And yet you don't say why. I suggest you think it's a bad analogy because it doesn't help your case.
One, nonsense, and two, I'm not talking about religion.
Now that's mighty odd, since you were talking about Christianity, which is a religion. And then you said "In fairness, they claimed to be against ALL religions." It's pretty difficult to now claim you weren't talking about religion.
See the irony in the activities of these self labelled "free thinkers"?
No.
We're on Slashdot, we don't even have to stretch to find the obvious analogy. Have you noticed that those of the "free software" movement are opposed to proprietary software. That.
Of course free thinkers are opposed to religion, because religion is the antithesis of free thinking.
Which is fine if you have a large house where you can afford to keep boxes of paper hanging around. A lot of people live in small homes or apartments, and don't want to spare the space for boxes of paper.
There's also paper that isn't tax stuff. Stuff with sentimental value, stuff from school, old love letters, cards, old magazines, photographs. Those with even a mild hoarding instinct can get weighed down with boxes of paper. And when you do want something, finding it might take hours.
Douglas Adams said that a VCR was a machine that watched TV for you, so you didn't have to. If there was something on TV that you didn't want to miss, and you also had to go out, you could get the VCR to watch the TV for you. You might never watch what's on the tape, but at least you didn't miss the possibility.
And that's what a scanner gives you. The opportunity to throw paper away now, without the worry that you'll want it again.
Seems like it would be difficult to prove. If someone does something, instincts did it. If they say that it was their own choice, they're just rationalizing it after the fact.
But that's exactly the kind of thing they are studying in psychology these days. They can experiment with it by setting up tasks for people to perform whilst their heads are in an MRI scanner. They can see what parts of the brain light up to see what parts are involved in the decision, and they can question the subjects afterwards to see how they think they made the decision.
Even if it is all just instinct, I really don't know why you're using words such as "irrational."
Because they are different brain processes. Rationale requires using the conscious brain. Instinct doesn't. If you predict what people will do assuming they will act with thought, and they act with instinct then you'll not be able to predict very well. We can predict what we ourselves will do in common situations, because we know what we did in those situations before. But being in a panicky crowd is outside of common experience, and the fight or flight instinct is going to be far stronger than we imagine.
Depending on where in the world it was, that might be the most sensible target of a political group. Anywhere where laws and administration are unduly influenced by religious beliefs.
I've made my points, including fact that people rationalise their actions after the fact. All you're doing is demonstrating that happening.
The changing it around thing is worth a mention though. Because usually diets fail. Another example of irrationality. Starting the diet is one of those minority rational points. But soon enough, it's back to instinct being more powerful than the conscious mind, and the diet usually fails. Where it succeeds it's because one has persisted long enough to create a new habit. And habits are instinctual.
I was actually in this situation for a time. I was simply deciding that I personally wanted to eat food I thought was good rather than get slim. If I had a choice, I would have rather been slim and been able to eat all the food that I wanted. Nothing forced me to eat. That was my own decision.
This is a textbook example of what I said in the post "Rationale is applied retrospectively to explain actions that were made instinctively."
You didn't decide to be obese because you thought the pleasure of the taste of the food was worth it. Rather your instinct to eat calorie heavy food was more powerful than your conscious desire to be slim.
And I'm not trying to be superior here, just educative. I'm just as much as slave to my instincts as is any living being.
It would technically be against the law to make a "Oh, those bad woman drivers" comment in some parts of Europe. Or to tell a racist joke. Or to mock an extremely effeminate gay person.
No it wouldn't. Sexism is contained in equal opportunities and sexual harassment law. There's no law applicable to comparing sexes abilities in a none work sense.
And neither racial or gay humour is illegal. Only hate speech is.
It's simply the progression from human rights being important to societal "rights" trumping those human rights. In some cases that's necessary, but the bar is pretty low in some places.
I'm glad you accept it's sometimes necessary, and I suggest that much of your disdain comes from not knowing where the bar actually is. That you've been misled.
you are wrong: one does not have to be ignorant to see that left-wingers restrict speech all the time.
How does that make me wrong, given that I didn't make any claim that they don't.
I pointed out the ludicrousness of spinning around to criticising lefties for restricted speech laws which can result in jail, when the story is about righties restricted speech laws resulting in death.
Huh? I don't understand. I merely pointed out the obvious (that individuals make up crowds).
Not only is it obvious, it was the very topic of the part of the sentence you snipped.
Do they? What is your definition of "irrational"? What is it that makes you believe that people (I'm assuming you meant everyone) behave "irrationally" most of the time?
Most of human behaviour is instinct, not rationale. Rationale is applied retrospectively to explain actions that were made instinctively. The situations where a person actually consciously weighs up pros and cons of different actions are vanishingly slim.
Some examples. Obesity - people who are obese and unhappy to be obese continue to eat sugary fatty foods to excess. They understand that eating those things is what made them and keeps them obese, and they do it anyway. Instinct is stronger than rationale.
Smoking - similar.
The discounting of a future good - this is where you sit a child down at a table in front of a marshmallow and tell him that he can eat it, or he can have two marshmallows if he waits 3 minutes. The kid will usually eat the one he has. Adults do the same, though the rewards and timescales change.
Procrastination - constantly putting things that must be done off for the future, even when that makes things worse.
Superstitions.
Preferring brand name goods over cheaper equivalents.
Gambling - in all the common cases where there is a negative expectation. (The house has an edge.)
Complaining about one's life when it's perfectly possible to change job, move to another city or country etc.
Irrational fears - flying, spiders etc.
These are just strong examples to illustrate the point. But literally the vast majority of the time people are following instinct and conditioning, not behaving from rationally thought out decisions.
I say "Crowds behave differently from individuals, which implies that people's behaviour is different in crowds."
And your response to that is to cut everything but the first 5 words and retort:
Individuals make up crowds.
WTF? You can't even rationally think your way from one end of a sentence to the other.
Wait... so you're saying that if someone screamed "fire" and everyone around me began panicking, I would do the same?
No I'm saying you don't know how you'll react in a panicking crowd until you're in one.
If so, I highly doubt that.
Of course you do, everyone likes to think they are above the common herd. Just like everyone likes to think they are an above average driver, even though about half are not.
People are people, and people behave irrationally most of the time.
It's so much easier to claim that someone's voice took control of your body and forced you to panic like a brainless animal and injure someone.
So many things wrong with this statement.
People are animals, and the vast majority of what every one of them does is instinctual, not conscious and rational. That's all people, not just the ones we look down on.
Crowds behave differently from individuals, which implies that people's behaviour is different in crowds. The poster himself will behave differently in a crowd. And it's impossible for him to sit behind his keyboard and predict what instincts will make him do when in the middle of a fearful crowd. Nor will they necessarily be the same each time.
There are Warm and Fuzzy Progressive countries in Europe that make saying certain opinion-related words a crime. We're not talking about fraud, or inciting a riot, or anything like that. That's lefties for you! Peace, harmony, equal rights and free stuff for everyone, as long as they don't say certain naughty and un-Progressive things, or paint Incorrect Pictures, etc. In which case it's off to jail.
Interesting turn around, given that the story is about the not infrequent scenario of religious CONSERVATIVES wanting DEATH for what someone said. You have to be particularly ignorant to try and spin that round the lefties being against free speech.
S1500 is good if it won't ever move from a desk. S1100 doesn't have a document feeder, but could be OK if you need utra-portability.
S1300 is a good compromise. A document feeder and also portable. It's the one I have and I like it.
They all use the same software.
Note that these scanners don't use TWAIN drivers. Which is mostly a good thing as TWAIN has drawbacks, and makes scanning fiddly. But it does mean these scanners won't work directly from within apps that use TWAIN, and might be a problem with Linux machines.
Sure. But in covering more positive aspects of history you probably heard more about christian people than muslim people too. If you live in the western world most of your history will be about the exploits of western world people. Good and bad.
Well, anti-thiests, those that believe there is no god, not those that don't have a belief that there is a god
That's atheism and agnosticism. Atheism isn't short for anti-theism. "a" as a prefix means without. So atheism is "without a belief in god(s)", not "opposed to the belief in gods".
The distinction between atheists and agnostics is very fine. The atheist says "I have no belief in the flying spaghetti monster" and the agnostic says "it's not possible to now for certain whether there is a flying spaghetti monster". Both think people who run their lives based on a belief that there is a flying spaghetti monster are pretty stupid. Either may also be actively opposed to flying spaghetti monsterism because of the bad effect it has on society, but that's not implied in either of the terms "atheist' or "agnostic".
I've never been approached by Christians pushing religion
Where do you live? Have you never passed a church with an evangelical poster outside it?
Are you a Christian? If so how did that come about? The most common method is parents pushing it on their children, indoctrination usually starting in the first few days of life with a "baptism" ceremony, claiming the person for christianity before the person is even able to think for themselves.
Very often its pushed in schools, on TV, on the radio. Atheism doesn't tend to have schools or TV channels and radio stations and programs. (Perhaps there's the odd exception to prove the rule.)
Humans are nothing more than a species of animal. Many animals are territorial, and those that are fight their own species for those territories. And those that are also social, fight together for their territories.
This isn't anything to do with a tendency for humans to pervert anything. It's just a behaviour strategy that's brought success to particular genes in DNA.
Nation states, racial differences, religion and sports, provide the human species with groups to identify with in order to pursue these instinctive territorial battles.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a really bad analogy.
And yet you don't say why. I suggest you think it's a bad analogy because it doesn't help your case.
One, nonsense, and two, I'm not talking about religion.
Now that's mighty odd, since you were talking about Christianity, which is a religion. And then you said "In fairness, they claimed to be against ALL religions." It's pretty difficult to now claim you weren't talking about religion.
See the irony in the activities of these self labelled "free thinkers"?
No.
We're on Slashdot, we don't even have to stretch to find the obvious analogy. Have you noticed that those of the "free software" movement are opposed to proprietary software. That.
Of course free thinkers are opposed to religion, because religion is the antithesis of free thinking.
No installation necessary on a Mac. All that's build in as standard.
Which is fine if you have a large house where you can afford to keep boxes of paper hanging around. A lot of people live in small homes or apartments, and don't want to spare the space for boxes of paper.
There's also paper that isn't tax stuff. Stuff with sentimental value, stuff from school, old love letters, cards, old magazines, photographs. Those with even a mild hoarding instinct can get weighed down with boxes of paper. And when you do want something, finding it might take hours.
Douglas Adams said that a VCR was a machine that watched TV for you, so you didn't have to. If there was something on TV that you didn't want to miss, and you also had to go out, you could get the VCR to watch the TV for you. You might never watch what's on the tape, but at least you didn't miss the possibility.
And that's what a scanner gives you. The opportunity to throw paper away now, without the worry that you'll want it again.
Seems like it would be difficult to prove. If someone does something, instincts did it. If they say that it was their own choice, they're just rationalizing it after the fact.
But that's exactly the kind of thing they are studying in psychology these days. They can experiment with it by setting up tasks for people to perform whilst their heads are in an MRI scanner. They can see what parts of the brain light up to see what parts are involved in the decision, and they can question the subjects afterwards to see how they think they made the decision.
Even if it is all just instinct, I really don't know why you're using words such as "irrational."
Because they are different brain processes. Rationale requires using the conscious brain. Instinct doesn't. If you predict what people will do assuming they will act with thought, and they act with instinct then you'll not be able to predict very well. We can predict what we ourselves will do in common situations, because we know what we did in those situations before. But being in a panicky crowd is outside of common experience, and the fight or flight instinct is going to be far stronger than we imagine.
Depending on where in the world it was, that might be the most sensible target of a political group. Anywhere where laws and administration are unduly influenced by religious beliefs.
Where did that "[CHRISTIAN!!!11]" come from? You really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if you've started misquoting people.
Still at least we agree on the fact that people rarely act as a result of rationality - that's it's almost always instinct.
I've made my points, including fact that people rationalise their actions after the fact. All you're doing is demonstrating that happening.
The changing it around thing is worth a mention though. Because usually diets fail. Another example of irrationality. Starting the diet is one of those minority rational points. But soon enough, it's back to instinct being more powerful than the conscious mind, and the diet usually fails. Where it succeeds it's because one has persisted long enough to create a new habit. And habits are instinctual.
The hysterical levels of the hunt for pedophiles is a right wing thing too. Judging by the newspapers that lead it.
I was actually in this situation for a time. I was simply deciding that I personally wanted to eat food I thought was good rather than get slim. If I had a choice, I would have rather been slim and been able to eat all the food that I wanted. Nothing forced me to eat. That was my own decision.
This is a textbook example of what I said in the post "Rationale is applied retrospectively to explain actions that were made instinctively."
You didn't decide to be obese because you thought the pleasure of the taste of the food was worth it. Rather your instinct to eat calorie heavy food was more powerful than your conscious desire to be slim.
And I'm not trying to be superior here, just educative. I'm just as much as slave to my instincts as is any living being.
It would technically be against the law to make a "Oh, those bad woman drivers" comment in some parts of Europe. Or to tell a racist joke. Or to mock an extremely effeminate gay person.
No it wouldn't. Sexism is contained in equal opportunities and sexual harassment law. There's no law applicable to comparing sexes abilities in a none work sense.
And neither racial or gay humour is illegal. Only hate speech is.
It's simply the progression from human rights being important to societal "rights" trumping those human rights. In some cases that's necessary, but the bar is pretty low in some places.
I'm glad you accept it's sometimes necessary, and I suggest that much of your disdain comes from not knowing where the bar actually is. That you've been misled.
Lol, now you're also trying to pretend all religious "CONSERVATIVES" are the same.
Sure, I was mocking your "lefties" comment. As if all lefties are the same.
you are wrong: one does not have to be ignorant to see that left-wingers restrict speech all the time.
How does that make me wrong, given that I didn't make any claim that they don't.
I pointed out the ludicrousness of spinning around to criticising lefties for restricted speech laws which can result in jail, when the story is about righties restricted speech laws resulting in death.
No, I wasn't thinking of that at all, actually.
No, obviously. That wouldn't at all have helped with the attempt to spin this around to being about lefties instead of conservatives.
All people are animals, but not all people are equally thus.
They're all 100% animal.
Huh? I don't understand. I merely pointed out the obvious (that individuals make up crowds).
Not only is it obvious, it was the very topic of the part of the sentence you snipped.
Do they? What is your definition of "irrational"? What is it that makes you believe that people (I'm assuming you meant everyone) behave "irrationally" most of the time?
Most of human behaviour is instinct, not rationale. Rationale is applied retrospectively to explain actions that were made instinctively. The situations where a person actually consciously weighs up pros and cons of different actions are vanishingly slim.
Some examples.
Obesity - people who are obese and unhappy to be obese continue to eat sugary fatty foods to excess. They understand that eating those things is what made them and keeps them obese, and they do it anyway. Instinct is stronger than rationale.
Smoking - similar.
The discounting of a future good - this is where you sit a child down at a table in front of a marshmallow and tell him that he can eat it, or he can have two marshmallows if he waits 3 minutes. The kid will usually eat the one he has. Adults do the same, though the rewards and timescales change.
Procrastination - constantly putting things that must be done off for the future, even when that makes things worse.
Superstitions.
Preferring brand name goods over cheaper equivalents.
Gambling - in all the common cases where there is a negative expectation. (The house has an edge.)
Complaining about one's life when it's perfectly possible to change job, move to another city or country etc.
Irrational fears - flying, spiders etc.
These are just strong examples to illustrate the point. But literally the vast majority of the time people are following instinct and conditioning, not behaving from rationally thought out decisions.
I say "Crowds behave differently from individuals, which implies that people's behaviour is different in crowds."
And your response to that is to cut everything but the first 5 words and retort:
Individuals make up crowds.
WTF? You can't even rationally think your way from one end of a sentence to the other.
Wait... so you're saying that if someone screamed "fire" and everyone around me began panicking, I would do the same?
No I'm saying you don't know how you'll react in a panicking crowd until you're in one.
If so, I highly doubt that.
Of course you do, everyone likes to think they are above the common herd. Just like everyone likes to think they are an above average driver, even though about half are not.
People are people, and people behave irrationally most of the time.
It's so much easier to claim that someone's voice took control of your body and forced you to panic like a brainless animal and injure someone.
So many things wrong with this statement.
People are animals, and the vast majority of what every one of them does is instinctual, not conscious and rational. That's all people, not just the ones we look down on.
Crowds behave differently from individuals, which implies that people's behaviour is different in crowds. The poster himself will behave differently in a crowd. And it's impossible for him to sit behind his keyboard and predict what instincts will make him do when in the middle of a fearful crowd. Nor will they necessarily be the same each time.
I don't know where are you going with that "Incorrect Picture" thing.
He's just a confused right wing nut. He thinks it was lefties that wanted the death of people making cartoons depicting Allah.
There are Warm and Fuzzy Progressive countries in Europe that make saying certain opinion-related words a crime. We're not talking about fraud, or inciting a riot, or anything like that. That's lefties for you! Peace, harmony, equal rights and free stuff for everyone, as long as they don't say certain naughty and un-Progressive things, or paint Incorrect Pictures, etc. In which case it's off to jail.
Interesting turn around, given that the story is about the not infrequent scenario of religious CONSERVATIVES wanting DEATH for what someone said. You have to be particularly ignorant to try and spin that round the lefties being against free speech.
S1500 is good if it won't ever move from a desk.
S1100 doesn't have a document feeder, but could be OK if you need utra-portability.
S1300 is a good compromise. A document feeder and also portable. It's the one I have and I like it.
They all use the same software.
Note that these scanners don't use TWAIN drivers. Which is mostly a good thing as TWAIN has drawbacks, and makes scanning fiddly. But it does mean these scanners won't work directly from within apps that use TWAIN, and might be a problem with Linux machines.
I've got a Scansnap S1300. Same software. If you have to do more than press the button on the scanner to scan a document, you've configured it wrong.
It does come with a manual.
Sure. But in covering more positive aspects of history you probably heard more about christian people than muslim people too. If you live in the western world most of your history will be about the exploits of western world people. Good and bad.
Well, anti-thiests, those that believe there is no god, not those that don't have a belief that there is a god
That's atheism and agnosticism. Atheism isn't short for anti-theism. "a" as a prefix means without. So atheism is "without a belief in god(s)", not "opposed to the belief in gods".
The distinction between atheists and agnostics is very fine. The atheist says "I have no belief in the flying spaghetti monster" and the agnostic says "it's not possible to now for certain whether there is a flying spaghetti monster". Both think people who run their lives based on a belief that there is a flying spaghetti monster are pretty stupid. Either may also be actively opposed to flying spaghetti monsterism because of the bad effect it has on society, but that's not implied in either of the terms "atheist' or "agnostic".
I've never been approached by Christians pushing religion
Where do you live? Have you never passed a church with an evangelical poster outside it?
Are you a Christian? If so how did that come about? The most common method is parents pushing it on their children, indoctrination usually starting in the first few days of life with a "baptism" ceremony, claiming the person for christianity before the person is even able to think for themselves.
Very often its pushed in schools, on TV, on the radio. Atheism doesn't tend to have schools or TV channels and radio stations and programs. (Perhaps there's the odd exception to prove the rule.)
Humans are nothing more than a species of animal. Many animals are territorial, and those that are fight their own species for those territories. And those that are also social, fight together for their territories.
This isn't anything to do with a tendency for humans to pervert anything. It's just a behaviour strategy that's brought success to particular genes in DNA.
Nation states, racial differences, religion and sports, provide the human species with groups to identify with in order to pursue these instinctive territorial battles.