Try being a doctor who is skeptical of the germ theory. Or an astronomer who believes in a geocentric solar system. Or a nuclear physicist who doesn't believe in the atomic theory. All would ge greeted with scorn and derision, and all would consider themselves to be the free-thinking pioneers and the others to be sad group-thinking sheeple.
That being said, I have to call BS on the "outright hatred" part of your post. Outright hatred is what motivates the Shiittes and Sunnies to kill one another, and it shows a lack of perspective to use that term so cavalierly. Me thinking that you're a dingbat for scorning modern science isn't outright hatred. And generally when the death-threats start happening, it's the scientists receiving them from the reactionary conservatives, not the other way around. Galileo didn't threaten the Pope with torture. In the Dover trial, the ones advocating the teaching of evolution and the judge who ruled in their favor were the ones receiving, not making, the death threats.
climatology is probably the hardest field to do real science in today
Which means that you think that mainstream climatology, i.e. the climatology that has shown global warming to be affected by human activity, isn't real science. Just because someone pops up who doesn't like what science has to say about evolution, global warming, the age of the earth, or the heliocentric solar system doens't mean that "real science" is suddenly difficult or even politicized--it just means that the kooks don't want to accept what science has found.
Science is still science, and the politicization caused by the right wing doesn't negate, or even call into question, the validity of the science. You're mistaking publicity for actual controversy. The controversy is in the media and in the minds of the naysayers, while the scientific community keeps chugging along, studying the environment as best they can.
Don't believe the hype--the climatological community has come to the conclusion that anthropocentric global warming is real. You don't have to believe climatologists about about climatology, and you don't have to believe the mathematicians that pi has infinite digits. The point of my post is not that you must believe them, but that you're mistakenly thinking that a controversy external to the scientific community invalidates the work of the scientific community.
I will build my next machine via Newegg or Mwave. Because of where I live system76 won't ship to me, and there aren't any mom n pop stores to buy from. And I'll still be taking a risk because I don't know what motherboards are supported by Linux. Boards today only have two PCI slots, so I can't add a sound card, network card, and also a video capture card and so on.
But I agree that the Linux fans here may be overestimating how important their purchases are to Dell. Dell cares about corporate and government contracts for thousands of desktops. Joe Schmoe buying a single $500 desktop and tying up the phone because his webcam won't work with Mandriva would probably be a lot more trouble than his business was worth.
No exceptions, no "most of the time" situation, no "power users only" weasel words. Config files and command lines are OK for developers, but not for mainstream users -- end of story.
There is a very wide range of experience and knowledge between developers and what you're thinking of as mainstream users. I'm not a developer. My command-line use is limited, and usually I have to Google for what I want to do and copy/paste into the terminal. But even knowing as little as I do, the command line is often still faster than the GUI, and what's more the command line is a string of text that I can save and run again later. I have LaTeX commands saved to a file that are completely cryptic to me, but I found them on a web-page somewhere and I know that if I put them at the top of my.tex file then they do what I want.
I agree that Linux will never reach the mainstream, and I agree that it's at least partly for the reason you give. But Linux shouldn't be dumbed down in an effort to win over people whose cardinal demand is that they not be expected to learn anything. Should things be made easier? Yes, of course. But Linux is powerful because of, not despite, the command line.
K3B is great, Kile is great, but if we consider these to be the point of Linux then we're stuck thinking that all Linux has to offer is that it isn't Windows. But it's the command-line tools like grep, sed, find, and most importantly the ability to pipe one into the other creatively, that makes Linux worth using at all. If the GUI tools and eye candy were all Linux offered, I'd jump ship immediately. Even though I'm no command-line expert, I dumped Windows because I wanted to use an OS that was built with that philosophy.
As far as fixing stuff goes, I agree with you. But Debian and Debian-derivative users will kneecap you if you make them install software via something other than apt and its gui frontends. Overall, I think it'd be best if Dell just made their hardware Linux-compatible and let the community worry about the distros. A Dell Distro isn't going to have the packages of Fedora or Debian. I'd be annoyed as hell if I bought a snazzy Dell Linux system to find that they had their own special distro and package-management software, and I couldn't install, say, LaTeX or GNU screen because they hadn't gotten around to supporting those programs.
What's wrong with the existing open source series from Dell, provided there is a genuine reduction in price for the absence of MS software?
Well, to be fair to Dell, they're charged much less than the shelf price for Windows. So the actual price difference from their end may only be $30-40 dollars. That's a guess, so please don't shoot me if I'm wrong. But also, they now have to set up a different production channel, train people on Linux, hammer out a plan for sales and support, and so on. This all costs money, which they have to recoup from the buyers. So we can't just look at the sticker price for Windows and expect a Linux PC to be that much less than a Windows PC.
I can choose my own distro (Ubuntu, naturally) but all I really want is for Dell (or anyone else) to sell computers with hardware that is supported by Linux. Release the drivers, or at least the specs, and let the Linux community make their distros compatible with your machine. Yes, I'd love it if Dell offered the top 25 distros on Distrowatch installed and supported, but that isn't practical for anyone. But right now I have a Sony desktop with a soundchip that is unsupported by ALSA. All I want is supported hardware. Though I agree that the business model of selling Linux-installed machines is a bit questionable (the only ones who care can install it themselves anyway), the business model of selling machines that CAN use Linux can't possibly be bad, can it?
This is such a strange mindset. People want a gui developed to accomplish a task that a program already has been written for, and if they don't get their gui frontend then they won't use it at all because they think that the command line is too primitive/old/whatever. I'm not saying that you're wrong, only that I'm always befuddled that people are like that. By refusing to use the command line at all you're giving up what makes Linux so useful. If all Linux had going for it was that it wasn't Windows, I'd just keep pirating Windows. But Windows lacks the bash shell, pipes, grep, sed, cron, perl, uniq, and the dozens of other tools that make the command line so powerful. There are sometimes gui standins, but gui programs can't be piped through each other. Even something as dead-simple as ls -A | grep "foo" > foolist.txt -- how the hell do I do that in a gui? I'm an idiot, and I can do that on Linux, and could since the first day I played with it. I still have no idea how to even print a directory listing in Windows, and I've been using it since 3.11. Which is easier again?
"Republican" is a political party, not a political philosophy. So while there are classical conservatives, there are no classical Republicans. At any point in the history of the party (or any party) you will find it comprised of a coalition of disparate groups, each of whose members think that they are the only ones who really represent the real party. Many people think of, say, Goldwater as the quintessential "real" Republican, but others will think of George Will, William F. Buckley, etc. There is no single political position that is "classical Republican."
And your asinine insults aside, Coulter and Limbaugh (along with O'Reilly) are modern conservatism, and their fans share control of the Republican Party with Dobson and the Evangelicals. More charitable liberals want to consider them extremist wackjobs, but that's where the mainstream is right now. The libertarian-leaning Republicans don't get any airtime, don't sell nearly as many books, and basically no one listens to them.
Well, when Democrats are in office, plenty of Republicans distrust government too. When Clinton was in office I saw that stupid Jefferson "tree of liberty" quote on blogs all the time. It was only after Bush's election (so to speak) that they decided that it was treason to question the executive branch. Strangely, their understanding of the role of Congress in deciding on whether or not the nation wages war also changed with the recent election. When Clinton was in office, Republicans were quite adamant that Congress had the authority to prevent the President from going to war, and even to use the power of the purse to force him to withdraw troops. Of course after the Democrats took a majority in the houses of Congress, Article I Section 8 of the Constitution suddenly changed and none of that is true anymore. If Clinton or Obama is elected in 2008, the Republicans will once again become government-distrusting quasi-anarchists, and every act of the executive and legislative branches will be a horrible rape of lady liberty. It'll be pretty nauseating to watch.
I fear that some of your generalizations don't map that well to reality. Part of the problem is that Democrat isn't synonymous with liberal, and Republican doesn't necessarily mean conservative. The parties are political coalitions of sometimes antithetical elements, like the libertarian-leaning Republicans and the Christian Reconstructionist Republicans.
A classical republican believes that the rights of the individual is more important than the group:
Unless they're gay, or a drug user, or a non-Christian. Look at the Republican resistance to medical marijuana and other decriminilization efforts--these efforts have the voters behind them (as in democracy), but the Repubs still will not give an inch. They are also more than willing to subject everyone to their definition of a "Christian nation" even though we aren't all Christian. So those individual rights are not actually sacrosanct--it all depends on whether the rights you want to exercise are in alignment with the agenda of the social conservatives. Conservatives are no more respectful of individual liberty than liberals. When you get Limbaugh and Coulter to side with ending the drug war and legalizing prostitution, I'll be convinced. They're just as power-hungry and totalitarian as their own worst suspicions about Hillary Clinton.
Agnosticism is a subset of atheism. Dictionary.com defines theism as:
The belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation (distinguished from deism).
belief in the existence of a god or gods (opposed to atheism).
The "a" at the end of "atheism" means "not". If you lack a belief in God or god (singular or plural) then you are not a theist, meaning you lack theistic belief, meaning you are an atheist. There are atheists who claim to have positive knowledge that there is no God, and maybe those are the ones you take issue with. I am not one of those atheists. And I can accurately say I "don't know" if there's a God to the same extent I can say I "don't know" if ESP or pyrokinesis or reincarnation are real. But I find that to be a bit on the hair-splitting side, so I just call myself an atheist, as in "one who lacks theistic belief".
But I'm a bit precise in what I say (or I try to be), and when I say "I don't believe in x," I mean precisely that I do not have a positive belief that x is true, not "I know x is false." It might be because I consider x to be unknowable, or I consider the question meaningless, or I find no credible reason to believe in it.
But apparently my position isn't that of the atheists you take offense with, so other than quibbling over terminology (why does it always come down to that?) there isn't much point for either of us. Neither of us believe, both will burn equally if the Christian theology is correct, and that's about the gist of it.
Well I wasn't really trying to refute you, only trying to add some context. If Linux, BSD, DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista, OSX, and other OSs have essentially similar problems and then you come along and bitch exclusively about the problem in Linux, then your complaints, though technically valid, lack perspective. I'm not a linux fanboy--actually I've dissuaded a couple of people from using it, and I am noncommital when curious people ask me if it's "better". I responded in the way I did not because I think Linux is great but because I disagree with your logic.
I don't really care if you use Linux or not. There are definitely some irritating Linux zealots out there, as there are BSD zealots, Mac fanboys, etc. Not to mention all the Windows snobs who look down on Linux because it isn't exactly like Windows. My favorite among those are the ones who would rather drink human blood than lower themselves to use a command line. But we're approaching holy war territory here, so I'll sign off before anyone smells blood.
I could say, "No, installing printers in Linux (or at least Ubuntu) isn't difficult--here, I'll show you..." but that might still qualify as "hard" to them. By "not hard" many people actually mean "magic". Some distros are harder than others, and not everyone can run Linux From Scratch.
But talking about the "linux is hard" problem is a lot like discussing politics with a zealot. Republicans bleat about the moral failings of Democrats, but don't notice that of Republicans. Democrats are the same way with Republicans. Similarly, Windows people will say "Linux is hard" while mentally editing out how difficult Windows printer installation is. People routinely have Windows hardware problems. I've read product reviews in magazines and on websites that concluded with "we just couldn't get it to work". Does mentioning this cure the Linux problems? Of course not, but if you're comparing two things but refusing to acknowledge the failings of one of those things, you're sabotaging the entire discussion. Windows has much worse hardware support than Linux. My Toshiba laptop needs about 7-8 WIndows drivers installed every time I reinstall Win2K. Ubuntu recognizes everything.
I do wish Linux distros were more standardized in software installation. I would love to run VMware player and Truecrypt on Damn Small Linux or some other tiny distro, but I can only get those programs to install on the more mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Fedora. But also I think the flexibility of Linux leads us to believe that it (meaning the distro we're running right this second) should be able to do simply everything, when really that's too much to ask. There isn't a Windows version to compare to DSL or Knoppix or Ubuntu, and the things I can do already with Linux aren't even part of the conversation with Windows. I think this flexibility just leads to higher expectations, and unrealistic disappointment when I can conceive of something that can't I can't manage to do with the distro I'm looking at.
You've captured perfectly why I will not seek a graduate degree in literature or philosophy. My professors have encouraged me to go to grad school, but I don't want to spend that much money and time on something I love only to have a job where I have to face a room full of business majors who think the subject is boring and worthless. I'm sure there have always been philistines (even before there were Philistines), but I'm not going to try to convince them that Sartre or Death of a Salesman are subjects they should care about. I'll work a regular job and do what I love on the side.
I don't know why anyone would teach. I've heard all the reasons, granted, but having been the one who proofs his coworkers' papers before they turn them in, I don't see what it is I would be teaching. I can't make them intellectually curious. I can't even get through their anti-intellectualism. All I can do is correct their mechanics and clarify a sentence or two. What's the point to that? If you have intellectual curiosity, you don't need me, and if you don't, then you still don't need me. The future CEOs of America are going to look down on me anyway because I'll never be as rich as them.
It may not work that way for the peons, but for those higher in the hierarchy seniority, networking, etc are key. Why do retired generals and congressmen get cake jobs making millions as soon as they leave public "service"? People from both political parties walk in and out of high-paying jobs all the time, making vastly more than the wage-workers who keep the doors open. Politics aside, Exxon just payed an executive $400 million dollars as part of a severance package--was he just a hard worker or something?
Face it, in the private sector as well as the public, being connected, being at the top, is a self-perpetuating thing. Once you're in, they have to pay you to leave, and they usually pay well. And this is ignoring the obvious nepotism, sexual favors, and ass-kissing that we all know is pervasive. I like capitalism too, but we need to kill the myths about capitalism. Bill Gates didn't get to be the world's richest man by making a better product, and the corporate ratrace is only nominally a meritocracy.
That not believing in God means you burn in hell isn't the way I "feel". That's basic doctrine. Either you accept Christ as your savior, explicitly, and have faith, or you don't. Those that don't, burn in an eternal lake of fire. Because God loves you. No, I couldn't figure it out either. But either way, I don't "feel" that way. My views come from my experience, and no I was never molested, abused, or tortured by Christians (or anyone else). But my point about Christians not noticing that others in that movie were tortured and crucified, and really only being moved by Christ's ordeal because he died for their sins, stands.
Once I call them on it of course they say "no, I was moved by that, too" but the fact is they had to think hard to even remember what I was talking about. It didn't register, because for them it isn't the point of the movie. That Christ died for their (and my, and your) sins, and that by accepting this we get into heaven, is the point. The tragedy of torture and execution being normalized to the point of hiring people to do it--that doesn't register. If you want to refute me, fine, I can live with that. But please don't go off on the "I'm sorry you're so bitter" angle while ignoring my actual points.
I'm not bitter and I don't hate Christians. I just don't consider them to be inherently moral or decent. They're people, just like everyone else, only they believe that everyone who doesn't believe in their God deserves to roast for all eternity. They're stuck with having to say either that the unbelievers deserve it, or that God is unjust. Tough choice when your own soul is on the line. How does God deal with open rebellion again? Oh, that's right.
I'm very reluctant to tie intelligence to religious belief. But... when the movie Gattaca came out, we were arguing at work over genetic engineering and so on. I said that if I could take a pill to increase my IQ by 50 points, I'd take it without any ethical concerns, and I wished it was on the market.
A co-worker said "but since smarter people tend to be less religious, wouldn't you be taking religion from people by giving them this pill?" The thing was, I'm an atheist, which he knew, and he was a biblical-literalist evangelical fundamentalist. It was very very hard not to laugh at him. Everyone in the room just tiptoed away from the subject. It was weird that he could say that and yet not make the obvious inference.
Anyway, smart people sometimes do believe in God. And even if your percentage is correct, you are hurting your cause by pointing it out because it's impossible to insulate yourself from accusations of arrogance and elitism.
OTOH, my (anecdotal) experience is that many teens question and even deny God, but find as they become an adult that they do have a need for belief. I think it's a phase that many teens go through, part of the process of rejecting authority and finding themselve
Or maybe as they become adults, admitting atheism has consequences. I know sleazy women who will do vile things on the first date but who wouldn't date an avowed atheist. I know bosses who will lie and self-promote shamelessly, but who wouldn't trust an overtly atheistic subordinate. I've known evangelical teachers who marked down the papers of a formly A+ student who became a C student starting on the day they talked about their atheism in class. No, I wasn't the student--I learned early to keep my head down.
But remember that George Bush Sr. said that atheists shouldn't even be considered citizens. It's okay to dislike us just because we don't share your faith. Adults have bills to pay, and that "integrity" thing that was so invigorating and principled at 16 becomes a liability when you have to pay the rent. Are they lying? Some of them. Most are rationalizing so they can be seen being just like everybody else.
Also, people become more sensitive to hurting their parents' feelings when they become parents too, or in that age range. I know one woman who said her mother wouldn't talk to her anymore, that her entire family wouldn't welcome her the same way, if she became "a Darwinist." No, I'm not making that up. So the dynamics involved here may be more complex than adults "needing" faith. Some no doubt do (I don't) but the stigma issue shouldn't be underestimated.
The Humanist ethics considered the norm in Western Countries are the direct outgrowth of Christian morals.
There are plenty of other morals to choose from. Choose them if you want to be free of Christian taint.
Are you suggesting that people only had morality after Jesus? The Greeks and Romans (and Jews and Chinese and Persians and so on) didn't love their kids, cherish their spouses, honor their parents, and have general feelings and observances about right and wrong? The Iliad is older than the Bible, and I remember some morality in there. Didn't Plato touch on this a time or two? "Treat others as you would be treated" predates Christianity by several hundred years. Are you really trying to claim the very existence of morality for your religion?
Even the "humanist" ethics came from a rediscovery of the Greeks and Romans (i.e. the classical world), which predated Christianity.
And all your holidays are pagan. Christmas, Easter, the whole bit. The virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection after three days, and other details all existed in religions older than Christianity. So I guess you have to choose something other than Christianity if you want to be free of pagan taint.
If you want to think you're going to heaven and I'm going to burn, fine, but stop thinking that Christianity sprang up as a completely new belief system when Jesus came along. You didn't exactly invent much, just killed off all the competition once you got the government on your side.
As far as I'm concerned, Christianity has actually harmed morality. Many Christians believe that you are saved not by works, but by faith. So whether or not you "walk with God" depends not on whether or not you help the poor, show kindness, or are decent, but purely on whether you have accepted Jesus as your savior. Being decent in my book is linked to what you DO, not what you BELIEVE. I don't care if you talk to Jesus and He loves you. I care if you're honest, decent, compassionate, humble, and so on. But to many Christians, those are incidental, and the real issue is whether or not you have accepted Jesus. I hate when evangelicals come to my door, because they just ask "have you accepted Jesus?" If someone asked "do you want to go work at a homeless shelter with me this weekend?" I might respect their religion a bit. But I've never, ever been asked anything by an evangelical that relates to anything other than doctrine. They're just trying to get to heaven, and that isn't a very elevated ethic. It's inherently selfish.
You want to know what nauseates me? In the movie Passion of the Christ, that table where Jesus was scourged was heavily gouged and blood-soaked, and the men whipping him were casual about it, meaning they did this all the time. This was their JOB--people made a living doing this. What made me cry (yes I cried) was this casual, commonplace cruelty of man towards man--that this is how we treat each other, and that this is acceptable behavior, by which you can even make a living. It's that normal. But not one Christian I've spoken to even noticed this scene. When I asked them, they were puzzled, and had to think about it for a bit before they could even recall this detail. ALL THEY CARED ABOUT was that Jesus suffered and died FOR THEM. That this suffering and dying was commonplace, that others were scourged and crucified that day, meant nothing to them. Yeah, Christians are moral. If you're saving THEIR butt from the fire, they'll shed a tear and sing your praises. Otherwise, it's beneath notice.
I can't say I'm really an atheist - because e^(i*pi)+1=0 brings together too many scientifically observable facets of the Universe for me to believe it could be accidental
100% of the observed universes have conditions conducive to the development of observers. Meaning, all the universes that have sentient beings (or even nonsentient ones) gawking at their magnificience also have conditions, which we observe, analyze, and state as "laws of physics", that allow those beings to come about.
Even if the universe was just a never-ending random shuffling of atoms, eventually there'd be one (in this finite search-space) that was conducive to the existence of observers, and the observers would more than likely make the observation that the current arrangement of atoms, the one that allowed them to be there, was too improbable. It is, but just as probable as each of the others.
You can call it an "accident," but it had to be some way, and this way is the only way anyone would ever witness.
Atheists believe in a lack of supreme being, without any prove that that being doesn't exist.
Then by your definition (which I don't share) I am indeed an agnostic. I'm agnostic about God to the same way I'm agnostic about the Easter Bunny, leprechauns, and magic elves. I don't have any proof they don't exist, but I'm just going to go out on a limb and say it's silly to believe in them.
Your definition is artificially structured to make atheists look like they're making claims of omniscience. When we hear someone say "I don't believe in ghosts|reincarnation|ESP|alien abduction|bigfoot," we know darned good and well that they aren't saying, "I know everything, and I can conclusively say that these things do not exist anywhere in the universe." We KNOW they aren't laying claims to omniscience. We KNOW what they're saying is "I don't see any credible reason to believe in any of these things." I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
But if you put the God word into it, suddenly people like you want to leap out and say "Aha! Atheists are arrogant because they think they know everything!" You using juvenile and absurd arguments doesn't make me arrogant, sorry. I don't believe in God in the same way I don't believe in Santa or faeries, or Thor or Shiva. I don't claim to know everything, but I can say "I don't believe in God" without magically becoming arrogant and closed-minded. Stop trying to shift the burden of evidence to me.
It doesn't surprise me that POWs attribute their survival to a belief in God. People routinely attribute survival, a narrowly-averted accident, recovery from illness, catching a fly ball, a baby, or their team winning the Superbowl to God, "a miracle," or something along those lines. Yep, no ifs about it.
My question is--what about all the POWs who believed in God, but still died from the abuse, malnutrition, or disease? Didn't they have enough belief in God? My guess is that people are just uncomfortable attributing their survival to chance, genetic advantage (body fat, disease resistance) or something beyond their control. So they attribute it to God.
It wouldn't be the first time the scientific community has been wrong
So you're faulting science because scientists can learn, and tend to revise their theories in light of new facts? Interesting. Should we pull all medicine from the shelves, stop air travel, turn off the electricity, and wander into the jungle, all because scientists are fallible? Isn't that a basic human trait? No one said "scientists are never and have never been wrong." What they said was, "this is what climatologists are saying about climate change."
The obvious example here is when everyone was worried about the ice ages returning a few decades back.
Everyone wasn't. A few people were, but the scientific community was not in consensus because the data was, at that time, inconclusive. The thing about scientists is that they collect more data, do more studies, and form better models. That process improved the scientific understanding of climatology, and moved the entire climatological community to the consensus that anthropocentric global warming is real and compelling.
That global warming has been politicized doesn't invalidate the science, any more than me being upset over the germ theory would invalidate that. I defer to physicists on physics, mathematicians on mathematics, and climatologists on climatology. Are you suggesting I should reject what climatologists say about climatology, just because of a political controversy? That seems a bit silly, especially considering the stakes involved. The "politicization" is unfortunate, but it's not my fault that the left wing noticed environmentalism first and the conservatives feel duty bound to oppose everything liberals do, even when the science is clear on the subject.
I work in an ER, and you're full of it. Doctors routinely throw medicines at an illness until something works. If it responded to anti-inflammatories, then that tells us what it was. If it responded to beta-blockers, then that tells us what it was. Medicine is not an exact science, and it is often a process of elimination, often conducted by seeing what treatments are effective and which are not.
And you will never, ever, ever, ever know with 100% certainy exactly what percentage of global warming is caused by human action, much less be able to break every human action down into a chart that shows how much impact that action had on the environment. We do know that carbon dioxide raises temperature in scientific experiments, and we do know that we release a vast amount of carbon dioxide into our environment. If you test something in a lab and it's poisonous, you give it to mice and it kills them, you can't turn around and say (with any intellectual integrity) "Well, we don't really KNOW what would happen if we poured a million gallons into a stream that a villiage gets its drinking water from."
CO2 reduction is one of the few things that we could improve that would have an effect. Would it be a panacea, and give every child a full belly and a pony? World peace? No, none of the above. But to say "We should do absolutely nothing until we know absolutely everything" is to effectively say we should do nothing. It may sound clever, but to people who think that our environment matters, you don't sound like the skeptic you see yourself as, but as someone who just thinks he's too clever to be helpful.
Great. You win. We keep studying. I don't care if the entire community of climatologists have come to the consensus that anthropocentric global warming, and the contributions of carbon dioxide, are unequivocal, unambiguous, and compelling. If you, a layman who has never worked in the field and who is not a climatologist, aren't convinced, then that's enough to convince me that we shouldn't trust the climatologists.
My question to you is--how much longer do we study this problem? How much longer do we scratch our collective chins and furrow our collective brows? If in five years, the climatologists are STILL saying the exact same thing they're saying NOW, will you be convinced? Mind you, oil companies and conservatives (who can't grant the evil liberals political capital by acknowledging that environmentalism is a legitimate and compelling issue) will still oppose the idea, right up the bitter end, and the media will STILL be breathlessly covering the "debate" as if the science wasn't firmly established. Would-be uber-skeptics on Slashdot will still be preening and saying "we can't be sure". But at what point will YOU be willing to believe the climatologists? Five years from now? Ten? Never? I need to know. At what point do you believe the climatologists on questions of climatology? This is important, so please get back to me.
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, I have to call BS on the "outright hatred" part of your post. Outright hatred is what motivates the Shiittes and Sunnies to kill one another, and it shows a lack of perspective to use that term so cavalierly. Me thinking that you're a dingbat for scorning modern science isn't outright hatred. And generally when the death-threats start happening, it's the scientists receiving them from the reactionary conservatives, not the other way around. Galileo didn't threaten the Pope with torture. In the Dover trial, the ones advocating the teaching of evolution and the judge who ruled in their favor were the ones receiving, not making, the death threats.
Which means that you think that mainstream climatology, i.e. the climatology that has shown global warming to be affected by human activity, isn't real science. Just because someone pops up who doesn't like what science has to say about evolution, global warming, the age of the earth, or the heliocentric solar system doens't mean that "real science" is suddenly difficult or even politicized--it just means that the kooks don't want to accept what science has found.
Science is still science, and the politicization caused by the right wing doesn't negate, or even call into question, the validity of the science. You're mistaking publicity for actual controversy. The controversy is in the media and in the minds of the naysayers, while the scientific community keeps chugging along, studying the environment as best they can.
Don't believe the hype--the climatological community has come to the conclusion that anthropocentric global warming is real. You don't have to believe climatologists about about climatology, and you don't have to believe the mathematicians that pi has infinite digits. The point of my post is not that you must believe them, but that you're mistakenly thinking that a controversy external to the scientific community invalidates the work of the scientific community.
But I agree that the Linux fans here may be overestimating how important their purchases are to Dell. Dell cares about corporate and government contracts for thousands of desktops. Joe Schmoe buying a single $500 desktop and tying up the phone because his webcam won't work with Mandriva would probably be a lot more trouble than his business was worth.
I agree that Linux will never reach the mainstream, and I agree that it's at least partly for the reason you give. But Linux shouldn't be dumbed down in an effort to win over people whose cardinal demand is that they not be expected to learn anything. Should things be made easier? Yes, of course. But Linux is powerful because of, not despite, the command line.
K3B is great, Kile is great, but if we consider these to be the point of Linux then we're stuck thinking that all Linux has to offer is that it isn't Windows. But it's the command-line tools like grep, sed, find, and most importantly the ability to pipe one into the other creatively, that makes Linux worth using at all. If the GUI tools and eye candy were all Linux offered, I'd jump ship immediately. Even though I'm no command-line expert, I dumped Windows because I wanted to use an OS that was built with that philosophy.
As far as fixing stuff goes, I agree with you. But Debian and Debian-derivative users will kneecap you if you make them install software via something other than apt and its gui frontends. Overall, I think it'd be best if Dell just made their hardware Linux-compatible and let the community worry about the distros. A Dell Distro isn't going to have the packages of Fedora or Debian. I'd be annoyed as hell if I bought a snazzy Dell Linux system to find that they had their own special distro and package-management software, and I couldn't install, say, LaTeX or GNU screen because they hadn't gotten around to supporting those programs.
I can choose my own distro (Ubuntu, naturally) but all I really want is for Dell (or anyone else) to sell computers with hardware that is supported by Linux. Release the drivers, or at least the specs, and let the Linux community make their distros compatible with your machine. Yes, I'd love it if Dell offered the top 25 distros on Distrowatch installed and supported, but that isn't practical for anyone. But right now I have a Sony desktop with a soundchip that is unsupported by ALSA. All I want is supported hardware. Though I agree that the business model of selling Linux-installed machines is a bit questionable (the only ones who care can install it themselves anyway), the business model of selling machines that CAN use Linux can't possibly be bad, can it?
This is such a strange mindset. People want a gui developed to accomplish a task that a program already has been written for, and if they don't get their gui frontend then they won't use it at all because they think that the command line is too primitive/old/whatever. I'm not saying that you're wrong, only that I'm always befuddled that people are like that. By refusing to use the command line at all you're giving up what makes Linux so useful. If all Linux had going for it was that it wasn't Windows, I'd just keep pirating Windows. But Windows lacks the bash shell, pipes, grep, sed, cron, perl, uniq, and the dozens of other tools that make the command line so powerful. There are sometimes gui standins, but gui programs can't be piped through each other. Even something as dead-simple as ls -A | grep "foo" > foolist.txt -- how the hell do I do that in a gui? I'm an idiot, and I can do that on Linux, and could since the first day I played with it. I still have no idea how to even print a directory listing in Windows, and I've been using it since 3.11. Which is easier again?
And your asinine insults aside, Coulter and Limbaugh (along with O'Reilly) are modern conservatism, and their fans share control of the Republican Party with Dobson and the Evangelicals. More charitable liberals want to consider them extremist wackjobs, but that's where the mainstream is right now. The libertarian-leaning Republicans don't get any airtime, don't sell nearly as many books, and basically no one listens to them.
Well, when Democrats are in office, plenty of Republicans distrust government too. When Clinton was in office I saw that stupid Jefferson "tree of liberty" quote on blogs all the time. It was only after Bush's election (so to speak) that they decided that it was treason to question the executive branch. Strangely, their understanding of the role of Congress in deciding on whether or not the nation wages war also changed with the recent election. When Clinton was in office, Republicans were quite adamant that Congress had the authority to prevent the President from going to war, and even to use the power of the purse to force him to withdraw troops. Of course after the Democrats took a majority in the houses of Congress, Article I Section 8 of the Constitution suddenly changed and none of that is true anymore. If Clinton or Obama is elected in 2008, the Republicans will once again become government-distrusting quasi-anarchists, and every act of the executive and legislative branches will be a horrible rape of lady liberty. It'll be pretty nauseating to watch.
- The belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation (distinguished from deism).
- belief in the existence of a god or gods (opposed to atheism).
The "a" at the end of "atheism" means "not". If you lack a belief in God or god (singular or plural) then you are not a theist, meaning you lack theistic belief, meaning you are an atheist. There are atheists who claim to have positive knowledge that there is no God, and maybe those are the ones you take issue with. I am not one of those atheists. And I can accurately say I "don't know" if there's a God to the same extent I can say I "don't know" if ESP or pyrokinesis or reincarnation are real. But I find that to be a bit on the hair-splitting side, so I just call myself an atheist, as in "one who lacks theistic belief".But I'm a bit precise in what I say (or I try to be), and when I say "I don't believe in x," I mean precisely that I do not have a positive belief that x is true, not "I know x is false." It might be because I consider x to be unknowable, or I consider the question meaningless, or I find no credible reason to believe in it.
But apparently my position isn't that of the atheists you take offense with, so other than quibbling over terminology (why does it always come down to that?) there isn't much point for either of us. Neither of us believe, both will burn equally if the Christian theology is correct, and that's about the gist of it.
I don't really care if you use Linux or not. There are definitely some irritating Linux zealots out there, as there are BSD zealots, Mac fanboys, etc. Not to mention all the Windows snobs who look down on Linux because it isn't exactly like Windows. My favorite among those are the ones who would rather drink human blood than lower themselves to use a command line. But we're approaching holy war territory here, so I'll sign off before anyone smells blood.
But talking about the "linux is hard" problem is a lot like discussing politics with a zealot. Republicans bleat about the moral failings of Democrats, but don't notice that of Republicans. Democrats are the same way with Republicans. Similarly, Windows people will say "Linux is hard" while mentally editing out how difficult Windows printer installation is. People routinely have Windows hardware problems. I've read product reviews in magazines and on websites that concluded with "we just couldn't get it to work". Does mentioning this cure the Linux problems? Of course not, but if you're comparing two things but refusing to acknowledge the failings of one of those things, you're sabotaging the entire discussion. Windows has much worse hardware support than Linux. My Toshiba laptop needs about 7-8 WIndows drivers installed every time I reinstall Win2K. Ubuntu recognizes everything.
I do wish Linux distros were more standardized in software installation. I would love to run VMware player and Truecrypt on Damn Small Linux or some other tiny distro, but I can only get those programs to install on the more mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Fedora. But also I think the flexibility of Linux leads us to believe that it (meaning the distro we're running right this second) should be able to do simply everything, when really that's too much to ask. There isn't a Windows version to compare to DSL or Knoppix or Ubuntu, and the things I can do already with Linux aren't even part of the conversation with Windows. I think this flexibility just leads to higher expectations, and unrealistic disappointment when I can conceive of something that can't I can't manage to do with the distro I'm looking at.
I don't know why anyone would teach. I've heard all the reasons, granted, but having been the one who proofs his coworkers' papers before they turn them in, I don't see what it is I would be teaching. I can't make them intellectually curious. I can't even get through their anti-intellectualism. All I can do is correct their mechanics and clarify a sentence or two. What's the point to that? If you have intellectual curiosity, you don't need me, and if you don't, then you still don't need me. The future CEOs of America are going to look down on me anyway because I'll never be as rich as them.
Face it, in the private sector as well as the public, being connected, being at the top, is a self-perpetuating thing. Once you're in, they have to pay you to leave, and they usually pay well. And this is ignoring the obvious nepotism, sexual favors, and ass-kissing that we all know is pervasive. I like capitalism too, but we need to kill the myths about capitalism. Bill Gates didn't get to be the world's richest man by making a better product, and the corporate ratrace is only nominally a meritocracy.
Once I call them on it of course they say "no, I was moved by that, too" but the fact is they had to think hard to even remember what I was talking about. It didn't register, because for them it isn't the point of the movie. That Christ died for their (and my, and your) sins, and that by accepting this we get into heaven, is the point. The tragedy of torture and execution being normalized to the point of hiring people to do it--that doesn't register. If you want to refute me, fine, I can live with that. But please don't go off on the "I'm sorry you're so bitter" angle while ignoring my actual points.
I'm not bitter and I don't hate Christians. I just don't consider them to be inherently moral or decent. They're people, just like everyone else, only they believe that everyone who doesn't believe in their God deserves to roast for all eternity. They're stuck with having to say either that the unbelievers deserve it, or that God is unjust. Tough choice when your own soul is on the line. How does God deal with open rebellion again? Oh, that's right.
A co-worker said "but since smarter people tend to be less religious, wouldn't you be taking religion from people by giving them this pill?" The thing was, I'm an atheist, which he knew, and he was a biblical-literalist evangelical fundamentalist. It was very very hard not to laugh at him. Everyone in the room just tiptoed away from the subject. It was weird that he could say that and yet not make the obvious inference.
Anyway, smart people sometimes do believe in God. And even if your percentage is correct, you are hurting your cause by pointing it out because it's impossible to insulate yourself from accusations of arrogance and elitism.
But remember that George Bush Sr. said that atheists shouldn't even be considered citizens. It's okay to dislike us just because we don't share your faith. Adults have bills to pay, and that "integrity" thing that was so invigorating and principled at 16 becomes a liability when you have to pay the rent. Are they lying? Some of them. Most are rationalizing so they can be seen being just like everybody else.
Also, people become more sensitive to hurting their parents' feelings when they become parents too, or in that age range. I know one woman who said her mother wouldn't talk to her anymore, that her entire family wouldn't welcome her the same way, if she became "a Darwinist." No, I'm not making that up. So the dynamics involved here may be more complex than adults "needing" faith. Some no doubt do (I don't) but the stigma issue shouldn't be underestimated.
Even the "humanist" ethics came from a rediscovery of the Greeks and Romans (i.e. the classical world), which predated Christianity.
And all your holidays are pagan. Christmas, Easter, the whole bit. The virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection after three days, and other details all existed in religions older than Christianity. So I guess you have to choose something other than Christianity if you want to be free of pagan taint.
If you want to think you're going to heaven and I'm going to burn, fine, but stop thinking that Christianity sprang up as a completely new belief system when Jesus came along. You didn't exactly invent much, just killed off all the competition once you got the government on your side.
As far as I'm concerned, Christianity has actually harmed morality. Many Christians believe that you are saved not by works, but by faith. So whether or not you "walk with God" depends not on whether or not you help the poor, show kindness, or are decent, but purely on whether you have accepted Jesus as your savior. Being decent in my book is linked to what you DO, not what you BELIEVE. I don't care if you talk to Jesus and He loves you. I care if you're honest, decent, compassionate, humble, and so on. But to many Christians, those are incidental, and the real issue is whether or not you have accepted Jesus. I hate when evangelicals come to my door, because they just ask "have you accepted Jesus?" If someone asked "do you want to go work at a homeless shelter with me this weekend?" I might respect their religion a bit. But I've never, ever been asked anything by an evangelical that relates to anything other than doctrine. They're just trying to get to heaven, and that isn't a very elevated ethic. It's inherently selfish.
You want to know what nauseates me? In the movie Passion of the Christ, that table where Jesus was scourged was heavily gouged and blood-soaked, and the men whipping him were casual about it, meaning they did this all the time. This was their JOB--people made a living doing this. What made me cry (yes I cried) was this casual, commonplace cruelty of man towards man--that this is how we treat each other, and that this is acceptable behavior, by which you can even make a living. It's that normal. But not one Christian I've spoken to even noticed this scene. When I asked them, they were puzzled, and had to think about it for a bit before they could even recall this detail. ALL THEY CARED ABOUT was that Jesus suffered and died FOR THEM. That this suffering and dying was commonplace, that others were scourged and crucified that day, meant nothing to them. Yeah, Christians are moral. If you're saving THEIR butt from the fire, they'll shed a tear and sing your praises. Otherwise, it's beneath notice.
Even if the universe was just a never-ending random shuffling of atoms, eventually there'd be one (in this finite search-space) that was conducive to the existence of observers, and the observers would more than likely make the observation that the current arrangement of atoms, the one that allowed them to be there, was too improbable. It is, but just as probable as each of the others.
You can call it an "accident," but it had to be some way, and this way is the only way anyone would ever witness.
Your definition is artificially structured to make atheists look like they're making claims of omniscience. When we hear someone say "I don't believe in ghosts|reincarnation|ESP|alien abduction|bigfoot," we know darned good and well that they aren't saying, "I know everything, and I can conclusively say that these things do not exist anywhere in the universe." We KNOW they aren't laying claims to omniscience. We KNOW what they're saying is "I don't see any credible reason to believe in any of these things." I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
But if you put the God word into it, suddenly people like you want to leap out and say "Aha! Atheists are arrogant because they think they know everything!" You using juvenile and absurd arguments doesn't make me arrogant, sorry. I don't believe in God in the same way I don't believe in Santa or faeries, or Thor or Shiva. I don't claim to know everything, but I can say "I don't believe in God" without magically becoming arrogant and closed-minded. Stop trying to shift the burden of evidence to me.
My question is--what about all the POWs who believed in God, but still died from the abuse, malnutrition, or disease? Didn't they have enough belief in God? My guess is that people are just uncomfortable attributing their survival to chance, genetic advantage (body fat, disease resistance) or something beyond their control. So they attribute it to God.
That global warming has been politicized doesn't invalidate the science, any more than me being upset over the germ theory would invalidate that. I defer to physicists on physics, mathematicians on mathematics, and climatologists on climatology. Are you suggesting I should reject what climatologists say about climatology, just because of a political controversy? That seems a bit silly, especially considering the stakes involved. The "politicization" is unfortunate, but it's not my fault that the left wing noticed environmentalism first and the conservatives feel duty bound to oppose everything liberals do, even when the science is clear on the subject.
And you will never, ever, ever, ever know with 100% certainy exactly what percentage of global warming is caused by human action, much less be able to break every human action down into a chart that shows how much impact that action had on the environment. We do know that carbon dioxide raises temperature in scientific experiments, and we do know that we release a vast amount of carbon dioxide into our environment. If you test something in a lab and it's poisonous, you give it to mice and it kills them, you can't turn around and say (with any intellectual integrity) "Well, we don't really KNOW what would happen if we poured a million gallons into a stream that a villiage gets its drinking water from."
CO2 reduction is one of the few things that we could improve that would have an effect. Would it be a panacea, and give every child a full belly and a pony? World peace? No, none of the above. But to say "We should do absolutely nothing until we know absolutely everything" is to effectively say we should do nothing. It may sound clever, but to people who think that our environment matters, you don't sound like the skeptic you see yourself as, but as someone who just thinks he's too clever to be helpful.
My question to you is--how much longer do we study this problem? How much longer do we scratch our collective chins and furrow our collective brows? If in five years, the climatologists are STILL saying the exact same thing they're saying NOW, will you be convinced? Mind you, oil companies and conservatives (who can't grant the evil liberals political capital by acknowledging that environmentalism is a legitimate and compelling issue) will still oppose the idea, right up the bitter end, and the media will STILL be breathlessly covering the "debate" as if the science wasn't firmly established. Would-be uber-skeptics on Slashdot will still be preening and saying "we can't be sure". But at what point will YOU be willing to believe the climatologists? Five years from now? Ten? Never? I need to know. At what point do you believe the climatologists on questions of climatology? This is important, so please get back to me.