That ignores the afterlife. Just define God to be unobservable in this life and observable in the next and it very much matters if God exists or not. Even then yours is a bit of a straw-man argument since I don't know of any religious people who honestly believe their God is unobservable. Usually they believe ancient accounts of miracles or some sort of personal, internal, highly emotional experience to be God's work. Sometimes the complexity of nature is given as evidence of God's work (which is a woefully incomplete argument, but that's a separate issue).
I figured someone would take exception to that line. Your reasoning is extremely sloppy, similar to the person I was replying to originally. You really have no idea what you're talking about.
The Supreme Court's current position on obscenity is Miller vs. California. The Miller Test is...
(a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient [lustful; sexual] interest (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
"patently offensive" is also determined by "community standards" since, 'The jury may measure the essentially factual issues of prurient appeal and patent offensiveness by the standard that prevails in the forum community, and need not employ a "national standard."' So, to "block [pornography] everywhere" on the internet, we would need...
(1) Under the current system, state legislation to outlaw it, completely changed community standards that call all internet pornography "patently offensive" (I myself am not at all offended by most depictions of sex acts on the internet), an amendment to Oregon's state constitution which according to State v. Henry allows no state obscenity laws in Oregon, a radically altered understanding of internet-based obscenity and indecency censorship as discussed in Reno v. ACLU, the ability to somehow block those outside the US generating pornography from letting US citizens view it,....
(2) An extraordinary overturning of the Miller test which also overturns several other protections while simultaneously making the Court into the legislature. Honestly if that happened in a climate anywhere near the current one, we would impeach them for astounding judicial activism. Their decision would almost certainly be reversed through their replacements or through the a constitutional amendment. It's just not going to happen.
(3) A constitutional amendment that's certain to be wildly unpopular. Even ostensibly popular ones like the DC Voting Rights Amendment don't pass.
Sexual obscenity prosecutions in the US traditionally deal with extremely hard core acts like simulated rape and abuse, unsolicited hard core materials distributed as advertising, or the distribution of materials to minors. Adults looking up regular porn online fits into none of those categories. The only attempts at restricting online porn I'm aware of try to restrict access to minors and not adults. In all, to "block [pornography] everywhere" on the internet would require extraordinary changes in the Supreme Court, society in general, the state legislatures, and probably Congress. It is not going to happen.
You're reading too far into what I wrote (and just to let you know, you rambled pretty badly). I didn't say revolutions are never justified, just that they're not some magical panacea. The French Revolution comes to mind as a good example. It led to *decades* of political instability, the Reign of Terror, several regime changes, and the Napoleanic Wars. It also at least dabbled in various Democratic ideals with the goal of giving the people power (the extent to which that actually happened is debatable; success was at least "mixed"). It also enhanced personal freedoms; for instance, sodomy has been legal in France since around the Revolution, whereas it took many other European countries centuries longer.
As in this example, revolutions often beget revolutions, which has been horrible in African in recent years. It's not all bad, though. South Africa arguably underwent a peaceful revolution in the 1990's that struck down apartheid and put a remarkably progressive Constitution in place. South Africa now has one of the highest GDP's per capita of any African nation.
Whether or not all of these revolutions were worthwhile is a hugely complicated question that you can't just brush off flippantly. My point is, there are a huge number of things that can go wrong with revolutions, and they should certainly not be started lightly. Government abuses need to be horrific to justify all the negative consequences and uncertainty. As a rule, I think revolutions are completely justified in the case of genocidal regimes.
I agree. I don't know how the GP got modded so highly. It did rail against the DMCA, the government in general, Republicans in particular, and it called the US government a slave to its "corporate masters"--all of which wins the/. popularity contest--but still, it's so... stupid.
To be specific...
* The.xxx scenario he outlined is ridiculously implausible. Porn was around in images, magazines, and film for decades or centuries in the US before the internet came around. It would take a fundamental, radical shift away from the First Amendment to "block it everywhere". It's just not going to happen. If anything the US is getting less conservative with time, not more.
* The idea that Iranians can "get rid of their government if they want an uncensored net" is naive in the extreme. Revolutions are terrible--they're bloody economic disasters that might not even do anything substantial when the dust finally settles. And it's not as if any large group of people ever agrees on anything. The way the sentence is phrased makes it seem as if Iranians are actually a single entity which is, well, stupid.
The only way a system vaguely like this one will ever work is if one day the health care system creates a national patient health information database. The issues involved in such a project are of course enormous, but if it could ever get off the ground, it would solve this and so many other problems with patient data. To give some examples...
1. My dad gets bloodwork done at a lab that needs to be faxed to a specialist clinic, and they've used the wrong fax number three times now. He has to talk to people at the clinic to see if it arrived and then to people at the lab to see why it didn't arrive, which is a huge waste of everyone's time. 2. After bloodwork he often wants to know the results, which requires asking someone or having them call him, when ideally he could just check online. 3. I recently got my eyes checked and spent the first ten minutes of the exam filling out mundane personal background that could have been imported from other clinics. I'm not completely certain I remembered my allergies correctly or if I accidentally told them one of dad's, so there are accuracy issues too with all this reentry. 4. I had to hunt down vaccination records a while ago which was a complete disaster. I ended up just getting the shots again, after visiting two clinics in person (it's always easier...) and talking with several people over the phone. At one place my records hadn't been digitized so I had to wait for them to physically pull them, and even then they were horribly incomplete and nobody has any idea why. 5. The place that wanted my vaccination had me fill out the form on my honor. I could lie, saying I got the shots when I didn't, and they'd never check or know because it would be impractical. If the system was digital it could have some reasonable integrity checks. 6. I swapped pharmacies recently. I had to give more mundane info to the new pharmacist that should have been imported and she had to call the old pharmacy to transfer some prescriptions. After being told they'd be ready in about an hour, I came back in three and they still weren't done because they had been "swamped" and were too busy to place the phone call. It would have been so much simpler if they could have just accessed a national database and filled my prescriptions during my first visit.
...the list goes on (especially if you include insurance info!) but I'll stop...
I'm a little confused. In the video they themselves note that around 90% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, and as far as I'm aware its configuration around our galaxies isn't well known, so... isn't the simulation basically worthless? The article doesn't clear this up either, though perhaps the papers would.
I was doing the calculations originally suggested by Colonel Korn. Presumably the Schwarzschild radius isn't completely accurate here, and the "four million suns" mass figure is of course not very precise.
Still, the answer I was replying to was off by around 33 orders of magnitude (which it got modded up for...) whereas mine was only off by a factor of 5--and I'm not sure how precise WA's figure is.
So you would suggest that you can in fact be fired or denied a job based on X if the job is for a non-profit, regardless of X? I suppose that's as good a solution as possible, though having to allow any sort of job-related discrimination is unfortunate.
...comprehensive anti-racist/sexist/discriminationist education for everyone from elementary school onward...
Presumably sexual orientation is included here. I'm not sure how appropriate anti-sexual-orientaton discrimination education would be in elementary school--I suppose you'd have to keep the specifics out of the discussion and leave it at the level of "Jack and Jill came down the hill and found their two daddies Tim and Steve who put them to bed and each sang one to sleep. The end." In a similar vein, you said originally
Furthermore, I have explicitly said that governments safeguard the rights of citizens, even in private deals between each other - i.e. you can't be fired or denied a job because of your race etc.
Do you make an exception for religious groups that, for instance, refuse to employ/ordain/etc. gay clergy? In either case, what is your moral rationale? I find this a difficult point to be consistent on. On the one hand, surely if a religious group can refuse gay clergy another religious group can refuse white clergy. On the other hand, religions should be separate from the government and free to practice whatever beliefs they want, including discrimination.
One episode for TNG, and one (bad) one for DS9. He didn't write the script for either.
You're talking about TNG: First Contact and DS9: Far Beyond the Stars. The DS9 one was certainly different, but I'd hardly call it bad. For instance, Memory Alpha quotes the actors who played Sisko, Quark, and Odo as calling it their favorite or one of their favorite DS9 episodes. The TNG one was certainly interesting. Maybe the writing could have been better (somehow I was never sold on the injured Riker idea; too convenient?), but the basic plot was a very good idea, and the episode is at least memorable.
But certainly "Star Trek Luminary" is pretty silly. I had never heard of him.
I should start by saying I generally agree with you.
1) This will never happen. I'm gay and I'm not going to pair off (with a woman) and have precisely two children. I haven't ruled out the possibility of a surrogate or adoption someday, but that's a separate issue and would require a woman to have 4 children, 2 of her own and 2 for me.
2) I actually don't find China's 1-child policy draconian. I wish India had implemented something similarly effective years ago. It's not as if couples can't have any children, and there are quite a number of exceptions. Certainly there are negative consequences, but the alternative of overpopulation is truly terrible.
3) It's really convenient that people in developed nations seem to want to have just enough children to replace themselves, on average.
Over 2000 years, even a 0.1% annual population growth rate still results in a 7.38 times larger population than you started with. This situation actually does require precision balance in the long term.
Minor nitpick: "fiancee" (really fiancée) indicates an engaged woman, while you used it to refer to your engaged man. "fiancé" indicates an engaged man. The extra vowel makes it feminine. For some reason extra vowels are often feminine--eg. girl's names in English often end in vowels while boy's often end in consonants.
I know this because some relatives made the same mistake you did on their wedding invitations and it got pointed out.
we have too many people. Population growth needs to level off if we are to have a sustainable future. I don't want to see that through draconian population control measures, I'd rather see it through people self regulating.
There was an interesting recent TED talk on world population growth. The numbers the guy presents say we're just about to reach steady-state in number of children worldwide, though as the world's population pyramid fills up the overall number of people (children plus adults of all ages) will take a few more decades to level off at around 10 billion. The number of children per woman worldwide has plummeted everywhere except sub-saharan Africa. If you don't want to watch the talk, you can at least see this animation (after it loads, click play). Watching China is particularly interesting. There's been a huge shift towards fewer children in the last 30 years, and we're just about down to the replacement rate, on the whole.
Your explanation is repeatedly incoherent--I cannot follow most of it. Parts of your original post were also incoherent as others have pointed out in detail. I'm honestly beginning to suspect you have a mental problem. You also exhibit many of the behaviors of mathematical cranks. Specifically, cranks...
"overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts."
-- Yup, you've talked about how you were smarter than your professors, and now you've put yourself next to Einstein.
"rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial."
-- Yup, you didn't admit to any mistakes at all in your reply to me or in your reply to "DragonWriter" who called part of your original post incoherent (which you ignored; that part clearly is incoherent since it doesn't even parse).
"love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations"
-- Sort of yes. You started this tangent which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft's new social network with very little prodding. By the way, I may find you crazy, but I also find you interesting for the time being.
"...but they tend to be bad listeners, being uninterested in anyone else's experience or opinions."
-- Mostly yes. You seem to have completely ignored the points in my main paragraph, and your response to "DragonWriter" ignores almost his entire post while making a superficial and rather pointless observation.
"misunderstand or fail to use standard notation and terminology"
-- Very much yes. You've invented your own terminology repeatedly ("framework of Truth", "view", "logic of the question",...). In contrast, both myself and "DragonWriter" referenced standard formal logic, and I referenced a number of standard terms from physics. You have used some basic terminology correctly at least some of the time (eg. premise).
"ignore fine distinctions which are essential to correctly understand mainstream belief."
-- Very much yes. You insist on ignoring the difference between the truth value of "A implies B" and "(A is true) and (A implies B)". You say the former is false in every case that A is false, whereas everyone else says the former can be true even if A is false. If A is false, the latter is in fact always false.
You also seem to fundamentally misunderstand that the experiment Einstein describes cannot be done as far as we currently understand physics since it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. The only value the thought experiment has is hypothetical. Also, while you say Einstein was "correct", in the strict sense he was not. Special and general relativity do describe many facets of reality extraordinarily well, but they're not complete theories since they don't handle quantum-scale interactions. The consensus of physicists is that some larger theory which includes special and general relativity in the appropriate gravity-dominated limits is needed--that is, relativity is just a very good approximation, and Einstein was far, far closer to "correct" than anyone before him.
Whether a particular technique is "good" or "bad" in a moral sense depends on whether it stirs or stunts our capacity for empathy, and whether it encourages us to grow and diversify or enforces a rigid set of behavior.
Replace "in a moral sense" with "in my moral sense" and it works well enough. The real good/bad discussion is extremely complicated, with too many contradictory criteria for me to name and with very unclear relative weights. You may prize empathy while another person might prize blind hatred (the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind here), and fundamentally what is to say who is right in some absolute moral sense? Practically speaking I of course ignore questions of foundations and agree with you while disagreeing with Westboro, though I don't know why I do so in a completely rigorous sense. I suppose humans are just born with the capacity to oversimplify since it's an absolutely necessary skill for dealing with the unknown and I'm applying that here.
So, morality = a quagmire, empathy = good, blind hatred = bad, me = oversimplified.
Indeed, many humans currently have technology implanted in them. My dad has both an internal cardioverter-defibrillator (a pacemaker that also shocks his heart out of dangerous rhythms) and a ventricular assist device (a battery-powered heart pump). He would be long dead without the shocker, and he would probably be dead without the pump. This likely isn't what you had in mind, but it's something real.
"valuable" hard drive space? You probably stopped keeping porn a few years ago when space was harder to come by. Today, all my files are under 1 TB and around 0.5% (6 GB) of that is porn. The article is talking about 60 TB disk drives in 4 years--at some point enough is enough, and for me that point has already passed.
That said, maybe it's easier to stream high-quality straight porn (I assume you're straight). Streamed gay porn is often low quality or amateurish, which is often fine, but it's not always to my taste, hence part of my "stash". (The other part being pictures I particularly liked.)
Finally, and I freely admit I have no spouse, hiding porn from your spouse sounds like a terrible plan. You should be honest enough with your spouse to admit porn use, and they should be understanding enough to accept it. Children, though, I understand.
(1) You're not in a position to question me on this point. I was in the closet for long enough to know what I'm talking about and to know what people think of my sexual orientation. I do not act effeminate--no girly hand gestures, word choice, voice, focus on fashion, excessive displays of emotion,.... A few months ago I remember meeting a friend of a friend briefly, and he simply assumed I was straight, in that he made a joke involving my hypothetical girlfriend (I corrected it to "boyfriend" and the conversation moved on). I have several similar anecdotes. People who knew me when I was in the closet assumed I was straight or asexual with two exceptions. One was a math person who didn't want to assume I was interested in her or women in general though who was unsure enough to express her interest in me, and the other was the most perceptive person I've ever known. To my knowledge, and I've made a point of tracking this, nobody has ever just assumed I was gay. Hah, I just remembered a gay guy who thought I was straight when I was in the closet.
(2) I dislike the term "breeder" (except as a joke). You don't have to like gay men no matter what; that's just preposterous. Hell, I find some particularly effeminate gay men annoying (by the way, I like masculine men), since it seems like they want everything they say and do to announce as loudly as possible "I AM GAY", as if we didn't get the message the first twenty times, which is just stupid. In general you should have good reasons for disliking a person, and they you. "I don't like effeminate gay men" is just as bad as "I don't like black people" unless you have a good reason for the former statement (note my justification for my annoyance above).
(3) No, I don't want others to accept me with open arms and care about my feelings/quirks without justification. I want them to care as little that I'm gay as I care that they're straight. Societal apathy towards homosexuality is what I want. You call my gayness a "quirk"; to me, it's like having brown hair. I don't have to accept other people's brown hair--there's just no need. I don't see any hypocrisy in my view. By the way, I don't have a solid opinion on hate crime laws. I see them in a similar light to affirmative action--maybe useful for a while, but maybe harmful in the long run.
(4) I'm curious, do you dislike gay people in general? Do you dislike effeminate gay men? If so, why? I agree that many people use "homophobe" the way you describe, but also try to remember that most people who support gay rights are not gay (which is a simple consequence of the tiny fraction of gay people), so most people who misuse "homophobe" in that way are not gay. In your particular case maybe you've just met some annoying gay guys, but listening to you, maybe you're the problem in those interactions. It depends on the "why" above.
That's very stupid. Hypothetical questions can have value, and if you insist on answering them all with "no" you lose that value. Here's an example taken from Albert Einstein; I've modified it somewhat, but the ideas are the same:
If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), do I observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating? Yes, according to the Gallilean transformation, I would. However, there seems to be no such thing, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations, so I deduced the principle of relativity.
If you insisted on answering "no" to his question, you'd get the wrong conclusion. Just because you can't get to velocity c doesn't mean the thought experiment is "outside the framework of Truth" (whatever the hell that means). This would all be fine if you simply accepted that an argument can have a truth value independent of its premises and conclusions. The argument "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, all cats are horses" is true. However, the premises are false, so the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the truth of the argument, and in fact in this case the conclusion is false. I could write this more clearly in first order predicate logic if needed.
To be honest, you don't really know what you're talking about, your professors were probably annoyed by your smugness mixed with your stupidity--not the fact that you were right--and you should have been modded down, not up.
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That ignores the afterlife. Just define God to be unobservable in this life and observable in the next and it very much matters if God exists or not. Even then yours is a bit of a straw-man argument since I don't know of any religious people who honestly believe their God is unobservable. Usually they believe ancient accounts of miracles or some sort of personal, internal, highly emotional experience to be God's work. Sometimes the complexity of nature is given as evidence of God's work (which is a woefully incomplete argument, but that's a separate issue).
I figured someone would take exception to that line. Your reasoning is extremely sloppy, similar to the person I was replying to originally. You really have no idea what you're talking about.
The Supreme Court's current position on obscenity is Miller vs. California. The Miller Test is...
(a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient [lustful; sexual] interest
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
"patently offensive" is also determined by "community standards" since, 'The jury may measure the essentially factual issues of prurient appeal and patent offensiveness by the standard that prevails in the forum community, and need not employ a "national standard."' So, to "block [pornography] everywhere" on the internet, we would need...
(1) Under the current system, state legislation to outlaw it, completely changed community standards that call all internet pornography "patently offensive" (I myself am not at all offended by most depictions of sex acts on the internet), an amendment to Oregon's state constitution which according to State v. Henry allows no state obscenity laws in Oregon, a radically altered understanding of internet-based obscenity and indecency censorship as discussed in Reno v. ACLU, the ability to somehow block those outside the US generating pornography from letting US citizens view it, ....
(2) An extraordinary overturning of the Miller test which also overturns several other protections while simultaneously making the Court into the legislature. Honestly if that happened in a climate anywhere near the current one, we would impeach them for astounding judicial activism. Their decision would almost certainly be reversed through their replacements or through the a constitutional amendment. It's just not going to happen.
(3) A constitutional amendment that's certain to be wildly unpopular. Even ostensibly popular ones like the DC Voting Rights Amendment don't pass.
Sexual obscenity prosecutions in the US traditionally deal with extremely hard core acts like simulated rape and abuse, unsolicited hard core materials distributed as advertising, or the distribution of materials to minors. Adults looking up regular porn online fits into none of those categories. The only attempts at restricting online porn I'm aware of try to restrict access to minors and not adults. In all, to "block [pornography] everywhere" on the internet would require extraordinary changes in the Supreme Court, society in general, the state legislatures, and probably Congress. It is not going to happen.
You're reading too far into what I wrote (and just to let you know, you rambled pretty badly). I didn't say revolutions are never justified, just that they're not some magical panacea. The French Revolution comes to mind as a good example. It led to *decades* of political instability, the Reign of Terror, several regime changes, and the Napoleanic Wars. It also at least dabbled in various Democratic ideals with the goal of giving the people power (the extent to which that actually happened is debatable; success was at least "mixed"). It also enhanced personal freedoms; for instance, sodomy has been legal in France since around the Revolution, whereas it took many other European countries centuries longer.
As in this example, revolutions often beget revolutions, which has been horrible in African in recent years. It's not all bad, though. South Africa arguably underwent a peaceful revolution in the 1990's that struck down apartheid and put a remarkably progressive Constitution in place. South Africa now has one of the highest GDP's per capita of any African nation.
Whether or not all of these revolutions were worthwhile is a hugely complicated question that you can't just brush off flippantly. My point is, there are a huge number of things that can go wrong with revolutions, and they should certainly not be started lightly. Government abuses need to be horrific to justify all the negative consequences and uncertainty. As a rule, I think revolutions are completely justified in the case of genocidal regimes.
I agree. I don't know how the GP got modded so highly. It did rail against the DMCA, the government in general, Republicans in particular, and it called the US government a slave to its "corporate masters"--all of which wins the /. popularity contest--but still, it's so... stupid.
To be specific... .xxx scenario he outlined is ridiculously implausible. Porn was around in images, magazines, and film for decades or centuries in the US before the internet came around. It would take a fundamental, radical shift away from the First Amendment to "block it everywhere". It's just not going to happen. If anything the US is getting less conservative with time, not more.
* The
* The idea that Iranians can "get rid of their government if they want an uncensored net" is naive in the extreme. Revolutions are terrible--they're bloody economic disasters that might not even do anything substantial when the dust finally settles. And it's not as if any large group of people ever agrees on anything. The way the sentence is phrased makes it seem as if Iranians are actually a single entity which is, well, stupid.
Ah cool, thanks.
The only way a system vaguely like this one will ever work is if one day the health care system creates a national patient health information database. The issues involved in such a project are of course enormous, but if it could ever get off the ground, it would solve this and so many other problems with patient data. To give some examples...
2. After bloodwork he often wants to know the results, which requires asking someone or having them call him, when ideally he could just check online.
3. I recently got my eyes checked and spent the first ten minutes of the exam filling out mundane personal background that could have been imported from other clinics. I'm not completely certain I remembered my allergies correctly or if I accidentally told them one of dad's, so there are accuracy issues too with all this reentry.
4. I had to hunt down vaccination records a while ago which was a complete disaster. I ended up just getting the shots again, after visiting two clinics in person (it's always easier...) and talking with several people over the phone. At one place my records hadn't been digitized so I had to wait for them to physically pull them, and even then they were horribly incomplete and nobody has any idea why.
5. The place that wanted my vaccination had me fill out the form on my honor. I could lie, saying I got the shots when I didn't, and they'd never check or know because it would be impractical. If the system was digital it could have some reasonable integrity checks.
6. I swapped pharmacies recently. I had to give more mundane info to the new pharmacist that should have been imported and she had to call the old pharmacy to transfer some prescriptions. After being told they'd be ready in about an hour, I came back in three and they still weren't done because they had been "swamped" and were too busy to place the phone call. It would have been so much simpler if they could have just accessed a national database and filled my prescriptions during my first visit.
I'm a little confused. In the video they themselves note that around 90% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, and as far as I'm aware its configuration around our galaxies isn't well known, so... isn't the simulation basically worthless? The article doesn't clear this up either, though perhaps the papers would.
You don't have to convert to seconds. You can use "...#t=2m53s" (or & instead of #).
Woah! So if time runs backwards, but you still measure it as going forward, does the cpu end up running at infinite hertz?
You made my brain hertz.
I was doing the calculations originally suggested by Colonel Korn. Presumably the Schwarzschild radius isn't completely accurate here, and the "four million suns" mass figure is of course not very precise.
Still, the answer I was replying to was off by around 33 orders of magnitude (which it got modded up for...) whereas mine was only off by a factor of 5--and I'm not sure how precise WA's figure is.
Your mass/volume ratio is way off, though the other three are correct. It should be...
mass / volume = 1.155 * 10^6 kg/m^3
1 tsp = 4.929 * 10^-6 m^3
1 tsp of Sagittarius A* = 5.693 kg
So, it's pretty heavy, but eg. neutron stars are far, far heavier. This black hole is far denser than the sun, which has about 6.94 g per tsp.
So you would suggest that you can in fact be fired or denied a job based on X if the job is for a non-profit, regardless of X? I suppose that's as good a solution as possible, though having to allow any sort of job-related discrimination is unfortunate.
...comprehensive anti-racist/sexist/discriminationist education for everyone from elementary school onward...
Presumably sexual orientation is included here. I'm not sure how appropriate anti-sexual-orientaton discrimination education would be in elementary school--I suppose you'd have to keep the specifics out of the discussion and leave it at the level of "Jack and Jill came down the hill and found their two daddies Tim and Steve who put them to bed and each sang one to sleep. The end." In a similar vein, you said originally
Furthermore, I have explicitly said that governments safeguard the rights of citizens, even in private deals between each other - i.e. you can't be fired or denied a job because of your race etc.
Do you make an exception for religious groups that, for instance, refuse to employ/ordain/etc. gay clergy? In either case, what is your moral rationale? I find this a difficult point to be consistent on. On the one hand, surely if a religious group can refuse gay clergy another religious group can refuse white clergy. On the other hand, religions should be separate from the government and free to practice whatever beliefs they want, including discrimination.
Is it wrong that I found page 15 arousing?
Only if you're gay. (Seriously, the pictures look like boobs and such.)
One episode for TNG, and one (bad) one for DS9. He didn't write the script for either.
You're talking about TNG: First Contact and DS9: Far Beyond the Stars. The DS9 one was certainly different, but I'd hardly call it bad. For instance, Memory Alpha quotes the actors who played Sisko, Quark, and Odo as calling it their favorite or one of their favorite DS9 episodes. The TNG one was certainly interesting. Maybe the writing could have been better (somehow I was never sold on the injured Riker idea; too convenient?), but the basic plot was a very good idea, and the episode is at least memorable.
But certainly "Star Trek Luminary" is pretty silly. I had never heard of him.
I should start by saying I generally agree with you.
1) This will never happen. I'm gay and I'm not going to pair off (with a woman) and have precisely two children. I haven't ruled out the possibility of a surrogate or adoption someday, but that's a separate issue and would require a woman to have 4 children, 2 of her own and 2 for me.
2) I actually don't find China's 1-child policy draconian. I wish India had implemented something similarly effective years ago. It's not as if couples can't have any children, and there are quite a number of exceptions. Certainly there are negative consequences, but the alternative of overpopulation is truly terrible.
3) It's really convenient that people in developed nations seem to want to have just enough children to replace themselves, on average.
Over 2000 years, even a 0.1% annual population growth rate still results in a 7.38 times larger population than you started with. This situation actually does require precision balance in the long term.
Minor nitpick: "fiancee" (really fiancée) indicates an engaged woman, while you used it to refer to your engaged man. "fiancé" indicates an engaged man. The extra vowel makes it feminine. For some reason extra vowels are often feminine--eg. girl's names in English often end in vowels while boy's often end in consonants.
I know this because some relatives made the same mistake you did on their wedding invitations and it got pointed out.
we have too many people. Population growth needs to level off if we are to have a sustainable future. I don't want to see that through draconian population control measures, I'd rather see it through people self regulating.
There was an interesting recent TED talk on world population growth. The numbers the guy presents say we're just about to reach steady-state in number of children worldwide, though as the world's population pyramid fills up the overall number of people (children plus adults of all ages) will take a few more decades to level off at around 10 billion. The number of children per woman worldwide has plummeted everywhere except sub-saharan Africa. If you don't want to watch the talk, you can at least see this animation (after it loads, click play). Watching China is particularly interesting. There's been a huge shift towards fewer children in the last 30 years, and we're just about down to the replacement rate, on the whole.
Your explanation is repeatedly incoherent--I cannot follow most of it. Parts of your original post were also incoherent as others have pointed out in detail. I'm honestly beginning to suspect you have a mental problem. You also exhibit many of the behaviors of mathematical cranks. Specifically, cranks...
"overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts."
-- Yup, you've talked about how you were smarter than your professors, and now you've put yourself next to Einstein.
"rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial."
-- Yup, you didn't admit to any mistakes at all in your reply to me or in your reply to "DragonWriter" who called part of your original post incoherent (which you ignored; that part clearly is incoherent since it doesn't even parse).
"love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations"
-- Sort of yes. You started this tangent which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft's new social network with very little prodding. By the way, I may find you crazy, but I also find you interesting for the time being.
"...but they tend to be bad listeners, being uninterested in anyone else's experience or opinions."
-- Mostly yes. You seem to have completely ignored the points in my main paragraph, and your response to "DragonWriter" ignores almost his entire post while making a superficial and rather pointless observation.
"misunderstand or fail to use standard notation and terminology" ...). In contrast, both myself and "DragonWriter" referenced standard formal logic, and I referenced a number of standard terms from physics. You have used some basic terminology correctly at least some of the time (eg. premise).
-- Very much yes. You've invented your own terminology repeatedly ("framework of Truth", "view", "logic of the question",
"ignore fine distinctions which are essential to correctly understand mainstream belief."
-- Very much yes. You insist on ignoring the difference between the truth value of "A implies B" and "(A is true) and (A implies B)". You say the former is false in every case that A is false, whereas everyone else says the former can be true even if A is false. If A is false, the latter is in fact always false.
You also seem to fundamentally misunderstand that the experiment Einstein describes cannot be done as far as we currently understand physics since it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. The only value the thought experiment has is hypothetical. Also, while you say Einstein was "correct", in the strict sense he was not. Special and general relativity do describe many facets of reality extraordinarily well, but they're not complete theories since they don't handle quantum-scale interactions. The consensus of physicists is that some larger theory which includes special and general relativity in the appropriate gravity-dominated limits is needed--that is, relativity is just a very good approximation, and Einstein was far, far closer to "correct" than anyone before him.
I agree with everything up to
Whether a particular technique is "good" or "bad" in a moral sense depends on whether it stirs or stunts our capacity for empathy, and whether it encourages us to grow and diversify or enforces a rigid set of behavior.
Replace "in a moral sense" with "in my moral sense" and it works well enough. The real good/bad discussion is extremely complicated, with too many contradictory criteria for me to name and with very unclear relative weights. You may prize empathy while another person might prize blind hatred (the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind here), and fundamentally what is to say who is right in some absolute moral sense? Practically speaking I of course ignore questions of foundations and agree with you while disagreeing with Westboro, though I don't know why I do so in a completely rigorous sense. I suppose humans are just born with the capacity to oversimplify since it's an absolutely necessary skill for dealing with the unknown and I'm applying that here.
So, morality = a quagmire, empathy = good, blind hatred = bad, me = oversimplified.
Indeed, many humans currently have technology implanted in them. My dad has both an internal cardioverter-defibrillator (a pacemaker that also shocks his heart out of dangerous rhythms) and a ventricular assist device (a battery-powered heart pump). He would be long dead without the shocker, and he would probably be dead without the pump. This likely isn't what you had in mind, but it's something real.
Wish I could mod you up
Hah, ironically your original post got modded up and mine is unmodded. Oh well :)
"valuable" hard drive space? You probably stopped keeping porn a few years ago when space was harder to come by. Today, all my files are under 1 TB and around 0.5% (6 GB) of that is porn. The article is talking about 60 TB disk drives in 4 years--at some point enough is enough, and for me that point has already passed.
That said, maybe it's easier to stream high-quality straight porn (I assume you're straight). Streamed gay porn is often low quality or amateurish, which is often fine, but it's not always to my taste, hence part of my "stash". (The other part being pictures I particularly liked.)
Finally, and I freely admit I have no spouse, hiding porn from your spouse sounds like a terrible plan. You should be honest enough with your spouse to admit porn use, and they should be understanding enough to accept it. Children, though, I understand.
(1) You're not in a position to question me on this point. I was in the closet for long enough to know what I'm talking about and to know what people think of my sexual orientation. I do not act effeminate--no girly hand gestures, word choice, voice, focus on fashion, excessive displays of emotion, .... A few months ago I remember meeting a friend of a friend briefly, and he simply assumed I was straight, in that he made a joke involving my hypothetical girlfriend (I corrected it to "boyfriend" and the conversation moved on). I have several similar anecdotes. People who knew me when I was in the closet assumed I was straight or asexual with two exceptions. One was a math person who didn't want to assume I was interested in her or women in general though who was unsure enough to express her interest in me, and the other was the most perceptive person I've ever known. To my knowledge, and I've made a point of tracking this, nobody has ever just assumed I was gay. Hah, I just remembered a gay guy who thought I was straight when I was in the closet.
(2) I dislike the term "breeder" (except as a joke). You don't have to like gay men no matter what; that's just preposterous. Hell, I find some particularly effeminate gay men annoying (by the way, I like masculine men), since it seems like they want everything they say and do to announce as loudly as possible "I AM GAY", as if we didn't get the message the first twenty times, which is just stupid. In general you should have good reasons for disliking a person, and they you. "I don't like effeminate gay men" is just as bad as "I don't like black people" unless you have a good reason for the former statement (note my justification for my annoyance above).
(3) No, I don't want others to accept me with open arms and care about my feelings/quirks without justification. I want them to care as little that I'm gay as I care that they're straight. Societal apathy towards homosexuality is what I want. You call my gayness a "quirk"; to me, it's like having brown hair. I don't have to accept other people's brown hair--there's just no need. I don't see any hypocrisy in my view. By the way, I don't have a solid opinion on hate crime laws. I see them in a similar light to affirmative action--maybe useful for a while, but maybe harmful in the long run.
(4) I'm curious, do you dislike gay people in general? Do you dislike effeminate gay men? If so, why? I agree that many people use "homophobe" the way you describe, but also try to remember that most people who support gay rights are not gay (which is a simple consequence of the tiny fraction of gay people), so most people who misuse "homophobe" in that way are not gay. In your particular case maybe you've just met some annoying gay guys, but listening to you, maybe you're the problem in those interactions. It depends on the "why" above.
That's very stupid. Hypothetical questions can have value, and if you insist on answering them all with "no" you lose that value. Here's an example taken from Albert Einstein; I've modified it somewhat, but the ideas are the same:
If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), do I observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating? Yes, according to the Gallilean transformation, I would. However, there seems to be no such thing, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations, so I deduced the principle of relativity.
(Original here)
If you insisted on answering "no" to his question, you'd get the wrong conclusion. Just because you can't get to velocity c doesn't mean the thought experiment is "outside the framework of Truth" (whatever the hell that means). This would all be fine if you simply accepted that an argument can have a truth value independent of its premises and conclusions. The argument "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, all cats are horses" is true. However, the premises are false, so the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the truth of the argument, and in fact in this case the conclusion is false. I could write this more clearly in first order predicate logic if needed.
To be honest, you don't really know what you're talking about, your professors were probably annoyed by your smugness mixed with your stupidity--not the fact that you were right--and you should have been modded down, not up.