As to hate directed toward the nation as opposed to its leadership... when the guy actually won an election outright, despite having demonstrated how dangerous he was, I think that may have, in the eyes of many, made the nation as a whole responsible for him. Anyone else remember Get Your War On for 11/8/04?
As for your second paragraph... First, disapproval of the current administration's policies doesn't imply a huge hard-on for the Taliban. One can think that starting a bloody civil war halfway around the world was a bad idea on its own merits (not to mention the blood and treasure we spent and are spending on it) without thinking the dictator in charge was a nice guy. And secondly, I'm not going to believe flim-flam about "but think of how they treat women and gays" for two reasons. (1) The people doing the invading aren't particularly hot on women and gays here; I'm not buying that they've suddenly had their collective consciousness raised. (2) If this had anything to do with actual human rights, we wouldn't be sucking up to Uzbekistan and Pakistan because they roll over when the US asks them to, because they're dictatorships. (Not to mention that if we were really friends of liberty, we wouldn't be trying to overthrow democratically-elected leaders in Latin America like it's 1973 all over again.)
It's a false dichotomy to imply that critics of US policy are insufficiently critical of Iran or North Korea. It's morally bankrupt, and it's a cheap attempt to wriggle out of accountability for the gross incompetence and compulsive lying that the administration has shown, by claiming that so long as we're not as bad as authoritarian dictatorship x, the citizens have nothing to complain about. (For extra points, try using "Clinton was worse!" as a defense as well.)
Employee: Four pounds of grease... that comes to... sixty-three cents. Homer: Woo-hoo! Bart: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars. Homer: Yeah, but your mom paid for that! Bart: But doesn't she get her money from you? Homer: And I get my money from grease! What's the problem?
You should feel special. You come here and whine that Christian creationism isn't regarded as equal in value to current biology, and then whine about being modded down.
I don't see anyone showing up on every thread that has to do with physics demanding that Slashdot provide equal time for Nature's Harmonious Simultanous Four Dimensional Time Cube, then whining about it when they get modded down--despite not having any more reason for their mystical blatherings than you do, with the exception of "but our mystical blatherings are popular!".
You missed the point about social pressures and the like. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you were brought up Christian, in a largely Christian nation, in a Christian community. What a coincidence that you would turn out Christian. Do you think that if you were brought up Hindu, in a largely Hindu nation, in a Hindu community, you would feel just as strongly about your Hinduism? Can you explain your belief, however deeply felt, as being completely independent of your upbringing?
Its a completely cohesive historical account, from the very beginning to the very end, about Jesus Christ, complete with historically accurate geneaologies, historically accurate geography, historically agreeing versions of events given at different times in history, historically proven prophecies galore, and historically consistent with archaeology.
Are you seriously saying that the Bible is literally true in every sense? At this point, you're not stating unprovable "belief", but rather making testable, easily falsifiable claims about the real, physical world.
Please find me a four-legged locust. (Lev. 11:20-23) And no, you can't make it yourself by tearing the legs off an existing one.
Please demonstrate how the sky is a "dome" with "waters" above it (Gen. 1:6-7), with god walking around on top (Job 22:14). Don't forget to mention how the Apollo missions managed to break through said dome, and what happened to the falling pieces.
Please explain why you think the earth is immobile. (Psa 93:1) Make sure you explain how stars and distant galaxies can zoom around at speeds far in excess of c as they orbit us.
You're complaining that talk.origins spends a lot of time on Christian creationism. This is because most creationists (that is, the majority of creationist messages that get out) are Christian here. Most Christians here in the United States aren't dishonest charlatans debasing science, but most creationists here are Christian. Don't worry, though, this crap works in any religion; Harun Yahya appears on the list, and I'm sure Deepak Chopra will make an appearance with his brand of woo, considering the nonsense he's been spewing over at Huffington Post.
Given the techincally-minded slant of the/. community, perhaps the problem is the percieved confliction between the bible and science? I've seen many claim that the Bible is in 180 degree confliction with many fundamentals accepted by the scientific community. But in reality, there's nothing in the Bible that says being illogical is good, or that ignoring facts is the right thing to do. Many people have asked "but this conflicts with..." or "what about here, where it says..." sorts of questions, but all of these that I've seen so far have stemmed from a misunderstanding of what the bible was saying, or the context in which it was speaking.
If you take the Bible as metaphor, you can make it square with reality pretty easily. It's the inerrantist position ("god made with world in six days, and my grampa weren't no monkey neither!") which is so easy to poke holes in.
For instance, Lev. 11:20-23, referring to locusts as having four legs. Psa. 93:1, referring to the Earth as immobile. Gen. 1:6-7, referring to the sky as a great big dome (which god walks around on, see Job 22:14), above which there are "waters".
Of course, this all makes sense as metaphor. But it's mighty hard for someone to claim that the Bible is (a) literally true, and (b) without error, and square it with this sort of thing.
As for the rest of your defense against the notion that Christianity is evil because it's done evil things (which no one here mentioned, by the way), I'd like to add that Communism is not evil because you can't judge it by Stalin and Mao (who were, after all, just men); the Thuggee cult was not evil, National Socialism wasn't evil, the Manson Family wasn't evil, and I'm sure I could go on. If we can't judge a system of thought by its fruits, what can we judge it by?
For extra points, try to prevent the same person from denouncing Communism by claiming that no true Communist would establish a reign of Stalinist terror, etc.
Just in case anyone thinks SubtleNuance was engaging in pointless stone-throwing, that the evolutionists are running and hiding from this stunning logic, and that the word 'microevolution' is meaningful...
CB902. "Microevolution is distinct from macroevolution."
It's possible that SubtleNuance was jumping down the throat of someone just trying to respond to the grandparent on their own terms. No offense intended, in that case.
Atheists are no more anti-god than they are anti-Invisible Pink Unicorn. They may be anti-religion on numerous grounds, but this doesn't make them anti-god. Whether or not religious people consider atheists their enemies is irrelevant.
The anti-god people are maltheists--"God exists but he's a bastard." An excellent work of maltheist fiction is Preacher, in nine illustrated volumes, with grievous head wounds every few pages.
Science can't disprove the existence of god but that does not mean that god exists. There are a million things we can't disprove. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had an analogy. Imagine there's a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because its too small to be spotted by our telescopes. No one but a lunatic would say, "Well, I'm prepared to believe in the teapot 'cause I can't disprove it." Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic, but in practice we are all teapot atheists.
Agnosticism is intellectual waffling. Richard Dawkins, as good an example of an atheist as anyone, isn't an atheist in the sense of certainly that God doesn't exist; he's an atheist in the sense that he puts no more stock in God than he does in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
These aren't conflicting usages, despite what it looks like.
CA602.1. "Darwin made it easy to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist." CA602.2. "Scientists aim to make God unnecessary."
That sort of thing would tend to work againt your claim, wouldn't it?
If you'll look in the ICC under "CB: Biology", you'll notice that the responses to claims which actually say something about biology tend to reference mainstream peer-reviewed research. Unless (random example) you're saying that (a) Darwin's original The Origin of Species, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences and Current Biology are fringe-science publications which have nothing to do with accepted evolution theory.
It's not exactly *built*, but I'm still proud of it.
Back in 2001/2002 or thereabouts, there was a film festival in the art department. I spent several weeks making a nonphotorealistic (cartoon-style) demo reel. I wrote some PHP scripts to generate the RIB files, wrote a pair of shaders (for cel-color and edge generation), and generated a couple of megabytes of scene description to feed into BMRT. (I even wrote a shader which made that red-yellow-and-blue Pixar ball, the one in the lower-right here, procedurally. I think I saw the Pixar version of the code at some point, and mine looked nothing like it.) I mostly used quadrics to render all sorts of things, like legos, bouncing balls, arches and the word "fin" at the end. (I found a bug in BMRT's rendering of certain quadrics' normal vectors, which became moot as Larry Gritz had stopped supporting it at that point.)
I ran the edge rendering on one machine and the cel-color rendering on my friend's down the hall. I wrote a GIMP-Perl script to composite them all together, then I think I used Adobe Premiere to smush it together with a copy of "Invention No. 4" and export it out to DV tape. It played in an audience full of art students, they applauded appreciatively, and I was very, very pleased with myself.
You didn't respond to anyone's arguments. You put out an assertion, then disclaimed responsibility for it because you phrased it as a question. You avoided responding to any counterarguments (such as requests for you to back up your claims), and whined about being insulted. Here, I'll reenact it with a different claim, and maybe you'll see what I'm talking about.
A: Is Pentavirate a baby-eating Furry? B: You're an idiot. Do you have any evidence to back that up? You're just talking smack. A: How dare you call me an idiot? Why, my delicate sensibilities are overwhelmed. I may faint. All I did was ask a simple question. What a savage place.
Did you respond to anything I said? You appear to have simply flung out a bunch of assertions which you're predicting will have some resonance with my political beliefs, about which you know nothing.
You did make the mistake of making an easily falsifiable claim ("If you say something even remotely positive about anything listed above, you are on the fast-track to being labeled a Troll or Flamebate. It is absolutely predictable and enternaining to watch this phenomenon."), and so I'll do you the courtesy of falsifying it for you, by picking something random from your list.
Non-free software has a purpose. I wouldn't tell a professional photographer to switch from their custom tools to using free software. One uses different tools for different reasons. As I am (a) not a professional photographer, (b) cheap, and (c) inclined to tweak and fiddle with things, I use free software for image editing, stitching and so forth. I can understand why a professional would rather use professional tools. While it's not my choice, I certainly don't hate the concept, and the idea that everyone should be forced to use the same tools is repugnant to me.
We'll see if the firestorm of troll/"flamebate" moderations that you predicted come to pass. I should also point out that you got modded up for your whining about the moderation system and the Slashdot Cabal that hates you.
I'm a bit surprised she didn't go public with that. Now that she's in another field, it's not like she really cares what her previous boss thinks of her, and clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing like that seems tailor-made for the press. What was her reason for not going to the press? Accountability is how we're kept honest; if that breaks down, we get the situation you described. (It's not surprising that the dean didn't punish the fudger; they have the same vested interest. Accountability comes from people with a different angle on the situation.)
And, of course, I didn't say that researchers motivated by grant money never fudge numbers or fake data; I just said that their motivation to do so is hardly comparable to that of a "think tank".
The only reason Russia is bound by international law, as the grandparent poster pointed out, is that they're part of a trade organization; because they've agreed to follow those particular laws.
Of course Russia has sovereignty. They gave up a portion of it when they signed those treaties. That's what treaties do.
I'm tempted to learn Russian just so I can read all that SF. (I can kinda pronounce the cyrillic, so I recognize a lot of the authors here.) At least "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" is in English...
What are "mechanicals"? Is that the compulsory-licensing fee for a single track of music, which goes to the record company? It's a bit of a generic word to try and look up.
You handwave into existence a vast conspiracy of commie scientists bent on the destruction of western civilization, all for some temporary gain of money or power, demeaning and debasing the actual work that these people do, and when called on it, you whine about how "venomous" the responses you get are?
Well, imagine that. Maybe you should go to Free Republic if you're such a shrinking violet that you can't stand having people disagreeing with you--not to mention that it conveniently prevents you from actually responding to them.
You were replying to a poster who claimed that while An Inconvenient Truth is backed by an overwhelming consensus of scientists, the industry films that the NSTA has accepted in the past are nothing more than propaganda. You claimed that scientists have just as much of an axe to grind as industry shills, and would support their own form of propaganda in order to acquire, as you said, "reputations, grant money, etc.".
If your purpose wasn't to discredit the scientists who have endorsed An Inconvenient Truth as just as biased, and therefore morally equivalent, to the fake "science" groups who have been donating to NSTA, what on earth were you saying?
Did you miss the hockey-stick graph? The bit about how temperature changes are distributed more towards the poles? Why melting polar ice is such a problem because it reduces the albedo by rougly a factor of nine?
What sort of hard numbers were you looking for that were not provided? You can't really read tables in a documentary; that's why there's a website and a book that go along with it. What the documentary does do is summarize the data, which you're free to look up yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
As to hate directed toward the nation as opposed to its leadership... when the guy actually won an election outright, despite having demonstrated how dangerous he was, I think that may have, in the eyes of many, made the nation as a whole responsible for him. Anyone else remember Get Your War On for 11/8/04?
As for your second paragraph... First, disapproval of the current administration's policies doesn't imply a huge hard-on for the Taliban. One can think that starting a bloody civil war halfway around the world was a bad idea on its own merits (not to mention the blood and treasure we spent and are spending on it) without thinking the dictator in charge was a nice guy. And secondly, I'm not going to believe flim-flam about "but think of how they treat women and gays" for two reasons. (1) The people doing the invading aren't particularly hot on women and gays here; I'm not buying that they've suddenly had their collective consciousness raised. (2) If this had anything to do with actual human rights, we wouldn't be sucking up to Uzbekistan and Pakistan because they roll over when the US asks them to, because they're dictatorships. (Not to mention that if we were really friends of liberty, we wouldn't be trying to overthrow democratically-elected leaders in Latin America like it's 1973 all over again.)
It's a false dichotomy to imply that critics of US policy are insufficiently critical of Iran or North Korea. It's morally bankrupt, and it's a cheap attempt to wriggle out of accountability for the gross incompetence and compulsive lying that the administration has shown, by claiming that so long as we're not as bad as authoritarian dictatorship x, the citizens have nothing to complain about. (For extra points, try using "Clinton was worse!" as a defense as well.)
Employee: Four pounds of grease ... that comes to ... sixty-three cents.
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Bart: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer: Yeah, but your mom paid for that!
Bart: But doesn't she get her money from you?
Homer: And I get my money from grease! What's the problem?
What are you doing with your septic tank that requires you to haul it to the dump? Aren't you supposed to just use a leaching field?
You should feel special. You come here and whine that Christian creationism isn't regarded as equal in value to current biology, and then whine about being modded down.
I don't see anyone showing up on every thread that has to do with physics demanding that Slashdot provide equal time for Nature's Harmonious Simultanous Four Dimensional Time Cube, then whining about it when they get modded down--despite not having any more reason for their mystical blatherings than you do, with the exception of "but our mystical blatherings are popular!".
You missed the point about social pressures and the like. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you were brought up Christian, in a largely Christian nation, in a Christian community. What a coincidence that you would turn out Christian. Do you think that if you were brought up Hindu, in a largely Hindu nation, in a Hindu community, you would feel just as strongly about your Hinduism? Can you explain your belief, however deeply felt, as being completely independent of your upbringing?
Please find me a four-legged locust. (Lev. 11:20-23) And no, you can't make it yourself by tearing the legs off an existing one.
Please demonstrate how the sky is a "dome" with "waters" above it (Gen. 1:6-7), with god walking around on top (Job 22:14). Don't forget to mention how the Apollo missions managed to break through said dome, and what happened to the falling pieces.
Please explain why you think the earth is immobile. (Psa 93:1) Make sure you explain how stars and distant galaxies can zoom around at speeds far in excess of c as they orbit us.
If you take the Bible as metaphor, you can make it square with reality pretty easily. It's the inerrantist position ("god made with world in six days, and my grampa weren't no monkey neither!") which is so easy to poke holes in.
For instance, Lev. 11:20-23, referring to locusts as having four legs. Psa. 93:1, referring to the Earth as immobile. Gen. 1:6-7, referring to the sky as a great big dome (which god walks around on, see Job 22:14), above which there are "waters".
Of course, this all makes sense as metaphor. But it's mighty hard for someone to claim that the Bible is (a) literally true, and (b) without error, and square it with this sort of thing.
As for the rest of your defense against the notion that Christianity is evil because it's done evil things (which no one here mentioned, by the way), I'd like to add that Communism is not evil because you can't judge it by Stalin and Mao (who were, after all, just men); the Thuggee cult was not evil, National Socialism wasn't evil, the Manson Family wasn't evil, and I'm sure I could go on. If we can't judge a system of thought by its fruits, what can we judge it by?
No true Scotsman.
For extra points, try to prevent the same person from denouncing Communism by claiming that no true Communist would establish a reign of Stalinist terror, etc.
Just in case anyone thinks SubtleNuance was engaging in pointless stone-throwing, that the evolutionists are running and hiding from this stunning logic, and that the word 'microevolution' is meaningful...
CB902. "Microevolution is distinct from macroevolution."
It's possible that SubtleNuance was jumping down the throat of someone just trying to respond to the grandparent on their own terms. No offense intended, in that case.
Atheists are no more anti-god than they are anti-Invisible Pink Unicorn. They may be anti-religion on numerous grounds, but this doesn't make them anti-god. Whether or not religious people consider atheists their enemies is irrelevant.
The anti-god people are maltheists--"God exists but he's a bastard." An excellent work of maltheist fiction is Preacher, in nine illustrated volumes, with grievous head wounds every few pages.
These aren't conflicting usages, despite what it looks like.
Dogmatic atheism, eh? ICC to the rescue!
CA602. "Evolution is atheistic."
And related.
CA602.1. "Darwin made it easy to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
CA602.2. "Scientists aim to make God unnecessary."
That sort of thing would tend to work againt your claim, wouldn't it?
If you'll look in the ICC under "CB: Biology", you'll notice that the responses to claims which actually say something about biology tend to reference mainstream peer-reviewed research. Unless (random example) you're saying that (a) Darwin's original The Origin of Species, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences and Current Biology are fringe-science publications which have nothing to do with accepted evolution theory.
They link back (in the Index to Creationist Claims) to the original site that made the claim, and on the main ICC page, they link to the rebuttal at CreationWiki.
It's not exactly *built*, but I'm still proud of it.
Back in 2001/2002 or thereabouts, there was a film festival in the art department. I spent several weeks making a nonphotorealistic (cartoon-style) demo reel. I wrote some PHP scripts to generate the RIB files, wrote a pair of shaders (for cel-color and edge generation), and generated a couple of megabytes of scene description to feed into BMRT. (I even wrote a shader which made that red-yellow-and-blue Pixar ball, the one in the lower-right here, procedurally. I think I saw the Pixar version of the code at some point, and mine looked nothing like it.) I mostly used quadrics to render all sorts of things, like legos, bouncing balls, arches and the word "fin" at the end. (I found a bug in BMRT's rendering of certain quadrics' normal vectors, which became moot as Larry Gritz had stopped supporting it at that point.)
I ran the edge rendering on one machine and the cel-color rendering on my friend's down the hall. I wrote a GIMP-Perl script to composite them all together, then I think I used Adobe Premiere to smush it together with a copy of "Invention No. 4" and export it out to DV tape. It played in an audience full of art students, they applauded appreciatively, and I was very, very pleased with myself.
You didn't respond to anyone's arguments. You put out an assertion, then disclaimed responsibility for it because you phrased it as a question. You avoided responding to any counterarguments (such as requests for you to back up your claims), and whined about being insulted. Here, I'll reenact it with a different claim, and maybe you'll see what I'm talking about.
A: Is Pentavirate a baby-eating Furry?
B: You're an idiot. Do you have any evidence to back that up? You're just talking smack.
A: How dare you call me an idiot? Why, my delicate sensibilities are overwhelmed. I may faint. All I did was ask a simple question. What a savage place.
I should get a damned nickel every time I point this out.
There were no warnings put out by the scientific press on an impending ice age in the 1970s. Stop claiming that there were. It's about as clever as that one about "we can't predict whether it will rain next week; how can we predict the climate in twenty years?".
Did you respond to anything I said? You appear to have simply flung out a bunch of assertions which you're predicting will have some resonance with my political beliefs, about which you know nothing.
You did make the mistake of making an easily falsifiable claim ("If you say something even remotely positive about anything listed above, you are on the fast-track to being labeled a Troll or Flamebate. It is absolutely predictable and enternaining to watch this phenomenon."), and so I'll do you the courtesy of falsifying it for you, by picking something random from your list.
Non-free software has a purpose. I wouldn't tell a professional photographer to switch from their custom tools to using free software. One uses different tools for different reasons. As I am (a) not a professional photographer, (b) cheap, and (c) inclined to tweak and fiddle with things, I use free software for image editing, stitching and so forth. I can understand why a professional would rather use professional tools. While it's not my choice, I certainly don't hate the concept, and the idea that everyone should be forced to use the same tools is repugnant to me.
We'll see if the firestorm of troll/"flamebate" moderations that you predicted come to pass. I should also point out that you got modded up for your whining about the moderation system and the Slashdot Cabal that hates you.
I'm a bit surprised she didn't go public with that. Now that she's in another field, it's not like she really cares what her previous boss thinks of her, and clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing like that seems tailor-made for the press. What was her reason for not going to the press? Accountability is how we're kept honest; if that breaks down, we get the situation you described. (It's not surprising that the dean didn't punish the fudger; they have the same vested interest. Accountability comes from people with a different angle on the situation.)
And, of course, I didn't say that researchers motivated by grant money never fudge numbers or fake data; I just said that their motivation to do so is hardly comparable to that of a "think tank".
I'd been meaning to get while the getting was good. Back to oth.net and P2P off of some other poor sap's wireless connection.
The only reason Russia is bound by international law, as the grandparent poster pointed out, is that they're part of a trade organization; because they've agreed to follow those particular laws.
Of course Russia has sovereignty. They gave up a portion of it when they signed those treaties. That's what treaties do.
I'm tempted to learn Russian just so I can read all that SF. (I can kinda pronounce the cyrillic, so I recognize a lot of the authors here.) At least "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" is in English...
What are "mechanicals"? Is that the compulsory-licensing fee for a single track of music, which goes to the record company? It's a bit of a generic word to try and look up.
You handwave into existence a vast conspiracy of commie scientists bent on the destruction of western civilization, all for some temporary gain of money or power, demeaning and debasing the actual work that these people do, and when called on it, you whine about how "venomous" the responses you get are?
Well, imagine that. Maybe you should go to Free Republic if you're such a shrinking violet that you can't stand having people disagreeing with you--not to mention that it conveniently prevents you from actually responding to them.
You were replying to a poster who claimed that while An Inconvenient Truth is backed by an overwhelming consensus of scientists, the industry films that the NSTA has accepted in the past are nothing more than propaganda. You claimed that scientists have just as much of an axe to grind as industry shills, and would support their own form of propaganda in order to acquire, as you said, "reputations, grant money, etc.".
If your purpose wasn't to discredit the scientists who have endorsed An Inconvenient Truth as just as biased, and therefore morally equivalent, to the fake "science" groups who have been donating to NSTA, what on earth were you saying?
Did you miss the hockey-stick graph? The bit about how temperature changes are distributed more towards the poles? Why melting polar ice is such a problem because it reduces the albedo by rougly a factor of nine?
What sort of hard numbers were you looking for that were not provided? You can't really read tables in a documentary; that's why there's a website and a book that go along with it. What the documentary does do is summarize the data, which you're free to look up yourself.