I know of a business that involves teams of a couple of guys in vans roaming areas of the country doing repair services.
I happen to KNOW that one of these teams hit an armadillo in TX, and, in a creative fit of boredom, threw it in their cooler with ice and headed on their northern circuit. The next day, in Michigan, they dumped it out beside the road....I'm nearly certain some state biologist in MI got to spend weeks studying the invasion of armadillos.
(Now, that story has become a lot grimmer with the suggestion that handling armadillos - and probably, throwing it in your lunch cooler with your pop cans & sandwiches - may transmit leprosy...)
I actually agree with most of your point, but this caught my attention:
"...And people think that the ITU is some how going to be worse [than the US's current control of the internet]? It would be different, but I can't see how it could be worse..."
Seriously? You don't see how it "could be" worse? Are you being naive out of sheer ignorance, or simply disingenuous based on US-loathing blinders?
The UN had a 'Human Rights Commission' for SIXTY years with members such as People's Republic of China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Uganda and Vietnam...
If you 'can't imagine' how a UN-controlled internet 'could be worse' you're not really trying terribly hard.
By the time that the physical demands of the work reach a point where they exceed your capabilities, in most cases you'll have one or two or more assistant, junior workers working for you - like the guy you started with, before you struck out on your own.
It's a very healthy, sustainable career choice, and won't be outsourced to China.
You miss the point. The goal here is not to better classify/treat people who may have a physiological or brain-chemical reasons impairing their ability to live comfortably everyday lives.
The goal here is for the APA to extend psychiatric definitions (which are broad, subjective, and entirely mutable) to justify more behaviors as aberrent, requiring more treatment, and ultimately more fees (of course) - as well as probably more application of personality-affecting chemistry for their pharma buddies.
I'm genuinely curious, given the general recognition in our enlightened society that 'normalcy' is a much broader thing than people used to define...using the APA's definitions, what % of society is "normal" (healthy, ie no psychiatric disorders)? It has to be vanishingly small.
So wait, you're suggesting that a giant Ponzi scheme (you know, the kind where you have to keep adding new people to continue payouts, aka Social Security) starts to fail when it no longer gets new members?
And that even a government-MANDATED Ponzi scheme will eventually fail when demographics turn against it?
"...it instead depends on discussions between politicians, lobbyists, and voters..."
Are there actually 'discussions' any more between these?
As far as I can tell, there are only (depending on one's particular role here) either sycophantic pandering, slavish unquestioning brain-dead following, or ceaseless vituperation led by knee-jerk demagogues (toward 'the enemy')?
IANARS, but it seems to me that while this is a great idea, there's a weak point in the mechanical linkages and the stirling engine.
RTGs use thermocouples which, while never very efficient, have the advantage of being solid state - a huge reliability benefit.
If you have this sort of system powering deep-space probes (or hell, near-space systems) I'd think that aside from all the normal wear-and-tear issues of any linkage (lubrication, debris, even erosion over time) would be exacerbated by the thermal extremes in space. Further, the vibration created through the rest of the craft couldn't be helpful for the lifespan of the other components. Finally, for the sorts of precision needed for space operations (pointing a space telescope comes to mind) the constant oscillation of mass within the craft probably would make other things significantly more difficult.
Again, not a rocket scientist, but from my point of view as 'cool' as this is, and as useful as it may be, it doesn't seem like something very applicable to space operations.
Tinfoil hat bit: Now...if one needed a long-term power source for something much less precise like earthly drone operations... (I don't know the mass/power here at all)...
Simple - the media magnate and politicians are generally older people, who don't understand much technology at all. Not only that, every time they open their mouths ("I invented the internet","the internet is a series of tubes","we'll pass a law banning (X) on the internet", etc.) they look stupider and stupider.
The only things more fearsome than ignorance to a politician are those that they cannot control, and that which diminishes their power. The "internets" are both.
Well, internet crusaders need to figure out what the HELL they want.
You cannot invite the government to be involved in every aspect of your life that you WANT them to, and then expect them to politely stay out of the bits you DON'T want them involved in. To expect anything else is at the very least naive.
As famously said "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. "
I don't believe I made ANY prescriptive statements there about what people's beliefs SHOULD be.
If you're left of center, my point is, recognize that and accept it. If you're right of center, my point is, recognize that and accept it.
To me, too many political discussions start from a fundamental point of dishonesty (whether it's that or willful ignorance, who can say?) in that too many people start with the belief that "I'm a centrist moderate" when they plainly aren't. I'm fairly right-wing in my views, so it would be dishonest to assert I'm a centrist; moreover, recognizing my own biases makes it easier for me to understand the bulk of proposals are going to look left-wing to me and that despite smelling so, they may in fact be a moderate compromise.
I'm just saying "know thyself". If you're on the left and recognize it, that's cool. From that point, we both know where we stand honestly and can try to have a constructive discussion.
To your points about the cultural 'shift rightward' I'd cheerfully disagree with you, but that's for another discussion. Cheers.
BTW, the first mistake is assuming you are in the center. We - and by this I mean everyone, including myself - need to depart from this simplistic, Ptolemaic political universe where we assume we each are at the middle, and everything swirls around us. The first point in figuring out where you're going is understanding where you are to start with.
Don't be Pauline Kael.
Try to understand that there is a broad spectrum of political opinion - even our idiom tends to betray us here as it's rarely as simple as a spectrum, although we tend to distill political issues down to (at best) a collection of 1-dimensional lines. You are somewhere on that spectrum and probably NOT in the center.
(Further, politically indecisive also is not ipso facto 'centrist'.)
This is incredibly difficult, because we naturally tend to circulate with friends of common opinion. It's very easy to say "I'm moderate" when in fact making such a statement is meaningless in any broader objective sense as it rarely means more than the implied "...among my friends."
Of course, all of this takes thought, personal candor, intellectual integrity, and hard thinking. Usually, one will find that at least a few of our gut-derived political positions turn out to be logically inconsistent and it requires courage to take those ideas apart and reassemble them. You might even change your mind.
I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.
I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.
BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.
Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.
To the OP: assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively). Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?
Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.
Those are the talking heads on both sides. They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".
WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats. WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there. WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Lol wut? He's not *ignoring* cultural factors, he (or she) is on the contrary making AN OBSERVATION. As far as I can tell he made no speculation at all on the basis for these differences, which, as you remark, is largely cultural.
Unfortunately your whole "it's the fault of conservatives/libertarians" is utterly, completely wrong....your tendentiousness is showing. A quick review of the record would show you that trial lawyers and their lobbyists give something on the order of 3x-4x to DEMOCRATS as to Republicans. The preponderance of bills regarding tort reform, reward limits, limits on punitive damages, limits on legal fees (!), limits on contingencies, etc come from Republicans.
The idea that somehow Republicans are trying to sponsor tort reform in order to cheapen lawsuits and make them more accessible is one of the more convoluted rationalizations I've heard recently.
I understand that it's hard to see past your political blinders, and convenient to try to blame everything bad in the world on the "enemy" but in this case, at least one of the two parties is trying to limit the recourse to lawsuits.
The moment you say that "because a certain proportion of the populace is nonwhite, we have to have a comparable proportion of speakers that are nonwhite" you've gone down the rabbit hole. The moment you set a floor on participation, you set a ceiling on someone else... or else you're simply applying your racism elsewhere.
Face it, you're not anti racist - you're simply racist in a different direction.
The cure for racism isn't counter-racism, it's colorblindness.
There are a LOT of smart people out there that nobody hates. Perhaps it says more about you and your ego, than about "society" that they don't like you.
I had a chat after a Cub Scout outing once, with one kid who was crying that "all the other kids hate me because I'm so much smarter than them".
Obviously, I couldn't say it to the kid, who just needed a sympathetic shoulder at the moment, but the fact is: any kid whose parents have taught him that he's such a special snowflake that he could even HAVE such an egotistical, obnoxious thought, is in for trouble.
And it's NOT because "he's so much smarter than everyone else". Not by a long shot.
It was a ringing condemnation of Ms Coulter personally, professionally, and politically.
Now, you may disagree with Ann Coulter. You may disagree with her approach and her message. But for the University President to take such a personally condemnatory stance - I don't recall him writing such a screed against John Brennan, the 2012 commencement speaker who defended the USE OF TORTURE (afaik the Catholics haven't explicitly endorsed that since Torquemada) - is seemingly unprecedented.
I believe your point is simple partisan bias.
If the president had written similar personally-disparaging remarks about other controversial speakers, I'd stand corrected.
He got a call from a massive donor who benefits from restrictive copyright (Disney, etc.) and he was told to immediately 'review' this position or he'd see an impact on national funding.
They're all such whores. Simply whores....except whores at least make one other person happy, they're not QUITE as selfish as politicians.
Really? It comes out of the pockets of the Congress in the House?
And here all this time I thought they were paid by the taxpayers!
So your evasion aside, I'm curious then: if I gave you climate-change data that refuted Global Warming from an 'independent' lab funded 100% by Exxon-Mobil, you'd accept that without doubt?
I'm surprised nobody's pointed out yet that the comment "...'[meat eaters] easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes,'..is in fact, true.
Meat eaters do all those things. Sadly, they do them rather readily.
Of course so do vegetarians, but that doesn't change the accuracy of the basic point.
One could also say that "meat eaters are more likely to do these things" accurately. Take a random sample of the population, and poll which cheat, tell lies, etc. By FAR most of them will be people that have eaten meat. Of course, this has everything to do with the fact that the huge majority of the sample aren't vegetarians, but again, the basic statement reviewed factually is true.
(In case anyone missed it, the *implication* of the statement - that meat eaters do this more readily than vegetarians - I'd guess is probably absurd. Then again, even though I'm a cheerful, unrepentant meat eater myself, I'd posit that it might be true; in nature carnivores are naturally more aggressive, (generally) selfish, opportunistic creatures. Herbivores seem to be more docile, group oriented, and passive. Who's to say that diet doesn't have an impact on this? All the vegetarians I know are relatively pale, docile people. Even the few that are militant vegans tend to be more passive-aggressive and whiny than in-your-face. The people I know that like to go to Fogo de Chao are mostly aggressive, brash type-A's. So without some data, it's all just anecdotes. This text book seems to be propagandistic, of course, but I think it's something that would be interesting to really study.)
I know it's very anti-pc of me to point out, but there's nothing illegal about being racist.
Remember that whatever strictures you place on someone's hateful speech today, could have been likewise been employed against those "crazy" people advocating things like gay rights and the rights of blacks to do things like vote and ride in the front of the bus.
The most abhorrent speech is that we must most stringently defend despite our personal loathing of what's being said.
"Independent" but "entirely funded by"...you don't see a conflict there?
By that same logic, then, if I asserted that a certain research company is "really independent", you'd accept that...even if it is 100% funded by the Koch brothers?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there's some science to it, but not always.
I know of a business that involves teams of a couple of guys in vans roaming areas of the country doing repair services.
I happen to KNOW that one of these teams hit an armadillo in TX, and, in a creative fit of boredom, threw it in their cooler with ice and headed on their northern circuit. The next day, in Michigan, they dumped it out beside the road....I'm nearly certain some state biologist in MI got to spend weeks studying the invasion of armadillos.
(Now, that story has become a lot grimmer with the suggestion that handling armadillos - and probably, throwing it in your lunch cooler with your pop cans & sandwiches - may transmit leprosy...)
I actually agree with most of your point, but this caught my attention:
"...And people think that the ITU is some how going to be worse [than the US's current control of the internet]? It would be different, but I can't see how it could be worse ..."
Seriously? You don't see how it "could be" worse?
Are you being naive out of sheer ignorance, or simply disingenuous based on US-loathing blinders?
The UN had a 'Human Rights Commission' for SIXTY years with members such as People's Republic of China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Uganda and Vietnam...
If you 'can't imagine' how a UN-controlled internet 'could be worse' you're not really trying terribly hard.
"In fact, most of it is political theater."
Isn't that pretty much the functional definition of the UN?
By the time that the physical demands of the work reach a point where they exceed your capabilities, in most cases you'll have one or two or more assistant, junior workers working for you - like the guy you started with, before you struck out on your own.
It's a very healthy, sustainable career choice, and won't be outsourced to China.
You miss the point.
The goal here is not to better classify/treat people who may have a physiological or brain-chemical reasons impairing their ability to live comfortably everyday lives.
The goal here is for the APA to extend psychiatric definitions (which are broad, subjective, and entirely mutable) to justify more behaviors as aberrent, requiring more treatment, and ultimately more fees (of course) - as well as probably more application of personality-affecting chemistry for their pharma buddies.
I'm genuinely curious, given the general recognition in our enlightened society that 'normalcy' is a much broader thing than people used to define...using the APA's definitions, what % of society is "normal" (healthy, ie no psychiatric disorders)? It has to be vanishingly small.
So wait, you're suggesting that a giant Ponzi scheme (you know, the kind where you have to keep adding new people to continue payouts, aka Social Security) starts to fail when it no longer gets new members?
And that even a government-MANDATED Ponzi scheme will eventually fail when demographics turn against it?
How is this "new" or "informative"?
"...it instead depends on discussions between politicians, lobbyists, and voters..."
Are there actually 'discussions' any more between these?
As far as I can tell, there are only (depending on one's particular role here) either sycophantic pandering, slavish unquestioning brain-dead following, or ceaseless vituperation led by knee-jerk demagogues (toward 'the enemy')?
IANARS, but it seems to me that while this is a great idea, there's a weak point in the mechanical linkages and the stirling engine.
RTGs use thermocouples which, while never very efficient, have the advantage of being solid state - a huge reliability benefit.
If you have this sort of system powering deep-space probes (or hell, near-space systems) I'd think that aside from all the normal wear-and-tear issues of any linkage (lubrication, debris, even erosion over time) would be exacerbated by the thermal extremes in space. Further, the vibration created through the rest of the craft couldn't be helpful for the lifespan of the other components. Finally, for the sorts of precision needed for space operations (pointing a space telescope comes to mind) the constant oscillation of mass within the craft probably would make other things significantly more difficult.
Again, not a rocket scientist, but from my point of view as 'cool' as this is, and as useful as it may be, it doesn't seem like something very applicable to space operations.
Tinfoil hat bit:
Now...if one needed a long-term power source for something much less precise like earthly drone operations... (I don't know the mass/power here at all)...
Simple - the media magnate and politicians are generally older people, who don't understand much technology at all. Not only that, every time they open their mouths ("I invented the internet","the internet is a series of tubes","we'll pass a law banning (X) on the internet", etc.) they look stupider and stupider.
The only things more fearsome than ignorance to a politician are those that they cannot control, and that which diminishes their power. The "internets" are both.
Well, internet crusaders need to figure out what the HELL they want.
You cannot invite the government to be involved in every aspect of your life that you WANT them to, and then expect them to politely stay out of the bits you DON'T want them involved in. To expect anything else is at the very least naive.
As famously said "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. "
I don't believe I made ANY prescriptive statements there about what people's beliefs SHOULD be.
If you're left of center, my point is, recognize that and accept it.
If you're right of center, my point is, recognize that and accept it.
To me, too many political discussions start from a fundamental point of dishonesty (whether it's that or willful ignorance, who can say?) in that too many people start with the belief that "I'm a centrist moderate" when they plainly aren't. I'm fairly right-wing in my views, so it would be dishonest to assert I'm a centrist; moreover, recognizing my own biases makes it easier for me to understand the bulk of proposals are going to look left-wing to me and that despite smelling so, they may in fact be a moderate compromise.
I'm just saying "know thyself". If you're on the left and recognize it, that's cool. From that point, we both know where we stand honestly and can try to have a constructive discussion.
To your points about the cultural 'shift rightward' I'd cheerfully disagree with you, but that's for another discussion. Cheers.
BTW, the first mistake is assuming you are in the center.
We - and by this I mean everyone, including myself - need to depart from this simplistic, Ptolemaic political universe where we assume we each are at the middle, and everything swirls around us. The first point in figuring out where you're going is understanding where you are to start with.
Don't be Pauline Kael.
Try to understand that there is a broad spectrum of political opinion - even our idiom tends to betray us here as it's rarely as simple as a spectrum, although we tend to distill political issues down to (at best) a collection of 1-dimensional lines. You are somewhere on that spectrum and probably NOT in the center.
(Further, politically indecisive also is not ipso facto 'centrist'.)
This is incredibly difficult, because we naturally tend to circulate with friends of common opinion. It's very easy to say "I'm moderate" when in fact making such a statement is meaningless in any broader objective sense as it rarely means more than the implied "...among my friends."
Of course, all of this takes thought, personal candor, intellectual integrity, and hard thinking. Usually, one will find that at least a few of our gut-derived political positions turn out to be logically inconsistent and it requires courage to take those ideas apart and reassemble them. You might even change your mind.
I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.
I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.
BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.
Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.
To the OP: assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively).
Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?
Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.
Those are the talking heads on both sides.
They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".
WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats.
WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there.
WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Lol wut?
He's not *ignoring* cultural factors, he (or she) is on the contrary making AN OBSERVATION. As far as I can tell he made no speculation at all on the basis for these differences, which, as you remark, is largely cultural.
Unfortunately your whole "it's the fault of conservatives/libertarians" is utterly, completely wrong....your tendentiousness is showing. A quick review of the record would show you that trial lawyers and their lobbyists give something on the order of 3x-4x to DEMOCRATS as to Republicans. The preponderance of bills regarding tort reform, reward limits, limits on punitive damages, limits on legal fees (!), limits on contingencies, etc come from Republicans.
The idea that somehow Republicans are trying to sponsor tort reform in order to cheapen lawsuits and make them more accessible is one of the more convoluted rationalizations I've heard recently.
I understand that it's hard to see past your political blinders, and convenient to try to blame everything bad in the world on the "enemy" but in this case, at least one of the two parties is trying to limit the recourse to lawsuits.
The moment you say that "because a certain proportion of the populace is nonwhite, we have to have a comparable proportion of speakers that are nonwhite" you've gone down the rabbit hole. The moment you set a floor on participation, you set a ceiling on someone else ... or else you're simply applying your racism elsewhere.
Face it, you're not anti racist - you're simply racist in a different direction.
The cure for racism isn't counter-racism, it's colorblindness.
A skull! ....of a dinosaur.... ...in a space suit!
"...flying a camera drone over private property full of gun-loving people they happen to have pissed off..."
you missed one bit: "...and who happen to have a penchant for shooting at flying things.."
There are a LOT of smart people out there that nobody hates. Perhaps it says more about you and your ego, than about "society" that they don't like you.
I had a chat after a Cub Scout outing once, with one kid who was crying that "all the other kids hate me because I'm so much smarter than them".
Obviously, I couldn't say it to the kid, who just needed a sympathetic shoulder at the moment, but the fact is: any kid whose parents have taught him that he's such a special snowflake that he could even HAVE such an egotistical, obnoxious thought, is in for trouble.
And it's NOT because "he's so much smarter than everyone else". Not by a long shot.
Did you bother to actually read the note in full?
It was a ringing condemnation of Ms Coulter personally, professionally, and politically.
Now, you may disagree with Ann Coulter.
You may disagree with her approach and her message.
But for the University President to take such a personally condemnatory stance - I don't recall him writing such a screed against John Brennan, the 2012 commencement speaker who defended the USE OF TORTURE (afaik the Catholics haven't explicitly endorsed that since Torquemada) - is seemingly unprecedented.
I believe your point is simple partisan bias.
If the president had written similar personally-disparaging remarks about other controversial speakers, I'd stand corrected.
Got any examples?
He got a call from a massive donor who benefits from restrictive copyright (Disney, etc.) and he was told to immediately 'review' this position or he'd see an impact on national funding.
They're all such whores. Simply whores....except whores at least make one other person happy, they're not QUITE as selfish as politicians.
Really? It comes out of the pockets of the Congress in the House?
And here all this time I thought they were paid by the taxpayers!
So your evasion aside, I'm curious then: if I gave you climate-change data that refuted Global Warming from an 'independent' lab funded 100% by Exxon-Mobil, you'd accept that without doubt?
Vigilantism IS illegal, and a site that incites people to acts against stupid racists, no matter how justified, is morally culpable for the results.
I'm surprised nobody's pointed out yet that the comment "...'[meat eaters] easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes,'..is in fact, true.
Meat eaters do all those things. Sadly, they do them rather readily.
Of course so do vegetarians, but that doesn't change the accuracy of the basic point.
One could also say that "meat eaters are more likely to do these things" accurately. Take a random sample of the population, and poll which cheat, tell lies, etc. By FAR most of them will be people that have eaten meat. Of course, this has everything to do with the fact that the huge majority of the sample aren't vegetarians, but again, the basic statement reviewed factually is true.
(In case anyone missed it, the *implication* of the statement - that meat eaters do this more readily than vegetarians - I'd guess is probably absurd. Then again, even though I'm a cheerful, unrepentant meat eater myself, I'd posit that it might be true; in nature carnivores are naturally more aggressive, (generally) selfish, opportunistic creatures. Herbivores seem to be more docile, group oriented, and passive. Who's to say that diet doesn't have an impact on this? All the vegetarians I know are relatively pale, docile people. Even the few that are militant vegans tend to be more passive-aggressive and whiny than in-your-face. The people I know that like to go to Fogo de Chao are mostly aggressive, brash type-A's. So without some data, it's all just anecdotes. This text book seems to be propagandistic, of course, but I think it's something that would be interesting to really study.)
I know it's very anti-pc of me to point out, but there's nothing illegal about being racist.
Remember that whatever strictures you place on someone's hateful speech today, could have been likewise been employed against those "crazy" people advocating things like gay rights and the rights of blacks to do things like vote and ride in the front of the bus.
The most abhorrent speech is that we must most stringently defend despite our personal loathing of what's being said.
"Independent" but "entirely funded by" ...you don't see a conflict there?
By that same logic, then, if I asserted that a certain research company is "really independent", you'd accept that...even if it is 100% funded by the Koch brothers?