If your computer tracked every URL you surfed, every keystroke you made, and every image you viewed and then automatically uploaded that info to your employer and/or local constabulary for review, would your computer be a "domain for 'freedom'" yet?
If a media corporation could remotely monitor the contents of your HD and selectively delete files for which you don't have a license on file with them, would your computer be a "domain for 'freedom'" yet? At what point does interference with what you can do become a "freedom" issue?
My computer is mainly a portal to the internet, but I also read, research, watch movies, listen to music, write papers, write blog entries, and so on. It plays a prominent part in my intellectual life, and is very much a "domain for freedom." What the hell were you thinking when you wrote that?
I have no personal complaint against Vista, though quality-wise, experience-wise, MS software seems to be getting worse, not better, so I'm a bit worried. I'm sure I'll be subjected to Vista at work eventually, and I'm not looking forward to it. I know that Office 2003 is a royal pain for me as an end user. It screws up my email formatting, Word opens up in some bizarre viewing mode that I don't want, and god knows what else. Windows 2000 and Office XP seemed fine to me, but obviously Microsoft has to make more software and push it down the pipeline if they want to stay in business.
This type of thing is why I'm all for Vista. The more Microsoft tries to lock down the computer, the more frustrating it is for the end users, and the more people will flock to OSS, and the greater market share may make it profitable for someone to figure out why the sound on my Ubuntu box is about half as loud as it should be. I'm not smart enough, but dammit if more people are involved in the market someone will figure it out for me. So bring on the DRM and trusted computing and locked-down everything, only not for me. Keep screwing those other guys so Linux will get more users and developers and I get more help with the piddly annoying things like that damned sound issue.
the USGS was the same agency that in 1998-2000 (under the clinton administration oversight) was accused of falsifying many research documents
So your argument is... what, exactly? Are you saying that science wasn't subordinated to politics? Are you saying that it happened, but it's okay since it happened under Clinton too? Are you saying that it's happening, but the people complaining about it are only complaining because of who the President is right now? You accuse people of "bushbashing" but you are the one making it political. This has happened time and time again--every time a real, significant problem is brought up, people like you come out of the woodwork crying bias and pandering, muddying the waters and casting aspersions on everyone's character, while pointedly failing to address the actual subject.
We torture people? Ah, it must be election season, or you wouldn't bring that up. Saddam had no WMD? Ah, political pandering again from the liberals. Bush's policies make terrorism worse? Ah, more partisanship. Someone in the administration outed a CIA agent for political reasons? Ah, the liberals are playing politics again. We were lied to about the threat posed by Iraq to justify an invasion, and now we're mired in an open-ended, pointless war? My, the liberals hate Bush, don't they? That's all we freaking hear from the right wing. They never address anything--just accuse the speaker of partisanship. A senator is found to be a pedophile and would-be sexual predator? Oh, you're politicking again.
Occasionally I get lucky and someone says this crap to my face, so I get to say "but is what I'm saying factually incorrect?" If you make people stay on the subject rather than going off on a tangent about whether or not an unbiased, completely objective person exists anywhere on the planet, things get a bit more interesting. Usually I just get resentful silence because they don't want to actually answer the question, but at least the smug "I'm not going to openly disagree with you, but what matters here is that you hate the president, so let's talk about that" crap gets stifled for a few seconds.
I feel that evolution is more of a miracle than Him simply saying "Let it Be"
So if slower antelopes get eaten more often, and faster ones leave more offspring, and the antelope population as a whole now is a bit faster, that's a miracle? If plants with a genetic variation that gives them more resistance to an herbicide leave more descendants than plants without the variation, that's a miracle? Your threshold for divine intervention doesn't seem to be very high. But oddly, a hypothetical, mysterious super-being who guides every cellular division seems more plausible to you than reproductive advantage leading to genetic change. You are, I must admit, a bit odd. Leprechauns must seem downright prosaic to you.
They were secular in that didn't like religion, but not secular in the "we defer to science" meaning of the word. Communism, or rather the Soviet party line, was for all practical purposes the state-mandated religion. Science was suborned completely to political doctrine. Stalin banned the teaching of evolution. On a side note, Hitler also opposed Darwinism.
Societies like this that revolve around a cult of personality can't tolerate alternative belief systems to explain anything--everything, whether religion or science, has to be subordinate to politics, or be destroyed. I know the creationists (Hovind comes to mind) love to say that Stalin and Hitler were evolutionists, but they weren't--they opposed science as well, though they did like to couch their bizarro theories in pseudo-scientific langauge. A lot of religious people like to credit dictators' lack of religion for their brutality, but being a power-hungry paranoid maniac with delusions of grandeur may have just a teensy-weensy more to do with it.
evolution isn't proven...most of us just have a problem with it being taught as a fact instead of a theory.
It hasn't been proven that selection, natural or otherwise, can act on genetic variation to drive divergent change, leading to speciation? That's been proven, shown, witnessed, documented, reproduced, studied, published, talked about, and probably everything short of being made into an opera starring Pavarotti.
The problem is that creationists and ID folk want not just their own opinion, but their own facts. They keep saying that evolution has never been witnessed, that there are no transitional fossils, that evolution is impossible because it violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, and so on. And if you read only creationist literature and have a general distrust of mainstream science, those arguments may seem tenable. But creationst thought only thrives when it's isolated--when you read mainstream literature about evolution, you find that these seemingly burning, portentious questions have been answered time and time again, usually decades ago. This would be like me reading only atheism books to learn about the Bible.
The company is out to make money, and I have no real grudge with that. But their goal is not to provide me with good software, and that's a problem. Their goal is to get my money. So while they have very little incentive to provide a stable, bug-minimized environment, they have every incentive to neglect security and stability while ramping up the eye candy.
I'll use a different example to illustrate the incompatibility in goals. I used to work in an emergency room, and we ordered a telephone recorder so we could record (obviously) the phone calls that came in. All the calls were compressed, stored on a HD, and you could burn them to CD whenever you wanted. Great. So I burned the calls from a date range to a CD and popped the CD into my computer, whereupon progress came to a screeching halt. The company used a proprietary format to compress and store the audio files. I needed to install the software from their vendor, but they forgot to include the disk, so we had to deal with that. There is no reason, quality-wise, to use a proprietary audio format at this stage. PCM wav files or OGG would have worked fine. Even licensing mp3 for use would've been cheaper than developing an in-house format. But they were more focused on brand lock-in than with selling us a good product. They went to more trouble, and spent more money, just to make sure that our recordings, that we were legally required to keep, were in a proprietary format.
Contrast this to OSS, where the goals are completely different. When private companies are screwing the customer to achieve vendor lock-in, OSS offerings are fanatically open and compatible. So while I don't hate the private companies like Microsoft, I do keep in mind that it's in their best interest to make me dependent on them to be able to access my own data down the road.
but the problem with de jure standards is that you'll either be stuck with a standard that lags far behind the state of the art or a standard that is loosely adhered to, and is rife with incompatibilities,
So... you're saying that standards stifle innovation? Do you realize that TCP/IP and HTML are standards, and if they were proprietary, one-company solutions, the internet would be impossible? How usable would email be if every program used its own formatting protocol? Plain text certainly isn't cutting-edge, but without it we wouldn't have much email. Anyone is free to make their own standard, but if a true open standard exists already, not many are going to adopt your proprietary standard.
It doesn't matter if their products are "inferior." If they can slowly kill off all the competitors, they get all the money. Business isn't about making a good product. That's incidental, and contingent on the priorities set by the board of directors. What matters is money, market share, stock price, and so on. In that light, their actions aren't really inexplicable. They aren't evil, only sociopathic. I'm a little surprized that people expect some modicum of morality or common human decency from a legal entity that is specifically designed to make money while allowing the stockholders to avoid responsibility. It's not sociopathic by accident, but by design. If kidnapping orphans and harvesting their organs were profitable, some corporation would do it, and you'd see sepia-toned PR ads showing that people's lives were improved by the organ transplants. What else do you expect?
Why aren't these wackos shouted down by the other Christians? I know several Christians who are embarassed by the right wing, but they don't say anything. They'll speak up and talk back to non-religious because they don't want to be pigeonholed with the kooks, but they won't shout the kooks down. They let the kooks dominate the discussion because they don't want dissention within the church, but they get defensive when we assume that they agree with their more militant brethren. You need to stand up and protest when a "Christian" isn't acting in a Christian way, not close ranks and yell "bigot" when we point out that you're tolerating him. If you don't share the values of the people you're hanging out with, stop hanging out with them.
And moreover, their whole religion is a fairy tale.
See because, it's OK for you to hate and belittle their religion, while at the same time damning all the Christian believers for being bigots.
Well what the hell is it, then? As a person who doesn't really have any religion, I can't differentiate between stories about Jesus, Loki, Vishnu, Shiva, Thor, Mithra, and so on. How can I tell which ones can safely be considered fairy tales without making myself into a bigot? Oh that's right--I have to check which religion you believe in, and respect that one, but all the others can be relegated to fairy-tale status, right?
I guess it's OK to be a bigot, as long as you're not Christian.
So thinking that your invisible, all-powerful, super-friend in the sky is an invisible, all-powerful, super-friend in the sky, i.e. a fairy tale, makes me a bigot? I also think that anyone who believes that the dismembered head of Orpheus was singing as it floated down the river is a kook--are you as bigoted as I am on that one? And thinking that lightning is thrown down by Zeuss--what a bunch of crazies! Oh wait, more bigotry. No, I'm not a bigot, and mythology is mythology, even if someone somewhere still believes in it. You just want special rules for your religious beliefs. You use the word "bigot" to rope off an area of your life from critical thought. I don't think you're stupid, or that "most" Christians are stupid (though I'm pretty sure half are below average), but I know make-believe when I see it. You believing in Loki or leprechauns doesn't mean I can't point out that they're just nice stories, and there is no reason to think that they're real.
Look this game does not represent Christianity, or the qualities of its followers.
So what does? Christian nationalism doesn't represent the views of most Christians, but they're still a sect of same.
So much hatred for Christianity on Slashdot
It's not our fault that so many people who happen to believe in the divinity of Jesus are also wacko, racist, or otherwise socially deviant. You need to deal with the kooks in your religion. Once you deal with them, we'll stop pointing them out. Pointing out that some Christians are bigots doesn't make me a bigot--it means that I have a grasp of the obvious.
Of course, there could be problems, but one thing I've found is most people aren't total dumb-asses. If you're unable to hunt safely, you probably won't actually want to hunt.
I grew up in a part of Texas where gun racks were more common than college degrees. I've never been to Canada, but I assure you that, at least in Texas, being a total dumbass and wanting to hunt are not by any stretch of the imagination mutually exclusive. Wanting to hunt doesn't make you a dumbass, but there are plenty of well-armed, drunk, trigger-happy dumbasses on or before the opening of deer season.
The point is that I have seen physical evidence, historical evidence, and linguistic evidence, and archealogical evidence of Biblical truth
Physical evidence - Ilium has been found
Historical Evidence - Greece and Troy are known to have existed, and some events described in the Iliad can be historically verified
Linguistic evidence - In the Iliad, Athena and the other gods spoke Greek. Greek is a well-known language.
Archaelogical evidence - Ilium was found with cutting-edge archaeological technique
Since we have physical, historical, linguistic, and archealogical evidence supporting the authenticity of the Iliad, I can safely conclude that all of the supernatural events in the Iliad actually took place.
Well, yes. If 5.8 billion people died of some pathogen, some people would still live, and there would still be a civilization of sorts. Nothing, short of the end of the world, is the end of the world. Got it. Am I supposed to take something constructive away from what you're saying?
If the temp rose 150 degrees worldwide, the world would still exist. We however, would not. But dammit, it sure wouldn't be the end of the world. I have to concede the wisdom of what you're saying.
That's the funny thing about the "environmental skeptics." Somehow "pollute less and consume fewer finite resources" became a far-left wacko idea. Since the environmentalists are never going to be able to predict anything with 100% accuracy, and the science will always be changing due to new research, the "skeptics" can eternally muddy the waters as we continue to undermine the planet's ability to sustain human society.
I have never understood why is it accepted completely that we're somehow responsible for supposed "global warming" and that we think we can do anything about it.
Because in laboratory experiments "greenhouse gases" have been shown to trap heat and raise the temperature. Inferred from this is the conclusion that "greenhouse gases" trap heat and raise the temperature, and when you release them into the environment in large amounts, you'll be at least partly responsible for trapped heat and a raised temperature.
We are doing something about it. We're making it worse.
If it has to be based on ignorance to qualify as bigotry, I guess we can rule out my statements. I'm not relying on shadowy unquantifiable inner qualities, but the very obvious, undisputed (by you) insouciance of Texans towards the execution of innocent people. Are you defending their indifference? Denying it? Do you even care about innocent people being executed? You're trying to make the debate about my "bigotry" rather than addressing the specific, explicit claims that I've made.
I'm still waiting for you to reconcile an indifference to the execution of innocent people with a high regard for human life. The two seem mutually exclusive, do they not? Is it bigoted to make that logical juxtaposition, and note that one denotes a lack of the other? Or is it bigoted to note that I'm talking about Texas? Is it bigoted to talk about Texas tax policy? Immigration? Or is it only bigotry when I say something bad about them, like they have a bad public school system and a high crime rate?
If Texans placed a high value on human life, they would be more concerned about innocent people being executed in their state. That is a seeminly simple, obvious statement--does it qualify as bigotry to you? Are you even going to address that question? I don't mind you disagreeing with me--I welcome that. But Texans vote the way they do, their state has the record it does, and it seems obvious that if they had a high regard for human life in general that they would make the policies of their state more rigorous and cautious, and lower the chance of an innocent being executed. That they don't collectively care all that much about it indicates that they don't collectively care all that much about it--meaning they place a low value on the subject. Are we communicating yet?
He killed half a million of his own people. Surely the survivors have the right to hang the bastard without deferring to world opinion.
The Kurds, at least, weren't "his own people." He was supressing a rebellion by which they were trying to carve out part of the country, the country that he had responsibility to keep together. If a violent faction took over part of Idaho, the rebellion would be put down, and if women and children were in the crowd, they'd be casualties.
The US government was so aghast at Saddam's gassing of the Kurds that Donald Rumsfeld flew to Iraq to shake his hand, open diplomatic relations, and increase the amount of money we were giving him. Yes, years and years later the neocons decided they didn't want him in office, but at the time of his worst atrocities he was all cuddly with a Republican White House. Current rationalizations for war aside, I'm tired of Americans pretending as if we were minding our own business and there was a bad man out there that we finally decided to bring to justice. I'm not saying he shouldn't be brought "to justice," but we're having very selective amnesia about who shook his hand and did business with him. Yes, it should be discussed on the news when they're talking about Rumsfeld's legacy--I'd love to see them show that clip and ask if he regretted doing business with such a madman after he gassed the Kurds. That would be "fair and balanced."
Not if it's warranted. Being that insouciant about innocent people being executed does mean that you don't value human life as much as someone who is upset about it. Whether or not you are a good person is in fact tied to both your actions and your belefs. If you don't care that an innocent man is executed, then you are a bit less civilized than the next chap.
When I wrote about them just not valuing life like the rest of us, I am addressing a specific, known, acknowledged trait. I'm not making a metaphysical generalization, but saying, again, that insouciance about the execution of innocent people means that you don't value human life very much. If Texans as a group were upset about it, it would change, but since it won't change anytime soon, and Texans don't seem very upset about it anyway as a group, it would be hard to draw another conclusion. What you're doing is ignoring the very specific criticisms I made and pretending that I'm just generalizing from nothing. If the people I'm calling cannibals are in fact cannibals, then the assessment isn't bigoted. Ergo, if the people I'm accusing of not valuing human life very much in fact don't value human life very much, then no, it's not a bigoted generalization.
I'm reminded of that old racist saying about Asian countries--they just don't value life the same way we do. Only rather than some unspecified Asian country, it's Texas, and unlike the racist generalization, this one happens to be true. They just don't value life the way civilized places do. If the executed is black, they don't care at all. If the executed is white, then they care a little bit, but nothing more vehement than "it's a damned shame." You could have 10 consecutive executions that turned out to be innocent and if the Supreme Court stopped capital punishment, they'd still hate the courts for interfering, and they'd think you threw out the baby with the bathwater. Even adjusting for my latent misanthropy, there is something rotten in the culture of that state.
These shows are no more "fake" than the mainstream media. Fox News is not really news, but entertainment. It panders to a demographic to keep the eyeballs tuned in so the sponsors can sell the viewers stuff. Fox News (and all the rest) do indeed cover stuff that happened, but only part of it, and only in a way to lead to a predetermined conclusion. They regularly broadcast items that are false, and known to be false. Sometimes they recant, sometimes they don't. It's well known that, circa 2004 or so, the more heavily someone relied on Fox News for their news, the more likely they were to believe that Saddam had WMD, was directly involved in 9/11, etc.
There is no mandate for accuracy in any of the news media, and hasn't been for some time. They get around any accusations of outright lying by not really taking on the position, but just talking about "the controversy." The Swiftboat thing is a good example--the accusations were known to be false, the thing was known to be financed by wealthy Republicans, and it was obviously, obviously a politically-motivated attack. But they talked about the controversy constantly, giving it air time, let it sink in and take effect.
Are they evil? No, they're just a business selling a product, and doing a good job of that. CNN and the rest are the same, as are the Comedy Central shows. But at least Comedy Central asks the obvious questions and admits that the ridiculous looks ridiculous. This isn't just a few comedians saying funny stuff--much of the show is given up to video clips of politicians doing their thing. It only looks ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The mainstream media is more gentle with politicians, because they need to maintain the access they have, and otherwise the "leaks" may dry up, and they'd be reporting on easter egg hunts the rest of their lives.
Yes, Colbert's entire schtick is to parody O'Reilly. "Truthiness" isn't really a joke. He's passing it as a joke so people will listen, but what he's lampooning actually exists and effects all of us every day. Truthiness has taken the place of truth, not only in the executive branch, but in the mainstream media. Bush, Rumsfeld, or Cheney can screw up their eyes a bit, furrow their brow, give a serious, pensive look into the camera and tell us in an exasperated voice that they're trying to protect America, and that the liberals only want to hurt our nation, and people nod sympathetically, but in reality experts in the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon all said Saddam posed no credible threat, didn't have a WMD stockpile, wasn't poised to attack anyone, wasn't helping Al-Queida, had no known involvement in 9/11, and that invading Iraq would destabilize the region and make terrorism worse, not better.
Truth places more value on this fact-based, rigorous analysis, conducted by experts in the field, than it does on the gut-feeling of Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld. A loyalty to truth means that you don't give people a free pass because they meant well and are probably decent people when they aren't making decisions that lead to tens of thousands of deaths. Truthiness ignores the fact-based analysis, distrusts the experts, and puts credence in Bush's gut-feeling. This sort of has consequences and stuff. So Colbert is joking, but not really, so faulting him for not being all that funny must be done with the knowledge that he's trying to call our attention to a collective insanity that we need to stop buying into.
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If a media corporation could remotely monitor the contents of your HD and selectively delete files for which you don't have a license on file with them, would your computer be a "domain for 'freedom'" yet? At what point does interference with what you can do become a "freedom" issue?
My computer is mainly a portal to the internet, but I also read, research, watch movies, listen to music, write papers, write blog entries, and so on. It plays a prominent part in my intellectual life, and is very much a "domain for freedom." What the hell were you thinking when you wrote that?
I have no personal complaint against Vista, though quality-wise, experience-wise, MS software seems to be getting worse, not better, so I'm a bit worried. I'm sure I'll be subjected to Vista at work eventually, and I'm not looking forward to it. I know that Office 2003 is a royal pain for me as an end user. It screws up my email formatting, Word opens up in some bizarre viewing mode that I don't want, and god knows what else. Windows 2000 and Office XP seemed fine to me, but obviously Microsoft has to make more software and push it down the pipeline if they want to stay in business.
This type of thing is why I'm all for Vista. The more Microsoft tries to lock down the computer, the more frustrating it is for the end users, and the more people will flock to OSS, and the greater market share may make it profitable for someone to figure out why the sound on my Ubuntu box is about half as loud as it should be. I'm not smart enough, but dammit if more people are involved in the market someone will figure it out for me. So bring on the DRM and trusted computing and locked-down everything, only not for me. Keep screwing those other guys so Linux will get more users and developers and I get more help with the piddly annoying things like that damned sound issue.
We torture people? Ah, it must be election season, or you wouldn't bring that up. Saddam had no WMD? Ah, political pandering again from the liberals. Bush's policies make terrorism worse? Ah, more partisanship. Someone in the administration outed a CIA agent for political reasons? Ah, the liberals are playing politics again. We were lied to about the threat posed by Iraq to justify an invasion, and now we're mired in an open-ended, pointless war? My, the liberals hate Bush, don't they? That's all we freaking hear from the right wing. They never address anything--just accuse the speaker of partisanship. A senator is found to be a pedophile and would-be sexual predator? Oh, you're politicking again.
Occasionally I get lucky and someone says this crap to my face, so I get to say "but is what I'm saying factually incorrect?" If you make people stay on the subject rather than going off on a tangent about whether or not an unbiased, completely objective person exists anywhere on the planet, things get a bit more interesting. Usually I just get resentful silence because they don't want to actually answer the question, but at least the smug "I'm not going to openly disagree with you, but what matters here is that you hate the president, so let's talk about that" crap gets stifled for a few seconds.
It's going to be a real pain to be made to remove your space boots before you enter the airlock.
Societies like this that revolve around a cult of personality can't tolerate alternative belief systems to explain anything--everything, whether religion or science, has to be subordinate to politics, or be destroyed. I know the creationists (Hovind comes to mind) love to say that Stalin and Hitler were evolutionists, but they weren't--they opposed science as well, though they did like to couch their bizarro theories in pseudo-scientific langauge. A lot of religious people like to credit dictators' lack of religion for their brutality, but being a power-hungry paranoid maniac with delusions of grandeur may have just a teensy-weensy more to do with it.
The problem is that creationists and ID folk want not just their own opinion, but their own facts. They keep saying that evolution has never been witnessed, that there are no transitional fossils, that evolution is impossible because it violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, and so on. And if you read only creationist literature and have a general distrust of mainstream science, those arguments may seem tenable. But creationst thought only thrives when it's isolated--when you read mainstream literature about evolution, you find that these seemingly burning, portentious questions have been answered time and time again, usually decades ago. This would be like me reading only atheism books to learn about the Bible.
I'll use a different example to illustrate the incompatibility in goals. I used to work in an emergency room, and we ordered a telephone recorder so we could record (obviously) the phone calls that came in. All the calls were compressed, stored on a HD, and you could burn them to CD whenever you wanted. Great. So I burned the calls from a date range to a CD and popped the CD into my computer, whereupon progress came to a screeching halt. The company used a proprietary format to compress and store the audio files. I needed to install the software from their vendor, but they forgot to include the disk, so we had to deal with that. There is no reason, quality-wise, to use a proprietary audio format at this stage. PCM wav files or OGG would have worked fine. Even licensing mp3 for use would've been cheaper than developing an in-house format. But they were more focused on brand lock-in than with selling us a good product. They went to more trouble, and spent more money, just to make sure that our recordings, that we were legally required to keep, were in a proprietary format.
Contrast this to OSS, where the goals are completely different. When private companies are screwing the customer to achieve vendor lock-in, OSS offerings are fanatically open and compatible. So while I don't hate the private companies like Microsoft, I do keep in mind that it's in their best interest to make me dependent on them to be able to access my own data down the road.
It doesn't matter if their products are "inferior." If they can slowly kill off all the competitors, they get all the money. Business isn't about making a good product. That's incidental, and contingent on the priorities set by the board of directors. What matters is money, market share, stock price, and so on. In that light, their actions aren't really inexplicable. They aren't evil, only sociopathic. I'm a little surprized that people expect some modicum of morality or common human decency from a legal entity that is specifically designed to make money while allowing the stockholders to avoid responsibility. It's not sociopathic by accident, but by design. If kidnapping orphans and harvesting their organs were profitable, some corporation would do it, and you'd see sepia-toned PR ads showing that people's lives were improved by the organ transplants. What else do you expect?
Why aren't these wackos shouted down by the other Christians? I know several Christians who are embarassed by the right wing, but they don't say anything. They'll speak up and talk back to non-religious because they don't want to be pigeonholed with the kooks, but they won't shout the kooks down. They let the kooks dominate the discussion because they don't want dissention within the church, but they get defensive when we assume that they agree with their more militant brethren. You need to stand up and protest when a "Christian" isn't acting in a Christian way, not close ranks and yell "bigot" when we point out that you're tolerating him. If you don't share the values of the people you're hanging out with, stop hanging out with them.
- Physical evidence - Ilium has been found
- Historical Evidence - Greece and Troy are known to have existed, and some events described in the Iliad can be historically verified
- Linguistic evidence - In the Iliad, Athena and the other gods spoke Greek. Greek is a well-known language.
- Archaelogical evidence - Ilium was found with cutting-edge archaeological technique
Since we have physical, historical, linguistic, and archealogical evidence supporting the authenticity of the Iliad, I can safely conclude that all of the supernatural events in the Iliad actually took place.If the temp rose 150 degrees worldwide, the world would still exist. We however, would not. But dammit, it sure wouldn't be the end of the world. I have to concede the wisdom of what you're saying.
That's the funny thing about the "environmental skeptics." Somehow "pollute less and consume fewer finite resources" became a far-left wacko idea. Since the environmentalists are never going to be able to predict anything with 100% accuracy, and the science will always be changing due to new research, the "skeptics" can eternally muddy the waters as we continue to undermine the planet's ability to sustain human society.
I'm still waiting for you to reconcile an indifference to the execution of innocent people with a high regard for human life. The two seem mutually exclusive, do they not? Is it bigoted to make that logical juxtaposition, and note that one denotes a lack of the other? Or is it bigoted to note that I'm talking about Texas? Is it bigoted to talk about Texas tax policy? Immigration? Or is it only bigotry when I say something bad about them, like they have a bad public school system and a high crime rate?
If Texans placed a high value on human life, they would be more concerned about innocent people being executed in their state. That is a seeminly simple, obvious statement--does it qualify as bigotry to you? Are you even going to address that question? I don't mind you disagreeing with me--I welcome that. But Texans vote the way they do, their state has the record it does, and it seems obvious that if they had a high regard for human life in general that they would make the policies of their state more rigorous and cautious, and lower the chance of an innocent being executed. That they don't collectively care all that much about it indicates that they don't collectively care all that much about it--meaning they place a low value on the subject. Are we communicating yet?
The US government was so aghast at Saddam's gassing of the Kurds that Donald Rumsfeld flew to Iraq to shake his hand, open diplomatic relations, and increase the amount of money we were giving him. Yes, years and years later the neocons decided they didn't want him in office, but at the time of his worst atrocities he was all cuddly with a Republican White House. Current rationalizations for war aside, I'm tired of Americans pretending as if we were minding our own business and there was a bad man out there that we finally decided to bring to justice. I'm not saying he shouldn't be brought "to justice," but we're having very selective amnesia about who shook his hand and did business with him. Yes, it should be discussed on the news when they're talking about Rumsfeld's legacy--I'd love to see them show that clip and ask if he regretted doing business with such a madman after he gassed the Kurds. That would be "fair and balanced."
When I wrote about them just not valuing life like the rest of us, I am addressing a specific, known, acknowledged trait. I'm not making a metaphysical generalization, but saying, again, that insouciance about the execution of innocent people means that you don't value human life very much. If Texans as a group were upset about it, it would change, but since it won't change anytime soon, and Texans don't seem very upset about it anyway as a group, it would be hard to draw another conclusion. What you're doing is ignoring the very specific criticisms I made and pretending that I'm just generalizing from nothing. If the people I'm calling cannibals are in fact cannibals, then the assessment isn't bigoted. Ergo, if the people I'm accusing of not valuing human life very much in fact don't value human life very much, then no, it's not a bigoted generalization.
I'm reminded of that old racist saying about Asian countries--they just don't value life the same way we do. Only rather than some unspecified Asian country, it's Texas, and unlike the racist generalization, this one happens to be true. They just don't value life the way civilized places do. If the executed is black, they don't care at all. If the executed is white, then they care a little bit, but nothing more vehement than "it's a damned shame." You could have 10 consecutive executions that turned out to be innocent and if the Supreme Court stopped capital punishment, they'd still hate the courts for interfering, and they'd think you threw out the baby with the bathwater. Even adjusting for my latent misanthropy, there is something rotten in the culture of that state.
There is no mandate for accuracy in any of the news media, and hasn't been for some time. They get around any accusations of outright lying by not really taking on the position, but just talking about "the controversy." The Swiftboat thing is a good example--the accusations were known to be false, the thing was known to be financed by wealthy Republicans, and it was obviously, obviously a politically-motivated attack. But they talked about the controversy constantly, giving it air time, let it sink in and take effect.
Are they evil? No, they're just a business selling a product, and doing a good job of that. CNN and the rest are the same, as are the Comedy Central shows. But at least Comedy Central asks the obvious questions and admits that the ridiculous looks ridiculous. This isn't just a few comedians saying funny stuff--much of the show is given up to video clips of politicians doing their thing. It only looks ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The mainstream media is more gentle with politicians, because they need to maintain the access they have, and otherwise the "leaks" may dry up, and they'd be reporting on easter egg hunts the rest of their lives.
Truth places more value on this fact-based, rigorous analysis, conducted by experts in the field, than it does on the gut-feeling of Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld. A loyalty to truth means that you don't give people a free pass because they meant well and are probably decent people when they aren't making decisions that lead to tens of thousands of deaths. Truthiness ignores the fact-based analysis, distrusts the experts, and puts credence in Bush's gut-feeling. This sort of has consequences and stuff. So Colbert is joking, but not really, so faulting him for not being all that funny must be done with the knowledge that he's trying to call our attention to a collective insanity that we need to stop buying into.