1: Seasonal affective disorder.this is caused by a chemical imbalance due to the lack of daylight . A high powered solar lamp can help you here will alleviate many many symptoms . Again see a doctor
My own experience: years ago I asked my doctor about SAD. I wasn't even asking her about treatment, just "do you think this is real, or just another trendy diagnosis-of-the-moment?" The first sentance out her mouth was something about Prozac. Thanks, no. (YYMV; I'm not criticizing anyone else's choice here. My own winter blahs weren't that severe that I felt the side-effects worth it.)
A year or so so later, I decided to give St. Johns Wort a try. Took it over the winter, did seem to feel better - even avoided putting on the extra few pounds of weight I usually added over the winter. Weaning off it in the spring was a little trickier than I anticipated, but I'd still rate it a positive. Did it again the next winter. Obviously my own experience is not a controlled study, though there is clinical evidence for its effectiveness in mild cases of depression.
About three years ago this summer, I started receiving acupuncture. When winter rolled around, I asked my acupuncturist about seasonal depression. She gave me a "duh!" look and pointed out that animals are supposed to be less active in the winter. It is not a disease to feel less energetic this time of year! Of course there's "feeling less energetic", and there's "debilitating, crushing, want-to-slit-my-wrists depression". The later is certainly a serious problem requring less subtle intervention, though I'm skeptical of applying the term "disease".
Slowing down and feeling different in the winter means that you haven't become disconnected from the natural world. Chinese medicine teaches that we should live more in harmony with these natural rhythms; indeed, it's much more about these lifestyle elements than about acupuncture, herbs, or bodywork. I've been trying to do that the past few years, and it's working for me.
Again, YMMV; I'm not advising anyone to stop taking their meds or anything like that.
what does any of that have to do with science vs or in conjunction with the media?
You made the claim that without science there would be neither media nor civilization. Certainly such historically inaccurate claims do nothing to advance the cause of science.
Stop being pedantic and keep it on topic.
There's nothing pedantic about pointing out the fact that mankind actually made progress before the scientific method was discovered.
Stop being defensive and keep it accurate. You made a misstatement, admit it and move on already.
And alternatively, Japanese people are scared of minorities and foreigners, to the extent that police will arrest and check for the papers of people just for looking foreign, or speaking in a foreign language. Literally any crime is blamed on foreigners.
Japan is schizophenic about foreigners.
A lot of Japanese women seek out gaijin (at least Caucasian) boyfriends, and most of the Japanese people I've met in my brief stays were very friendly. On the other hand, some merchants will pretend not to even hear requests from foreign customers (even if such customers are attempting to use their phrasebook Nihongo), drunk old guys will yell at you, and you're definitely not treated equally by the police. I think being a white guy in Japan may be in some small way like being a black guy in the U.S. - to some degee you're automatically "cool" in a fashion sense, while at the same time you're likely to encounter discrimination. (Before any PC cops bash me, let me point out that an African-American friend of mine suggested the comparison.)
The real story is, why is Japan more willing to spend billions of dollars for absurd pie-in-the-sky visions of robots becoming your friend, and unwilling to grant citizenship to other ethnicities, to increase the labor force and make up for a shrinking population?
Many of the stories on robots in Japan I've seen have talked about them caring for the elderly - the age group most likely to harbot racist and xenopobic thoughts. (Though again, I met some wonderful, friendly elderly Japanese; but when I did encounter hostility, it was almost always from someone at least I would guess in their late 50s.)
But on top of that, even with a shrinking population population Japan is tremendously crowded. A lower population with Mr. Robotos, who only take up a closet, instead of some gaijin workers who takes up whole apartments, could be very appealing.
Prior to that, there were few appreciable differences (besides obvious cultural ones) between Medieval, ancient Greek, Sumerian, Incan, or Roman lifestyles and technological capabilities.
IIRC the Sumerians and Inca were neolithic. The ancient Greeks were Bronze Age, the Romans and Medieval Europe were Iron Age societies. There were very large differences in technology and lifestyle between the neolithic villages of Sumer, the city-states of Ancient Greece, and the Empire of Rome.
Science is good and great and all, but there were plenty of smart people around having ideas and making stuff happen before we hit on the meta-idea of the scientific method. Those folks deserve props.
After all, there wouldn't be a media without science. Or, for that matter, a civilisation.
The scientific method is only a few centuries old.
Civilization is around 9,000 years old; the first examples of writing, if we count the inscriptions on early counting tokens, are about as old, and certainly the medium of oral storytelling long predates that.
The money isn't being taxed?? You mean it is not being taxed for a fourth or fifth time.
"Money" is not and never has bene what is taxed. What is taxed is transactions (including a continuing transaction like owning a house). So, yes, the transaction of me getting paid is taxed. Then the transaction of me buying a six-pack of fine beer at the store is taxed. We can argue about the tax burden (though lightly-taxed Americans whining about their taxes is probably very amusing to the rest of the world) and what transactions should be taxed, but the idea that the "same" money is being taxed multiple times is completely misleading.
I'm going to extrapolate that you are refering to the fact that the money isn't tied to a gold standard and therefore has a rather arbitrary value. I agree with this. There should be a gold standard.
Your extrapolation seems far off the mark; it's clear to me that the GP was refering to the fact that money (as we know and use it today, at least) is a creation of the state - "a share in a government run fantasy".
A gold standard not much less of an imaginary form of tying value to currency than any other. "This piece of paper represents one gram of gold!" Fine. Gold is pretty, but other than its use in jewlery, dentistry, and some industrial applications, nearly useless. Can I eat it? Drink it? Does that gram of gold keep the rain off, or the chill away?
The question is, how much goods and services can I get for that gram of gold? And that value is just as arbitrary as how much goods and services I can get for a little green (or whatever colors currency uses where you are) piece of paper.
Actually, our government did let us keep all of our money prior to the 16th ammendment...and we did it all without a federal income tax.
There were federal taxes before the federal income tax. And the first federal income tax was levied during the Civil War.
It was called copyright law. Then large numbers of selfish people decided they were above the law, and it ceased to be as effective at fighting copyright infringement.
Yeah, it surely was bad when industry decided they were above the law of the land and got Congress to create unconstitutional copyright laws that created eternal monopolies on content to people who weren't the creators of that content. Once citizens saw that copyright was about greed rather than about allowing artists to make a living off their work, it ceased to be effective.
You can't really blame the media industry for fighting back
Oh! I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. When you said "above the law" I naturally thought you meant the bastards who have shredded the law of the land in order to maximize their profits, not the guy who wants to make a mix CD for his girlfriend. Yeah, we really have to fight that guy.
I've encountered a tremendous amount of suckage from Maxtor drives over the years (my punishment for buying on price alone). Seagate drives have been a little bit more expensive but much more reliable.
So will Maxtor drives improve now? Or Seagate ones get worse?
Its all PR stunts, that amount of freon is insignificant to the 1000 billion tonnes of coal being burned yearly by USA to make power, that itself spews PURE uranium atoms into the air that we all intake, that otherwise would not be there.
Uh, freon fucks with the ozone layer. CO2 and uranium contamination from coal-fired plants is a completely different problem. (And all atoms are PURE, it's not like a uranium atom could be contaminated with carbon or something...)
If the greenies and eco dudes had a clue they would promote safe pebble based nuke plants
Fission is a non-solution, inherently confounded by security, fuel availability, and pollution issues. Only fusion - including making good use of that big fusion reactor just 93,000,000 miles away - is a viable long-term solution.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means fantastic things like aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel.
Maybe that's what "sci-fi" is about. Which is why many fans and creators of SF - science fiction, or "speculative" fiction for a more inclusive view - avoid the term "sci-fi".
SF stories give the creator licence to use fantastic things in order to tell a good story. Bad stories that happen to be about fantastic things may be amusing and entertaining for a little while but will be quickly forgotten.
Shouldn't they be allowed to teach it, so long as they teach all of the current theories?
ID is not a "current theory" of biology.
A scientific theory is a testable and tested statement about or model of some aspect of the observable world. "God(s) did it" is neither testable, tested, nor about the observable world.
Certainly other sorts of statements have their place. But that place is not the science classroom.
Both plumbers and doctors have more difficult jobs, as measured by the percentage of the population competent to fill that role.
That's a interesting measurement of the difficulty of a job.
Very few people are competent to, say, be a starring movie actor, while the government will take just about anyone to be a soldier. Are you saying that it follows that Tom Cruise has a more difficult job than some poor schlub getting shot at in Iraq? Not saying that, loopy as he is on the whole Scientology thing, Tom doesn't work hard on his craft and all, but still...
They also have one of the most dangerous (your garbage collector is much more likely to be killed on the job than a cop) and important (along with your plumber, your garbage collector is more responsible for increased life expectancy than your doctor) jobs around.
Somewhere around here I have an old Fenton comic strip with dialog like this: "Did you know a garbage collector makes more than I do?!" "Then get a job as a garbage collector." "Are you kidding? You couldn't pay me enough for that kind of work!"
He promoted a theory not a fact. So what if he promoted it,
maybe it's true.
Somebody hand me my clue stick. Bam! Bam ! Bam! THE FOAM THAT FELL
OFF OF THE COLUMBIA ET WAS MADE WITH FREON. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Rush's "theory" also involves the idea that freon somehow makes the foam
stick to the tank: "They had to use something else to cause the foam to
bond to the fuel tank, and it was not nearly as good as Freon was. And
that's why the chunks started coming loose."
The BS he spouted was not only never NASA's theory about the cause, but
is not grounded in reality.
I mean, this theory was never his to begin but that of
NASA.
No. Actually read
the fine space.com article you linked to above. NASA had a list of
concerns in 2000, years before the Columbia disaster. The list included
problems with the new foam, that have since been fixed. TFA does not say
that the freon-free nature of the foam was a theory in the Columbia
disaster, just that it was on this list of concerns.
This idea that the foam was just fine before we made it freon-free is just more bullshit from the "loot and pollute" segment of the far right. Shame on them for trying to use the deaths of the Columbia crew to prop up their anti-ecology agenda.
That still doesn't change the fact that neither you nor the OP is the target market, so your collective opinions are essentially worthless.
People who are silly enough to buy new cars usually count on being able to sell them when they become bored with their new toy. The opinions of those of us sensible enough to buy our vehuicles used, impact that possibility; and we're certainly going to take maintenance issues into consideration.
In other words: a car that nobody but the dealer can fix is going to have crappy resale value.
A good number of them are beginning to find offense in the attempts to remove the Christian aspects of Christmas.
No one is attempting to "remove the Christian aspects of Christmas". As stated previously, there are damn few of them anyway, few enough that many of the popular "mega-churches" are closing on Christmas. But those who want those elements are welcome to them and no one is trying to stop them from celebrating Christmas in their own way - in their own time and on their own property.
But a few loudmouth kooks in the theocratic right are attempting to get people to act as if Christmas is the only holiday that anyone is celebrating this time of year, to act as if anyone not celebrating Christmas is in the wrong.
I didn't shop at Target this year because they excluded the Salvation Army from collecting at there stores.
Just as I have heard that the Homosexual community is suggesting that it's members shouldn't buy cars from Ford because Ford doesn't advertise in Gay media outlets the Christian community is deciding that should do it's Christmas shopping at stores that support there life style choices. It is no different.
Legally, they're on equal footing, certainly we can all choose who we do business with. Ethically, they're completely different. Ford has slapped the gay community in the face (and shot itself in the wallet) by caving to homophobes and withdrawing ads from magazines serving the gay community. Message: we don't want gays as customers. Ok, Ford can do that, and gays and their friends can say, "Well, fuck you then Ford, I'm buying a Toyota."
Target is declining to slap non-Christians in the face, declining an
exclusive "Merry X-mas" in favor of an inclusive "Happy Holidays".
Message: whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, the Solstice,
Festivus, Bodhi Day, Ramadan, New Year's Day, whatever holiday floats your
boat, c'mon in and buy our stuff. It takes a twisted, bigoted mind to take
offense at that.
Having a protest march the streets must be blocked off and the access is limited so in this case you are clearly limiting access.
You're blurring the notion of "access". The state can regulate time and manner of speech; it can block off the streets in order to create a venue. But it cannot restrict content - it must provide equal opportunity access to that venue. Obviously, to create a useful venue, access must be divided either by space or by time, so the access may be granted at different times; but it still must be granted fairly - you can't say that the Democrats get to use the town square on Election Day and the Republicans have to wait until the day after. Or the Christians get to use it for December but the Pagans have to wait until January.
Putting up Christmas decorations doesn't give only one group access. Other groups could very well be allowed to put up decorations as well.
Is it theoretically possible for a city to grant non-discriminatory access to multiple groups to decorate its city hall? Yes. Is that
likely to happen? No. Imagine the outcry when the Satanists demand their equal opportunity. Or the agnostics put up their question mark. Or their athiests their "There's no god like no god" billboard. Or the Pastafarians do their thing. Heck, it would be hard enough to let the Muslims have their say. It would be a heck of a lot more practical to avoid the issue - and save the city a few bucks that could be put to better use - by leaving the building unadorned. Or stick to a simple, tastefull, pretty, inclusive, string of colored lights.
The one thing that we already made clear is that it is NOT in any way illegal for any individual or group to speak in favor it it's religion.
...on that person/group's own time and own behalf and own private property, sure. There's a difference (both legal and ethical) between what the mayor can say when he's acting in his official role in city hall, and what he says at home.
It is also not illegal for any business to use the term Christmas or make reference to Christ in advertising.
Modulo the concern that businesses over a certain size may be bound by laws against religious discrimination, correct. Your company can choose to send out customer-alienating "Have a Blessed and Holy Christmas or burn in Hell you heathens" card, or an inclusive "Happy Holidays" one. (The first might be fine if your business is, say, Bible printing, but for most businesses I'd recommend the second.)
The user has selected the font most comfortable for them. Other than for headings and special effects, why not leave it the heck alone? (Especially font size. "Designers" who want to shrink body text from the size I've chosen need to be horsewhipped.)
Okay how is sharing your views on religion any more rude than your views on politics, food, or computers?
I didn't say sharing, I said "ramming it down other people's throats". It's not the content, it's the context and the method.
As you put it is not only legal but protected for people to try and cram a religion down your throat as you put it.
Not when they use state power to do it. You can put whatever holiday decorations you want on your house, but no Christmas decorations belong on city hall, that's establishment of religion. There are also regulations on employers forbidding religious discrimination, i.e. your boss is not allowed to make you participate in a Zoroastrianism ritual to keep your job.
The ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in a Jewish community. While it may have been right from a freedom of speech point of view I doubt that any sane person would claim it was good manners?
Of course. I can say "You shouldn't do that, it's very rude", and still oppose an effort by the state to point guns at you to make you stop. There's the difference between the personal/ethical freedom to do a thing, and the legal freedom to do a thing.
You don't have grounds to sue for anything. Fraud? Who was defrauded?
My post was unclear. Apologies. If the show is what it claims, the "contestants" have been defrauded. If the whole thing is a put-on on the viewing audience, then it's merely stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
The "depression is a chemical imbalance" theory is not as rooted in research as the drug peddlers would like you to beleive.
My own experience: years ago I asked my doctor about SAD. I wasn't even asking her about treatment, just "do you think this is real, or just another trendy diagnosis-of-the-moment?" The first sentance out her mouth was something about Prozac. Thanks, no. (YYMV; I'm not criticizing anyone else's choice here. My own winter blahs weren't that severe that I felt the side-effects worth it.)
A year or so so later, I decided to give St. Johns Wort a try. Took it over the winter, did seem to feel better - even avoided putting on the extra few pounds of weight I usually added over the winter. Weaning off it in the spring was a little trickier than I anticipated, but I'd still rate it a positive. Did it again the next winter. Obviously my own experience is not a controlled study, though there is clinical evidence for its effectiveness in mild cases of depression.
About three years ago this summer, I started receiving acupuncture. When winter rolled around, I asked my acupuncturist about seasonal depression. She gave me a "duh!" look and pointed out that animals are supposed to be less active in the winter. It is not a disease to feel less energetic this time of year! Of course there's "feeling less energetic", and there's "debilitating, crushing, want-to-slit-my-wrists depression". The later is certainly a serious problem requring less subtle intervention, though I'm skeptical of applying the term "disease".
Slowing down and feeling different in the winter means that you haven't become disconnected from the natural world. Chinese medicine teaches that we should live more in harmony with these natural rhythms; indeed, it's much more about these lifestyle elements than about acupuncture, herbs, or bodywork. I've been trying to do that the past few years, and it's working for me.
Again, YMMV; I'm not advising anyone to stop taking their meds or anything like that.
You made the claim that without science there would be neither media nor civilization. Certainly such historically inaccurate claims do nothing to advance the cause of science.
There's nothing pedantic about pointing out the fact that mankind actually made progress before the scientific method was discovered.
Stop being defensive and keep it accurate. You made a misstatement, admit it and move on already.
Japan is schizophenic about foreigners.
A lot of Japanese women seek out gaijin (at least Caucasian) boyfriends, and most of the Japanese people I've met in my brief stays were very friendly. On the other hand, some merchants will pretend not to even hear requests from foreign customers (even if such customers are attempting to use their phrasebook Nihongo), drunk old guys will yell at you, and you're definitely not treated equally by the police. I think being a white guy in Japan may be in some small way like being a black guy in the U.S. - to some degee you're automatically "cool" in a fashion sense, while at the same time you're likely to encounter discrimination. (Before any PC cops bash me, let me point out that an African-American friend of mine suggested the comparison.)
Many of the stories on robots in Japan I've seen have talked about them caring for the elderly - the age group most likely to harbot racist and xenopobic thoughts. (Though again, I met some wonderful, friendly elderly Japanese; but when I did encounter hostility, it was almost always from someone at least I would guess in their late 50s.)
But on top of that, even with a shrinking population population Japan is tremendously crowded. A lower population with Mr. Robotos, who only take up a closet, instead of some gaijin workers who takes up whole apartments, could be very appealing.
IIRC the Sumerians and Inca were neolithic. The ancient Greeks were Bronze Age, the Romans and Medieval Europe were Iron Age societies. There were very large differences in technology and lifestyle between the neolithic villages of Sumer, the city-states of Ancient Greece, and the Empire of Rome.
Science is good and great and all, but there were plenty of smart people around having ideas and making stuff happen before we hit on the meta-idea of the scientific method. Those folks deserve props.
Keep it simple. Sylpheed. Or fancy it up a little with Sylpheed-Claws.
The scientific method is only a few centuries old.
Civilization is around 9,000 years old; the first examples of writing, if we count the inscriptions on early counting tokens, are about as old, and certainly the medium of oral storytelling long predates that.
"Money" is not and never has bene what is taxed. What is taxed is transactions (including a continuing transaction like owning a house). So, yes, the transaction of me getting paid is taxed. Then the transaction of me buying a six-pack of fine beer at the store is taxed. We can argue about the tax burden (though lightly-taxed Americans whining about their taxes is probably very amusing to the rest of the world) and what transactions should be taxed, but the idea that the "same" money is being taxed multiple times is completely misleading.
Your extrapolation seems far off the mark; it's clear to me that the GP was refering to the fact that money (as we know and use it today, at least) is a creation of the state - "a share in a government run fantasy".
A gold standard not much less of an imaginary form of tying value to currency than any other. "This piece of paper represents one gram of gold!" Fine. Gold is pretty, but other than its use in jewlery, dentistry, and some industrial applications, nearly useless. Can I eat it? Drink it? Does that gram of gold keep the rain off, or the chill away?
The question is, how much goods and services can I get for that gram of gold? And that value is just as arbitrary as how much goods and services I can get for a little green (or whatever colors currency uses where you are) piece of paper.
There were federal taxes before the federal income tax. And the first federal income tax was levied during the Civil War.
Yeah, it surely was bad when industry decided they were above the law of the land and got Congress to create unconstitutional copyright laws that created eternal monopolies on content to people who weren't the creators of that content. Once citizens saw that copyright was about greed rather than about allowing artists to make a living off their work, it ceased to be effective.
Oh! I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. When you said "above the law" I naturally thought you meant the bastards who have shredded the law of the land in order to maximize their profits, not the guy who wants to make a mix CD for his girlfriend. Yeah, we really have to fight that guy.
I've encountered a tremendous amount of suckage from Maxtor drives over the years (my punishment for buying on price alone). Seagate drives have been a little bit more expensive but much more reliable.
So will Maxtor drives improve now? Or Seagate ones get worse?
Uh, freon fucks with the ozone layer. CO2 and uranium contamination from coal-fired plants is a completely different problem. (And all atoms are PURE, it's not like a uranium atom could be contaminated with carbon or something...)
I thought pebble-bed reactors were an interesting idea. Too bad they haven't actually proven to be safe.
Fission is a non-solution, inherently confounded by security, fuel availability, and pollution issues. Only fusion - including making good use of that big fusion reactor just 93,000,000 miles away - is a viable long-term solution.
Maybe that's what "sci-fi" is about. Which is why many fans and creators of SF - science fiction, or "speculative" fiction for a more inclusive view - avoid the term "sci-fi".
SF stories give the creator licence to use fantastic things in order to tell a good story. Bad stories that happen to be about fantastic things may be amusing and entertaining for a little while but will be quickly forgotten.
ID is not a "current theory" of biology.
A scientific theory is a testable and tested statement about or model of some aspect of the observable world. "God(s) did it" is neither testable, tested, nor about the observable world.
Certainly other sorts of statements have their place. But that place is not the science classroom.
Slightly under one death per 100,000 per year is not zero casualties.
Keep making stuff up and lying, you crazy cons.
That's a interesting measurement of the difficulty of a job.
Very few people are competent to, say, be a starring movie actor, while the government will take just about anyone to be a soldier. Are you saying that it follows that Tom Cruise has a more difficult job than some poor schlub getting shot at in Iraq? Not saying that, loopy as he is on the whole Scientology thing, Tom doesn't work hard on his craft and all, but still...
They also have one of the most dangerous (your garbage collector is much more likely to be killed on the job than a cop) and important (along with your plumber, your garbage collector is more responsible for increased life expectancy than your doctor) jobs around.
Somewhere around here I have an old Fenton comic strip with dialog like this: "Did you know a garbage collector makes more than I do?!" "Then get a job as a garbage collector." "Are you kidding? You couldn't pay me enough for that kind of work!"
Somebody hand me my clue stick. Bam! Bam ! Bam! THE FOAM THAT FELL OFF OF THE COLUMBIA ET WAS MADE WITH FREON. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Rush's "theory" also involves the idea that freon somehow makes the foam stick to the tank: "They had to use something else to cause the foam to bond to the fuel tank, and it was not nearly as good as Freon was. And that's why the chunks started coming loose."
The BS he spouted was not only never NASA's theory about the cause, but is not grounded in reality.
No. Actually read the fine space.com article you linked to above. NASA had a list of concerns in 2000, years before the Columbia disaster. The list included problems with the new foam, that have since been fixed. TFA does not say that the freon-free nature of the foam was a theory in the Columbia disaster, just that it was on this list of concerns.
That's a popular meme spread by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but the truth is the Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the section of foam that broke off and damaged Columbia had been made with freon.
This idea that the foam was just fine before we made it freon-free is just more bullshit from the "loot and pollute" segment of the far right. Shame on them for trying to use the deaths of the Columbia crew to prop up their anti-ecology agenda.
People who are silly enough to buy new cars usually count on being able to sell them when they become bored with their new toy. The opinions of those of us sensible enough to buy our vehuicles used, impact that possibility; and we're certainly going to take maintenance issues into consideration.
In other words: a car that nobody but the dealer can fix is going to have crappy resale value.
No one is attempting to "remove the Christian aspects of Christmas". As stated previously, there are damn few of them anyway, few enough that many of the popular "mega-churches" are closing on Christmas. But those who want those elements are welcome to them and no one is trying to stop them from celebrating Christmas in their own way - in their own time and on their own property.
But a few loudmouth kooks in the theocratic right are attempting to get people to act as if Christmas is the only holiday that anyone is celebrating this time of year, to act as if anyone not celebrating Christmas is in the wrong.
That's a misleading statement. Target doesn't allow anyone to engage in solicitation or petitioning at their stores regardless of the cause being represented. They used to not enforce this policy on the SA. They've just made their policy consistent and non-discriminatory. And they've still partnered with the SA for Katrina relief, and many stores have made grants to local SA chapters.
Legally, they're on equal footing, certainly we can all choose who we do business with. Ethically, they're completely different. Ford has slapped the gay community in the face (and shot itself in the wallet) by caving to homophobes and withdrawing ads from magazines serving the gay community. Message: we don't want gays as customers. Ok, Ford can do that, and gays and their friends can say, "Well, fuck you then Ford, I'm buying a Toyota."
Target is declining to slap non-Christians in the face, declining an exclusive "Merry X-mas" in favor of an inclusive "Happy Holidays". Message: whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, the Solstice, Festivus, Bodhi Day, Ramadan, New Year's Day, whatever holiday floats your boat, c'mon in and buy our stuff. It takes a twisted, bigoted mind to take offense at that.
(Though I'm still not shopping at Target until they stop allowing employees to deny women access to health care and guarantee access to prescriptions without discrimination or delay; medical care trumps holiday banners, Target.)
You're blurring the notion of "access". The state can regulate time and manner of speech; it can block off the streets in order to create a venue. But it cannot restrict content - it must provide equal opportunity access to that venue. Obviously, to create a useful venue, access must be divided either by space or by time, so the access may be granted at different times; but it still must be granted fairly - you can't say that the Democrats get to use the town square on Election Day and the Republicans have to wait until the day after. Or the Christians get to use it for December but the Pagans have to wait until January.
Is it theoretically possible for a city to grant non-discriminatory access to multiple groups to decorate its city hall? Yes. Is that likely to happen? No. Imagine the outcry when the Satanists demand their equal opportunity. Or the agnostics put up their question mark. Or their athiests their "There's no god like no god" billboard. Or the Pastafarians do their thing. Heck, it would be hard enough to let the Muslims have their say. It would be a heck of a lot more practical to avoid the issue - and save the city a few bucks that could be put to better use - by leaving the building unadorned. Or stick to a simple, tastefull, pretty, inclusive, string of colored lights.
...on that person/group's own time and own behalf and own private property, sure. There's a difference (both legal and ethical) between what the mayor can say when he's acting in his official role in city hall, and what he says at home.
Modulo the concern that businesses over a certain size may be bound by laws against religious discrimination, correct. Your company can choose to send out customer-alienating "Have a Blessed and Holy Christmas or burn in Hell you heathens" card, or an inclusive "Happy Holidays" one. (The first might be fine if your business is, say, Bible printing, but for most businesses I'd recommend the second.)
The user has selected the font most comfortable for them. Other than for headings and special effects, why not leave it the heck alone? (Especially font size. "Designers" who want to shrink body text from the size I've chosen need to be horsewhipped.)
Are you being deliberately dense?
Everyone has access to the public streets. The issue with putting up Christmas decorations on the town hall means only giving one group access.
I didn't say sharing, I said "ramming it down other people's throats". It's not the content, it's the context and the method.
Not when they use state power to do it. You can put whatever holiday decorations you want on your house, but no Christmas decorations belong on city hall, that's establishment of religion. There are also regulations on employers forbidding religious discrimination, i.e. your boss is not allowed to make you participate in a Zoroastrianism ritual to keep your job.
Of course. I can say "You shouldn't do that, it's very rude", and still oppose an effort by the state to point guns at you to make you stop. There's the difference between the personal/ethical freedom to do a thing, and the legal freedom to do a thing.
My post was unclear. Apologies. If the show is what it claims, the "contestants" have been defrauded. If the whole thing is a put-on on the viewing audience, then it's merely stupid.