I wouldn't expect GP to recognize hypocrisy; he's consistently clamoring about the evils of government control and how everything it does restricts our freedoms... But now, for some reason, *this* would be a reasonable exception, and should be under control of the government.
The movie ratings are applied voluntarily by an independent industry organization.
Game ratings are currently applied voluntarily by an independent industry organization. It is quite possibly the most comprehensive rating system available for any form of media.
This survey was about a government ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, similar to what we have with alcohol and tobacco.
Hmm, comparing Disneyland to God... That's a new one.
I've also never been to Disneyland, and it's true that I just accept on blind faith that it does, in fact, exist. I've only seen it in movies or TV or read about it in various places. I tend to believe that all of these accounts are probably correct, and about a place that actually exists. This is somewhat similar to having never seen God, and having billions of personal accounts of people's interaction with him/it.
But here, I'll clue you in to the main difference between God and Disneyland:
You or I can go visit Disneyland to see what it's like. There is no similar test to verify whether or not God exists, or what it looks like.
Every morning before dawn He descends into lower heaven close to earth and asks if there is anyone seeking forgiveness.
No, he doesn't.
When you walk towards Him, He runs towards you.
No, he doesn't.
When I was a child, they told me that Santa Claus delivered presents to every kid in the world on Christmas Eve. It was a great story to believe when I didn't know any better. As I grew older and learned that none of this was true, I realized that all of these supernatural things I had been told about as a child (the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny) were all just made up, and that they all had a lot in common with this dude Jesus that I'd heard about as well. I kept thinking, "ok, so when do they tell me that Jesus wasn't real either?" and came to the realization that Jesus was Santa Claus for grown-ups.
Just wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Now let's start on your parable:
A murderer killed 100 people and at the advice of one scholar moved to a different city to start a new life. He died halfway between the cities, so Allah told angels to measure the distance between cities, saying that if he is closer to the destination than to the origin, He will forgive him. When angels measured the distances it turned out that he was closer to the origin. Then Allah shortened the distance to the destination and forgave him.
Killed 100 people exactly? Wow. That's a nice big round number.
The scholar told him to move to a different city, and not to turn himself in to authorities for the atrocities he'd committed? Was the scholar in cahootz or something?
Why did Allah need angels to measure? Surely, if he's the same omniscient god that Christians believe in, he would have just known; was he just making busy work for the angels?
Hmm, he'll forgive the murderer? Wow, what a merciful god; was he similarly merciful to the victims and to the families of the people who lost loved ones? Also, that's a great story to motivate people to stick with a religion: no matter how bad you are, your god will forgive you.
So Allah has made up this arbitrary rule that he needs to be closer to his destination to be forgiven (why?), finds out that he was closer to the original city, and rather than just saying, "I'm going to forgive him anyway," shortens the distance so that he can forgive him. The solution sounds awfully convoluted to me; if Allah had already made up his mind to forgive the dude, why didn't he just forgive him immediately?
The whole thing sounds a lot like the fairy tales I read as a child; they're nice little stories, but rational people should be able to see that that's all they are. If you're going to start citing parables as some sort of "proof" of what you believe, I see no reason to not pick them apart.
If you truly believe, then believe; you shouldn't seek the validation of other people. If you need validation from other people, then you don't truly believe. If you're just looking for challenges to reaffirm your faith, then keep the stories coming.
Yeah, your free market sure did a great job at getting everyone a 40 hour work week, ending child labor and slavery, and bringing about emissions standards that had a huge beneficial impact on air quality in large cities.
Seriously, give it a rest. Your blind trust in the free market is as insipid as someone else's blind trust in government.
I'd be surprised if portable devices account for even 0.1% of household energy usage.
Maybe you should actually look into it rather than just making wild guesses? Here, I'll even do some of the work for you; 30 seconds of Googling finds:
I don't plug in any of my handheld devices behind my TV unit or computer desk. This won't do a thing for those wires; you can't power a TV and 700 watt home theater amp, along with all the other components wirelessly with this technology. Not to mention that most of those wires are things like audio, video, ethernet, and various USB connections that this, again, won't replace.
And on top of *all* of that, the only things this would replace are a couple of USB cables that get tethered to the front of my PC. Instead, it would give me yet another wire to plug in behind the TV unit or computer desk along with all those other wires. Big net gain. Yeah.
Anyway I think this is a great idea. I want to READ a book not own it, unless it's something exceptionally good (like Asimov's Best Science Fiction of ____ anthologies). So free borrowing via a Sony or Nook device is a great plan.
And now you're calling someone else an entitled freeloader? Oh, I see -- he wants to keep them FOREVER, but you just want to read them once for free. Completely different.
There was an interesting pair of CNN polls the last couple of days:
The first asked if people thought that burning Qurans would endanger US soldiers: it was roughly 80% saying yes, 20% saying no.
Today, they asked "does the pastor have the right to burn Qurans" and, amazingly, it is roughly 80% saying yes, 20% saying no.
So really, I think it's pretty clear that most people think that it's just a stupid idea to burn them. Few people are saying they shouldn't be able to; but the vast majority of people think they *shouldn't*.
Nobody is talking about sacrificing any values (well, 4/5 of the people aren't talking about that); it's more that this group has the right to be idiots, and everyone else has the right to point out that they are idiots.
Christians believe in The New Covenant that changes "Eye for an Eye" to "Turn the Other Cheek".
So you must have been chanting "turn the other cheek" back in the lead-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or do you have some logical gymnastics that allow you to believe that starting two wars (one against a nation that had nothing to do with anything) was somehow Christ-like?
Why do people assume that "freedom of speech" carries with it the freedom to not deal with the consequences of their actions when they say/do shit that people obviously don't like?
You don't get to be a provocative asshole and then play the part of the victim when people call you a provocative asshole.
and NO ONE in our government has ANY RIGHT to interfere with ANY OF IT.
You're in the wrong story then; nobody in the government is interfering with this idiot's plan to burn Korans.
Further I put forward that if you're in favor of Obama going on TV against it, then you'd likewise support laws against it
Yeah, that's just wrong. I'm actually fully in favor of our government making it *absolutely* clear to anyone that is listening that the U.S. government does not in any way condone or support these actions. That's actually what makes it such a good demonstration of free speech; the government is against it, but isn't stopping it from happening. Of course, none of the terrorist radicals will show the government's response of "this is bad, m'kay?" alongside their footage of the burning when they're out recruiting, but it's still better to let the Muslim world know that as a nation, we do NOT support this.
I'm for freedom of speech. I'm also for people electing to not do stupid shit. This minister is doing stupid shit, and we are all free to call him on it.
My question for you is, why do you hate the troops and want them to get shot at more?
Yeah, you're pretty fucking brave out here in anonymous Slashdot land.
Some of us actually think that it's a bad idea to stir up a hornet's nest because we have soldiers over in said hornet's nest.
I don't give a shit about Korans or Bibles or any other crap; some of us are actually pragmatic and think that giving our enemies recruiting tools and more motivation to fight is us just a STUPID IDEA.
But yeah, we'll just go with your theory that everyone who thinks this instance of book burning is wrong is some sort of a coward. We're used to being called pussies by internet tough guys anyway.
Wait, did you seriously just compare Ghandi, a dude who urged peaceful civil disobedience and fasted to get religious fighting to stop, with this preacher who's burning another religion's holy books and saying, "this is a warning"?
And yes, there was at least one person who probably thought Ghandi was an asshole; the guy who shot him.
But here, I'll play along; I'm sure there were some people who thought that what Hitler was doing was a bad thing, too, and he was completely free to ignore them.
Are you serious? If a Mosque decided to burn some bibles? Just burning some bibles would be a significant upgrade from what muslims are usually known for burning.
Nice non sequitur. Really shows where your priorities lie.
You can't legally discriminate against a non-protected class.
Hateful religious bigots are not a protected class.
You seem to like to argue by analogies of photo shops and megaphones, but how's this one? If you go to a photo shop that has a sign on the door (i.e. the contract) saying "we do not condone witchcraft, and will not develop photos of witches" (i.e. "no hate speech on our servers"), and then try to get them to develop photos of your witch party, what would you expect to happen?
Besides, Rackspace has just as much freedom to say, "while we respect free speech, we do not condone anything this church has said, and do not wish to be the distributor for their message." That's the great thing about free speech; everyone also has the right to disagree.
Seriously? 26 trips out of town every year? When you live in center-of-everything-that-is-happening New York?
Are these like short drives to Newark to check out the scenery, or flights to LA to visit Hollywood film openings?
Everything else you had said seemed reasonable up until that point, but that really casts the rest into doubt. What kind of restaurants are you going out to for this "comfortable" living? $15/plate? $30/plate? $100/plate? Even at $2k/month, rent would only be $24k/year, which leaves you probably $176k after taxes to play around with.
Obviously, it's expensive to live in NYC, but you may have to define "comfortable living" a little more specifically before I'm willing to agree with your $300k/yr estimate.
It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of respect.
If you find out that a friend of yours is making more than twice your income, will that make you start plotting to steal it from them somehow? Or will it maybe make you feel somewhat inferior, and that you should be spending time with other people instead?
Perhaps you, personally, would be just fine hanging out with people with a large income disparity, but there are a lot of people who would have a problem with it. That's why you just don't talk about it.
If we had an open market in this country we'd have had services like cable and fibre years ago.
I love authoritative statements like this; "if X were true, then Y would have happened." You don't know that, you can't say it with any certainty whatsoever, yet we're supposed to just accept that it's true?
Somehow statements like this usually seem to be in relation to the free market as well: "if we'd just let the free market decide and never passed the CRA, then the housing bubble would have never happened." "If not for government regulation, the BP oil spill would never have happened." You hear this stuff all the time and the sad thing is that the speakers believe it to be true in nearly every case.
Fact is, you don't know what would be different. You don't know what differences changes in a large system would have effected. The only thing you can do is look at the current system, look at the results, and say, "let's try XX and maybe YY will happen." Claiming to be reverse-clairvoyant is just blowing smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't expect GP to recognize hypocrisy; he's consistently clamoring about the evils of government control and how everything it does restricts our freedoms... But now, for some reason, *this* would be a reasonable exception, and should be under control of the government.
--Jeremy
The movie ratings are applied voluntarily by an independent industry organization.
Game ratings are currently applied voluntarily by an independent industry organization. It is quite possibly the most comprehensive rating system available for any form of media.
This survey was about a government ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, similar to what we have with alcohol and tobacco.
Yes, there is a huge difference.
--Jeremy
Dude, just ignore it. Seriously. Stick to the discussion and don't get dragged into name calling.
--Jeremy
I like that you sidestep the direct question and instead respond only to the name calling.
I'll re-ask: can you name one person who was against the war during Bush, who is now pro-war under Obama?
--Jeremy
Hmm, comparing Disneyland to God... That's a new one.
I've also never been to Disneyland, and it's true that I just accept on blind faith that it does, in fact, exist. I've only seen it in movies or TV or read about it in various places. I tend to believe that all of these accounts are probably correct, and about a place that actually exists. This is somewhat similar to having never seen God, and having billions of personal accounts of people's interaction with him/it.
But here, I'll clue you in to the main difference between God and Disneyland:
You or I can go visit Disneyland to see what it's like. There is no similar test to verify whether or not God exists, or what it looks like.
--Jeremy
No, he doesn't.
No, he doesn't.
When I was a child, they told me that Santa Claus delivered presents to every kid in the world on Christmas Eve. It was a great story to believe when I didn't know any better. As I grew older and learned that none of this was true, I realized that all of these supernatural things I had been told about as a child (the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny) were all just made up, and that they all had a lot in common with this dude Jesus that I'd heard about as well. I kept thinking, "ok, so when do they tell me that Jesus wasn't real either?" and came to the realization that Jesus was Santa Claus for grown-ups.
Just wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Now let's start on your parable:
Killed 100 people exactly? Wow. That's a nice big round number.
The scholar told him to move to a different city, and not to turn himself in to authorities for the atrocities he'd committed? Was the scholar in cahootz or something?
Why did Allah need angels to measure? Surely, if he's the same omniscient god that Christians believe in, he would have just known; was he just making busy work for the angels?
Hmm, he'll forgive the murderer? Wow, what a merciful god; was he similarly merciful to the victims and to the families of the people who lost loved ones? Also, that's a great story to motivate people to stick with a religion: no matter how bad you are, your god will forgive you.
So Allah has made up this arbitrary rule that he needs to be closer to his destination to be forgiven (why?), finds out that he was closer to the original city, and rather than just saying, "I'm going to forgive him anyway," shortens the distance so that he can forgive him. The solution sounds awfully convoluted to me; if Allah had already made up his mind to forgive the dude, why didn't he just forgive him immediately?
The whole thing sounds a lot like the fairy tales I read as a child; they're nice little stories, but rational people should be able to see that that's all they are. If you're going to start citing parables as some sort of "proof" of what you believe, I see no reason to not pick them apart.
If you truly believe, then believe; you shouldn't seek the validation of other people. If you need validation from other people, then you don't truly believe. If you're just looking for challenges to reaffirm your faith, then keep the stories coming.
--Jeremy
No you don't.
See?
--Jeremy
So now you're asserting that this biblical passage was referring to cohesion? When did cohesion, as understood by chemists, enter the lexicon?
And B) the curtains you refer to still go from floor to ceiling; they do not envelop the entire room.
Trying to find scientific accuracy in religious texts is really not a worthwhile pursuit.
--Jeremy
Yeah, your free market sure did a great job at getting everyone a 40 hour work week, ending child labor and slavery, and bringing about emissions standards that had a huge beneficial impact on air quality in large cities.
Seriously, give it a rest. Your blind trust in the free market is as insipid as someone else's blind trust in government.
--Jeremy
Maybe you should actually look into it rather than just making wild guesses? Here, I'll even do some of the work for you; 30 seconds of Googling finds:
This one estimates at 15-19%
And this one at about 10%
So it looks like you're at least 2 orders of magnitude off... But I guess completely uneducated guesses count as "insightful" these days.
--Jeremy
I don't plug in any of my handheld devices behind my TV unit or computer desk. This won't do a thing for those wires; you can't power a TV and 700 watt home theater amp, along with all the other components wirelessly with this technology. Not to mention that most of those wires are things like audio, video, ethernet, and various USB connections that this, again, won't replace.
And on top of *all* of that, the only things this would replace are a couple of USB cables that get tethered to the front of my PC. Instead, it would give me yet another wire to plug in behind the TV unit or computer desk along with all those other wires. Big net gain. Yeah.
--Jeremy
Wait a minute. Earlier in this thread, you said:
And now you're calling someone else an entitled freeloader? Oh, I see -- he wants to keep them FOREVER, but you just want to read them once for free. Completely different.
The hypocrisy is strong with this one.
--Jeremy
There was an interesting pair of CNN polls the last couple of days:
The first asked if people thought that burning Qurans would endanger US soldiers: it was roughly 80% saying yes, 20% saying no.
Today, they asked "does the pastor have the right to burn Qurans" and, amazingly, it is roughly 80% saying yes, 20% saying no.
So really, I think it's pretty clear that most people think that it's just a stupid idea to burn them. Few people are saying they shouldn't be able to; but the vast majority of people think they *shouldn't*.
Nobody is talking about sacrificing any values (well, 4/5 of the people aren't talking about that); it's more that this group has the right to be idiots, and everyone else has the right to point out that they are idiots.
--Jeremy
So you must have been chanting "turn the other cheek" back in the lead-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or do you have some logical gymnastics that allow you to believe that starting two wars (one against a nation that had nothing to do with anything) was somehow Christ-like?
--Jeremy
Why do people assume that "freedom of speech" carries with it the freedom to not deal with the consequences of their actions when they say/do shit that people obviously don't like?
You don't get to be a provocative asshole and then play the part of the victim when people call you a provocative asshole.
--Jeremy
You're in the wrong story then; nobody in the government is interfering with this idiot's plan to burn Korans.
Yeah, that's just wrong. I'm actually fully in favor of our government making it *absolutely* clear to anyone that is listening that the U.S. government does not in any way condone or support these actions. That's actually what makes it such a good demonstration of free speech; the government is against it, but isn't stopping it from happening. Of course, none of the terrorist radicals will show the government's response of "this is bad, m'kay?" alongside their footage of the burning when they're out recruiting, but it's still better to let the Muslim world know that as a nation, we do NOT support this.
I'm for freedom of speech. I'm also for people electing to not do stupid shit. This minister is doing stupid shit, and we are all free to call him on it.
My question for you is, why do you hate the troops and want them to get shot at more?
--Jeremy
Yeah, you're pretty fucking brave out here in anonymous Slashdot land.
Some of us actually think that it's a bad idea to stir up a hornet's nest because we have soldiers over in said hornet's nest.
I don't give a shit about Korans or Bibles or any other crap; some of us are actually pragmatic and think that giving our enemies recruiting tools and more motivation to fight is us just a STUPID IDEA.
But yeah, we'll just go with your theory that everyone who thinks this instance of book burning is wrong is some sort of a coward. We're used to being called pussies by internet tough guys anyway.
--Jeremy
Wait, did you seriously just compare Ghandi, a dude who urged peaceful civil disobedience and fasted to get religious fighting to stop, with this preacher who's burning another religion's holy books and saying, "this is a warning"?
And yes, there was at least one person who probably thought Ghandi was an asshole; the guy who shot him.
But here, I'll play along; I'm sure there were some people who thought that what Hitler was doing was a bad thing, too, and he was completely free to ignore them.
--Jeremy
Rackspace isn't a carrier. They are a hosting company. There is a huge difference.
--Jeremy
So we're holding our soldiers up to the same standards as suicide bombers? Cool.
--Jeremy
Nice non sequitur. Really shows where your priorities lie.
--Jeremy
You can't legally discriminate against a non-protected class.
Hateful religious bigots are not a protected class.
You seem to like to argue by analogies of photo shops and megaphones, but how's this one? If you go to a photo shop that has a sign on the door (i.e. the contract) saying "we do not condone witchcraft, and will not develop photos of witches" (i.e. "no hate speech on our servers"), and then try to get them to develop photos of your witch party, what would you expect to happen?
Besides, Rackspace has just as much freedom to say, "while we respect free speech, we do not condone anything this church has said, and do not wish to be the distributor for their message." That's the great thing about free speech; everyone also has the right to disagree.
--Jeremy
Seriously? 26 trips out of town every year? When you live in center-of-everything-that-is-happening New York?
Are these like short drives to Newark to check out the scenery, or flights to LA to visit Hollywood film openings?
Everything else you had said seemed reasonable up until that point, but that really casts the rest into doubt. What kind of restaurants are you going out to for this "comfortable" living? $15/plate? $30/plate? $100/plate? Even at $2k/month, rent would only be $24k/year, which leaves you probably $176k after taxes to play around with.
Obviously, it's expensive to live in NYC, but you may have to define "comfortable living" a little more specifically before I'm willing to agree with your $300k/yr estimate.
--Jeremy
It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of respect.
If you find out that a friend of yours is making more than twice your income, will that make you start plotting to steal it from them somehow? Or will it maybe make you feel somewhat inferior, and that you should be spending time with other people instead?
Perhaps you, personally, would be just fine hanging out with people with a large income disparity, but there are a lot of people who would have a problem with it. That's why you just don't talk about it.
--Jeremy
I love authoritative statements like this; "if X were true, then Y would have happened." You don't know that, you can't say it with any certainty whatsoever, yet we're supposed to just accept that it's true?
Somehow statements like this usually seem to be in relation to the free market as well: "if we'd just let the free market decide and never passed the CRA, then the housing bubble would have never happened." "If not for government regulation, the BP oil spill would never have happened." You hear this stuff all the time and the sad thing is that the speakers believe it to be true in nearly every case.
Fact is, you don't know what would be different. You don't know what differences changes in a large system would have effected. The only thing you can do is look at the current system, look at the results, and say, "let's try XX and maybe YY will happen." Claiming to be reverse-clairvoyant is just blowing smoke.
--Jeremy