Anti-intellectual? The US is more pro-intellectual than it has been in a very long time. It's finally cool to be smart, to an extent. If anything, the pendulum is only just beginning to swing back in our favor. It may not look like it now, but we just need to give the pendulum more time.
If you're basing this on the newfound popularity of computer geeks, I'd argue that it's not cool to be intellectual, but to be percieved as potentially rich and powerful. If anything, I'd say American society is trending toward complete apathy.
Since this debacle started, there's been talk in Europe about passing anti-"hate speech" laws forbidding the defamation of religion. This is a Bad Idea(TM).
The achilles' heel of liberalism (disclaimer: I consider myself one) is the idea that we must tolerate intolerance. The idea that we must coddle the beliefs of others, even when those beliefs pose a threat to the continued existence of Western liberalism. We're seeing it here, where Islam responds to criticism with violence, and we respond by trying harder to accommodate their culture. We see it here in the U.S., where fundamentalist Christianity is condemned for individual acts of intolerance, but their foundation of faith remains unquestioned, and publicly unquestionable.
There's a confusion between equality of individuals and equality of ideas. No one, from UFOlogists to holocaust deniers to religious fundamentalists, has the right to force others to treat their beliefs with kid gloves. In fact, if we have a better idea, we have a duty to promote it with the same tenacity as our intellectual opposition. Better ideas don't win by themselves. Good ideas like freedom of speech are constantly usurped by more virulent ideas, like fundamentalism and nationalism. Forward thinkers had better wake up to this fact, or they'll find themselves facing a new dark age that they helped usher in under the banner of tolerance of ideas.
I hate my boss. I prolly already told you I got a job in politics. I can't tell you what it is without giving away my ID, but trust me when I say I've got a hardass boss - "Bob" Cheney.
He's got me into this...conflict... where he tells me what to do, and I get all the blame when it goes wrong. I'm like: "Bob, why are we doing this again?" And he's all like "Geopolitical Interest this, and Economic Superiority that, and Strategic Base the other. He doesn't even explain it good, and when I ask questions, he's like: "I don't pay you to think. I pay you to get those dissenting assholes off my back." What a dickweed. lol
1.20.06
I have this thing at work, sort of like an intercom system, where you can listen to different rooms, only those rooms are people's houses. One of the funnest things about work was getting to listen to these boring assholes going about their daily lives, with like no idea someone's listening to them farting and singing in the shower like idiots. I just got caught though, so my job just got more boring.
People were assholes about it, too. I had to be like, "National Security! National Security!" And even then, some people were still riding my ass. My work sux. I swear I'm gonna quit in 2008.
The comments on this thread are the first I've heard of a flash drive's limited rewrite capacity. Does this mean MIT is about to supply the third-world with a bunch of laptops whose drives will need to be replaced every few years?
Because for everyone but a handful of oddballs, the Intelligent Designer is assumed to be Jehovah --a deity whose basis for existence rests entirely upon Abrahamic scriptures.
If you have any doubts about that, try speculating about the nature of the "Intelligent Designer" in front of the ID set, and see if they appreciate your curiosity and open-mindedness or simply set you straight about who they know him to be.
Hipness escalation is the ultimate downfall of all such communities. It happened to Friendster, and it's happening to MySpace now. Sincere people look frumpy and boring next to the chick who looks like Trinity and has five-hundred friends and listens only to bands that are so cool that no one's heard of them yet.
A handful of those flakes can turn a legitimate social venue into an absurd hipness contest with a million contestants and no prize. They make me long for the days when people established dominance hierarchies by kicking each other's asses.
"If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear," might work in a world that only looks down upon real crimes, like murder, rape, arson, burglary, and so on. In reality, people can be jailed, blackmailed, or just plain ruined if it is revealed that they use drugs or that they have weird fetishes or unpopular opinions, even if they harm no one.
And will the government ever be held to the same level of transparency as citizens lives are? I doubt that very much.
Though China is surely no friend of individual empowerment, we should keep in mind as relations become more strained that our own nation propagandizes as well - perhaps more subtly and effectively than China's.
I know dozens of talented musicians in active local bands, but I don't know anyone - not even a friend of a friend - who makes a living from their band.
The solution? Let go of those cherished dreams about getting "discovered" and give your music to the world for free. If you don't like the record industry, that's the best way to screw them. Do it for the recognition. Do it for the chicks. Do it because you enjoy it. But if you're doing it for the money, you'd be better off buying lottery tickets.
"Infidel Guy," an atheist radio talk show host, recently went on the show Wife Swap in hopes of showing the masses that atheists are real people just like them.
What happened instead was that ABC took something like 60 hours of footage and molded it into exactly the kind of atheist stereotype IG was trying to debunk. The comments he and his wife made were frequently taken out of context. The narrator described them as agoraphobic workaholics, and then cut all footage of them playing with their kids or going outside. Video and audio tracks were mixed and matched to make them appear to nod in agreement at voice tracks from some other piece of footage.
Anyway, the point is that the networks intent to deceive is already evident in shows that are technically from real life, which makes the idea that they'd do a completely fraudulent show pretty credible.
Most people wouldn't point and laugh at retarded kids, and the difference between them and these guys is only a matter of degree. How high an IQ does someone have to have before it's okay to mock them for being stupid?
I looked up IPv6 on Wikipedia and found the following info:
IPv4 supports 4.2 billion (4.294 × 10^9) addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10^38) addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion (4.3 × 10^20) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 10^17) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface. In other terms, assuming a population of about 6.5 billion humans, there are enough IPv6 addresses such that every atom of every person on Earth could be assigned 7 unique addresses with enough to spare (assuming 7 × 10^27 atoms per human).
They haven't just planned for the next wave of cell phones. They've planned for the Technological Singularity.
That is the Christian world view. A free gift has been offered to people who desparately need it -- what is so inherently evil about that?
That a supposedly all-powerful creator could have chosen to save everyone, could have chosen to reveal himself to everyone, but instead made Hell the default value, and a guessing-game of unverified belief the only way out.
After seeing the wild-eyed look kids get after they squash an innocent mushroom or turtle, after seeing the sadistic glee they obtain from causing Sebulba's pod racer to crash, I fear for our next generation.
My question is, what are they going to do about black trenchcoats?
I've been recording songs off the radio since elementary school, and I was perfectly content to listen to cassette tapes before CDs existed. How is this qualitatively different?
The RIAA is powered by the naivete of musicians. I think this whole thing can only be solved when musical artists start seeing pop music as a hobby and not as a potential career. How many people do you know who make a living purely through their band, anyway? At least if they put their music in the public domain, they'd save themselves the trouble of attempting to play the fixed game of "getting discovered."
An adult possum is one of the ugliest creatures in creation. A possum-fur coat would only feel at home on the shoulders of Mad Max. Whose idea was it to breed them for fur?
People tend not to vote for them because they are a "fringe" party, but if people did vote for them, they wouldn't be. Also, if you're disturbed by the party's more extreme views, keep in mind that the real extremists are already members, and as their membership increases, they can only become more moderate.
Whatever you do, don't throw your vote away on a "small government" Republican or a "civil liberties" Democrat. They have never delivered what they've promised.
Slashdot Mirror
Anti-intellectual? The US is more pro-intellectual than it has been in a very long time. It's finally cool to be smart, to an extent. If anything, the pendulum is only just beginning to swing back in our favor. It may not look like it now, but we just need to give the pendulum more time.
If you're basing this on the newfound popularity of computer geeks, I'd argue that it's not cool to be intellectual, but to be percieved as potentially rich and powerful. If anything, I'd say American society is trending toward complete apathy.
If you kick a hornets' nest, you'll get stung.
Which is an old and honored tradition among hornets, whose culture is no more or less valid than ours.
Since this debacle started, there's been talk in Europe about passing anti-"hate speech" laws forbidding the defamation of religion. This is a Bad Idea(TM).
The achilles' heel of liberalism (disclaimer: I consider myself one) is the idea that we must tolerate intolerance. The idea that we must coddle the beliefs of others, even when those beliefs pose a threat to the continued existence of Western liberalism. We're seeing it here, where Islam responds to criticism with violence, and we respond by trying harder to accommodate their culture. We see it here in the U.S., where fundamentalist Christianity is condemned for individual acts of intolerance, but their foundation of faith remains unquestioned, and publicly unquestionable.
There's a confusion between equality of individuals and equality of ideas. No one, from UFOlogists to holocaust deniers to religious fundamentalists, has the right to force others to treat their beliefs with kid gloves. In fact, if we have a better idea, we have a duty to promote it with the same tenacity as our intellectual opposition. Better ideas don't win by themselves. Good ideas like freedom of speech are constantly usurped by more virulent ideas, like fundamentalism and nationalism. Forward thinkers had better wake up to this fact, or they'll find themselves facing a new dark age that they helped usher in under the banner of tolerance of ideas.
Actually, it was the drunk at the Horse N Groom who said that.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to finish putting black tape on my glasses.
1.12.06
...conflict... where he tells me what to do, and I get all the blame when it goes wrong. I'm like: "Bob, why are we doing this again?" And he's all like "Geopolitical Interest this, and Economic Superiority that, and Strategic Base the other. He doesn't even explain it good, and when I ask questions, he's like: "I don't pay you to think. I pay you to get those dissenting assholes off my back." What a dickweed. lol
I hate my boss. I prolly already told you I got a job in politics. I can't tell you what it is without giving away my ID, but trust me when I say I've got a hardass boss - "Bob" Cheney.
He's got me into this
1.20.06
I have this thing at work, sort of like an intercom system, where you can listen to different rooms, only those rooms are people's houses. One of the funnest things about work was getting to listen to these boring assholes going about their daily lives, with like no idea someone's listening to them farting and singing in the shower like idiots. I just got caught though, so my job just got more boring.
People were assholes about it, too. I had to be like, "National Security! National Security!" And even then, some people were still riding my ass. My work sux. I swear I'm gonna quit in 2008.
The comments on this thread are the first I've heard of a flash drive's limited rewrite capacity. Does this mean MIT is about to supply the third-world with a bunch of laptops whose drives will need to be replaced every few years?
Because for everyone but a handful of oddballs, the Intelligent Designer is assumed to be Jehovah --a deity whose basis for existence rests entirely upon Abrahamic scriptures.
If you have any doubts about that, try speculating about the nature of the "Intelligent Designer" in front of the ID set, and see if they appreciate your curiosity and open-mindedness or simply set you straight about who they know him to be.
Creationists: We don't know how bees fly, therefore Jehovah created them in their present state.
Scientists: Oh yes, we do. Therefore, they evolved from primitive replicators.
Me: (Smacks them both with a copy of The Baloney Detection Kit)
Hipness escalation is the ultimate downfall of all such communities. It happened to Friendster, and it's happening to MySpace now. Sincere people look frumpy and boring next to the chick who looks like Trinity and has five-hundred friends and listens only to bands that are so cool that no one's heard of them yet.
A handful of those flakes can turn a legitimate social venue into an absurd hipness contest with a million contestants and no prize. They make me long for the days when people established dominance hierarchies by kicking each other's asses.
"If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear," might work in a world that only looks down upon real crimes, like murder, rape, arson, burglary, and so on. In reality, people can be jailed, blackmailed, or just plain ruined if it is revealed that they use drugs or that they have weird fetishes or unpopular opinions, even if they harm no one.
And will the government ever be held to the same level of transparency as citizens lives are? I doubt that very much.
Though China is surely no friend of individual empowerment, we should keep in mind as relations become more strained that our own nation propagandizes as well - perhaps more subtly and effectively than China's.
Apropos, Slashdot h4xx0rs might want to check out the Cult of the Dead Cow's efforts to undermine Chinese censorship through groups like Hactivismo and techniques like The Six/Four System.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I know dozens of talented musicians in active local bands, but I don't know anyone - not even a friend of a friend - who makes a living from their band.
The solution? Let go of those cherished dreams about getting "discovered" and give your music to the world for free. If you don't like the record industry, that's the best way to screw them. Do it for the recognition. Do it for the chicks. Do it because you enjoy it. But if you're doing it for the money, you'd be better off buying lottery tickets.
"Infidel Guy," an atheist radio talk show host, recently went on the show Wife Swap in hopes of showing the masses that atheists are real people just like them.
What happened instead was that ABC took something like 60 hours of footage and molded it into exactly the kind of atheist stereotype IG was trying to debunk. The comments he and his wife made were frequently taken out of context. The narrator described them as agoraphobic workaholics, and then cut all footage of them playing with their kids or going outside. Video and audio tracks were mixed and matched to make them appear to nod in agreement at voice tracks from some other piece of footage.
Anyway, the point is that the networks intent to deceive is already evident in shows that are technically from real life, which makes the idea that they'd do a completely fraudulent show pretty credible.
Most people wouldn't point and laugh at retarded kids, and the difference between them and these guys is only a matter of degree. How high an IQ does someone have to have before it's okay to mock them for being stupid?
I looked up IPv6 on Wikipedia and found the following info:
IPv4 supports 4.2 billion (4.294 × 10^9) addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10^38) addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion (4.3 × 10^20) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 10^17) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface. In other terms, assuming a population of about 6.5 billion humans, there are enough IPv6 addresses such that every atom of every person on Earth could be assigned 7 unique addresses with enough to spare (assuming 7 × 10^27 atoms per human).
They haven't just planned for the next wave of cell phones. They've planned for the Technological Singularity.
The bottom line, the internet wouldn't exist had it not been for Christ's humble teachings 2,000 years ago.
In your face, Al Gore!
That is the Christian world view. A free gift has been offered to people who desparately need it -- what is so inherently evil about that?
That a supposedly all-powerful creator could have chosen to save everyone, could have chosen to reveal himself to everyone, but instead made Hell the default value, and a guessing-game of unverified belief the only way out.
After seeing the wild-eyed look kids get after they squash an innocent mushroom or turtle, after seeing the sadistic glee they obtain from causing Sebulba's pod racer to crash, I fear for our next generation.
My question is, what are they going to do about black trenchcoats?
I've been recording songs off the radio since elementary school, and I was perfectly content to listen to cassette tapes before CDs existed. How is this qualitatively different?
The RIAA is powered by the naivete of musicians. I think this whole thing can only be solved when musical artists start seeing pop music as a hobby and not as a potential career. How many people do you know who make a living purely through their band, anyway? At least if they put their music in the public domain, they'd save themselves the trouble of attempting to play the fixed game of "getting discovered."
Oh, fine. If you're going to impugn my mad ski11z...
function checkAttendance(student){
count = 0;
if (!isPresent(student) && count < 3){
echo student."?";
count++;
}
}
checkAttendance("Bueller");
function checkAttendance(){
if (!isPresent(Bueller)){
echo "Bueller?";
checkAttendance();
}
}
Here is an online 'Chick' tract that humorously debunks the watchmaker argument.
1. Humans
2. Starbucks
3. Talk Shows
4. Neoconservatives
5. "Alternative" Bands
6. Cell-Phone-Talking SUV Drivers
Possum fur?
An adult possum is one of the ugliest creatures in creation. A possum-fur coat would only feel at home on the shoulders of Mad Max. Whose idea was it to breed them for fur?
I vote Libertarian.
People tend not to vote for them because they are a "fringe" party, but if people did vote for them, they wouldn't be. Also, if you're disturbed by the party's more extreme views, keep in mind that the real extremists are already members, and as their membership increases, they can only become more moderate.
Whatever you do, don't throw your vote away on a "small government" Republican or a "civil liberties" Democrat. They have never delivered what they've promised.