The government is simply "protecting" kids from stopping them buying violent video games...
That's the job of parents. Don't want your kid buying certain games? Great. Don't give 'em the money to do so, and tell 'em they're grounded if they do. Hey, you could even take the game console away if theybring in verbotten games.
Having the state threated to lock people in cages seems a much poorer remedy.
No, you do not need to understand the mathematics of finite state automata to make good use of regular expression.
I said "understand". Not merely "make good use of". You can make decent use of a thing without fully understanding it - I have little understanding of how my car works. But if I wanted to get the best use out of it, high performance, I need to understand it as fully as I can. You also have to know the limits of that tool, which means learning about the difference between context-free and context-sensitive languages (when to use lex/flex and when to use yacc/bison).
I don't want to flame, but I am 90% certain that you are either a student, or working in academics.
It makes a tremendous amount of sense in the real world. I don't want someone I'm working with to be so ignorant of algorithm analysis, for example, that they use bubble sort. (Yes, I came across this in the "real world" in code written by someone who has a "computer engineering" degree.)
If you want to understand regular expressions, you've got to understand the mathematics of finite state automata. If you want to write truly reliable code, try proving a couple while loops. If you want to understand parsing, you've got to grok PDAs. (Uh, that's "Push Down Automata", I guess it might be better to refer to them as "stack machines" now.)
Of course this should be leavened with practical programming classes. But languages and coding fashions come and go; big-O notation and Turing machines are forever.
You can't seem to accept that reasoning like this exits.
Obviously people make such arguments. That doesn't change their fallacious nature. Marriage is not bound by child-rearing; the idea that gay couples don't have stable relations therefore shouldn't be able to marry is a self-fulfulling prophecy in addition to being prejudice of the worst sort; and saying "You two people can get married while you two have to draw up a bunch of contracts" is bogus "seperate-but-equal" reasoning.
Plenty of good, caring, smart people oppose homosexual marraige - shocking, isn't it?
Sorry, no. If someone is not willing to grant equal legal and ethical protection to all citizens, there are lacking in one or more of the qualities of knowledge, compassion, or reason. There is simply no legitimate excuse for it.
A century and a half ago, plenty of people who were regarded by their contemporaries as good honest citizens defended and participated in slavery. From today's more informed perspective we understand them to be at best naive and at worst evil. A century and a half from now, I am hopeful we will understand todays homophobes the same way.
You are fine with people who are factually mistaken, or show fallacies in reasoning, but when someone is from a different culture, for example one that accepts as an axiom that homosexuality is "just wrong", there is no tolerance to be found - straight to "evil".
Looking back over this thread, I do not seem to have used the word "evil", until just now in describing slavery. I do hope you'll agree with me on that one? (Untill you want to take this discussion into the realm of Zen, where the difference between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind...I can be down with that.)
Seriously, though, being from another culture is not some "get out of criticism free card". What about an axiom that interracial dating is "just wrong"? Am I supposed to not speak out against racism simply because some people were raised with it? If I see someone from a nation where "female circumcision" is a normal practice trying to force it on his daughter, am I supposed to shut up and let her be mutilated? If I meet a slave trader from Sudan, should I just say, "well, that's just his culture" and let it go?
Can you even claim that "some of my best friends are Bush supporters"? Would you let your daughter marry an SUV-driving evangelical Christian?
I live in a pretty blue state, and most Bush supporters around here have repented by now.:-)
My brother voted for W. My grandfather was a racist. I love 'em both; but I still told my grandfather off when he made racist statements, and I told my brother I was disappointed that he was enough of a sucker to fall for Bush's line of bullshit about security.
If I had a daughter, I'd have no power to "let" or "not let" her choose, she'd be free to marry whoever she wanted. If I thought her boyfriend was a jerk, I'd tell her; if he was a jerk in my presence, I'd tell him.
Do people have the right to drive whatever car they choose...
Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; your right to make chunks of metal move around swiftly ends at my safety; and your right to put smoke in the air, including automobile exhaust, ends at my lungs.
The exact parameters of regulation are something that honest men of goodwill can disagree about. I'd say the best way to cure SUV drivers might be to price gasoline at its true price, include external costs, of about $5 a gallon, and end the tax breaks for SUV owners, instead increasing their taxes for the extra road wear. (Oh, and close the federal emissions loophole, and enforce existing laws about
Saying "you're wrong, and you're clearly irrational, irresponsible, or immoral because you disagree with me" is the problem.
There are people who disagree with me who are rational and responsible; a few are even ethical to boot. There are people who agree with me about some issues who are irrational, irresponsible, or unethical.
If someone is engaged in a logical fallacy, I may correctly describe their argument or belief as "irrational", though I try to avoid using the word to describe the person. Logical fallacies are as objective as errors in arithmetic; if someone is basing their disagreement with me on a logical fallacy, it's no more intolerant of me to call the on it than to call someone for numbers that don't add up.
Your lack of tolerance for bigotry extends (to judge by your/. posts) to treating half the nation as less than (mature, responsible) humans, because they clearly hold different values than you.
Your accusations remain vague. Please provide an example of something I've said that makes me a "freedom hater", or withdrawl the accusation.
If you ever accept the fact that someone who opposes homosexual marraige, or who drives a SUV, or who thinks Bush is doing what's right for this nation, might just be a moral, responsible, rational person, just with a different set of values than you, than you might stop being an intolerant bigot yourself
People who oppose equal protection under the law for homosexuals, or for any minority group, are bigots, suffering from either fundamental flaws in ethical values or in reasoning, and I'll make absolutely no apology for saying so.
Yes, that means I'm saying that a depressingly large percentage of Americans are suffering from irrational beliefs or flawed ethics. Historically that's nothing new, it was true when our nation condoned slavery, when it condoned genocide, when it condoned segregration, when it condoned criminalization of socialist politics. Indeed, one need only look at the continuing controversy about teaching accurate biology to see that a large percentage of Americans are willing to let irrational thought patterns dominate political decisions. (Mind you, I have nothing against irrational thought patterns in their proper place. Biology class, or politics, just ain't it.)
Driving an SUV as a commuter vechicle or voting for Bush are more issues of mere ignorance - dangerous and deadly ignorance, in the later case.
Did [Bush] get re-elected because half of America are evil greedy idiots, or because the left so alienated the right that they were unable to actually pursuade the uncertain voters to switch sides?
Bush got re-elected because the GOP played 9/11 like the Reichstag fire, and the Democrats offered a lousy candidate. (Just to be clear about the Reichstag fire comparision - I'm not, as some fringe groups have done, accusing 9/11 of being some sort of inside job. Just comparing the political use of a disaster. There's no doubt that the GOP has played better politics over the past twenty years or so.)
Quite apart from Kerry's personal failings, Americans simply don't elect Senators to the Presidency - since the 1913 ratification of Amendment XVII fundamentally changed the nature of the Senate, only Harding and Kennedy have moved from there to the Presidency.
Harding was an exceptional case because 1920 1920 was the first Presidental election since Amendment XIX gave the vote to all American women, and Harding was a supporter. There's a great way to get votes!
Kennedy rode PT-109 to the White House, and still barely beat Nixon. (Some claim he may have won only by electoral fraud.)
Americans like to elect Governors, Vice-Presidents, and war heroes.
You often are quite over-the-top in evangelizing your values, even tolerance and accepance of diversity, to the point where you show a lack of tolerance and acceptance of cultures that don't support these values.
Let me make it clear: while I have no tolerance for bigotry, I equally have no tolerance for repression. That's while you'll find people like me supporting the rights of hate groups to free speech, even as we decry their message in the strongest terms.
Or are you suggesting that merely because I speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other irrational forms of prejudice, that I am against freedom? If that's your argument then you clearly misunderstand the word.
Saying "You're wrong" - even saying, "You're wrong and you're an idiot" - is not opposing freedom. Saying "You're wrong and therefore should be forced to shut up," or "You're wrong and therefore should be forced to live in a manner that I approve of," that would be opposing freedom.
You don't seem to understand that people who disagree with your conclusions can be just as intelligent, rational, and responsible as you are, just working from different assumptions or seeking to achieve different goals.
That depends on the conclusions. If we disagree about, say, the relative balance of federal versus state power, fine, though our arguments may get heated we can both be rational people of goodwill coming to different conclusions.
Sometimes there are simply basic facts that one side has wrong, like your assertations in this thread about traffic and about the completion of flood control construction around Lake Pontchartrain. Doesn't mean you're irrational, just misinformed.
And sometimes one side has fallen into a logical fallacy. That might be said, in some strict sense, to be "irrational", i.e., not in accordance with the rules of reason, but the person may still be intelligent and well-meaning.
But if we disagree about a question like whether slavery is acceptable, no, one side is clearly defective; and it is no abridgement of freedom to state strongly that slavery is a bad thing, and that its defenders have not just bad facts or bad reasoning, but bad values that should be condemned. (Though again, I would even defend the right of a pro-slavery idiot to speak. But if he starts trying to enslave people, I make no apologies for my advice to shoot his ass.)
Traditionally, Atheistic regimes have been responsible for several times the death tally of all Theisms combined. Your point was?
The only thing I can think of that comes close to an "Atheistic regime" was the USSR under Stalin, and even he brought back the Russian Orthodox church during WWII. So who exactly do you have in mind?
Sure the Commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers says funding levels were fine, but what does he know?
In any engineering project, you never ask top management how things are going, you ask the guys on the ground. June 8, 2004 Times-Picayune:
What's new, said Morehiser [Mervin Morehiser, who manages the "Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity" levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers] and Naomi [Al Naomi, the corps' senior project manager], is that the agency has run out of money for the next round of lifts. Naomi said this is the first time a lack of money has stopped major corps work on the levees since the project began in 1967.
..."But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects."
..."This project isn't expected to end for another 13 to 15 years," Morehiser said. "They aren't really finished levees at this point. We don't even turn them over to their local sponsors until we consider them stable, which is years from now."
The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration's $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million.
"I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million," Naomi said. "I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn't get paid this year."
...The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Maestri said. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project was funded by the Bush administration at levels far below those requested by the Army Corp of Engineers.
Specifically the Lake Ponchatrain Levee was finished some time ago, and 2005 funding was irrelevent.
I said the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project, which was "designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain", i.e. exactly this occurance. It wasn't done:
Work in the Chalmette area includes an additional levee lift and miscellaneous floodwall cappings. Work in Orleans Parish is about 90% complete, with the major remaining construction being the parallel protection along London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals. That work is scheduled to be completed by 2009. The remaining work in Jefferson Parish consists of at least two more lakefront levee enlargements and construction of a floodproofed bridge at Hammond Highway over the 17th Street Canal. That work is scheduled to be completed by 2010. The work in St. Charles Parish is only about 60% complete, and there is not yet a closed system. A closed system could be achieved by 2005 if Federal and non-Federal funding levels can support that effort. Overall project completion is scheduled for 2015.
Our desire for freedom created a car culture. The ability to travel where you like is a significant element of freedom.
It's amazing the irrational response you get from many Americans where you mention that a car culture may have some negative effects. Bam - suddenly I'm a freedom hater.
Our car culture was created by a huge federal road-building plan, which directly reduced freedom for many people via eminent domain, as well as indirectly for all of us via increased taxation. It's supported by brutal and stupid foreign policy which works in favor of cheap oil over freedom.
Building more roads always reduces traffic congestion.
No, it doesn't. Build more roads to the exurbs and people move out there, lengthening their daily commute and filling them up.
We just don't appreciate infrastructure, to the point where many people actually believe that roads cause traffic!
Well, they do. Poorly planned infrastructure leads to development in ways that stress that infrastructure; our road-building boom of the past few decades created a car culture that leads to more driving, thus more traffic congestion, thus more demand for roads.
Anyway, have you traded anything for little green pieces of paper lately? Or even wackier, for a piece of paper that promises green pieces of paper? Or an electronic promise of green pieces of paper?
..instead those very same Euros blame Americans, who were only doing the best they could with the system forced on them.
Uh, the only ones who had slavery forced on them were the slaves. Americans could have chosen to end the practice of slavery when they founded the new nation; it was a hot topic in the construction of the Constitution.
America's literacy rate has never recovered since mandatory, factory-style formal schooling was introduced. Today, their (Western society's, basically) illiteracy rate is at least five times as high as it was then.
Cite your source for this, please.
What education is doing is teaching us to not believe in God; or to put it another way, that nothing we do, cosmically speaking, matters. Big surprise, we have steadily increasing social problems to match our steadily longer and more rigorous educations.
So we should lie to people to get them to behave? "Be good or the Big Daddy in the Sky will be mad?" Thank you, no.
In fact, it seems that often beleivers in a Big Daddy in the Sky who beleive that nothing we do here on earth matters - it's all about the afterlife, baby. So blow up some infidels, or wreck the planet, whatever.
There's no connection between professed belief in a Big Daddy in the Sky, and ethical behavior.
If a farmer paid the equivalent of a freeman's salary for a year to buy a slave at least he had to protect his investment. Same as grease, oil changes and other maintenance on the tractor...You find another Irish the next day after you've gotten the blood mopped up. 100% on their own until a mean death in a short life and no cost to the factory owner.
And yet I suspect most of us would rather take that factory job and be free, rather than be subect to slavery.
Besides, unlike tractors, slaves are self-reproducing. Heck, you could just go ahead and rape the slave women and breed yourself a new generation of 'em. So on a large plantation, if you shot or beat one to death occasionally, no great loss.
The Europeans brought slavery to America, but Americans are to blame for it?
Uh, there were no Americans (in the sense of inhabitants of the United States, or of the colonies that would become them) yet. A bunch of Europeans brought slavery and genocide to the continent and then became Americans.
In the long view, Americans are Europeans; inheritors of Western civilization, or what passes for civilization, anyway. In the history books a millenium hence, the U.S. may end up a footnote to the British Empire the way the Constantinople was a footnote to Rome.
(Assuming there's anyone left to read history. And it probably won't really be in book form...maybe some long peptide chain absobed directly into the brain, who knows?)
What made me sick was the court system (I am pretty sure this is clear in my post).
Sorry, but it's not.
I can't parse "I don't know which is worse. The fact that this law exists or that you gave a link to a decision on a bunch of homosexuals who were into BDSM torture. Blech." in a way that doesn't imply that the existence of "homosexuals who were into BDSM torture" isn't objectionable to you.
phobia, n.
1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.
homophobia n.
1. Fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men.
2. Behavior based on such a feeling.
Emphasis added.
Can I use the File Format Specification to create a SWF interpreter or player?
No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF).
The format is only made available to those who agree to a restrcitive licence. That's not open.
The fact that this law exists or that you gave a link to a decision on a bunch of homosexuals who were into BDSM torture.
Is it the homosexualaity or the BDSM that upsets you so much?
Homophobia is no more an acceptable form of intolerance than rascism or sexism.
BDSM is a game. It is not torture. More actual harm is done in your average high school football game than at the average "play party". It's really no more than taking the way you might bite your lover's earlobe and racheting it up several notches.
How much power do you need, and for how long? I find myself using solar to top off batteries that I fully charge before my trip.
I found the new Everlite solar-powered lamps to be very handy, you can charge a cell phone or PDA off of the lamp battery with the adaptors they have. Obviously not enough for a laptop, but to top off your cell phone, pretty practical.
Most of my camping these days is car-camping, though (pull up car, unload tent and cushy gear) so weight's not an issue; I take along an rechargable air compressor (for blowing up the mattress) with a 12 VDC socket, it's got a built-in lead-acid battery. That, you can top off with a solar car battery charger.
What do you think America has been that last 200 years? Christian-Judism has always had a strong influence on America the influence is less and les each year.
No so much. Most of the founders were Deists, and the intelligentsia who until relatively recently did most of the governing were less religious then most of the population. Evangelical and fundamentalist religion has much more political power today than in the past.
Take any shred of religion out of the government, but don't tell me our forefathers or constitution says it should be that way.
I'll tell you just that. The constitution has Amendment I. An early treaty ratified under John Adams states "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion". Madison said "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
Yes, but the Tax Code provides the wherewithall for thousands of social programs...
Uh, no. The complexity of the tax code (i.e., the number of loopholes for the well-off and for corporations) generally works against tax renvenues, as well as shifting the tax burden more onto the middle class and working poor.
And a small percentage of federal spending goes to social programs other than Social Security pensions - only about 16% of federal spending is on assistance to the poor. And half of that's on Medicaid; there's an argument to be make that keeping our lower-income people healthy so that they won't be a reservoir of communicable disease is more of the nature of national defense that a social program. (Especially in an age of bioterrrorism threats.)
The complexity of the tax code has nothing to do with social spending.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the job of parents. Don't want your kid buying certain games? Great. Don't give 'em the money to do so, and tell 'em they're grounded if they do. Hey, you could even take the game console away if theybring in verbotten games.
Having the state threated to lock people in cages seems a much poorer remedy.
I said "understand". Not merely "make good use of". You can make decent use of a thing without fully understanding it - I have little understanding of how my car works. But if I wanted to get the best use out of it, high performance, I need to understand it as fully as I can. You also have to know the limits of that tool, which means learning about the difference between context-free and context-sensitive languages (when to use lex/flex and when to use yacc/bison).
Nope.It makes a tremendous amount of sense in the real world. I don't want someone I'm working with to be so ignorant of algorithm analysis, for example, that they use bubble sort. (Yes, I came across this in the "real world" in code written by someone who has a "computer engineering" degree.)
If you want to understand regular expressions, you've got to understand the mathematics of finite state automata. If you want to write truly reliable code, try proving a couple while loops. If you want to understand parsing, you've got to grok PDAs. (Uh, that's "Push Down Automata", I guess it might be better to refer to them as "stack machines" now.)
Of course this should be leavened with practical programming classes. But languages and coding fashions come and go; big-O notation and Turing machines are forever.
Obviously people make such arguments. That doesn't change their fallacious nature. Marriage is not bound by child-rearing; the idea that gay couples don't have stable relations therefore shouldn't be able to marry is a self-fulfulling prophecy in addition to being prejudice of the worst sort; and saying "You two people can get married while you two have to draw up a bunch of contracts" is bogus "seperate-but-equal" reasoning.
Sorry, no. If someone is not willing to grant equal legal and ethical protection to all citizens, there are lacking in one or more of the qualities of knowledge, compassion, or reason. There is simply no legitimate excuse for it.
A century and a half ago, plenty of people who were regarded by their contemporaries as good honest citizens defended and participated in slavery. From today's more informed perspective we understand them to be at best naive and at worst evil. A century and a half from now, I am hopeful we will understand todays homophobes the same way.
Looking back over this thread, I do not seem to have used the word "evil", until just now in describing slavery. I do hope you'll agree with me on that one? (Untill you want to take this discussion into the realm of Zen, where the difference between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind...I can be down with that.)
Seriously, though, being from another culture is not some "get out of criticism free card". What about an axiom that interracial dating is "just wrong"? Am I supposed to not speak out against racism simply because some people were raised with it? If I see someone from a nation where "female circumcision" is a normal practice trying to force it on his daughter, am I supposed to shut up and let her be mutilated? If I meet a slave trader from Sudan, should I just say, "well, that's just his culture" and let it go?
I live in a pretty blue state, and most Bush supporters around here have repented by now. :-)
My brother voted for W. My grandfather was a racist. I love 'em both; but I still told my grandfather off when he made racist statements, and I told my brother I was disappointed that he was enough of a sucker to fall for Bush's line of bullshit about security.
If I had a daughter, I'd have no power to "let" or "not let" her choose, she'd be free to marry whoever she wanted. If I thought her boyfriend was a jerk, I'd tell her; if he was a jerk in my presence, I'd tell him.
Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose; your right to make chunks of metal move around swiftly ends at my safety; and your right to put smoke in the air, including automobile exhaust, ends at my lungs.
The exact parameters of regulation are something that honest men of goodwill can disagree about. I'd say the best way to cure SUV drivers might be to price gasoline at its true price, include external costs, of about $5 a gallon, and end the tax breaks for SUV owners, instead increasing their taxes for the extra road wear. (Oh, and close the federal emissions loophole, and enforce existing laws about
I recently saw a great two-line explanation of why top-posting is broken behavior:
A: Because it goes against the way we normally read text.
>Q: Why is top-posting a bad idea?
Top-posters, and those who can't trim quoted material, need keel-hauling.
There are people who disagree with me who are rational and responsible; a few are even ethical to boot. There are people who agree with me about some issues who are irrational, irresponsible, or unethical.
If someone is engaged in a logical fallacy, I may correctly describe their argument or belief as "irrational", though I try to avoid using the word to describe the person. Logical fallacies are as objective as errors in arithmetic; if someone is basing their disagreement with me on a logical fallacy, it's no more intolerant of me to call the on it than to call someone for numbers that don't add up.
Your accusations remain vague. Please provide an example of something I've said that makes me a "freedom hater", or withdrawl the accusation.
People who oppose equal protection under the law for homosexuals, or for any minority group, are bigots, suffering from either fundamental flaws in ethical values or in reasoning, and I'll make absolutely no apology for saying so.
Yes, that means I'm saying that a depressingly large percentage of Americans are suffering from irrational beliefs or flawed ethics. Historically that's nothing new, it was true when our nation condoned slavery, when it condoned genocide, when it condoned segregration, when it condoned criminalization of socialist politics. Indeed, one need only look at the continuing controversy about teaching accurate biology to see that a large percentage of Americans are willing to let irrational thought patterns dominate political decisions. (Mind you, I have nothing against irrational thought patterns in their proper place. Biology class, or politics, just ain't it.)
Driving an SUV as a commuter vechicle or voting for Bush are more issues of mere ignorance - dangerous and deadly ignorance, in the later case.
Bush got re-elected because the GOP played 9/11 like the Reichstag fire, and the Democrats offered a lousy candidate. (Just to be clear about the Reichstag fire comparision - I'm not, as some fringe groups have done, accusing 9/11 of being some sort of inside job. Just comparing the political use of a disaster. There's no doubt that the GOP has played better politics over the past twenty years or so.)
Quite apart from Kerry's personal failings, Americans simply don't elect Senators to the Presidency - since the 1913 ratification of Amendment XVII fundamentally changed the nature of the Senate, only Harding and Kennedy have moved from there to the Presidency.
Harding was an exceptional case because 1920 1920 was the first Presidental election since Amendment XIX gave the vote to all American women, and Harding was a supporter. There's a great way to get votes!
Kennedy rode PT-109 to the White House, and still barely beat Nixon. (Some claim he may have won only by electoral fraud.)
Americans like to elect Governors, Vice-Presidents, and war heroes.
Let me make it clear: while I have no tolerance for bigotry, I equally have no tolerance for repression. That's while you'll find people like me supporting the rights of hate groups to free speech, even as we decry their message in the strongest terms.
Or are you suggesting that merely because I speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other irrational forms of prejudice, that I am against freedom? If that's your argument then you clearly misunderstand the word.
Saying "You're wrong" - even saying, "You're wrong and you're an idiot" - is not opposing freedom. Saying "You're wrong and therefore should be forced to shut up," or "You're wrong and therefore should be forced to live in a manner that I approve of," that would be opposing freedom.
That depends on the conclusions. If we disagree about, say, the relative balance of federal versus state power, fine, though our arguments may get heated we can both be rational people of goodwill coming to different conclusions.
Sometimes there are simply basic facts that one side has wrong, like your assertations in this thread about traffic and about the completion of flood control construction around Lake Pontchartrain. Doesn't mean you're irrational, just misinformed.
And sometimes one side has fallen into a logical fallacy. That might be said, in some strict sense, to be "irrational", i.e., not in accordance with the rules of reason, but the person may still be intelligent and well-meaning.
But if we disagree about a question like whether slavery is acceptable, no, one side is clearly defective; and it is no abridgement of freedom to state strongly that slavery is a bad thing, and that its defenders have not just bad facts or bad reasoning, but bad values that should be condemned. (Though again, I would even defend the right of a pro-slavery idiot to speak. But if he starts trying to enslave people, I make no apologies for my advice to shoot his ass.)
Interesting accusation. What have I said that leads you to this belief?
They burried the hippie in Golden Gate park in 1967. You can relax.The only thing I can think of that comes close to an "Atheistic regime" was the USSR under Stalin, and even he brought back the Russian Orthodox church during WWII. So who exactly do you have in mind?
In any engineering project, you never ask top management how things are going, you ask the guys on the ground. June 8, 2004 Times-Picayune:
I said the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project, which was "designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain", i.e. exactly this occurance. It wasn't done:
It's amazing the irrational response you get from many Americans where you mention that a car culture may have some negative effects. Bam - suddenly I'm a freedom hater.
Our car culture was created by a huge federal road-building plan, which directly reduced freedom for many people via eminent domain, as well as indirectly for all of us via increased taxation. It's supported by brutal and stupid foreign policy which works in favor of cheap oil over freedom.
No, it doesn't. Build more roads to the exurbs and people move out there, lengthening their daily commute and filling them up.
No. Levee maintenance and flood control for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project was about $250 million dollars behind, due to the war in Iraq. Specifically, the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project was funded by the Bush administration at levels far below those requested by the Army Corp of Engineers.
Well, they do. Poorly planned infrastructure leads to development in ways that stress that infrastructure; our road-building boom of the past few decades created a car culture that leads to more driving, thus more traffic congestion, thus more demand for roads.
Except they didn't.
Anyway, have you traded anything for little green pieces of paper lately? Or even wackier, for a piece of paper that promises green pieces of paper? Or an electronic promise of green pieces of paper?
Uh, the only ones who had slavery forced on them were the slaves. Americans could have chosen to end the practice of slavery when they founded the new nation; it was a hot topic in the construction of the Constitution.
Cite your source for this, please.
So we should lie to people to get them to behave? "Be good or the Big Daddy in the Sky will be mad?" Thank you, no.
In fact, it seems that often beleivers in a Big Daddy in the Sky who beleive that nothing we do here on earth matters - it's all about the afterlife, baby. So blow up some infidels, or wreck the planet, whatever.
There's no connection between professed belief in a Big Daddy in the Sky, and ethical behavior.
And yet I suspect most of us would rather take that factory job and be free, rather than be subect to slavery.
Besides, unlike tractors, slaves are self-reproducing. Heck, you could just go ahead and rape the slave women and breed yourself a new generation of 'em. So on a large plantation, if you shot or beat one to death occasionally, no great loss.
Uh, there were no Americans (in the sense of inhabitants of the United States, or of the colonies that would become them) yet. A bunch of Europeans brought slavery and genocide to the continent and then became Americans.
In the long view, Americans are Europeans; inheritors of Western civilization, or what passes for civilization, anyway. In the history books a millenium hence, the U.S. may end up a footnote to the British Empire the way the Constantinople was a footnote to Rome.
(Assuming there's anyone left to read history. And it probably won't really be in book form...maybe some long peptide chain absobed directly into the brain, who knows?)
Sorry, but it's not.
I can't parse "I don't know which is worse. The fact that this law exists or that you gave a link to a decision on a bunch of homosexuals who were into BDSM torture. Blech." in a way that doesn't imply that the existence of "homosexuals who were into BDSM torture" isn't objectionable to you.
phobia, n.
1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.
homophobia n.
1. Fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men.
2. Behavior based on such a feeling. Emphasis added.
The format is only made available to those who agree to a restrcitive licence. That's not open.
Is it the homosexualaity or the BDSM that upsets you so much?
Homophobia is no more an acceptable form of intolerance than rascism or sexism.
BDSM is a game. It is not torture. More actual harm is done in your average high school football game than at the average "play party". It's really no more than taking the way you might bite your lover's earlobe and racheting it up several notches.
How much power do you need, and for how long? I find myself using solar to top off batteries that I fully charge before my trip.
I found the new Everlite solar-powered lamps to be very handy, you can charge a cell phone or PDA off of the lamp battery with the adaptors they have. Obviously not enough for a laptop, but to top off your cell phone, pretty practical.
Most of my camping these days is car-camping, though (pull up car, unload tent and cushy gear) so weight's not an issue; I take along an rechargable air compressor (for blowing up the mattress) with a 12 VDC socket, it's got a built-in lead-acid battery. That, you can top off with a solar car battery charger.
No so much. Most of the founders were Deists, and the intelligentsia who until relatively recently did most of the governing were less religious then most of the population. Evangelical and fundamentalist religion has much more political power today than in the past.
I'll tell you just that. The constitution has Amendment I. An early treaty ratified under John Adams states "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion". Madison said "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
The Odyssey II was a cartiridge-based machine. We had one in the early 80s.
Had a home "Pong" game before that with 4 games: Pong, Hockey (Pong with walls on the sides), Handball, and a solitare practice mode.
Uh, no. The complexity of the tax code (i.e., the number of loopholes for the well-off and for corporations) generally works against tax renvenues, as well as shifting the tax burden more onto the middle class and working poor.
And a small percentage of federal spending goes to social programs other than Social Security pensions - only about 16% of federal spending is on assistance to the poor. And half of that's on Medicaid; there's an argument to be make that keeping our lower-income people healthy so that they won't be a reservoir of communicable disease is more of the nature of national defense that a social program. (Especially in an age of bioterrrorism threats.)
The complexity of the tax code has nothing to do with social spending.