Right. Your primary care provider at Kaiser isn't going to call you from home. But your therapist might call to respond to your request for an appointment. They won't want you to call them back at home. So they get an unlisted number and caller ID blocking. They deal with insane people for a living, so not wanting to give out their home phone number makes some sense.
Are you attempting to say that the above Ford is not cheaper than the above Porsche?
So the Porsche is better. But the Ford is cheaper. Someone was trying to say he couldn't afford a new Powerbook. He wasn't trying to say that the Powerbook was a ripoff and should cost $750 like the lowest-end Thinkpad.
Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for.
Then, if you want to get your site ranked higher, it's best to have "links" from trustworthy sites to your "original content". And in order to get that, you probably need "higher quality".
Google Analytics provides very little value for personal websites. It's set up for a team, and it's set up for sales/adclick conversions. Neither has anything to do with blogs unless your blog is some idiotic get-rich-quick scheme. Good luck with that.
One could always believe that evolution is just a tool in God's hands. That way it's possible to believe in intelligent design without denying facts, that Earth is older than a few thousands years, etc.
I don't disagree with your point. However, "Intelligent Design" is different from believing that God may have guided evolution. Many scientists believe that God guided evolution, and certainly none have disproven or care to disprove it. The point of "Intelligent Design" is that evolution is impossible without the help of an intelligent designer, and that this can be proven via scientific evidence. Their evidence has proven to be a pile of crap.
Since lots of people believe that God guided evolution, many people assume that "Intelligent Design" is the same as the thing they believe, because what they believe makes sense.
So "One could always believe that evolution is just a tool in God's hands" is true, while "That way it's possible to believe in intelligent design without denying facts" is not.
The Catholic Church, for example, states clearly that evolution is a fact, God guided evolution, and Intelligent Design is spurious crap.
Also, there is nothing in existing evolutionary theory that restricts speciation in a small or stressed population to a single common ancestor.
Wouldn't any individual gene be traceable to a common ancestor? Unless the identical mutation occurred twice? (And that's the subject of this imaginary theory that MrFlibs accidentally read into the bad science writing)
I don't hear him actually saying that environmental stress creates the same mutation in different ancestors. All I get from the article is punctuated equilibrium + conspiracy theory.
Did you read the research, or is this just two different interpretations of some awful science writing?
MrFlibbs' highly rated comment above is suggesting that this theory says environmental stresses could lead to simultaneous mutations in different members of the same species, and the species wouldn't necessarily need a common ancestor for each individual gene. That's certainly different from punctuated equilibrium.
There's nothing in the article that leads me to that reading, though, so yeah, either MrFlibb read the actual research and found something more than the article, or this sounds like total crap.
It's a shame you decided against them based on verbosity rather than content.
Um... the verbosity meant that rather than 1 wrong, and imho, refutable point, you had 30 wrong, and imho, refutable points. So I'd say I skipped them based on verbosity and content both. Too deep. And I'll point out that your overly verbose post did not address many of the points in my preceding comment either, so I didn't feel quite so obligated. You seemed to think that by talking about marriage-the-institution vs marriage-for-individuals you would trump all my little points, so I wasn't going to go off making 30 more little points.
I would say that being capable of frankly admitting errors in one's own argument is - logically speaking - not such a bad thing. If we're trying to look better than you get points for making me look unsure of myself. But if the question is an earnest search for truth, than I don't see how this is relevant one way or the other.
You're absolutely right. It is only relevant because it's taking so much time, and it guarantees that I'll never go dig up the original point that didn't stick because you refuted it with something that you've now backtracked on. If you see what I mean.
I've been telling you again and again that there's a difference between asking "who can get married" and asking "what is marriage". I'm going to have to pull a trick out of your repetoire and implore you to not bother responding unless you're going to either accept or refute that distinction directly.
You know, I'd tend to agree with that: the definition of marriage is independent of who is allowed to participate in it. Is that what you mean when you say "who can get married" is different from "what is marriage"? Because elsewhere you're saying
In order for a word to mean something it has to not mean someting else. Definitions are inherently exclusive.
Which makes it sound like "what is marriage" is exactly defined by "who can get married".
You know, given that little contradiction, I'm pretty sure I must have misunderstood you. I stand by what I've said, but not my interpretation of what you said was your ultimatum. So I'm going to backtrack a whole lot. There are two bits from your overly verbose (and overly italicized:) argument that I feel are your central points, and I think they're unrelated:
In other words - if you take two average gay people and two average straight people which will make better parents? You HAVE to take individual variation (other than sexuality, obviously) out of the equation. It's like a science experiment: you must change only 1 variable and that variable is same-sex vs opposite sex. Bringing anything else into the discussion is immaterial to the gay marriage question. I understand that you think that they gays would be just as good. I however, disagree. Not that they are not as good individually - but systematically.
Ok. Systematically, institutionally speaking, tell me another criterion that we use here aside from the sex of the parents. If it's like a science experiment and I must change only 1 variable... how about it's making both parents uneducated? Obviously two uneducated parents will be less likely to have educated, productive children, than families with one educated parent and one uneducated parent. But we don't require that one person on each marriage license has a college degree. That's not an invasion of privacy (like, you know, the mandatory blood tests in several states). And maybe you can come up with some reason why education is a different kind of criterion, and obviously it is. But I'm saying your job is to tell me that we are already using, or at least attemting to use all the bad-for-the-institution-of-raising-kids criterion that we can use here (theoretic
Oh. I forgot greencard marriages. I would prefer to change our greencard policy so that there was no desire for greencard marriages, and then no one would have to police whether people married to foreigners were actually in love. 'Till then I have no problem with greencard marriages.
Definitions are inherently exclusive. So where would you draw the line on marriage? How broad of a definition do you accept and - more importantly - what's your basis for making the decision?
That's a good question. I can't think of many other categories of people that want to get married but cannot due to current marriage law. I guess blood relatives and polygamists. I know families with same-sex partners, and I know how functional they are, and I don't see any reason to hurt them where we help other much less societally-beneficial relationships. I don't know any relatives that want to get married, and I don't know anyone who wants to marry a gaggle of people. If they could explain the way they think that should work, legally, and what benefits they'd get from legal marriage, then I might have some way of deciding. Honestly, I don't think there are enough advocates for either group to consider it a widely desired thing.
If Utah were joining the US right now, I'd only really care that polygamists made efforts that the legal structure of marriage was equitable, enjoined by consenting adults, and couldn't be used by Ken Lay to marry & pay off all his witnesses. No big deal and most of all not my business.
Wait a fucking second. What's your opinion of polygamy? I know you accept that it is & can be banned, but you've kindof sounded like you think it shouldn't be. Please dish. I swear I'll address your ultimatum when I get worked up to it.
It's also fair to try to say that mormon-on-mormon marriage isn't really marriage, but I think it doesn't actually work.
There. That's the thing I'm trying to talk about. All of the rest of your response to my Mormon-on-Mormon analogy is irrelevant. While you believe that sentence, we will disagree. I do not believe that it is fair to try to say that Mormon-on-Mormon marriage isn't really marriage, whether or not there are negative characteristics of Mormon-on-Mormon marriage. My accused conflation of "Mormons are bad parents" and "Mormonism is bad for children" completely aside.
Look, help me out here. The question "can gays get married" is distinct from the question "can people of the same sex get married". You can say yes to the first while saying no to the second. And you can say no to the first while saying yes to the second (although why two same-gendered straight people would want to get married is another matter). Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
Absolutely. I agree that those two things are distinct. I have not indicated otherwise in this conversation.
3. Who accused you of preventing gay people from marrying someone of the opposite sex? Not me! No, you didn't . I didn't say you did. I'm not sure what your point is here.
Uh... then wtf was that question about? ("Can gays get married" is distinct from "Can people of the same sex get married"; Agree or disagree.) You keep repeating things like that question, and since I have not accused you of preventing gay people from marrying someone of the opposite sex, I cannot fathom the reason.
continued to confuse two very differen things (eg: "mormon-on-mormon marriage" vs Mormon-marriage)
I have not, in this conversation, misspoken on this point. Every single time, I spoke about prohibiting Mormon people from marrying other Mormon people. There were several times when you clearly interpretted it the other way, that Mormon people would be prohibited from marrying at all, and that has nearly driven me mad with frustration. You've done it again here:
For the hundredth time: what I'm pointing out is that it's discrimination to say "mormons get married". It's also discrimination to say "gays can't married". But as I've pointed out, gays can get married. That's clever rhetoric that disguises the real issues.
And it makes me want to stab you in the neck. Why would you repeat that again? Who brought up the concept of preventing Mormons from marrying at all? Not me! Who accused you of preventing gay people from marrying someone of the opposite sex? Not me!
I'll attempt to address a number of things and your (welcome) ultimatum later.
By what strange logic do you conclude that in an argument your opponent is not only responsible for expressing what he does believe, but also listing all of the things that he doesn't?
Oh, no. That was an expression of frustration. No, you were not responsible for stating your every relevant opinion.
it seems to me we don't agree so much after all. If the rights of a civil union are expanded to include all those of marriage than we have a distinction without a difference.
But the rights that you specifically named as being OK with you are absolutely the bulk of the difference for me. If only those things were changed, gay marriage advocates would be largely silenced. You change those things, and I'll tell Lambda Legal & The Human Rights Campaign that I think my donated money is better spent on other efforts.
I was disheartened by your comment as well. I was skipping to the points that felt relevant. I felt that we'd discovered the source of our disagreement w.r.t. the analogy to no-mormon-on-mormon marriage. I felt that you were finally addressing my point about the merits of regulating same-sex relationships in a similar fashion to opposite-sex relationships. Your argument for why gay marriage is inherently different in a destructive fashion than any other marriage went so vague and verbosely off the deep end that I didn't have any interest in sorting it out.
Ugh. I just reread your original comment. "You don't need the county clerk to give you a license to love. That's stupid. Have you ever realized how ridiculous it sounds to get a license from the gov't if marriage is just about love and commitment and all that jazz?"
No, but you need the county clerk to give you shared property rights. If that's related to marital commitment, maybe you should reconsider some of that crap. Do you understand how broken your line of reasoning sounds? How many things you've backtracked on? Eventually you said it would be ok to prohibit mormon-on-mormon marriage if we could show that Mormons are bad parents. Do you realize how far removed that is from our culture's "definition" of mariage? That would be so unbelievably unfair, whether or not Mormonism was bad for children.
There is very little in above comment that means anything to me, and I disagree what does, but:
I am not opposed to civil unions that would establish inheritance, power of attorney, visitation rights and the like.
You could have said this a fucking decade ago and we'd have been done. If we had strong civil union laws that confered most of the legal rights of marriage to gay people, wtf do you think that would do to the gay marriage advocates? Silence us completely. That's what it would do. Yes, there are people who would not be satisfied, and they might even have good reasons, but they wouldn't be getting paid to lobby & campaign by people like me who just care about the rights.
I'll point that most of the state ballot items in the last election, paid for and voted for by the religious right, also prohibited civil unions between same-sex partners. The only explanation that I can perceive is that the goal was to hurt families. The ones that y'all don't like.
So my question is this - given my arguments regarding the superiority of father/mother parenthood - why are marriage licenses required above and beyond civil unions?
No reason. They aren't. There are a number of rights conferred to marriage that are not provided to domestic partnerships, and if that were changed I wouldn't care one iota about gay marriage.
I'm just really disappointed, since you said that I was right if homosexuals can raise children as well as straight people. They do. Their children are not more likely to be gay.
The fact that we have Social Services to go in after the fact and take kids away when there IS reasonable grounds to suspect abuse demonstrates society's attempt to balance the rights of the individual parents with the rights of their children.
And what the hell does that have to do with marriage? Do people get their marriages anulled automatically by the government when their children get taken away? No, because it is un-fucking-related. Does social services take children away from single parents, or parents living with a domestic partner? Yes, because it is un-fucking-related.
Homosexuality is not like "any other criterion". Most obviosly it is differnt in that it doesn't require any breach of privacy to ascertain that gay marriage is between gay people. But it does require a breach of privacy to ascertain that straights getting married may or may not be abusive, pyschologically disturbed, etc.
You are being dishonest here. You know perfectly well that we do not restrict marriage to people who will be good at parenting in any way, including many ways that would not require any breach of privacy whatsoever, for example felons. If you think we should start, then my no-mormon-on-mormon marriage prohibition is looking better all the time.
Of course, it's less practical in the case of straights because they can have kids without a license.
Believe it or not, gay people come with all the same parts as straight people, and are perfectly capabale of having children without them being delivered by stork. They have kids already. If your problem is with adoption, then you are even more of an idiot than I originally suspected.
Regarding the two Mormons getting married I think everything I wrote in my initial post responding to that stands. It's not a genuine redefinition of marriage - it's just a filter on who can get married. That's discrimination.
You have said fifteen times that prohibiting gay marriage is not discrimination because gays can still get married. They just can't marry someone of the same sex. Obviously prohibiting Mormon-on-Mormon marriage is absolutely identical in that regard: They can get married, they just can't marry another Mormon. That is, by your idiotic definition, "not a filter" on who can get married, and thus "not discrimination". The only way in which you have addressed this is by saying that it is a filter, and is discrimination, but you cannot explain the difference between it and prohibiting gay marriage, which you say is not a filter, and is not discrimination. Notice how my point does not depend on whether or not my criterion is "redefining" marriage.
Unless, of course, you could actually prove that Mormons are bad parents. If you proved that - or even if the majority of Americans believed that strongly enough - I suppose you could ban it. I would consider that unfair, but not illegal. And note that my reason for arguing against it would depend on whether or not Mormons make bad parents.
Hah. I take it back. This conversation is fucked.
You still haven't addressed my description of why it is beneficial for society to regulate same-sex relationships, but whatever. I'm done.
Your points about the potential caustic effects of homosexuality are irrelevant. I disagree with them all, but they could all be true and your position would still be incorrect.
But in general two-parents (man/woman) is better than two-parents (same gender) and therefore the law - as a blunt instrument - should encourage the former over the latter.
It is bullshit like this that will make me tire of this conversation.
We don't prevent people with the same recessive-allele genetic disorders from getting married. We don't prevent felons from getting married. We absolutely do now and always will "formally allow sub-optimal parenting to be equivalent". We also pick some of the families, the ones that you think encourage the wrong kind of social structure, and we hurt them.
So imagine for a moment that there was actually no dysfunction whatsoever to homosexuality. Imagine that homosexual parents, on average, raise their children as well or better than straight parents, and their children were about equally likely to be gay.
Pretend you lived in that world, and had to listen to some fuckwit repeat himself with... your arguments. Child molesters? You're concerned that gay people might be more likely to molest children? WE ALLOW CONVICTED CHILD MOLESTERS TO MARRY EACH OTHER BUT WE DON'T ALLOW WOMEN TO MARRY EACH OTHER. Choke & die, you inveterate moron.
In this thread, I do not think that you have addressed my point: "Just like any other criterion that may or may not influence, but definitely doesn't determine child-rearing ability, it doesn't make any sense to prohibit marriage based on it."
In our other thread, I similarly do not think that you have addressed my point that explains why it is in our best interest to regulate same-sex relationships. You have also not addressed my analogy to prohibiting marriage between two Mormons. Repeat yourself a whole lot more, and you'll win. I'll give up.
If the only redefinition of marriage is to say that neither party can be Mormon than you've made no substantial change to the definition.
Jiminy Jesus, no. I'm saying that you can both marry, just not another Mormon. Please go re-read with that in mind (my italicized bit here, for example), and perhaps you'll understand my frustration.
Finally - not sure I like this creepy talk about "regulating" families.
But that's all we're talking about. The legal status of marriage. That is regulation. We make marriage follow similar rules for everyone. It is in our best interest to regulate opposite-sex relationships so that when people get married they all have the same access to: Inheritance; Divorce; Parenting; Shared assets. Those are good things to regulate for opposite-sex relationships. We are debating whether they are also good things to regulate for same-sex relationships.
Slashdot Mirror
Most common source of data loss.
Laptop hard drives: the new floppy
Right. Your primary care provider at Kaiser isn't going to call you from home. But your therapist might call to respond to your request for an appointment. They won't want you to call them back at home. So they get an unlisted number and caller ID blocking. They deal with insane people for a living, so not wanting to give out their home phone number makes some sense.
There are some people who would not like to be reached on their home telephone number for work related acquaintances.
You might wind up blocking calls from your doctor or psychotherapist.
Are you attempting to say that the above Ford is not cheaper than the above Porsche?
So the Porsche is better. But the Ford is cheaper. Someone was trying to say he couldn't afford a new Powerbook. He wasn't trying to say that the Powerbook was a ripoff and should cost $750 like the lowest-end Thinkpad.
Go away.
So what's the problem?
Google Analytics provides very little value for personal websites. It's set up for a team, and it's set up for sales/adclick conversions. Neither has anything to do with blogs unless your blog is some idiotic get-rich-quick scheme. Good luck with that.
The reason no one at my office kills themselves must be because of the weekly fistfights.
Brilliant analysis, sir.
Since lots of people believe that God guided evolution, many people assume that "Intelligent Design" is the same as the thing they believe, because what they believe makes sense.
So "One could always believe that evolution is just a tool in God's hands" is true, while "That way it's possible to believe in intelligent design without denying facts" is not.
The Catholic Church, for example, states clearly that evolution is a fact, God guided evolution, and Intelligent Design is spurious crap.
I don't hear him actually saying that environmental stress creates the same mutation in different ancestors. All I get from the article is punctuated equilibrium + conspiracy theory.
Did you read the research, or is this just two different interpretations of some awful science writing?
MrFlibbs' highly rated comment above is suggesting that this theory says environmental stresses could lead to simultaneous mutations in different members of the same species, and the species wouldn't necessarily need a common ancestor for each individual gene. That's certainly different from punctuated equilibrium.
There's nothing in the article that leads me to that reading, though, so yeah, either MrFlibb read the actual research and found something more than the article, or this sounds like total crap.
Not sure if you missed it or just busy, but I already did respond.
No, you'd be anti-semetic if you didn't want people advertising a group free from anti-semetism on your mmorpg.
Um... the verbosity meant that rather than 1 wrong, and imho, refutable point, you had 30 wrong, and imho, refutable points. So I'd say I skipped them based on verbosity and content both. Too deep. And I'll point out that your overly verbose post did not address many of the points in my preceding comment either, so I didn't feel quite so obligated. You seemed to think that by talking about marriage-the-institution vs marriage-for-individuals you would trump all my little points, so I wasn't going to go off making 30 more little points.
You're absolutely right. It is only relevant because it's taking so much time, and it guarantees that I'll never go dig up the original point that didn't stick because you refuted it with something that you've now backtracked on. If you see what I mean.
You know, I'd tend to agree with that: the definition of marriage is independent of who is allowed to participate in it. Is that what you mean when you say "who can get married" is different from "what is marriage"? Because elsewhere you're saying
Which makes it sound like "what is marriage" is exactly defined by "who can get married".
:) argument that I feel are your central points, and I think they're unrelated:
You know, given that little contradiction, I'm pretty sure I must have misunderstood you. I stand by what I've said, but not my interpretation of what you said was your ultimatum. So I'm going to backtrack a whole lot. There are two bits from your overly verbose (and overly italicized
Ok. Systematically, institutionally speaking, tell me another criterion that we use here aside from the sex of the parents. If it's like a science experiment and I must change only 1 variable... how about it's making both parents uneducated? Obviously two uneducated parents will be less likely to have educated, productive children, than families with one educated parent and one uneducated parent. But we don't require that one person on each marriage license has a college degree. That's not an invasion of privacy (like, you know, the mandatory blood tests in several states). And maybe you can come up with some reason why education is a different kind of criterion, and obviously it is. But I'm saying your job is to tell me that we are already using, or at least attemting to use all the bad-for-the-institution-of-raising-kids criterion that we can use here (theoretic
Oh. I forgot greencard marriages. I would prefer to change our greencard policy so that there was no desire for greencard marriages, and then no one would have to police whether people married to foreigners were actually in love. 'Till then I have no problem with greencard marriages.
If Utah were joining the US right now, I'd only really care that polygamists made efforts that the legal structure of marriage was equitable, enjoined by consenting adults, and couldn't be used by Ken Lay to marry & pay off all his witnesses. No big deal and most of all not my business.
Wait a fucking second. What's your opinion of polygamy? I know you accept that it is & can be banned, but you've kindof sounded like you think it shouldn't be. Please dish. I swear I'll address your ultimatum when I get worked up to it.
I'm not actually trying to change your mind here. That's why I said "I felt that we'd discovered the source of our disagreement w.r.t. the analogy to no-mormon-on-mormon marriage." If you think it's fair for me to try to argue that Mormon-on-Mormon marriage isn't really marriage, then I have no further line of argument along that point. I just think you're nuts.Absolutely. I agree that those two things are distinct. I have not indicated otherwise in this conversation.Uh... then wtf was that question about? ("Can gays get married" is distinct from "Can people of the same sex get married"; Agree or disagree.) You keep repeating things like that question, and since I have not accused you of preventing gay people from marrying someone of the opposite sex, I cannot fathom the reason.
I'll attempt to address a number of things and your (welcome) ultimatum later.
I was disheartened by your comment as well. I was skipping to the points that felt relevant. I felt that we'd discovered the source of our disagreement w.r.t. the analogy to no-mormon-on-mormon marriage. I felt that you were finally addressing my point about the merits of regulating same-sex relationships in a similar fashion to opposite-sex relationships. Your argument for why gay marriage is inherently different in a destructive fashion than any other marriage went so vague and verbosely off the deep end that I didn't have any interest in sorting it out.
Ugh. I just reread your original comment. "You don't need the county clerk to give you a license to love. That's stupid. Have you ever realized how ridiculous it sounds to get a license from the gov't if marriage is just about love and commitment and all that jazz?"
No, but you need the county clerk to give you shared property rights. If that's related to marital commitment, maybe you should reconsider some of that crap. Do you understand how broken your line of reasoning sounds? How many things you've backtracked on? Eventually you said it would be ok to prohibit mormon-on-mormon marriage if we could show that Mormons are bad parents. Do you realize how far removed that is from our culture's "definition" of mariage? That would be so unbelievably unfair, whether or not Mormonism was bad for children.
Anyway. Now I'm repeating myself.
RIM is a patent troll. They've threated other people that use a thumb-wheel on a handheld device.
They're all fuckers.
I'll point that most of the state ballot items in the last election, paid for and voted for by the religious right, also prohibited civil unions between same-sex partners. The only explanation that I can perceive is that the goal was to hurt families. The ones that y'all don't like.No reason. They aren't. There are a number of rights conferred to marriage that are not provided to domestic partnerships, and if that were changed I wouldn't care one iota about gay marriage.
You still haven't addressed my description of why it is beneficial for society to regulate same-sex relationships, but whatever. I'm done.
We don't prevent people with the same recessive-allele genetic disorders from getting married. We don't prevent felons from getting married. We absolutely do now and always will "formally allow sub-optimal parenting to be equivalent". We also pick some of the families, the ones that you think encourage the wrong kind of social structure, and we hurt them.
So imagine for a moment that there was actually no dysfunction whatsoever to homosexuality. Imagine that homosexual parents, on average, raise their children as well or better than straight parents, and their children were about equally likely to be gay.
Pretend you lived in that world, and had to listen to some fuckwit repeat himself with... your arguments. Child molesters? You're concerned that gay people might be more likely to molest children? WE ALLOW CONVICTED CHILD MOLESTERS TO MARRY EACH OTHER BUT WE DON'T ALLOW WOMEN TO MARRY EACH OTHER. Choke & die, you inveterate moron.
In this thread, I do not think that you have addressed my point: "Just like any other criterion that may or may not influence, but definitely doesn't determine child-rearing ability, it doesn't make any sense to prohibit marriage based on it."
In our other thread, I similarly do not think that you have addressed my point that explains why it is in our best interest to regulate same-sex relationships. You have also not addressed my analogy to prohibiting marriage between two Mormons. Repeat yourself a whole lot more, and you'll win. I'll give up.