This is the best response you've written in this thread so far, and I will stay true to my word and converse as we now have something of substance to discuss. I apologize for the length, but some things cannot be said briefly.
There is no "greater power", no "meaning to life" except that which we choose to make it. Anyone who claims otherwise has to show at least SOME proof that there is "more" - not just argue that there must be more, which is what you do when you claim that we are more than just a collection of atoms. ... When you get down to it, we're just an organization of atoms into molecules into cells into tissues into people; our conscience is a by-product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, probably with effects at the quantum level. There's no need for more than that to explain everything we are, and everything we feel, how we came to be, and there is no hidden meaning to life and the universe, not even the number 42.
The fact that we can choose to make our lives have meaning is what I am getting at. When I say that we are more than just a collection of atoms, I am not speaking of a magical spiritual substance. To give an example, if you have a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, or best friend, you do not think of him in terms of all the chemical processes that make up his being; you think of him in terms of his personality, tastes, shared experiences, etc. Yes, it is very true that all of these things are possible because of his atomic makeup and chemical interactions (and even solely caused by them if you're a determinist), but those are quite peripheral to his value as a human being whom you know and love. In other words, there is a vast difference between explaining the mechanism behind how we feel something and the act of feeling something, and learning the mechanism does not invalidate the feeling or make it less real. If this were not the case, love and friendship would by necessity be self-delusion and "inarguably bad." There is no place for personality in chemistry, and to quote Jacques Barzun, "nor does science touch human beings directly through affirmations about ethics, religion, art, politics, history, and the cosmos--affirmations that must be believed and felt before they can affect life."
Let me give a much simpler example that may clarify my point: an analog wall clock. The wall clock on its own, if shown to a stranger who has never encountered our system of hours and minutes for measuring time, will appear as a circle of evenly spaced, unique squiggles with two (or three) sticks anchored at the center and rotating around it at different speeds. You or I look at the wall clock and almost instantaneously know "it is four thirty-five." This is most obviously a self-made meaning; it is not inherent in the wall clock or else the stranger would have grasped the same meaning. That the meaning is made by us does not make it any less real, otherwise it would have no effect on anything when in reality we see that it is 4:35 and run out of the room because we are late for an appointment. An interesting thought involves the trustworthiness of this wall clock: if we know or suspect that that clock is set to the wrong time, the thought changes from "it is four thirty-five" to "that clock reads four thirty-five." The level of meaning has gone from a broad statement about the current time to a narrow statement about the wall clock, yet both are true statements about reality that depend on some meaning other than what is provided by physics and chemistry.
(Incidentally, you and I are both in the minority that hasn't written off a quantum component of consciousness.)
Religion gives them a purpose. It's a crutch; some people need a crutch, and for them, fine. However, they have no right to ask the rest of us to accomodate their false reality. For too long, we've done so, in the name of "religious tolerance", and we've seen it subvert national and foreign policy. We've seen it di
How is that working out? It's a serious question and I ask because the libertarian streak in me thinks that it should work better than a system with welfare, but the empiricist part of me says I don't know enough about the real consequences of not having it to form a solid opinion. There's a lot of other big differences between the two countries, but getting more info certainly can't hurt.
The OP may have been an exaggeration, in that teaching ID in some schools may not lead to such effects worldwide. But I don't see how it's a straw man.
I will accept that I should have called it "hyperbole" instead of a straw man, which is painful for me to do because I can't stand it when people call "straw man!" at the drop of a hat, and in this instance I guess I've joined their ranks.
The entire point of my first post was really to bring its parent down from its (at the time) +3 pedestal, not to defend "actively teaching children things that are disproven by overwhelming amounts of evidence." Since then it has since risen to +5 Insightful so I failed utterly in that respect, but I had hoped to get some decent discussion out of my second post. So far I have had zero responses even acknowledging what I am trying to say and instead being derailed by the preconceived notion that I must be anti-science or pro-ID or something, so I'm going to try yet again by addressing your objection and further clarifying my remarks.
Yes, perhaps we'll end up in a world where people can still tie their shoelaces, but the OP never claimed otherwise - so that is another straw man. A world where people believe we lived with dinosaurs, and we're supposed to not care just so long as people can still tie shoelaces?
In my opinion, yes, we should care about errors potentially being spread throughout our educational system. The problem is that while Slashdotters are generally very good at finding faults in fundamentalist teachings, things like "Earth is 6000 years old," they are also generally very bad at finding faults that are likely to reside within their own mental framework, things like "science is the only way to acquire knowledge about reality;" this in spite of Einstein, Bohr, and others freely admitting that some of their greatest achievements were rooted in ideas that appeared while they were in dreamlike states--a completely unscientific and non-rational way of going about things. There is a related tendency to view current scientific models as holy, dismissing contrary evidence with a few weak excuses (in many cases ad hominem) instead of rigorously examining it and being open to the possibility that the model needs refining (and, to avoid further confusion, I am not referring here to intelligent design).
Have I made myself clearer? I am not rejecting science or its methods as a tool for acquiring knowledge and I am certainly not encouraging creationism--excuse me, intelligent design--to be taught in science classes at school. I am merely urging people to realize that the pendulum can swing just as far in the opposite direction and with consequences just as detrimental, and that when people move away from the extreme edge of either side there can be more honest, meaningful discussion and a truly plural existence. My writing may appear one-sided against followers of scientism, but that is only because this forum leans in that direction and so is already well aware of the faults of religious fundamentalism and I would be wasting my time.
I'm done talking with you until you learn to read what is written in the post instead of assuming that I must be arguing for the existence of God, something that is entirely unrelated to the point I am making. You are as bad as the fundamentalists you take on, and you're clearly not interested in doing anything other than that.
I am not arguing for fundamentalist influence in education. I am cautioning you who would take the opposite extreme of scientism and parade it as the hallmark standard of human existence (as if there could be such a thing). You have already misread me.
Well, until someone can prove that one or more gods actually exist, self-delusion seems to be a good contender for "best explanation", though others, such as fraud and greed, also work.
I didn't come here to debate religion. The fact that you are apparently unaware of atheistic religions and that you are blind to the real and positive influence that religion has had on the lives of many individuals shows me that you are unprepared for such a debate anyway. Given your displayed email address I should assume you are simply trolling, but you've given me a vehicle to defend my original remarks and I am going to make use of it.
last I heard, people did believe that humans are collections of atoms
I did not say that we were not collections of atoms. My exemplary straw man said that we are "nothing but" collections of atoms, and it is an important difference. We think. We feel. We strive for purposes that are real whether they are God-given or self-invented. I find it hard to believe that this element of human life would be eradicated en masse (though it is routinely ignored, especially when science is in the room), which made it a good counterpoint to your original straw man of fundamentalist education leading to dinosaurs roaming the '60s.
and science certainly has a better record of imparting knowledge than religion.
People tied shoe laces before we developed knot theory. More often than not, scientific analysis comes after someone simply doing something that works. This is not to diminish the role of such analyses or the improvements that they have given us, but we used gravity as a tool long before Newton. Knowledge is only useful as it is applied, meaning that there is a great deal more to existence than knowledge; namely, experience. Knowing and doing are two vastly different ways of understanding: ask any geek with a vast porn collection and no sexual experience. Why isn't the knowledge good enough for him?
The rest of your reply is nonsense about Biblical nonsense, the stuff that only fundamentalists and their polar opposites argue about. The rest of us (of all walks and creeds) view the Bible with widely varying degrees of respect but are very aware that it is an old and organic set of documents touched by many hands and not a direct download from God. In short, you're wasting your time and mine on that subject.
To be clear, should you or anyone else care to respond, I am not a fundamentalist of any stripe, and I have zero interest in Religion 101 debates. I responded in a failed effort to stop the Slashdot groupthink from asserting itself, trying to get some people to think about the kinds of posts that deserve upmods instead of just reacting with "fundies bad and rediculous [sic] == insighful." I thought if I was really lucky, some person out there might think carefully about what he believes, be it about God or the Singularity or really how he came to any particular belief, and by doing so improve his understanding of both himself and of his belief.
That is the answer to my opening question. I try because I know that there are others like me who do our best to sidestep mutual incomprehension, to push for a better standard of meaningful discussion, and to be open to examining (and reexamining!) things in detail rather than repeating the same pre-packaged rants and aphorisms to anyone who doesn't look like they belong in "our camp." There is more to life than getting people to agree with you.
Obviously my first message failed to reach you, at least. Maybe this one will do better.
And you would replace the fundie influence with a scientism that says humans are nothing but collections of atoms. That all religion is self-delusion and inarguably bad. That science is the only domain of knowledge.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
Oh, come on. Slashdot was full of anti-Bush posts when he was in office, and lots of Bush bashers did not get modded down. Even if they did, maybe it just says something about the greater benevolence of Obama fans that they can take a topical joke.
Well, except for the ones who whine about the past =p
I was hoping to be able to have a reasoned discussion where we could at least attempt to separate mistakes in reasoning on all sides from differences in perspective, but you don't appear to be interested. It is entirely possible to amicably disagree even in heated discussion, and we would all be better off if more people chose to do so.
paying for the procedure furthers medical training and the progress of medicine and maintains social stability
No, paying for the procedure pays for the procedure. The people or organizations that profit from it will choose to invest some of that into the progress of medicine, but performing one more or one less heart transplant is not affecting the advance of medicine to any significant degree. I also reject your doomsday scenario for Bob's family, and this is tangential but I think it's dishonest to place no blame on them for getting involved in a gunfight. I thought I was pushing the envelope with my simplistic chain of possible positive events, but I'm no longer worried about that.
I, like most people (incl. said libertarians), will spend money to pursue my interests and to help the people whom I care about, and that letting me use my money to do so will result in a greater good for me and them.
Bullshit. You would not.
Yeah, your bias is showing. Joke's on you because I have spent thousands of dollars (and I'm not so old yet that that is an insignificant amount) helping the people I care about. Perhaps I am the exception and not the norm, but to claim that I would not help others of my own free will simply because I hold libertarian beliefs is akin to being called a baby-killer for supporting legal abortions. It is irresponsible, unsound, and juvenile, and I expected better from you.
A vast majority of "libertarians" are concerned only with their own ass and satisfying of their own astronomical greed, and would (quoting one of you on this very thread) "cross the street to piss" on Bob as he dies.
Come on. You are equating my reasoned disagreement (however faulty in your eyes) with a blatant troll. That's dirty pool. Furthermore, a vast number of *people* are concerned only with their own greed; hence the call by other people for mandating that those people share their wealth. This is the wrong way to go about it: you must convince people's hearts-and-minds to share and only then will you see true community. It must be a bottom-up procedure. Finally, you act as if support for the community is selfless, which it clearly is not. You would rightfully object to being forced to pay into a hypothetical health care system in Tajikistan because you are in Canada, and paying for Bob in Tajikistan's heart should not be an obligation for you. Now, why is my objection to paying for the heart of Bob in California or Michigan or Florida or in the next county different in any way except for scope? When exactly does it become "wrong" or "antisocial" for me to object to mandatory payment for someone else's benefit?
The choice, historically proven, is between social unrest, vast hordes of destitute and dying in filth surrounding palaces of "capitalist" Robber Barons who occasionally take rides in their Rolls Royce limos, tossing coins out of the window and calling it "charity", and a stable society where there are no armed revolts of indentured "servants" lurking around every corner. And again, this is history not some hypothesis.
You keep saying "history" without giving any evidence. You have also created a false dichotomy as there is nothing inherent in wealth that makes decent folks turn into "robber barons."
Being a Canadian I do not have [the problem of constitutionality], our Charter of Rights being quite compatible with our single-payer medical system.
Yeah, I had forgotten that you mentioned being Canadian further down. Mea culpa.
I realize I'm late to the party and this thread is hopelessly tangled, and I am jumping in here with a few points rather than somewhere else because I want to emphasize your statement that cable is indeed a private enterprise (though it is also anything but a free market) and so all this talk of socialism is a little nonsensical given the context.
However. (Of course there's a "but," and this time it's dressed up all fancy-like!) Both of your assessments of Bob's new heart are incomplete.
C64 says that I shouldn't be forced to pay for Bob's heart and he's right. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes me his slave, but I would agree that it is theft (more accurately "legal plunder" as theft is by definition illegal whereas taxes used for socialist policies are legal). You helpfully pointed out that giving Bob a new heart will have a ripple effect throughout society since he will have the ability to make more contributions.
What you are missing, though, is that the money taken from me to help pay for Bob's heart, if left under my own control, would also have been contributed to society through my own use of it, and the ripple effect that my use of it would have started is lost. The problem for a lot of people (with no judgments made on present company) is that they can see the positive effect of paying for Bob's new heart, but they never think clearly enough to realize that the funds to pay for it, had Bob not had the need or had I not been forced to pay, would have gone somewhere else, and--here is the most important part--society as a whole would be richer by the cost of one heart transplant. Your point about Bob's future contribution is an example of the broken window fallacy, albeit made a bit strange by the health care aspect and the emotions and tangential problems it brings with it.
Now, having said that, there are some often-mentioned things that are indeed privileges of society, mostly lumped together under "infrastructure." That is what taxes ought to be for and historically in the USA it is what they were for. It having been demonstrated that any use of money will have ripple (indirect) effects, you can no longer claim that Bob's new heart is an issue of common welfare. It directly affects Bob, for sure, but Bob should not be my responsibility unless I choose to take it upon myself to help him, and the indirect effects of Bob's future contributions are, quite frankly, unimportant--if he is working somewhere where he cannot be replaced, rest assured that someone there will pay for his transplant. This makes me (and most libertarians) sound like a stingy bastard until you realize that I, like most people (incl. said libertarians), will spend money to pursue my interests and to help the people whom I care about, and that letting me use my money to do so will result in a greater good for me and them*. Hell, with some of that extra cash, I'd even subscribe to my local public radio station along with hundreds of others, which could let them give Jeff the bonus he deserves, and Jeff could chip in with the rest of his family to help his brother Bob pay for his heart transplant!
Of course the above paragraph is my opinion which you are free to disagree with, but the one above that, about the unseen consequences of making me chip in for Bob's heart, is plain economic fact and indisputable. My belief is that if you desire a socialized system, be it health care or welfare or education, it is your duty to fight for its existence as well as its constitutionality, as none of the federal stuff we currently have implemented is constitutional, a fact that has been ignored for too long (which has ripple effects of its own). I see that I'm in danger of a further digression, so I should stop. I really only intended to illustrate the failure to account for the unseen consequences of involuntary socialist policy and leave you to draw your own conclusions, which may very well be "I care more about Bob's individual welfare than the c
I don't know how we got led so badly astray that we no longer follow such a simple, logical, obvious method. PC-ness run amok, maybe.
You have named it exactly. What we have begun to experience is an excess of pluralism. Barzun puts it well:
In society, to be sure, an unchecked pluralism can be disastrous. When everybody has to be listened to, or has a veto or usurps one through solitary or group obstruction, the quasi chaos returns. Time passes, angers mount, nothing gets done, and with each bout of paralysis the necessary faith in private and public institutions is breached. That is how, by a progressive failure of nerve, civilizations come to an end. Once again, the refusal to limit and qualify truths, because doing so would tarnish "principle," incurs its own punishment.
I should note that the above quote in context comes after a few pages extolling the worth of pluralism, so don't mistake its intended meaning (a warning against excess) as an attack on the whole practice of pluralism.
The reason that there is no objective method for sorting good teachers from bad is that "the given always comes first, the person or fact whose reality is complete and 'thick' in comparison with concepts." A person who has spent a lot of time watching teachers and students interact can rely on that wealth of experience as a scale for judging the quality of any teacher put in front of him, and his observation will take the teacher's character into account far better than any ScanTron competency test or good teaching practices checklist ever could.
Oh I didn't mean to imply that you didn't! It's just that saying "this is already happening" while pointing to evidence is a lot more likely to make people pay attention than something projected in the future. Since it is an important issue and I had a link to evidence handy, I took it upon myself to share it. And what do I get from it? A measly +3 and an offended parent. There's just no respect for do-gooders nowadays;)
FEMA selling the books == indoctrination. FEMA removing the books == indoctrination.
If selling the books or removing the books both result in indoctrination, does that mean FEMA == indoctrination?:)
It just goes to show you the power of perspective. Mine is that FEMA shouldn't have published the thing in the first place, because it does nothing to actually prepare kids for disaster events (a stated purpose of FEMA). I wouldn't call its publication indoctrination and I wouldn't call its removal censorship: like many others here I see it as FEMA deciding against wasting taxpayer money with this particular method.
The only bit which I think is strange is that the black hole from the swallowed galaxy hangs around in our galaxy. It should [...] pass right through our galaxy and never come back.
Gas clouds in the captured galaxy would interact with our gas clouds.
Why does it always have to be us versus them? Is it a color issue?;)
A lot of doctors ARE opting out of Medicare/Medicaid, and a fair amount are leaving the practice altogether due to too much overhead and too little doctoring. I've heard plenty of anecdotes here about cash-paying patients being given discounts because the lack of HMO overhead is enough to make them profitable to the practice at a reduced cost.
With all this in mind, the national health care push that's building up looks a lot less attractive.
You make a good point, but I think you're being a little harsh. There are other assets that get passed on after death, like stocks and wealth and houses and boats. Why should copyright be any different? It's also no guarantee that the heirs will get rich--the vast majority of copyrighted works don't make much money, especially after the first few years.
I personally think that the 1909 law (28 years + renewal) was a much better length of time (though I am skeptical about the renewal), and that fair use should have simply been added to that law. If the unfortunate author would still have held copyright while living, it makes sense that his heirs would retain it until it expired, yet the strict time limit would keep pressure on a still-living author to create more works.
Obama:"We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation." Our currency, national motto, laws, and morals disagree.
"Christian" implies "God". "God" does not necessarily imply "Christian". Most of the founders were Deists. Morals exist independent of religion, though religions can be vehicles for them. There are a lot of Judeo-Christian values in our laws and morals, but that does not make the US a Christian nation any more than eating spaghetti makes you Italian.
If you think that the US should become a Christian nation, by all means continue to work towards your goal. Getting rid of the falsehood in your sig will strengthen your case.
"Puting" is what happens when you spend the energy to solve a problem but are resting on assumptions that are taken as axioms when they too need to be worked out. What often happens is that while the solution you come up with works in theory, it goes to hell in practice because you've only solved the second half of a problem that, due to false assumptions, doesn't even exist in reality.
For examples, see most US legislation, especially TARP, the Food Safety Modernization Act, the stimulus package, USAPATRIOT Act, DMCA...
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
So...you wouldn't have bought another one anyway, so they didn't lose a customer now, did they? Unless you're saying that in the event some must-have game comes out for Wii, you now won't purchase one that you otherwise would have because they were, like, holding out on you.
Bollocks. I read your (poorly argued and spelled) post. You wouldn't have bought another Wii anyway and you're just looking for more reasons to (needlessly, since nobody cares) back up that decision. Now run along and play Halo like a good "hardcore" gamer.
Yes, but they're both square-ish and have roofs, stairs for multiple floors, ceilings and doors usually high enough so you don't have to duck, places to cook and to poop and to sleep, furniture...man, I had no idea I'd find so much alike when I started this list!
Anyway, all those things clearly outnumber your little difference that you hardly even notice when inside them. Let's not make a mountain out of a molehill, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the best response you've written in this thread so far, and I will stay true to my word and converse as we now have something of substance to discuss. I apologize for the length, but some things cannot be said briefly.
There is no "greater power", no "meaning to life" except that which we choose to make it. Anyone who claims otherwise has to show at least SOME proof that there is "more" - not just argue that there must be more, which is what you do when you claim that we are more than just a collection of atoms.
...
When you get down to it, we're just an organization of atoms into molecules into cells into tissues into people; our conscience is a by-product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, probably with effects at the quantum level. There's no need for more than that to explain everything we are, and everything we feel, how we came to be, and there is no hidden meaning to life and the universe, not even the number 42.
The fact that we can choose to make our lives have meaning is what I am getting at. When I say that we are more than just a collection of atoms, I am not speaking of a magical spiritual substance. To give an example, if you have a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, or best friend, you do not think of him in terms of all the chemical processes that make up his being; you think of him in terms of his personality, tastes, shared experiences, etc. Yes, it is very true that all of these things are possible because of his atomic makeup and chemical interactions (and even solely caused by them if you're a determinist), but those are quite peripheral to his value as a human being whom you know and love. In other words, there is a vast difference between explaining the mechanism behind how we feel something and the act of feeling something, and learning the mechanism does not invalidate the feeling or make it less real. If this were not the case, love and friendship would by necessity be self-delusion and "inarguably bad." There is no place for personality in chemistry, and to quote Jacques Barzun, "nor does science touch human beings directly through affirmations about ethics, religion, art, politics, history, and the cosmos--affirmations that must be believed and felt before they can affect life."
Let me give a much simpler example that may clarify my point: an analog wall clock. The wall clock on its own, if shown to a stranger who has never encountered our system of hours and minutes for measuring time, will appear as a circle of evenly spaced, unique squiggles with two (or three) sticks anchored at the center and rotating around it at different speeds. You or I look at the wall clock and almost instantaneously know "it is four thirty-five." This is most obviously a self-made meaning; it is not inherent in the wall clock or else the stranger would have grasped the same meaning. That the meaning is made by us does not make it any less real, otherwise it would have no effect on anything when in reality we see that it is 4:35 and run out of the room because we are late for an appointment. An interesting thought involves the trustworthiness of this wall clock: if we know or suspect that that clock is set to the wrong time, the thought changes from "it is four thirty-five" to "that clock reads four thirty-five." The level of meaning has gone from a broad statement about the current time to a narrow statement about the wall clock, yet both are true statements about reality that depend on some meaning other than what is provided by physics and chemistry.
(Incidentally, you and I are both in the minority that hasn't written off a quantum component of consciousness.)
Religion gives them a purpose. It's a crutch; some people need a crutch, and for them, fine. However, they have no right to ask the rest of us to accomodate their false reality. For too long, we've done so, in the name of "religious tolerance", and we've seen it subvert national and foreign policy. We've seen it di
there is no welfare
How is that working out? It's a serious question and I ask because the libertarian streak in me thinks that it should work better than a system with welfare, but the empiricist part of me says I don't know enough about the real consequences of not having it to form a solid opinion. There's a lot of other big differences between the two countries, but getting more info certainly can't hurt.
Why go to Bird-In-Hand when you can go through Intercourse to get to Paradise? Too close to Blue Ball?
Crap normally means deification
I have no humorous quip to add do this, but it stands on its own =)
The OP may have been an exaggeration, in that teaching ID in some schools may not lead to such effects worldwide. But I don't see how it's a straw man.
I will accept that I should have called it "hyperbole" instead of a straw man, which is painful for me to do because I can't stand it when people call "straw man!" at the drop of a hat, and in this instance I guess I've joined their ranks.
The entire point of my first post was really to bring its parent down from its (at the time) +3 pedestal, not to defend "actively teaching children things that are disproven by overwhelming amounts of evidence." Since then it has since risen to +5 Insightful so I failed utterly in that respect, but I had hoped to get some decent discussion out of my second post. So far I have had zero responses even acknowledging what I am trying to say and instead being derailed by the preconceived notion that I must be anti-science or pro-ID or something, so I'm going to try yet again by addressing your objection and further clarifying my remarks.
Yes, perhaps we'll end up in a world where people can still tie their shoelaces, but the OP never claimed otherwise - so that is another straw man. A world where people believe we lived with dinosaurs, and we're supposed to not care just so long as people can still tie shoelaces?
In my opinion, yes, we should care about errors potentially being spread throughout our educational system. The problem is that while Slashdotters are generally very good at finding faults in fundamentalist teachings, things like "Earth is 6000 years old," they are also generally very bad at finding faults that are likely to reside within their own mental framework, things like "science is the only way to acquire knowledge about reality;" this in spite of Einstein, Bohr, and others freely admitting that some of their greatest achievements were rooted in ideas that appeared while they were in dreamlike states--a completely unscientific and non-rational way of going about things. There is a related tendency to view current scientific models as holy, dismissing contrary evidence with a few weak excuses (in many cases ad hominem) instead of rigorously examining it and being open to the possibility that the model needs refining (and, to avoid further confusion, I am not referring here to intelligent design).
Have I made myself clearer? I am not rejecting science or its methods as a tool for acquiring knowledge and I am certainly not encouraging creationism--excuse me, intelligent design--to be taught in science classes at school. I am merely urging people to realize that the pendulum can swing just as far in the opposite direction and with consequences just as detrimental, and that when people move away from the extreme edge of either side there can be more honest, meaningful discussion and a truly plural existence. My writing may appear one-sided against followers of scientism, but that is only because this forum leans in that direction and so is already well aware of the faults of religious fundamentalism and I would be wasting my time.
I'm done talking with you until you learn to read what is written in the post instead of assuming that I must be arguing for the existence of God, something that is entirely unrelated to the point I am making. You are as bad as the fundamentalists you take on, and you're clearly not interested in doing anything other than that.
Good day.
My God, why do I even try?
I am not arguing for fundamentalist influence in education. I am cautioning you who would take the opposite extreme of scientism and parade it as the hallmark standard of human existence (as if there could be such a thing). You have already misread me.
Well, until someone can prove that one or more gods actually exist, self-delusion seems to be a good contender for "best explanation", though others, such as fraud and greed, also work.
I didn't come here to debate religion. The fact that you are apparently unaware of atheistic religions and that you are blind to the real and positive influence that religion has had on the lives of many individuals shows me that you are unprepared for such a debate anyway. Given your displayed email address I should assume you are simply trolling, but you've given me a vehicle to defend my original remarks and I am going to make use of it.
last I heard, people did believe that humans are collections of atoms
I did not say that we were not collections of atoms. My exemplary straw man said that we are "nothing but" collections of atoms, and it is an important difference. We think. We feel. We strive for purposes that are real whether they are God-given or self-invented. I find it hard to believe that this element of human life would be eradicated en masse (though it is routinely ignored, especially when science is in the room), which made it a good counterpoint to your original straw man of fundamentalist education leading to dinosaurs roaming the '60s.
and science certainly has a better record of imparting knowledge than religion.
People tied shoe laces before we developed knot theory. More often than not, scientific analysis comes after someone simply doing something that works. This is not to diminish the role of such analyses or the improvements that they have given us, but we used gravity as a tool long before Newton. Knowledge is only useful as it is applied, meaning that there is a great deal more to existence than knowledge; namely, experience. Knowing and doing are two vastly different ways of understanding: ask any geek with a vast porn collection and no sexual experience. Why isn't the knowledge good enough for him?
The rest of your reply is nonsense about Biblical nonsense, the stuff that only fundamentalists and their polar opposites argue about. The rest of us (of all walks and creeds) view the Bible with widely varying degrees of respect but are very aware that it is an old and organic set of documents touched by many hands and not a direct download from God. In short, you're wasting your time and mine on that subject.
To be clear, should you or anyone else care to respond, I am not a fundamentalist of any stripe, and I have zero interest in Religion 101 debates. I responded in a failed effort to stop the Slashdot groupthink from asserting itself, trying to get some people to think about the kinds of posts that deserve upmods instead of just reacting with "fundies bad and rediculous [sic] == insighful." I thought if I was really lucky, some person out there might think carefully about what he believes, be it about God or the Singularity or really how he came to any particular belief, and by doing so improve his understanding of both himself and of his belief.
That is the answer to my opening question. I try because I know that there are others like me who do our best to sidestep mutual incomprehension, to push for a better standard of meaningful discussion, and to be open to examining (and reexamining!) things in detail rather than repeating the same pre-packaged rants and aphorisms to anyone who doesn't look like they belong in "our camp." There is more to life than getting people to agree with you.
Obviously my first message failed to reach you, at least. Maybe this one will do better.
And you would replace the fundie influence with a scientism that says humans are nothing but collections of atoms. That all religion is self-delusion and inarguably bad. That science is the only domain of knowledge.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
Oh, come on. Slashdot was full of anti-Bush posts when he was in office, and lots of Bush bashers did not get modded down. Even if they did, maybe it just says something about the greater benevolence of Obama fans that they can take a topical joke.
Well, except for the ones who whine about the past =p
I was hoping to be able to have a reasoned discussion where we could at least attempt to separate mistakes in reasoning on all sides from differences in perspective, but you don't appear to be interested. It is entirely possible to amicably disagree even in heated discussion, and we would all be better off if more people chose to do so.
paying for the procedure furthers medical training and the progress of medicine and maintains social stability
No, paying for the procedure pays for the procedure. The people or organizations that profit from it will choose to invest some of that into the progress of medicine, but performing one more or one less heart transplant is not affecting the advance of medicine to any significant degree. I also reject your doomsday scenario for Bob's family, and this is tangential but I think it's dishonest to place no blame on them for getting involved in a gunfight. I thought I was pushing the envelope with my simplistic chain of possible positive events, but I'm no longer worried about that.
I, like most people (incl. said libertarians), will spend money to pursue my interests and to help the people whom I care about, and that letting me use my money to do so will result in a greater good for me and them.
Bullshit. You would not.
Yeah, your bias is showing. Joke's on you because I have spent thousands of dollars (and I'm not so old yet that that is an insignificant amount) helping the people I care about. Perhaps I am the exception and not the norm, but to claim that I would not help others of my own free will simply because I hold libertarian beliefs is akin to being called a baby-killer for supporting legal abortions. It is irresponsible, unsound, and juvenile, and I expected better from you.
A vast majority of "libertarians" are concerned only with their own ass and satisfying of their own astronomical greed, and would (quoting one of you on this very thread) "cross the street to piss" on Bob as he dies.
Come on. You are equating my reasoned disagreement (however faulty in your eyes) with a blatant troll. That's dirty pool. Furthermore, a vast number of *people* are concerned only with their own greed; hence the call by other people for mandating that those people share their wealth. This is the wrong way to go about it: you must convince people's hearts-and-minds to share and only then will you see true community. It must be a bottom-up procedure. Finally, you act as if support for the community is selfless, which it clearly is not. You would rightfully object to being forced to pay into a hypothetical health care system in Tajikistan because you are in Canada, and paying for Bob in Tajikistan's heart should not be an obligation for you. Now, why is my objection to paying for the heart of Bob in California or Michigan or Florida or in the next county different in any way except for scope? When exactly does it become "wrong" or "antisocial" for me to object to mandatory payment for someone else's benefit?
The choice, historically proven, is between social unrest, vast hordes of destitute and dying in filth surrounding palaces of "capitalist" Robber Barons who occasionally take rides in their Rolls Royce limos, tossing coins out of the window and calling it "charity", and a stable society where there are no armed revolts of indentured "servants" lurking around every corner. And again, this is history not some hypothesis.
You keep saying "history" without giving any evidence. You have also created a false dichotomy as there is nothing inherent in wealth that makes decent folks turn into "robber barons."
Being a Canadian I do not have [the problem of constitutionality], our Charter of Rights being quite compatible with our single-payer medical system.
Yeah, I had forgotten that you mentioned being Canadian further down. Mea culpa.
I realize I'm late to the party and this thread is hopelessly tangled, and I am jumping in here with a few points rather than somewhere else because I want to emphasize your statement that cable is indeed a private enterprise (though it is also anything but a free market) and so all this talk of socialism is a little nonsensical given the context.
However. (Of course there's a "but," and this time it's dressed up all fancy-like!) Both of your assessments of Bob's new heart are incomplete.
C64 says that I shouldn't be forced to pay for Bob's heart and he's right. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes me his slave, but I would agree that it is theft (more accurately "legal plunder" as theft is by definition illegal whereas taxes used for socialist policies are legal). You helpfully pointed out that giving Bob a new heart will have a ripple effect throughout society since he will have the ability to make more contributions.
What you are missing, though, is that the money taken from me to help pay for Bob's heart, if left under my own control, would also have been contributed to society through my own use of it, and the ripple effect that my use of it would have started is lost. The problem for a lot of people (with no judgments made on present company) is that they can see the positive effect of paying for Bob's new heart, but they never think clearly enough to realize that the funds to pay for it, had Bob not had the need or had I not been forced to pay, would have gone somewhere else, and--here is the most important part--society as a whole would be richer by the cost of one heart transplant. Your point about Bob's future contribution is an example of the broken window fallacy, albeit made a bit strange by the health care aspect and the emotions and tangential problems it brings with it.
Now, having said that, there are some often-mentioned things that are indeed privileges of society, mostly lumped together under "infrastructure." That is what taxes ought to be for and historically in the USA it is what they were for. It having been demonstrated that any use of money will have ripple (indirect) effects, you can no longer claim that Bob's new heart is an issue of common welfare. It directly affects Bob, for sure, but Bob should not be my responsibility unless I choose to take it upon myself to help him, and the indirect effects of Bob's future contributions are, quite frankly, unimportant--if he is working somewhere where he cannot be replaced, rest assured that someone there will pay for his transplant. This makes me (and most libertarians) sound like a stingy bastard until you realize that I, like most people (incl. said libertarians), will spend money to pursue my interests and to help the people whom I care about, and that letting me use my money to do so will result in a greater good for me and them*. Hell, with some of that extra cash, I'd even subscribe to my local public radio station along with hundreds of others, which could let them give Jeff the bonus he deserves, and Jeff could chip in with the rest of his family to help his brother Bob pay for his heart transplant!
Of course the above paragraph is my opinion which you are free to disagree with, but the one above that, about the unseen consequences of making me chip in for Bob's heart, is plain economic fact and indisputable. My belief is that if you desire a socialized system, be it health care or welfare or education, it is your duty to fight for its existence as well as its constitutionality, as none of the federal stuff we currently have implemented is constitutional, a fact that has been ignored for too long (which has ripple effects of its own). I see that I'm in danger of a further digression, so I should stop. I really only intended to illustrate the failure to account for the unseen consequences of involuntary socialist policy and leave you to draw your own conclusions, which may very well be "I care more about Bob's individual welfare than the c
I don't know how we got led so badly astray that we no longer follow such a simple, logical, obvious method. PC-ness run amok, maybe.
You have named it exactly. What we have begun to experience is an excess of pluralism. Barzun puts it well:
In society, to be sure, an unchecked pluralism can be disastrous. When everybody has to be listened to, or has a veto or usurps one through solitary or group obstruction, the quasi chaos returns. Time passes, angers mount, nothing gets done, and with each bout of paralysis the necessary faith in private and public institutions is breached. That is how, by a progressive failure of nerve, civilizations come to an end. Once again, the refusal to limit and qualify truths, because doing so would tarnish "principle," incurs its own punishment.
I should note that the above quote in context comes after a few pages extolling the worth of pluralism, so don't mistake its intended meaning (a warning against excess) as an attack on the whole practice of pluralism.
The reason that there is no objective method for sorting good teachers from bad is that "the given always comes first, the person or fact whose reality is complete and 'thick' in comparison with concepts." A person who has spent a lot of time watching teachers and students interact can rely on that wealth of experience as a scale for judging the quality of any teacher put in front of him, and his observation will take the teacher's character into account far better than any ScanTron competency test or good teaching practices checklist ever could.
I know that
Oh I didn't mean to imply that you didn't! It's just that saying "this is already happening" while pointing to evidence is a lot more likely to make people pay attention than something projected in the future. Since it is an important issue and I had a link to evidence handy, I took it upon myself to share it. And what do I get from it? A measly +3 and an offended parent. There's just no respect for do-gooders nowadays ;)
FEMA selling the books == indoctrination.
FEMA removing the books == indoctrination.
If selling the books or removing the books both result in indoctrination, does that mean FEMA == indoctrination? :)
It just goes to show you the power of perspective. Mine is that FEMA shouldn't have published the thing in the first place, because it does nothing to actually prepare kids for disaster events (a stated purpose of FEMA). I wouldn't call its publication indoctrination and I wouldn't call its removal censorship: like many others here I see it as FEMA deciding against wasting taxpayer money with this particular method.
The only bit which I think is strange is that the black hole from the swallowed galaxy hangs around in our galaxy. It should [...] pass right through our galaxy and never come back.
Gas clouds in the captured galaxy would interact with our gas clouds.
Why does it always have to be us versus them? Is it a color issue? ;)
A lot of doctors ARE opting out of Medicare/Medicaid, and a fair amount are leaving the practice altogether due to too much overhead and too little doctoring. I've heard plenty of anecdotes here about cash-paying patients being given discounts because the lack of HMO overhead is enough to make them profitable to the practice at a reduced cost.
With all this in mind, the national health care push that's building up looks a lot less attractive.
*raises hand*
We're not the only ones, either:
from the in-development dept.
You make a good point, but I think you're being a little harsh. There are other assets that get passed on after death, like stocks and wealth and houses and boats. Why should copyright be any different? It's also no guarantee that the heirs will get rich--the vast majority of copyrighted works don't make much money, especially after the first few years.
I personally think that the 1909 law (28 years + renewal) was a much better length of time (though I am skeptical about the renewal), and that fair use should have simply been added to that law. If the unfortunate author would still have held copyright while living, it makes sense that his heirs would retain it until it expired, yet the strict time limit would keep pressure on a still-living author to create more works.
"lazyness" should be "laziness"
"implimented" should be "implemented"
"seggregate" should be "segregate"
Halo is a terribly over-rated game, please don't associate my posts with it again.
Fair enough. Please don't make uninformed statements about the habits of traditional gamers.
Obama:"We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation." Our currency, national motto, laws, and morals disagree.
"Christian" implies "God". "God" does not necessarily imply "Christian". Most of the founders were Deists. Morals exist independent of religion, though religions can be vehicles for them. There are a lot of Judeo-Christian values in our laws and morals, but that does not make the US a Christian nation any more than eating spaghetti makes you Italian.
If you think that the US should become a Christian nation, by all means continue to work towards your goal. Getting rid of the falsehood in your sig will strengthen your case.
"Puting" is what happens when you spend the energy to solve a problem but are resting on assumptions that are taken as axioms when they too need to be worked out. What often happens is that while the solution you come up with works in theory, it goes to hell in practice because you've only solved the second half of a problem that, due to false assumptions, doesn't even exist in reality.
For examples, see most US legislation, especially TARP, the Food Safety Modernization Act, the stimulus package, USAPATRIOT Act, DMCA...
Except that Obama has repeatedly said that he doesn't want to prosecute people for things that happened in the past; he'd rather look to The Future!
This creates a problem, since we only know that someone has done something wrong once it has occurred and is therefore in the past...
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
So...you wouldn't have bought another one anyway, so they didn't lose a customer now, did they? Unless you're saying that in the event some must-have game comes out for Wii, you now won't purchase one that you otherwise would have because they were, like, holding out on you.
Bollocks. I read your (poorly argued and spelled) post. You wouldn't have bought another Wii anyway and you're just looking for more reasons to (needlessly, since nobody cares) back up that decision. Now run along and play Halo like a good "hardcore" gamer.
Yes, but they're both square-ish and have roofs, stairs for multiple floors, ceilings and doors usually high enough so you don't have to duck, places to cook and to poop and to sleep, furniture...man, I had no idea I'd find so much alike when I started this list!
Anyway, all those things clearly outnumber your little difference that you hardly even notice when inside them. Let's not make a mountain out of a molehill, eh?
Wait wait wait...I thought it was the MAN that was keeping us down! Why would we vote for him?