You and I would not be here but for that unique and special union between male and female.
You and I are here because our parents had sex, not because they were married, as many children born out of wedlock are every day. How does gay marriage threaten continued heterosexual reproduction? Are you suggesting that heterosexuals who might otherwise get married to each other will instead choose same-sex mates for variety? By definition, homosexuals have already selected out of continuing the reproduction of the species--well, except when they're allowed to adopt, or use artificial means of conception. Not seeing how gay marriage poses any threat to the continuation of the species.
The very entomology of the word, 'marriage' describes a union of opposites.
This is the naturalistic fallacy: that's how things were/are, therefore that's how they should be. Many historical practices are now viewed as, at best, morally mistaken.
Not that the continuation of a species six billion plus strong should be anyone's worry.
Just because not all parents are responsible, doesn't mean they don't deserve the unique framework that is the formation of a family, and with that goes the special definition.
You're begging the question here that they do deserve the unique framework that is the heterosexual nuclear family; rather, that they deserve a framework that is unique to them. You still haven't made an argument for why homosexual couples should not be granted access to the same framework. I'm not seeing how a heterosexual couple's marriage is affected. Straight couples will continue to do what they do.
As for 'rights and responsibilities', I don't have a problem with civil unions,
If you don't have a problem with gay couples having access to a legal arrangement that's functionally identical to marriage, then why do you have a problem with using the word "marriage" to describe it?
And as for their 'legal' right - well, it's not now - at least in California.
What should those gay people have done in California? Not gotten married because they might be involuntarily divorced by referendum later on?
36,000 people didn't get married because they 'got it into their heads', they got married because it was their legal right to do so, and they wanted to have all the rights and responsibilities thereof.
In what sense is marriage fundamentally between two people, given the long history of polygamy in cultures throughout the world (including, ironically, the Mormon community that came out so strongly with activism and money to pass Prop 8)? More importantly, why should it be stopped at a man and woman when gay couples live long, committed relationships exactly as many heterosexually married couples do?
And what, exactly, is wrong with not stopping at a union of two, male and female?
Having read his world|war|civilization watch columns in the Rhino Times, yes, that article does accurately reflect Card's views. He is that much of a douchebag.
So when a majority votes to remove the rights of a subgroup, that's okay? The 18,000 marriages that were voted out of existence were, what, collateral damage?
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, it's not. McCarthyism is the government suppressing dissenting views by using investigation as punishment. Punishing someone for their views by not engaging them or buying their products is called "making choices".
Re:I don't like books by Bigots.
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
It's not (necessarily) about punishing his views by withholding sales from him. It's realizing that Card isn't nearly as smart in real life as he seems to be in his books, and understanding that a novel is a monologue that the author controls completely. It's understanding that, in contact with the real world, Card is a hateful twit with a persecution complex, and suspecting that the books that seemed so clever before might be a bit slanted in the author's favor.
Re:hey modern day brownshirts
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
Being in favor of traditional marriage itself may not be bigotry, but voting 18,000 marriages out of existence is. It's not necessarily bigotry to think that marriage should be heterosexual if that's your religious doctrine, but it's definitely bigotry to take away the civil rights of an identifiable, excludable subgroup.
I mean, seriously: did any of the yes voters or the Mormons sending money from Utah think for one second about the human cost? About the raw amount of pain they were causing to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in California?
Card thought to himself "I need an easy project guaranteed to make money from the fanbois, so I'll go back to the goldmine and crank out some backstory."
I lost a lot of respect for Card when I started reading his sites, especially his "World Watch" columns that are published in the Rhino Times. As a columnist, he's a stupid, irrational thinker, and rationalizing this with books that seem really smart clued me in to the degree to which authors get to dress the stage on which they argue in their novels. Whatever point they're trying to make exists in a universe constructed to make that point, which is rhetorically compelling but thoroughly intellectually dishonest.
So what happens when Card tries to write about the real world? He comes off as a bombastic jagoff who lays his bigotries out flat and can't understand why his opinions aren't more respected.
I still like Ender's Game and some of the sequels (unlike most, I quite enjoyed Xenocide). But the author is, in real life, the sort of pedantic crank that, if you're unfortunate enough to be at dinner with them, you do a lot of nodding and sipping and hope the conversation just moves on.
Other things being equal, they're probably happier to be paid to work on their projects than not. Except for the drama llamas who stormed out, that is.
This is what's meant by the saying "you can't con an honest man." It was her greed that drove her deeper and deeper into the scam, greed to get $26 million she did nothing to earn, $26 million that didn't and shouldn't belong to her even if it did exist.
Kudos to her for publicizing her story as a warning to others, but jeers for the basic lack of honesty that got her in trouble in the first place.
Oh please. By the fifth book, Jordan was already wrist deep in skullfucking his own creative property by recycling storylines and padding word counts with endless descriptions of wardrobe. They're doing nothing but carrying on a tradition Jordan started himself.
Agreed. I didn't retain much from my philosophy degree in terms of strong convictions on any particular matter, but my head was screwed on so much more tightly just from all the mental pick-and-shovel work I'd done.
The Department of Justice is not the lawyer for the White House--they have White House Counsel for that, and their work is privileged. Any work produced by the DOJ on request from the White House is, by definition, not privileged. It's a request to a third party to produce a legal opinion. The memos are the equivalent of going to the EFF and asking them to produce a 'friend of the court' brief; the fact that you requested it and they didn't doesn't create the attorney-client relationship, so privilege isn't an issue.
He was not raised as a muslim--his household was always non-religious. His attendance at a school in Indonesia was no more a Muslim education than the fact that my education at a Lutheran college makes me somehow Lutheran--I'm agnostic now, as I was then.
And the apostate claim is crap. Muslims in general don't consider him Muslim because he never considered himself Muslim. And for those who would attack the U.S., they don't really need it for a religious justification.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
You can pretend that the absence of the phrase "separation of church and state" in the constitution means that such separation is somehow not constitutionally mandated, but centuries of constitutional jurisprudence have clearly established it, and done so in line with the intention of those who wrote it in the first place. The phrase "wall of separation between church and state" comes from Thomas Jefferson himself.
We need to have 365.25 days a year because a day is the most immediate, obvious time division in human affairs. You're not going to change that. If you created some arbitrary standard of time that wasn't tied to the day, no one would pay any attention to it. Given that a day is a basic unit, you need leap years to synchronize the calendar. I don't know why you'd want to change this--no one has any real problems with it.
Daylight Savings Time is silly, IMHO, but it really has nothing to do with leap years.
Funny you should mention the conversion from standard to metric. The U.S. still runs on standard despite half a century of trying to switch.
There is no need for a leap year (or a leap anything...)
The purpose of leap years has nothing to do with timezones; it's to synchronize the calendar. Our year is 365 and 1/4 days long. Without leap years the days of the year would drift in relation to annual events like the solstices and equinoxes, and the seasons. Over a long enough period, winter would fall in July and summer in February. Adding a day every four years resets the calendar.
[extended rules for leap years, like skipping leap years every century, except every four centuries, unless it's a millenium... correct for the fact that it isn't exactly 1/4 day extra].
On an industry wide scale, it probably does cost more to keep paying COBOL programmers to maintain legacy systems. But at any individual company, the short-term cost of paying a high hourly rate to an aging COBOL coder to keep the wheels turning is much less than the cost of rebuilding the system that's run the company for forty years.
Remember Schwarzenegger wanting to cut California state employee's salaries to minimum wage for the duration of a budget crisis? It was the state IT department that nixed that idea by pointing out that it would cost millions over the course of a year to execute that change. That's the situation in which many companies dependent upon COBOL find themselves. Pay someone $200 an hour to make minor changes, or face a years long rewrite costing millions (or a years long implementation of SAP costing tens of millions).
Why would any serious photographer or videographer not pony up for the MacBook Pro? Did any of them enjoy working on Intel embedded graphics rather than an nVidia GPU?
What good would encrypting it do? If they see that it's encrypted, they'll demand the key. If you don't provide the key, you've just bought endless legal trouble for yourself.
You can either gamble that they don't notice/care what's on a bunch of portable hard drives, or you can host it securely in Canada and download it once you're back in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
You and I are here because our parents had sex, not because they were married, as many children born out of wedlock are every day. How does gay marriage threaten continued heterosexual reproduction? Are you suggesting that heterosexuals who might otherwise get married to each other will instead choose same-sex mates for variety? By definition, homosexuals have already selected out of continuing the reproduction of the species--well, except when they're allowed to adopt, or use artificial means of conception. Not seeing how gay marriage poses any threat to the continuation of the species.
This is the naturalistic fallacy: that's how things were/are, therefore that's how they should be. Many historical practices are now viewed as, at best, morally mistaken.
Not that the continuation of a species six billion plus strong should be anyone's worry.
Just because not all parents are responsible, doesn't mean they don't deserve the unique framework that is the formation of a family, and with that goes the special definition.
You're begging the question here that they do deserve the unique framework that is the heterosexual nuclear family; rather, that they deserve a framework that is unique to them. You still haven't made an argument for why homosexual couples should not be granted access to the same framework. I'm not seeing how a heterosexual couple's marriage is affected. Straight couples will continue to do what they do.
If you don't have a problem with gay couples having access to a legal arrangement that's functionally identical to marriage, then why do you have a problem with using the word "marriage" to describe it?
What should those gay people have done in California? Not gotten married because they might be involuntarily divorced by referendum later on?
36,000 people didn't get married because they 'got it into their heads', they got married because it was their legal right to do so, and they wanted to have all the rights and responsibilities thereof.
In what sense is marriage fundamentally between two people, given the long history of polygamy in cultures throughout the world (including, ironically, the Mormon community that came out so strongly with activism and money to pass Prop 8)? More importantly, why should it be stopped at a man and woman when gay couples live long, committed relationships exactly as many heterosexually married couples do?
And what, exactly, is wrong with not stopping at a union of two, male and female?
Having read his world|war|civilization watch columns in the Rhino Times, yes, that article does accurately reflect Card's views. He is that much of a douchebag.
So when a majority votes to remove the rights of a subgroup, that's okay? The 18,000 marriages that were voted out of existence were, what, collateral damage?
No, it's not. McCarthyism is the government suppressing dissenting views by using investigation as punishment. Punishing someone for their views by not engaging them or buying their products is called "making choices".
It's not (necessarily) about punishing his views by withholding sales from him. It's realizing that Card isn't nearly as smart in real life as he seems to be in his books, and understanding that a novel is a monologue that the author controls completely. It's understanding that, in contact with the real world, Card is a hateful twit with a persecution complex, and suspecting that the books that seemed so clever before might be a bit slanted in the author's favor.
Being in favor of traditional marriage itself may not be bigotry, but voting 18,000 marriages out of existence is. It's not necessarily bigotry to think that marriage should be heterosexual if that's your religious doctrine, but it's definitely bigotry to take away the civil rights of an identifiable, excludable subgroup.
I mean, seriously: did any of the yes voters or the Mormons sending money from Utah think for one second about the human cost? About the raw amount of pain they were causing to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in California?
Card thought to himself "I need an easy project guaranteed to make money from the fanbois, so I'll go back to the goldmine and crank out some backstory."
I lost a lot of respect for Card when I started reading his sites, especially his "World Watch" columns that are published in the Rhino Times. As a columnist, he's a stupid, irrational thinker, and rationalizing this with books that seem really smart clued me in to the degree to which authors get to dress the stage on which they argue in their novels. Whatever point they're trying to make exists in a universe constructed to make that point, which is rhetorically compelling but thoroughly intellectually dishonest.
So what happens when Card tries to write about the real world? He comes off as a bombastic jagoff who lays his bigotries out flat and can't understand why his opinions aren't more respected.
I still like Ender's Game and some of the sequels (unlike most, I quite enjoyed Xenocide). But the author is, in real life, the sort of pedantic crank that, if you're unfortunate enough to be at dinner with them, you do a lot of nodding and sipping and hope the conversation just moves on.
Other things being equal, they're probably happier to be paid to work on their projects than not. Except for the drama llamas who stormed out, that is.
This is what's meant by the saying "you can't con an honest man." It was her greed that drove her deeper and deeper into the scam, greed to get $26 million she did nothing to earn, $26 million that didn't and shouldn't belong to her even if it did exist.
Kudos to her for publicizing her story as a warning to others, but jeers for the basic lack of honesty that got her in trouble in the first place.
Pffft. Maybe not the way you do it, amateur.
Oh please. By the fifth book, Jordan was already wrist deep in skullfucking his own creative property by recycling storylines and padding word counts with endless descriptions of wardrobe. They're doing nothing but carrying on a tradition Jordan started himself.
Agreed. I didn't retain much from my philosophy degree in terms of strong convictions on any particular matter, but my head was screwed on so much more tightly just from all the mental pick-and-shovel work I'd done.
Another pocket language with idiosyncratic design choices that seem just right to the understimulated nerd looking for fame.
The Department of Justice is not the lawyer for the White House--they have White House Counsel for that, and their work is privileged. Any work produced by the DOJ on request from the White House is, by definition, not privileged. It's a request to a third party to produce a legal opinion. The memos are the equivalent of going to the EFF and asking them to produce a 'friend of the court' brief; the fact that you requested it and they didn't doesn't create the attorney-client relationship, so privilege isn't an issue.
He was not raised as a muslim--his household was always non-religious. His attendance at a school in Indonesia was no more a Muslim education than the fact that my education at a Lutheran college makes me somehow Lutheran--I'm agnostic now, as I was then.
And the apostate claim is crap. Muslims in general don't consider him Muslim because he never considered himself Muslim. And for those who would attack the U.S., they don't really need it for a religious justification.
You can pretend that the absence of the phrase "separation of church and state" in the constitution means that such separation is somehow not constitutionally mandated, but centuries of constitutional jurisprudence have clearly established it, and done so in line with the intention of those who wrote it in the first place. The phrase "wall of separation between church and state" comes from Thomas Jefferson himself.
Sorry, I couldn't read the rest of your post. My brain short-circuited at this line:
We need to have 365.25 days a year because a day is the most immediate, obvious time division in human affairs. You're not going to change that. If you created some arbitrary standard of time that wasn't tied to the day, no one would pay any attention to it. Given that a day is a basic unit, you need leap years to synchronize the calendar. I don't know why you'd want to change this--no one has any real problems with it.
Daylight Savings Time is silly, IMHO, but it really has nothing to do with leap years.
Funny you should mention the conversion from standard to metric. The U.S. still runs on standard despite half a century of trying to switch.
The purpose of leap years has nothing to do with timezones; it's to synchronize the calendar. Our year is 365 and 1/4 days long. Without leap years the days of the year would drift in relation to annual events like the solstices and equinoxes, and the seasons. Over a long enough period, winter would fall in July and summer in February. Adding a day every four years resets the calendar.
[extended rules for leap years, like skipping leap years every century, except every four centuries, unless it's a millenium... correct for the fact that it isn't exactly 1/4 day extra].
On an industry wide scale, it probably does cost more to keep paying COBOL programmers to maintain legacy systems. But at any individual company, the short-term cost of paying a high hourly rate to an aging COBOL coder to keep the wheels turning is much less than the cost of rebuilding the system that's run the company for forty years.
Remember Schwarzenegger wanting to cut California state employee's salaries to minimum wage for the duration of a budget crisis? It was the state IT department that nixed that idea by pointing out that it would cost millions over the course of a year to execute that change. That's the situation in which many companies dependent upon COBOL find themselves. Pay someone $200 an hour to make minor changes, or face a years long rewrite costing millions (or a years long implementation of SAP costing tens of millions).
Why would any serious photographer or videographer not pony up for the MacBook Pro? Did any of them enjoy working on Intel embedded graphics rather than an nVidia GPU?
What are you doing in your home that shouldn't be seen by anyone else? How's that basement fusion reactor going?
What good would encrypting it do? If they see that it's encrypted, they'll demand the key. If you don't provide the key, you've just bought endless legal trouble for yourself.
You can either gamble that they don't notice/care what's on a bunch of portable hard drives, or you can host it securely in Canada and download it once you're back in the US.
Well, at 37, I guess I'm not an adult. Please explain why, because all of my thirtysomething friends are on FaceBook.