You're using the wrong set of axioms. Religious people don't gamble. They trust in God instead- the idea that God is in CONTROL of the universe. Now do you understand why Chaos and Mutation makes no sense to such people? It denies that their father-figure is in CONTROL.
Religious people do gamble, and big time.
The big gambles in book-bound monotheistic religion are usually of the 'pavlov's wager' variety. They gamble that His Sole Transcendence will intervene on this plane of shit and dust. There's also the risk of taboo (exposure), etc. The gamble of unswerving belief in the Book is taboo, however, because the Book is so authoritarian. Don't go poking around in there, it'll poke back.
Chaos etc. makes no sense to creationists only when applied to cosmology; other games of chance are understood. Yahweh's fine-grained meddling control over the earth and its goings on is the incredibly parochial story of some badass nomads, stretched to the point of breaking, little different from their neighbours at the time, except for that "only Me" statement. It's because this story is stretched so thin that people get so vicious about asserting its verity.
You're missing the big picture- and trying to use your worldview to explain somebody else's.
Slow down, kind and ambiguous sir, I'm not expressing my worldview, just pointing out the self-avowed roots of the LogosEaters with an irreverent tone. The Big Picture that I was talking about was the historical continuity of a line of thinking about origins--and the nasty political fallout of that thinking being given power over my life. I DON'T think people are simply too stupid to understand evolution. I have observed how any understanding of it is, however, supressed, using taboo, identity, and logocentrism.
And yet without them [late-paleolithic-cum-urban totalizing laws], stupid things happen- like kids raised without fathers.
Oh, give me a break. Like a kid raised without a father is more tragic than stoning a rape victim who won't marry her rapist. The people jumping on the neo-Xian theocracy bandwagon aren't reading their own book very well, they're listening to preachers and upstanding leading-citizens, whose identities need authoritarian beliefs to work. Driving across the midwest listening to late night talk radio is like living in a Philip K Dick novel. The feel-good cynical deception is palpable, caricatured. But the devil's best work is done on the temple steps, as they say.
Actually, I was thinking about the days before the white man came- but yes.
Yes what, it was better under the miscegenation laws, or the US is sinking because it isn't using a tribal ethos? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt...
Civilization is your problem, then, the reason for sinking into corporatism and revolt. Civil power pools and coagulates just like its miscarried twin, capital, and that's the city for ya.
I'm all for a tribal ethos. We'll just have to break up into groups of a thousand or so, and take care of a nice little patch of nature. The city dwellers will put an end to that pronto, though.
it's a pretty crappy educational system that teaches people that there's only ONE way to think.
Hear hear. It's a pretty big electromagnetic spectrum, and we only see a wee slice. Just sayin.
Just as you have substituted a crazy myth about reality for a diety.
Oh, now, you've confused this with some other thread. What reality? it's a contextual thing, moves when you try to pin it down, so obviously we're not very good at observing it. Still, I put my foot down on concrete and it stops, so there's 'good enough,' and then there's some unholy grail of the absolute called Fact. Doesn't matter if that concrete is jiggly mostly empty atoms, or aether, designed by Joe who was designed by Yahweh when He gave Adam balls. It's all fiction, stories to relate. But I can walk, today. And make better concrete by understanding the jiggly atom story, so it's good enough for sidewalks.
Deities, on the other hand, well, puny human, what do any of you really know about them? Does the ant understand the finger that flicks it?
I'm guessing that unlike them, he hasn't been brainwashed into believing that he will burn in hell for all eternity should he "question the lord".
Well, they tried, we let her go to the evangelical church and sunday school that the relatives insisted on. And, praise the Gourd, she is pluralist, and knows that beliefs based on books are stories, and there are other versions. She's still learning that she should even question that.
Now, if she'd only believe me when I tell her that in order for her to achieve her dream of being a paleontologist, she has to work harder at math...:-D
It's chaos theory (mutation) that is the anti-intuitive part.
Crikey, are you blind? You should see my kids, they don't look one bit like they came out of their mother. But seriously, games of chance are a fundamental part of all human cultures, so don't tell me that it's too hard to grasp.
how did that Guy in the sky get a penis?... Nobody said he did
Holy guacamole! did you really just write that? Wow. Penises indicate maleness. So does the pronoun "he." And why would the creator have a large lump of neurons, i.e. a 'brain?' Puny human.
Because it's fun?
Now see, that's a real stretch. I can believe "shit happens" much easier than some twilight zone episode.
Basically so that we HAVE a universal law- a shared set of values.
Well, yours ain't it, and neither's the set of laws set out by a bunch of nomads who grew up to slaughter cities and divvy up the donkeys and virgins (Deuteronomy and Numbers: yeah, that's how we should live, right). Don't forget the 10th commandment-- never cook a kid goat in its mothers milk.
See, the problem with universal (totalizing, really) laws associated with stone-age living is that they don't work anymore. They never really worked then, and they don't work now. They aren't holy, they're patently temporal, and invariably enforced by jerks.
the United States is sinking into corporatism and revolt.
Yes, it was so much better in the days of Jim Crow! Sod. Corporatism and revolt are at the very origins of your precious State.
contradictions are only a problem to scientists- nobody else cares.
Just goes to show what a crappy educational system you have -- by design. Excuse the pun.
Nobody can actually prove there is a world
Great! now if you'll just step off this non-existent plank, there you go...
This is what comes of worshipping Logos over creation. Just another golden calf. The people of the Book have all substituted their poetry for their deity.
$40,000 was saved from being wasted on a useless study.
Do you have any idea how much of your daily life is impacted by government and bureaucratic policy decisions? I didn't think so.
Policy makers who are acting in good faith (OK, maybe that's rare, just to be cynical) rely on studies like this. It is anything but useless, it's crucial.
Before anyone sputters about it not really being about science, well, it isn't supposed to be. It's about social power. ID isn't about science either: its express goals are to displace science with political, cultural, and moral authority derived from the Bible. In other words, ID is about social power.
ID and "skepticism" over global warming are both integral parts of the same movement.... it's just a stupid position to take.
It's more than just a stupid position, it's a trojan horse.
I'm a broad skeptic, even towards reductionist scientific dogma (because we're infants in the realm of systems). But ID is, as you identify, simply another front for interests that are extremely dangerous to me and mine.
ID's grassroots backers will have us living under a neo-christian version of sharia law as soon as control over our cosmology is once again returned to the keepers of biblical interpretation. If the stories about our origins can be controlled within the emotional framework set out by the preachers, the stories about how we should live can be controlled by them too. Then come the laws that control our daily morality. It's bad enough that the quasi-theological State determines what I can or can't do with my own body (drugs, sex, suicide, etc.). It could get much worse, and many of the ID'ers would like that.
ID (and scientist repression) represents a deeply dystopic vision of society. This is a fight not just about what's right, but about what's just.
ID can take the complexity of life and the structure of the universe itself and explain it in terms anybody who has ever been to church can understand. Biology can't. Which is sad.
Reehhh? What's so tough about natural selection? If you get killed before you have kids, your uniqueness doesn't get passed on. Kind of 1+1=2. From there, evolution (grossly oversimplified, but that's what you ask for) is not a huge leap, just scaled up somewhat. Even my 8 year old kid gets it, whithout much ado.
One of the marvelous features about this part of the universe, or creation if you must, is that simple things like the fibonacci sequence can lead to incredibly complex things, like a fern frond. Yes it's a mystery, but it isn't that difficult to grasp.
On the other hand, how did that Guy in the sky get a penis? Why bother running this whole place as a complex simulation for the sake of some shaky moral principles? Why is this book that was assembled in a political process 1700 years ago taken as universal law? Why do people ignore all the contradictions in these absolute, but textual laws? Where is the physical evidence? That I have trouble understanding, as theology is incredibly abstruse.
They used to sell "PC Compatibility cards" that went in some of the PowerMacs
Yeah, but they were expensive, nearly the price of a separate machine, and had a poor price-performance ratio as well as being older processors, plus all kinds of little bugs and gotchas. This is a much more elegant and bleeding edge setup, even as a bit of a hack, and I predict it will get used a whole lot.
Gas is cheap and subsidized here for a reason... we need it to get where we're going.
True. But your argument takes a whole series of design and systems decisions, and naturalizes them, as though they just happened.
N.A. is simply designed around the private auto, and some of that design process was nefarious, such as when the oil companies subsidized the mothballing of the electric trolley system im my home town, as happened all over in the '50's. The postwar economy demanded it, seemingly.
Cities are simply more liveable with smarter density distribution and excellent public transit. I say that as a suburban brat who's lived and travelled in a variety of cities and settled down in the country. The suburban/exurban sprawl and dead office/retail core were a design based on a dream of castles and cornucopia.
Well, it was design on credit, and now the interest is due. Look to the mess that is Detroit for the future of the typical metropolis.
3 hours is not a long drive in a car. 24 hours is getting there.
All the more reason to have a frickin' cheap rail transport tradition, don't you think? Oh, but wait, when you get there, there are no buses that reach aunt Betsy's house, and the store is an hour's walk away. Hmmm.
Infrastructure is the USA's biggest ball and chain in this latest "fight."
I am right handed but left-eyed, and tasks that require aiming (like darts, shooting, etc) are handicapped.
Aye, me too, and it's because of corrective measures when I was a small child. Born cross-eyed and various kinds of blurry, they patched and put drops in my over-dominant right eye. I sometimes wonder if I told them when to stop, and no-one listened.
Now my left eye is dominant, but reverts if I'm really tired, which makes for some interesting vision. The worst is trying to play pool: my chin just gets in the way.
Now my son has amblyopia and a patch at the age of 5 -- and I'm trying to listen to his honest opinions on the matter.
Don't try to justify your theft (and yes, it is theft) by saying that I'm an idiot for paying for my music.
I never downloaded any music files until I discovered that living under canadian copyright law means that I'm paying for shared music through the levy on blank media. Since I buy a fair bit of blank discs (and, formerly, casettes) for data and original non-commercial productions, I was paying for music I didn't get to hear.
So who was the thief?
Now I download judiciously to try to keep up with the levy; i.e. I download far less than would fill up the media I purchase, but enough so that I don't feel like an idiot for paying for music I don't get to hear.
I actually believe that could be true. I'm not one for paranoid conspiracy theories and such but it's probably not even a good idea to discuss that book.
You're referring, I hope, to the belief that the 'Cookbook' is a partly bogus text and that it was put out there as a tracer to mark suppressable malcontents. Low hanging fruit, in a sense.
I hope you aren't intimidated to the point where you wouldn't even discuss subversive motivations and techniques, whether you intend to use them or not. Working towards a free society requires a healthy dose of this kind of talk -- for the sake of openness if nothing else -- whether you consider yourself suffering under tyrrany or not. Just part of staying vigilant.
Mind you, I don't live in 'The Land of the Free,' and don't really know what it's like to live under fear of having the Feds show up at the door because of a t-shirt, or being jailed for failing to produce my papers.
Information about making napalm with styrofoam wants to be suppressed... How about microbial expertise? I'm sure a real 21st century subversive 'cookbook' would find interesting uses for bacteria that can be tailored to only eat one industrial product.
Absolutely, nor, necessarily, should they. The opinions on this matter vary, but it really is OK, so long as you read out loud to them regularly, have lots of age-appropriate books in their space, and let them see you reading, for instance, take them to the library, and get books for yourself too. They practically teach themselves under these circumstances, when they're ready.
What concerns me here is that kids are trained to shoot people shortly after they learn to walk. Yay, let's naturalize war for them early on. I mean, WTF? GIGO.
It probably won't survive much past castros death and eventually capitalism would breach it anyways
In a thread about censorship and propaganda on an American site, it's always interesting to watch the way Cuba gets bandied about, as though the US populace isn't getting intense anti-cuban propaganda.
It won't be capitalism breaching 'the revolution,' it will be sanctions, blockade, and other pressure by the USA, i.e. active belligerence and hostility.
Castro has been able to tiptoe on that delicate balance between tyranny and rebellion
Castro rules with an "iron fist" but not in an ostentatiously material way. His office is humble, his limos are nothing special beyond bulletproof, etc. He dresses the part of commandante, never pretentions beyond the job. This ongoing PR stunt is part of his genius; many in Cuba still really believe in the revolution as an ongoing socialist endeavour.
It helps that they have many of the benefits of socialism (health/welfare/education) despite being under severe external economic pressures. At the decision-making level of the community, there is a great deal of democracy (really! no corporate lobbyists, e.g.), and people are quite engaged. It also helps that Castro has prevented and avoided invasions, assasinations, intense propaganda campaigns and nearly global economic pressure for half a century. When the underdog holds off the Guantanamonster USA, it is worth a great deal politically.
People remember Batista, and how he was selling out the country while being brutally repressive and censorial. Castro's a pussycat in comparison, practically benevolent, and a true nationalist; it's no wonder he's still there. Their state censorship is seen by many in Cuba in the context of a nation at war--unpleasant but necessitated by external agression.
One thing that maturity has taught me is what a completely immature person I was when I was younger and thought I was mature. Seems like an ongoing process.
I'm still grappling with the 14-year-old in me who was frustrated that the world was grey but everyone talked in black-and-white. I'm over 40, don't party much, have kids and a mortgage, drive safely, have some great stories to tell and can handle most situations. But many of the foibles I struggled with as a child are still with me, and I don't feel mature, and don't really expect to.
Is not feeling mature a sign of maturity? Or has raising kids given me perspective? I look around at my peers of all ages, and see the toddler barely concealed under the veneer of civility and confidence.
The older I grow the more I recall how little I knew when I knew it all.
Don't ya just love these definitions? WTF is normal? I live in a het relationship with two kids. Is that normal? No. There're no grandparents around for the kids to hang with, nor aunts or uncles, or cousins, no extended blood family at all. Not normal.
On the other hand, there are lots of 'adopted' aunties around. Many of them are lesbian couples. Is that normal? Yes. To us. Works really well, excellent environment for the kids, emotionally, physically, intellectually. And where I live, lesbian couples are numerous enough to be normal, some are even legally married.
Some of the aunties are het. Dark skinned, in mixed relationships. Is that normal? Yes. To us. Is it normal to my brother-in-law? Yes, because he's in a mixed relationship too. Is it normal in the church in Alamagordo, where he lives? Not really. He's a cultural pioneer.
Even better: this "normal" tag is applied regularly by fundamentalists, the same ones who deny gay marriage. Do they read their bible? Yes, selectively... the different kinds of marriage referred to in the Book are legion -- such as forcing your two slaves to marry (mutual rape?), or the whole compulsory widow-marries-brotherinlaw thing, or the marriage-with-slave-concubine way to get an heir, or marrying your virginal rape victim for a few shekels to dad, or other variations on institutionalized rape. All normal, since it happened in the bible, no?
The REAL reason for marriage licenses goes back to Miscegenation e.g. racial mixing.... Frankly I have always found it offensive that the state thinks it can force you to get permission and pay them in order to marry someone.
Thank you for that link. As long-time miscegenators, my spouse and I have been living in common-law as fully married: a ceremony, rings, only joint accounts and ownership of all the stuff, two children, etc. We felt that given how our union was viewed even only a few decades ago, and still is to some, neither church nor state had any right in our relationship, so we excluded as much temporal power from our home as we could. The ceremony had us jumping a broom, a tradition in both olde europe and some parts of africa as well as among the church-denied slaves of the South. Most don't realize we're common-law, including some family members (we 'eloped'), since they think wearing the ring means we accept some higher authority's approval. Amazing how that works.
Buying a house this month has us thinking about asserting our rights more fully, but we don't feel pressed. We'll probably make up a certificate, there are still some witnesses to the ceremony around.
I must add that being very happily and productively "intermarried," in a recently proscribed way, gives me great sympathy to same-sex couples who wish for the same condition.
You seem to have forgotten Apple's utter dominance in the video editing arena. Even if this is but a small fraction of Apple's total userbase, FireWire will remain on various Apple hardware as an integrated item for quite some time even for those people alone.
There's a pretty big halo effect to the pro video applications of the Mac, combined with OS X and reliable hardware.
I and many of my fellow videographers/filmmakers got pretty hooked on FinalCut and the other DV apps for the Mac, especially at the time that running Firewire on a PC in Premiere was extremely flakey. The result? we made more money, lost less hair, insisted on the gear we needed, and infected those around us with similar software addictions. Eventually many of us completely converted our shops over. Bye bye NT etc. and super quirky device drivers! Bye bye forgetting to turn off the virus scanner and dropping frames! There was a MHz lag, the Macs were slower, but less down-time and futzing around more than made up for it, especially when Jaguar came out and we could move to OS X.
Then I inadvertently demonstrated target disk mode to one of the IT guys: "what the hell are you doing?" "Oh, just needed to synch home folders." "Wow, cool. Woah, fast!" There were quite a few Mac orders next budget cycle. Apple relies on the "creative types" for more than just sales.
Many people advocate that the bandits set up false terrorist attacks, to solidify their power. Some of these people are certainly kooks, but following the general principle of 'where there's smoke, there's fire', there has to be something to the claims of a grand conspiracy.
Why doesn't every single politically-minded american know about the Operation Northwoods memo? It was released a few months before the WTC attacks, and it clearly outlines the willingness of Kennedy's Hawks to sacrifice innocents to build a pretense for invading another country. Even the conspiracy theorists (kooks) miss this rather obvious declaration of motive and cynicism.
A reminder: the kooks brayed about this document's existence, and were dismissed for it, for years. Then, it's released, and no-one notices. WTF?
Try admining a website in Canada that's visibly critical of a right wing provincial government (ie the curent government of BC). Same thing. It's really funny when you can easily track them back to places like the Vancouver Board of Trade.
WTF? Please back that up. I'd like to see Cambell flogged in the stocks like most BC'ers, but attacks on critical websites... seems unlikely. If so, that's news, man, don't keep it to yourself, share your records.
In the US and other free countries, you can be a hell bound atheist, but nobody will put you in prison or execute you for your beliefs.
Let's not forget that Poppa Bush once stated (on the campaign trail, no less!) that atheists shouldn't be citizens. It's a short hop from there to work camps, if you ask me.
Need I go on? Saying that countries should focus on their own problems before international problems, and then singling out the U.S. is extremely ignorant.
Well, yes. Your examples are not all about benign attitude shifts away from militarism, which was the topic. Not that I disagree with the statements you're making about those nations; they just don't address the issue, and are somewhat anecdotal and impressionistic. I was hoping for some concrete evidence, as I'm curious whether it's true or not.
If things are getting worse, one would have to be extremely well-versed on the subject to conjecture why. For instance, if there is increasing militarism, could it be the result of decades of seeds planted by KGB/CIA competition? How would one know? Is it due to meta-processes like ideological developments reinforced by religious opportunism, as seems to be the case in the States? Is it due to World Bank / IMF policies and "economic hit men", or local corruption that naturally emerges from inferior societies? Etc.
I think that what was being asserted was not so much that 'countries should focus on their own problems' as much as that the lone superpower should stop making other countries' problems much worse. Your logic [sic] in that sentence is hard to follow.
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Religious people do gamble, and big time.
The big gambles in book-bound monotheistic religion are usually of the 'pavlov's wager' variety. They gamble that His Sole Transcendence will intervene on this plane of shit and dust. There's also the risk of taboo (exposure), etc. The gamble of unswerving belief in the Book is taboo, however, because the Book is so authoritarian. Don't go poking around in there, it'll poke back.
Chaos etc. makes no sense to creationists only when applied to cosmology; other games of chance are understood. Yahweh's fine-grained meddling control over the earth and its goings on is the incredibly parochial story of some badass nomads, stretched to the point of breaking, little different from their neighbours at the time, except for that "only Me" statement. It's because this story is stretched so thin that people get so vicious about asserting its verity.
You're missing the big picture- and trying to use your worldview to explain somebody else's.
Slow down, kind and ambiguous sir, I'm not expressing my worldview, just pointing out the self-avowed roots of the LogosEaters with an irreverent tone. The Big Picture that I was talking about was the historical continuity of a line of thinking about origins--and the nasty political fallout of that thinking being given power over my life. I DON'T think people are simply too stupid to understand evolution. I have observed how any understanding of it is, however, supressed, using taboo, identity, and logocentrism.
And yet without them [late-paleolithic-cum-urban totalizing laws], stupid things happen- like kids raised without fathers.
Oh, give me a break. Like a kid raised without a father is more tragic than stoning a rape victim who won't marry her rapist. The people jumping on the neo-Xian theocracy bandwagon aren't reading their own book very well, they're listening to preachers and upstanding leading-citizens, whose identities need authoritarian beliefs to work. Driving across the midwest listening to late night talk radio is like living in a Philip K Dick novel. The feel-good cynical deception is palpable, caricatured. But the devil's best work is done on the temple steps, as they say.
Actually, I was thinking about the days before the white man came- but yes.
Yes what, it was better under the miscegenation laws, or the US is sinking because it isn't using a tribal ethos? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt...
Civilization is your problem, then, the reason for sinking into corporatism and revolt. Civil power pools and coagulates just like its miscarried twin, capital, and that's the city for ya.
I'm all for a tribal ethos. We'll just have to break up into groups of a thousand or so, and take care of a nice little patch of nature. The city dwellers will put an end to that pronto, though.
it's a pretty crappy educational system that teaches people that there's only ONE way to think.
Hear hear. It's a pretty big electromagnetic spectrum, and we only see a wee slice. Just sayin.
Just as you have substituted a crazy myth about reality for a diety.
Oh, now, you've confused this with some other thread. What reality? it's a contextual thing, moves when you try to pin it down, so obviously we're not very good at observing it. Still, I put my foot down on concrete and it stops, so there's 'good enough,' and then there's some unholy grail of the absolute called Fact. Doesn't matter if that concrete is jiggly mostly empty atoms, or aether, designed by Joe who was designed by Yahweh when He gave Adam balls. It's all fiction, stories to relate. But I can walk, today. And make better concrete by understanding the jiggly atom story, so it's good enough for sidewalks.
Deities, on the other hand, well, puny human, what do any of you really know about them? Does the ant understand the finger that flicks it?
Guess by the time I got one they weren't... but I'm more of a 'fleeting edge' kind of computer buyer anyway, so you're probably right.
Well, they tried, we let her go to the evangelical church and sunday school that the relatives insisted on. And, praise the Gourd, she is pluralist, and knows that beliefs based on books are stories, and there are other versions. She's still learning that she should even question that.
Now, if she'd only believe me when I tell her that in order for her to achieve her dream of being a paleontologist, she has to work harder at math... :-D
Crikey, are you blind? You should see my kids, they don't look one bit like they came out of their mother. But seriously, games of chance are a fundamental part of all human cultures, so don't tell me that it's too hard to grasp.
how did that Guy in the sky get a penis? ... Nobody said he did
Holy guacamole! did you really just write that? Wow. Penises indicate maleness. So does the pronoun "he." And why would the creator have a large lump of neurons, i.e. a 'brain?' Puny human.
Because it's fun?
Now see, that's a real stretch. I can believe "shit happens" much easier than some twilight zone episode.
Basically so that we HAVE a universal law- a shared set of values.
Well, yours ain't it, and neither's the set of laws set out by a bunch of nomads who grew up to slaughter cities and divvy up the donkeys and virgins (Deuteronomy and Numbers: yeah, that's how we should live, right). Don't forget the 10th commandment-- never cook a kid goat in its mothers milk.
See, the problem with universal (totalizing, really) laws associated with stone-age living is that they don't work anymore. They never really worked then, and they don't work now. They aren't holy, they're patently temporal, and invariably enforced by jerks.
the United States is sinking into corporatism and revolt.
Yes, it was so much better in the days of Jim Crow! Sod. Corporatism and revolt are at the very origins of your precious State.
contradictions are only a problem to scientists- nobody else cares.
Just goes to show what a crappy educational system you have -- by design. Excuse the pun.
Nobody can actually prove there is a world
Great! now if you'll just step off this non-existent plank, there you go...
This is what comes of worshipping Logos over creation. Just another golden calf. The people of the Book have all substituted their poetry for their deity.
Do you have any idea how much of your daily life is impacted by government and bureaucratic policy decisions? I didn't think so.
Policy makers who are acting in good faith (OK, maybe that's rare, just to be cynical) rely on studies like this. It is anything but useless, it's crucial.
Before anyone sputters about it not really being about science, well, it isn't supposed to be. It's about social power. ID isn't about science either: its express goals are to displace science with political, cultural, and moral authority derived from the Bible. In other words, ID is about social power.
It's more than just a stupid position, it's a trojan horse.
I'm a broad skeptic, even towards reductionist scientific dogma (because we're infants in the realm of systems). But ID is, as you identify, simply another front for interests that are extremely dangerous to me and mine.
ID's grassroots backers will have us living under a neo-christian version of sharia law as soon as control over our cosmology is once again returned to the keepers of biblical interpretation. If the stories about our origins can be controlled within the emotional framework set out by the preachers, the stories about how we should live can be controlled by them too. Then come the laws that control our daily morality. It's bad enough that the quasi-theological State determines what I can or can't do with my own body (drugs, sex, suicide, etc.). It could get much worse, and many of the ID'ers would like that.
ID (and scientist repression) represents a deeply dystopic vision of society. This is a fight not just about what's right, but about what's just.
Reehhh? What's so tough about natural selection? If you get killed before you have kids, your uniqueness doesn't get passed on. Kind of 1+1=2. From there, evolution (grossly oversimplified, but that's what you ask for) is not a huge leap, just scaled up somewhat. Even my 8 year old kid gets it, whithout much ado.
One of the marvelous features about this part of the universe, or creation if you must, is that simple things like the fibonacci sequence can lead to incredibly complex things, like a fern frond. Yes it's a mystery, but it isn't that difficult to grasp.
On the other hand, how did that Guy in the sky get a penis? Why bother running this whole place as a complex simulation for the sake of some shaky moral principles? Why is this book that was assembled in a political process 1700 years ago taken as universal law? Why do people ignore all the contradictions in these absolute, but textual laws? Where is the physical evidence? That I have trouble understanding, as theology is incredibly abstruse.
Yeah, but they were expensive, nearly the price of a separate machine, and had a poor price-performance ratio as well as being older processors, plus all kinds of little bugs and gotchas. This is a much more elegant and bleeding edge setup, even as a bit of a hack, and I predict it will get used a whole lot.
True. But your argument takes a whole series of design and systems decisions, and naturalizes them, as though they just happened.
N.A. is simply designed around the private auto, and some of that design process was nefarious, such as when the oil companies subsidized the mothballing of the electric trolley system im my home town, as happened all over in the '50's. The postwar economy demanded it, seemingly.
Cities are simply more liveable with smarter density distribution and excellent public transit. I say that as a suburban brat who's lived and travelled in a variety of cities and settled down in the country. The suburban/exurban sprawl and dead office/retail core were a design based on a dream of castles and cornucopia.
Well, it was design on credit, and now the interest is due. Look to the mess that is Detroit for the future of the typical metropolis.
3 hours is not a long drive in a car. 24 hours is getting there.
All the more reason to have a frickin' cheap rail transport tradition, don't you think? Oh, but wait, when you get there, there are no buses that reach aunt Betsy's house, and the store is an hour's walk away. Hmmm.
Infrastructure is the USA's biggest ball and chain in this latest "fight."
Aye, me too, and it's because of corrective measures when I was a small child. Born cross-eyed and various kinds of blurry, they patched and put drops in my over-dominant right eye. I sometimes wonder if I told them when to stop, and no-one listened.
Now my left eye is dominant, but reverts if I'm really tired, which makes for some interesting vision. The worst is trying to play pool: my chin just gets in the way.
Now my son has amblyopia and a patch at the age of 5 -- and I'm trying to listen to his honest opinions on the matter.
I never downloaded any music files until I discovered that living under canadian copyright law means that I'm paying for shared music through the levy on blank media. Since I buy a fair bit of blank discs (and, formerly, casettes) for data and original non-commercial productions, I was paying for music I didn't get to hear.
So who was the thief?
Now I download judiciously to try to keep up with the levy; i.e. I download far less than would fill up the media I purchase, but enough so that I don't feel like an idiot for paying for music I don't get to hear.
I know some buddhists, and non-religious folk, who do just that. None of them politicians, sadly.
You're referring, I hope, to the belief that the 'Cookbook' is a partly bogus text and that it was put out there as a tracer to mark suppressable malcontents. Low hanging fruit, in a sense.
I hope you aren't intimidated to the point where you wouldn't even discuss subversive motivations and techniques, whether you intend to use them or not. Working towards a free society requires a healthy dose of this kind of talk -- for the sake of openness if nothing else -- whether you consider yourself suffering under tyrrany or not. Just part of staying vigilant.
Mind you, I don't live in 'The Land of the Free,' and don't really know what it's like to live under fear of having the Feds show up at the door because of a t-shirt, or being jailed for failing to produce my papers.
Information about making napalm with styrofoam wants to be suppressed... How about microbial expertise? I'm sure a real 21st century subversive 'cookbook' would find interesting uses for bacteria that can be tailored to only eat one industrial product.
Absolutely, nor, necessarily, should they. The opinions on this matter vary, but it really is OK, so long as you read out loud to them regularly, have lots of age-appropriate books in their space, and let them see you reading, for instance, take them to the library, and get books for yourself too. They practically teach themselves under these circumstances, when they're ready.
What concerns me here is that kids are trained to shoot people shortly after they learn to walk. Yay, let's naturalize war for them early on. I mean, WTF? GIGO.
In a thread about censorship and propaganda on an American site, it's always interesting to watch the way Cuba gets bandied about, as though the US populace isn't getting intense anti-cuban propaganda.
It won't be capitalism breaching 'the revolution,' it will be sanctions, blockade, and other pressure by the USA, i.e. active belligerence and hostility.
Castro has been able to tiptoe on that delicate balance between tyranny and rebellion
Castro rules with an "iron fist" but not in an ostentatiously material way. His office is humble, his limos are nothing special beyond bulletproof, etc. He dresses the part of commandante, never pretentions beyond the job. This ongoing PR stunt is part of his genius; many in Cuba still really believe in the revolution as an ongoing socialist endeavour.
It helps that they have many of the benefits of socialism (health/welfare/education) despite being under severe external economic pressures. At the decision-making level of the community, there is a great deal of democracy (really! no corporate lobbyists, e.g.), and people are quite engaged. It also helps that Castro has prevented and avoided invasions, assasinations, intense propaganda campaigns and nearly global economic pressure for half a century. When the underdog holds off the Guantanamonster USA, it is worth a great deal politically.
People remember Batista, and how he was selling out the country while being brutally repressive and censorial. Castro's a pussycat in comparison, practically benevolent, and a true nationalist; it's no wonder he's still there. Their state censorship is seen by many in Cuba in the context of a nation at war--unpleasant but necessitated by external agression.
I'm still grappling with the 14-year-old in me who was frustrated that the world was grey but everyone talked in black-and-white. I'm over 40, don't party much, have kids and a mortgage, drive safely, have some great stories to tell and can handle most situations. But many of the foibles I struggled with as a child are still with me, and I don't feel mature, and don't really expect to.
Is not feeling mature a sign of maturity? Or has raising kids given me perspective? I look around at my peers of all ages, and see the toddler barely concealed under the veneer of civility and confidence.
Don't ya just love these definitions? WTF is normal? I live in a het relationship with two kids. Is that normal? No. There're no grandparents around for the kids to hang with, nor aunts or uncles, or cousins, no extended blood family at all. Not normal.
On the other hand, there are lots of 'adopted' aunties around. Many of them are lesbian couples. Is that normal? Yes. To us. Works really well, excellent environment for the kids, emotionally, physically, intellectually. And where I live, lesbian couples are numerous enough to be normal, some are even legally married.
Some of the aunties are het. Dark skinned, in mixed relationships. Is that normal? Yes. To us. Is it normal to my brother-in-law? Yes, because he's in a mixed relationship too. Is it normal in the church in Alamagordo, where he lives? Not really. He's a cultural pioneer.
Even better: this "normal" tag is applied regularly by fundamentalists, the same ones who deny gay marriage. Do they read their bible? Yes, selectively... the different kinds of marriage referred to in the Book are legion -- such as forcing your two slaves to marry (mutual rape?), or the whole compulsory widow-marries-brotherinlaw thing, or the marriage-with-slave-concubine way to get an heir, or marrying your virginal rape victim for a few shekels to dad, or other variations on institutionalized rape. All normal, since it happened in the bible, no?
Thank you for that link. As long-time miscegenators, my spouse and I have been living in common-law as fully married: a ceremony, rings, only joint accounts and ownership of all the stuff, two children, etc. We felt that given how our union was viewed even only a few decades ago, and still is to some, neither church nor state had any right in our relationship, so we excluded as much temporal power from our home as we could. The ceremony had us jumping a broom, a tradition in both olde europe and some parts of africa as well as among the church-denied slaves of the South. Most don't realize we're common-law, including some family members (we 'eloped'), since they think wearing the ring means we accept some higher authority's approval. Amazing how that works.
Buying a house this month has us thinking about asserting our rights more fully, but we don't feel pressed. We'll probably make up a certificate, there are still some witnesses to the ceremony around.
I must add that being very happily and productively "intermarried," in a recently proscribed way, gives me great sympathy to same-sex couples who wish for the same condition.
There's a pretty big halo effect to the pro video applications of the Mac, combined with OS X and reliable hardware.
I and many of my fellow videographers/filmmakers got pretty hooked on FinalCut and the other DV apps for the Mac, especially at the time that running Firewire on a PC in Premiere was extremely flakey. The result? we made more money, lost less hair, insisted on the gear we needed, and infected those around us with similar software addictions. Eventually many of us completely converted our shops over. Bye bye NT etc. and super quirky device drivers! Bye bye forgetting to turn off the virus scanner and dropping frames! There was a MHz lag, the Macs were slower, but less down-time and futzing around more than made up for it, especially when Jaguar came out and we could move to OS X.
Then I inadvertently demonstrated target disk mode to one of the IT guys: "what the hell are you doing?" "Oh, just needed to synch home folders." "Wow, cool. Woah, fast!" There were quite a few Mac orders next budget cycle. Apple relies on the "creative types" for more than just sales.
Firewire was the key to all that.
Why doesn't every single politically-minded american know about the Operation Northwoods memo? It was released a few months before the WTC attacks, and it clearly outlines the willingness of Kennedy's Hawks to sacrifice innocents to build a pretense for invading another country. Even the conspiracy theorists (kooks) miss this rather obvious declaration of motive and cynicism.
A reminder: the kooks brayed about this document's existence, and were dismissed for it, for years. Then, it's released, and no-one notices. WTF?
Yeah! Like the War on Poverty.
But seriously, you can listen to GWB himself state that "you can't win IT" -- i.e. the war on terror [sic] will never end.
WTF? Please back that up. I'd like to see Cambell flogged in the stocks like most BC'ers, but attacks on critical websites... seems unlikely. If so, that's news, man, don't keep it to yourself, share your records.
Woah. I finally found something I agree with the current administration about. Party on! Just don't start any more fights, or I'm gonna call the cops.
Let's not forget that Poppa Bush once stated (on the campaign trail, no less!) that atheists shouldn't be citizens. It's a short hop from there to work camps, if you ask me.
Well, yes. Your examples are not all about benign attitude shifts away from militarism, which was the topic. Not that I disagree with the statements you're making about those nations; they just don't address the issue, and are somewhat anecdotal and impressionistic. I was hoping for some concrete evidence, as I'm curious whether it's true or not.
If things are getting worse, one would have to be extremely well-versed on the subject to conjecture why. For instance, if there is increasing militarism, could it be the result of decades of seeds planted by KGB/CIA competition? How would one know? Is it due to meta-processes like ideological developments reinforced by religious opportunism, as seems to be the case in the States? Is it due to World Bank / IMF policies and "economic hit men", or local corruption that naturally emerges from inferior societies? Etc.
I think that what was being asserted was not so much that 'countries should focus on their own problems' as much as that the lone superpower should stop making other countries' problems much worse. Your logic [sic] in that sentence is hard to follow.