It's not just ignorance, it's people that have closed minds and can't separate reality from the spin.
That's what ignorance is.
Unfortunately, I'm thinking more and more that that's how everybody is, on all sides. Except mine, of course, but everybody has their own version of "my side" that they're sure is the one not composed of closed-minded ignoramuses. (Alas, "my side" has a generous helping of closed-minded ignoramuses too.)
War exists between nations. Anything else is a metaphor, OR a lie.
Or, as I said, ignorance.
Terror is a name we give to guerilla warfare practiced against civilians by anational networks. If someone we like practices it, it's freedom fighting. If not, they're terrorists.
Don't include me in that "we". I disavow terrorism conducted by those who would be my political allies, and I believe that guerrilla warfare that does not target civilians is possible (and is sometimes appropriately labelled "freedom fighting" and sometimes not).
To be fair, some people really do believe that the "war on terror" is a real war calling for real wartime sacrifices, like WW2 was. Those people aren't lying, they're mistaken (about a great many things.)
I see accusations of "intentional lying" too much in political discussions. It happens, but not as often as simple ignorance.
Since when has anything to do with Christianity and related religions been logically consistent?
Logical consistency is not difficult for a religion (or any worldview for that matter) to achieve, especially if you limit the scope to a subset of that religion/worldview (as "anything to do" allows). The key is in the axioms of one's belief system.
The flaw with the free will argument is that if God created everything, then that includes concepts, e.g. good and evil. If he hadn't created evil, then you'd still have free will, but wouldn't be able to be evil. Therefore he purposely created evil, which means he's either insane or nasty, neither properties in anyone worthy of worship.
I don't think it's logically consistent to say that God created everything (as opposed to "everything creatable"). Is a concept created? In the story, evil is the opposite of the traits of God and God has always existed, so therefore the concept of evil has also always existed. Actualized or manifested evil is the act of a created being, at which point we're back to the question of free will.
A trait cannot exist without its complement also existing, so it can't be claimed that the concept of good can exist apart from evil. Good and evil are simply labels applied to actions. If there is no free will, then God is directly responsible for all evil acts. If there is free will, then sentient beings are free to choose good or evil and God is off the hook.
Interestingly, the relative wind resistence of a blimp goes down as its size increases, since cross section increases at a squared rate while volume increases at a cubed rate (and volume determines lift.) I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but as engine technology and materials science advance it seems likely to me that we will see bigger blimps that are better able to cope with nontrivial weather conditions.
You think the military would really be interested? That thing could be downed with a BB gun.
Not only are blimps impervious to BB guns, but bullets as well. It takes a long time to deflate out a small hole. In addition, militaries use lots of non-combat vehicles, so lack of suitability for combat does not disqualify military interest.
Emergency supplies? Emergency means 'we need it fast' not 'load up the goodyear and we'll expect in 10 days.' They would need to be standing by at the ready everywhere to be effective.
A blimp could be useful in an emergency situation because it flies and can potentially have more cargo and range than a helicopter. Blimps can have overland speeds in excess of those of trucks, so a 10 day wait time is an exaggeration. Actual emergency response time would probably be dominated by the warehousing of relief supplies, as it is today.
It's true if you pay more attention to the "reduce" than the "eliminate" part of "reduce or eliminate government". One of the valid roles (perhaps the most valid role) of government is to protect society from government; more specifically, it is to prevent warlords, corporations, foreign powers etc. from imposing themselves on the citizenry.
Though I love the term anarcho-capitalist, I think they go too far. If, in the absence of government, a group of people bands together for self-protection, guess what? They've just formed a "government".
Anyway, the fact you are splitting hairs about this suggests to me a hidden agenda. I suppose you are a Christian?
If insisting on correct terminology made one likely to be Christian, the world would be a very different place.
I don't see what's so hard to understand about the two positions that have been argued and re-argued many times in this discussion. The technical definition of atheism (lack of belief in any god) is different from the colloquial definition (belief in lack of any god). Many people use agnostic to mean "lack of knowledge + lack of belief" despite the fact that the unprovability of theism does not make it self-contradictory. (Lots of people believe things they can't prove, and lots of true things can't be proven.)
There was a great racist theory going around for a long time, that sounded remarkably like what you've described above. We didn't understand the language of the African persons, or Indian persons, and as such there was no evidence they were having deep reflective thoughts. And without deep reflective thoughts, they aren't human. (Of course, many African tribes thought the same about the white people. Many still do, basically correctly).
Basically correctly? Surely you don't agree with them that white people aren't human?
I'm not sure if I would describe cat religion as Secular Felinism or the simple belief that if one is a cat, one is a god. Does it count as polytheism if multiple cats believe that they are each the one and only True God?
Why add the "under 18" restriction? In the story, Lucifer is an adult with free will, so if his decisions make God guilty, then one's adult childrens' decisions should make one guilty.
The flaw in the reasoning is the "free will" part. If free will exists, then I'm not necessarily at fault for the decisions of my children, because they can choose for themselves whether to do right or wrong. If it doesn't, then I'm not at fault for anything, because I'm just a puppet.
That's 14 products without a single issue - and that's just one person!
Multiply 14 products/1 customer without any issues by all of Apple's millions of products sold and you get millions of products squared with zero issues per customer! That's amazing!
Without such important features as operator overloading, constructors, stack-based objects, and references, I really can't take Objective C seriously. I can't imagine it being used for much mission critical software, that's for sure.
How much is "much"? C doesn't have all of those important features, yet it is the backbone of much mission critical software. Maybe by "take seriously" you meant "consider optimal" and by "used" you meant "preferred"?
aggressive "sex sells" nature of the character makes me resent the makers for attempting to influence me in such a base way
They're not trying to influence you. The character is manipulating humans, particularly Baltar, and using their human instincts to do it. You should feel like it's manipulation, because it is. It just doesn't happen to be directed at you.
In character, that's the case. The creators of the show, however, are not in character. Out of character, there really isn't a robot trying to manipulate Baltar. They're just actors, and their acting is designed to attract viewers, in order to sell commercials.
Sex does sell, so I would be surprised if they didn't include sexual content of some kind. To their credit, they fit it into the plot, rather than tacking it on as an afterthought.
People have a moral imperative to be nice to each other; if this means that people have the right to be treated nicely, then Og has the right to expect Ug to not take away his stick, because taking something that belongs to somebody else is not nice.
I don't know. I think the "natural" state is the law of the jungle, or "might makes right": something is "yours" for however long you can defend it. Humanity still reverts to force often enough.
I expect lots of people to disagree with me on that one; it's based on my religious beliefs.
Out of curiosity, do you feel intellectual property is a natural right also?
No, not the "intellectual property" (copyright, trademark, and patent rules) we have today. In a "state of nature", everybody who is aware of an idea "owns" that idea; they possess it in their brains until they forget it. If you tell me a joke, now we both know the joke, and we have an equal right to share that idea (or a variation of it) with others. The same is true if you tell me your 100,000 word novel or if you sing me a song. (If I tell somebody that I invented that joke/novel/song, then I've lied, which is wrong; this is the basis for attribution.)
Just because something isn't a natural right, though, doesn't mean that it's not useful or valuable. I believe that it is theoretically possible to have copyright, trademark or patent rules that benefit society, and practical benefits are sometimes sufficient justification for rules that are not based on natural rights.
But certain people assume economics is (or should be) purely about natural rights or cause and effect, and don't realize that alot of it is rules society has created and adopted simply because they work well in practice - including property.
I don't think I consider myself to be in that group, but I disagree with the assertion that the concept of property (ownership of physical items) is not a natural right. When Og the caveman picks up a stick from the ground, he owns that stick. If his neighbor Ug takes it away, Ug now owns that stick. The concept of ownership is not an artificial construct; it describes who currently controls a thing.
People have a moral imperative to be nice to each other; if this means that people have the right to be treated nicely, then Og has the right to expect Ug to not take away his stick, because taking something that belongs to somebody else is not nice.
Of course the complicated property-related rules and regulations that our society has are man-made, but they are based on these "natural rights".
What I want to hear (and I mean really want to hear) is an argument from someone on why they think they shouldn't pay ANY sales tax?
Government should be as small as practical, so that it is less able to oppress people. Decreasing government revenue is one way to at least slow down its growth; eliminating sales tax decreases government revenue.
Sales tax impedes economic growth. To maximize economic growth, sales tax should be minimized.
Elimination of sales tax would eliminate a ton of infrastructure (every merchant in a sales tax zone needs to calculate the sales tax, and there need to be laws and rules regulating the implementation of the tax.) The resources spent on that infrastructure could then be spent on other things.
All that being said, there are worse taxes than sales taxes. In practical terms, sales tax might be implementable in such a way as to be the least bad kind of tax, but that doesn't invalidate any of the above arguments.
tell me exactly WHY the Government has to redistribute wealth?
The government doesn't *have* to redistribute wealth; it's simply inclined to.
The government has some power, so it is an attractive career choice for people attracted to power.
When someone who is attracted to power has a little power, they'll do what they can to acquire more. When such a person's means to power is the government, the result of them acquiring more power is more power in the hands of government.
Whether this is an upward spiral or downward spiral is a matter of your politics. In the end, it's a self-reinforcing pattern of behavior: when the opportunity arises for the government to acquire more power, it will tend to do so.
If a government is to redistribute wealth, it must have certain powers that a government that doesn't redistribute wealth does not necessarily require. Therefore, to many of the people who make up the government (and its support structures - the parties, special interest groups, etc.), redistributing wealth seems desirable.
Breaking loose of the spiral requires a major shock to the system, like a revolution or a national movement of some kind. Major shocks like that are hard to generate in a country like the U.S., and they can have counterproductive effects: 9/11 was a major shock, but it resulted in government power increasing, not decreasing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what ignorance is.
Unfortunately, I'm thinking more and more that that's how everybody is, on all sides. Except mine, of course, but everybody has their own version of "my side" that they're sure is the one not composed of closed-minded ignoramuses. (Alas, "my side" has a generous helping of closed-minded ignoramuses too.)
Or, as I said, ignorance.
Don't include me in that "we". I disavow terrorism conducted by those who would be my political allies, and I believe that guerrilla warfare that does not target civilians is possible (and is sometimes appropriately labelled "freedom fighting" and sometimes not).
I see accusations of "intentional lying" too much in political discussions. It happens, but not as often as simple ignorance.
Sounds like a good reason to avoid that particular technology.
How did they distinguish between nausea due to motion and nausea due to content?
"opposite" is an imprecise term, but I'd say "absence of light".
What's the problem with emptiness ("absence of matter") being the opposite of matter?
Logical consistency is not difficult for a religion (or any worldview for that matter) to achieve, especially if you limit the scope to a subset of that religion/worldview (as "anything to do" allows). The key is in the axioms of one's belief system.
I don't think it's logically consistent to say that God created everything (as opposed to "everything creatable"). Is a concept created? In the story, evil is the opposite of the traits of God and God has always existed, so therefore the concept of evil has also always existed. Actualized or manifested evil is the act of a created being, at which point we're back to the question of free will.
A trait cannot exist without its complement also existing, so it can't be claimed that the concept of good can exist apart from evil. Good and evil are simply labels applied to actions. If there is no free will, then God is directly responsible for all evil acts. If there is free will, then sentient beings are free to choose good or evil and God is off the hook.
Interestingly, the relative wind resistence of a blimp goes down as its size increases, since cross section increases at a squared rate while volume increases at a cubed rate (and volume determines lift.) I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but as engine technology and materials science advance it seems likely to me that we will see bigger blimps that are better able to cope with nontrivial weather conditions.
Not only are blimps impervious to BB guns, but bullets as well. It takes a long time to deflate out a small hole. In addition, militaries use lots of non-combat vehicles, so lack of suitability for combat does not disqualify military interest.
A blimp could be useful in an emergency situation because it flies and can potentially have more cargo and range than a helicopter. Blimps can have overland speeds in excess of those of trucks, so a 10 day wait time is an exaggeration. Actual emergency response time would probably be dominated by the warehousing of relief supplies, as it is today.
Though I love the term anarcho-capitalist, I think they go too far. If, in the absence of government, a group of people bands together for self-protection, guess what? They've just formed a "government".
If insisting on correct terminology made one likely to be Christian, the world would be a very different place.
I don't see what's so hard to understand about the two positions that have been argued and re-argued many times in this discussion. The technical definition of atheism (lack of belief in any god) is different from the colloquial definition (belief in lack of any god). Many people use agnostic to mean "lack of knowledge + lack of belief" despite the fact that the unprovability of theism does not make it self-contradictory. (Lots of people believe things they can't prove, and lots of true things can't be proven.)
Basically correctly? Surely you don't agree with them that white people aren't human?
I'm not sure if I would describe cat religion as Secular Felinism or the simple belief that if one is a cat, one is a god. Does it count as polytheism if multiple cats believe that they are each the one and only True God?
Dogs, of course, clearly do have religion.
The flaw in the reasoning is the "free will" part. If free will exists, then I'm not necessarily at fault for the decisions of my children, because they can choose for themselves whether to do right or wrong. If it doesn't, then I'm not at fault for anything, because I'm just a puppet.
Multiply 14 products/1 customer without any issues by all of Apple's millions of products sold and you get millions of products squared with zero issues per customer! That's amazing!
How much is "much"? C doesn't have all of those important features, yet it is the backbone of much mission critical software. Maybe by "take seriously" you meant "consider optimal" and by "used" you meant "preferred"?
FYI, emphasis *is* possible with plain text, and has been for decades.
There might or might not be reasons for using HTML in email, but "emphasizing a point" is not one of them.
In character, that's the case. The creators of the show, however, are not in character. Out of character, there really isn't a robot trying to manipulate Baltar. They're just actors, and their acting is designed to attract viewers, in order to sell commercials.
Sex does sell, so I would be surprised if they didn't include sexual content of some kind. To their credit, they fit it into the plot, rather than tacking it on as an afterthought.
I expect lots of people to disagree with me on that one; it's based on my religious beliefs.
No, not the "intellectual property" (copyright, trademark, and patent rules) we have today. In a "state of nature", everybody who is aware of an idea "owns" that idea; they possess it in their brains until they forget it. If you tell me a joke, now we both know the joke, and we have an equal right to share that idea (or a variation of it) with others. The same is true if you tell me your 100,000 word novel or if you sing me a song. (If I tell somebody that I invented that joke/novel/song, then I've lied, which is wrong; this is the basis for attribution.)
Just because something isn't a natural right, though, doesn't mean that it's not useful or valuable. I believe that it is theoretically possible to have copyright, trademark or patent rules that benefit society, and practical benefits are sometimes sufficient justification for rules that are not based on natural rights.
I don't think I consider myself to be in that group, but I disagree with the assertion that the concept of property (ownership of physical items) is not a natural right. When Og the caveman picks up a stick from the ground, he owns that stick. If his neighbor Ug takes it away, Ug now owns that stick. The concept of ownership is not an artificial construct; it describes who currently controls a thing.
People have a moral imperative to be nice to each other; if this means that people have the right to be treated nicely, then Og has the right to expect Ug to not take away his stick, because taking something that belongs to somebody else is not nice.
Of course the complicated property-related rules and regulations that our society has are man-made, but they are based on these "natural rights".
Government should be as small as practical, so that it is less able to oppress people. Decreasing government revenue is one way to at least slow down its growth; eliminating sales tax decreases government revenue.
Sales tax impedes economic growth. To maximize economic growth, sales tax should be minimized.
Elimination of sales tax would eliminate a ton of infrastructure (every merchant in a sales tax zone needs to calculate the sales tax, and there need to be laws and rules regulating the implementation of the tax.) The resources spent on that infrastructure could then be spent on other things.
All that being said, there are worse taxes than sales taxes. In practical terms, sales tax might be implementable in such a way as to be the least bad kind of tax, but that doesn't invalidate any of the above arguments.
The government doesn't *have* to redistribute wealth; it's simply inclined to.
The government has some power, so it is an attractive career choice for people attracted to power.
When someone who is attracted to power has a little power, they'll do what they can to acquire more. When such a person's means to power is the government, the result of them acquiring more power is more power in the hands of government.
Whether this is an upward spiral or downward spiral is a matter of your politics. In the end, it's a self-reinforcing pattern of behavior: when the opportunity arises for the government to acquire more power, it will tend to do so.
If a government is to redistribute wealth, it must have certain powers that a government that doesn't redistribute wealth does not necessarily require. Therefore, to many of the people who make up the government (and its support structures - the parties, special interest groups, etc.), redistributing wealth seems desirable.
Breaking loose of the spiral requires a major shock to the system, like a revolution or a national movement of some kind. Major shocks like that are hard to generate in a country like the U.S., and they can have counterproductive effects: 9/11 was a major shock, but it resulted in government power increasing, not decreasing.
At the same time, let's not confuse "doesn't have a law explicitly allowing it" with "illegal".
Plus, the robotic voice of the bot would be a dead giveaway.
I sense a flaw in the plan.