I don't watch the Daily Show that often (I don't watch TV that often, sorry) but every show I've seen showed actual video clips of the alleged hypocrite, liar, or fool in question demonstrating for all to see their hypocrisy, lies, or foolishness. Stewart's schtick seems to be confined to snickering at the obvious, not in dazzling displays of erudite persuasion by which he makes hypocrisy appear where there is none. And though he's obviously to the left of Rush Limbaugh, he skewers people from both parties quite enthusiastically. .
As for this "left wing evangelism," it matters to me whether a candidate favors magic over science as an explanation. If a candidate was "skeptical" of the germ theory (it's only a theory!) and wanted "alternative ideas" discussed in school, wouldn't that concern you? Science matters, and candiates' views on science matters.
This issue only works for the left wing to the extent that it does because the right wing is dependent on the vote of the evangelicals, who are largely creationist. It's unfortunate that one party is beholden to a group that is so hostile to science, but hey, politics makes strange bedfellows. Either way, it isn't the left wing's fault that the other side goes to such great lengths to make themselves look silly on this issue. Jettison the fundies from the party, and they won't be an embarassment. But then again, you won't get anyone elected because they're such a large percentage of the Republican vote. Not an easy option. I really do wish the Republicans would build a party on actualy conservativism, rather than what they have now, because I really am very (fiscally) conservative.
I could vote for a Goldwater small-government conservative, but not for a messianic neoconservative "let's reshape the world" party like they have now. Right now I'm reduced to voting for the party I consider least likely to believe in torture. As a citizen, this is not my proudest moment when it comes to my country.
of this line of reasoning. Stop using the internet, for god's sake, because the government funded its development. Don't use any road that isn't privately owned. Extrapolate that through the rest of your activities, and let me know how that works out for you.
Yes, because saying "I don't believe God exists, because there is no reason to believe that" is just as arrogant as saying "I don't believe Santa exists, because there is no reason to believe that." Non-belief in Santa/elves/bigfoot is just as logically untenable in non-belief in God. But when you don't believe in those other things, people don't suddenly act as if you're claiming to be omniscient. When it comes to not believing in anything else (ESP, alien abductions, nessie, etc) we know that people just mean "I see no credible reason to believe in this, ergo I don't believe in this." Suddenly when the noun is "God," then everything changes and someone pretends that the speaker is claiming to know everything. They aren't, and it's obvious. You can't prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't real, but you would't lament someone's arrogance for not believing in His Noodliness.
How many SF movies have you seen where "it" (i.e. an individual) evolved, or the creatures evolved within the few hours/days covered by the show? Evolution is a good examle of a horrible trend. And then you have the X-Men, "the next step in human evolution" etc. At least people are just ignorant of physics--they actively know and believe things that are false when it comes to evolution. Movies are make-believe (as are comic books, etc) and I'd guess they've always worked against real-life knowledge by being more entertaining and fun than, well, reality. Do you think movies like The Day After Tomorrow really help public knowledge of environmental concerns? Movies always suck when it comes to science.
I agree that corporations have no morals. They'd be killing homeless people for their organs if it was profitable and they could get away with it. My argument was that we should not allow this level of obligation, not that comapnies don't want it.
it's up to them to determine the terms under which they offer it for sale
Those terms would be what we call "money." When it has changed hands and the console is mine, then it is mine. I don't get to set terms for what you do with my car, or my house, or my pencil, after you buy it. There is no binding contract you enter into by buying a console that mandates you to buy games down the line.
If GE sold a coffee maker that magically permitted only GE-brand coffee filters, no one would give you a moral lecture for using a workaround and using non-GE filters. It's your coffee maker. If GM sold cars that accepted only GM-designed bolts, no one would lecture you for using an adapter or changing out the bolt thingy so you could use whatever bolts you wanted.
It would never occur to anyone to be so damned stupid as to think that GE or GM or any other company has a moral claim to dictate how you use the product you already paid for--unless it's a video game console, or otherwise involves a computer or, God forbid, the internet. These are apparently magical, and are not subject to the same common-sense, well-known principles by which we have conducted business since, well, forever.
Saying that you have a weak sex drive isn't going to convince me that you're gay. You must not get out much.
You are an animal. Whether or not you reproduce is not my concern.
There is nothing wrong with having a weak sex drive. There are other things to do in the world. Men with very high sex drives (who don't have the commensurate looks/wealth) end up doing very stupid, very pathetic things to indulge their needs, and I pity them.
No one cares if you aren't crazy about sex. I'm not crazy about orchids, but I don't look down on people who are. Relax a little. You need a blowjob or something.
Or, they're more socially awkward, don't have the qualities that many young women want, so they spend their time on other pursuits, such as reading. Extrapolate this over time, and they've spent more time fiddling with computers or reading than their peers who have been having mind-boggling amounts of sex. They will be more articulate, more well-read, and probably "smarter" by most measures. So there may indeed be a causal relationship, but probably one that is not nearly as flattering.
People love to attribute necessity to choice. I just have difficulty believing that all those teen boys chose not to have sex with all those girls who didn't want them.
The "safety" concerns about sex aren't really safety concerns. It's moral, but they're stuck in a world where people roll their eyes and laugh if you moralize like that ol' time religion. So they disguise their moralizing as a concern for safety. Ironically, this shows a lack of integrity, which is morally concerning to me. Why should I trust someone who would misrepresent their motives?
OpenOffice WILL create a nested, hierarchical TOC. You just have to use the styles function on your section headings. I do it all the time. I've created TOCs 3-4 levels deep that work in both the odt file and in the exported pdf file. I don't have OpenOffice on this computer, and I can't remember if I'm talking about HEADING1-4, but it's something with different levels, like H1, H3 etc does in HTML.
Another cool way to create hierarchical TOCs in PDF files is to use pdftex--the/section,/subsection, and similar tags create a collapsible TOC. The only reason I prefer OpenOffice is that you can't copy and paste gobs of text from the web into a LaTeX editor and keep the links intact. If I'm creating my own document from scratch, I'd prefer to use LaTeX. Except for tables. But that tangent is larger than my original point, so nevermind...
Print-to-pdf programs are not as good as OpenOffice, because they don't preserve hyperlinks. With OpenOffice, hyperlinks are even preserved (and exported to the pdf file) in selections copied/pasted from web pages.
I'm hoping that someone makes a print-to-pdf program that does some mojo to preserve the hyperlinks, but as of yet I've never heard of one, and until I do then OpenOffice (or Google docs, which also works for this purpose) is far better than pdfCreator or whatever.
I have 13 and 15 year old kids, both of whom want laptops. They aren't getting a $1200 Macbook. They aren't even getting a $600 laptop. It'll get left at a friend's house, on the bus, or dropped. It may not, but it may. At $200 or so, it wouldn't kill me if they lost it, though I'd be irritated. At $600 or even $400, it would piss me off and they wouldn't get another one. Price points do matter.
I want a ~$500-$600 laptop with a 12"-13" screen that is 100% Linux (well, Debian|Ubuntu|Knoppix) compatible. By this I mean sound (my Sony desktop isn't supported by ALSA) and WiFi. There are loads of affordable laptops with decent specs, but I can't figure out how to get them to work without a lot of tweaking. Mainly it's the WiFi, of course.
Yes, it can be done. But what if WiFi is your only internet connection? I want to buy the laptop, drop in Knoppix or Debian, and surf the web at the library or whatever. Right now, I can't, even with Linux Mint.
I don't think the ACLU has sued to undermine the other Amendments--those poorly-reasoned arguments were probably just in response to people asking why they didn't fight for the 2nd Amendment. They have also said, I believe, that they don't fight for the 2nd Amendment because the NRA serves to do that. Without the ACLU, the other 9 amendments would have no champion at all. They are precisely 9 times as valuable as the NRA. I do value what the NRA does, but please don't make the ACLU into a gun-control organization. Some members may agree with gun control (not sure on that one), but their modus operandi is to sue to limit government power, not to increase it, even when it comes to firearms.
Man, they are hypocritical. They only support 9/10 of the Bill of Rights. I'm mad at the NRA too--they support 1/10! Even worse!
Seriously, I wish the ACLU did support the 2nd Amendment as well, but they work they do is no less valuable for their blindness to that one Amendment. The NRA generally does good work too, though there are only 1/9 as committed to the Bill of Rights as the ACLU.
So I can follow the police car around and film everything they do while they're in uniform while in public? Or would that get me arrested?
Reasonable expectation of privacy aside, not many people want to live in a society where every movement is tracked and logged. And that is where this will end up. If we're okay with the police doing it via automobiles, it will progress to traffic lights and other places, and eventually the whereabouts of every auto (or every license plate) will be tracked. No big deal, you say? What happens when it gets hacked, or someone sells the data to insurance companies, and so on?
But I'm guessing this falls on deaf ears. Some people just don't see the value of freedom, and nothing I can say is going to change that. Totalitarianism doesn't develop because of bad people trying to take away freedom; it exists because people in that society don't care about freedom enough to preserve it.
By dumb I don't mean "less gifted." I mean a lack of general intellectual development, which in my experience has more to do with giving a damn about intellectual things than with native ability. I know plenty of people who are smarter than me (better at math, better memories, etc) but who don't read. The concept of becoming interested in, say, evolutionary theory or renaissance history and buying a book, and then reading that book, to indulge their intellectual curiosity is alien to them, because they have no intellectual curiosity.
That is not an exaggeration. I've had people pick up a book I was reading, turn it over and over looking for the library sticker, open it up and see my name pencilled on the title page, and say "You bought this book? Is it for a class or something?" Most of these people top out at having a few dog-eared Steven King or Tom Clancy mass-market paperbacks lying around the house. If you're reading Proust, how do you explain what it's about to a person who told you yesterday that Metallica lyrics are "really deep"? He's not stupid, not a bad person, but there is precious little common ground to work with here.
I agree that there are some for whom the genetic component is too strong. I run 3-4 times a week and can run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes. I work with a guy who runs once every few months and can run the same distance in about 9.5 minutes. He's also much thinner than me, though he eats two Whopper cheesburgers at a sitting. Genetics do play a role. But if I were 40 pounds heavier (which I have been) and sedentary, eating at McDonalds every day would undermine any attempts to blame it on genetics. Our own actions do have an influence on our lives.
I'd guess you were joking, but hanging out with dumb people makes you dumb. The jokes you share, the vocabulary you use, the activities you participate in, are all shared with your friends. If you're smart but hang out with dumb people, your intellect will get less exercise because you will dumb down your conversation. You will use simpler, less nuanced arguments--you may just be left with slogans and ad hominem attacks to make your point. You'll rely more on TV to inform you, and less on reading, which is a cerebral, more solitary experience. The company you keep is normative, like it or not. Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, and you will become smarter. This doesn't mean you'll discover cold fusion, but the idea is still sound.
This is not to say that anyone else is to blame because we're surrounded by convenient and bad-for-you food, but eating healthy requires you to think ahead. Salads aren't filling, sorry. Rabbit food sucks. But as long as I remember to stock tuna and other low-cal stuff, I'm okay. The healthiest people I know cook their own food the night before and bring it in in cute little containers, along with snacks to munch on throughout the day. Being a person who doesn't think of food until I'm hungry, it's hard to plan that far ahead. Wendy's is definitely more convenient. It's actually easier for me to skip the meal than to plan ahead and bring something healthy.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that fat people are th elast socialy acceptable peer group to abuse.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that everyone wants to obscure their own contribution to their own situation by taking on the role of a victim. Who is "abusing" fat people? They presumably do have free will, and their caloric intake/caloric expenditure ratio presumably does have at least a passing relationship with their weight, no?
You can't ever prove causation--it's an inference. It isn't written in really small words on viruses and bacteria that they cause disease, but from the high correlation between their presence and disease, we infer that they are the causative agent. We are aware than not all correlation involves causation--thanks for pointing out the obvious--but the task of thinking people is to figure out the cases in which causation can reliably be inferred.
Well, if you have 80% more body mass for your heart to pump blood to, your heart has to work harder. That doesn't seem like a conspiracy. I agree that dieting doesn't work, because diets by their nature are temporary. You have to change how you look at food. Food shouldn't be recreation. That's hard to do, because hell, I like to eat. But all the thin people I know pretty much eat for survival. A plate of brownies doesn't interest them a bit, whereas for me it's a torment and takes actual willpower to resist. If I stay away from stuff like that I'm okay, but temptation is a bitch. I envy the people who aren't tempted because they don't really like sweets.
Well, if GM crops push out non-GM owned by you on your own land, you can sue the designers. If someone's non-GM crops push out your GM crops, you can sue the designer. That would be God, per the 90% of the population that believes in Him. Good luck with that. I hear the appeals process leaves a bit to be desired.
If GM crops nudge out the conventional ones, eventually we'll be in a position where a company can starve millions of people to death at will. Legally. And since capitalism essentially equates morality with legality and profitability, who will really argue with them? People really, really need to watch The Corporation. I'm all about making a buck, but we really, really need re re-evaluate what we let corporations get away with. Do even the most materialistic among us really want a private corporation owning not only the food, but the capacity of the plants to reproduce?
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As for this "left wing evangelism," it matters to me whether a candidate favors magic over science as an explanation. If a candidate was "skeptical" of the germ theory (it's only a theory!) and wanted "alternative ideas" discussed in school, wouldn't that concern you? Science matters, and candiates' views on science matters.
This issue only works for the left wing to the extent that it does because the right wing is dependent on the vote of the evangelicals, who are largely creationist. It's unfortunate that one party is beholden to a group that is so hostile to science, but hey, politics makes strange bedfellows. Either way, it isn't the left wing's fault that the other side goes to such great lengths to make themselves look silly on this issue. Jettison the fundies from the party, and they won't be an embarassment. But then again, you won't get anyone elected because they're such a large percentage of the Republican vote. Not an easy option. I really do wish the Republicans would build a party on actualy conservativism, rather than what they have now, because I really am very (fiscally) conservative.
I could vote for a Goldwater small-government conservative, but not for a messianic neoconservative "let's reshape the world" party like they have now. Right now I'm reduced to voting for the party I consider least likely to believe in torture. As a citizen, this is not my proudest moment when it comes to my country.
of this line of reasoning. Stop using the internet, for god's sake, because the government funded its development. Don't use any road that isn't privately owned. Extrapolate that through the rest of your activities, and let me know how that works out for you.
Yes, because saying "I don't believe God exists, because there is no reason to believe that" is just as arrogant as saying "I don't believe Santa exists, because there is no reason to believe that." Non-belief in Santa/elves/bigfoot is just as logically untenable in non-belief in God. But when you don't believe in those other things, people don't suddenly act as if you're claiming to be omniscient. When it comes to not believing in anything else (ESP, alien abductions, nessie, etc) we know that people just mean "I see no credible reason to believe in this, ergo I don't believe in this." Suddenly when the noun is "God," then everything changes and someone pretends that the speaker is claiming to know everything. They aren't, and it's obvious. You can't prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't real, but you would't lament someone's arrogance for not believing in His Noodliness.
How many SF movies have you seen where "it" (i.e. an individual) evolved, or the creatures evolved within the few hours/days covered by the show? Evolution is a good examle of a horrible trend. And then you have the X-Men, "the next step in human evolution" etc. At least people are just ignorant of physics--they actively know and believe things that are false when it comes to evolution. Movies are make-believe (as are comic books, etc) and I'd guess they've always worked against real-life knowledge by being more entertaining and fun than, well, reality. Do you think movies like The Day After Tomorrow really help public knowledge of environmental concerns? Movies always suck when it comes to science.
I agree that corporations have no morals. They'd be killing homeless people for their organs if it was profitable and they could get away with it. My argument was that we should not allow this level of obligation, not that comapnies don't want it.
If GE sold a coffee maker that magically permitted only GE-brand coffee filters, no one would give you a moral lecture for using a workaround and using non-GE filters. It's your coffee maker. If GM sold cars that accepted only GM-designed bolts, no one would lecture you for using an adapter or changing out the bolt thingy so you could use whatever bolts you wanted.
It would never occur to anyone to be so damned stupid as to think that GE or GM or any other company has a moral claim to dictate how you use the product you already paid for--unless it's a video game console, or otherwise involves a computer or, God forbid, the internet. These are apparently magical, and are not subject to the same common-sense, well-known principles by which we have conducted business since, well, forever.
People love to attribute necessity to choice. I just have difficulty believing that all those teen boys chose not to have sex with all those girls who didn't want them.
The "safety" concerns about sex aren't really safety concerns. It's moral, but they're stuck in a world where people roll their eyes and laugh if you moralize like that ol' time religion. So they disguise their moralizing as a concern for safety. Ironically, this shows a lack of integrity, which is morally concerning to me. Why should I trust someone who would misrepresent their motives?
Another cool way to create hierarchical TOCs in PDF files is to use pdftex--the /section, /subsection, and similar tags create a collapsible TOC. The only reason I prefer OpenOffice is that you can't copy and paste gobs of text from the web into a LaTeX editor and keep the links intact. If I'm creating my own document from scratch, I'd prefer to use LaTeX. Except for tables. But that tangent is larger than my original point, so nevermind...
I'm hoping that someone makes a print-to-pdf program that does some mojo to preserve the hyperlinks, but as of yet I've never heard of one, and until I do then OpenOffice (or Google docs, which also works for this purpose) is far better than pdfCreator or whatever.
I have 13 and 15 year old kids, both of whom want laptops. They aren't getting a $1200 Macbook. They aren't even getting a $600 laptop. It'll get left at a friend's house, on the bus, or dropped. It may not, but it may. At $200 or so, it wouldn't kill me if they lost it, though I'd be irritated. At $600 or even $400, it would piss me off and they wouldn't get another one. Price points do matter.
Yes, it can be done. But what if WiFi is your only internet connection? I want to buy the laptop, drop in Knoppix or Debian, and surf the web at the library or whatever. Right now, I can't, even with Linux Mint.
I don't think the ACLU has sued to undermine the other Amendments--those poorly-reasoned arguments were probably just in response to people asking why they didn't fight for the 2nd Amendment. They have also said, I believe, that they don't fight for the 2nd Amendment because the NRA serves to do that. Without the ACLU, the other 9 amendments would have no champion at all. They are precisely 9 times as valuable as the NRA. I do value what the NRA does, but please don't make the ACLU into a gun-control organization. Some members may agree with gun control (not sure on that one), but their modus operandi is to sue to limit government power, not to increase it, even when it comes to firearms.
Seriously, I wish the ACLU did support the 2nd Amendment as well, but they work they do is no less valuable for their blindness to that one Amendment. The NRA generally does good work too, though there are only 1/9 as committed to the Bill of Rights as the ACLU.
Reasonable expectation of privacy aside, not many people want to live in a society where every movement is tracked and logged. And that is where this will end up. If we're okay with the police doing it via automobiles, it will progress to traffic lights and other places, and eventually the whereabouts of every auto (or every license plate) will be tracked. No big deal, you say? What happens when it gets hacked, or someone sells the data to insurance companies, and so on?
But I'm guessing this falls on deaf ears. Some people just don't see the value of freedom, and nothing I can say is going to change that. Totalitarianism doesn't develop because of bad people trying to take away freedom; it exists because people in that society don't care about freedom enough to preserve it.
That is not an exaggeration. I've had people pick up a book I was reading, turn it over and over looking for the library sticker, open it up and see my name pencilled on the title page, and say "You bought this book? Is it for a class or something?" Most of these people top out at having a few dog-eared Steven King or Tom Clancy mass-market paperbacks lying around the house. If you're reading Proust, how do you explain what it's about to a person who told you yesterday that Metallica lyrics are "really deep"? He's not stupid, not a bad person, but there is precious little common ground to work with here.
I agree that there are some for whom the genetic component is too strong. I run 3-4 times a week and can run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes. I work with a guy who runs once every few months and can run the same distance in about 9.5 minutes. He's also much thinner than me, though he eats two Whopper cheesburgers at a sitting. Genetics do play a role. But if I were 40 pounds heavier (which I have been) and sedentary, eating at McDonalds every day would undermine any attempts to blame it on genetics. Our own actions do have an influence on our lives.
I'd guess you were joking, but hanging out with dumb people makes you dumb. The jokes you share, the vocabulary you use, the activities you participate in, are all shared with your friends. If you're smart but hang out with dumb people, your intellect will get less exercise because you will dumb down your conversation. You will use simpler, less nuanced arguments--you may just be left with slogans and ad hominem attacks to make your point. You'll rely more on TV to inform you, and less on reading, which is a cerebral, more solitary experience. The company you keep is normative, like it or not. Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, and you will become smarter. This doesn't mean you'll discover cold fusion, but the idea is still sound.
This is not to say that anyone else is to blame because we're surrounded by convenient and bad-for-you food, but eating healthy requires you to think ahead. Salads aren't filling, sorry. Rabbit food sucks. But as long as I remember to stock tuna and other low-cal stuff, I'm okay. The healthiest people I know cook their own food the night before and bring it in in cute little containers, along with snacks to munch on throughout the day. Being a person who doesn't think of food until I'm hungry, it's hard to plan that far ahead. Wendy's is definitely more convenient. It's actually easier for me to skip the meal than to plan ahead and bring something healthy.
You can't ever prove causation--it's an inference. It isn't written in really small words on viruses and bacteria that they cause disease, but from the high correlation between their presence and disease, we infer that they are the causative agent. We are aware than not all correlation involves causation--thanks for pointing out the obvious--but the task of thinking people is to figure out the cases in which causation can reliably be inferred.
Well, if you have 80% more body mass for your heart to pump blood to, your heart has to work harder. That doesn't seem like a conspiracy. I agree that dieting doesn't work, because diets by their nature are temporary. You have to change how you look at food. Food shouldn't be recreation. That's hard to do, because hell, I like to eat. But all the thin people I know pretty much eat for survival. A plate of brownies doesn't interest them a bit, whereas for me it's a torment and takes actual willpower to resist. If I stay away from stuff like that I'm okay, but temptation is a bitch. I envy the people who aren't tempted because they don't really like sweets.
Well, if GM crops push out non-GM owned by you on your own land, you can sue the designers. If someone's non-GM crops push out your GM crops, you can sue the designer. That would be God, per the 90% of the population that believes in Him. Good luck with that. I hear the appeals process leaves a bit to be desired.
If GM crops nudge out the conventional ones, eventually we'll be in a position where a company can starve millions of people to death at will. Legally. And since capitalism essentially equates morality with legality and profitability, who will really argue with them? People really, really need to watch The Corporation. I'm all about making a buck, but we really, really need re re-evaluate what we let corporations get away with. Do even the most materialistic among us really want a private corporation owning not only the food, but the capacity of the plants to reproduce?