Creationism is an idea. There are plenty of specific, testable theories based on the creationist idea, (Earth was created 6000 years ago by a God who was something like a man, he did it in this order, etc), it's just that they've already been tested and found wanting, to say the lease. There are plenty of people who propose untestable theories of creation, too. These shouldn't be brought into science class and are more closely related to the an internet troll than to science.
Sites like Google and Yahoo are blurring the line between private communication channels and public channels. They are fast becoming essential tools for public communication, and the nation has a growing interest in protecting them in the same way it protects the mail, the press, the telephone, and plain old speech. There is precedent for the government forcing private communications companies to keep their channels free, and at some point we should consider doing the same for these websites.
Of course not, it's many theories. Some of them are of recent vintage and are all but untestable, but others dominated scientific thinking for thousands of years and only recently have been disproved.
Democratic politicians in congress that support human rights and the constitution are only about 50%. Since the Republican percentage is almost zero, that means the pro-freedom faction of congress is only about 25%.
People still come here from other countries to have procedures done that are simply unavailable in many parts of the world.
That's only one part of "Poor". Many complex and expensive procedures are available all over the world, quite often for less many and for world-class quality. Americans can travel to exotic locations, have a two week vacation, get top notch care, and come out financially ahead, sometimes by thousands of dollars. They do it in droves.
This is a pendulum, but it's gonna get worse before it gets better.
My most hated phrase. Things can always get worse, and it's quite possible for things to get so bad that they'll never get better for a very long time.
Whatever position one holds on the "irreducible complexity" argument, the argument is not "therefore we can learn no more."
This would be a good point if "Irreducible Complexity" were not such a bankrupt concept. At some level, and argument is so stupid you'd have to assume it's proponents have motives other than advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure there's only a small set of things you can't be fired for in the US, like race, and anything else is legal. There's probably no law protecting your right not to file patents.
So, you equate the capture and interrogation of combatants to the kidnapping, torture and beheading of civilians, journalists and aid workers?
How many captured terrorists have been executed by the US? How many by the terrorists (I can list two by NAME!)? Like I said, perfect example.
Many "illegal combatants" have been murdered in US custody, all with out a fair trial to see whether they were actually guilty of the crimes for which they often weren't even accused.
The US, on the other hand, targets military targets exclusively.
That's right, the US doesn't want to kill civilians, the president merely orders actions with long range hi powered weapons that will inevitably kill thousands of men women and children.
Osama could have "regretted the loss of life, it was necessary to take out these buildings as symbols of western power" (similar reasoning was used in our Shock and Awe campaign that killed many civilians). It wouldn't have made him one bit less an evil terrorist.
But, I guess it's all the same to you. Intent makes no difference and the US Soldier is the same as Mohamed Atta in your eyes.
I saw a picture of a bomb destined for Iraq: it had "9/11 payback" scrawled on it. Such people shouldn't have this burden of decision. It's what we hired the president for.
Because the US was never attacked on 9-11.
Not by Iraq, and not by anybody who threatened US existence.
Iraq did not violate 17 UN resolutions,
Country ignores UN, stop the presses.
fire on US and NATO forces
you mean they fired on warplanes in Iraqi airspace.
and attempt to murder a former US president.
The only charge that has any merit, but all out war is probably not an appropriate retaliation.
The USS Cole was never attacked
See 9/11, same guys. This was a band of terrorists, not the wehrmacht.
and no one shot down BlackHawk helicopters that were there trying to feed the starving. These helicopters were shot down by the forces of the man the helicopters were sent to capture.
Hey, the Reichstag really burned. Archduke Ferdinand was really killed by a terrorist. Unlike the present situation, in 1914 the offending terrorists were backed by a great power, and in both 1914 and 1939, Germany was surrounded on all sides by ancient enemies with huge armies capable of wiping them out. And yet I say to you, the pacifists in Germany, though they had zero political power, were right.
Either the attack on Iraq was accidental, the US strategy to conquer Iraq had a good chance of not killing anyone, or the civilian deaths were not accidental.
Also, the Iraqi soldiers, most of them just conscripts who weren't trying to wage war on the US, were quite deliberately targeted.
How many times a day to read on/. someone saying something like, "Iran has a right to the bomb" or "US invades countries. Hitler invaded countries. Coincidence?" or my favorite, "Terrorists kill civilians. So does the US!". That moral equivalency bullshit is exactly what Orwell is calling out here.
In the passage quoted, he is calling out fascist sympathizers feigning pacifism as a means to an end of selling their country. He does elsewhere callout true pacifists as "objectively pro fascist", but later renounced that thinking as Stalinist, which it is.
British pacifists were clearly misguided IMHO, but were German pacifists in '38 and '40, not to mention '14? Their views were suppressed too, should we applaud that?
"Terrorists kill civilians. So does the US!".
What else makes a terrorist evil? I suppose torture and kidnapping, but the US does that too.
If you think the high-altitude bombing of civilians especially of a nation that never overtly or covertly attacked us is some how morally superior to ramming planes into buildings, then you are a moral relativist of the worst sort. Bush and bin-Laden are both mass murdering war criminals that should be brought to justice, using force if necessary, and tried for their crimes.
You'll note there is no moral dimension to Orwell's argument, he's point is about patriotism and putting your country before your ideals or your political fantasies. In this situation, where the US is not faced by an existential by a superior military force bent on its destruction, but is instead waging an unprovoked war of aggression, it's the closet fascists in the pro-Iraq war faction that have (this time successfully) betrayed their country.
Mostly agreed, but they did one up the last crusade with the Atom Bomb, an artifact that was thoroughly modern and far more dangerous and powerful than any of the mythological stuff Indy had run into before.
It's an interesting comparison with Raiders: Hitler wanted the Ark (and the Grail) so that his armies of darkness could march over the face of the earth. Americans simply built a better ark.
Why is the ending bleak? They were told the surface was unlivable, and it clearly wasn't. There were birds, it wasn't a barren wasteland. Yeah he's alone, but he's master of himself in a living world he never knew existed.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, seem to have a reading comprehension problem.
In any case, the value of oil is only going to go up. We should sit on it as long as we can.
There are certainly scientific creationist theories, it's just that they've been supplanted for almost 200 years by better theories.
"God did it" is not a theory, but "God did it in 6 days 6000 years ago" is easily testable.
Creationism is an idea. There are plenty of specific, testable theories based on the creationist idea, (Earth was created 6000 years ago by a God who was something like a man, he did it in this order, etc), it's just that they've already been tested and found wanting, to say the lease. There are plenty of people who propose untestable theories of creation, too. These shouldn't be brought into science class and are more closely related to the an internet troll than to science.
At the most basic definition, evolution is the change in gene distribution in a gene pool, so your fish example is definitely evolution.
It should probably be discussed in any section on the history of biology as an example of an inferior theory that was replaced by a superior one.
Sites like Google and Yahoo are blurring the line between private communication channels and public channels. They are fast becoming essential tools for public communication, and the nation has a growing interest in protecting them in the same way it protects the mail, the press, the telephone, and plain old speech. There is precedent for the government forcing private communications companies to keep their channels free, and at some point we should consider doing the same for these websites.
Creationism is not a theory.
Of course not, it's many theories. Some of them are of recent vintage and are all but untestable, but others dominated scientific thinking for thousands of years and only recently have been disproved.
Are you arguing so vehemently against this strawman to avoid confronting. the hypocrisy of your approval of the Iraq action?
We know it wasn't Putin's fault because Bush looked into his eyes and got a sense of his soul.
The US system is screwed up in that the more sure we are of someone's guilt via confession, the more lenient the sentence!
Democratic politicians in congress that support human rights and the constitution are only about 50%. Since the Republican percentage is almost zero, that means the pro-freedom faction of congress is only about 25%.
People still come here from other countries to have procedures done that are simply unavailable in many parts of the world.
That's only one part of "Poor". Many complex and expensive procedures are available all over the world, quite often for less many and for world-class quality. Americans can travel to exotic locations, have a two week vacation, get top notch care, and come out financially ahead, sometimes by thousands of dollars. They do it in droves.
This is a pendulum, but it's gonna get worse before it gets better.
My most hated phrase. Things can always get worse, and it's quite possible for things to get so bad that they'll never get better for a very long time.
Hope is not necessary for success.
Whatever position one holds on the "irreducible complexity" argument, the argument is not "therefore we can learn no more."
This would be a good point if "Irreducible Complexity" were not such a bankrupt concept. At some level, and argument is so stupid you'd have to assume it's proponents have motives other than advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure there's only a small set of things you can't be fired for in the US, like race, and anything else is legal. There's probably no law protecting your right not to file patents.
Or the second computer inevitably breaks down, or build a third computer that takes the prediction of the first computer into account.
So, you equate the capture and interrogation of combatants to the kidnapping, torture and beheading of civilians, journalists and aid workers?
How many captured terrorists have been executed by the US? How many by the terrorists (I can list two by NAME!)? Like I said, perfect example.
Many "illegal combatants" have been murdered in US custody, all with out a fair trial to see whether they were actually guilty of the crimes for which they often weren't even accused.
The US, on the other hand, targets military targets exclusively.
That's right, the US doesn't want to kill civilians, the president merely orders actions with long range hi powered weapons that will inevitably kill thousands of men women and children.
Osama could have "regretted the loss of life, it was necessary to take out these buildings as symbols of western power" (similar reasoning was used in our Shock and Awe campaign that killed many civilians). It wouldn't have made him one bit less an evil terrorist.
But, I guess it's all the same to you. Intent makes no difference and the US Soldier is the same as Mohamed Atta in your eyes.
I saw a picture of a bomb destined for Iraq: it had "9/11 payback" scrawled on it. Such people shouldn't have this burden of decision. It's what we hired the president for.
Because the US was never attacked on 9-11.
Not by Iraq, and not by anybody who threatened US existence.
Iraq did not violate 17 UN resolutions,
Country ignores UN, stop the presses.
fire on US and NATO forces
you mean they fired on warplanes in Iraqi airspace.
and attempt to murder a former US president.
The only charge that has any merit, but all out war is probably not an appropriate retaliation.
The USS Cole was never attacked
See 9/11, same guys. This was a band of terrorists, not the wehrmacht.
and no one shot down BlackHawk helicopters that were there trying to feed the starving. These helicopters were shot down by the forces of the man the helicopters were sent to capture.
Hey, the Reichstag really burned. Archduke Ferdinand was really killed by a terrorist. Unlike the present situation, in 1914 the offending terrorists were backed by a great power, and in both 1914 and 1939, Germany was surrounded on all sides by ancient enemies with huge armies capable of wiping them out. And yet I say to you, the pacifists in Germany, though they had zero political power, were right.
Either the attack on Iraq was accidental, the US strategy to conquer Iraq had a good chance of not killing anyone, or the civilian deaths were not accidental.
Also, the Iraqi soldiers, most of them just conscripts who weren't trying to wage war on the US, were quite deliberately targeted.
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.
Orwell later wrote his regrets about that bit.
If you haven't figured it out yet replace "fascist" with "terrorist", "Germany and Japan" with "Al Qaeda and Iran"
Why would anyone do something so ridiculous? This is exactly the kind of muddled thinking of which Orwell correctly accused pacifists in his day.
There were German pacifists in 1914 and 1939. Should we applaud their suppression the same as we do the British pacifists?
How many times a day to read on /. someone saying something like, "Iran has a right to the bomb" or "US invades countries. Hitler invaded countries. Coincidence?" or my favorite, "Terrorists kill civilians. So does the US!". That moral equivalency bullshit is exactly what Orwell is calling out here.
In the passage quoted, he is calling out fascist sympathizers feigning pacifism as a means to an end of selling their country. He does elsewhere callout true pacifists as "objectively pro fascist", but later renounced that thinking as Stalinist, which it is.
British pacifists were clearly misguided IMHO, but were German pacifists in '38 and '40, not to mention '14? Their views were suppressed too, should we applaud that?
"Terrorists kill civilians. So does the US!".
What else makes a terrorist evil? I suppose torture and kidnapping, but the US does that too.
If you think the high-altitude bombing of civilians especially of a nation that never overtly or covertly attacked us is some how morally superior to ramming planes into buildings, then you are a moral relativist of the worst sort. Bush and bin-Laden are both mass murdering war criminals that should be brought to justice, using force if necessary, and tried for their crimes.
You'll note there is no moral dimension to Orwell's argument, he's point is about patriotism and putting your country before your ideals or your political fantasies. In this situation, where the US is not faced by an existential by a superior military force bent on its destruction, but is instead waging an unprovoked war of aggression, it's the closet fascists in the pro-Iraq war faction that have (this time successfully) betrayed their country.
This is something a lot of slashdotters really need to read
Why?
********* SPOILER *************
Mostly agreed, but they did one up the last crusade with the Atom Bomb, an artifact that was thoroughly modern and far more dangerous and powerful than any of the mythological stuff Indy had run into before.
It's an interesting comparison with Raiders: Hitler wanted the Ark (and the Grail) so that his armies of darkness could march over the face of the earth. Americans simply built a better ark.
Why is the ending bleak? They were told the surface was unlivable, and it clearly wasn't. There were birds, it wasn't a barren wasteland. Yeah he's alone, but he's master of himself in a living world he never knew existed.
States like Georgia where Bush won many percentage points more than expected are heavy users of Diebold machines.