So, if there's no libertarian candidate, the solution is to vote for the party that embodies every single thing that libertarians oppose?
This is why libertarians are generally considered the biggest dipshits in all of western politics (although anarchists and communists are tied for a VERY close second).
The small improvement in healing rate associated with prayer is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the placebo effect. Whether they person is actually being prayed for makes no difference, but it doesn't work on atheists. This directly contradicts the account in the bible, in which people who did NOT have faith in Jesus, and even pagans in some case, were healed. The bible says that what matters in the faith of the person who prays. The placebo affect, as measured in the scientific studies that you so pathetically mention, depends on the faith of the patient. You can get exactly the same effect with sugar pills, meditation, positive thinking, or giving the doctors and nurses extra-clean uniforms and keeping the hospital looking clean. Science: 1, God: 0.
Like how would you know? You have been alive for less than 100 years.
Turn that one around, and YOU have just successfully disproven Christianity. Heh. Seriously though -- if it had ever happened, someone would have written it down, right? I mean, that would be a really big deal. And yet there isn't a single historical account, let alone one within the 400 years since the Copernican revolution.
Maybe if people rid themselve of vain traditions of man and actually do what scripture says, there may be more healing.
So prayer doesn't work unless EVERYONE is good and faithful? Now YOU are contradicting the bible. I can be as evil as I want, I can organize satanic parades every Friday, I can eat babies and murder saints, and that doesn't make a single lick of difference in whether YOUR prayers should work. Yet if I cut off your arm, IT WILL NOT GROW BACK. If I cut off the Pope's arm, IT WILL NOT GROW BACK. No one's arm ever grows back, ever. No matter of prayer will help -- and you know that.
Israeli archaeologists actually go out and look for the remnants and signs of the events that occurred in the bible. Guess what? There's no evidence for any of them. Most archaeologists who've studied the middle east are in agreement that there was no Hebrew monarchy, and that the ancient Jews got started not as nomads but as a cult in an already settled region. That's what the real-world research has concluded. The bible is as reliable as greek mythology, norse mythology, egyptian mythology, or Grimm's Fairytales. Archaeological evidence is substantially better, being based, you know, on observable facts. Not unlike the observable fact that the amputated limbs of truly holy, faithful men are just as impossible to regrow as the limbs of sinners, despite any amount of prayer whatsoever.
Schizophrenia going away isn't particularly unusual. It's an unpredictable, transient disorder. Metastasized tumours the size of grapefruits (including the tumours of atheists) will occasionally go away spontaneously. Conversely, if your prayer group were to pray for a child's amputated arm to grow back, nothing would happen. Schizophrenia clears up coincidentally all the time. Limbs never do (which makes them the ideal test of the power of prayer). Most people with schizophrenia don't recover, even with prayer. I had three entire congregatons at three very different Christian churches praying for me, plus my entire extended family praying for me to this very day. It has never done a single bit of good. If anything, the false hope it provided made me wait for things to improve, rather than taking actionl The only thing that has ever helped was turning my back on God and putting my life into MY hands, putting faith in MYSELF, turning to my OWN skills and abilities for salvation. When you finally say "Fuck God" and start living for this life, you can actually accomplish things in the world; you can get out there and help yourself and those around you.
Read that website I linked: This page in particular will make it very clear to you. It explains about coincidences in clear, unambiguous language that even a theist can understand, should they be willing to engage in some basic reasoning.
Yeah, and if he ends up not being the candidate that the Republicans run? What then? There just isn't ANY choice? Everyone has to stay home?
Try not to sound like such a tool... Ron Paul may be great, but he's in the Republican party -- and the Republican party only runs cronyistic fascists nowadays. They wont run him precisely BECAUSE he might actually even pay lip-service to the constitution. The constitution is BAD for politicians, especially presidents. Iraq is FANTASTIC for politicians, especially presidents.
Hillary is a reactionary fear-driven manipulator, but at least she isn't in the grips an organization as horrible as the GOP. The GOP basically guarantee that the Republican, as a party, can neve stand for anything more than fascism, cronyism, the police-state, and the economics of perpetual warfare.
The mistake is in assuming that they are your only two choices. Any vote for the two main parties is a vote that was not only wasted, but a vote that was a detriment to freedom itself.
When are the libertarians going to buck the Republicans for real, and get out on their own? The GOP ARE the Republicans now. The Republicans are irrevocably a big-government, police-state, perpetual-warfare party now. They are the blackshirts. And as long as the libertarians keep lending their delusional support to the GOP, every ideal that libertarians stand for will be trampled and destroyed.
Anyone who can rip on the Democratic party without following it up with some lame attempt to justify the actions of the Blackshirts... well, they get a thumbs up from me.
Don't get me wrong: I despise libertarians (not just their ideas -- the people as well; I'm bitter like that:) ) and I think they're living in a deranged fantasy world where people get along by magic and things get done because divine intervention coordinates peoples' efforts... but at least they don't go around trying to justify Fascism. That's a marked improvement over the current political debate in America. One side promoting a vision of a theocratic police state, the other side trying to convince people that they share that vision. What the hell!
As an aside, you do know that Americans already pay, through the government, nearly 70% of what Canadians do, for Health care? And for what? If anything, a universal healthcare system (not necessarily a single-payor system like ours, but SOMETHING) would provide vastly better value for your tax dollars. As it stands, Americans are paying that 70% for basically nothing. It's not hard to see why the universal healthcare movement in the US is gaining momentum -- especially when "conservatives" aren't willing to reclaim that money by cancelling existing national healhcare programs. That said, of course, it's not really the federal government's business... Even in Canada, the provinces are the ones in charge of the healthcare program. The Federal government just mandates that such programs have to be in place, as well as providing a certain amount of the funding.
You'll probably start caring a lot more about public healthcare when there's a major outbreak of TB in your city and your kids get sick... just because the low income families that live on the other side of town can't afford antibiotics, people with HIV can't get their medications and act as reservoirs for TB to fester and become more virulent, there are no programs to get junkies (another major TB reservoir) off the street, etcetera. Diseases affect everyone. For that matter, worker productivity affects everyone -- healthy people contribute more to a strong economy than low taxes do. There are very good economic reasons to get behind universal healthcare of one kind or another. And until employers start giving full health-benefits to their part-time and contract workers, universal healthcare is the only way that low-income families will ever have access to a reasonable level of medical care.
All that said, you still get a high-five for not getting behind the Blackshirts. Good job. I'd rather vote Libertarian than Republican or Democrat (thankfully, all three of the major Canadian political parties are vastly superior to either of them).
Hillary is popular, but she really is a political dead-end. If she were elected, the best anyone would be able to say afterwards is that "well, that was a... waste." No disasters, no major cock-ups. Nevertheless, four years of uninspired, reactionary, fear-based leadership. And she's taken enough truly horrible stances on the issues that informed voters will have trouble getting past a lot of it.
Hillary is part of the Democrat's old way -- the social-democracy way. They need to reinvent themselves as a proper neoliberal party, like the other modern centre-left parties that the rest of the western world is enjoying. People have a great deal of lingering suspicion about social-democracy, but neoliberalism does extraordinarily well. Neoliberalism can even be mixed with a touch of social-welfare policy, if that should be what the people want -- but it keeps the focus on economic performance, as well as personal and organizational freedom. And that's what a liberal movement should really be about.
Obama's muslim background could actually become an advantage. It will make it VERY easy to shut down his critics, even when they are making legitimate criticisms. The kind of slander that normally gets slung around during an American presidential election will come off as being only marginally above the level of KKK ranting (and to be fair, most of it really will be only marginally above the level of KKK ranting... there's nothing Americans hate more than hearing reasonable criticism of public figures).
I think he has a much better chance than Hillary. For every good intention Ms. Clinton has, she has five stupid, shortsighted, fear-based intentions. For every compassionate stance she has, like support for universal healthcare or improved privacy legislation, she has a dozen stances involving banning things that are awesome -- like hookers, videogames, drugs, profanity and sex on TV (god forbid television resembles real life...). Did She vote against the DMCA? Against the PATRIOT act? Against any of the other monstrous pieces of legislation that make life shitty for the Americans? Hillary Clinton is a reactionary, fear-based legislator, so her good heart doesn't mean a thing. Good people are just as horrible and destructive as evil people when they are in the grips of fear and irrationality.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to be a fiery and charismatic public speaker that has yet to endorse any notably retarded ideas. In any other age, that would make him the god-emperor of a continent-spanning empire, until he died of malaria or typhus or something. In this age, it ought to at least get him a serious run at the presidency of the world's... well, let's just call it the world's most flamboyant democracy.
If she were a genuine leader, she'd say "eat shit and die you fucking cowardly traitor scumbags."
This would be a followed by comments along the following lines:
Freedom rocks.
Winner do take drugs.
Hookers are national hereoes.
Guns are great, and weed out the stupid.
Smoke more, we'll cure lung cancer any day now.
STDs are badges of honour.
Marriage is for people too ugly to get laid.
Pot is great if you can't get any good cubans.
One nation under God. Dionysus, specifically. *
Then she'd throw some free condoms and blister-packs of amphetamines into the crowd, slug back some Jack Daniels, and walk off-stage grinning like a crack-addict. Reporters would later note that she was wearing a "Plan C" shirt.
* Hey, I just said exactly those things. Maybe I should run -- I know I'd vote for me. It's a shame Americans are too wimpy to elect a foreigner that hates their country and would sell their childrens' organs to zoos for meat...
Privacy? Screw that. Give me the piracy candidate. Damn fisherman and cruiseships sailing around like they own the water... it's high time the seas ran red with blood of the fat and rich.
A man needs choices. The opportunity to take a letter of Marquee and do some plundering of foreign shipping is just what we need to get some gumption back into the young men. Wouldn't be no metrosexual flouncery goin' on if the kids learned to wear a pouffy white shirt and swing a cutlass.
Smaller and smaller governments are managing to put things in orbit. More and more private citizens are buying trips into space, albeit aboard government equipment. There have actually BEEN private launches.
Patience man, patience. We're advancing at a fantastic rate, when you get right down to it. Space is an incredibly challenging place to travel to; if private companies are putting satellites into LEO within ten years and manned craft into LEO in twenty, that will be a FANTASTIC accomplishment.
5000 spaceplane launches a year seem like a lot, but it's really not that bad. The regular air-travel industry and the marine shipping industry are far, far worse offenders. A few space plane flights means virtually nothing. And there's nothing to say that the fuel (the cheapest part of a spaceplane ride) can't be made from non-petroleum derived hydrocarbons. Kerosene is normally derived from crude, but it's very similar to, oh, let's say... whale oil (I kid, I kid). Seriously, there are almost certainly usable airplane fuels that we can derive from organic matter.
Besides, what else are rich suckers going to spend their money on? Hummer-Limousines? Helicopter rides? Chartered cruises? Condor-egg omelettes? Nigerian babies? White Rhino testes? Siberian albino tiger axillary lymph nodes served over ground orphan bones? Hunting the world's least dangerous prey -- humans? Buying entire American states to convert into their future burial plots? Dredging the Marianas trench for tourist pennies? Tossing Star Trek fans into volcanoes? Having Pythagoras cloned and then forced to go-go dance for Pesos?
These people are desperate. If they don't find some creative ways to dispose of their income, they might end up having to do something useful or socially positive with it. Have some fucking compassion, man. We can't let it come to that. Branson is saving them.
Hate God? I don't hate God any more than I hate Zeus or Ra. Hating imaginary things is the sign of a broken, delusional mind.
As for God being my servant? Of course not. But there are Christians in the world who do follow the commandments, who do believe in Jesus with all their hearts, and who are veritable paragons of faith. Their prayers go just as unanswered as mine did. NO prayers get answered, except in so far as is consistent with random chance. Prayer doesn't pass the muster of even the weakest statistical tests. You're better off betting on horse races. I'd say that pretty much shuts the book on Christianity.
Only a fool respects all other points of view. Many points of view aren't deserving of respect. For example, believing in astrology (which is provably wrong), believing in crystal healing (also provably wrong), believing in the power of prayer (provably wrong, which simultaneously disproves the word of the bible completely), the mythology of the bible (there was provably no flood, no exodus, no wandering the desert, no series of wars to conquer Israel, and no king David).
You might think this is just random, undirected crankiness, but this really is something that people have looked into and researched extensively. Consider even this site: Why Wont God Heal Amputees. The bible doesn't say that prayer will make you go to heaven, it says that the prayers of the faithful will HEAL THE FUCKING SICK. Yet the sick are unhealed.
There isn't a single example in all of Human history of ANYONE -- no matter how faithfully they or their family or their church prayed -- regrowing an amputated limb. Ever. Therefore, the bible lied, Jesus lied, Christianity is a false religion. QED.
Christians ARE dimwits. What other word can you use to describe people that believe things that aren't true?
A simple test: the bible says, and I quote,
"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." -- Matthew 7:7,
"For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." -- Matthew 17:20,
"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." -- Mark 11:24,
"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it." -- John 14:12-14,
"Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." -- Matthew 18:19,
"And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." -- James 5:15-16.
And yet, you can go to any hospital in the western world and find deeply faithful, god-fearing men and women dying and in pain. Their prayers accomplish nothing other than to provide a very, very meagre placebo effect. Jesus didn't promise a mild placebo effect -- he promised MIRACLE CURES. He promised that you could literally move mountains by faith alone.
Deep down, everyone knows that prayer is bullshit. The bible says that prayer works, so the bible is bullshit. And if Jesus really lived and really said these things, then he was a liar, and was completely full of shit. Christians are aware that the bible says this, and that their brethren do NOT have their prayers answered. For example, hundreds of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses -- who are the most true and faithful Christians on Earth -- died in the Nazi concentration camps. Their prayers for God's help fell on deaf or absent ears. Christians know this, and yet delude themselves about the power of prayer and the validity of the bible anyway. That makes them dimwitted retards that are too stupid to be entrusted to leave their homes, let alone to have jobs and driver's license and guns.
Sorry, Christianity doesn't get a pass anymore than paganism, astrology, crystal-healing, or any of the other ridiculous moronic fantasies that people refuse to let die.
It's funny... other Canadians I know who have visited the UK come back with most, if not all, of the following:
A leprachaun-accent (I'm totally not kidding, I swear you've NEVER heard ANYTHING like it).
A taste for botox taken orally (aka: British pub food...)
A godlike alcohol-tolerance.
In any case, Britain really does have some kind of a very different culture regarding alcohol. And that's speaking as a Canadian, a citizen of a country that's already pretty serious about its boozing (there are few things we love more than watching a visiting American tourist drink four Canadian beers and start puking their guts out... other than watching them weep when they discover how shitty the conversion rate from the US dollar is these days...)
If the states don't get their highway money, can they stop the feds from getting their income tax money?
This is an incredibly stupid way to run a government. If you have a multilevel administration, each level should be able to count on its funding. States/provinces/cities/whatever should KNOW that they'll have their allotted funding, PERIOD. If the feds feel that their law is SO important that they will override the ability of the state/province/city/whatever, the alternative should be having the leader of that subordinate body arrested and shot. IE: if Maine doesn't want the mandate ID cards, the governor of Maine gets a bullet to the head in a small dark cell somewhere in Washington DC, and gets replaced with someone who knows their place.
If the law isn't important enough to murder the governor and state legislature over, it's not important enough for the feds to fuck with at all. At least in the Republican system... I suppose if the US were to revert to being a constitutional monarchy or something, it would be a different case entirely.
When the population of the United States was more "God fearing," it was a superb place to live.
.... I'm absolutely stunned that anyone would say something so incredibly stupid, inane, and deeply deluded.
When America was "god fearing", black people were lynched, homosexuals could be murdered without reprisal, spousal abuse was accepted as a matter of course, innocent people were burned as witches, slavery was tolerated, there was a civil war, women who were raped and became pregnant as a result were ostracized DESPITE HAVING DONE NOTHING WRONG, single mothers were the most reviled form of live on the entire planet, etc.
Sorry, no sale. Everything in the past was ghastly and horrible. A small minority lived lives of comfort, but most people suffered tremendously. Today, thanks to the elimination of fairy tales from the public consciousness, millions and millions of people have rights and freedoms that they would have been denied in any previous age. Millions of people get treated with basic Human dignity, who would been have treated like lepers in the age of Christianity and the hate-mongering that has ALWAYS (without exception) accompanied it.
Today, we don't have murderous inquisitions, we don't have witch burnings, homosexuals aren't murdered (other than in the ultra-religious south), blacks aren't hung for vaguely resembling a mistranslation of some gibberish in the book Genesis, single mothers receive at least a bit of support from the community (atheists, unlike Christians, believe that children deserve to live no matter who their parents are or aren't; before you disagree, note that the bible is VERY clear that children are damned for seven generations if their parents sin, and deserve to die if they are bastards; there isn't any ambiguity in the old testament on the subject at all).
To quote a wiseman of the modern age: "People laughed at David Koresh for claiming to be the second coming of Christ. I laugh at Christians for worshipping the first coming of David Koresh." -- NegativePositive.
Except that the people that discover things that saves lives actually DO get nothing more than a "hey thanks", and an off-chance of not being laid-off. The people that are already rich, and didn't do jack-shit other than harassing the scientists and techs, ultimately get all the rewards. The only real exceptions are the odd Nobel prize or having one's name appear in the field's textbooks.
You know, nine times out of time, I'll back the free, democratic option. Free software, free art, free elections, etc.
But there is one real world form of government that beats democracy, hands down -- the "enlightened dictatorship" (AKA, the meritocracy). Science is one of the few arenas where such a thing has been achieved, for the simple reason that there is no real way to achieve power and respect in the scientific community without producing real results that are genuinely meaningful. And that's what peer reviewed journals are all about.
Granted, that system is expensive and not particularly fair. But it gets results in a big way. It evades most of the issues that come up when committees attempt to achieve consensus, because the folk at the top -- who actually know what they hell they're talking about -- get to rule with an iron hand. That's something that open, democratic systems can't match. That's why China's economy is spiralling upwards out of control while America's economy is spiralling downwards out of control: an enlightened dictatorship beats a democracy every time.
... it's just that you can't guarantee that a dictatorship will stay enlightened. Which is where democracy shows its true colours. Open, free, democratic systems can correct themselves, whereas when dictatorships go bad, they tend to die and take their neighbours out with them.
(feel free to disregard this post entirely, informed as it was by two litres of wine and a sizeable quantity of toxic, recreational, and semi-legal alkaloids...)
It seems like the big problem with string theory is more that it's too far out ahead of experimntal physics. By contrast, when the standard model surged ahead of experimental physics, it provided clear avenues for new experiments to make up the gap. String theory is too far ahead for those experiments to be apparent. It's like we need some model that fits in-between, providing a program of experiments and testable predictions that will allow improved models, new instruments, and more new experiments.
String theory may turn out to be crap, or it may turn out to be prescient. But until experimental physics makes a few more strides forwards, trying to say one way or the other seems to be fruitless. Of course, it's worth continuing with string theory, if only for the advances it has brought in mathematics and for the lessons it may teach us about what a unified field theory has to be. Every unified field theory that fails teaches us one more way to not construct a theory. And were string theory to fail, I think physicists would probably be able to glean a great deal of insight from how it failed.
I'm amazed that you're so goddam fucking stupid that you would bring up the Wikipedia article about Communism to support your point... which includes, among other things, this notable quotes:
"The usage of the terms "communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917".
9... 10... ding! The singular definition of the word "communism" is out for the count. "Communism" is as subject to change as any other word in the english language. I like the clarity of this statement, the implication that "communism" is just a noise that comes out of people's mouths and that usage is what ultimately matters.
You ought to read the whole article. It's good. Later on it explicitly discusses the different usages of the word communism, with respect to the group of political theories and the family of political parties and systems of real-world government. The authors seem rather sure that you can talk about Communism and be referring to Stalinist governments, states, and ideologies.
It's interesting that you can't get past "definitions". I'm not sure why you think that common usage is soooo deplorable and monstrous, and can never be considered a reasonable way for anyone to communicate. It makes me wonder how you have conversations with anyone that isn't a political scientist. Do you spend every moment in a state of hopeless confusion, as you try to reconcile your strict classical definitions of words with the ways in which those words are being used by those around you? Do you stop and lecture people when they use the word communism in the common way rather than the traditional way? Or do you, deep down, understand exactly what people mean?
I fully intend to find a political scientist prof at school on Monday and see if he or she agrees that Communism is, in the common usage (ie: the English language as it is actually spoken by 99.5% of English speaking people), generally synonymous with soviet-style governance. I think you know what the prof will say...
Oh, and you're calling people "commoners" now? Are you royalty now? Landed nobility? That is... wow. And I'm supposedly pretentious for using the word "vernacular".
Yeah, this is so true. It's the same with child abuse -- sooner or later, the kid has to take responsibility and fight back against his or her parents. Relying on the police to stop child abuse just makes kids weak.
Let's start arming kids -- as soon as they start kindergarten, they receive a revolver and are trained to use it. Presto -- bullying and child abuse are a thing of the past.
...
You know that teasing and bullying aren't the same thing, right? In much the same way that spanking your child is different than beating him with a lead pipe, or that flirting with the cute girl at the office is different than dragging her into the forest and raping her.
I'd be surprised if you'd say this if we were talking about adults abusing children, or husbands abusing wives. Abuse is abuse -- it doesn't matter whether it's adults mistreating each other at work, playground bullies, or mommy coming home drunk and beating her son with leather belt for an hour every night. It has exactly the same affect, and the victim is just as deserving of protection and support. This is particularly true for children, who generally lack any means whatsoever of defending themselves.
Incidentally, do you know what happens if you ignore the people making fun of you in elementary school? They up the stakes -- spitting in your hair, destroying your belongings, physical assaults after school, framing you for vandalism... I'm guessing that you were never really picked on. You can always spot the guy that wasn't picked on, because he thinks the "we all had it just as bad". Unless you were terrified of leaving your house and contemplating suicide because on non-stop harassment, you don't know shit. You're just as stupid and clueless as people that say that an abused wife should "just leave" -- with her two children, numerous injuries, and no income, in a society that despises single mothers above all other forms of life... THAT'LL work.
People like you are why bullying still exists. This kind of stubborn refusal to accept that there is a problem, just because YOU didn't experience it personally, is ultimately at the root of most social injustices that exist in western society. People who have never had a mental illness think that depression is just "the blues", and people should just "get over it". People who haven't suffered a severe trauma usually think that post-traumatic-stress-disorder is just "nerves". And people who have never been bullied think that bullying is the same thing as the friendly teasing that everyone experiences. Sorry, it just ain't the case.
Seriously man, fuck you. I can't even imagine the kind of mentality that goes into such sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others.
You can quit your job. Can kids quit their life? (Well, they CAN, and more than a few DO, but it isn't really an optimal solution).
Most kids have no choice over where they live, what school they go to, what classes they are in, or anything like that. They have NO choice. They are on about the same level as prisoners. Except that in prison, the jailers are responsible for your safety. Schools wont even go that far -- they'll use the force of the state to compel children to attend, and then do nothing to protect them while they are there. If a prisoner is abused by the other inmates, they get moved to a separate part of the prison for protection. If a child is abused by the other students, most teachers just ignore it.
Going back to your stupid, stupid analogy, keep in mind that if your coworker assaults you, you can press charges. If he verbally harasses you, the company's harassment policy provides you with recourse. As an adult, you have access to lawyers, workers' rights groups, the human resources department of your organization, etc. What do kids have? Teachers that don't give a shit.
The answer is so simple, and once again the Yanks are showing us the way: every kid needs to have a gun. After all, children have just as much right to defend themselves as adults, and significantly more NEED to defend themselves. How many kids are going to be brave enough to bully someone that can shoot them in the face and claim self-defense? Watch child-abduction evaporate overnight (this fits in well with my idea of giving each child a collar with a high-explosive charge in it).
Guns tamed the wild west, and they can do the same for schools. Let's reissue the "Peacemaker" as the "BullyKiller".
(This content is best consumed with a glass of water and a healthy sense of humour).
Funny how my "lay" understanding EXACTLY matches the expert understanding of published linguistics scholars... while your (supposedly) expert opinion doesn't really seem to match anything whatsoever. One linguistics reference supporting your position... just one. Is that too much for me to ask?
== Final score ==
Team A (Mark, dictionaries, linguistics experts, historians, and 99.9% of all Humans): 1.
Team B (Mr Naz and a handful of other philosophy majors): 0.
Does it hurt to be on the side that has absolutely nothing upon which to base it's argument? I bet you'd make a outstanding religious zealot, or a devoted critic of evolutionary theory.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why libertarians are generally considered the biggest dipshits in all of western politics (although anarchists and communists are tied for a VERY close second).
Israeli archaeologists actually go out and look for the remnants and signs of the events that occurred in the bible. Guess what? There's no evidence for any of them. Most archaeologists who've studied the middle east are in agreement that there was no Hebrew monarchy, and that the ancient Jews got started not as nomads but as a cult in an already settled region. That's what the real-world research has concluded. The bible is as reliable as greek mythology, norse mythology, egyptian mythology, or Grimm's Fairytales. Archaeological evidence is substantially better, being based, you know, on observable facts. Not unlike the observable fact that the amputated limbs of truly holy, faithful men are just as impossible to regrow as the limbs of sinners, despite any amount of prayer whatsoever.
Schizophrenia going away isn't particularly unusual. It's an unpredictable, transient disorder. Metastasized tumours the size of grapefruits (including the tumours of atheists) will occasionally go away spontaneously. Conversely, if your prayer group were to pray for a child's amputated arm to grow back, nothing would happen. Schizophrenia clears up coincidentally all the time. Limbs never do (which makes them the ideal test of the power of prayer). Most people with schizophrenia don't recover, even with prayer. I had three entire congregatons at three very different Christian churches praying for me, plus my entire extended family praying for me to this very day. It has never done a single bit of good. If anything, the false hope it provided made me wait for things to improve, rather than taking actionl The only thing that has ever helped was turning my back on God and putting my life into MY hands, putting faith in MYSELF, turning to my OWN skills and abilities for salvation. When you finally say "Fuck God" and start living for this life, you can actually accomplish things in the world; you can get out there and help yourself and those around you.
Read that website I linked: This page in particular will make it very clear to you. It explains about coincidences in clear, unambiguous language that even a theist can understand, should they be willing to engage in some basic reasoning.
Try not to sound like such a tool... Ron Paul may be great, but he's in the Republican party -- and the Republican party only runs cronyistic fascists nowadays. They wont run him precisely BECAUSE he might actually even pay lip-service to the constitution. The constitution is BAD for politicians, especially presidents. Iraq is FANTASTIC for politicians, especially presidents.
Hillary is a reactionary fear-driven manipulator, but at least she isn't in the grips an organization as horrible as the GOP. The GOP basically guarantee that the Republican, as a party, can neve stand for anything more than fascism, cronyism, the police-state, and the economics of perpetual warfare.
The mistake is in assuming that they are your only two choices. Any vote for the two main parties is a vote that was not only wasted, but a vote that was a detriment to freedom itself.
When are the libertarians going to buck the Republicans for real, and get out on their own? The GOP ARE the Republicans now. The Republicans are irrevocably a big-government, police-state, perpetual-warfare party now. They are the blackshirts. And as long as the libertarians keep lending their delusional support to the GOP, every ideal that libertarians stand for will be trampled and destroyed.
Don't get me wrong: I despise libertarians (not just their ideas -- the people as well; I'm bitter like that :) ) and I think they're living in a deranged fantasy world where people get along by magic and things get done because divine intervention coordinates peoples' efforts ... but at least they don't go around trying to justify Fascism. That's a marked improvement over the current political debate in America. One side promoting a vision of a theocratic police state, the other side trying to convince people that they share that vision. What the hell!
As an aside, you do know that Americans already pay, through the government, nearly 70% of what Canadians do, for Health care? And for what? If anything, a universal healthcare system (not necessarily a single-payor system like ours, but SOMETHING) would provide vastly better value for your tax dollars. As it stands, Americans are paying that 70% for basically nothing. It's not hard to see why the universal healthcare movement in the US is gaining momentum -- especially when "conservatives" aren't willing to reclaim that money by cancelling existing national healhcare programs. That said, of course, it's not really the federal government's business... Even in Canada, the provinces are the ones in charge of the healthcare program. The Federal government just mandates that such programs have to be in place, as well as providing a certain amount of the funding.
You'll probably start caring a lot more about public healthcare when there's a major outbreak of TB in your city and your kids get sick ... just because the low income families that live on the other side of town can't afford antibiotics, people with HIV can't get their medications and act as reservoirs for TB to fester and become more virulent, there are no programs to get junkies (another major TB reservoir) off the street, etcetera. Diseases affect everyone. For that matter, worker productivity affects everyone -- healthy people contribute more to a strong economy than low taxes do. There are very good economic reasons to get behind universal healthcare of one kind or another. And until employers start giving full health-benefits to their part-time and contract workers, universal healthcare is the only way that low-income families will ever have access to a reasonable level of medical care.
All that said, you still get a high-five for not getting behind the Blackshirts. Good job. I'd rather vote Libertarian than Republican or Democrat (thankfully, all three of the major Canadian political parties are vastly superior to either of them).
Hillary is part of the Democrat's old way -- the social-democracy way. They need to reinvent themselves as a proper neoliberal party, like the other modern centre-left parties that the rest of the western world is enjoying. People have a great deal of lingering suspicion about social-democracy, but neoliberalism does extraordinarily well. Neoliberalism can even be mixed with a touch of social-welfare policy, if that should be what the people want -- but it keeps the focus on economic performance, as well as personal and organizational freedom. And that's what a liberal movement should really be about.
I think he has a much better chance than Hillary. For every good intention Ms. Clinton has, she has five stupid, shortsighted, fear-based intentions. For every compassionate stance she has, like support for universal healthcare or improved privacy legislation, she has a dozen stances involving banning things that are awesome -- like hookers, videogames, drugs, profanity and sex on TV (god forbid television resembles real life...). Did She vote against the DMCA? Against the PATRIOT act? Against any of the other monstrous pieces of legislation that make life shitty for the Americans? Hillary Clinton is a reactionary, fear-based legislator, so her good heart doesn't mean a thing. Good people are just as horrible and destructive as evil people when they are in the grips of fear and irrationality.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to be a fiery and charismatic public speaker that has yet to endorse any notably retarded ideas. In any other age, that would make him the god-emperor of a continent-spanning empire, until he died of malaria or typhus or something. In this age, it ought to at least get him a serious run at the presidency of the world's ... well, let's just call it the world's most flamboyant democracy.
This would be a followed by comments along the following lines:
Then she'd throw some free condoms and blister-packs of amphetamines into the crowd, slug back some Jack Daniels, and walk off-stage grinning like a crack-addict. Reporters would later note that she was wearing a "Plan C" shirt.
* Hey, I just said exactly those things. Maybe I should run -- I know I'd vote for me. It's a shame Americans are too wimpy to elect a foreigner that hates their country and would sell their childrens' organs to zoos for meat...
A man needs choices. The opportunity to take a letter of Marquee and do some plundering of foreign shipping is just what we need to get some gumption back into the young men. Wouldn't be no metrosexual flouncery goin' on if the kids learned to wear a pouffy white shirt and swing a cutlass.
Vote Captain SkullQuaff in '08!
Patience man, patience. We're advancing at a fantastic rate, when you get right down to it. Space is an incredibly challenging place to travel to; if private companies are putting satellites into LEO within ten years and manned craft into LEO in twenty, that will be a FANTASTIC accomplishment.
Besides, what else are rich suckers going to spend their money on? Hummer-Limousines? Helicopter rides? Chartered cruises? Condor-egg omelettes? Nigerian babies? White Rhino testes? Siberian albino tiger axillary lymph nodes served over ground orphan bones? Hunting the world's least dangerous prey -- humans? Buying entire American states to convert into their future burial plots? Dredging the Marianas trench for tourist pennies? Tossing Star Trek fans into volcanoes? Having Pythagoras cloned and then forced to go-go dance for Pesos?
These people are desperate. If they don't find some creative ways to dispose of their income, they might end up having to do something useful or socially positive with it. Have some fucking compassion, man. We can't let it come to that. Branson is saving them.
As for God being my servant? Of course not. But there are Christians in the world who do follow the commandments, who do believe in Jesus with all their hearts, and who are veritable paragons of faith. Their prayers go just as unanswered as mine did. NO prayers get answered, except in so far as is consistent with random chance. Prayer doesn't pass the muster of even the weakest statistical tests. You're better off betting on horse races. I'd say that pretty much shuts the book on Christianity.
Only a fool respects all other points of view. Many points of view aren't deserving of respect. For example, believing in astrology (which is provably wrong), believing in crystal healing (also provably wrong), believing in the power of prayer (provably wrong, which simultaneously disproves the word of the bible completely), the mythology of the bible (there was provably no flood, no exodus, no wandering the desert, no series of wars to conquer Israel, and no king David).
You might think this is just random, undirected crankiness, but this really is something that people have looked into and researched extensively. Consider even this site: Why Wont God Heal Amputees. The bible doesn't say that prayer will make you go to heaven, it says that the prayers of the faithful will HEAL THE FUCKING SICK. Yet the sick are unhealed.
There isn't a single example in all of Human history of ANYONE -- no matter how faithfully they or their family or their church prayed -- regrowing an amputated limb. Ever. Therefore, the bible lied, Jesus lied, Christianity is a false religion. QED.
A simple test: the bible says, and I quote,
"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." -- Matthew 7:7,
"For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." -- Matthew 17:20,
"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." -- Mark 11:24,
"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it." -- John 14:12-14,
"Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." -- Matthew 18:19,
"And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." -- James 5:15-16.
And yet, you can go to any hospital in the western world and find deeply faithful, god-fearing men and women dying and in pain. Their prayers accomplish nothing other than to provide a very, very meagre placebo effect. Jesus didn't promise a mild placebo effect -- he promised MIRACLE CURES. He promised that you could literally move mountains by faith alone.
Deep down, everyone knows that prayer is bullshit. The bible says that prayer works, so the bible is bullshit. And if Jesus really lived and really said these things, then he was a liar, and was completely full of shit. Christians are aware that the bible says this, and that their brethren do NOT have their prayers answered. For example, hundreds of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses -- who are the most true and faithful Christians on Earth -- died in the Nazi concentration camps. Their prayers for God's help fell on deaf or absent ears. Christians know this, and yet delude themselves about the power of prayer and the validity of the bible anyway. That makes them dimwitted retards that are too stupid to be entrusted to leave their homes, let alone to have jobs and driver's license and guns.
Sorry, Christianity doesn't get a pass anymore than paganism, astrology, crystal-healing, or any of the other ridiculous moronic fantasies that people refuse to let die.
In any case, Britain really does have some kind of a very different culture regarding alcohol. And that's speaking as a Canadian, a citizen of a country that's already pretty serious about its boozing (there are few things we love more than watching a visiting American tourist drink four Canadian beers and start puking their guts out ... other than watching them weep when they discover how shitty the conversion rate from the US dollar is these days...)
This is an incredibly stupid way to run a government. If you have a multilevel administration, each level should be able to count on its funding. States/provinces/cities/whatever should KNOW that they'll have their allotted funding, PERIOD. If the feds feel that their law is SO important that they will override the ability of the state/province/city/whatever, the alternative should be having the leader of that subordinate body arrested and shot. IE: if Maine doesn't want the mandate ID cards, the governor of Maine gets a bullet to the head in a small dark cell somewhere in Washington DC, and gets replaced with someone who knows their place.
If the law isn't important enough to murder the governor and state legislature over, it's not important enough for the feds to fuck with at all. At least in the Republican system ... I suppose if the US were to revert to being a constitutional monarchy or something, it would be a different case entirely.
When America was "god fearing", black people were lynched, homosexuals could be murdered without reprisal, spousal abuse was accepted as a matter of course, innocent people were burned as witches, slavery was tolerated, there was a civil war, women who were raped and became pregnant as a result were ostracized DESPITE HAVING DONE NOTHING WRONG, single mothers were the most reviled form of live on the entire planet, etc.
Sorry, no sale. Everything in the past was ghastly and horrible. A small minority lived lives of comfort, but most people suffered tremendously. Today, thanks to the elimination of fairy tales from the public consciousness, millions and millions of people have rights and freedoms that they would have been denied in any previous age. Millions of people get treated with basic Human dignity, who would been have treated like lepers in the age of Christianity and the hate-mongering that has ALWAYS (without exception) accompanied it.
Today, we don't have murderous inquisitions, we don't have witch burnings, homosexuals aren't murdered (other than in the ultra-religious south), blacks aren't hung for vaguely resembling a mistranslation of some gibberish in the book Genesis, single mothers receive at least a bit of support from the community (atheists, unlike Christians, believe that children deserve to live no matter who their parents are or aren't; before you disagree, note that the bible is VERY clear that children are damned for seven generations if their parents sin, and deserve to die if they are bastards; there isn't any ambiguity in the old testament on the subject at all).
To quote a wiseman of the modern age:
"People laughed at David Koresh for claiming to be the second coming of Christ. I laugh at Christians for worshipping the first coming of David Koresh." -- NegativePositive.
Except that the people that discover things that saves lives actually DO get nothing more than a "hey thanks", and an off-chance of not being laid-off. The people that are already rich, and didn't do jack-shit other than harassing the scientists and techs, ultimately get all the rewards. The only real exceptions are the odd Nobel prize or having one's name appear in the field's textbooks.
But there is one real world form of government that beats democracy, hands down -- the "enlightened dictatorship" (AKA, the meritocracy). Science is one of the few arenas where such a thing has been achieved, for the simple reason that there is no real way to achieve power and respect in the scientific community without producing real results that are genuinely meaningful. And that's what peer reviewed journals are all about.
Granted, that system is expensive and not particularly fair. But it gets results in a big way. It evades most of the issues that come up when committees attempt to achieve consensus, because the folk at the top -- who actually know what they hell they're talking about -- get to rule with an iron hand. That's something that open, democratic systems can't match. That's why China's economy is spiralling upwards out of control while America's economy is spiralling downwards out of control: an enlightened dictatorship beats a democracy every time.
(feel free to disregard this post entirely, informed as it was by two litres of wine and a sizeable quantity of toxic, recreational, and semi-legal alkaloids...)
String theory may turn out to be crap, or it may turn out to be prescient. But until experimental physics makes a few more strides forwards, trying to say one way or the other seems to be fruitless. Of course, it's worth continuing with string theory, if only for the advances it has brought in mathematics and for the lessons it may teach us about what a unified field theory has to be. Every unified field theory that fails teaches us one more way to not construct a theory. And were string theory to fail, I think physicists would probably be able to glean a great deal of insight from how it failed.
"The usage of the terms "communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917".
9... 10... ding! The singular definition of the word "communism" is out for the count. "Communism" is as subject to change as any other word in the english language. I like the clarity of this statement, the implication that "communism" is just a noise that comes out of people's mouths and that usage is what ultimately matters.
You ought to read the whole article. It's good. Later on it explicitly discusses the different usages of the word communism, with respect to the group of political theories and the family of political parties and systems of real-world government. The authors seem rather sure that you can talk about Communism and be referring to Stalinist governments, states, and ideologies.
It's interesting that you can't get past "definitions". I'm not sure why you think that common usage is soooo deplorable and monstrous, and can never be considered a reasonable way for anyone to communicate. It makes me wonder how you have conversations with anyone that isn't a political scientist. Do you spend every moment in a state of hopeless confusion, as you try to reconcile your strict classical definitions of words with the ways in which those words are being used by those around you? Do you stop and lecture people when they use the word communism in the common way rather than the traditional way? Or do you, deep down, understand exactly what people mean?
I fully intend to find a political scientist prof at school on Monday and see if he or she agrees that Communism is, in the common usage (ie: the English language as it is actually spoken by 99.5% of English speaking people), generally synonymous with soviet-style governance. I think you know what the prof will say...
Oh, and you're calling people "commoners" now? Are you royalty now? Landed nobility? That is ... wow. And I'm supposedly pretentious for using the word "vernacular".
Let's start arming kids -- as soon as they start kindergarten, they receive a revolver and are trained to use it. Presto -- bullying and child abuse are a thing of the past.
You know that teasing and bullying aren't the same thing, right? In much the same way that spanking your child is different than beating him with a lead pipe, or that flirting with the cute girl at the office is different than dragging her into the forest and raping her.
I'd be surprised if you'd say this if we were talking about adults abusing children, or husbands abusing wives. Abuse is abuse -- it doesn't matter whether it's adults mistreating each other at work, playground bullies, or mommy coming home drunk and beating her son with leather belt for an hour every night. It has exactly the same affect, and the victim is just as deserving of protection and support. This is particularly true for children, who generally lack any means whatsoever of defending themselves.
Incidentally, do you know what happens if you ignore the people making fun of you in elementary school? They up the stakes -- spitting in your hair, destroying your belongings, physical assaults after school, framing you for vandalism ... I'm guessing that you were never really picked on. You can always spot the guy that wasn't picked on, because he thinks the "we all had it just as bad". Unless you were terrified of leaving your house and contemplating suicide because on non-stop harassment, you don't know shit. You're just as stupid and clueless as people that say that an abused wife should "just leave" -- with her two children, numerous injuries, and no income, in a society that despises single mothers above all other forms of life ... THAT'LL work.
People like you are why bullying still exists. This kind of stubborn refusal to accept that there is a problem, just because YOU didn't experience it personally, is ultimately at the root of most social injustices that exist in western society. People who have never had a mental illness think that depression is just "the blues", and people should just "get over it". People who haven't suffered a severe trauma usually think that post-traumatic-stress-disorder is just "nerves". And people who have never been bullied think that bullying is the same thing as the friendly teasing that everyone experiences. Sorry, it just ain't the case.
Seriously man, fuck you. I can't even imagine the kind of mentality that goes into such sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others.
Most kids have no choice over where they live, what school they go to, what classes they are in, or anything like that. They have NO choice. They are on about the same level as prisoners. Except that in prison, the jailers are responsible for your safety. Schools wont even go that far -- they'll use the force of the state to compel children to attend, and then do nothing to protect them while they are there. If a prisoner is abused by the other inmates, they get moved to a separate part of the prison for protection. If a child is abused by the other students, most teachers just ignore it.
Going back to your stupid, stupid analogy, keep in mind that if your coworker assaults you, you can press charges. If he verbally harasses you, the company's harassment policy provides you with recourse. As an adult, you have access to lawyers, workers' rights groups, the human resources department of your organization, etc. What do kids have? Teachers that don't give a shit.
Guns tamed the wild west, and they can do the same for schools. Let's reissue the "Peacemaker" as the "BullyKiller".
(This content is best consumed with a glass of water and a healthy sense of humour).
Funny how my "lay" understanding EXACTLY matches the expert understanding of published linguistics scholars... while your (supposedly) expert opinion doesn't really seem to match anything whatsoever. One linguistics reference supporting your position ... just one. Is that too much for me to ask?
== Final score ==
Team A (Mark, dictionaries, linguistics experts, historians, and 99.9% of all Humans): 1.
Team B (Mr Naz and a handful of other philosophy majors): 0.
Does it hurt to be on the side that has absolutely nothing upon which to base it's argument? I bet you'd make a outstanding religious zealot, or a devoted critic of evolutionary theory.