The Troll moderation is unfair -- the electric car is impractical in the minds of most Americans. It's twice the price of a comparable car, and people aren't even buying hybrids right now because of the measily $3000 premium, much less a $15k-$18 premium. There's no way you'd make up those costs.
Furthermore, people are perpetually worried about the range problem in spite of the fact that they could rent a car for the rare, once or twice a year long vacation. Having to make a 5 hour stop every 300 miles kills the viability of the vehicle for long trips and people irrationally place a lot of stock in that.
This car is dead in the water before it's even sold.
They're all being charged for funny accounting tricks. No one's been charged for deliberate economic sabotage to the businesses and private citizens of California. Essentially, they're getting away scott free on this issue, which I think is perhaps more sinister. Read more quotes from the case and note how the Guvernator didn't take them to task for blatant screwing over of California.
Gray Davis lost his election over the energy crisis, and Schwartzenegger does nothing to punish the parties responsible. I'm not saying that Davis was a great governor, but I doubt that he'd have let Enron walk away scott free.
Getting educated. Getting upset. Getting out the vote. Getting others educated. Getting others upset. Getting others out to the vote.
The trick of the whole thing is that we have to get enough people on the boat nationwide to make a change. The big problem is that the majority doesn't want to do anything, and a sizeable plurality actually encourages the loss of rights (for others of course, never realizing that it's a loss of rights for them too) for safety. Unless we can convince them that the rights of others matter and that it's not making them safer anyway, we have lost.
This country has taught itself helplessness. We hear about "the lesser of two evils" and don't pay enough attention to the fact that we enable the supposed no-win vote. We don't write our candidates. We don't rally for our causes, and when we do, we do it in a hapzard and unprofessional manner in contrast to the great movements of the past. We don't contribute to campaigns, volunteer to help candidates get elected, and make clear that our support is contingent on them supporting us in exchange. We sit on our butts and do nothing to effect a change.
In 2000, I heard a lot of people say that there was no difference between the Republicans and Democrats. 6 years later, I wonder how many people think Al Gore would've led this nation the same way. Why couldn't people see the difference? The answer's a lack of education about the candidates and lack of interest in getting educated.
All we can do is get ourselves and our friends informed and active. As long as enough of us work on changing things locally, we will eventually change things globally.
However, I sincerely despair that we'll ever recover our sense of outrage at what we've lost in terms of rights until someone truly exploits and abuses power on a large enough scale to make the people more scared of government than of foreigners.
For example, Citibank has a card which gives 5% back on groceries, gas, and prescriptions, and 1% back on everything else, which comes out to a fair amount of money you get back. You don't get money back if you stick to cash or checks.
This money mostly comes from a cut of the merchant fees embedded in every purchase; credit card companies have basically forced retailers to pass the surcharges on to everybody and not just credit card users.
It's a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. Everyone who uses credit cards drives up the prices for everybody. Only people who use credit cards can get a discount for using credit cards as companies give back a cut of what they demand from retailers.
If no one used credit cards, prices would be lower since the merchant's fees wouldn't be spread out across all goods. However, if people use credit cards, then prices are pushed up for everybody except credit card users who get a discount relative to the others even though they still pay slightly more too.
Assume that a spread-out merchant's fee is a surcharge of X on goods, that a cashback card gives back 80% of that, and that the price on goods responds instantly to changes in cost:
........... | B uses card......... | B uses cash A uses card | A pays 0.4X surcharge | A pays 0.2X surcharge ........... | B pays 0.4X surcharge | B pays 1.0X surcharge A uses cash | A pays 1.0X surcharge | A pays no surcharge ........... | B pays 0.2X surcharge | B pays no surcharge
Naturally, prices don't change that fast in the real world, but the aggregate of merchant fees do get applied to prices eventually.
At any rate, credit cards are also evil because they give a third party information that tracks your purchases and locations, and if you get sick or find yourself suddenly unable to pay, you may get hit with suddenly increased interest rates and unable to declare bankruptcy thanks to tougher laws passed on the behalf of credit card companies. Welcome to legalized usury -- predatory lending to the financially disadvantaged.
While the federal ruling is that you cannot be arrested for failing to provide an ID...
Actually, in certain situations you can. If an officer thinks that you might've done something wrong, they can demand your name and ID and arrest you for failing to present them thanks to Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada. Oh, if you're not suspected of anything then you're safe but only so long as the cop gives away that he honestly didn't suspect you of anything. Hope you don't get involved in a protest that the cops are cracking down on "for disorderly conduct."
Credit may not be evil, but I'd rather avoid it just the same.
Fear of debt is the beginning of financial wisdom.
Or, as the bard said: Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. -- Polonius to Laertes, Hamlet
RFID chip implants don't have to be mandatory. All you have to do is make it a rule that you can't fly, or cross the border, or get a drivers license without one.
Are you implying that Americans will just sit back and let that happen in the first place? I don't know a single person that would stand for the government pulling that one over on us.
Try flying, driving, or crossing the border without ID. Try opening a bank account without presenting your government ID number (aka SSN). Try getting insurance, a credit card, a home loan, a car loan, a place to rent, and utilities for that place without presenting a SSN.
Do you realize that we have a backdoor national ID card system right now? Legislation was passed to require an interlinking of driver's license record systems. Driver's licenses have to have biometric data encoded on them. A Supreme Court decision in the past few years means that you can't refuse to present them to law enforcement. Originally, this was portrayed as being intended to keep drunk drivers (especially commercial truck drivers) from just moving to another state to get a new license, but today it's being used by remote jurisdictions to enforce parking and speeding tickets with no means of appeal if the system has you wrong.
We set up an unaccountable national database of people who are not allowed to fly that is based purely on names and aliases instead of more reliable data. Senators have been kept from flying because of the list.
Police today can enter your home, plant listening devices, keystroke monitors, etc. and leave without letting you know and forbidding landlords from telling you about it. They can tap your phones if it's suspected that someone they might be interested in might use the phone (under their discretion). They can snatch records of what you read from the library, who you email and what sites you visit from your ISP, what potentially embarassing medical conditions you might have from your doctor, and any and all business transactions you make from your bank and credit card companies, and none of them can tell you under threat of criminal prosecution.
Our government imprisoned people without trial and without access to laywers in violation of the 6th Amendment. Our government spies on citizens without a warrant in violation of the 4th Amendment. It tortures prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention as well as the 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments, and there is a significant portion of the populace that approves of these actions since it makes them feel safer. It even prevents protesters from gathering outside of "Free Speech Zones" in front of the President in violation of the 1st Amendment, and people still aren't outraged.
Let me tell you what Americans will do. NOT A DAMNED THING. All this government has to do is explain how it will protect us against terrorists, child molesters, Iranians, or whoever the hell we're supposed to be most scared of today, and so-called citizens will line up to be sheared like the good little sheep they are.
If you think there is such a thing as public outrage at the loss of our rights, then you haven't been paying attention to in this post-9/11 world. Do you know what gets people angry? High gas prices, incompetent handling of a disaster, and the stink of failure in war.
Civil rights doesn't even register as an issue thanks to the learned helplessness of the American people. Just shelter us from harm, and you can do anything with that guy's rights.
I use cash everywhere I can to avoid identity theft and profiling. Every place you leave a receipt with your credit card number on it is an opportunity for someone to steal money from you.
I also am adverse to data mining. I hate push advertising and don't want to be bothered by people who think that I might purchase some crap I don't want based on something else I purchased.
All in all, using cash is about freedom and security to me, and I think it's worth the inconvenience.
My guess is that Microsoft's effort is an attempt to create a demand for some future operating system that will be hardened against rootkits.
You mean trusted computing? Gee, maybe MS would like to have some excuse for the unpopular idea of requiring all OS's to be signed by a central signing authority and monitored against tampering. Maybe MS is trying the idea out right now on the Xbox 360 as well.
How about that's exactly what I said. I said to mod him up because he knew more about the situation than I did. I never said he was wrong.
I then offered a guess for why the poll said that most soldier believe something that's plain wrong which he didn't talk about. Again, I didn't contradict anything he said.
Good. I figured that access to news probably wasn't blocked and reget insinuating that it might be.
A more logical guess is a lack of time and interest in the news and a greater trust for what your commanders and buddies believe than what the media says. Is that the case?
Anyway, if randomness does not exist in the physical world, the exact same monkey presented with the exact same decision will always make the same choice.
Actually, that's kind of up in the air. The most popular quantum mechanics interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, rejects any sort of determinism. All you would have is exactly equal probabilities that they'd make the same decision, not a fixed determinism. Fundamentally, all processes in the universe are random (but weighted) under that interpretation. You can read about more quantum mechanics interpretations on the Wikipedia.
Part of your woes may be that the Nokia 6682 doesn't support UMTS. You want the Nokia 6680 for that. It's the same phone with one of the GSM bands dropped for UMTS and a VGA phone in the front for video phone calls.
Goes with the conservative backlash mythology
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 1
I never thought of eviromentalists as Harvard graduates.
It's part of the conservative backlash mythology that all liberals are intellectual and cultural elitists. An Ivy League education is frequently used as short-hand for being one of these out of touch types. Of course, the people with money and power aren't the elites -- it's the snobby liberals. It's class warfare without economics -- a world where liberals try to get in the way of God-fearing, hard-working Americans for no reason other than their loony, secular dogma.
I suggest reading the book What's the Matter With Kansas sometime for a good perspective on this. The author shows how the liberal / populist arguments of the turn of the century when Kansas was a seething hotbed of liberal agitation have basically been recast in the modern era as a class struggle against an illusionary foe -- the mythical liberal elite from Hollywood, New England, and the "Left Coast" that rules America in spite of the efforts of trod-upon, underdog conservatives.
Personally, I just want to know what the heck "waffle-stomping" is supposed to mean.
I also never thought of government not owning property. What? They are supposed to pay rent of some sort for the rest of the country's life?
His specific objections are to federally-owned nature preserves (as opposed to parks used for camping, etc.). In his opinion, if something isn't being exploited for commercial gain, then it isn't worth anything, and he views wildlife preserves as an obscene waste.
Out of curiosity, do you know if there's any law that prevents you from putting that notice on any random system outside of the DoD? That would be a great motd for a "don't touch me" laptop.
Really? Man that must be why I don't get paid twice what I made fresh out of college only 3 years later and don't get a new job offer every three weeks or so from a 8 month old resume on Monster.com.
Thanks for clearing that up. Should I polish up on Visual Basic or get my MCSE certification first?
Have some tasty Don Young quotes
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 5, Informative
You know these people aren't environmentalists when they get Don Young on their side. Let's look at some Don Young quotes:
"Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans."
"I don't see any justification for the federal government owning land, other than the Statue of Liberty and maybe a few parks, maybe a few refuges. But to just own land to do nothing with it I think is a disservice to the Constitution."
"We wonder why we have got the Freemen or the militants. We wonder why we have got unrest in this country. It is because our government, in fact, has got out of hand and out of line, with the Endangered Species Act."
If I have my way, I'm going to dissolve the Forest Service. They're in the business of harvesting trees and they're not harvesting trees, so why have them anymore?
If you can't eat it, can't sleep under it, can't wear it or make something from it, it's not worth anything.
The environmentalists - the self-centered bunch, the waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots that don't understand that they're leading this country into environmental disaster.
Yeah, Don, it's the environmentalists that are leading us into environmental disaster. Riiiiiight....
Re:These are not environmentalists
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 3, Interesting
No. You're confusing the loony, back-to-nature, anti-civilization crowd with the moneyed, "as long as it doesn't involve actual sacrifice", feel-good faux-enviromentalist crowd.
Completely opposite ends of the green spectrum: Extremists vs. dabblers. Wannabe terrorists vs. people who put a bumper sticker on their SUV.
It's like equating Falwell's crazies with fair-weather Christians. It offends people in the middle who care about the message but haven't gone so far as to be unable to understand it anymore.
I agree. These people aren't environmentalists. They're too wrapped up in their property values to sacrifice for the greater good by allowing pollution free power that might be visible from their backyard.
Calling these people environmentalists is an smear attack against actual environmentalists.
I wonder why the 'pro-life' movement isn't trying to do something about this? It must be the number one cause of human death. (if we accept that a human embryo is a human).
Coming from someone who sits in between the hard pro-life and hard pro-choice ends of the spectrum, I have to let you know that this argument has never influenced a pro-lifer. Never. I've spent a lot of time debating people from both sides of the spectrum both from honest beliefs and from devil's advocate positions. That argument is only used by pro-choicers to pat themselves on the back about how clever they are.
The essence of the pro-life movement's motivation is the belief that abortion is murder. Murder requires two things -- that the victim be considered human and that the action be deliberate. Natural death may be a tragedy even if it's a very common occurence, but it's not murder. It's comparing apples and oranges (or heart attacks and serial killers if you will) in the minds of pro-lifers.
Abortion moderates are even less impressed.
Those that consider even an embryo to be human (but support abortion in cases of rape, incest, health of the mother, etc.) are essentially indistinguishable from hard pro-lifers on this one -- a tragedy or life but not murder.
Those that support embryonic stem cell research, in virto fertilization, and emergency contraception draw the line on what is human somewhere beyond that point. While they may oppose the killing of a well developed fetus, the natural death of an embryo doesn't even register on their moral radar.
In essence, you're impressing no one with your argument but people who already agree with you.
Slashdot Mirror
The Troll moderation is unfair -- the electric car is impractical in the minds of most Americans. It's twice the price of a comparable car, and people aren't even buying hybrids right now because of the measily $3000 premium, much less a $15k-$18 premium. There's no way you'd make up those costs.
Furthermore, people are perpetually worried about the range problem in spite of the fact that they could rent a car for the rare, once or twice a year long vacation. Having to make a 5 hour stop every 300 miles kills the viability of the vehicle for long trips and people irrationally place a lot of stock in that.
This car is dead in the water before it's even sold.
They're all being charged for funny accounting tricks.
No one's been charged for deliberate economic sabotage to the businesses and private citizens of California. Essentially, they're getting away scott free on this issue, which I think is perhaps more sinister. Read more quotes from the case and note how the Guvernator didn't take them to task for blatant screwing over of California.
Gray Davis lost his election over the energy crisis, and Schwartzenegger does nothing to punish the parties responsible. I'm not saying that Davis was a great governor, but I doubt that he'd have let Enron walk away scott free.
Getting educated. Getting upset. Getting out the vote.
Getting others educated. Getting others upset. Getting others out to the vote.
The trick of the whole thing is that we have to get enough people on the boat nationwide to make a change. The big problem is that the majority doesn't want to do anything, and a sizeable plurality actually encourages the loss of rights (for others of course, never realizing that it's a loss of rights for them too) for safety. Unless we can convince them that the rights of others matter and that it's not making them safer anyway, we have lost.
This country has taught itself helplessness. We hear about "the lesser of two evils" and don't pay enough attention to the fact that we enable the supposed no-win vote. We don't write our candidates. We don't rally for our causes, and when we do, we do it in a hapzard and unprofessional manner in contrast to the great movements of the past. We don't contribute to campaigns, volunteer to help candidates get elected, and make clear that our support is contingent on them supporting us in exchange. We sit on our butts and do nothing to effect a change.
In 2000, I heard a lot of people say that there was no difference between the Republicans and Democrats. 6 years later, I wonder how many people think Al Gore would've led this nation the same way. Why couldn't people see the difference? The answer's a lack of education about the candidates and lack of interest in getting educated.
All we can do is get ourselves and our friends informed and active. As long as enough of us work on changing things locally, we will eventually change things globally.
However, I sincerely despair that we'll ever recover our sense of outrage at what we've lost in terms of rights until someone truly exploits and abuses power on a large enough scale to make the people more scared of government than of foreigners.
This money mostly comes from a cut of the merchant fees embedded in every purchase; credit card companies have basically forced retailers to pass the surcharges on to everybody and not just credit card users.
It's a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. Everyone who uses credit cards drives up the prices for everybody. Only people who use credit cards can get a discount for using credit cards as companies give back a cut of what they demand from retailers.
If no one used credit cards, prices would be lower since the merchant's fees wouldn't be spread out across all goods. However, if people use credit cards, then prices are pushed up for everybody except credit card users who get a discount relative to the others even though they still pay slightly more too.
Assume that a spread-out merchant's fee is a surcharge of X on goods, that a cashback card gives back 80% of that, and that the price on goods responds instantly to changes in cost:Naturally, prices don't change that fast in the real world, but the aggregate of merchant fees do get applied to prices eventually.
At any rate, credit cards are also evil because they give a third party information that tracks your purchases and locations, and if you get sick or find yourself suddenly unable to pay, you may get hit with suddenly increased interest rates and unable to declare bankruptcy thanks to tougher laws passed on the behalf of credit card companies. Welcome to legalized usury -- predatory lending to the financially disadvantaged.
While the federal ruling is that you cannot be arrested for failing to provide an ID...
Actually, in certain situations you can. If an officer thinks that you might've done something wrong, they can demand your name and ID and arrest you for failing to present them thanks to Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada. Oh, if you're not suspected of anything then you're safe but only so long as the cop gives away that he honestly didn't suspect you of anything. Hope you don't get involved in a protest that the cops are cracking down on "for disorderly conduct."
Credit may not be evil, but I'd rather avoid it just the same.
Fear of debt is the beginning of financial wisdom.
Or, as the bard said:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
-- Polonius to Laertes, Hamlet
Are you implying that Americans will just sit back and let that happen in the first place? I don't know a single person that would stand for the government pulling that one over on us.
Try flying, driving, or crossing the border without ID. Try opening a bank account without presenting your government ID number (aka SSN). Try getting insurance, a credit card, a home loan, a car loan, a place to rent, and utilities for that place without presenting a SSN.
Do you realize that we have a backdoor national ID card system right now? Legislation was passed to require an interlinking of driver's license record systems. Driver's licenses have to have biometric data encoded on them. A Supreme Court decision in the past few years means that you can't refuse to present them to law enforcement. Originally, this was portrayed as being intended to keep drunk drivers (especially commercial truck drivers) from just moving to another state to get a new license, but today it's being used by remote jurisdictions to enforce parking and speeding tickets with no means of appeal if the system has you wrong.
We set up an unaccountable national database of people who are not allowed to fly that is based purely on names and aliases instead of more reliable data. Senators have been kept from flying because of the list.
Police today can enter your home, plant listening devices, keystroke monitors, etc. and leave without letting you know and forbidding landlords from telling you about it. They can tap your phones if it's suspected that someone they might be interested in might use the phone (under their discretion). They can snatch records of what you read from the library, who you email and what sites you visit from your ISP, what potentially embarassing medical conditions you might have from your doctor, and any and all business transactions you make from your bank and credit card companies, and none of them can tell you under threat of criminal prosecution.
Our government imprisoned people without trial and without access to laywers in violation of the 6th Amendment. Our government spies on citizens without a warrant in violation of the 4th Amendment. It tortures prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention as well as the 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments, and there is a significant portion of the populace that approves of these actions since it makes them feel safer. It even prevents protesters from gathering outside of "Free Speech Zones" in front of the President in violation of the 1st Amendment, and people still aren't outraged.
Let me tell you what Americans will do. NOT A DAMNED THING. All this government has to do is explain how it will protect us against terrorists, child molesters, Iranians, or whoever the hell we're supposed to be most scared of today, and so-called citizens will line up to be sheared like the good little sheep they are.
If you think there is such a thing as public outrage at the loss of our rights, then you haven't been paying attention to in this post-9/11 world. Do you know what gets people angry? High gas prices, incompetent handling of a disaster, and the stink of failure in war. Civil rights doesn't even register as an issue thanks to the learned helplessness of the American people. Just shelter us from harm, and you can do anything with that guy's rights.
I use cash everywhere I can to avoid identity theft and profiling. Every place you leave a receipt with your credit card number on it is an opportunity for someone to steal money from you.
I also am adverse to data mining. I hate push advertising and don't want to be bothered by people who think that I might purchase some crap I don't want based on something else I purchased.
All in all, using cash is about freedom and security to me, and I think it's worth the inconvenience.
My guess is that Microsoft's effort is an attempt to create a demand for some future operating system that will be hardened against rootkits.
You mean trusted computing? Gee, maybe MS would like to have some excuse for the unpopular idea of requiring all OS's to be signed by a central signing authority and monitored against tampering. Maybe MS is trying the idea out right now on the Xbox 360 as well.
So how did you detect the undetectable rootkit getting on your system within 15 minutes of installation?
How about that's exactly what I said. I said to mod him up because he knew more about the situation than I did. I never said he was wrong.
I then offered a guess for why the poll said that most soldier believe something that's plain wrong which he didn't talk about. Again, I didn't contradict anything he said.
So, what are you talking about now?
Good. I figured that access to news probably wasn't blocked and reget insinuating that it might be.
A more logical guess is a lack of time and interest in the news and a greater trust for what your commanders and buddies believe than what the media says. Is that the case?
Anyway, if randomness does not exist in the physical world, the exact same monkey presented with the exact same decision will always make the same choice.
Actually, that's kind of up in the air. The most popular quantum mechanics interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, rejects any sort of determinism. All you would have is exactly equal probabilities that they'd make the same decision, not a fixed determinism. Fundamentally, all processes in the universe are random (but weighted) under that interpretation. You can read about more quantum mechanics interpretations on the Wikipedia.
"And that's great, except some of the grey-list sites are kind of blocked so basically you can't get porn off it, among other things."
I wonder how good their access to news is considering that 85% of our troops think that their role in Iraq is to retaliate against Saddam for his role in 9-11. There seems to be a disconnect between what the troops believe and what the President has publicly stated before and after the war started.
Part of your woes may be that the Nokia 6682 doesn't support UMTS.
You want the Nokia 6680 for that. It's the same phone with one of the GSM bands dropped for UMTS and a VGA phone in the front for video phone calls.
I never thought of eviromentalists as Harvard graduates.
It's part of the conservative backlash mythology that all liberals are intellectual and cultural elitists. An Ivy League education is frequently used as short-hand for being one of these out of touch types. Of course, the people with money and power aren't the elites -- it's the snobby liberals. It's class warfare without economics -- a world where liberals try to get in the way of God-fearing, hard-working Americans for no reason other than their loony, secular dogma.
I suggest reading the book What's the Matter With Kansas sometime for a good perspective on this. The author shows how the liberal / populist arguments of the turn of the century when Kansas was a seething hotbed of liberal agitation have basically been recast in the modern era as a class struggle against an illusionary foe -- the mythical liberal elite from Hollywood, New England, and the "Left Coast" that rules America in spite of the efforts of trod-upon, underdog conservatives.
Personally, I just want to know what the heck "waffle-stomping" is supposed to mean.
I also never thought of government not owning property. What? They are supposed to pay rent of some sort for the rest of the country's life?
His specific objections are to federally-owned nature preserves (as opposed to parks used for camping, etc.). In his opinion, if something isn't being exploited for commercial gain, then it isn't worth anything, and he views wildlife preserves as an obscene waste.
Well, I don't know about him, but I didn't.
Thanks for pointing out their existence. I'll have to thinker with them when I get home.
Out of curiosity, do you know if there's any law that prevents you from putting that notice on any random system outside of the DoD? That would be a great motd for a "don't touch me" laptop.
Man, a guy throws ONE chair according an internet rumor, and he never lives it down.
Can't we get back to making fun of him for jumping up and down screaming "Developers!" like a drunken football fan?
Really? Man that must be why I don't get paid twice what I made fresh out of college only 3 years later and don't get a new job offer every three weeks or so from a 8 month old resume on Monster.com.
Thanks for clearing that up. Should I polish up on Visual Basic or get my MCSE certification first?
You know these people aren't environmentalists when they get Don Young on their side. Let's look at some Don Young quotes:
Yeah, Don, it's the environmentalists that are leading us into environmental disaster. Riiiiiight....
No. You're confusing the loony, back-to-nature, anti-civilization crowd with the moneyed, "as long as it doesn't involve actual sacrifice", feel-good faux-enviromentalist crowd.
Completely opposite ends of the green spectrum: Extremists vs. dabblers. Wannabe terrorists vs. people who put a bumper sticker on their SUV.
It's like equating Falwell's crazies with fair-weather Christians. It offends people in the middle who care about the message but haven't gone so far as to be unable to understand it anymore.
I agree. These people aren't environmentalists. They're too wrapped up in their property values to sacrifice for the greater good by allowing pollution free power that might be visible from their backyard.
Calling these people environmentalists is an smear attack against actual environmentalists.
Who is surviving nuke? Bear is surviving nuke! How can that be!?
I wonder why the 'pro-life' movement isn't trying to do something about this?
It must be the number one cause of human death. (if we accept that a human embryo is a human).
Coming from someone who sits in between the hard pro-life and hard pro-choice ends of the spectrum, I have to let you know that this argument has never influenced a pro-lifer. Never. I've spent a lot of time debating people from both sides of the spectrum both from honest beliefs and from devil's advocate positions. That argument is only used by pro-choicers to pat themselves on the back about how clever they are.
The essence of the pro-life movement's motivation is the belief that abortion is murder. Murder requires two things -- that the victim be considered human and that the action be deliberate. Natural death may be a tragedy even if it's a very common occurence, but it's not murder. It's comparing apples and oranges (or heart attacks and serial killers if you will) in the minds of pro-lifers.
Abortion moderates are even less impressed.
Those that consider even an embryo to be human (but support abortion in cases of rape, incest, health of the mother, etc.) are essentially indistinguishable from hard pro-lifers on this one -- a tragedy or life but not murder.
Those that support embryonic stem cell research, in virto fertilization, and emergency contraception draw the line on what is human somewhere beyond that point. While they may oppose the killing of a well developed fetus, the natural death of an embryo doesn't even register on their moral radar.
In essence, you're impressing no one with your argument but people who already agree with you.