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User: misanthrope101

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  1. Re:not a teacher.... on Global Warming Only a Theory, Says School Board · · Score: 1

    Plus, he was Jewish. Has anyone told Mel Gibson this?

  2. Re:Here's the Problem on Global Warming Only a Theory, Says School Board · · Score: 1
    Your post makes me think that climatologists are still debating the subject, and that relevant scientific journals are filled with articles trying to hash out the question even now. Your post makes me think that the scientific community has not actually come to a consensus, but one side of the political spectrum has taken a side and pretended that the mainstream scientific community has come to a consensus.

    That's interesting, because what I read everywhere else contradicts what you're saying. Climatologists have come to a consensus, and the political left is only clamoring to act on the consensus that the mainstream scientific community has already agreed on. The "controversy" is about as significant as that over evolution in the biology community, in that there isn't really a controversy, only well-funded naysayers getting more press than their intellectual accomplishments warrant. Our well-intentioned concern for fairness is causing us to diminish the significance and breadth of the scientific consensus, and overestimate the merit of the naysayers. Anything funded by an oil company is crap. Anything associated with the Heritage Foundation et al cannot be taken seriously as a scientific publication. Take away those groups, and how much "science" casts doubt on anthropocentric global warming?

  3. Re:A Teachable Moment? on Global Warming Only a Theory, Says School Board · · Score: 1
    EVERY SINGLE EXAMINATION of ANY TOPIC could now be banned from schools unless equal time, money, and attention is given
    No, because only those subjects that offend the religious right are contested, and thus only those are controversial. They don't actually want critical thought and free-thinking, any more than they want freedom of religious expression. They will use the language of "let's talk about it" as well as they can to discredit what they don't like and advance what they do, but if you tried to subject Bible stories to critical analysis, they'd run you out of town. They're only using science-talk because they can't come out and say "it doesn't really matter anyway, because the Rapture will be here any second." They don't actually trust science, and never have. Even Martin Luther called reason itself "Satan's Whore." They have a faith-based worldview, and only use post-Enlightenment language because it furthers their ends. In a nutshell, they're fraudulently using post-Enlightenment language to try and undermine Enlightenment values. It's a sad, if intellectually interesting, trick to watch in action.
  4. Re:Don't be stupid with money. on Does Income Inequality Matter? · · Score: 1
    student loans are utterly fantastic investments
    This is true if your degree will make you enough money to pay off your loans. I think you'll find that a lot of people major in English or some other fascinating (for them) subject, only to find later that they aren't marketable. I wanted to major in philosophy or classical studies, just for the hell of it, but then I realized "hmm... I'm not rich, and I have to eat." The poor and middle class may not quite be in the position of Jude Fawley (Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy) anymore, but needing to pay the rent after college should play a part in deciding your major.
  5. maybe... on Adult Film Industry Moving To HD DVD · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you should stop buying your porn in farm supply stores. Just a thought.

  6. Re:"Cum hoc ergo propter hoc" on 2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever · · Score: 1
    You have to look at the consensus of the mainstream scientific community. There IS agreement, there IS consensus, and the waters are not nearly as muddy as you would believe. There are people claiming that the earth is flat, and there are people claiming that the moon is made of cheese--that someone, somewhere, is making the claim does not mean it should be given equal weight with the mainstream scientific community. Climatologists have come to a consensus.

    I'm not arguing that they're right, mind you. My argument is only that mainstream science has come to a consensus, which you can find by watching "An Inconvenient Truth," among other sources. A secondary argument I'm making is that people are deliberately mixing in big-oil-funded pseudo-science and other naysayers and then claiming that they constitute a controversy, much as other people are pointing to creationsism and claiming that constitutes a controversy with evolution.

    I'm not "gambling" with the world economy. We don't have to do anything, just as you don't have to get treatment for cancer. You can let the disease run its course. Medicine is expensive, illness often wreaks havoc with people's finances, and some people just choose to ignore the illness rather than put up with the inconvenience. Sometimes it isn't as bad as the doctors predicted, but usually they die. I'm not saying that we have to do anything, though I do want us to be honest with ourselves. The mainstream scientific community, the one that gave me air conditioning and antibiotics, has come to a consensus about global warming and what the effects will be. We are completely free to ignore their warnings and go about our business.

    All I really want is for us to be honest about what we're doing. What I hate is when people ignore valid input and then when things go badly, wring their hands and say "we had no way of knowing!" See Iraq for a good example of that in action.

  7. Re:longest year on record on 2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever · · Score: 1
    Are you a good judge of the scientific methods of studying antibiotic resistance? Quasars? Cancer therapies? Quantum gravity? Genetic drift? Dark matter? There are a huge number of fields where laymen do not consider themselves qualified to weigh in on the validity of scientific knowledge, because they are ignorant of the methods, lack the requisite education and experience, etc. Global warming is the consensus of the scientific community, the same community that investigates all those other phenomenon that it would be arrogant for laymen to think they know more about just because they don't understand the field.

    Are you soft-headed enough to accept scientific consensus when it comes to antibiotic research, or are you investigating for yourself? How about the question of whether smoking contributes to cancer--are you just one of those sheeple who let science lead them by the nose, or are you coming up with your own theories?

    Face it, we live in a world where scientific knowledge is beyond the ken of the average layman. We can read the books written for laymen, and read articles here and there, but if you remain "skeptical" of this scientific consensus on this one field of study, it is not becuse you've come to your own conclusions after reviewing the data. You're misleading yourself as to the validity of your analysis, and your intuition is no more valid than if you were investigating "alternatives" to the germ theory in your spare time. The consensus on global warming is the product of the same scientific method that gave us those other scientific findings we're so comfortable with. You can't just excise out this one subject and decide that, just on this subject, the entire scientific community has failed to think rationally. The body of data, the depth of analysis, and the degree of consensus is too large to shrug off as an anomaly or as the work of an overly enthusiastic imagination.

    Science came up with this conclusion. We may not like it--hell, we may not be able to fix it, but if you trust the mental model that constitutes science, you have to trust this conclusion. Otherwise you're stuck in the odd position of welcoming every single material benefit of science, while rejecting the mental framework that made possible those benefits. I'm not going to sign off on the "scientists use science, except on the subject of global warming, and then what they do isn't science anymore" argument. Scientists don't go collectively insane, all over the world, together, all at once, every day, consistently, like magic when they turn to global warming.

  8. Re:"Cum hoc ergo propter hoc" on 2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever · · Score: 1
    By your degree of skepticism, we don't definitively know that cyanide kills you, that smoking causes cancer, that antibiotics fight pathogens, or any number of other things that people routinely accept without objection. I respect your right to be "skeptical," just as much as I respect the guy who is skeptical of the germ theory. Sometimes skepticism is just arrogance. Some claims, like "there is a leprechaun in my closet" are inherently unverifiable. But the scientific community, which gave me medicine and airplanes and air conditioning and the internet and so on, has come to the conclusion that global warming is real and is being influenced by people. It isn't so much that I think that science is infallible, rather that I think it's the only productive, useful method we have to understand the world around us to the extent that we can.

    Our perception (and data) are always by their nature limited, but the best tool we have, which is science, has led us to this conclusion. To enjoy the fruits of science as I do, with enthusiasm and gratitude, and then reject this one conclusion out of hand with no alternative explanation other than "nuh-uh!" would be arrogance. No thanks. I'll stick with the scientific community. They aren't infallible, but they're the only show in town.

  9. Re:longest year on record on 2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever · · Score: 1
    Well, I guess you have a choice. You can trust science, which has given you antibiotics, painkillers, heart surgery, sanitation, airplanes, spaceships, telescopes, eyeglasses, iron, bronze, food preservatives, automobiles, immunizations, and so on, or you can trust one of those other processes that have been equally beneficial to mankind. When you find one, let me know. See, scientists, even if you don't personally, off the top of your head, without their experience and expertise to inform you, find their data persuasive, have come to the conclusion that global warming is happening and is being accelerated/exacerbated by human activity.

    Is science infallible? Nope. But it's the best thing going. It cracks me up that you can live in a society that has benefited so heavily from science, but still act as if they're just making it all up, or that the scientific process is really as sloppy as your one-line would-be rebuttal implies. Your "skepticism" is about as intelligent as that of a kook who is "skeptical" of the germ theory.

  10. Re:Ate much ramen? on Father of Instant Ramen Passes Away · · Score: 1
    many people of long ago had daily intakes of sodium that would be considered astronomical by today's standards, yet managed to find many interesting ways to die that didn't involve stroke or heart attack.
    Being tortured to death by Genghis Khan might qualify as interesting, but I'll take an old-fashioned heart attack any day. The plague, too, would be far from boring. But I think part of the reason people didn't die back then from conditions endemic to old age is that disease and other factors killed them before they got to old age. But I admit our diet does play a role. Diabetes is becoming more common, and so on.
  11. Shocking, really. on YouTube Blocked in Brazil · · Score: 1

    It's damn funny that the US company in question gets money (via ad revenue) from eyeballs in that market, er, country. If I'm sending product into their country, that product is subject to their laws. That concept even applies to Americans and to corporations based in the USA. Shocking, really. Maybe they need a good liberatin'.

  12. Re:I wish I had portable vi on The Birth of vi · · Score: 1

    I didn't know about portable gvim. Thanks!

  13. Re:I wish I had portable vi on The Birth of vi · · Score: 1

    I use Truecrypt, on both Windows and Linux. But you still have to be able to install it, something you can't do on locked-down systems like I have at work. I'd like to be able to just drag the container file to the Truecrypt icon on the pen-drive, but there is some deeper mojo that has to take place for it to work, and you need administrator priveleges to get it to work.

  14. I wish I had portable vi on The Birth of vi · · Score: 1

    I run Portable Openoffice and Portable Firefox from a usb pendrive. The only other programs that I have really wanted was a portable version of Drivecrypt and Portable Vi. That, and maybe TexMaker with all the requisite backend LaTeX stuff to make PDFs.

  15. parentheses and brackets, oh yeah on The Birth of vi · · Score: 1

    I'm new to Unix-type things, but I really like vi. My favorite features are the movement commands. As soon as I found that I could use the parentheses and brackets to move around and copy/paste, I was hooked. I still haven't figured out the buffers that well, and I miss the idiot-proof ctrl-c/x/v, but p hasn't killed me yet. But selecting the last 2 sentences is much easier with 2( than it is with the mouse, with which I have to visually count sentences and then hunt for the beginning of the one I want to start from.

  16. Re:Clueless (or humorless) mods strike again on How ExxonMobil Funded Global Warming Skeptics · · Score: 1
    Everyone has a viewpoint to push, but in objective reality, only one of those views will be correct.
    That "objective reality" part is the part that interests me. I think the right wing, particularly the neoconservatives, has come around to the position of the far-left deconstructionists, such as Derrida and Foucault. For them there is no "objective reality," and perception matters more than fact. Criticism over, say, the situation in Iraq is countered not with contrary facts, but with accusations of bias. The same goes with climate change, evolution, etc. Fact and hard analysis take the back seat to arguments over perception, nuance, bias, tone, emphasis, etc. This idea of a "created reality" instead of an "objective reality" is straight from weird gay French philosophers, but is being served hot and fresh every day on Fox News. It's a strange world we live in.
  17. Re:OH NOES!!! on Bush Claims Mail Can Be Opened Without Warrant · · Score: 1

    Maybe there should be a few additional sub-sub-pages to Slashdot. "News For Nerds Who Don't Give a Rat's Ass About Anything Other Than Technology," perhaps. "Nerds who'd work for the Nazis if they had the coolest technology," perhaps. We have to admit that there are people who really wouldn't care if genocide or slavery were going on in their backyard, so long as it didn't affect them yet.

  18. Re:Give and take on U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight · · Score: 1
    I don't think the people should ever passively accept classification of documents or withholding of information
    They don't. Niether do they want war. But they are whipped into a fervor, kept afraid of the enemy, and government can push us to war and cloak their own actions in secrecy because of it.

    "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering

    If President Bush wants these documents secret, even if he doesn't realize they exist until 2345 tonight, he will classify them. He'll say "we can't help the terrorists," and every talking head on Fox will agree with him, along with about 60% of the country. It's a big, easy button to push, and every politician knows right where it is. Are they evil? Perhaps, but we're the suckers. This is why I wish we hadn't crowed about this "automatic" declassification until after it happened.

  19. Re:well said on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1
    Actually no, not at all. If you read about the cases that have been exonerated on death row, you'll find many cases of planted evidence, jailhouse snitches, coerced confessions, testimony given by criminals to reduce their own sentence, and most significantly, many of them were later exonerated via DNA. I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, and I can't find any that were let off of death row because of a "technicality" like a warrant being misspelled, dated wrong, or something like that. Those situations are largely urban legend, and the stories are comforting because we like to think that we know they're guilty. Otherwise it would sit on our concsience.

    And OJ Simpson wasn't let off on a technicality. He was tried in a court of law, and acquitted by a jury, fair and square. Was he guilty? Probably, but the prosecutors failed to convince the jury of that. What I found interesting was that Fuhrman bragged on tape about planting evidence in cases involving other blacks, and nothing every happened to him. Law and order, indeed. I wish Simpson had been convicted, if for no other reason that I wouldn't have to hear the indignation about him all the time, but I also wish Fuhrman had been prosecuted.

  20. Re:oh, you mean taxes! on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1
    So, say, tomorrow, would you cut off all Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, No-Child-Left-Behind, subsidized (free) immunizations for children, farm subsidies, oil subsidies, faith-based funding, etc etc? I realize that most people are talking specifically about poor people when they mention wealth redistribution, but it applies to Social Security and farm subsidies as well. Actually when someone drives on a non-toll road, one built with tax dollars, that is wealth redistribution. Wealth takes more forms than cold hard cash.

    I think the question is one of what kind of society we want to live in. "Welfare" or whatever you want to call it can be abused and can foster dependence, but what alternative do we want? Do we want them to starve to death? Would you cut off all government-financed health care? Immunizations? School lunch programs? What sorts of "wealth redistribution" would you leave standing? When a poor person dies in the street, do we just leave them to decompose? Someone has to pay to bury them. Why are governments financing the roads and water system? I've read a bit of libertarian and even anarchist literature, and though I was enthusiastic about it in my twenties because it made so much sense, 15 years on it doesn't seem to mesh well with the world around me. It still sounds good on paper, but what do we do with the single mom (or even nuclear family) who is out of work, broke, with 2 children to feed? Let them starve? What if they don't have family to rely on? Do we just shrug our collective shoulders? If that isn't at least as burning of a problem as Saddam Hussein was, I don't know what is.

    But while I'm not crazy about the type of "wealth redistribution" you're talking about, I also realize that there are hundreds of billions of dollars of pork spending that is just as effective at wealth redistribution. "Getting something for nothing" isn't the only type of abuse--getting something the taxpayers don't really need, or making every corner of the world into a vital national interest that must be "defended" with a $700+ billion dollar military, qualifies as pigs slopping at a large barrel. I see a lot of people up in arms over "wealth redistribution" when it comes to a poor single mother, but who shouted when we bailed out Chrysler, or when Haliburton gets no-bid contracts and then is fined for fraudulent billing?

  21. Re:well said on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1
    I've never actually seen any indication that Democrats spend more than Republicans. The national debt actually increases faster under Republicans than Democrats. I'm not a fan of high taxes, but there is no one party (other than the Libertarians, who'll never get elected) who is really committed to lower spending and smaller government. There is a faction of the Republican Party, but they certainly don't run the party.

    I don't think the people want small government, but neither do they want to pay for large government. If every American had to pony up the $30K each or so to pay for it, that would become obvious. But one day the Chinese or whoever it is that holds that debt is going to dump it and refuse to buy more, and we're going to have a problem. Maybe that's why we spend more on the military than the next 20-30 countries combined.

  22. Re:well said on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1

    So how low should taxes go? I don't have my heart set on a number--I just want the current generation to pay for their own government, own wars, etc.

  23. Re:well said on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1

    I should have been more specific. I believe in balancing the budget. I'm not averse to tax cuts for everyone--if government outlays are matched to revenue. But if you want big government, that means big taxes. I do wish the government was smaller, but I think if Americans were made to actually pay for their government, that would take care of itself.

  24. are you lying, or just wrong? hard to decide... on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1
    It's funny that you were modded "insightful," since your post was factually wrong. I searched for "fatty" (as in trans-fatty acids) on ACLU.org and found this:

    The government should be no more able to criminalize smoking a joint than it is able to prohibit an individual from drinking a martini or eating too many fatty foods. [also see "Why Marijuana Law Reform Should Matter to You," by Ira Glasser]

    And "smoking" returned this:

    Q: Isn't this creating a "civil right" to drink and smoke?

    A: Not at all. The ACLU does not oppose smoking bans in public buildings, in the workplace or in locations where non-smokers may be subjected to secondary smoke. We object only to bans on smoking, drinking, diet and hobbies in a person's own home.

    So yes, if you're blowing smoke in people's faces, the ACLU supports bans on that. But your alarmist attitude towards the ACLU, while commonplace among the right, is based on either ignorance or dishonesty. It's true that they don't support the 2nd amendment as well as they might, but hell, that makes them 900% (9/10 vs 1/10) as supportive of the Bill of Rights as the NRA. I'll take that.

  25. oh, you mean taxes! on 2006's Bill of Wrongs · · Score: 1
    wealth redistribution
    "Wealth redistribution"? What the heck is that? Oh, you mean taxes? Like, to pay for the government? Wouldn't the moral thing to do be to pay for your government? If you want a smaller, cheaper government, say, one that doesn't spend about 0.7 trillion dollars on a military, fine, then I can understand your committment to low taxes. But can you give me any reason why Americans shouldn't pay for the government they have? As far as "wealth redistribution" goes, are you talking about Haliburton? I'm confused. The US government sure gave them a lot of money.