I'd say you've proven the point of this article, your religious beliefs prevent you from accepting alternate arguments...
I'd say youmissed the point of the article, which was not that all viewpoints are equally valid, and that therefore, the only mechanism by which Person A could possibly dismiss Person B's viewpoint is by being blinded by his own biases. The point of the article was that people will ignore facts that don't jive with their own biases. In the case of the grandparent dismissing Christianity, exactly what facts has he ignored? There are no facts that support religion. Religion is based purely on faith, and survives only through indoctrination, not by any preponderance of facts or evidence.
Yet, you've managed to interpret TFA as meaning that anybody who dismisses another's ideas and/or beliefs, regardless of their rationale for doing so, is guilty of succumbing to their own biases. This implies that there is no such thing as a logical basis for dismissing an idea, which necessarily means that all ideas are equally valid. And since there are many conflicting ideas, this also implies, somewhat paradoxically, that all ideas are equally invalid. In other words, it's all relative, there is no such thing as truth, and basically, anything goes (except for dismissing someone else's idea, that is).
I'm sure that this is not, in fact, the meaning you intended, but it is the logical conclusion of what you said. Yes, "try[ing] to view both sides of the argument as fairly as we can" is a good thing, indeed. But at some point, you have to allow for there to be disagreement, or else it just devolves into the morass of relativism I described above, which means, for instance, that ancient beliefs about volcanoes and earthquakes being caused by angry gods are just as "correct" as the modern science of plate-tectonics. That's a bunch of crap, if you ask me. But then, I suppose you could just conveniently counter that I'm only dismissing the "angry gods" theory because I'm blinded by my own biases regarding plate-tectonics.
Further, you assert that the grandparent's views on religion are "based more on [his] beliefs than actual facts", which blindly assumes that you know what his line of reasoning was, even though he did not address that in his post. Calling someone out on their poor reasoning skills and their closed-mindedness, when you have in fact assumed (i.e., completely fabricated) what his line of reasoning was, and are apparently no more open to his religious beliefs than he is to yours? Really??? That just reeks of hypocrisy!
With regard to biased thinking being a pervasive problem, you are spot on. However, you throw the baby out with the bath water when you assert that all human thought is hopelessly biased, and that rationalism (and presumably, all other epistemological frameworks as well) is nothing more than a convenient way to disguise one's biases. If that's true, then science, philosophy, and all other human endeavors which involve the pursuit of truth and knowledge are merely various forms of bias masquerading as rational thought. I don't deny that we humans are all, by our very nature, incapable of 100% pure rational thought. However, most of us are, at least, capable of short spurts of mostly rational thought. Unless you believe that all of mankind's progress over the last few thousand years can be attributed to the "monkeys with typewriters" effect, I don't see how you can conclude that rationalism and biased thinking are merely two sides of the same coin.
Furthermore, both you and the grandparent completely misused the term "magical thinking". Magical thinking is not merely a synonym for bias, it is (in the words of the Wiki article) "causal reasoning that applies unwarranted weight to coincidence and often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world (see the philosophical problem of mental causation), and correlation mistaken for causation."
Any idea how many are missing from other nuclear-capable countries? The former Soviet Union, at minimum, lost three missiles when submarine K-129 went down (which is the incident I linked to in my original comment). I haven't tried to look it up (I'm at work), but I would imagine there have been at least a few other missiles/bombs lost by the Soviets, as well as possibly several more from China/India/UK/France/Israel/etc.
I would also venture to guess that the public tally of missing nukes (worldwide) is only a partial list, for reasons known only to various government spooks belonging to various governments. I think it's probably quite likely that there are at least a few such incidents that have yet to be made public. I don't think that puts me in tinfoil hat territory.
How many "missing" nukes lay on the bottom of the world's oceans? Just counting the ones we know about, there are at least a few, and you can bet that there are at least a few more we don't know about.
Ever seen that demotivational poster that says "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." ?
Well, that was me on my last project. I inherited a codebase of about 1.2 million lines of antequated C code, written by a dozen or so different people over the course of a dozen or so years, for half a dozen different projects. For your benefit, here are a few dos/don'ts that I learned the hard way:
1. DO NOT try to be a hero and learn the code inside/out all by yourself. Going in, I had a long history of doing exactly that on numerous smaller projects. Turns out 1.2 million lines was WAY beyond my ability to grasp just by pouring over the source code. The whole time I was trying to decipher this massive, seemingly amorphous blob of code all by myself, there were at least 2 or 3 of the previous developers sitting a couple floors up. All I had to do was ask for help, but for a variety of reasons (they are very busy people, I don't want to come off as being incompetent, my own overconfidence, etc), I didn't use that resource nearly as much as I could (and should) have.
2. DO NOT try to learn the code bottom-up, by diving straight in and trying to put it all together one piece at a time like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Get a good, solid big picture view in your head first. Draw it out. Data flow, logic flow, UML diagrams, whatever it takes for you to really understand it at a high level, before you start reading source code line by line, function by function, class by class.
3. DO NOT be afraid to make a few assumptions, at least initially. Yes, this may well mean that your high-level mental picture of the code may have some errors that you will need to fix later on, but you need to use your time efficiently. If you can reasonably discern what a given module, file, or function does without having to read every line of code, go ahead and pencil it in on your high level diagram and move on. If you see a source code file named reset_xyz_board.c, you can be reasonably sure it's resetting the "xyz" board. No need to fully grasp every little detail right off the bat. There will be time for that later, if and when it becomes necessary. But keep in mind that with any sufficiently large codebase, there are going to be numerous dark corners that you never end up seeing anyway. Why waste time meticulously mapping out every single one of those dark corners when, in all likelihood, you are only ever going to modify a tenth of the code, or maybe a quarter at the most? The more time you waste obsessing about every minute detail, the less time you will have to truly understand the code from a high level.
4. DO get help from your team! I don't mean the previous developers. If the codebase is large enough that you don't feel you can learn the code all on your own, chances are you aren't the only person assigned to the project. If you are the only person, and your bosses refuse to get you help, then good luck. Otherwise, enlist your fellow developers to help you figure the damn thing out, before you all go off trying to write new code. In my case, I was the team lead and started off with 3 other developers on my team. I was foolish enough to let my ego get in the way, thinking that it somehow wasn't "right" for a team lead to have to rely on his team to help him figure out the existing code (which I probably could have done if not for mistakes 1-3, but that's beside the point). I wanted to be the guru who had a better, clearer understanding of the code than the rest of my team. Why? Because I figured that was part of my role as a team leader, and I didn't think they would respect me as much if I didn't know more than they did. Let's face it, programmers are a meritocratic bunch. Ranks and titles don't equate to respect. Your fellow programmers will invariably treat you with a level of respect that is in direct relation to their estimation of your
I think you missed my point, which is that it is often a new interpretation (hopefully, a more enlightened one, though this is clearly not always the case) of the Constitution is an inherent and even necessary part of debate and amendment. We can't and shouldn't always seek to confine this process to trying to divine what the framers' intent was, because often times their intent was flawed. The framers certainly did not intend for slaves to be freed or women to have the right to vote. Sometimes, the Constitution really does need to be reinterpreted to fit current mores and norms.
Having said that, I am not at all oblivious to the dangers of treating the Constitution as if it were merely a reflection of the current general consensus. That clearly leads to things like tyranny of the majority, or to a lazy, complacent, apathetic populace giving away certain rights simply because they haven't had to learn the value of liberty the hard way, and thus are oblivious to the importance of certain rights. For instance, I believe the right to bear arms is every bit as important as the right to free speech. Not because I'm some deranged "gun nut" who wants to go blow away some defenseless animal with a bazooka, but because, as the founders realized, humans have the right to overthrow their own government if/when that government becomes corrupt or oppressive. Thus the right to bear arms (which, despite the feigned confusion by gun control advocates as to what this means, clearly means the right to own guns) is every bit as essential to liberty as free speech is.
So, yeah, I appreciate your point, but I think the distinction between reinterpretation and debate/amendment is not quite as clear as you suggest. Although, I suppose I'm the one splitting hairs now, since I can easily gather what you meant by interpretation, which is that the judicial branch of government ought not to be able to just flippantly decide to interpret the Constitution as they see fit, without proper regard for the original intent behind the words.
Yeah, "living document" was definitely a rhetorical fraud or at least a rhetorical mistake made at some point. The constitution is valueless if it can be simply interpreted into the mores and norms of whatever the current age happens to be rather than debated and amended into the modern age as the framers intended.
Gee, you're right. Let's go back to having slavery, child labor, indentured servitude, debtor's prisons, and no right to vote for women. Clearly, the framers did not intend for the Constitution to get in the way of those things.
After all, the initial singularity from which the universe sprung had to come from somewhere.
This oft-parroted argument never ceases to stupefy me. You observe that the universe appears to have sprung into existence from complete nothingness, and you cite this as some sort of "proof" that God must have done it. But when someone asks you "Okay, so where did God come from?", all you can muster is "Well, he's GOD. He is forever and eternal."
It's a circular argument, with no basis in logic whatsoever. You masquerade as a humble follower of logic by asserting that the singularity "had to come from somewhere", then you all-too-conveniently answer your own (implied) question by abruptly pronouncing that "God must have done it". Then, when someone asks "Where did God come from?", you abandon your facade of humble logic and fall back on dogma by claiming that God is "eternal" or some other BS.
If you're going to assert the existence of your god based purely on your own faith, that's fine. But don't try to pass it off as logic or science.
It's precisely because of dogma-masquerading-as-logic arguments like this that science absolutely is incompatible with intelligent design.
They should rename this place to Boring Stuff Bonanza.
I can, to some degree, understand people being a little nostalgic for the old days of computer tech. I'm not all that nostalgic about it myself, but if I ever did decide to get nostalgic about it, those are not the items I would pick. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95??? Good riddance to those crappy operating systems! A broken down P-133 with 16MB RAM??? A Betamax tape? WTF?
If you're going to be nostalgic about old computing stuff, at least pick stuff that was actually cool at the time. Like maybe a Commodore 64 or even an Apple IIe. Or maybe an old copy of Zork. Heck, even things like the Mac Plus, or Turbo Pascal would be more interesting than a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 3.1.
Yes, I'm sure they've got all those things and more at Weird Stuff Warehouse, but TFA sure picked the wrong items to be nostalgic about.
No kidding. Guns N' Roses and Queen are not even remotely in the "heavy metal" category. Especially Guns N' Roses' later stuff (by which I mean everything after their first album), which devolved more and more into overwrought ballads that didn't even sound like rock, much less heavy metal.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and this is one of those times. The extreme ends of the political spectrum wrap back around and meet each other. Obama's fisnancial and military policies are merely an extension of Bush's policies, which were in turn merely an extension of Clinton and Bush Sr. Obama kept essentially the same financial team that Bush had, and kept the same military team as well. He didn't even bother to change defense secretaries.
Obama won the election largely because people were sick of Bush's policies. We wanted out of Iraq, and we wanted someone to clean house in the financial sector. Has Obama done either of those things? Are we even so much as an inch closer to those things happening? Nope. Obama just picked up where Bush left off, without skipping a beat.
You want to believe that Obama really is fundamentally different from Bush in any way that actually matters, go ahead. You want to casually dismiss people like me as tinfoil hat types, go ahead. But I'm not talking about some vague, totally unverifiable conspiracy theory involving aliens and Area 51. I'm talking about stuff that is being done in plain sight.
It's all there for you to see, if you'd bother to look, instead of dismissing it just because it sounds too outlandish. Look closely at the events of the last decade or two, paying close attention to events involving the financial sector, for instance, and tell me with a straight face that Goldman Sachs, et al, have not appeared to have any undue influence on American politics (on both sides of the aisle). Look at the repeal of the Glass Steagal Act, which was a bill sponsored by Phil Gramm and signed into law by Bill Clinton. Tell me there wasn't something fishy about that. Whose interests were served when Glass-Steagal was repealed? Yours? Mine? And could the recent economic disaster have happened without the repeal of Glass-Steagal, along with the systematic dismantling of dozens of other regulatory roadblocks? It was all done in the name of "financial innovation", and it was touted as a way to make our economy stronger and to provide growth. Yet, how much have your wages grown in the past 10 or 20 years, if at all? Do you really believe all those things were done for your benefit, and that the Democrats and Republicans were playing on different teams in those matters?
When it comes to skepticism, I'm as big a proponent of skepticism as you are likely to ever meet. But anybody with half a brain will tell you that too much skepticism is just as bad as too little skepticism. Too much can blind you to the truth, because you begin to casually dismiss any idea that doesn't fit nicely into your current worldview. It causes you to develop a resistance to new ideas. And where is your skepticism when it comes to your own, already-established worldview? If you're going to carry the flag of Skepticism, you need to apply it equally to your own ideas, not just to new and different ideas.
I'm no idiot. I read TFA, but it turns out TFA conveniently left off the last bit about violent means. So, at the worst, I'm guilty of trusting TFA to have adequately summed up the law's actual text. And don't give me any crap about not reading the entire text of the law unless you can honestly say you've read the entire text of every single ballot measure you've ever voted on in your life. This hardly places me in the "idiot" category, although you clearly have some ugly personality issues, going off calling someone an idiot when you could have just calmly pointed out the error.
Regardless of whether or not the law only covers overthrow of the government by violent means, it's an incredibly stupid law. It should be clear to any reasonable person that nobody is going to actually register with the state. The lawmakers must have known this, so what were they really trying to accomplish? Seems pretty obvious to me their true intent is to ban the existence of such groups, but they can't do it directly as that would be a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment. So instead of banning such groups outright, they're just trying to bully these groups into submission. How is that bullying, you ask? Well, any such group now has two choices: stop advocating (i.e., give up their right to free speech), or face intense scrutiny by all manner of local/state/federal agencies, J. Edgar Hoover style. [I'm not suggesting that the government shouldn't keep a close eye on potential threats, but I don't think that justifies any and all manner of bullying and harassment, which is what I suspect any group that registers with the state will be subjected to.]
I don't feel particularly sympathetic to groups who advocate the violent overthrow of the government, mind you, but the government's clear disregard for our basic human rights (including free speech) scares me WAY more than some wannabe revolutionaries.
Sounds like an end-run around the First Amendment. The legislators probably realized that an outright ban on such groups would amount to prior restraint of free speech, so they figured they could achieve essentially the same effect by attempting to regulate your right to free speech, knowing that no sane person (or group) would willingly put themselves under the government's microscope. This is straight out of the playbook of J. Edgar Hoover. I am not a lawyer.
By "subversive organization," the law means "every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State."
Is it just me, or does that definition necessarily include all U.S. citizens of voting age?
What ever happened to "for the People, by the People" ???
Silly me, I was under the impression that it is every citizen's civic duty to control the government. It's called voting.
They're not planning to overthrow the government. They already have. Don't be fooled just because there's a Democrat in the White House. Democrats vs. Republicans is just a puppet show they put on to keep us all distracted and divided. Meanwhile, Obama and Bush have more interests in common with each other than either of them do with The People.
Definitely agree with the parent that internet use is a symptom rather than a cause. I too have, at various times in my life, been severely depressed and have seriously contemplated suicide.
However, in my case, the internet was more than merely a distraction. I was reaching out for something or someone (anything, really) that would make me feel welcome, wanted, or even just a part of something, instead of feeling like I was completely disconnected and alone.
Of course, the internet, generally speaking, is not such a great avenue for that. Sure, you can go into a chat room at 3am and meet someone from halfway around the world, but that's not the same thing as making a real human connection.
I was one of the rare few (or perhaps not so rare - who knows) that suffered from fairly severe, debilitating depression, but was able to pull myself out of it without drugs or therapy. I'm not saying those methods are somehow inferior, mind you - only that I managed to come out of it despite the fact that I never sought treatment. Instead, I managed to talk myself out of it - I spent countless days and hours pondering my situation and eventually arrived at some critical insights that led me out of my "bad place". In retrospect, I wish I'd sought treatment, and I would not recommend anybody try to battle depression on their own.
I'm rambling here a bit, but I have a point. One of those critical insights I eventually arrived at was that the internet (by which I'm referring generically to BBSes, chat rooms, forums, WoW, and any/all other types of online interaction) never was, and never would be anything other than a dead end, in terms of helping with my depression. Seems silly, and fairly obvious now that I look back, but in my mind at the time, the "real world" had already failed me, and the internet was my last resort. It was an alluring thought, too - that although nobody I interacted with in my day to day life ever really understood me or appreciated me, somehow, some way, in the unimaginable vastness of the internet, I would find someone who did. It took me almost a decade to realize that despite its vastness, the internet was as barren and empty as space when it came to finding real, meaningful human contact.
I seriously don't know why the parent god modded Funny. He should have been modded insightful. I, for one, could not wait for the 80's to be over, for exactly the reasons the parent mentions. The only thing that got me through it was the fact that the 80's also happened to be the golden age of heavy metal. Bands like Dio, Van Halen, AC/DC, Iron Maiden -- all of them peaked in the early-to-mid 80's. The last 3 or 4 years of that decade were pretty grim, though. By that time, even Van Halen and Iron Maiden were using synthesizers quite heavily (although, Van Halen's 1984 album was a great album, synthesizers or not).
The courts did absolutely nothing to legalize bribery.
Have you been paying attention lately? Like, for instance, the last 30 years? Bribery may still be "very much illegal" on paper, but in practice, it's par for the course. Tell me something. When bribery is illegal on paper, but in practice it is so widespread as to almost be the rule rather than the exception, and it happens frequently and routinely in broad daylight because nobody can be bothered to give a damn, how exactly is someone wrong for suggesting that bribery has become legal?
Our legal code is chock full of old laws that are no longer enforced, yet remain on the books merely because nobody pays them any mind. In the old days, those seeking to get around a given legal statute would hire a team of lawyers to find some sort of loophole. Nowadays they just call their buddies in government and say "How 'bout we stop enforcing that law? Mmm-kay? Yeah. Sounds great." What the hell good does an anti-bribery law do if the people in government charged with enforcing that law can themselves be bribed?
Don't you realize that the recent economic disaster was brought about by an absolute orgy of lawlessness? And I'm not just talking about the big evil banks. You had millions of would-be homeowners lying about their income to qualify for loans. You had loan officers who took those fraudulent applications, and in turn fudged the numbers even more so they wouldn't be rejected. You had appraisers giving fraudulent appraisals. Then there were the banks and hedge funds chopping all the bad loans up and repackaging them into securities so complex that no human being could possibly understand them, for the sole purpose of being able to misrepresent the risk involved. You had all the major ratings agencies giving those securities fraudulent AAA ratings. Then you had the Federal Reserve fueling the entire debacle by inundating the system with absurdly low rates, which translate directly into cheap, easy credit for even the worst borrowers. And all the while, the government not only stood by and watched, but they actively spurred the situation on by removing numerous regulatory roadblocks that would normally have kept a situation like this from ever occurring.
Now here we are, two and a half years later, and where are all the criminal prosecutions for the literally millions of criminal acts that were committed? Are you seriously telling me that tens of trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared practically overnight, and the only person who we could make a criminal case against was Bernard Madoff?
So tell me, what was it you were saying about how bribery is technically still illegal?
Speaking of ass clowns, you must not have even bothered to look closely at the census data you linked to. Yes, non-Hispanic whites will account for less than 50% of the population by 2042. However, that same census data shows that the growth of the Hispanic population will not keep the aging problem at bay. This is exactly why, no matter how much "breeding" is done by Hispanics, Social Security is expected to go broke by 2037.
Next time you start calling people politically correct ass clowns, make sure you've checked your facts and that you aren't being an ass-clown yourself.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to use the phrase "Big Pharma" . At least you didn't go off on the whole autism spiel. I'm getting really tired of hearing that one.
Wow. Who knew someone would actually try that? I thought of that idea 15 years ago, but figured it would be way too costly, not to mention potentially dangerous, even as a garage project.
As far as I know, nobody has accused Pat Robertson of making up the devil pact story.
Rather, the criticism has been that he has taken a 200 year old myth, cited it as fact, and used it to imply that 150,000 Haitians deserved to die.
Even if the devil-pact myth is true, Robertson is a colossal hypocrite for suggesting that the entire population of Haiti is guilty of the sins of their forefathers. If that's the case, then Pat Robertson really ought to shut up and start worrying about all the evil things his own forefathers have done. I'm not suggesting that Pat Robertson's forefathers in particular are any more evil than yours or mine, but if you're going to judge people by the actions of all of their ancestors going back to 1791, then watch out, because by that definition, we're pretty much all guilty.
If you add up the total number of your direct ancestors going back N generations (where N=1 means your parents), you get a total of 2^(N+1) - 2 people. It's been 219 years since 1791, which means for most people, there have been 10 or so intervening generations (probably several more than that considering people used to start having children a whole lot earlier in life than they do now). Going back 10 generations, you end up with 2046 total ancestors. That's an awful lot of people to have to worry about, especially considering those people most likely came from all walks of life, numerous races/nationalities/ethnicities, all different levels of wealth, education, and on and on. So no matter how much one might protest that one's own forefathers were "good, hardworking people" or any nonsense like that, chances are at least one of those 2046 people did something truly evil at one time or another.
Yes, the 2^(N+1) - 2 number is only theoretical, since it assumes that each one of your ancestors, in turn, had their own unique set of ancestors (i.e., no marriages between cousins, etc). But for N=10, it's probably not too far off.
And keep in mind, this is assuming that the "sin" washes off after 220 years or so. If you go back 40 or 50 generations, you find that we are all descended from the same ancestors, which means we are ALL, without exception, equally "guilty". So really, it doesn't even matter if the Haitian devil pact story is true or not. Either way, Robertson has proved himself to be not only a moron, but a total hypocrite as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say you've proven the point of this article, your religious beliefs prevent you from accepting alternate arguments ...
I'd say you missed the point of the article, which was not that all viewpoints are equally valid, and that therefore, the only mechanism by which Person A could possibly dismiss Person B's viewpoint is by being blinded by his own biases. The point of the article was that people will ignore facts that don't jive with their own biases. In the case of the grandparent dismissing Christianity, exactly what facts has he ignored? There are no facts that support religion. Religion is based purely on faith, and survives only through indoctrination, not by any preponderance of facts or evidence.
Yet, you've managed to interpret TFA as meaning that anybody who dismisses another's ideas and/or beliefs, regardless of their rationale for doing so, is guilty of succumbing to their own biases. This implies that there is no such thing as a logical basis for dismissing an idea, which necessarily means that all ideas are equally valid. And since there are many conflicting ideas, this also implies, somewhat paradoxically, that all ideas are equally invalid. In other words, it's all relative, there is no such thing as truth, and basically, anything goes (except for dismissing someone else's idea, that is).
I'm sure that this is not, in fact, the meaning you intended, but it is the logical conclusion of what you said. Yes, "try[ing] to view both sides of the argument as fairly as we can" is a good thing, indeed. But at some point, you have to allow for there to be disagreement, or else it just devolves into the morass of relativism I described above, which means, for instance, that ancient beliefs about volcanoes and earthquakes being caused by angry gods are just as "correct" as the modern science of plate-tectonics. That's a bunch of crap, if you ask me. But then, I suppose you could just conveniently counter that I'm only dismissing the "angry gods" theory because I'm blinded by my own biases regarding plate-tectonics.
Further, you assert that the grandparent's views on religion are "based more on [his] beliefs than actual facts", which blindly assumes that you know what his line of reasoning was, even though he did not address that in his post. Calling someone out on their poor reasoning skills and their closed-mindedness, when you have in fact assumed (i.e., completely fabricated) what his line of reasoning was, and are apparently no more open to his religious beliefs than he is to yours? Really??? That just reeks of hypocrisy!
You start well, but go too far.
With regard to biased thinking being a pervasive problem, you are spot on. However, you throw the baby out with the bath water when you assert that all human thought is hopelessly biased, and that rationalism (and presumably, all other epistemological frameworks as well) is nothing more than a convenient way to disguise one's biases. If that's true, then science, philosophy, and all other human endeavors which involve the pursuit of truth and knowledge are merely various forms of bias masquerading as rational thought. I don't deny that we humans are all, by our very nature, incapable of 100% pure rational thought. However, most of us are, at least, capable of short spurts of mostly rational thought. Unless you believe that all of mankind's progress over the last few thousand years can be attributed to the "monkeys with typewriters" effect, I don't see how you can conclude that rationalism and biased thinking are merely two sides of the same coin.
Furthermore, both you and the grandparent completely misused the term "magical thinking". Magical thinking is not merely a synonym for bias, it is (in the words of the Wiki article) "causal reasoning that applies unwarranted weight to coincidence and often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world (see the philosophical problem of mental causation), and correlation mistaken for causation."
Any idea how many are missing from other nuclear-capable countries? The former Soviet Union, at minimum, lost three missiles when submarine K-129 went down (which is the incident I linked to in my original comment). I haven't tried to look it up (I'm at work), but I would imagine there have been at least a few other missiles/bombs lost by the Soviets, as well as possibly several more from China/India/UK/France/Israel/etc.
I would also venture to guess that the public tally of missing nukes (worldwide) is only a partial list, for reasons known only to various government spooks belonging to various governments. I think it's probably quite likely that there are at least a few such incidents that have yet to be made public. I don't think that puts me in tinfoil hat territory.
How many "missing" nukes lay on the bottom of the world's oceans? Just counting the ones we know about, there are at least a few, and you can bet that there are at least a few more we don't know about.
I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
...you just answered your own question.
Ever seen that demotivational poster that says "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." ?
Well, that was me on my last project. I inherited a codebase of about 1.2 million lines of antequated C code, written by a dozen or so different people over the course of a dozen or so years, for half a dozen different projects. For your benefit, here are a few dos/don'ts that I learned the hard way:
1. DO NOT try to be a hero and learn the code inside/out all by yourself. Going in, I had a long history of doing exactly that on numerous smaller projects. Turns out 1.2 million lines was WAY beyond my ability to grasp just by pouring over the source code. The whole time I was trying to decipher this massive, seemingly amorphous blob of code all by myself, there were at least 2 or 3 of the previous developers sitting a couple floors up. All I had to do was ask for help, but for a variety of reasons (they are very busy people, I don't want to come off as being incompetent, my own overconfidence, etc), I didn't use that resource nearly as much as I could (and should) have.
2. DO NOT try to learn the code bottom-up, by diving straight in and trying to put it all together one piece at a time like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Get a good, solid big picture view in your head first. Draw it out. Data flow, logic flow, UML diagrams, whatever it takes for you to really understand it at a high level, before you start reading source code line by line, function by function, class by class.
3. DO NOT be afraid to make a few assumptions, at least initially. Yes, this may well mean that your high-level mental picture of the code may have some errors that you will need to fix later on, but you need to use your time efficiently. If you can reasonably discern what a given module, file, or function does without having to read every line of code, go ahead and pencil it in on your high level diagram and move on. If you see a source code file named reset_xyz_board.c, you can be reasonably sure it's resetting the "xyz" board. No need to fully grasp every little detail right off the bat. There will be time for that later, if and when it becomes necessary. But keep in mind that with any sufficiently large codebase, there are going to be numerous dark corners that you never end up seeing anyway. Why waste time meticulously mapping out every single one of those dark corners when, in all likelihood, you are only ever going to modify a tenth of the code, or maybe a quarter at the most? The more time you waste obsessing about every minute detail, the less time you will have to truly understand the code from a high level.
4. DO get help from your team! I don't mean the previous developers. If the codebase is large enough that you don't feel you can learn the code all on your own, chances are you aren't the only person assigned to the project. If you are the only person, and your bosses refuse to get you help, then good luck. Otherwise, enlist your fellow developers to help you figure the damn thing out, before you all go off trying to write new code. In my case, I was the team lead and started off with 3 other developers on my team. I was foolish enough to let my ego get in the way, thinking that it somehow wasn't "right" for a team lead to have to rely on his team to help him figure out the existing code (which I probably could have done if not for mistakes 1-3, but that's beside the point). I wanted to be the guru who had a better, clearer understanding of the code than the rest of my team. Why? Because I figured that was part of my role as a team leader, and I didn't think they would respect me as much if I didn't know more than they did. Let's face it, programmers are a meritocratic bunch. Ranks and titles don't equate to respect. Your fellow programmers will invariably treat you with a level of respect that is in direct relation to their estimation of your
I think you missed my point, which is that it is often a new interpretation (hopefully, a more enlightened one, though this is clearly not always the case) of the Constitution is an inherent and even necessary part of debate and amendment. We can't and shouldn't always seek to confine this process to trying to divine what the framers' intent was, because often times their intent was flawed. The framers certainly did not intend for slaves to be freed or women to have the right to vote. Sometimes, the Constitution really does need to be reinterpreted to fit current mores and norms.
Having said that, I am not at all oblivious to the dangers of treating the Constitution as if it were merely a reflection of the current general consensus. That clearly leads to things like tyranny of the majority, or to a lazy, complacent, apathetic populace giving away certain rights simply because they haven't had to learn the value of liberty the hard way, and thus are oblivious to the importance of certain rights. For instance, I believe the right to bear arms is every bit as important as the right to free speech. Not because I'm some deranged "gun nut" who wants to go blow away some defenseless animal with a bazooka, but because, as the founders realized, humans have the right to overthrow their own government if/when that government becomes corrupt or oppressive. Thus the right to bear arms (which, despite the feigned confusion by gun control advocates as to what this means, clearly means the right to own guns) is every bit as essential to liberty as free speech is.
So, yeah, I appreciate your point, but I think the distinction between reinterpretation and debate/amendment is not quite as clear as you suggest. Although, I suppose I'm the one splitting hairs now, since I can easily gather what you meant by interpretation, which is that the judicial branch of government ought not to be able to just flippantly decide to interpret the Constitution as they see fit, without proper regard for the original intent behind the words.
Yeah, "living document" was definitely a rhetorical fraud or at least a rhetorical mistake made at some point. The constitution is valueless if it can be simply interpreted into the mores and norms of whatever the current age happens to be rather than debated and amended into the modern age as the framers intended.
Gee, you're right. Let's go back to having slavery, child labor, indentured servitude, debtor's prisons, and no right to vote for women. Clearly, the framers did not intend for the Constitution to get in the way of those things.
After all, the initial singularity from which the universe sprung had to come from somewhere.
This oft-parroted argument never ceases to stupefy me. You observe that the universe appears to have sprung into existence from complete nothingness, and you cite this as some sort of "proof" that God must have done it. But when someone asks you "Okay, so where did God come from?", all you can muster is "Well, he's GOD. He is forever and eternal."
It's a circular argument, with no basis in logic whatsoever. You masquerade as a humble follower of logic by asserting that the singularity "had to come from somewhere", then you all-too-conveniently answer your own (implied) question by abruptly pronouncing that "God must have done it". Then, when someone asks "Where did God come from?", you abandon your facade of humble logic and fall back on dogma by claiming that God is "eternal" or some other BS.
If you're going to assert the existence of your god based purely on your own faith, that's fine. But don't try to pass it off as logic or science.
It's precisely because of dogma-masquerading-as-logic arguments like this that science absolutely is incompatible with intelligent design.
They should rename this place to Boring Stuff Bonanza.
I can, to some degree, understand people being a little nostalgic for the old days of computer tech. I'm not all that nostalgic about it myself, but if I ever did decide to get nostalgic about it, those are not the items I would pick. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95??? Good riddance to those crappy operating systems! A broken down P-133 with 16MB RAM??? A Betamax tape? WTF?
If you're going to be nostalgic about old computing stuff, at least pick stuff that was actually cool at the time. Like maybe a Commodore 64 or even an Apple IIe. Or maybe an old copy of Zork. Heck, even things like the Mac Plus, or Turbo Pascal would be more interesting than a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 3.1.
Yes, I'm sure they've got all those things and more at Weird Stuff Warehouse, but TFA sure picked the wrong items to be nostalgic about.
No kidding. Guns N' Roses and Queen are not even remotely in the "heavy metal" category. Especially Guns N' Roses' later stuff (by which I mean everything after their first album), which devolved more and more into overwrought ballads that didn't even sound like rock, much less heavy metal.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and this is one of those times. The extreme ends of the political spectrum wrap back around and meet each other. Obama's fisnancial and military policies are merely an extension of Bush's policies, which were in turn merely an extension of Clinton and Bush Sr. Obama kept essentially the same financial team that Bush had, and kept the same military team as well. He didn't even bother to change defense secretaries.
Obama won the election largely because people were sick of Bush's policies. We wanted out of Iraq, and we wanted someone to clean house in the financial sector. Has Obama done either of those things? Are we even so much as an inch closer to those things happening? Nope. Obama just picked up where Bush left off, without skipping a beat.
You want to believe that Obama really is fundamentally different from Bush in any way that actually matters, go ahead. You want to casually dismiss people like me as tinfoil hat types, go ahead. But I'm not talking about some vague, totally unverifiable conspiracy theory involving aliens and Area 51. I'm talking about stuff that is being done in plain sight.
It's all there for you to see, if you'd bother to look, instead of dismissing it just because it sounds too outlandish. Look closely at the events of the last decade or two, paying close attention to events involving the financial sector, for instance, and tell me with a straight face that Goldman Sachs, et al, have not appeared to have any undue influence on American politics (on both sides of the aisle). Look at the repeal of the Glass Steagal Act, which was a bill sponsored by Phil Gramm and signed into law by Bill Clinton. Tell me there wasn't something fishy about that. Whose interests were served when Glass-Steagal was repealed? Yours? Mine? And could the recent economic disaster have happened without the repeal of Glass-Steagal, along with the systematic dismantling of dozens of other regulatory roadblocks? It was all done in the name of "financial innovation", and it was touted as a way to make our economy stronger and to provide growth. Yet, how much have your wages grown in the past 10 or 20 years, if at all? Do you really believe all those things were done for your benefit, and that the Democrats and Republicans were playing on different teams in those matters?
When it comes to skepticism, I'm as big a proponent of skepticism as you are likely to ever meet. But anybody with half a brain will tell you that too much skepticism is just as bad as too little skepticism. Too much can blind you to the truth, because you begin to casually dismiss any idea that doesn't fit nicely into your current worldview. It causes you to develop a resistance to new ideas. And where is your skepticism when it comes to your own, already-established worldview? If you're going to carry the flag of Skepticism, you need to apply it equally to your own ideas, not just to new and different ideas.
I'm no idiot. I read TFA, but it turns out TFA conveniently left off the last bit about violent means. So, at the worst, I'm guilty of trusting TFA to have adequately summed up the law's actual text. And don't give me any crap about not reading the entire text of the law unless you can honestly say you've read the entire text of every single ballot measure you've ever voted on in your life. This hardly places me in the "idiot" category, although you clearly have some ugly personality issues, going off calling someone an idiot when you could have just calmly pointed out the error.
Regardless of whether or not the law only covers overthrow of the government by violent means, it's an incredibly stupid law. It should be clear to any reasonable person that nobody is going to actually register with the state. The lawmakers must have known this, so what were they really trying to accomplish? Seems pretty obvious to me their true intent is to ban the existence of such groups, but they can't do it directly as that would be a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment. So instead of banning such groups outright, they're just trying to bully these groups into submission. How is that bullying, you ask? Well, any such group now has two choices: stop advocating (i.e., give up their right to free speech), or face intense scrutiny by all manner of local/state/federal agencies, J. Edgar Hoover style. [I'm not suggesting that the government shouldn't keep a close eye on potential threats, but I don't think that justifies any and all manner of bullying and harassment, which is what I suspect any group that registers with the state will be subjected to.]
I don't feel particularly sympathetic to groups who advocate the violent overthrow of the government, mind you, but the government's clear disregard for our basic human rights (including free speech) scares me WAY more than some wannabe revolutionaries.
Sounds like an end-run around the First Amendment. The legislators probably realized that an outright ban on such groups would amount to prior restraint of free speech, so they figured they could achieve essentially the same effect by attempting to regulate your right to free speech, knowing that no sane person (or group) would willingly put themselves under the government's microscope. This is straight out of the playbook of J. Edgar Hoover. I am not a lawyer.
By "subversive organization," the law means "every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State."
Is it just me, or does that definition necessarily include all U.S. citizens of voting age? What ever happened to "for the People, by the People" ??? Silly me, I was under the impression that it is every citizen's civic duty to control the government. It's called voting.
They're not planning to overthrow the government. They already have. Don't be fooled just because there's a Democrat in the White House. Democrats vs. Republicans is just a puppet show they put on to keep us all distracted and divided. Meanwhile, Obama and Bush have more interests in common with each other than either of them do with The People.
Definitely agree with the parent that internet use is a symptom rather than a cause. I too have, at various times in my life, been severely depressed and have seriously contemplated suicide.
However, in my case, the internet was more than merely a distraction. I was reaching out for something or someone (anything, really) that would make me feel welcome, wanted, or even just a part of something, instead of feeling like I was completely disconnected and alone.
Of course, the internet, generally speaking, is not such a great avenue for that. Sure, you can go into a chat room at 3am and meet someone from halfway around the world, but that's not the same thing as making a real human connection.
I was one of the rare few (or perhaps not so rare - who knows) that suffered from fairly severe, debilitating depression, but was able to pull myself out of it without drugs or therapy. I'm not saying those methods are somehow inferior, mind you - only that I managed to come out of it despite the fact that I never sought treatment. Instead, I managed to talk myself out of it - I spent countless days and hours pondering my situation and eventually arrived at some critical insights that led me out of my "bad place". In retrospect, I wish I'd sought treatment, and I would not recommend anybody try to battle depression on their own.
I'm rambling here a bit, but I have a point. One of those critical insights I eventually arrived at was that the internet (by which I'm referring generically to BBSes, chat rooms, forums, WoW, and any/all other types of online interaction) never was, and never would be anything other than a dead end, in terms of helping with my depression. Seems silly, and fairly obvious now that I look back, but in my mind at the time, the "real world" had already failed me, and the internet was my last resort. It was an alluring thought, too - that although nobody I interacted with in my day to day life ever really understood me or appreciated me, somehow, some way, in the unimaginable vastness of the internet, I would find someone who did. It took me almost a decade to realize that despite its vastness, the internet was as barren and empty as space when it came to finding real, meaningful human contact.
I seriously don't know why the parent god modded Funny. He should have been modded insightful. I, for one, could not wait for the 80's to be over, for exactly the reasons the parent mentions. The only thing that got me through it was the fact that the 80's also happened to be the golden age of heavy metal. Bands like Dio, Van Halen, AC/DC, Iron Maiden -- all of them peaked in the early-to-mid 80's. The last 3 or 4 years of that decade were pretty grim, though. By that time, even Van Halen and Iron Maiden were using synthesizers quite heavily (although, Van Halen's 1984 album was a great album, synthesizers or not).
The courts did absolutely nothing to legalize bribery.
Have you been paying attention lately? Like, for instance, the last 30 years? Bribery may still be "very much illegal" on paper, but in practice, it's par for the course. Tell me something. When bribery is illegal on paper, but in practice it is so widespread as to almost be the rule rather than the exception, and it happens frequently and routinely in broad daylight because nobody can be bothered to give a damn, how exactly is someone wrong for suggesting that bribery has become legal?
Our legal code is chock full of old laws that are no longer enforced, yet remain on the books merely because nobody pays them any mind. In the old days, those seeking to get around a given legal statute would hire a team of lawyers to find some sort of loophole. Nowadays they just call their buddies in government and say "How 'bout we stop enforcing that law? Mmm-kay? Yeah. Sounds great." What the hell good does an anti-bribery law do if the people in government charged with enforcing that law can themselves be bribed?
Don't you realize that the recent economic disaster was brought about by an absolute orgy of lawlessness? And I'm not just talking about the big evil banks. You had millions of would-be homeowners lying about their income to qualify for loans. You had loan officers who took those fraudulent applications, and in turn fudged the numbers even more so they wouldn't be rejected. You had appraisers giving fraudulent appraisals. Then there were the banks and hedge funds chopping all the bad loans up and repackaging them into securities so complex that no human being could possibly understand them, for the sole purpose of being able to misrepresent the risk involved. You had all the major ratings agencies giving those securities fraudulent AAA ratings. Then you had the Federal Reserve fueling the entire debacle by inundating the system with absurdly low rates, which translate directly into cheap, easy credit for even the worst borrowers. And all the while, the government not only stood by and watched, but they actively spurred the situation on by removing numerous regulatory roadblocks that would normally have kept a situation like this from ever occurring.
Now here we are, two and a half years later, and where are all the criminal prosecutions for the literally millions of criminal acts that were committed? Are you seriously telling me that tens of trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared practically overnight, and the only person who we could make a criminal case against was Bernard Madoff?
So tell me, what was it you were saying about how bribery is technically still illegal?
Speaking of ass clowns, you must not have even bothered to look closely at the census data you linked to. Yes, non-Hispanic whites will account for less than 50% of the population by 2042. However, that same census data shows that the growth of the Hispanic population will not keep the aging problem at bay. This is exactly why, no matter how much "breeding" is done by Hispanics, Social Security is expected to go broke by 2037.
Next time you start calling people politically correct ass clowns, make sure you've checked your facts and that you aren't being an ass-clown yourself.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to use the phrase "Big Pharma" . At least you didn't go off on the whole autism spiel. I'm getting really tired of hearing that one.
Wow. Who knew someone would actually try that? I thought of that idea 15 years ago, but figured it would be way too costly, not to mention potentially dangerous, even as a garage project.
You mean the United States, circa 2038?
Let's not forget this little gem.
As far as I know, nobody has accused Pat Robertson of making up the devil pact story.
Rather, the criticism has been that he has taken a 200 year old myth, cited it as fact, and used it to imply that 150,000 Haitians deserved to die.
Even if the devil-pact myth is true, Robertson is a colossal hypocrite for suggesting that the entire population of Haiti is guilty of the sins of their forefathers. If that's the case, then Pat Robertson really ought to shut up and start worrying about all the evil things his own forefathers have done. I'm not suggesting that Pat Robertson's forefathers in particular are any more evil than yours or mine, but if you're going to judge people by the actions of all of their ancestors going back to 1791, then watch out, because by that definition, we're pretty much all guilty.
If you add up the total number of your direct ancestors going back N generations (where N=1 means your parents), you get a total of 2^(N+1) - 2 people. It's been 219 years since 1791, which means for most people, there have been 10 or so intervening generations (probably several more than that considering people used to start having children a whole lot earlier in life than they do now). Going back 10 generations, you end up with 2046 total ancestors. That's an awful lot of people to have to worry about, especially considering those people most likely came from all walks of life, numerous races/nationalities/ethnicities, all different levels of wealth, education, and on and on. So no matter how much one might protest that one's own forefathers were "good, hardworking people" or any nonsense like that, chances are at least one of those 2046 people did something truly evil at one time or another.
Yes, the 2^(N+1) - 2 number is only theoretical, since it assumes that each one of your ancestors, in turn, had their own unique set of ancestors (i.e., no marriages between cousins, etc). But for N=10, it's probably not too far off.
And keep in mind, this is assuming that the "sin" washes off after 220 years or so. If you go back 40 or 50 generations, you find that we are all descended from the same ancestors, which means we are ALL, without exception, equally "guilty". So really, it doesn't even matter if the Haitian devil pact story is true or not. Either way, Robertson has proved himself to be not only a moron, but a total hypocrite as well.