> However, starting to look in this direction based soley on the failure rate is not as crazy as you make it out to be.
Well done. You fell into exactly the same hole that the original poster did. I didn't say it was crazy, nor did I say that investigation is improper, just that his conclusion was due to faulty logic. In fact, I said that investigation is not only proper but necessary, and that he'd left it out. He jumped to the conclusion based solely on the article, and provided nothing outside the article that butressed his conclusion. Because the article itself doesn't directly support the conclusion he drew, drawing it without citing anything else makes his argument break down. Broken arguments and leaps of logic are the hallmark of conspiracy theorists.
Next time, you might try quoting the whole sentence instead of cutting out that part that you think is easiest to shoot down. The whole sentence is this:
There's nothing to say that faults in the voting machines were purposeful, nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election.
Simply pointing out the evidence that does say these things would be sufficient to answer this sentence, but the original poster didn't do that, so his argument is incomplete. Frankly I find it likely (based on my own investigation) that his conclusion is correct, but his argument is weak, and must be buttressed by further points of proof if it's to mean anything at all.
Well, what I'm looking for is exactly what you provided. See how that works? He takes the article's "large number of anomalies" and jumps to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" without provided the stuff in the middle, like you just did. I'm trying to force people to take the intermediate step of "I should investigate further because there are a large number of anomalies" because it's the only way to support the conclusion. The original poster didn't do that, so I pointed out that his conclusion was unsupported.
You've unfortunately fallen into a hole that far too many people do, and it's stolen the thunder out of your argument. This story is about a large number of anomalies in Florida voting machines. You've hyperextended that to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" and even though I'm of a notion to think that voting machines are a bad idea because of their lack of accountability, I start to tune you out as a conspiracy theorist. There's nothing to say that faults in the voting machines were purposeful, nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election. That's not to say that such things didn't happen, but these are different, unconnected things and the stuff in the article does nothing to prove that they did, so tying them together just shows that you're not using logic properly.
Wow, you're not much of a spin doctor. I know nothing of the city nor of the state of affairs there, and your argument still reads like it's BS put out by someone who's trying to protect McKillip. Let's take just the first few points:
> Wow! So let me get this straight. Trying to protect the citizens is something to attack the mayor on, right?
You'll have a hard time convincing anyone here that offering a list for hand-copying but not in a more suitable format is "trying to protect the citizens" and not "trying to make the investigation so painful that it'll go away." Moreover, once it became clear that the law wasn't going to support him directly, capituating would be more in the interests of his constiuency than fighting to the bitter and very expensive end.
> He is trying to promote family instead of a "get married, if it doesn't work out, who cares?" attitude, since the divorce rate in Kokomo is approx. 50%.
Firstly, the divorce rate nationwide is around 50 percent, and secondly, there's a huge span between wanting to promote family and commenting that divorce should be criminalized. That he would even think that, much less say it, indicates that he's far too concerned with pushing his brand of morality on others to be entrusted with public office.
> The public meetings? He did so in accordance to law. Those meetings were suppose to be closed.
Is the definition of "public" in public meetings somehow confusing to you? What reasonable argument can you present that meetings of public officials discussing public business shouldn't be open to the public? What could a mayor possibly talk about in meetings that the general public shouldn't have access to? Last I checked, mayors don't discuss military or classified subjects in the course of their duties. It sounds more like he wants to talk about stuff that he'd rather his constituents don't hear about, and because of the above-stated reasons I suspect that means stuff that would get him in trouble if he wasn't allowed to control access. That's unacceptable in a public office.
> Maybe those "top campaign" contributers are the most qualified? Oh, and EVERY policitian does that.
First, you argue that these top contributors got the jobs for being most qualified, then you excuse the behavior by saying "every politician does that". Which is it? Did they get the jobs by being qualified, or should we excuse the cronyism because it's widespread? Didn't your mother teach you that "everyone does it" doesn't make it right?
To put it bluntly, these comments of yours do little to reassure me that you're anything more than a shill. After the list I just reviewed, reading that you think he's an honest man carries no weight because I see nothing in your testimony that leads me to think you're an unbiased or honest commentator. Here's a hint: when you say that even after you no longer work with him, that you can call or email him and he'll respond personally, that says to others that you're a part of his inner circle. Maybe you should check to see whether the average citizen can do that before you try to use it to demonstrate that he's not better to those he knows than everyone else. People who are only honest and open with their friends aren't generally considered honest and open.
> So, unless you disregard the purpose of the game you should be fine.
This is stupidly naive. It's very much in the same vein as saying that just because nobody knows you're black, having to listen to people constantly calling those around them "stupid niggers" and making remarks about the inferiority of blacks wouldn't bother you.
In a gay-friendly guild, a gay person could join and never comment about their orientation at all, and still enjoy an environment where "gay" isn't used as a generalized insult.
> But that being said, there is quite a few issues that will greatly offend many people. For me, it happens to be "same-sex marriage." Call me what you will, but my feelings on that one is religious.
I can't see a problem with that. The problem comes up when you recognize that "married" carries legal weight. You want "marriage" for heterosexuals only? No problem. But if you do you'd better damn well be ready to give up any and all legal implications of the term, so you can reserve it to religion. Nowehere in the United States can a military person enter into any kind of same-sex civil union that will confer any kind of legal recognition to their chosen partner. There are many places where a same-sex civil union partner can be excluded from medical decisions or hospital visitation rights because they aren't considered "family". Nobody in a same-sex civil union can file a federal tax return as "married".
In short, it's not the left-wingers that attached all the legal baggage to the term "marriage". You want to prevent redefinition of the term "marriage"? Then stop using it for legal language. Press your legislature to remove the legal status of your own heterosexual marriage and require everyone to get a civil union. Until and unless you do, your feelings on that one isn't religious, and if you continue to say it then you're simply a liar.
> In the prequels, he tried to get all scientific, without making an effort to make the science plausible, which was just irritating. And NOBODY liked Jar-Jar.
An argument can be made that the old order tried to "scientificate" their religion, whereas by the time of the Rebellion they had moved to simply accepting the mystical nature of the Force. It would be a weak argument, but I'll take what I can get. And I liked Jar-Jar, as a character. Some of the things that Mr. Lucas made him do were annoying, but that's no different than the annoying things he made other characters do, like forcing Han Solo to try to go romantic, or making Hayden Christensen speak when he was on screen.
> Say, while we're discussing moot points, let's talk about the voices: what's up with making all the bad Sith and Empire officers British (except Darth Vader, who had a Nazi helmet -- on that note, all the Empire uniforms were kind of nazi-ish)...
George hired a lot of British actors (Sir Alec Guiness wasn't Empire) so it stands to reason that they'd fill a lot of those roles. The uniforms were just a well-used method for generating dislike in the viewer by making it easy to associate the Empire with the SS. It was actually well done, as an atmosphere-builder.
>...all the Army of the Republic stormtroopers Kiwis...
They were all one guy, gov.
>...all the 2nd generation stormtroopers American cops (did they get a new clone model???)
By the time the Rebellion had begun, they weren't the original clones any more, and there's no mention nor reason to believe that they're clones at all. Remember that both Luke and Biggs wanted to become pilots at the Imperial Academy, and it's reasonable to assume they'd have been issued Stormtrooper uniforms if they'd been accepted. So, the Rebellion-era Stormtroopers were most likely just soldiers, not clones.
>...all the rebels American midwesterners...
Like Lando Calrissian, or Admiral Akbar, or perhaps Chewbacca?
>...all the bad aliens asian
Jabba the Hut wasn't Asian. Nor was Greedo or General Grievous.
>...and all the good Gungans Rastas???
All of the Gungans spoke with a Rastafarian accent.
> There's something really bizarre going on in Lucasarts, I think.
Mee-sah tinkin' dey's a bit a prejudice in da viewah, hey?
> Your defense of midichloreans seems to be "Well... It was just a theory that these jedi had, because even though they had starships, medical robots, advanced physics and the ability to travel faster than light, they couldn't figure out something like telekinesis so they had to guess."
Try something more along the lines of mistaken causality, if it's important. Perhaps midichloreans are an effect of Force sensitivity, not a cause, but there's no way to know that if you never encounter one without the other. Besides, the Jedi (and the Sith) were more a religious order than a secular scientific group, and were demonstrably full of themselves. Remember the comment the librarian made about Camino? And consider the fact that a bunch of Jedi talked about Anakin bringing balance to the Force and yet none of them did a head count and thought about what "bringing balance" meant to a world with hundreds of Jedi and only two Sith. It's not hard to consider that they considered midichloreans a "dogma" and therefore never really questioned it, but when the Jedi were reduced to just Yoda and Obi-Wan, those two came to reanalyze what they'd learned in the face of the near elimination of the old order.
> Anyway, don't take my criticism of the goofy Star Wars universe so seriously. It's a goofy bunch of movies that didn't spend too much time on making the technology realistic.
I wholly agree, but it's fun to debate Moot points. It's good mental exercise.
Take a closer look at the movie again. The chairs in the Millenium Falcon were not directly attached to the turret guns outside on the hull, and they both had and used targeting computers to aim.
Well, assuming that the lightsaber radiates enough heat to melt a door (as seen in the "Negotiations" scene of The Phantom Menace, you'd have several problems. First, containment. What holds the hot water? The surrounding ice? That would melt too, and your "Jacuzzi" would lose its shape. Second, temperature differential. To melt the snow/heat the water, you'd need to plunge the lightsaber into it, which would create a super-hotspot in the water. Sure, you could stir it around, but you'd risk scalding to the extreme. Third, steam. Plunging a lightsaber that can melt metal into a snowbank would result in a steam jet that could potentially cook your goose before you could get out of its way.
> try dodging a bunch bb's throw at you at the same time....
No need. Once you've mastered the Force well enough to throw a robot into a wall hard enough to disable it by pointing at it with your palm, stopping a shotgun blast the same way is duck soup. Besides, Jedi are able to sense things happening before they occur, so they'd just be gone before you leveled the weapon to begin with. Seems simple enough to me.
> It seems to me that if the Jedi really had any Force powers at all, they would get cramps every time Palpatine entered the room, seeing as he's positively dripping with the Dark Side.
Two things. Firstly, perhaps a part of the power of the Dark Side is the ability to disguise its own presence, or suppress the ability of those around you to react to it. Secondly, you'll remember that a number of the more powerful Jedi were very uneasy regarding the Chancellor, and some of them didn't seem to know quite why. Perhaps they were sensing his Sith nature, but not strongly enough to realize that.
> Instead, Lucas et al came up with the concept of a laser beam focused through some special crystal. Uh huh. Yeeeeaaah. Good idea, George.
Funny you can pull something out of your butt and label it "better" than something pulled out of someone else's butt. OK, then my take is that firing a laser beam through this special crystal causes a plasma, EM or gravitic reaction in the crystal that creates the energy field we see as the "blade". That works just fine, eh?
> And what about "midichloreans"???
I like to look at midichloreans as a kind of "18th century elements" view of the Force. Back in Earth's past, scientists believed that there were only four elements, those being earth, air, fire and water. Drilling a hole produced heat, they said, by releasing the fire element from the material. It was workable, fit the evidence they had at the time, and turned out to be entirely wrong. The fact that Yoda and Obi-Wan never mentioned midichloreans to Luke late in their lives seems to indicate that they discovered that this view of the Force was incorrect, and therefore they rejected it, but in the old Republic's Jedi heyday, it was a popular theory.
> Yes, they can "force" you to sign the contract, but that contract would not be legally valid, as an employer is responsible for all costs associated with training when the hiree is functioning in the capacity of an employee.
I'd say you're absolutely right...in Canada. However, this discussion centers around someone employed in the U.S. and the laws surrounding training are different. Keep in mind, training in specific IT programs and OSes realistically can't be construed to be necessary training for safety, so there's a lot more leeway in how (and whether) employers offer it.
> Remember that if you stay home to take care of the kid, this calculation assumes that your salary would have remained the same indefinitely -- an invalid assumption for a career-oriented woman.
True to consider, but your other calculation assumes that both parents would rather work full time and have a nanny spending the bulk of the day with the kid(s), which is also not necessarily a valid assumption. While I agree that both parents' careers need to be considered, if both parents want a parent to raise the kids full time instead of a hired caretaker, then the calculation must incorporate one or the other in total, not a split of both, since it's not usually feasible for both parents to work part-time so they can split the stay-at-home portion of it.
> I also want to quote this stunning piece...which is so incredibly true that I'm amazed it's even looked at any other way.
See above. The quote only works if neither parent wants to stay home with the kids, and frankly the number of couples where that's true is in the minority. Reconsider your amazement.
Sure, they can't force you to remain with the company, but they can ask you to sign a contract that says if you leave before your year is up, you get the bill for the training. Simple enough, without being illegal.
The problem with your reality is that it's very one-sided, and you're only willing to admit one side and not a general trend, which leads you to bias. You keep claiming that Indians engage in nepotism, and yet because your experience is biased you seem unable to grasp that nepotism is everywhere, and not just an Indian trend. Have you ever taken a good look at nepotism that works for people like you? It's a delight to say that everything involving you is meritocratic but that's just living in a bubble. You want a counter to your Indians? Take me. When my company decided to relocate, I was given the choice to move with them, but I decided to look around at other opportunities. My dad worked at a big corporation that had openings in IT, and he set me up with an interview. Sure, I know my stuff, but the simple fact is that I was offered a position for which I was clearly unqualified, and I have no doubt that it was because my dad was the second highest on the ladder at that site. After I turned down the job offer (and talked to my dad about why) he introduced me to the guy who got the job only because I had refused. He was a much better fit, and do you want to guess what nationality he was?
You've obviously never lived in large portions of the U.S. if you think that this country is a meritocracy and ethnocentrism is dead and gone among the majority. Try being Catholic in the Midwest. Try being black in the South. Racism and its attendant problems still show up every day.
Well, we don't need a contract to do it, but some thought needs to be put into it. After all, China intends to set up a base on the Moon, so they'll need to deal with it, and if they go it's certainly possible that it'll renew interest in the U.S. going back too, in which case we'll need to deal with it too.
> I think that one of those Ms stands for "massive" which refers to the number of people playing it.
Actually, the "M" stands for "Massively", which refers to the number of people that can play it, not just the number who are. It's an MMO game, just not yet old enough to tell whether it'll be a successful MMO game.
> My father disciplined me by spanking me. He did this until I was a teenager. I have no emotional scars.
As an adult and parent, I have an enormous amount of respect for my father because he ONLY disciplined me when I deserved it and loved me very much.
The question to ask yourself is, if he'd only disciplined you when you deserved it and loved you very much, but never spanked you (instead punishing you in some other fashion), would you have come out of it with less respect for him? That answered, does that not mean the spanking wasn't a necessary part of the discipline?
> You have blurred the line between corporal punishment and abuse.
You've blurred the line between discipline and corporal punishment.
> Whether premise 1 is true or not is irrelevant to me right now, it's premise 2 that I don't accept. This is an "ends justifies the means" approach.
It's also well-chosen to be as bad as you can make it. If I phrase it, "we've discovered that the best of all possible alternatives that can actually be implemented in real life is to regulate the industry as a whole", it becomes rather more benign than "we can do anything we damn well please." Again, I ask you to present something that could work in a society that consists of more than a handful of people, but that fits everyone's desires for the level of regulation very closely. By the time you get to the size of a small town, "your liberty stops where my nose begins" simply stops functioning. Because the solution we use actually has to work, that's what gets chosen.
> Of course you always have the right to initiate force against the actual perpetrators of fraud and malpractice, but when you decide that you have the right to initiate force against *everyone*, simply because you have a worthy goal, you make exactly the same move as a slaveholder. You are not treating me as an end in myself, you are treating me as you personal property.
Again, you're using melodramatic phrasing to try to exaggerate your point. Again, to say the same thing in different words that spin it entirely differently, I didn't "decide that [I] have the right to initiate force against everyone, simply because [I] have a worthy goal", society at large decided that the only functional way to control fraud was to restrict the market as a whole, and then implemented it because it was workable. Yet again, your solution is a great idea except for that niggling detail of not working in the real world.
> How would you feel if people with guns came and force-marched you to New Orleans to repair buildings?
Let's toss in the rest of the picture that you rather conveniently omit, and see how it works:
1.) I got together with others in the society, and together we voted to put people in positions of control.
2.) We give those people guns, and tell them it's valid to use them to enforce rules that we establish by vote.
3.) We vote on rules. One of those rules is that we can be force marched to places to do civic work on occasion.
4.) We don't turn down the help when others get force marched to us to help us.
5.) We regularly vote on what stuff warrants forced marching.
Now, how would I feel about being force marched to New Orleans? Well, considering the point I've now included, I'd have to say I'd feel a bit different than if it happened out of the blue.
> How come *I* have to work for *you*, and not the reverse? Only because there are more of you. You probably don't want to live in a democracy where the majority forces you to preach or pay for preachers, and I don't want to live in a democracy where the majority forces me to pay for food and clothing. Both majorities overstep their bounds: they attempt to spend that which is not theirs to spend. All I'm suggesting is a hands-off policy. That is what I call "civilized".
Funny, most people call that "fantasy". When you live in a society that comprises more than a small crowd, compromise is necessary to coexist. That's been proven too many times for you simply to refute it by saying you don't like it. Nothing you've presented comes into contact with real life experience, which is why it's a rather unpopular view. In your particular case, I say you'll have to leave our society if you want the kind of society you want, because there are too many people in this one to execute your version of society successfully.
> I grant you all of this. It doesn't change the fact that nobody has any right to tell me how to spend the fruits of my labor. Racism is a societal problem, and a big one. But that doesn't make it a legal problem.
In a society that allows rampant racism, the suppression of the "outside" race becomes so pervasive that those in that "outside" class generally cannot change their lot for the better. This is exactly was has happened, time and time again, and it's the reason that it's become acceptable to enforce anti-discrimination.
> On the other hand, you don't accept the notion that there could really be two societies. You want to force everyone to be part of one society, at least as far as the distribution of goods is concerned. Who they spend their free time with may be their own business, but who they sell the fruits of their labor to is *your* business. Don't get me wrong, I like your idea of society better. I just don't agree that you have a right to achieve it by force.
I accept the idea that there could be two societies. In fact, the pre-'60s south was in fact two societies. I just don't see the perpetuation of such a society to be acceptable. To respond to you, your favored method of government gave us feudalism. It gave us what happened in the Deep South. My idea of society came about when the force of law was applied. That's because your idea of society was deemed to be unworkable.
> It's never been tried.
That's because it's unworkable. See above.
> Actually the rail barons demonstrate abuse of government, and were not the result of a free market.
I have never seen anything in the business practices of the rail barons that would have malfunctioned without corruption in the government. It would have taken quite a bit longer, but eventually the market would have dead-ended itself, in very much the same fashion as it did until governmental agencies stepped in. Since you don't consider economic suppression to be an initiation of force, it wouldn't even have violated your concept of a free market. If you can find any of the tactics that they used that wouldn't have worked without the government assisting, feel free to point it out, but grange busting didn't need the government to work, it just accelerated it.
> I never said I was opposed to laws or their enforcement. I want a government and a police force. I just want them to limit their activies to protecting me from force and fraud.
I have no answer for this to someone who considers discriminatory practice and economic suppression to be "not force". If someone decides they don't like my particluar race, and that person owns enough capital to dominate a market such that I find myself without certain necessities, I'd like to have reasonable protection from that. Say it doesn't happen? I've seen all of the grocery stores in a twenty mile radius stop selling to black people to force them all to move out of a town. When it happened, it wasn't illegal. By your metric, it wasn't an initiaion of force, because it was done by economic collusion. One store that decided to break the "rule" was driven out of business by the other stores undercutting him. Sounds like rail baron tactics, doesn't it?
> I don't want them taking money out of my pocket to put your kid through school...
The "If I don't use it, it has no value to me so I won't pay for it" concept is a comforting refrain, but again and again it's been shown to be entirely unworkable in real life. What starts with schools goes to roads and safety laws and fire departments and 911 and a thousand other things that people never use until they do. They take money out of everyone's pocket to put everyone's kids through school because if only those with kids payed for the schools, then only those who could afford it would get an education, and that creates more societal problems than across-the-board taxation does. Again, your model is great
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> However, starting to look in this direction based soley on the failure rate is not as crazy as you make it out to be.
Well done. You fell into exactly the same hole that the original poster did. I didn't say it was crazy, nor did I say that investigation is improper, just that his conclusion was due to faulty logic. In fact, I said that investigation is not only proper but necessary, and that he'd left it out. He jumped to the conclusion based solely on the article, and provided nothing outside the article that butressed his conclusion. Because the article itself doesn't directly support the conclusion he drew, drawing it without citing anything else makes his argument break down. Broken arguments and leaps of logic are the hallmark of conspiracy theorists.
Virg
Virg
> What exactly are you looking for?
Well, what I'm looking for is exactly what you provided. See how that works? He takes the article's "large number of anomalies" and jumps to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" without provided the stuff in the middle, like you just did. I'm trying to force people to take the intermediate step of "I should investigate further because there are a large number of anomalies" because it's the only way to support the conclusion. The original poster didn't do that, so I pointed out that his conclusion was unsupported.
Carry on.
Virg
You've unfortunately fallen into a hole that far too many people do, and it's stolen the thunder out of your argument. This story is about a large number of anomalies in Florida voting machines. You've hyperextended that to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" and even though I'm of a notion to think that voting machines are a bad idea because of their lack of accountability, I start to tune you out as a conspiracy theorist. There's nothing to say that faults in the voting machines were purposeful, nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election. That's not to say that such things didn't happen, but these are different, unconnected things and the stuff in the article does nothing to prove that they did, so tying them together just shows that you're not using logic properly.
Virg
Wow, you're not much of a spin doctor. I know nothing of the city nor of the state of affairs there, and your argument still reads like it's BS put out by someone who's trying to protect McKillip. Let's take just the first few points:
> Wow! So let me get this straight. Trying to protect the citizens is something to attack the mayor on, right?
You'll have a hard time convincing anyone here that offering a list for hand-copying but not in a more suitable format is "trying to protect the citizens" and not "trying to make the investigation so painful that it'll go away." Moreover, once it became clear that the law wasn't going to support him directly, capituating would be more in the interests of his constiuency than fighting to the bitter and very expensive end.
> He is trying to promote family instead of a "get married, if it doesn't work out, who cares?" attitude, since the divorce rate in Kokomo is approx. 50%.
Firstly, the divorce rate nationwide is around 50 percent, and secondly, there's a huge span between wanting to promote family and commenting that divorce should be criminalized. That he would even think that, much less say it, indicates that he's far too concerned with pushing his brand of morality on others to be entrusted with public office.
> The public meetings? He did so in accordance to law. Those meetings were suppose to be closed.
Is the definition of "public" in public meetings somehow confusing to you? What reasonable argument can you present that meetings of public officials discussing public business shouldn't be open to the public? What could a mayor possibly talk about in meetings that the general public shouldn't have access to? Last I checked, mayors don't discuss military or classified subjects in the course of their duties. It sounds more like he wants to talk about stuff that he'd rather his constituents don't hear about, and because of the above-stated reasons I suspect that means stuff that would get him in trouble if he wasn't allowed to control access. That's unacceptable in a public office.
> Maybe those "top campaign" contributers are the most qualified? Oh, and EVERY policitian does that.
First, you argue that these top contributors got the jobs for being most qualified, then you excuse the behavior by saying "every politician does that". Which is it? Did they get the jobs by being qualified, or should we excuse the cronyism because it's widespread? Didn't your mother teach you that "everyone does it" doesn't make it right?
To put it bluntly, these comments of yours do little to reassure me that you're anything more than a shill. After the list I just reviewed, reading that you think he's an honest man carries no weight because I see nothing in your testimony that leads me to think you're an unbiased or honest commentator. Here's a hint: when you say that even after you no longer work with him, that you can call or email him and he'll respond personally, that says to others that you're a part of his inner circle. Maybe you should check to see whether the average citizen can do that before you try to use it to demonstrate that he's not better to those he knows than everyone else. People who are only honest and open with their friends aren't generally considered honest and open.
Virg
> So, unless you disregard the purpose of the game you should be fine.
This is stupidly naive. It's very much in the same vein as saying that just because nobody knows you're black, having to listen to people constantly calling those around them "stupid niggers" and making remarks about the inferiority of blacks wouldn't bother you.
In a gay-friendly guild, a gay person could join and never comment about their orientation at all, and still enjoy an environment where "gay" isn't used as a generalized insult.
Virg
> But that being said, there is quite a few issues that will greatly offend many people. For me, it happens to be "same-sex marriage." Call me what you will, but my feelings on that one is religious.
I can't see a problem with that. The problem comes up when you recognize that "married" carries legal weight. You want "marriage" for heterosexuals only? No problem. But if you do you'd better damn well be ready to give up any and all legal implications of the term, so you can reserve it to religion. Nowehere in the United States can a military person enter into any kind of same-sex civil union that will confer any kind of legal recognition to their chosen partner. There are many places where a same-sex civil union partner can be excluded from medical decisions or hospital visitation rights because they aren't considered "family". Nobody in a same-sex civil union can file a federal tax return as "married".
In short, it's not the left-wingers that attached all the legal baggage to the term "marriage". You want to prevent redefinition of the term "marriage"? Then stop using it for legal language. Press your legislature to remove the legal status of your own heterosexual marriage and require everyone to get a civil union. Until and unless you do, your feelings on that one isn't religious, and if you continue to say it then you're simply a liar.
Virg
> In the prequels, he tried to get all scientific, without making an effort to make the science plausible, which was just irritating. And NOBODY liked Jar-Jar.
...all the Army of the Republic stormtroopers Kiwis...
...all the 2nd generation stormtroopers American cops (did they get a new clone model???)
...all the rebels American midwesterners...
...all the bad aliens asian
...and all the good Gungans Rastas???
An argument can be made that the old order tried to "scientificate" their religion, whereas by the time of the Rebellion they had moved to simply accepting the mystical nature of the Force. It would be a weak argument, but I'll take what I can get. And I liked Jar-Jar, as a character. Some of the things that Mr. Lucas made him do were annoying, but that's no different than the annoying things he made other characters do, like forcing Han Solo to try to go romantic, or making Hayden Christensen speak when he was on screen.
> Say, while we're discussing moot points, let's talk about the voices: what's up with making all the bad Sith and Empire officers British (except Darth Vader, who had a Nazi helmet -- on that note, all the Empire uniforms were kind of nazi-ish)...
George hired a lot of British actors (Sir Alec Guiness wasn't Empire) so it stands to reason that they'd fill a lot of those roles. The uniforms were just a well-used method for generating dislike in the viewer by making it easy to associate the Empire with the SS. It was actually well done, as an atmosphere-builder.
>
They were all one guy, gov.
>
By the time the Rebellion had begun, they weren't the original clones any more, and there's no mention nor reason to believe that they're clones at all. Remember that both Luke and Biggs wanted to become pilots at the Imperial Academy, and it's reasonable to assume they'd have been issued Stormtrooper uniforms if they'd been accepted. So, the Rebellion-era Stormtroopers were most likely just soldiers, not clones.
>
Like Lando Calrissian, or Admiral Akbar, or perhaps Chewbacca?
>
Jabba the Hut wasn't Asian. Nor was Greedo or General Grievous.
>
All of the Gungans spoke with a Rastafarian accent.
> There's something really bizarre going on in Lucasarts, I think.
Mee-sah tinkin' dey's a bit a prejudice in da viewah, hey?
Virg
> Your defense of midichloreans seems to be "Well... It was just a theory that these jedi had, because even though they had starships, medical robots, advanced physics and the ability to travel faster than light, they couldn't figure out something like telekinesis so they had to guess."
Try something more along the lines of mistaken causality, if it's important. Perhaps midichloreans are an effect of Force sensitivity, not a cause, but there's no way to know that if you never encounter one without the other. Besides, the Jedi (and the Sith) were more a religious order than a secular scientific group, and were demonstrably full of themselves. Remember the comment the librarian made about Camino? And consider the fact that a bunch of Jedi talked about Anakin bringing balance to the Force and yet none of them did a head count and thought about what "bringing balance" meant to a world with hundreds of Jedi and only two Sith. It's not hard to consider that they considered midichloreans a "dogma" and therefore never really questioned it, but when the Jedi were reduced to just Yoda and Obi-Wan, those two came to reanalyze what they'd learned in the face of the near elimination of the old order.
> Anyway, don't take my criticism of the goofy Star Wars universe so seriously. It's a goofy bunch of movies that didn't spend too much time on making the technology realistic.
I wholly agree, but it's fun to debate Moot points. It's good mental exercise.
Virg
> There's a "In Soviet Russia" joke in there, but I can't put my finger on it.
In Soviet Russia, joke puts finger on YOU!
Carry on.
Virg
Take a closer look at the movie again. The chairs in the Millenium Falcon were not directly attached to the turret guns outside on the hull, and they both had and used targeting computers to aim.
Virg
Well, assuming that the lightsaber radiates enough heat to melt a door (as seen in the "Negotiations" scene of The Phantom Menace, you'd have several problems. First, containment. What holds the hot water? The surrounding ice? That would melt too, and your "Jacuzzi" would lose its shape. Second, temperature differential. To melt the snow/heat the water, you'd need to plunge the lightsaber into it, which would create a super-hotspot in the water. Sure, you could stir it around, but you'd risk scalding to the extreme. Third, steam. Plunging a lightsaber that can melt metal into a snowbank would result in a steam jet that could potentially cook your goose before you could get out of its way.
So, no go.
Virg
> try dodging a bunch bb's throw at you at the same time....
No need. Once you've mastered the Force well enough to throw a robot into a wall hard enough to disable it by pointing at it with your palm, stopping a shotgun blast the same way is duck soup. Besides, Jedi are able to sense things happening before they occur, so they'd just be gone before you leveled the weapon to begin with. Seems simple enough to me.
Virg
> It seems to me that if the Jedi really had any Force powers at all, they would get cramps every time Palpatine entered the room, seeing as he's positively dripping with the Dark Side.
Two things. Firstly, perhaps a part of the power of the Dark Side is the ability to disguise its own presence, or suppress the ability of those around you to react to it. Secondly, you'll remember that a number of the more powerful Jedi were very uneasy regarding the Chancellor, and some of them didn't seem to know quite why. Perhaps they were sensing his Sith nature, but not strongly enough to realize that.
Virg
Holy crap that was funny. Thank you.
Virg
> Instead, Lucas et al came up with the concept of a laser beam focused through some special crystal. Uh huh. Yeeeeaaah. Good idea, George.
Funny you can pull something out of your butt and label it "better" than something pulled out of someone else's butt. OK, then my take is that firing a laser beam through this special crystal causes a plasma, EM or gravitic reaction in the crystal that creates the energy field we see as the "blade". That works just fine, eh?
> And what about "midichloreans"???
I like to look at midichloreans as a kind of "18th century elements" view of the Force. Back in Earth's past, scientists believed that there were only four elements, those being earth, air, fire and water. Drilling a hole produced heat, they said, by releasing the fire element from the material. It was workable, fit the evidence they had at the time, and turned out to be entirely wrong. The fact that Yoda and Obi-Wan never mentioned midichloreans to Luke late in their lives seems to indicate that they discovered that this view of the Force was incorrect, and therefore they rejected it, but in the old Republic's Jedi heyday, it was a popular theory.
Virg
> Yes, they can "force" you to sign the contract, but that contract would not be legally valid, as an employer is responsible for all costs associated with training when the hiree is functioning in the capacity of an employee.
I'd say you're absolutely right...in Canada. However, this discussion centers around someone employed in the U.S. and the laws surrounding training are different. Keep in mind, training in specific IT programs and OSes realistically can't be construed to be necessary training for safety, so there's a lot more leeway in how (and whether) employers offer it.
Virg
> Remember that if you stay home to take care of the kid, this calculation assumes that your salary would have remained the same indefinitely -- an invalid assumption for a career-oriented woman.
True to consider, but your other calculation assumes that both parents would rather work full time and have a nanny spending the bulk of the day with the kid(s), which is also not necessarily a valid assumption. While I agree that both parents' careers need to be considered, if both parents want a parent to raise the kids full time instead of a hired caretaker, then the calculation must incorporate one or the other in total, not a split of both, since it's not usually feasible for both parents to work part-time so they can split the stay-at-home portion of it.
> I also want to quote this stunning piece...which is so incredibly true that I'm amazed it's even looked at any other way.
See above. The quote only works if neither parent wants to stay home with the kids, and frankly the number of couples where that's true is in the minority. Reconsider your amazement.
Virg
Sure, they can't force you to remain with the company, but they can ask you to sign a contract that says if you leave before your year is up, you get the bill for the training. Simple enough, without being illegal.
Virg
The problem with your reality is that it's very one-sided, and you're only willing to admit one side and not a general trend, which leads you to bias. You keep claiming that Indians engage in nepotism, and yet because your experience is biased you seem unable to grasp that nepotism is everywhere, and not just an Indian trend. Have you ever taken a good look at nepotism that works for people like you? It's a delight to say that everything involving you is meritocratic but that's just living in a bubble. You want a counter to your Indians? Take me. When my company decided to relocate, I was given the choice to move with them, but I decided to look around at other opportunities. My dad worked at a big corporation that had openings in IT, and he set me up with an interview. Sure, I know my stuff, but the simple fact is that I was offered a position for which I was clearly unqualified, and I have no doubt that it was because my dad was the second highest on the ladder at that site. After I turned down the job offer (and talked to my dad about why) he introduced me to the guy who got the job only because I had refused. He was a much better fit, and do you want to guess what nationality he was?
You've obviously never lived in large portions of the U.S. if you think that this country is a meritocracy and ethnocentrism is dead and gone among the majority. Try being Catholic in the Midwest. Try being black in the South. Racism and its attendant problems still show up every day.
Virg
Well, we don't need a contract to do it, but some thought needs to be put into it. After all, China intends to set up a base on the Moon, so they'll need to deal with it, and if they go it's certainly possible that it'll renew interest in the U.S. going back too, in which case we'll need to deal with it too.
Virg
> I think that one of those Ms stands for "massive" which refers to the number of people playing it.
Actually, the "M" stands for "Massively", which refers to the number of people that can play it, not just the number who are. It's an MMO game, just not yet old enough to tell whether it'll be a successful MMO game.
Virg
> My father disciplined me by spanking me. He did this until I was a teenager. I have no emotional scars.
As an adult and parent, I have an enormous amount of respect for my father because he ONLY disciplined me when I deserved it and loved me very much.
The question to ask yourself is, if he'd only disciplined you when you deserved it and loved you very much, but never spanked you (instead punishing you in some other fashion), would you have come out of it with less respect for him? That answered, does that not mean the spanking wasn't a necessary part of the discipline?
> You have blurred the line between corporal punishment and abuse.
You've blurred the line between discipline and corporal punishment.
Virg
> Whether premise 1 is true or not is irrelevant to me right now, it's premise 2 that I don't accept. This is an "ends justifies the means" approach.
It's also well-chosen to be as bad as you can make it. If I phrase it, "we've discovered that the best of all possible alternatives that can actually be implemented in real life is to regulate the industry as a whole", it becomes rather more benign than "we can do anything we damn well please." Again, I ask you to present something that could work in a society that consists of more than a handful of people, but that fits everyone's desires for the level of regulation very closely. By the time you get to the size of a small town, "your liberty stops where my nose begins" simply stops functioning. Because the solution we use actually has to work, that's what gets chosen.
> Of course you always have the right to initiate force against the actual perpetrators of fraud and malpractice, but when you decide that you have the right to initiate force against *everyone*, simply because you have a worthy goal, you make exactly the same move as a slaveholder. You are not treating me as an end in myself, you are treating me as you personal property.
Again, you're using melodramatic phrasing to try to exaggerate your point. Again, to say the same thing in different words that spin it entirely differently, I didn't "decide that [I] have the right to initiate force against everyone, simply because [I] have a worthy goal", society at large decided that the only functional way to control fraud was to restrict the market as a whole, and then implemented it because it was workable. Yet again, your solution is a great idea except for that niggling detail of not working in the real world.
> How would you feel if people with guns came and force-marched you to New Orleans to repair buildings?
Let's toss in the rest of the picture that you rather conveniently omit, and see how it works:
1.) I got together with others in the society, and together we voted to put people in positions of control.
2.) We give those people guns, and tell them it's valid to use them to enforce rules that we establish by vote.
3.) We vote on rules. One of those rules is that we can be force marched to places to do civic work on occasion.
4.) We don't turn down the help when others get force marched to us to help us.
5.) We regularly vote on what stuff warrants forced marching.
Now, how would I feel about being force marched to New Orleans? Well, considering the point I've now included, I'd have to say I'd feel a bit different than if it happened out of the blue.
> How come *I* have to work for *you*, and not the reverse? Only because there are more of you. You probably don't want to live in a democracy where the majority forces you to preach or pay for preachers, and I don't want to live in a democracy where the majority forces me to pay for food and clothing. Both majorities overstep their bounds: they attempt to spend that which is not theirs to spend. All I'm suggesting is a hands-off policy. That is what I call "civilized".
Funny, most people call that "fantasy". When you live in a society that comprises more than a small crowd, compromise is necessary to coexist. That's been proven too many times for you simply to refute it by saying you don't like it. Nothing you've presented comes into contact with real life experience, which is why it's a rather unpopular view. In your particular case, I say you'll have to leave our society if you want the kind of society you want, because there are too many people in this one to execute your version of society successfully.
Virg
> I grant you all of this. It doesn't change the fact that nobody has any right to tell me how to spend the fruits of my labor. Racism is a societal problem, and a big one. But that doesn't make it a legal problem.
In a society that allows rampant racism, the suppression of the "outside" race becomes so pervasive that those in that "outside" class generally cannot change their lot for the better. This is exactly was has happened, time and time again, and it's the reason that it's become acceptable to enforce anti-discrimination.
> On the other hand, you don't accept the notion that there could really be two societies. You want to force everyone to be part of one society, at least as far as the distribution of goods is concerned. Who they spend their free time with may be their own business, but who they sell the fruits of their labor to is *your* business. Don't get me wrong, I like your idea of society better. I just don't agree that you have a right to achieve it by force.
I accept the idea that there could be two societies. In fact, the pre-'60s south was in fact two societies. I just don't see the perpetuation of such a society to be acceptable. To respond to you, your favored method of government gave us feudalism. It gave us what happened in the Deep South. My idea of society came about when the force of law was applied. That's because your idea of society was deemed to be unworkable.
> It's never been tried.
That's because it's unworkable. See above.
> Actually the rail barons demonstrate abuse of government, and were not the result of a free market.
I have never seen anything in the business practices of the rail barons that would have malfunctioned without corruption in the government. It would have taken quite a bit longer, but eventually the market would have dead-ended itself, in very much the same fashion as it did until governmental agencies stepped in. Since you don't consider economic suppression to be an initiation of force, it wouldn't even have violated your concept of a free market. If you can find any of the tactics that they used that wouldn't have worked without the government assisting, feel free to point it out, but grange busting didn't need the government to work, it just accelerated it.
> I never said I was opposed to laws or their enforcement. I want a government and a police force. I just want them to limit their activies to protecting me from force and fraud.
I have no answer for this to someone who considers discriminatory practice and economic suppression to be "not force". If someone decides they don't like my particluar race, and that person owns enough capital to dominate a market such that I find myself without certain necessities, I'd like to have reasonable protection from that. Say it doesn't happen? I've seen all of the grocery stores in a twenty mile radius stop selling to black people to force them all to move out of a town. When it happened, it wasn't illegal. By your metric, it wasn't an initiaion of force, because it was done by economic collusion. One store that decided to break the "rule" was driven out of business by the other stores undercutting him. Sounds like rail baron tactics, doesn't it?
> I don't want them taking money out of my pocket to put your kid through school...
The "If I don't use it, it has no value to me so I won't pay for it" concept is a comforting refrain, but again and again it's been shown to be entirely unworkable in real life. What starts with schools goes to roads and safety laws and fire departments and 911 and a thousand other things that people never use until they do. They take money out of everyone's pocket to put everyone's kids through school because if only those with kids payed for the schools, then only those who could afford it would get an education, and that creates more societal problems than across-the-board taxation does. Again, your model is great