If you had worked 20 days straight and needed a day off to see a doctor about feeling dizzy, you were branded a slacker or a pussy... Only when Microsoft started hiring more women and minorities did things change to a large degree. Of course, Microsoft's productivity also took a hit right around that time too.
So, what am I saying?
You are saying that its awesome to be so weak-minded that you can be bullied into risking damage to your health so you can ship some bullshit product that will be obsolete in a year and a half. Also, you are saying that its a wondrously manly virtue to treat yourself and others as if they are empty shells with no intrinsic value outside of their ability to perform a function. In our society, men are trained to believe in the virtue of "taking one for the team." In practice, this means:
pretend to be invulnerable, ignore your basic physical and emotional needs and desensitize yourself to pain
take extremely dangerous jobs where you could be hurt or killed and don't complain about it
join the military and risk violent and bloody death for "patriotism" and "loyalty" -- which are code words that really mean "you have the obligation to die" -- even though war mainly benefits a handful of rich people
men are taught to believe that they are worthless if they don't have a job. This is why the suicide rate rises with the unemployment rate.
men are 5 times more likely to kill themselves than women, partly because men are not permitted to express emotional pain
men are 4 times more likely to be murdered
male life expectancy is 5-10 years less than women, partly because male virtues include recklessness, aggression, competition and emotional repression leading to suicide
From an early age, men are suckered into the macho cult of invulnerability, aggression and competition, and taught that it makes us powerful. But it doesn't, it kills us off in large numbers. But it sure works out well for the wealthy. Are you having a hard time finding workers willing to be shot at, burned or buried alive, have their limbs torn off by machinery and their bodies subjected to toxic chemicals? Just tell them they are a bunch of pussies, and not only will they be begging you for the chance to prove their manhood, they'll also do free recruiting. Men are taunted, bullied and humiliated to the point that even their basic humanity is taken -- something that no-one has the right to take -- and then taught they can earn it back by suffering and dying for some rich person on a literal or metaphorical battle field. Those that survive turn around and hand their sons the same raw deal.
Hence some of the folks taken on the battlefields of Afghanistan going to Guantanamo.
Except for Jose Padilla, who was arrested by federal agents at O'Hare International Airport, not by military personnel in a combat zone. Nonetheless, the president argued that he can classify Padilla as an enemy combatant despite never have been in a combat zone, and that he's not entitled to Geneva protections.
All of this is justified by what can best be described as bong-smoke logic that says, well, really, when you think about it, in the post-9/11 world, isn't the entire world really a "combat zone"? The terrorists sure think so, and I agree with them! And even though legally, we're not at war since war has never actually been declared by Congress, as long as the president says, "We're at war, people!", then Americans have fewer rights. Oh, but don't take away my guns - I need them because you can't trust the government. You see, I don't like the government telling me how to live, I just want to be left alone. Taxation is theft! But I don't mind that exact same government telling the rest of the world at the point of a gun who they can and can't vote for, what sort of government and laws they should live under and how to live. Don't you see? Its all OK because the president says we're spreading freedom! Besides, these are terrorists we're talking about, not real Americans who deserve to have rights.
Illegal orders include but are not limited to attacking non-combatants.
Attacking non-combatants is illegal according to Article 3 of the Geneva Convention -- you may have heard of it -- but the president argues that his role as commander-in-chief gives him the right to decide whether he wants to follow that law. As far as we know, this has only been used to justify torture, but there's no reason why it doesn't include killing. The president believes that he can legally withdraw Geneva convention protections on his say so, which includes ordering the military to kill American civilians.
Apple should encourage blogging because openness and transparency are good things. Openness forces a company to behave ethically, which is good for customers but bad for companies. They prefer to keep their customers in the dark because it shifts the risk on to the customer, and when the customer complains, they get routed to professional "customer service" divisions whose job is to deflect criticism and insulate the developers and the rest of the company from the true impact of their decisions.
What I find troubling is that both you and the author seem to think that the only reason people are calling for openness is because they are really really excited about Apple products and just want the latest scoop. I'm not sure if I should chalk this up to stupidity or malice, but either way, its condescending. Companies routinely treat their customers with disdain, and calling for openness and transparency is way to even the playing field.
Riiight -- most web developers you know develop on a mac, so therefore all web developers must develop on a mac. Makes perfect sense! But if you are developing on a mac, you are probably designing web sites or maybe doing a Rails or php app, not working on the UI for a large enterprise system where developers run a local instance of the development environment on their own machines. Among those people, no-one I know runs a mac, and when your app fails to work on a browser, its a serious problem for a customer. And its not only UI developers who need to test against IE7 and IE6, the QA team needs to test it too. This saves people from having to have two boxes just for different versions of IE.
If someone spends time and a lot of money to develop a new something, whether directly as an investment, or in their own time (so they can't earn money elsewhere), why do you think it should be OK for someone else to profit off of it.
You argument is incoherent. This scenario applies equally as well to writers and authors -- it is not OK for them to be influenced by and make a profit off other people's intellectual property without proper clearances and providing compensation to the original author. There is nothing new under the sun. Every idea is rooted in a prior idea, so to claim that an idea is property, you have to restrict the property to only the completely original contributions, and license the borrowed parts. Otherwise, its stealing. That would be coherent, but I don't see you making that argument, I see you making an arbitrary determination about who owns an idea and who is authorized to license a work, and by strange co-incidence, that determination favors profit-making.
Sadly, that's how economist think and work. The Exxon Valdez disaster, for example, was a boon to the US economy according to standard models of economics, because it created lots of jobs.
Er, no. At the risk of being modded redundant, economists call this the Broken Windows fallacy. Economists, especially libertarian economists recognize that cleaning up the environment is not a boon to the economy, which is why they generally want to avoid doing it. It is mainly liberal economists who might argue that in times of recession, it could stimulate the economy.
"TWiki" should be called "GroupEditor" or at worst, "BullPen"...
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast' or 'quick', so it does at least partly describe the function of the software. You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen". Open source software tends to have a very cross-cultural, cross-language audience. Do you suggest that projects rename themselves for each language they target? Projects are named for marketing purposes, to be memorable and appealing. It sounds very much like you just hate the idea of marketing, so I will rename you CrankyBastard, which I think we can all agree is memorable, appealing and accurately describes you!
I don't see how letting a child communicate with his or her parents is the same as having the parents put everything right for them. Its important for children to develop a sense of competence, but shutting down communication is a brute-force method that may accomplish the goal, but with a serious downside. This approach undermines the child's confidence in their parents' ability to provide support, and the child uses this as a generalized mental model of all intimate relationships that carries over into adult life.
Creating insecurity in a child's relationship with their parent will cause the child to become more dependent. Imagine that a kid finds himself on his own and facing a terrifying situation. He runs to his parents, who refuse to communicate with him. Since his parents are providing him with no information or a greater understanding about this new danger, and he is "on his own", the rational strategy is to play it safe, avoid all danger and run to safety at the slightest provocation. After all, how is he supposed to know if a particular situation is really dangerous, or only just a bit challenging? To develop independence, the parents should communicate to the child that 1) they completely understand his feelings of anxiety and 2) they feel that he has the ability to overcome it.
From a broader perspective, it makes sense that men typically counsel parents to help their children learn that they are on their own, because men almost always are. Men are strongly discouraged from sharing their feelings and showing weakness. Even as children, they are taught that communicating feelings is like talking to a brick wall. They quickly learn that they are alone, and as adults, try to minimize the importance and influence that their intimate relationships have on them. But this is a symptom of abuse, not a sign of healthy independence. Men are routinely humiliated for experiencing normal emotions, and sometimes this results in men who lash out angrily when they see vulnerability in other people. The approach that parents take has a big influence in their children's ability to form healthy relationships and develop independence.
SpaceCadetTrav's post doesn't contain either of those fallacies. Zerocool's original post divides the world into things that we currently understand, and things that we don't yet understand, which assumes that all facts about the universe can, in principle, be understood by humans. Pointing this out doesn't mean I'm assuming the opposite - that some facts are not knowable, even though Godel's Incompleteness Theorem might imply that.
But even supposing it is true that some facts are not knowable, that doesn't imply that God exists, it implies agnosticism. One certainly can't say that God is a fact that can't be known, but also say that the Bible contains special information about God. If something can't be known rationally, then how can you teach people about it?
I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it, but many people are becoming comfortable with the whole Web 2.0 interface and it is almost expected.
So wait, you think that a 'web 2.0 interface' means that you have to use CSS? You could use crappy table layouts and font tags if you want. This basic misunderstanding of what CSS actually does makes me wonder if all your problems are caused by an incorrect DOCTYPE and having IE render in quirks mode.
Real maturity is achieved when one achieves the level of self-confidence needed to outgrow the "fitting a mold just because thats what one is '(not) expected to do' behaviour" and one finds out it's possible to balance responsabilities and fun without beraking the first or giving up the second.
I think maybe people are thinking that maturity is a binary property, but I think it is better represented with two bits - emotional variability and cognitive variability. Both are in 'on' position during childhood, which we think of as immature, and maybe an infant has high emotional variability, low cognitive function. As people mature, they want to switch emotional variability off because its unpredictable and potentially harmful, and because its not completely independent from cognitive variability, its easier to switch them both off. Now people are wondering why that's necessary, so maybe some people want to switch them both on again like when they were kids, but really, they aren't that closely linked. And what if increased cognitive flexibility is in fact necessary to emotional stability in today's world? I can't imagine that a rigid, inflexible person would be able to maintain emotional stability for very long in the chaos of a modern city. In any case, I really don't think maturity is dualistic like the way people are portraying it. Its not necessary to throw temper tantrums in order to maintain imagination and curiosity -- I think that maintaining these properties might actually make people more emotionally stable.
Dressing up in a specific style (geek, retro, necro, whatever) to "make a statement", "be different" or "cause a reaction" can be just as much a form of "trying to belong", "accomodating to a sterotype" or in general "being relative to others" as wearing a suit for work...
I agree with that -- subcultures are generally trying to make the point that society unfairly marginalizes people like them or who have their values. What makes suit-wearing people different is not that they want to be included, while Goths, let's say, don't care about being included. They differ in that suits may care about being rejected, while Goths don't. Goths dress up to make the statement that society ought to be more accepting of personal expression, but someone wearing a suit (e.g. parents) could be interpreted as saying that they accept society's narrow standards. And in fact, Goths have been reasonably successful at creating space for their subculture.
Ultimately, the argument is that their middle-class parents live average lives absent of vitality and meaning, and the wearing of suit is a symbol of sacrificing one's individuality. That's not to say that wearing a suit is completely incompatible with vitality and meaning though.
How much responsibility falls on Apple to encourage its contractors and subcontractors to significantly exceed statutory labor guidelines...
To the extent that failing to exceed local labor laws would cause their customer base to revolt, they have a large responsibility. It's well-known that American and European consumers take a very harsh view of companies practicing what they view as exploitative labor practices. For some reason, they don't like it when they find out that their lifestyle is causing misery around the globe. Not taking that into account could be seen as evidence of negligent business practices.
How much, exactly, do other workers in their locale earn? What is the overall cost of living?
This BusinessWeek article indicates that the average hourly wage of a Chinese factory worker is $0.45 (rural) and $1.06 (city). Guessing at 22 working days a month, that's about $150 and $350 a month. The article suggests that $150 in China has the same purchasing power as $693 in the US ($350 is equivalent to $1618). So it would seem that, assuming that Longhua is a rural area, factory workers in these two locations are paid less than a third of the average local wage. But you raise a good point -- why is anyone even working there? What sort of illegal practices are being used?
How, precisely and specifically, has Apple "staked its image" on "progressive politics"?
Apple frequently uses icons of human rights in its marketing materials, such as Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. Arguably, these are cynical marketing tools designed to give the impression that Apple cares about the same things as its target market, and shouldn't be taken seriously. Nonetheless, Apple has made a significant investment in portraying itself as a pro-human rights, pro-environment company, and permitting potential abuses to continue would significantly undermine their brand, as well as make a mockery of their own internal standards for suppliers. See the Apple Supplier Code of Conduct [pdf].
wouldn't more effective change come from the US being able to have a global position such that it can exert pressure on the Chinese government and other human rights abusers, rather than trying to mobilize consumers to target US companies?
Would it? The US is not presently in a very good position to exert pressure on human rights abusers and the government is influenced by multinational corporations who have strong financial incentives to maintain the status quo. And in any case, those are not mutally exclusive options. It occurs to me that companies frequently complain about government interfering with their business, but when human rights activists adopt free-market compatible strategies such as publically embarrassing companies, they complain about that too. This gives the impression that corporations are untrustworthy, interested only in covering up their immoral practices.
I will say that it's rather unfair that, in campaigns like these, it's often that one target, however, that bears a hugely disproportionate burden of vilification...
I'm afraid I'm not terribly sympathetic to that argument. How can you argue that people treat corporations fairly when they expend a great deal of effort to evade their own responsibilities? Is it fair for competent employees to lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control? The social contract says that if you work hard and do good work for your company, you will be rewarded, but companies have successfully freed themselves of that and now claim that they actually have no responsibility whatsoever to treat their workers fairly. They should not now make appeals to fairness. If you engage in labor practices to the displeasure of your customers, you run the ri
You are just defining "end-to-end" to mean "ease-of-use". The fact is that Apple once used an end-to-end model, but starting with the original iMac and co-inciding with their resurrection, they've considerably backed off from that. Arguably, that was one of the main reasons they came back, because it simplified things for peripheral developers, and lessened the pain for people switching from windows, because now they can run most of their windows devices.
The fact that Apple partners with other companies to ship OS X with printer drivers is a good example of how not end-to-end they are. It could be argued that Apple has had more success with the component model because Microsoft believes it can dictate terms to its peripheral developers.
I really like this part of the column: "Even the Mac isn't as closed as its critics charge. It's still designed to work with Apple's own operating system and software." Oh, good -- Apple isn't closed because it interoperates with its own software. Isn't that like saying that I'm a teamplayer, but only when team size == 1?
Wikipedia tells me that when Apple started to make a come back with the iMac, they discarded legacy Apple ports like Apple Desktop Bus, GeoPort and SCSI. That's why they can support Windows printers, scanners, keyboards and mice, and with AGP and PCI-E support, high performance video cards too. They also support the standard internet protocols, RSS feeds for podcasting and a POSIX kernel.
So how is this a good example of an end-to-end model?
It's possible that popular Hollywood images of ninjas are actually more authentic than you might think. From a post on The Japan History Group Blog:
"Movie-style ninja, BTW, have a much longer history than the movies (although the term "ninja" does not appear to have been popularized until the 20th century). Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American "haunted houses" at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The "ninja" performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it's clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre."
"I used to tell students that the question of ninja was, from a historian's standpoint, still somewhat open. I think I'm going to take a much stronger line from now on, and point out that there are no historically credible claims supporting the historicity of a tradition which somehow concludes with modern schools of ninjustsu."
Somewhat related is this post makes the argument that the supposedly ancient history of karate (and possibly other martial arts) was manufactured in the 19th century for political reasons related to the colonization of Okinawa by the Japanese.
Humans may not be able to destroy the earth, but what does that have to do with whether we can alter the environment to make the earth inhospitable to human life. Obviously, the earth has survived environmental catastrophes in the past. Good. It will be a very cold comfort when the last human has died, and we're all in heaven listening to you say, "What's the big deal? The earth is fine, just like I said! Look, the cockroaches made it! Hey, why is this mob I am now surrounded by so angry?"
That's not true, developers do design all the time. Let's say you are writing a command line tool that does some operation on a unix file system and you need to be able to optionally recurse through directories. How do you indicate that option? Most people would use -R, -v to indicate verbose, return 0 on success and follow perhaps dozens of other Unix conventions. These are all design choices. Function comes before form, then what's wrong with using the windows convention / for command line options instead of - for a unix command? Both work equally well, and anyone who criticizes my use of windows switches can be accused of putting form above function.
To take an even geekier example, look at API design. Say you were looking at a string API, where method names and signatures were inconsistent, so you'd have something like strcpy(source, destination) along side strncpy(destination, source, length). These are significant design and usability issues that developers care a great deal about, yet when you want to apply those same principles to the GUI world, people think its all just frivolous eye candy that no serious person bothers with.
Yes. I too hate those godless liberal terrorist lovers who undermine our way of life with their politically correct poor spelling! Obviously they are trying to avoid hurting the feelings of immigrants who refuse to learn English when they come to this country. They think there's no "right" way of spelling, its all just relative. And relativism, as we all know, is really a kind of terrorism.
It is basically legislating what sort of motivations for doing a crime is worse than some other motivation...
No, its creating stiffer penalties for crimes that have different effects than other crimes. A hate crime is intended to harm a victim and intimidate and terrorize a group of people, such that they could reasonably fear that they are also targets. If you knew anything about hate crime legislation beyond what you heard on Fox News, you would know that the legal reasoning behind those laws are nothing like what you've described.
Right-wing groups, including Christians, have seized on the name 'hate crime' and distorted its (admittedly ambiguous) meaning to give their more violent members special immunity from prosecution when they commit acts of terrorism, which is exactly what they are. Abortion clinic bombers are terrorists, lynch mobs are terrorists and should be condemned. Let's have no irrelevant whining from the right that their ability to keep minorities in their place is being eroded.
Luke 10:10 is pretty clear that cities who do not receive Jesus' message will be worse off than Soddom and Gammorah.
What does that have to do with your claim that Jesus promised to kill everyone when he returns?
What "facts"?
You are making certain claims about Christian apocalyptic literature and the place it holds in religious teachings. You are describing a doctrine that is a unique creation of American Evangelicals, and then pretending that all christians believe that, and that they always have. The facts say otherwise.
The Bible's morality is distorted and frankly despicable...it's not a matter of "interpretation"; it's a matter of which parts you like better.
You are making two contrary claims here. You say that the Bible has a very definite, specific morality that is despicable, but on the other hand, you say that interpreting what the Bible is impossible, its just picking and choosing. Does that mean that by reading of a despicable morality in the Bible, you are picking and choosing to create something that you like, to be used as a rhetorical weapon against people you disagree with?
And for a book that's supposedly handed down from an almighty god, no one's given a satisfactory explanation as to why he would choose to be so contradictory or why he would be so cryptic.
Well yeah that's a good point. A related question is why does God communicate solely by means of words?
The difference is that Plato never claimed that his works were an absolute authority...Having a passage that supports racism makes it a racist book.
Jesus never claimed that his works were an absolute authority either, having never written any. And of course the Jews believe that the Mosaic law only applies to Jews.
Here's a quotation from Artistotle: 'For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.' Aristotle held that some races (and women) were naturally inferior to the Greeks, so slavery was natural. By your standard, one racist passage makes it a racist book, regardless of the social context of the time. But you say that no-one worships Aristotle, so its ok. What if people started worshipping him? Would that be a reason to condemn Aristotle, ban his works and burn every copy?
In reality, you don't care about Aristotle because his followers have no political power, but you think evangelical Christians have too much political power. I agree with you, but I don't agree with making false, distorted and irrelevant claims in order to advance a political agenda, even one I support.
So you pick and choose which parts of the Bible you like.
No, I'm correcting an error you made. You said Jesus himself said he would kill everyone who didn't believe in him when he returns. That is simply wrong.
But the religious establishments themselves, including the Catholic Church, have officially recognized Revelation as divinely-inspired.
The Eastern Orthodox Church doesn't, they don't include it in their Bible. Amillenialism is the official Catholic and mainline Protestant dogma, established by St. Augustine in the 4th century. It teaches that the Book of Revelation is allegorical or possibly refers to Roman Emperors, the Antichrist is a metaphor and not a real person. From religioustolerance.org: "Events described in The Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21) and in most of the book of Revelation are seen as occurrences which have already happened, or which are symbolic in nature and not to be taken literally." What you mistakenly call the dogma of all of Christianity is one particular interpretation created in the 19th century by American fundamentalists. For someone so committed to the scientific method, you have a remarkable disdain for facts.
Morality is not an addition / subtraction kind of affair. One passage explicitly condoning racism is not "nullified" or canceled out by one that encourages tolerance. If you murder someone, you are and always will be a murderer; it doesn't matter how much charity you give.
The Bible is a book, not a person, it has no morality. What the Bible teaches is an addition/subtraction affair, because it has a mixed and ambiguous set of teachings that are open to interpretation. The question here is not whether we can pull out some verses of the Bible that can be interpreted to support immoral acts, but whether Christian churches make that interpretation, and whether it makes up a substantial part of their teachings. Additionally, Christian theology is heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. The works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle make up what we might call the unofficial scriptures, and they too have been used to justify various acts we now consider to be immoral. For example, the Great Chain of Being. If you want to implicate our culture's ancient roots for perpetrating various evil things, why do you stop with the Bible? It is very clear the that Great Chain of Being justifies slavery, that it has been used that way and that is a Platonic idea. Do you denounce Plato?
The Bible is not "ambiguous" on racism... One passage explicitly condoning racism is not "nullified" or canceled out by one that encourages tolerance.
Oh, but one passage explicitly rejecting racism is nullified by one that encourages racism?
Exodus 19:5 explicitly states that God favors the Israelites over all other people.
You are claiming that this specific verse substantially influences Christian behavior and morality, but that contradicts historical Christian anti-semitism.
I think what happens is that often christians take this transcendence thing a bit too far.
Yes, they do. But this is not something unique to Christianity or unique to religion. The opposite tendency, called immanence, can be equally dangerous, since it can claim that there is no real value to human life. Tribal religions that practice human sacrifice and cannibalism may fall into this category. Since we aren't really dealing with that extreme today, its easy to imagine that there are no problems with it and paint the other side as an unalloyed evil.
I don't think anybody tries to say God is the reason why the internet was invented.
You should try talking to some conservatives. From this article: "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians." From the author of The Victory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. This is not a fringe view, this is very commonly discussed by conservatives to justify invading Iraq.
What do you mean? Aren't your children going to die no matter what you do?
Jesus asked God to save him from being killed. God did nothing. This does not imply that the Bible teaches us to abandon our children. The original post was trying to say that because God supposedly committed infanticide, it implies that Christians are OK with infanticide. In fact, Christians are only OK with those atrocities because they believe that they are caused by a transcendent moral principle that is always just, i.e. they believe in something called the greater good. The problem with transcendent moral principles is that they lead to the-end-justifies-the-means thinking, but this is not a problem with religion per se, but of any ideology that becomes transcendent, like Communism for example. The irony is that most rationalists have their own transcendent, sacred ideology (the inviolability of the individual's rights), even while they denounce transcendence itself.
All I ask is that you give other people the right to ignore passages of their choice and to interpret any pssage they like according to what they think the old world was like.
Everyone is free to make whatever interpretations they like, but some people make a particular interpretation, then claim that all Christians have that interpretation, and what's more, it is the cause of all the ills that we face in the world today. I believe that this is a dangerous claim to make, because if we can blame religion for many of the bad things that our society produces, that encourages people to credit religion with all the good things that our society has produced. And many conservatives claim that the reason that America is so great is because we are a white Christian nation, and therefore we have the right to impose that on other people. So I think its hard to start off by saying that religion is the cause of our ills, but then make the complete opposite argument and say that religion had nothing to do with our successes.
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You are saying that its awesome to be so weak-minded that you can be bullied into risking damage to your health so you can ship some bullshit product that will be obsolete in a year and a half. Also, you are saying that its a wondrously manly virtue to treat yourself and others as if they are empty shells with no intrinsic value outside of their ability to perform a function. In our society, men are trained to believe in the virtue of "taking one for the team." In practice, this means:
- pretend to be invulnerable, ignore your basic physical and emotional needs and desensitize yourself to pain
- take extremely dangerous jobs where you could be hurt or killed and don't complain about it
- join the military and risk violent and bloody death for "patriotism" and "loyalty" -- which are code words that really mean "you have the obligation to die" -- even though war mainly benefits a handful of rich people
- men are taught to believe that they are worthless if they don't have a job. This is why the suicide rate rises with the unemployment rate.
- men are 5 times more likely to kill themselves than women, partly because men are not permitted to express emotional pain
- men are 4 times more likely to be murdered
- male life expectancy is 5-10 years less than women, partly because male virtues include recklessness, aggression, competition and emotional repression leading to suicide
From an early age, men are suckered into the macho cult of invulnerability, aggression and competition, and taught that it makes us powerful. But it doesn't, it kills us off in large numbers. But it sure works out well for the wealthy. Are you having a hard time finding workers willing to be shot at, burned or buried alive, have their limbs torn off by machinery and their bodies subjected to toxic chemicals? Just tell them they are a bunch of pussies, and not only will they be begging you for the chance to prove their manhood, they'll also do free recruiting. Men are taunted, bullied and humiliated to the point that even their basic humanity is taken -- something that no-one has the right to take -- and then taught they can earn it back by suffering and dying for some rich person on a literal or metaphorical battle field. Those that survive turn around and hand their sons the same raw deal.Except for Jose Padilla, who was arrested by federal agents at O'Hare International Airport, not by military personnel in a combat zone. Nonetheless, the president argued that he can classify Padilla as an enemy combatant despite never have been in a combat zone, and that he's not entitled to Geneva protections.
All of this is justified by what can best be described as bong-smoke logic that says, well, really, when you think about it, in the post-9/11 world, isn't the entire world really a "combat zone"? The terrorists sure think so, and I agree with them! And even though legally, we're not at war since war has never actually been declared by Congress, as long as the president says, "We're at war, people!", then Americans have fewer rights. Oh, but don't take away my guns - I need them because you can't trust the government. You see, I don't like the government telling me how to live, I just want to be left alone. Taxation is theft! But I don't mind that exact same government telling the rest of the world at the point of a gun who they can and can't vote for, what sort of government and laws they should live under and how to live. Don't you see? Its all OK because the president says we're spreading freedom! Besides, these are terrorists we're talking about, not real Americans who deserve to have rights.
Attacking non-combatants is illegal according to Article 3 of the Geneva Convention -- you may have heard of it -- but the president argues that his role as commander-in-chief gives him the right to decide whether he wants to follow that law. As far as we know, this has only been used to justify torture, but there's no reason why it doesn't include killing. The president believes that he can legally withdraw Geneva convention protections on his say so, which includes ordering the military to kill American civilians.
Apple should encourage blogging because openness and transparency are good things. Openness forces a company to behave ethically, which is good for customers but bad for companies. They prefer to keep their customers in the dark because it shifts the risk on to the customer, and when the customer complains, they get routed to professional "customer service" divisions whose job is to deflect criticism and insulate the developers and the rest of the company from the true impact of their decisions.
What I find troubling is that both you and the author seem to think that the only reason people are calling for openness is because they are really really excited about Apple products and just want the latest scoop. I'm not sure if I should chalk this up to stupidity or malice, but either way, its condescending. Companies routinely treat their customers with disdain, and calling for openness and transparency is way to even the playing field.
Riiight -- most web developers you know develop on a mac, so therefore all web developers must develop on a mac. Makes perfect sense! But if you are developing on a mac, you are probably designing web sites or maybe doing a Rails or php app, not working on the UI for a large enterprise system where developers run a local instance of the development environment on their own machines. Among those people, no-one I know runs a mac, and when your app fails to work on a browser, its a serious problem for a customer. And its not only UI developers who need to test against IE7 and IE6, the QA team needs to test it too. This saves people from having to have two boxes just for different versions of IE.
You argument is incoherent. This scenario applies equally as well to writers and authors -- it is not OK for them to be influenced by and make a profit off other people's intellectual property without proper clearances and providing compensation to the original author. There is nothing new under the sun. Every idea is rooted in a prior idea, so to claim that an idea is property, you have to restrict the property to only the completely original contributions, and license the borrowed parts. Otherwise, its stealing. That would be coherent, but I don't see you making that argument, I see you making an arbitrary determination about who owns an idea and who is authorized to license a work, and by strange co-incidence, that determination favors profit-making.
Er, no. At the risk of being modded redundant, economists call this the Broken Windows fallacy. Economists, especially libertarian economists recognize that cleaning up the environment is not a boon to the economy, which is why they generally want to avoid doing it. It is mainly liberal economists who might argue that in times of recession, it could stimulate the economy.
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast' or 'quick', so it does at least partly describe the function of the software. You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen". Open source software tends to have a very cross-cultural, cross-language audience. Do you suggest that projects rename themselves for each language they target? Projects are named for marketing purposes, to be memorable and appealing. It sounds very much like you just hate the idea of marketing, so I will rename you CrankyBastard, which I think we can all agree is memorable, appealing and accurately describes you!
I don't see how letting a child communicate with his or her parents is the same as having the parents put everything right for them. Its important for children to develop a sense of competence, but shutting down communication is a brute-force method that may accomplish the goal, but with a serious downside. This approach undermines the child's confidence in their parents' ability to provide support, and the child uses this as a generalized mental model of all intimate relationships that carries over into adult life.
Creating insecurity in a child's relationship with their parent will cause the child to become more dependent. Imagine that a kid finds himself on his own and facing a terrifying situation. He runs to his parents, who refuse to communicate with him. Since his parents are providing him with no information or a greater understanding about this new danger, and he is "on his own", the rational strategy is to play it safe, avoid all danger and run to safety at the slightest provocation. After all, how is he supposed to know if a particular situation is really dangerous, or only just a bit challenging? To develop independence, the parents should communicate to the child that 1) they completely understand his feelings of anxiety and 2) they feel that he has the ability to overcome it.
From a broader perspective, it makes sense that men typically counsel parents to help their children learn that they are on their own, because men almost always are. Men are strongly discouraged from sharing their feelings and showing weakness. Even as children, they are taught that communicating feelings is like talking to a brick wall. They quickly learn that they are alone, and as adults, try to minimize the importance and influence that their intimate relationships have on them. But this is a symptom of abuse, not a sign of healthy independence. Men are routinely humiliated for experiencing normal emotions, and sometimes this results in men who lash out angrily when they see vulnerability in other people. The approach that parents take has a big influence in their children's ability to form healthy relationships and develop independence.
Yeah! Who ever heard of kids having unrestricted access to their parents? Next those little bastards will be demanding that their parents love them!
But even supposing it is true that some facts are not knowable, that doesn't imply that God exists, it implies agnosticism. One certainly can't say that God is a fact that can't be known, but also say that the Bible contains special information about God. If something can't be known rationally, then how can you teach people about it?
So wait, you think that a 'web 2.0 interface' means that you have to use CSS? You could use crappy table layouts and font tags if you want. This basic misunderstanding of what CSS actually does makes me wonder if all your problems are caused by an incorrect DOCTYPE and having IE render in quirks mode.
I think maybe people are thinking that maturity is a binary property, but I think it is better represented with two bits - emotional variability and cognitive variability. Both are in 'on' position during childhood, which we think of as immature, and maybe an infant has high emotional variability, low cognitive function. As people mature, they want to switch emotional variability off because its unpredictable and potentially harmful, and because its not completely independent from cognitive variability, its easier to switch them both off. Now people are wondering why that's necessary, so maybe some people want to switch them both on again like when they were kids, but really, they aren't that closely linked. And what if increased cognitive flexibility is in fact necessary to emotional stability in today's world? I can't imagine that a rigid, inflexible person would be able to maintain emotional stability for very long in the chaos of a modern city. In any case, I really don't think maturity is dualistic like the way people are portraying it. Its not necessary to throw temper tantrums in order to maintain imagination and curiosity -- I think that maintaining these properties might actually make people more emotionally stable.
I agree with that -- subcultures are generally trying to make the point that society unfairly marginalizes people like them or who have their values. What makes suit-wearing people different is not that they want to be included, while Goths, let's say, don't care about being included. They differ in that suits may care about being rejected, while Goths don't. Goths dress up to make the statement that society ought to be more accepting of personal expression, but someone wearing a suit (e.g. parents) could be interpreted as saying that they accept society's narrow standards. And in fact, Goths have been reasonably successful at creating space for their subculture.
Ultimately, the argument is that their middle-class parents live average lives absent of vitality and meaning, and the wearing of suit is a symbol of sacrificing one's individuality. That's not to say that wearing a suit is completely incompatible with vitality and meaning though.
To the extent that failing to exceed local labor laws would cause their customer base to revolt, they have a large responsibility. It's well-known that American and European consumers take a very harsh view of companies practicing what they view as exploitative labor practices. For some reason, they don't like it when they find out that their lifestyle is causing misery around the globe. Not taking that into account could be seen as evidence of negligent business practices.
How much, exactly, do other workers in their locale earn? What is the overall cost of living?
This BusinessWeek article indicates that the average hourly wage of a Chinese factory worker is $0.45 (rural) and $1.06 (city). Guessing at 22 working days a month, that's about $150 and $350 a month. The article suggests that $150 in China has the same purchasing power as $693 in the US ($350 is equivalent to $1618). So it would seem that, assuming that Longhua is a rural area, factory workers in these two locations are paid less than a third of the average local wage. But you raise a good point -- why is anyone even working there? What sort of illegal practices are being used?
How, precisely and specifically, has Apple "staked its image" on "progressive politics"?
Apple frequently uses icons of human rights in its marketing materials, such as Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. Arguably, these are cynical marketing tools designed to give the impression that Apple cares about the same things as its target market, and shouldn't be taken seriously. Nonetheless, Apple has made a significant investment in portraying itself as a pro-human rights, pro-environment company, and permitting potential abuses to continue would significantly undermine their brand, as well as make a mockery of their own internal standards for suppliers. See the Apple Supplier Code of Conduct [pdf].
wouldn't more effective change come from the US being able to have a global position such that it can exert pressure on the Chinese government and other human rights abusers, rather than trying to mobilize consumers to target US companies?
Would it? The US is not presently in a very good position to exert pressure on human rights abusers and the government is influenced by multinational corporations who have strong financial incentives to maintain the status quo. And in any case, those are not mutally exclusive options. It occurs to me that companies frequently complain about government interfering with their business, but when human rights activists adopt free-market compatible strategies such as publically embarrassing companies, they complain about that too. This gives the impression that corporations are untrustworthy, interested only in covering up their immoral practices.
I will say that it's rather unfair that, in campaigns like these, it's often that one target, however, that bears a hugely disproportionate burden of vilification...
I'm afraid I'm not terribly sympathetic to that argument. How can you argue that people treat corporations fairly when they expend a great deal of effort to evade their own responsibilities? Is it fair for competent employees to lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control? The social contract says that if you work hard and do good work for your company, you will be rewarded, but companies have successfully freed themselves of that and now claim that they actually have no responsibility whatsoever to treat their workers fairly. They should not now make appeals to fairness. If you engage in labor practices to the displeasure of your customers, you run the ri
The fact that Apple partners with other companies to ship OS X with printer drivers is a good example of how not end-to-end they are. It could be argued that Apple has had more success with the component model because Microsoft believes it can dictate terms to its peripheral developers.
I really like this part of the column: "Even the Mac isn't as closed as its critics charge. It's still designed to work with Apple's own operating system and software." Oh, good -- Apple isn't closed because it interoperates with its own software. Isn't that like saying that I'm a teamplayer, but only when team size == 1?
So how is this a good example of an end-to-end model?
"Movie-style ninja, BTW, have a much longer history than the movies (although the term "ninja" does not appear to have been popularized until the 20th century). Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American "haunted houses" at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The "ninja" performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it's clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre."
"I used to tell students that the question of ninja was, from a historian's standpoint, still somewhat open. I think I'm going to take a much stronger line from now on, and point out that there are no historically credible claims supporting the historicity of a tradition which somehow concludes with modern schools of ninjustsu."
Somewhat related is this post makes the argument that the supposedly ancient history of karate (and possibly other martial arts) was manufactured in the 19th century for political reasons related to the colonization of Okinawa by the Japanese.
Humans may not be able to destroy the earth, but what does that have to do with whether we can alter the environment to make the earth inhospitable to human life. Obviously, the earth has survived environmental catastrophes in the past. Good. It will be a very cold comfort when the last human has died, and we're all in heaven listening to you say, "What's the big deal? The earth is fine, just like I said! Look, the cockroaches made it! Hey, why is this mob I am now surrounded by so angry?"
That's not true, developers do design all the time. Let's say you are writing a command line tool that does some operation on a unix file system and you need to be able to optionally recurse through directories. How do you indicate that option? Most people would use -R, -v to indicate verbose, return 0 on success and follow perhaps dozens of other Unix conventions. These are all design choices. Function comes before form, then what's wrong with using the windows convention / for command line options instead of - for a unix command? Both work equally well, and anyone who criticizes my use of windows switches can be accused of putting form above function.
To take an even geekier example, look at API design. Say you were looking at a string API, where method names and signatures were inconsistent, so you'd have something like strcpy(source, destination) along side strncpy(destination, source, length). These are significant design and usability issues that developers care a great deal about, yet when you want to apply those same principles to the GUI world, people think its all just frivolous eye candy that no serious person bothers with.
Yes. I too hate those godless liberal terrorist lovers who undermine our way of life with their politically correct poor spelling! Obviously they are trying to avoid hurting the feelings of immigrants who refuse to learn English when they come to this country. They think there's no "right" way of spelling, its all just relative. And relativism, as we all know, is really a kind of terrorism.
No, its creating stiffer penalties for crimes that have different effects than other crimes. A hate crime is intended to harm a victim and intimidate and terrorize a group of people, such that they could reasonably fear that they are also targets. If you knew anything about hate crime legislation beyond what you heard on Fox News, you would know that the legal reasoning behind those laws are nothing like what you've described.
Right-wing groups, including Christians, have seized on the name 'hate crime' and distorted its (admittedly ambiguous) meaning to give their more violent members special immunity from prosecution when they commit acts of terrorism, which is exactly what they are. Abortion clinic bombers are terrorists, lynch mobs are terrorists and should be condemned. Let's have no irrelevant whining from the right that their ability to keep minorities in their place is being eroded.
What does that have to do with your claim that Jesus promised to kill everyone when he returns?
What "facts"?
You are making certain claims about Christian apocalyptic literature and the place it holds in religious teachings. You are describing a doctrine that is a unique creation of American Evangelicals, and then pretending that all christians believe that, and that they always have. The facts say otherwise.
The Bible's morality is distorted and frankly despicable...it's not a matter of "interpretation"; it's a matter of which parts you like better.
You are making two contrary claims here. You say that the Bible has a very definite, specific morality that is despicable, but on the other hand, you say that interpreting what the Bible is impossible, its just picking and choosing. Does that mean that by reading of a despicable morality in the Bible, you are picking and choosing to create something that you like, to be used as a rhetorical weapon against people you disagree with?
And for a book that's supposedly handed down from an almighty god, no one's given a satisfactory explanation as to why he would choose to be so contradictory or why he would be so cryptic.
Well yeah that's a good point. A related question is why does God communicate solely by means of words?
The difference is that Plato never claimed that his works were an absolute authority...Having a passage that supports racism makes it a racist book.
Jesus never claimed that his works were an absolute authority either, having never written any. And of course the Jews believe that the Mosaic law only applies to Jews.
Here's a quotation from Artistotle: 'For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.' Aristotle held that some races (and women) were naturally inferior to the Greeks, so slavery was natural. By your standard, one racist passage makes it a racist book, regardless of the social context of the time. But you say that no-one worships Aristotle, so its ok. What if people started worshipping him? Would that be a reason to condemn Aristotle, ban his works and burn every copy?
In reality, you don't care about Aristotle because his followers have no political power, but you think evangelical Christians have too much political power. I agree with you, but I don't agree with making false, distorted and irrelevant claims in order to advance a political agenda, even one I support.
No, I'm correcting an error you made. You said Jesus himself said he would kill everyone who didn't believe in him when he returns. That is simply wrong.
But the religious establishments themselves, including the Catholic Church, have officially recognized Revelation as divinely-inspired.
The Eastern Orthodox Church doesn't, they don't include it in their Bible. Amillenialism is the official Catholic and mainline Protestant dogma, established by St. Augustine in the 4th century. It teaches that the Book of Revelation is allegorical or possibly refers to Roman Emperors, the Antichrist is a metaphor and not a real person. From religioustolerance.org: "Events described in The Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21) and in most of the book of Revelation are seen as occurrences which have already happened, or which are symbolic in nature and not to be taken literally." What you mistakenly call the dogma of all of Christianity is one particular interpretation created in the 19th century by American fundamentalists. For someone so committed to the scientific method, you have a remarkable disdain for facts.
Morality is not an addition / subtraction kind of affair. One passage explicitly condoning racism is not "nullified" or canceled out by one that encourages tolerance. If you murder someone, you are and always will be a murderer; it doesn't matter how much charity you give.
The Bible is a book, not a person, it has no morality. What the Bible teaches is an addition/subtraction affair, because it has a mixed and ambiguous set of teachings that are open to interpretation. The question here is not whether we can pull out some verses of the Bible that can be interpreted to support immoral acts, but whether Christian churches make that interpretation, and whether it makes up a substantial part of their teachings. Additionally, Christian theology is heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. The works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle make up what we might call the unofficial scriptures, and they too have been used to justify various acts we now consider to be immoral. For example, the Great Chain of Being. If you want to implicate our culture's ancient roots for perpetrating various evil things, why do you stop with the Bible? It is very clear the that Great Chain of Being justifies slavery, that it has been used that way and that is a Platonic idea. Do you denounce Plato?
The Bible is not "ambiguous" on racism... One passage explicitly condoning racism is not "nullified" or canceled out by one that encourages tolerance.
Oh, but one passage explicitly rejecting racism is nullified by one that encourages racism?
Exodus 19:5 explicitly states that God favors the Israelites over all other people.
You are claiming that this specific verse substantially influences Christian behavior and morality, but that contradicts historical Christian anti-semitism.
Yes, they do. But this is not something unique to Christianity or unique to religion. The opposite tendency, called immanence, can be equally dangerous, since it can claim that there is no real value to human life. Tribal religions that practice human sacrifice and cannibalism may fall into this category. Since we aren't really dealing with that extreme today, its easy to imagine that there are no problems with it and paint the other side as an unalloyed evil.
I don't think anybody tries to say God is the reason why the internet was invented.
You should try talking to some conservatives. From this article: "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians." From the author of The Victory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. This is not a fringe view, this is very commonly discussed by conservatives to justify invading Iraq.
Jesus asked God to save him from being killed. God did nothing. This does not imply that the Bible teaches us to abandon our children. The original post was trying to say that because God supposedly committed infanticide, it implies that Christians are OK with infanticide. In fact, Christians are only OK with those atrocities because they believe that they are caused by a transcendent moral principle that is always just, i.e. they believe in something called the greater good. The problem with transcendent moral principles is that they lead to the-end-justifies-the-means thinking, but this is not a problem with religion per se, but of any ideology that becomes transcendent, like Communism for example. The irony is that most rationalists have their own transcendent, sacred ideology (the inviolability of the individual's rights), even while they denounce transcendence itself.
All I ask is that you give other people the right to ignore passages of their choice and to interpret any pssage they like according to what they think the old world was like.
Everyone is free to make whatever interpretations they like, but some people make a particular interpretation, then claim that all Christians have that interpretation, and what's more, it is the cause of all the ills that we face in the world today. I believe that this is a dangerous claim to make, because if we can blame religion for many of the bad things that our society produces, that encourages people to credit religion with all the good things that our society has produced. And many conservatives claim that the reason that America is so great is because we are a white Christian nation, and therefore we have the right to impose that on other people. So I think its hard to start off by saying that religion is the cause of our ills, but then make the complete opposite argument and say that religion had nothing to do with our successes.