Doesn't look that way to me, except in the most general sense. Good writing is about precision. He is referring to a type of writing that makes up or comprises the bulk of a genre of press. By using 'encapsulate', he is reversing the composition.
This was among the most poorly-written "professional" opinion pieces I've ever seen. Does TG Daily not have a copy editor? Does this McKenna kid actually get paid to write?
the formulaic, child-minded writing-for-the-lowest-common-marketing-denominato r style that encapsulates 99% of the mainstream videogame press
Encapsulates? That word does not mean what you think it means.
Starting in the most critical area of the videogame press's remit and where I have the most self-doubt about my own writings in the past
Is this English?
McKenna, I'm sure that you had point in there somewhere. From what I was able to decipher from your article, I'm pretty sure I agree with you, more or less. But I guarantee that you'd benefit from a couple of years of formal education in composition, and your work would certainly benefit from a couple of studious edits, preferably from someone else.
And for Pete's sake, lay off the parentheses, ellipses, generalizations, overuse of subordinate clauses, overuse of multiple descriptive adjectives per clause, and the like. Thankfully, you didn't use "quite" or "a tad" as qualifiers. You did, however, use "rather" several times; those three qualifiers are among the strongest indicators of amateur writing.
I'd sooner read well-written marketing copy than poorly-written criticism.
A riding is an electoral district. South Vancouver would be an example. Voters vote for a candidate in their riding; whoever gets the most votes gets that riding's seat in the House of Commons. So, right now, Ujjal Dosanjh is the Member of Parliament for Vancouver South. Voters in one riding do not get to vote for candidates in any other riding. I cannot vote in (say) Victoria-Hillside, because I don't have residence in that riding.
In your example, John Green is running, not the Green Party. John Green may change parties before, during or after the election if he likes. The party he belongs to has no ability to place someone else in the spot he wins. You do not vote for a party (except in the general sense; saying "I'm voting Conservative" means only that you are voting for the Conservativer candidate in your riding); you vote for a candidate.
It's not a question of whether the Green Party has a legal obligation to put John Green into his riding's elected seat if he is elected. He has been elected. If they wanted to put someone else on the ballot, their riding association would have nominated someone else as their party candidate.
So the party fields a candidate, but there is nothing but the party's credibility to guarantee that candidate gets into office if that party wins the vote?
You've got it backwards, I think -- the candidate is elected (or not) on a per-riding basis, not the party. The leader of the party with the greatest number of elected members becomes Prime Minister and determines the composition of his Executive.
You cannot, for example, vote for the NDP Party in your riding but not vote for the candidate that the local NDP riding association has nominated. If Joe Blow is the Conservative candidate and you want to vote Conservative, you have no chooice but to vote for Joe Blow. There's no bait-and-switch. The party that wins in your riding cannot simply decide that while Joe Blow won the riding that they will appoint Jill Mill to be the MP for that riding.
That's correct, yes. Government refers specifically to the Prime Minister and his or her Cabinet (the Executive). The other members of parliament are not considered to be part of government.
One consequence of this is that in Canada, the Cabinet offices -- the physical offices in which Cabinet members conduct business while not debating in the House -- must be outside the Parliament Buildings proper so as to draw a clear line between Government and Parliament.
In Canada, the local party riding association decides who the candidate is. Any party member in the riding may cast a vote for who should represent that party in that riding. In one recent notable case, the incumbent candidate for one party (Chuck Cadman, Conservative)was not renominated when a group of ethnic citizens joined the party en masse to nominate a different candidate. The deposed nominee then ran fofr re-election, but as an Independent, and beat his old party's candidate soundly.
The leader of the party is determined similarly, except that the riding associations send representatives to a leadership convention to elect a leader.
So in Canada, nobody directly elects a leader, even if they are a member of the leader's party. And I would disagree that people generally vote for parties and agenda rather than personalities. The above Chuck Cadman story, for instance. And most of the people who will be voting Liberal in the next Canadian election will be doing so not because of any love for the party or its agenda but rather because they support their local candidate. (I am voting for Ujjal Dosanjh in the election despite the fact that I am not a Liberal supporter, not because of it.)
As the original poster said, in countries without proportional representation, such as Canada and the UK, you vote for a candidate in your riding. The leader of the party that elects the most members becomes Prime Minister. The Prime Minister decides who becomes ministers in his or her Cabinet (or Executive). And while the ranks of Ministers are typically taken from MPs from his or her party, any citizen may be appointed to Cabinet. (For example, the former Premier of British Columbia chose Ed John, a tribal chief who hadn't even run for office, to be his minister for child and family services).
In the parliamentary system, all budget votes are confidence votes. If a budget vote fails, the government is toppled and an election is forced (there are exceptions, but they're rare).
A member may also call for a vote of non-confidence in the government, but only under certain conditions -- usually when there aren't enough government members in the House at that moment to prevent a new bill from being tabled, or when the government has assigned time to the opposition to introduce a private bill.
See, the government has absolute power in the House as to the order in which business is read. The Government House Leader need not allow any private bill to be heard or to go past first reading, which makes it difficult for a non-budget non-confidence vote to be heard. Practically speaking, however, any government which does not give the opposition a day or two every legislative session to introduce bills can lose the confidence of their own private members, which is dangerous.
The Canadian government was brought down last month when the Conservatives introduced a non-confidence motion on one of their Opposition Days.
All forms of Buddhism still have a belief in a supernatural force of some kind; I do not agree that such concepts are not sufficiently well-defined. Further, to suggest that Buddhism is not a religion requires a very narrow definition of religion. It's not analogous to atheism.
It is therefore quite possible to be a religious atheist but not all those who are atheists are religious
Not by any useful definition. Ritual is not required for religion and religion is not required for ritual. They are orthogonal. Even the practice of some atheists to belong to an organization and meet regularly does not in any way suggest that any form of atheism is a religion. And the idea that state-worship is a religion is also not a useful (or used) definition.
In any case: no, atheism is not a religion. It's the atheists who get to decide if they're following a religion, and you will not find an informed atheist who considers his or her atheism a religion.
and all definitions of 'atheist' I've seen/heard/can find, specificy state that it does require 'positive non-belief' as you put it.
Then you haven't looked very hard. Or at all, I suspect.
however, it does require faith, since it is a belief.
That's also debatable. The default existential position is always "X does not exist". Therefore, without evidence for the existence of an entity, it is reasonable to assume non-existence. Thus, positive non-belief need not require any faith.
agnostic is where you've not been convinced either way
And you're wrong again. Agnosticism is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unprovable; it says nothing about the stance on belief.
Why do people feel the need to spout off on things they know nothing about?
Atheism includes both positive non-belief and lack of belief. Agnosticism is orthogonal to theism and atheism; it is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unknowable. One can be a theistic agnostic or an atheistic agnostic. Religion requires a belief in a supernatural force; as such, atheism is not a religion.
A statement of postitive non-belief in gods is not religious by any meaningful sense of the word. In any case, atheism does not require positive non-belief, but only requires the absence of belief, which is not a religious belief (in exactly the same way that 'bald' is not a hair colour.)
So, regardless of approach, atheism is not a religion.
By the way, I'm sure the next of your contradictions was going to be that insects don't have four feet, and snails do not melt.
You'd be wrong. I don't consider the interpretation of those passages as errors to be compelling. The "bats are birds" and cud-chewing bits, however, are very clearly errors, even in the original language, and provide absolute proof that the bible cannot be considered infallible (your intrpretation of the original Hebrew is incorrect, BTW).
I am not trying to show that the Bible is false or that his or your religion is false (although I do believe that it is false). I am showing that it is not infallible and must therefore be interpreted. Since the Bible is thus open to interpretation, Genesis should be taken allegorically and the timeline of history should not be considered to be mere thousands of years old. If you want to believe that a god created the universe, go for it. But to cite the Bible as evidence as to why evolution is false is utter bullshit, and I will continue to call out that bullshit.
Now I'm know you're just trolling. That is an astonshingly, gobsmackingly stupid question; it assumes that under evolutionary theory that all existing species are already perfect and that no more evolution is occurring. Evolutionary theory makes no such claim.
Instead, I'll turn it around: there are flaws in our evolutionary ancestors that are not present to the same degree in modern humans. Those flaws did 'evolve out'. And other flaws 'evolved in'; for example, the human sinus cavities are extremely inefficient compared to those of Cro-Magnon man. This is because our skulls have evolved to make room for larger brains; this is an example of evolution providing both a benefit and a flaw tied to that benefit.
And, predictably, the Christian retreats from the fight, bruised and bloodied.
I have read more on science, theology and rhetoric than you have probably read about everything in total. I have invited you to read a very simple encyclopedia on the nature of the scientific method; it isn't a trick, it's an honest attempt to educate you on something about which you have more than adequately shown your ignorance.
Religious faith is not incompatible with the fact of evolution -- and it is a fact. ID is completely incompatible with science. I'm not trying to shake your faith; I have shown that you are wrong in your belief that ID is science.
The moderations of your posts have, I suspect, been accurate. You are displaying all of the characteristics of a troll: hit-and-run, ignoring most of what is being written, and pushing the right buttons to get a flamewar going.
I refer you to this primer on how the probability for spontaneous generation of of life only appears to be so high as to be impossible, and why the "airplane parts in a hurricans" analogy is just plain ridiculous.
Are you interpreting the bible such that your god created plants and animals twice? Once before and once after he created man? Heresy.
In any case, evolution and belief in any god are not incompatible -- unless you believe that the bible is literal truth, which I suspect that you do, which is why you so casually ignored my question as to whether or not bats are birds and if rabbits chew their cud.
Your bible contains contradictions and errors; it cannot be said to be infallible. It must therefore be interpreted by its believers. And most of its believers interpret Genesis as an allegory.
Because more people are saying that it is a scientific theory.
More people can call it whatever they like; it's still not a scientific theory, because it is not falsifiable. "Those people" do not get to decide that the scientific method is inadequate. The ID theory will never be peer-reviewed science. It is not a scientific theory.
Were falsifiability no longer necessary for the scientific method, then "The Universe was created last Tuesday will all matter and energy in situ and all of our memories implanted and illusionary" could be considered a scientific theory.
But falsifiability is not negotiable. No ID theory can be truthfully called a scientific theory. As such, it doesn't matter how many people are calling it such.
You can't possibly intelligently discuss evolution based solely on what your high school science teacher taught you. No, evolution does not require a stimulus to drive mutation. Either your science teacher was wrong, was purposefully dumbing it down for you (my high school chemistry teacher never once discussed pi or sigma bonding, for example) or you have misunderstood what he told you.
Evolution is, simply, the change in allele frequencies in a population from one generation to the next. Natural selection is one of the mechanisms that drives this. The drug-resistant bacteria example is one illustration of natural selection-driven evolution.
You take the data from a scientific experiment and plot it out on a graph and then derive a curve from those plotted points. Then you try the experiment again and again and again. Eventually, you should be able to predict where on that curve the data will fall.
You don't need to determine every point on that curve. In fact, it is impossible to plot every point on that curve; there will always be gaps.
We have hundreds of millions of data points supporting evolution. This latest discovery, in an analogous way, fits the curve. That it only "plugs one hole" or fills one gap is absolutely irrelevant.
In any case, you're wrong: some mutations are beneficial; this is not controversial in any way, even among "creation scientists". We have seen it happen on shorter time-scales (the Daphnia of Lake Constance, and so forth). If your main objection is that we haven't seen it on a "macroevolutionary" scale, I have two answers for you. First, the article in question describes such an occurrence; we don't have to witness it happening for it to fit the curve. Second, the "macro/micro-evolution" canard is a false dichotomy.
Lastly, ID is not growing as an accepted scientific theory, because it is not a scientific theory. It is not falsifiable; therefore it is not scientific. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't look that way to me, except in the most general sense. Good writing is about precision. He is referring to a type of writing that makes up or comprises the bulk of a genre of press. By using 'encapsulate', he is reversing the composition.
This was among the most poorly-written "professional" opinion pieces I've ever seen. Does TG Daily not have a copy editor? Does this McKenna kid actually get paid to write?
o r style that encapsulates 99% of the mainstream videogame press
the formulaic, child-minded writing-for-the-lowest-common-marketing-denominat
Encapsulates? That word does not mean what you think it means.
Starting in the most critical area of the videogame press's remit and where I have the most self-doubt about my own writings in the past
Is this English?
McKenna, I'm sure that you had point in there somewhere. From what I was able to decipher from your article, I'm pretty sure I agree with you, more or less. But I guarantee that you'd benefit from a couple of years of formal education in composition, and your work would certainly benefit from a couple of studious edits, preferably from someone else.
And for Pete's sake, lay off the parentheses, ellipses, generalizations, overuse of subordinate clauses, overuse of multiple descriptive adjectives per clause, and the like. Thankfully, you didn't use "quite" or "a tad" as qualifiers. You did, however, use "rather" several times; those three qualifiers are among the strongest indicators of amateur writing.
I'd sooner read well-written marketing copy than poorly-written criticism.
A riding is an electoral district. South Vancouver would be an example. Voters vote for a candidate in their riding; whoever gets the most votes gets that riding's seat in the House of Commons. So, right now, Ujjal Dosanjh is the Member of Parliament for Vancouver South. Voters in one riding do not get to vote for candidates in any other riding. I cannot vote in (say) Victoria-Hillside, because I don't have residence in that riding.
In your example, John Green is running, not the Green Party. John Green may change parties before, during or after the election if he likes. The party he belongs to has no ability to place someone else in the spot he wins. You do not vote for a party (except in the general sense; saying "I'm voting Conservative" means only that you are voting for the Conservativer candidate in your riding); you vote for a candidate.
It's not a question of whether the Green Party has a legal obligation to put John Green into his riding's elected seat if he is elected. He has been elected. If they wanted to put someone else on the ballot, their riding association would have nominated someone else as their party candidate.
So the party fields a candidate, but there is nothing but the party's credibility to guarantee that candidate gets into office if that party wins the vote?
You've got it backwards, I think -- the candidate is elected (or not) on a per-riding basis, not the party. The leader of the party with the greatest number of elected members becomes Prime Minister and determines the composition of his Executive.
You cannot, for example, vote for the NDP Party in your riding but not vote for the candidate that the local NDP riding association has nominated. If Joe Blow is the Conservative candidate and you want to vote Conservative, you have no chooice but to vote for Joe Blow. There's no bait-and-switch. The party that wins in your riding cannot simply decide that while Joe Blow won the riding that they will appoint Jill Mill to be the MP for that riding.
That's correct, yes. Government refers specifically to the Prime Minister and his or her Cabinet (the Executive). The other members of parliament are not considered to be part of government.
One consequence of this is that in Canada, the Cabinet offices -- the physical offices in which Cabinet members conduct business while not debating in the House -- must be outside the Parliament Buildings proper so as to draw a clear line between Government and Parliament.
In Canada, the local party riding association decides who the candidate is. Any party member in the riding may cast a vote for who should represent that party in that riding. In one recent notable case, the incumbent candidate for one party (Chuck Cadman, Conservative)was not renominated when a group of ethnic citizens joined the party en masse to nominate a different candidate. The deposed nominee then ran fofr re-election, but as an Independent, and beat his old party's candidate soundly.
The leader of the party is determined similarly, except that the riding associations send representatives to a leadership convention to elect a leader.
So in Canada, nobody directly elects a leader, even if they are a member of the leader's party. And I would disagree that people generally vote for parties and agenda rather than personalities. The above Chuck Cadman story, for instance. And most of the people who will be voting Liberal in the next Canadian election will be doing so not because of any love for the party or its agenda but rather because they support their local candidate. (I am voting for Ujjal Dosanjh in the election despite the fact that I am not a Liberal supporter, not because of it.)
I will step in here to answer.
As the original poster said, in countries without proportional representation, such as Canada and the UK, you vote for a candidate in your riding. The leader of the party that elects the most members becomes Prime Minister. The Prime Minister decides who becomes ministers in his or her Cabinet (or Executive). And while the ranks of Ministers are typically taken from MPs from his or her party, any citizen may be appointed to Cabinet. (For example, the former Premier of British Columbia chose Ed John, a tribal chief who hadn't even run for office, to be his minister for child and family services).
In the parliamentary system, all budget votes are confidence votes. If a budget vote fails, the government is toppled and an election is forced (there are exceptions, but they're rare).
A member may also call for a vote of non-confidence in the government, but only under certain conditions -- usually when there aren't enough government members in the House at that moment to prevent a new bill from being tabled, or when the government has assigned time to the opposition to introduce a private bill.
See, the government has absolute power in the House as to the order in which business is read. The Government House Leader need not allow any private bill to be heard or to go past first reading, which makes it difficult for a non-budget non-confidence vote to be heard. Practically speaking, however, any government which does not give the opposition a day or two every legislative session to introduce bills can lose the confidence of their own private members, which is dangerous.
The Canadian government was brought down last month when the Conservatives introduced a non-confidence motion on one of their Opposition Days.
It is indeed an interesting discussion -- thank you for posting that link. Someone should mod your post +1 Informative.
All forms of Buddhism still have a belief in a supernatural force of some kind; I do not agree that such concepts are not sufficiently well-defined. Further, to suggest that Buddhism is not a religion requires a very narrow definition of religion. It's not analogous to atheism.
It is therefore quite possible to be a religious atheist but not all those who are atheists are religious
Not by any useful definition. Ritual is not required for religion and religion is not required for ritual. They are orthogonal. Even the practice of some atheists to belong to an organization and meet regularly does not in any way suggest that any form of atheism is a religion. And the idea that state-worship is a religion is also not a useful (or used) definition.
In any case: no, atheism is not a religion. It's the atheists who get to decide if they're following a religion, and you will not find an informed atheist who considers his or her atheism a religion.
and all definitions of 'atheist' I've seen/heard/can find, specificy state that it does require 'positive non-belief' as you put it.
Then you haven't looked very hard. Or at all, I suspect.
however, it does require faith, since it is a belief.
That's also debatable. The default existential position is always "X does not exist". Therefore, without evidence for the existence of an entity, it is reasonable to assume non-existence. Thus, positive non-belief need not require any faith.
agnostic is where you've not been convinced either way
And you're wrong again. Agnosticism is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unprovable; it says nothing about the stance on belief.
Why do people feel the need to spout off on things they know nothing about?
Atheism includes both positive non-belief and lack of belief. Agnosticism is orthogonal to theism and atheism; it is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unknowable. One can be a theistic agnostic or an atheistic agnostic. Religion requires a belief in a supernatural force; as such, atheism is not a religion.
A statement of postitive non-belief in gods is not religious by any meaningful sense of the word. In any case, atheism does not require positive non-belief, but only requires the absence of belief, which is not a religious belief (in exactly the same way that 'bald' is not a hair colour.)
So, regardless of approach, atheism is not a religion.
Bell and Virgin are also available in Western Canada; there is plenty of competition.
This doesn't alter the fact that dada is a Randroid moron.
By the way, I'm sure the next of your contradictions was going to be that insects don't have four feet, and snails do not melt.
You'd be wrong. I don't consider the interpretation of those passages as errors to be compelling. The "bats are birds" and cud-chewing bits, however, are very clearly errors, even in the original language, and provide absolute proof that the bible cannot be considered infallible (your intrpretation of the original Hebrew is incorrect, BTW).
I am not trying to show that the Bible is false or that his or your religion is false (although I do believe that it is false). I am showing that it is not infallible and must therefore be interpreted. Since the Bible is thus open to interpretation, Genesis should be taken allegorically and the timeline of history should not be considered to be mere thousands of years old. If you want to believe that a god created the universe, go for it. But to cite the Bible as evidence as to why evolution is false is utter bullshit, and I will continue to call out that bullshit.
I invite you to read this explanation of probability in abiogenetic theory. It pops every one of your bubbles.
Now I'm know you're just trolling. That is an astonshingly, gobsmackingly stupid question; it assumes that under evolutionary theory that all existing species are already perfect and that no more evolution is occurring. Evolutionary theory makes no such claim.
Instead, I'll turn it around: there are flaws in our evolutionary ancestors that are not present to the same degree in modern humans. Those flaws did 'evolve out'. And other flaws 'evolved in'; for example, the human sinus cavities are extremely inefficient compared to those of Cro-Magnon man. This is because our skulls have evolved to make room for larger brains; this is an example of evolution providing both a benefit and a flaw tied to that benefit.
And, predictably, the Christian retreats from the fight, bruised and bloodied.
I have read more on science, theology and rhetoric than you have probably read about everything in total. I have invited you to read a very simple encyclopedia on the nature of the scientific method; it isn't a trick, it's an honest attempt to educate you on something about which you have more than adequately shown your ignorance.
Religious faith is not incompatible with the fact of evolution -- and it is a fact. ID is completely incompatible with science. I'm not trying to shake your faith; I have shown that you are wrong in your belief that ID is science.
The moderations of your posts have, I suspect, been accurate. You are displaying all of the characteristics of a troll: hit-and-run, ignoring most of what is being written, and pushing the right buttons to get a flamewar going.
Either debate the issue or take a hike.
I refer you to this primer on how the probability for spontaneous generation of of life only appears to be so high as to be impossible, and why the "airplane parts in a hurricans" analogy is just plain ridiculous.
Dude. That link you pointed to is full of shit. It misdefines both agnostic and atheist; it's just plain wrong.
Are you interpreting the bible such that your god created plants and animals twice? Once before and once after he created man? Heresy.
In any case, evolution and belief in any god are not incompatible -- unless you believe that the bible is literal truth, which I suspect that you do, which is why you so casually ignored my question as to whether or not bats are birds and if rabbits chew their cud.
Your bible contains contradictions and errors; it cannot be said to be infallible. It must therefore be interpreted by its believers. And most of its believers interpret Genesis as an allegory.
Because more people are saying that it is a scientific theory.
More people can call it whatever they like; it's still not a scientific theory, because it is not falsifiable. "Those people" do not get to decide that the scientific method is inadequate. The ID theory will never be peer-reviewed science. It is not a scientific theory.
I invite you to read the Wikipedia entry on the scientific method.
Were falsifiability no longer necessary for the scientific method, then "The Universe was created last Tuesday will all matter and energy in situ and all of our memories implanted and illusionary" could be considered a scientific theory.
But falsifiability is not negotiable. No ID theory can be truthfully called a scientific theory. As such, it doesn't matter how many people are calling it such.
You can't possibly intelligently discuss evolution based solely on what your high school science teacher taught you. No, evolution does not require a stimulus to drive mutation. Either your science teacher was wrong, was purposefully dumbing it down for you (my high school chemistry teacher never once discussed pi or sigma bonding, for example) or you have misunderstood what he told you.
Evolution is, simply, the change in allele frequencies in a population from one generation to the next. Natural selection is one of the mechanisms that drives this. The drug-resistant bacteria example is one illustration of natural selection-driven evolution.
So do you also believe that bats are birds, and that rabbits chew their cud?
And are you sure that your god created man on the 6th day and not before he created plants and animals as per Genesis 2?
You take the data from a scientific experiment and plot it out on a graph and then derive a curve from those plotted points. Then you try the experiment again and again and again. Eventually, you should be able to predict where on that curve the data will fall.
You don't need to determine every point on that curve. In fact, it is impossible to plot every point on that curve; there will always be gaps.
We have hundreds of millions of data points supporting evolution. This latest discovery, in an analogous way, fits the curve. That it only "plugs one hole" or fills one gap is absolutely irrelevant.
In any case, you're wrong: some mutations are beneficial; this is not controversial in any way, even among "creation scientists". We have seen it happen on shorter time-scales (the Daphnia of Lake Constance, and so forth). If your main objection is that we haven't seen it on a "macroevolutionary" scale, I have two answers for you. First, the article in question describes such an occurrence; we don't have to witness it happening for it to fit the curve. Second, the "macro/micro-evolution" canard is a false dichotomy.
Lastly, ID is not growing as an accepted scientific theory, because it is not a scientific theory. It is not falsifiable; therefore it is not scientific. Period.
Your experience, again, is exceptional, not the rule. And I doubt that it's the truth.