, in practice and backed up by statistics, as foreign nationals are. So why do you want to target the foreign nationals specifically?
BTW, I'm a foreign national living in the U.S. I'm a partner in a software company that employs other Americans, and software I developed is used by American companies and by local and state governments. When you take action against all foreign nationals, you're taking action against me. Essentially, you're making me and tens of millions of other people like me your enemy, because you've somehow come to the conclusion that there's some similarity between us and terrorists. You say you're rational, but that's not how it looks from where I stand. You readily seem to equate "foreigner" with "threat". The word for that is "jingoism", and it's not rational.
That kind of issue over trade is not so unusual, but it doesn't count as the sort of thing I was thinking of. Problems like the U.S. attempting to export its newly-screwed up intellectual property laws don't seem to hit that same radar, or trigger the same level of response. In that case, part of the reason is that the same corporations lobbying for those laws are present in other countries. However, something similar goes for many of the less enlightened responses to the terrorism issue: in many cases, U.S. behavior doesn't affect other countries all that directly, but certainly affects them indirectly. So the usual tit-for-tat that happens with trade doesn't really work.
In any case, trade issues like that don't usually involve the man in the street much: they're worked out between industry groups and governments. What I'm getting it is that instead of just grumbling about U.S. behavior on these non-trade issues, EU countries and other first world countries (ones which the U.S. considers closer to being peers) need to start responding at an official level. It could even simply be by passing resolutions that do nothing but express an opinion: while purely symbolic, that sort of thing hits the media and can have an effect.
The U.S. demonstrated how effective its internal propaganda machine is in responding to the French opposition to the Iraq war. Suddenly Americans were eating Freedom Fries instead of French fries, and every mean joke about the French was trotted out on TV. Part of the reason that worked on the American people as well as it did (aside from the fact that the U.S. is home to some of the most jingoistic nationalists of any country) is that most other countries caved, and it's easy to demonize one ally. It's less easy to demonize many of your allies. People are much more likely to start questioning what their government is telling them.
Something which would cost a whole bunch of people their jobs in the affected areas, quite possibly leading to Bush losing the reelection.
Well hmm. They had their chance, and they blew it. I hope the EU is enjoying the second Bush administration.
Yeah, but George isn't Canadian... (Is he? I dunno, those Canucks pop up where you least expect 'em.)
Anyway, the serious point behind all of this is that it is much more about corporations exercising power, and using the U.S. government as a powerful stooge over which they have the most direct control, than anything else. In that sense, the objection about movies needs to be to any movies made by major corporations, which want to exert draconian IP ownership control wherever they sell them, regardless of where they are made. For example, the Bronfmans are Canadian, and through Edgar at least they are or have been owners and/or major partners in Universal, Vivendi, and Warner Music. I'd be rather surprised to find that Edgar is laissez-faire about intellectual property.
National boundaries long ago became little more than administrative obstacles to corporations, but the man in the street hasn't yet figured out that their misplaced nationalism is now being used against them.
This really is a win-win situation for Canada. The worst the U.S. can do to Canada is the best possible thing for Canada's cinema and the worst possible thing for american film makers. So *PLEASE* blacklist us. Pretty please! I freakin' double dare ya! Heck, BAN the release of american movies in Canada indefinately!
If your cute Canadian pride would allow you to quote a U.S. movie, you could just have said: "Darth Bush, if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!"
Canada should put the USA on some kind of a rogue counties list , for terrorism, meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, being way too fat and making crappy movies.
Actually, quite seriously, this is the way to go. The grievances we all hear that other countries have with the U.S. are often raised, but never to a level at which the U.S. government really has to answer to them or think about them. The U.S. people have failed to keep its government in check, it's up to the rest of the first world (and perhaps other countries) to step up and help do so.
Your ability to think rationally has been seriously degraded by fear and/or propaganda. Implating chips in all foreign nationals is very much like outlawing guns: only the criminal foreign nationals would have no chips (they'd remove them if necessary), and the monitoring effort would be focused on exactly the wrong group, the law-abiding foreign nationals. You'd have to implant chips in all citizens for it to be meaningful, but then you'd have to do something about the 11 million illegal aliens who wouldn't have chips, most of whom aren't terrorists and are instead looking after your babies, washing your clothes, picking your fruit, and writing your software.
But it is interesting to watch fascism bubbling from the grassroots up, apparently with an utter lack of self-awareness. Look in the mirror: you are responsible for the world around you. If you want it to ever change, learn to think past the jerking of your knee.
Actually, it is a suggestion. The fact that it's backed up by force doesn't change that. Or is your mind so warped by "law" that you can't conceive of disobeying it under any circumstances? That's a good little sheepizen!
For someone who allegedly gets paid to grade student papers, you have a remarkably sophomoric discussion style. If you were confident in your intellectual abilities and your ability to argue your case, you wouldn't need to resort to such pettiness. Not to mention that the discussion would be more interesting.
If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley. The reviews on the Amazon page summarize it better than I could. Worth reading.
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The real problem that the Anti-Defamation League has is the same one that haunts intelligent politicians: nuance doesn't sell to the comprehension-challenged masses. Both of the articles you linked to contain a nuanced message which points out the problems with aspects of Borat's humour while at the same time recognizing what Borat is about. Are you really incapable of understanding that? Or are you simply pushing some kind of political agenda? Do you expect anyone to take you seriously?
My position is essentially that "no, really, there's no conflict!", and I'd really like to know why you respect that position much less than that of the other poster. I responded to the other poster with my points in this comment. Please read that comment, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Briefly, it is clear that if one accepts evolution, then it refutes a literal interpretation of the creation story as given by the Bible. However, I see no connection between that and the idea that evolution "justifies" moral relativism, sexual promiscuity, etc., and I explain that in the linked comment.
As an atheist who believes that logic should trump dogma, I disagree. Belief in evolution doesn't automatically eliminate the possibility of a creator/deity, or the moral force of such an entity if it exists. What it does do is imply that a great deal of the content of the Christian Bible, and other religious texts, is metaphorical. That's a bit of a no-brainer, with or without evolution. But in no way does this "remove the moral force" from religious texts.
The moral force exists for those who believe that their religious text is a divinely-inspired work, and evolution has nothing to do with that at all. Belief in evolution does not preclude belief in a creator or belief in the Bible. Your or my belief that there is no creator does not change that. From the other direction, if we're wrong in our belief, and there is some kind of creator whose moral code is represented by the Bible, that doesn't necessarily refute evolution.
I'll try to anticipate one argument you might be thinking of: evolution postulates motives for humans that are ultimately driven by natural selection. But if one believes in a creator that is using evolution as a means to an end, then in Christian terms, those natural-selection driven motives may simply be the "original sin" which humans are supposed to overcome, by following the allegedly divine moral guidance given in the Bible.
(Another, more trivially refuted argument is that if there were no evidence for anything like evolution, it would be strong evidence for some sort of miraculous creation event. But the fact that there is evidence for evolution doesn't preclude a creation event influenced by a deity.)
Either way, I'd be curious to hear your argument about how "belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible."
I agree with the grandparent: an entrepreneur is someone who figures out how to monetize an idea that someone else has already had (innovation vs. invention), and who actually gets off his butt and does it. In this case, suggesting ads on Wikipedia is not entrepreneurship, it's just back-seat driving.
You will change your mind when you feel the sting of a thousand giant bees from the center of the Earth.
You ignorant clod, any child knows that the bees at the center of the Earth are giant bees, and their wings beat at exactly 10 millihertz.
Kind of like how trees waving cause the wind?
And the Tatooine scenes were filmed in Tunisia, but it doesn't change the fact that the largest share of the dollars paid for Star Wars products around the world ends up back in California.
That was just an example of the propaganda at its worst, and "Americans were eating Freedom Fries" was a metaphorical way to communicate that. The name change first took effect in the House of Representatives cafeterias, as a result of instigation by two Congressmen, one of whom was the chairman of the Committee on House Administration (see here for more). However, this action resulted in widespread excoriation of the French position on the war, which certainly extended to many ordinary Americans. The number of jokes in the media about the whole French surrender theme skyrocketed. It was an effective way of politically neutralizing the French opposition to the war, which made it unnecessary to respond to the French position at a more serious level. That opposition could simply be ignored, because there was no political pressure to do otherwise. Granted, the two Congressmen responsible for that particular initiative may not have been operating in such a calculated way, but propaganda doesn't have to be conscious to be effective - that kind of propaganda taps into nationalism and patriotism, and it was certainly consciously intended to send a message to the French people and government.
You don't recognize the propaganda because you eat, sleep, and breathe it, and you've probably never travelled anywhere outside the U.S., so you have no point of comparison.You're extrapolating from your own experience and those of the people you know, which is not everyone in the U.S. There are millions of people in the U.S. who do care about politics -- turn on MSNBC or CNN or Fox once in a while to see evidence of that. To a large extent, those people end up forming the opinions that drive the country's agenda - for example, the whole neo-conservative movement played out on TV long before its huge impact came in the form of the Iraq war. Part of the reason that many people who do pay attention to the political process were willing to go along with the war was because they'd been influenced by the neocon arguments and position with respect to the way in which the U.S. should project power in the rest of the world.
Just because you don't recognize or understand the role that propaganda plays in this process, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does, however, make you easy to exploit. Your tax dollars get used for many things that you hate, or would hate if you paid enough attention to know about them. The propaganda about terrorism (the "War on Terror" is pure propaganda) is used to justify billions, and ultimately trillions, of your tax dollars being poured into the military and its supporting industries -- over $300 billion in Iraq so far. That propaganda doesn't just affect people who "spend a lot of time discussing political issues of the day".
Right, but the way in which you choose to protect them should be rational, otherwise you're simply going to fail to protect them, and in this case, make their lives worse in other ways.
You're talking about implanting chips in millions of other people -- there were 40 million foreign visitors to the U.S. in 2003, extremely few of whom pose any threat to you. As I pointed out, implanting them all with chips isn't likely to be very effective as a technique for anything but plunging the U.S. further into fascism. Foreign visits to the U.S. dropped by 10 million people between 2000 (source). That's bad for the U.S. economy (the linked page claims the loss cost about $20 billion), and bad for relations with the rest of the world. Many of those 10 million people tried to get U.S. visas but were refused, not because they were thought to be terrorists, but because the requirements for entry have been significantly tightened, so that many students and less wealthy people can't easily come here as tourists or even business visitors, because they're considered a risk for illegal overstay. Do you really think that this is effective at keeping terrorists out? How far do you plan to support the tightening of that net? Until the U.S. gets effectively no tourist dollars, and many fewer visiting foreign businessmen? Implanting chips in visitors is a sure way to hasten that process.
I think you may be wrong about propaganda not having affected the way you think. For a start, the idea that the source of all danger is foreign nationals is clearly false: one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever on American soil was by Timothy McVeigh, an American, and millions of people are mugged, raped, murdered etc. every year by other Americans. So to keep your family safe, you're going to need to widen your net. Unfortunately, criminals don't come with a convenient label on their foreheads, so it's hard to know who to implant chips into in advance. Here are some popular suggestions which might appeal to you, or hopefully, help you see where your logic is going astray: you could put chips in all black people, since they commit the most crimes in the U.S. (unless they've been overtaken by Hispanics now, in which case, let's chip them too); or to avoid being racist, you could put chips in poor people, since they're much more likely to be a direct and obvious threat than wealthier people; or you could chip everyone who goes to prison, all the better to track them after they come out (doing away with the notion of rehabilitation in the process). All of these groups are at least as dangerous to your family, in practice and backed up by statistics, as foreign nationals are. So why do you want to target the foreign nationals specifically?
BTW, I'm a foreign national living in the U.S. I'm a partner in a software company that employs other Americans, and software I developed is used by American companies and by local and state governments. When you take action against all foreign nationals, you're taking action against me. Essentially, you're making me and tens of millions of other people like me your enemy, because you've somehow come to the conclusion that there's some similarity between us and terrorists. You say you're rational, but that's not how it looks from where I stand. You readily seem to equate "foreigner" with "threat". The word for that is "jingoism", and it's not rational.
That kind of issue over trade is not so unusual, but it doesn't count as the sort of thing I was thinking of. Problems like the U.S. attempting to export its newly-screwed up intellectual property laws don't seem to hit that same radar, or trigger the same level of response. In that case, part of the reason is that the same corporations lobbying for those laws are present in other countries. However, something similar goes for many of the less enlightened responses to the terrorism issue: in many cases, U.S. behavior doesn't affect other countries all that directly, but certainly affects them indirectly. So the usual tit-for-tat that happens with trade doesn't really work.
In any case, trade issues like that don't usually involve the man in the street much: they're worked out between industry groups and governments. What I'm getting it is that instead of just grumbling about U.S. behavior on these non-trade issues, EU countries and other first world countries (ones which the U.S. considers closer to being peers) need to start responding at an official level. It could even simply be by passing resolutions that do nothing but express an opinion: while purely symbolic, that sort of thing hits the media and can have an effect.
The U.S. demonstrated how effective its internal propaganda machine is in responding to the French opposition to the Iraq war. Suddenly Americans were eating Freedom Fries instead of French fries, and every mean joke about the French was trotted out on TV. Part of the reason that worked on the American people as well as it did (aside from the fact that the U.S. is home to some of the most jingoistic nationalists of any country) is that most other countries caved, and it's easy to demonize one ally. It's less easy to demonize many of your allies. People are much more likely to start questioning what their government is telling them.
Well hmm. They had their chance, and they blew it. I hope the EU is enjoying the second Bush administration.Yeah, but George isn't Canadian... (Is he? I dunno, those Canucks pop up where you least expect 'em.)
Anyway, the serious point behind all of this is that it is much more about corporations exercising power, and using the U.S. government as a powerful stooge over which they have the most direct control, than anything else. In that sense, the objection about movies needs to be to any movies made by major corporations, which want to exert draconian IP ownership control wherever they sell them, regardless of where they are made. For example, the Bronfmans are Canadian, and through Edgar at least they are or have been owners and/or major partners in Universal, Vivendi, and Warner Music. I'd be rather surprised to find that Edgar is laissez-faire about intellectual property.
National boundaries long ago became little more than administrative obstacles to corporations, but the man in the street hasn't yet figured out that their misplaced nationalism is now being used against them.
If your cute Canadian pride would allow you to quote a U.S. movie, you could just have said: "Darth Bush, if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!"
That's "free rein", not "free reign". It's a metaphor from horses (reins) not kings (reigns). See here.
Your ability to think rationally has been seriously degraded by fear and/or propaganda. Implating chips in all foreign nationals is very much like outlawing guns: only the criminal foreign nationals would have no chips (they'd remove them if necessary), and the monitoring effort would be focused on exactly the wrong group, the law-abiding foreign nationals. You'd have to implant chips in all citizens for it to be meaningful, but then you'd have to do something about the 11 million illegal aliens who wouldn't have chips, most of whom aren't terrorists and are instead looking after your babies, washing your clothes, picking your fruit, and writing your software.
But it is interesting to watch fascism bubbling from the grassroots up, apparently with an utter lack of self-awareness. Look in the mirror: you are responsible for the world around you. If you want it to ever change, learn to think past the jerking of your knee.
Actually, it is a suggestion. The fact that it's backed up by force doesn't change that. Or is your mind so warped by "law" that you can't conceive of disobeying it under any circumstances? That's a good little sheepizen!
Feh. Time was when programmers used to hang out on Slashdot. I thought the title was about race conditions in game programming!
Turns out its something to do with skin color, which being a disciple of the great Dr. Colbert, I don't see anyway.
Congratulations! That's the first truly funny variation on the "In communist..." joke that I've seen for years...
For someone who allegedly gets paid to grade student papers, you have a remarkably sophomoric discussion style. If you were confident in your intellectual abilities and your ability to argue your case, you wouldn't need to resort to such pettiness. Not to mention that the discussion would be more interesting.
If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley. The reviews on the Amazon page summarize it better than I could. Worth reading.