The easiest way to describe the difference between Medieval Islam and Medieval Christianity is this: Christians were seeking to increase their faith despite what the natural world told them while Muslims were seeking to understand the natural world in order to better understand God.
That's nonsense. Both Christians and Muslims started out believing that understanding the natural world would help them understand and glorify God.
But science under Christianity eventually advanced to the point where that view wasn't tenable anymore. In addition, deism and other deviations from dogma became tolerated in Christianity. It was both the advancement of science and the tolerance of different religious views that changed the relationship between Christianity and science in the West.
Islamic science just never evolved that far, and to this day takes place mostly in nations that are intolerant of deviations from Islamic beliefs.
Completely true. But some religions are worse than others - and Islam is terrible.
It's no more terrible than Christianity was a few centuries ago. Christian Europe had public executions, pillories, torture, informants, fatwas, and theocracy. It took centuries of bloody wars to stop the reign of terror by Christian churches. For example, the Catholic church was opposed to human rights and democracy until the mid-20th century, when they finally were forced to change their tune, and even then they continued to support dictators for decades.
Your statement is pretty arrogant, blaming laziness and stupidity as cause. There are people - smart and courageous - putting their life on the line in totalitarian societies.
As opposed to "we have the only truth, and anybody who doesn't believe what we believe is going to burn in hell"? That's what both Christianity and Islam teach, and that is what these "smart and courageous" people you speak of believe.
What does the BBC documentary have to do with what we are talking about? Whether global warming is happening is not in dispute. What's in dispute is your ridiculous claims about economics and media.
You implied that Europe had achieved meaningful carbon emissions reductions through public policy, and that is objectively false; all of Europe's carbon reductions are explained by the European recession, as you can easily verify yourself from public GDP and emission data.
You also implied that action on climate change in the US was inhibited by greedy US corporations, but you haven't come up with any plausible way in which US corporations would actually benefit from stopping climate change legislation or in what way US media or schools are supposedly influenced. What US corporations do fear is losing competitiveness with China and India, but in that, their interests are aligned with everybody's interests in the US. And you fail to apply the same analysis to European companies and media.
Your problem isn't what you do or don't believe about climate change, your problem is an utter lack of understanding of economics and politics, and as a result you believe in wild conspiracy theories.
Why isn't the insurance industry already insisting on psychopathic screening of senior managers for the companies they are covering?
Because they don't have to: when such people wreck companies, often the government steps in and bails everybody out. In addition, stock holders have an incentive to select ruthless executives because their risk and liability are limited no matter how much misconduct management is guilty of. And the ability to buy and sell shares at the drop of a hat means that corporations have a incentive to go for short term success.
We don't need rules for screening for psychopaths, we just need to change the incentive structure. Corporations and their management simply are doing what we incentivize them to do.
Seriously folks, their behaviour is classed as antisocial for a reason, read the words - ANTI SOCIAL.
Man, just listen to yourself. You sound like some Soviet-style or prisoner style party member: "They are REACTIONARY! They are COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY! They are UN-MUTUAL! They want to STEAL FROM THE WORKING CLASS! We need to root out these SUBVERSIVES! There is something MENTALLY WRONG WITH THEM! Send them to RE-EDUCATION CAMPS!"
Thanks, but I'll take my chances with "psychopathic" American-style capitalists over your kind of government administered test of ideological and societal conformance any day.
Actually one of the main properties of the welfare state a la Europe is that is not sociopathic,
The same notions of responsibility to society that you think as "not sociopathic" were at work for bringing about socialism and fascism in Europe, because sociopaths manage to misuse them to get themselves into positions power. Looking at recent European leaders, I'd say that's still a problem.
"Meaningful CO2 emission reductions simply aren't in the cards." But It absolutely could be. Just look at the reductions that have already been achieved in Europe.
The only thing Europe has done to reduce its carbon emissions is wreck its economy (by means unrelated to carbon emissions); European reductions (e.g., in Germany) are right on the same line expressing a linear relationship between economic growth and growth in carbon emissions that the US, India, South Korea, and Canada are on.
Furthermore, European reductions aren't meaningful. They have been more than compensated for by increases in China and India. And even if you managed to get the entire world to achieve European style reductions, climate change would only be delayed by a few years.
Unfortunately in the US big business has too much of a stranglehold on the government and media to let anything stand in the way of extracting the last 1% of short term profits,
Carbon emission reductions are basically the same as an increase in the price of oil, something we already experience anyway. The only way US companies would suffer from carbon emission reductions is if companies in, oh, China or India aren't forced to make the same reductions. You're right that US companies are strongly opposed to that kind of agreement, because it threatens their existence and competitiveness. And you should be concerned about it as well, because if that comes to pass, many additional US jobs will move to those countries but no net decrease in carbon emission happens.
I mean there's still a massive number of Americans that dont even believe global warming is happening. That alone shows you either how ignorant most Americans are or how much big businesses can control the media, schools, government etc in the US. Probably both.
Europeans believe in climate change because their corporate and government media and educational systems find this a convenient fact to highlight as part of their own agenda. The corporate agenda behind pushing belief in climate change is to get people to vote for more taxes to combat this problem, taxes that then get paid as subsidies to big corporations in order to "compensate" them for "costs" associated with acting on climate change. You're right that there's a corporate agenda at work here, just not the way you think.
.gov is for the American government, don't ask me why we aren't using.us or.gov.us for that...
Because the US Department of Defense created the ARPAnet/Internet and created domains for the only organizations allowed on it: US COMpanies, US GOVernment, US EDUcational institutions, US MILitary, US NETwork infrastructure, and other US ORGanizations.
The country TLDs came much later. When they appeared, US companies (including most multinationals) continued to register under COM and the US government continued to register under GOV. Eventually, all the restrictions on US TLDs were lifted, except for GOV, EDU, and MIL. All these gTLDs remain under US jurisdiction, however, just like FR and DE are French and German TLDs.
The.com domain was created by the US Department of Defense, and has been under US control ever since. The US registrar chose to make it a generic domain allowing international registrants early on, and that turned out to be a good decision, because a lot of foreign and multinational companies chose to register under it. But openness to foreign registrants shouldn't give other nations legal claims on the TLD. The.com domain is still a US-owned and administered domain.
If you want a location based domain, you're free to get one. But other nations have chosen to transform their TLDs into generic TLDs as well, like ".to", ".ly", and ".cc".
Good for them; they certainly need the contact with alternative viewpoints. A technical college, on the other hand, may simply want to keep religion and politics off campus since it has nothing to do with their mission. The point is that students don't have a "free speech right" on campus, it's up to each educational institution to decide for themselves.
If we carry on the way we are, everyones (including your) lifestyle WILL get changed, either proactively by the government, or the resultant environmental disasters because the proactive changes were too little too late.
I don't mind my lifestyle being changed by what you call "environmental disasters" resulting from carbon emissions; I look at the IPCC report and find that I can live with that.
While industry is still polluting the way it does, and the system forces everyone to continue living the way we currently do
Nobody forces you to live in any particular way. You can join the Amish if you like. But of course your willingness to do something for the environment ends when it means any change for you personally.
Thats why it really is the rich corps and the government they own that are the problem.
And the solution of climate change activists is to hand even more power and more money to the government that is "owned by the rich corps". Does that make sense? Who do you think is going to write the carbon reduction legislation? Where do you think your carbon taxes are going to end up? It's a supreme irony that just the people who are most jaded about "big corporations" and "corrupt government" want to fix these problems by giving even more money and power to government and corporations.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, buy less crap and emit less carbon. Unlike a carbon tax, you'll end up with m.ore money in your pocket, and your choice actually will reduce carbon emissions.
wow really? as opposed to say, having the east coast repeatedly wiped out by mega-storms and western states becoming uninhabitable due to heat + the lack of water? Thats not even considering the effects on agriculture and the problems the rest of the world will face.
So, in your magical world, Obama passes a law, CO2 emissions get reduced, and we all live happily ever after in a never-changing lush green paradise? Come on, what are you on? Meaningful CO2 emission reductions simply aren't in the cards. And even at pre-industrial CO2 levels, lush forests turned to deserts and entire coastlines disappeared. And past experience shows that humans have no problems adapting to changing climate. Twenty percent of the Netherlands live below sea level, and large parts of Southern Europe turned from lush green forests to near desert conditions centuries ago.
Carbon taxes and similar policies end up only as another way by which corporations and cronies will be able to enrich themselves, and in the process, will hold up economic progress. The solution to global warming isn't trying to stop the unstoppable, it is to increase development around the globe so that people can cope better with the inevitable change.
The joke is the very ones denying global warming tend to be the ones buying beach houses. Those same beach houses won't be around in 50 or 100 years due to global warming.
No, the real joke is that the federal flood insurance programs pay for rebuilding these beach houses every time they get flooded.
In truth I think the majority of deniers believe it's happening they just don't want to change how they live so it's easier to just claim it's all a lie.
I do think it's happening, and I don't deny it. I don't want to change the way I live. I already don't drive much and live in an energy efficient home.
I don't see why I should pay additional taxes and subsidies just because people like you are incapable of reducing your carbon footprint voluntarily. If everybody who says they believe in global warming in the US stopped being such a hypocrite and voluntarily reduced their carbon footprint, we'd have bigger reductions than we will ever achieve by law. The problem isn't "rich corporations", the problem is you.
Politicians on either side of this issue don't understand the science behind global warming. But as someone who believes that global warming is happening but that the US should not adopt policies to reduce carbon emissions (because such policies do more harm than good), I don't really care why people vote the way they do as long as they do.
Restricting religious speech if any speech is allowed at all is a form of discrimination. That is where you are mistaken here.
That obviously fails as a legal principle. For example, professors can kick you out of class and give you a failing grade if you start proselytizing in math lecture when called to do an integral.
If you use AT&T as your ISP, who in their right mind thinks that just because you have att.com at the end of your e-mail address that you actually represent the company?
AT&T is just an ISP. A university, on the other hand, has highly selective admissions and its name usually enjoys special esteem, and merely being at the university constitutes an endorsement. Posting on myspace.com and on berkeley.edu are intrinsically different. Using a domain name is analogous to using a letterhead, and it is reasonable for a university (and in some cases mandatory) to prohibit others from using its letterhead or logo for political or religious purposes.
I'm for free speech on campus, but free speech on campus is largely a policy decision, not a constitutional right. People can't achieve more free speech if they start with the wrong arguments. And FIRE is wrong in claiming that there is an unprecedented level of authoritarianism.
You sound like one of those young earth creationists talking about evolutionary biology: you don't like it, so you ignore the evidence and just denigrate it.
You don't need evidence if you have the laws of physics and chemistry on your side.
Bravo on the rhetorical point. However, your understanding of the physics and chemistry still sucks. You obviously have no idea of how complex global climate models are and the assumptions and empirical data that go into them. The idea that you can predict future climate from physics and chemistry alone is ludicrous.
Actually Mainstream science has been fairly unequivocal since long before the 1970s. You can subract a century off that for when Fourier first demonstrated the green-house effect in the laboratory
Climate models and predictions aren't just based on the greenhouse effect, they assume complicated feedback mechanisms for which there is much less evidence.
Actually Mainstream science has been fairly unequivocal since long before the 1970s.
What science is unclear about is what the cost/benefit tradeoff of various warming scenarios and actions will be, and that is more important than temperatures.
You should pay attention to science. Economics is a science, and exceptionally clear on questions like comparative advantage, rational behavior, risk, and opportunity costs. You just happen to selectively listen to those scientists who tell you what you want to hear, while choosing to ignore those that tell you what doesn't fit your ideology.
those students are paying for the university networks with the university as the ISP... But because it is a public institution I would dare say that unless the are simply denying any ability to create private personal communications using school computers, that they are constitutionally obligated to accept such expression of religious ideas.
I don't see why; where do you see such a constitutional obligation? As long as their restrictions don't discriminate against specific religions or ideologies, those restrictions seem to be constitutional. The NSU policy does not discriminate, so it seems constitutional to me (it may have to clarify "inappropriate", most likely as "pornographic").
Misrepresenting yourself as having the university endorsing or supporting a particular political cause or promoting a particular religion would be bad... but that is not what a student generated web page usually does.
There are really two questions here. First, does the university have a right to impose restrictions; on that, see above. The second is whether it has an interest or even an obligation to impose such restrictions. I think it does, although that's obviously a harder argument to make. Many public universities are selective and reputable, so posting a statement like "Allah is great" or "God does not exist" on a site like berkeley.edu has a different weight and impact than posting it on myspace.com. In addition, many students are also instructors, making such an action potentially analogous to posting of the Ten Commandments by a teacher.
Apart from that, I don't see how letting students use the university name to promote their personal religious or political views contributes to their education, which to me is the relevant question to ask as a tax payer. I think it's good for students to engage in political and social debate, but they don't need to publish those debates to the rest of the world under the university banner.
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For practical purposes, it doesn't matter what the original texts say, it matters what the followers of the religion believe.
That's nonsense. Both Christians and Muslims started out believing that understanding the natural world would help them understand and glorify God.
But science under Christianity eventually advanced to the point where that view wasn't tenable anymore. In addition, deism and other deviations from dogma became tolerated in Christianity. It was both the advancement of science and the tolerance of different religious views that changed the relationship between Christianity and science in the West.
Islamic science just never evolved that far, and to this day takes place mostly in nations that are intolerant of deviations from Islamic beliefs.
It's no more terrible than Christianity was a few centuries ago. Christian Europe had public executions, pillories, torture, informants, fatwas, and theocracy. It took centuries of bloody wars to stop the reign of terror by Christian churches. For example, the Catholic church was opposed to human rights and democracy until the mid-20th century, when they finally were forced to change their tune, and even then they continued to support dictators for decades.
As opposed to "we have the only truth, and anybody who doesn't believe what we believe is going to burn in hell"? That's what both Christianity and Islam teach, and that is what these "smart and courageous" people you speak of believe.
What does the BBC documentary have to do with what we are talking about? Whether global warming is happening is not in dispute. What's in dispute is your ridiculous claims about economics and media.
You implied that Europe had achieved meaningful carbon emissions reductions through public policy, and that is objectively false; all of Europe's carbon reductions are explained by the European recession, as you can easily verify yourself from public GDP and emission data.
You also implied that action on climate change in the US was inhibited by greedy US corporations, but you haven't come up with any plausible way in which US corporations would actually benefit from stopping climate change legislation or in what way US media or schools are supposedly influenced. What US corporations do fear is losing competitiveness with China and India, but in that, their interests are aligned with everybody's interests in the US. And you fail to apply the same analysis to European companies and media.
Your problem isn't what you do or don't believe about climate change, your problem is an utter lack of understanding of economics and politics, and as a result you believe in wild conspiracy theories.
Because they don't have to: when such people wreck companies, often the government steps in and bails everybody out. In addition, stock holders have an incentive to select ruthless executives because their risk and liability are limited no matter how much misconduct management is guilty of. And the ability to buy and sell shares at the drop of a hat means that corporations have a incentive to go for short term success.
We don't need rules for screening for psychopaths, we just need to change the incentive structure. Corporations and their management simply are doing what we incentivize them to do.
Man, just listen to yourself. You sound like some Soviet-style or prisoner style party member: "They are REACTIONARY! They are COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY! They are UN-MUTUAL! They want to STEAL FROM THE WORKING CLASS! We need to root out these SUBVERSIVES! There is something MENTALLY WRONG WITH THEM! Send them to RE-EDUCATION CAMPS!"
Thanks, but I'll take my chances with "psychopathic" American-style capitalists over your kind of government administered test of ideological and societal conformance any day.
The same notions of responsibility to society that you think as "not sociopathic" were at work for bringing about socialism and fascism in Europe, because sociopaths manage to misuse them to get themselves into positions power. Looking at recent European leaders, I'd say that's still a problem.
Yeah, it goes a long ways towards explaining the fact that we are wealthier, healthier, more free, and live longer than ever before in human history.
The only thing Europe has done to reduce its carbon emissions is wreck its economy (by means unrelated to carbon emissions); European reductions (e.g., in Germany) are right on the same line expressing a linear relationship between economic growth and growth in carbon emissions that the US, India, South Korea, and Canada are on.
Furthermore, European reductions aren't meaningful. They have been more than compensated for by increases in China and India. And even if you managed to get the entire world to achieve European style reductions, climate change would only be delayed by a few years.
Carbon emission reductions are basically the same as an increase in the price of oil, something we already experience anyway. The only way US companies would suffer from carbon emission reductions is if companies in, oh, China or India aren't forced to make the same reductions. You're right that US companies are strongly opposed to that kind of agreement, because it threatens their existence and competitiveness. And you should be concerned about it as well, because if that comes to pass, many additional US jobs will move to those countries but no net decrease in carbon emission happens.
Europeans believe in climate change because their corporate and government media and educational systems find this a convenient fact to highlight as part of their own agenda. The corporate agenda behind pushing belief in climate change is to get people to vote for more taxes to combat this problem, taxes that then get paid as subsidies to big corporations in order to "compensate" them for "costs" associated with acting on climate change. You're right that there's a corporate agenda at work here, just not the way you think.
Because the US Department of Defense created the ARPAnet/Internet and created domains for the only organizations allowed on it: US COMpanies, US GOVernment, US EDUcational institutions, US MILitary, US NETwork infrastructure, and other US ORGanizations.
The country TLDs came much later. When they appeared, US companies (including most multinationals) continued to register under COM and the US government continued to register under GOV. Eventually, all the restrictions on US TLDs were lifted, except for GOV, EDU, and MIL. All these gTLDs remain under US jurisdiction, however, just like FR and DE are French and German TLDs.
The .com domain was created by the US Department of Defense, and has been under US control ever since. The US registrar chose to make it a generic domain allowing international registrants early on, and that turned out to be a good decision, because a lot of foreign and multinational companies chose to register under it. But openness to foreign registrants shouldn't give other nations legal claims on the TLD. The .com domain is still a US-owned and administered domain.
If you want a location based domain, you're free to get one. But other nations have chosen to transform their TLDs into generic TLDs as well, like ".to", ".ly", and ".cc".
Good for them; they certainly need the contact with alternative viewpoints. A technical college, on the other hand, may simply want to keep religion and politics off campus since it has nothing to do with their mission. The point is that students don't have a "free speech right" on campus, it's up to each educational institution to decide for themselves.
I don't mind my lifestyle being changed by what you call "environmental disasters" resulting from carbon emissions; I look at the IPCC report and find that I can live with that.
Nobody forces you to live in any particular way. You can join the Amish if you like. But of course your willingness to do something for the environment ends when it means any change for you personally.
And the solution of climate change activists is to hand even more power and more money to the government that is "owned by the rich corps". Does that make sense? Who do you think is going to write the carbon reduction legislation? Where do you think your carbon taxes are going to end up? It's a supreme irony that just the people who are most jaded about "big corporations" and "corrupt government" want to fix these problems by giving even more money and power to government and corporations.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, buy less crap and emit less carbon. Unlike a carbon tax, you'll end up with m.ore money in your pocket, and your choice actually will reduce carbon emissions.
So, in your magical world, Obama passes a law, CO2 emissions get reduced, and we all live happily ever after in a never-changing lush green paradise? Come on, what are you on? Meaningful CO2 emission reductions simply aren't in the cards. And even at pre-industrial CO2 levels, lush forests turned to deserts and entire coastlines disappeared. And past experience shows that humans have no problems adapting to changing climate. Twenty percent of the Netherlands live below sea level, and large parts of Southern Europe turned from lush green forests to near desert conditions centuries ago.
Carbon taxes and similar policies end up only as another way by which corporations and cronies will be able to enrich themselves, and in the process, will hold up economic progress. The solution to global warming isn't trying to stop the unstoppable, it is to increase development around the globe so that people can cope better with the inevitable change.
No, the real joke is that the federal flood insurance programs pay for rebuilding these beach houses every time they get flooded.
I do think it's happening, and I don't deny it. I don't want to change the way I live. I already don't drive much and live in an energy efficient home.
I don't see why I should pay additional taxes and subsidies just because people like you are incapable of reducing your carbon footprint voluntarily. If everybody who says they believe in global warming in the US stopped being such a hypocrite and voluntarily reduced their carbon footprint, we'd have bigger reductions than we will ever achieve by law. The problem isn't "rich corporations", the problem is you.
Politicians on either side of this issue don't understand the science behind global warming. But as someone who believes that global warming is happening but that the US should not adopt policies to reduce carbon emissions (because such policies do more harm than good), I don't really care why people vote the way they do as long as they do.
Your signature applies aptly to yourself.
A totally secure cyber infrastructure is like a totally secure home: just not very pleasant to live with.
That obviously fails as a legal principle. For example, professors can kick you out of class and give you a failing grade if you start proselytizing in math lecture when called to do an integral.
AT&T is just an ISP. A university, on the other hand, has highly selective admissions and its name usually enjoys special esteem, and merely being at the university constitutes an endorsement. Posting on myspace.com and on berkeley.edu are intrinsically different. Using a domain name is analogous to using a letterhead, and it is reasonable for a university (and in some cases mandatory) to prohibit others from using its letterhead or logo for political or religious purposes.
I'm for free speech on campus, but free speech on campus is largely a policy decision, not a constitutional right. People can't achieve more free speech if they start with the wrong arguments. And FIRE is wrong in claiming that there is an unprecedented level of authoritarianism.
You sound like one of those young earth creationists talking about evolutionary biology: you don't like it, so you ignore the evidence and just denigrate it.
Bravo on the rhetorical point. However, your understanding of the physics and chemistry still sucks. You obviously have no idea of how complex global climate models are and the assumptions and empirical data that go into them. The idea that you can predict future climate from physics and chemistry alone is ludicrous.
Climate models and predictions aren't just based on the greenhouse effect, they assume complicated feedback mechanisms for which there is much less evidence.
What science is unclear about is what the cost/benefit tradeoff of various warming scenarios and actions will be, and that is more important than temperatures.
You should pay attention to science. Economics is a science, and exceptionally clear on questions like comparative advantage, rational behavior, risk, and opportunity costs. You just happen to selectively listen to those scientists who tell you what you want to hear, while choosing to ignore those that tell you what doesn't fit your ideology.
I don't see why; where do you see such a constitutional obligation? As long as their restrictions don't discriminate against specific religions or ideologies, those restrictions seem to be constitutional. The NSU policy does not discriminate, so it seems constitutional to me (it may have to clarify "inappropriate", most likely as "pornographic").
There are really two questions here. First, does the university have a right to impose restrictions; on that, see above. The second is whether it has an interest or even an obligation to impose such restrictions. I think it does, although that's obviously a harder argument to make. Many public universities are selective and reputable, so posting a statement like "Allah is great" or "God does not exist" on a site like berkeley.edu has a different weight and impact than posting it on myspace.com. In addition, many students are also instructors, making such an action potentially analogous to posting of the Ten Commandments by a teacher.
Apart from that, I don't see how letting students use the university name to promote their personal religious or political views contributes to their education, which to me is the relevant question to ask as a tax payer. I think it's good for students to engage in political and social debate, but they don't need to publish those debates to the rest of the world under the university banner.