Glad you brought that historical point up. It's nice to see someone else who has some grasp that there is something called "history" and that in certain ways, things were different back then.
So a little while back I reread the Communist Manifesto, including the various prefaces I never read before, and when after Marx's death Engels wrote the preface to the 1890 English edition, he wrote...now wait, do you have a job, work for a living? or do you live, effort-free, upon the dividends of your or your parents's and grandparents's capital investments? If the latter, hang up now, I'm not talking to you, parasite; if the former, then this, brother, is what Marxism has done, historically, for you:
"...But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as _one_ army, under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
"If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!"
So, in the names of decency and gratitude, won't you please say "thank you" to the shade of old Uncle Karl? For having untightened somewhat the clamps and shackles of your wage-slavery, so that they don't bind so severely, or chafe so harshly, that after your working day you have no strength left to think straight.
Off-the-shelf commercial GPS does elevations too. Now that they've taken the dithering off the satellite signal, you can get high-accuracy elevations, not just to the degree needed to keep airplanes off the sides of mountains, but to land surveyor's accuracies, nice and fast.
My big fear is that this airplane guidance system seems to be distributed, so if the GPS system in one plane goes on the fritz, then all the other planes will think that one plane isn't where it is; you can see the danger in that.
What the Hell! Try it, it's new and new is good. Sometimes. And remember, if you were a good technician up till now, you will still be a good technician later, so if you decide that you really don't have the gift for management and you don't like your new job at all any more, you still have that successful tech career to fall back on. Keep in mind that hi-tech types are, at least these days, in consistent high demand. As far as the prestige angle goes ("I can't step down from management to production, everyone will think I'm sinking!") all I can reply is, "Why should you care more about what other people think than about how satisfied you are with your life?"
The worst mistake you could make, then, in that regard, is if your company gives you a big raise, and you decide to go spend it all right away - i.e. you rush out and buy a new expensive house, car, etc. that you couldn't afford to keep up on your old salary. Do that and you'll find you have painted yourself into a corner, where you can't go back to your old position. So if you do get that big raise, my suggestion would be, at least for the first couple of years, to keep your living expenses where they are at now and invest the difference into savings.
Physics courses are very nice, but have you ever personally actually measured the width of the sun, or timed it as it marched across a fixed telescope's crosshairs? I've measured the angular width of the sun several times with a surveyor's transit (it's about a two minutes of time, or 32 minutes of angle) and it does not change from midday to sunset. Neither does the image of the moon widen as it nears the horizon. That either one seems bigger to your eye at sunset is only an optical illusion.
If you don't trust that statement, which after all is sound thinking - really, what would you read off a weblog that you'd believe uncritically? - then get hold of a transit and sun filter, or for cheap, get sunglasses, two sticks and a watch with a second hand, and perform the experiment yourself.
It looks like a big round head with two eyes, a little too close set, with furry eyebrows, those pointed up at the ends and down at the middle (which indicates a squinting or frowning or cynical cast of face). You also see the diagonal wrinkles on the forehead. Immediately below the eyes is the tip of the nose. Because the sun is frowning so, the lips are pale and tightly compressed together, and somewhat askew; the right side is up and the left side is down, as if to ask sarcastically "What the Hell are you going to do about it?!" And on the right cheek is the scar he got back when he was a junior in high school, in that fight in the parking lot of the pizza parlor.
Don't know if he ever got a degree, but Philip Dick was a clerk in a classical record store, and (allegedly) he liked drugs a lot, and he got divorced several times, which background variously informed his extensive and inimitable body of work.
The guy who wrote the article is talking out of his ass. Like Colonel Klink from Hogan's Hero, he "knowz abzolutely nuttzing."
It is unforgivable that you are not aware it is Sergeant Schultz, not Colonel Klink, who knows "abzolutely nuttzing."
To keep in tone with a few of the other more rabid comments I've read under this article, I shall now assert, (don't take it personally, I don't really mean any of it, it just seems to be de rigueur here)(what's with you Mac guys anyway? you don't see Linux people getting all fanatical like that over little technical details) that this lapse proves you have no right to post anymore anywhere, to speak publicly, to procreate with those idiot's genes of yours, even to breathe the valuable air any more, etc., etc.
Yeah right, grammar, "OK," but Apple's ad guys, to Hell with them anyway! I saw this, they had the gall to illustrate an store ad for their merchandise, with a picture of Mohandas Gandhi, and that is not OK, not OK at all. Did Apple's advertising agency think, "Gandhi's safe in his grave and unable to sue and we're running out of celebrities, so let him spin there," do these people have no sense of decency at all?
Just wondering, why would you change a perfectly good, nice-sounding, intrinsically meaningful and well-known name like "metalab" to "iBiblio," which you can't confidently pronounce nor spell, which doesn't scan either, and on top of everything else has one of those annoying embedded caps?
See, a lot of people already know about the justly famous "metalab," they know its history and reputation. But if you go up to those same people and say, "Hey, what about that iBiblio?" they're apt to think it's yet another new e-business scam, or another on-line bookstore, or one of those loathsome schemes to sell crippled electronic documents with some kind of cryptographic built-in expiration or copyright protection. After having spent a decade making "metalab" into one of the most respected site names on the web, why would they toss away their good name for a new one?
I hope none of the metalab, er I mean "iBiblio" staff, will be offended by this only mildly critical observation. I've downloaded plenty of stuff from their site and I really appreciate their efforts, and wish them the best of luck in the future, embedded cap and all.
That ruins it. The Prisoner was so great because you kept on asking Who is Number One!? and they kept on saying You are number Six! so you kept on hanging on hoping to find out but now you've told and the secret's out and there's no need to wonder anymore.
It's not only theoretically possible for the artist to owe the studio money after a profitable album, it happens all the time. Records go platinum, and the artist goes bankrupt. So, yeah, Universal ought to owe all their artists a proportional chunk of that money...
Actually when Universal loses this suit their various slave-artists will get a computer printed letter in the mail informing them of the good news that that they owe the record company somewhat less than they did the previous day. Sort of a "win-win" situation.
i bought a wooden whistle
but it wooden whistle
so i bought a steel whistle
and it steel wooden whistle.
thank you.
OK, so how is this relevant to "library internet filtering"? I'm not saying that it is irrelevant, far be it from me to be so judgmental especially of a poet, I actually just want to hear your specific explanation, or someone's, of how it is. Come on, you can do it! Entertain me, I insist!
There is, when ya consider it, that definite link there in the frustrated struggle for self expression your sad song so plaintively sung, and "steel" suggests the substance of that cage (defective, leaky! impotent! yet which deforms like the Sung woman's foot-bindings...) in which the spirit of information, which wants so to be free, instead flutters away its sad imprisonment...
no wait the other way it's the controlled lockstep of the air, the desired, managed, mechanical industrial cyclical throb of the sequential compression and rarefaction of air, that's the thing the overmastering would-be whistleblower from above, maybe that's what he wants, but the law of chaos, the force of independence, ensures that that is the one thing he God damn well won't get! No, first cage us in your tedious rules and passwords, we hax0r em you betcha! then next you pushy lusers fortify your rules with iron laws, still no way you sorryass "leaders" that you'll impell us to sing your tune for you, basta!
...pure art. Here's that wonderful New Testament reference to stoning re adultery.
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world...
There is no perfect filtering system, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to develop one that is workable.
Maybe not, neither does it mean we should bother to use internet filtering at all, any more than I should attach anti-aircraft missiles to my car, "just in case."
Anyway, Chrissake, if you yourself can put up with slashdot enough to actually post here, with that fucking goatse.cx picture popping up all the time, then how can you expect us to take you seriously when you whine over a mere porno repeating web page? Next you'll be insisting on installing some kind of expensive and stupid atomic-powered somethingware (emits ghostly blue light, occasionally buzzes and snaps like a Georgia skeeter zapper) down at the city park because this one time once you happened to step in some dog shit.
Must be nice to have had a parent who would talk to you about stuff like that or anything for that matter. I first learned about the Second and First World Wars, and incidentally a few other real important facts my Dad-n-Mom couldn't be bothered to tell me about, off the shelves of the Clearwater, Florida and Dunedin, Florida public libraries.
No Christian will ever tell you that the human body, God's creation, is inheritly sinful. We're not talking about tasteful portrayals of the human body, we're talking about hardcore porn. Big difference.
You are wrong. Go find you some pictures by an art photgrapher named Jock Sturges. Books of his work are available in book stores, sometimes, in some locales. He does nudes. His photos are very good, very beautiful, far from indecent or prurient; by comparison, Milo's Venus and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are, relatively speaking, practically lewd. If you find Sturges's photos pornographic then clearly you are insane.
Next sniff around the net in a search engine and check out how the so-called "christian" right has relentlessly hounded this guy over those books of photos for the last decade or so.
If you want to defend Christianity, by telling me that the "christian" right of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon's American Family Association does not in any comprehensible way represent anything which any sensible reader of the New Testament can label "Christianity," then I suppose I can, with certain reservations, accept that argument.
A famously creative speller, you mean. An inspiration to us all; in that sense like Shakespeare, who even occasionally mis-spelled (? but wouldn't he be the authority?) his own name as "Shaxpere." You owe it to yourself to violate at least one law a day. I mean, whose language is it, theirs or yours?
Yeah, a snake-ball of ten million laws and another million new ones expected by the end of the year, and yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Obviously the plan is, a fearful proletariat, each individual subject to arbitrary arrest from any direction at any given moment, will be a docile and productive one. Somehow I doubt this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind.
Sweet Skepticism of the Heart --
That knows -- and does not know --
And tosses like a Fleet of Balm --
Affronted by the snow --
Invites and then retards the Truth
Lest Certainty be sere
Compared with the delicious throe
Of transport thrilled with Fear --
-------------
Anonymous Emily Dickinson LIVES!
Jesus Christ, how in the world did this woman manage to anticipate all these slashdot articles so many decades before they were published? +1, Interesting, +1, Ontopic!
...While I'm on the subject, an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie". I'm neither an xtian nor a fundie, but I find that sort of gratuitous nastiness distasteful. It only makes me think less of the person who uses it, not the person it's directed at.
Me too, I agree entirely, you betcha. "IXTHUS," Greek for "fish," is an acronym and an excellent multi-level pun (cf. Mark 1:17, Matthew 4:19) nearly two millenia old, which, expanded, spells out "Iesus Christos Theu Uios Soter," or in English "Jesus Christ Son of God Savior".
Now whenever I see someone with one of them cute lil' "IXTHUS" fishies glued to the rear end of their car, I immediately think, "Whoo-ee! What a vicious atheist, gratuitously insulting the world's billion-plus Christians with that ugly one-letter abbreviation for 'Christ'".
Yeah buddy, yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps: animated fish.GIF courtesy of this web page...
Nice rant! Thanks for writing. Say, how do you feel about VP candidate Lieberman, that Social Security bandito^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprivatizer, and his claim that we atheists (and for that matter, followers of non-theistic religions like Buddhism) can't possibly be good Merkins on account of us failing to believe in "God"? And, ha ha, the very next day after I read that crap in the newspaper, I get a solicitation in my mailbox from the Democratic National Committee asking me to dig into my wallet and give till it hurts! Bite me, DNC, and rack up another vote for Righteous Ralph instead!
...because after all, I can always leave the oppressed and join the oppressors...
cf. our crabby old friend Mencken on this very issue.
How can you possibly know there are no gods / is no God?
The problem you have is that you expect a person's beliefs to be watertight and absolutely unsinkable. I can't imagine being so egotistical to claim that my arguments are irresistible against those of any and all debaters from now till eternity. I would also like to point out that you yourself surely do not use the words "belief" of "believe" in this rigid sense elsewhere when you talk.
For example, you or I might honestly, sincerely, and reasonably say, "I believe it's not going to rain tomorrow, so I will pack a picnic lunch and prepare to go fishing." If you say this to me, I'm not about to jump down your throat with "But how can you be sure?" Now we know that we can't be absolutely sure what the weather is going to be tomorrow. But we can still formulate a belief and act upon it. A couple of other common beliefs are these:
a.) The Sun is going to rise tomorrow, and b.) The Sun is going to rise the day after I die.
Everyone believes the first, right? yet no one can prove it ahead of time; we'd have to wait until tomorrow to absolutely know it is true. The second is even weirder; clearly, by deinition, I can't ever possibly prove that one. But who reading this fails to put 100% full reliance on either conjecture?
If you like, for us to firmly hold mundane beliefs such as these is nothing less than a leap of faith; "faith" is a word which alarms atheists and theists alike, but the alternative to this ordinary sort of faith is that we don't make any plans whatsoever any more.
The difference, then, between an atheist and an agnostic is that an atheist believes that there definitely is no such thing as "God" and he orders his actions and plans accordingly, whereas an agnostic believes that the "God" question is either currently unsolved in practice, or else is unsolvable per axiom, and he conducts his affairs with that somewhat different belief in mind.
So now for a brief commercial: isn't the Biblical account of creation uniquely rational and uniquely similar to present-day scientific theory on how and when things came to be?
The Biblical account of creation appears to claim, among other things:
a.) There was a self-conscious, intelligent entity - which means, at least, that you or I could in theory have a conversation with it - and this entity existed before the creation of all the matter in the universe.
b.) There was exactly one of these things: not two, not zero.
c.) This entity, the very same one, whom English-speaking believers refer to as "God," exists essentially unchanged and with a continuity of identity, from prior to the beginning of the universe to this very day.
d.) And finally, this entity is actively concerned, even as I type, with every detail of my unimportant and pointless life, as well as yours.
Pitch overboard any of the above elements and I say you have abandoned the Biblical creation hypothesis altogether. But if these four axioms are central to the Biblical creation theory, I fail to see what is so "uniquely" convincing about it. First of all, why only one "God"? In nature, as we see around us, so many things that generate new forms reproduce by twos; why is "God" single and lonely? Second, if the properties of the universe are the outcome of consciousness, why are they so boringly mechanical? One would expect water to flow up hill every now and again, just by Divine whim, if consciousness rather than mechanics created and ruled the cosmos.
Finally, why is today's "God" identical with the creator "God"? Other living things age and die and are replaced by new ones, and besides if I were "God," sentenced as He is to loneliness forever, and beholding this unsatisfactory world in such close detail as He does, I do believe I'd jump off the bridge. I did once read some philosopher somewhere who claimed that "God," though He is omnipotent by definition, nonetheless is logically incapable of killing Himself, from which follows the pride-inflating lemma that you and I possess a super-divine power to do what even "God" himself can not.
Finally, where you say
Atheistic materialism ultimately can't explain anything, because it can't account for its own existence
I can buy that notion, less because of Godel's theorem (why should the number of rules of the universe be countable, anyway?) than the old "first cause" argument (if X caused everything what caused X? if the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, upon what does the turtle rest?) but the "first cause" paradox weighs equally heavily against any scheme, theistic or atheistic, which claims to globally explain the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, very few people work 12 hour days.
Glad you brought that historical point up. It's nice to see someone else who has some grasp that there is something called "history" and that in certain ways, things were different back then.
So a little while back I reread the Communist Manifesto, including the various prefaces I never read before, and when after Marx's death Engels wrote the preface to the 1890 English edition, he wrote...now wait, do you have a job, work for a living? or do you live, effort-free, upon the dividends of your or your parents's and grandparents's capital investments? If the latter, hang up now, I'm not talking to you, parasite; if the former, then this, brother, is what Marxism has done, historically, for you:
"...But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as _one_ army, under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
"If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!"
So, in the names of decency and gratitude, won't you please say "thank you" to the shade of old Uncle Karl? For having untightened somewhat the clamps and shackles of your wage-slavery, so that they don't bind so severely, or chafe so harshly, that after your working day you have no strength left to think straight.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Off-the-shelf commercial GPS does elevations too. Now that they've taken the dithering off the satellite signal, you can get high-accuracy elevations, not just to the degree needed to keep airplanes off the sides of mountains, but to land surveyor's accuracies, nice and fast.
My big fear is that this airplane guidance system seems to be distributed, so if the GPS system in one plane goes on the fritz, then all the other planes will think that one plane isn't where it is; you can see the danger in that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What the Hell! Try it, it's new and new is good. Sometimes. And remember, if you were a good technician up till now, you will still be a good technician later, so if you decide that you really don't have the gift for management and you don't like your new job at all any more, you still have that successful tech career to fall back on. Keep in mind that hi-tech types are, at least these days, in consistent high demand. As far as the prestige angle goes ("I can't step down from management to production, everyone will think I'm sinking!") all I can reply is, "Why should you care more about what other people think than about how satisfied you are with your life?"
The worst mistake you could make, then, in that regard, is if your company gives you a big raise, and you decide to go spend it all right away - i.e. you rush out and buy a new expensive house, car, etc. that you couldn't afford to keep up on your old salary. Do that and you'll find you have painted yourself into a corner, where you can't go back to your old position. So if you do get that big raise, my suggestion would be, at least for the first couple of years, to keep your living expenses where they are at now and invest the difference into savings.
Good luck!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Physics courses are very nice, but have you ever personally actually measured the width of the sun, or timed it as it marched across a fixed telescope's crosshairs? I've measured the angular width of the sun several times with a surveyor's transit (it's about a two minutes of time, or 32 minutes of angle) and it does not change from midday to sunset. Neither does the image of the moon widen as it nears the horizon. That either one seems bigger to your eye at sunset is only an optical illusion.
If you don't trust that statement, which after all is sound thinking - really, what would you read off a weblog that you'd believe uncritically? - then get hold of a transit and sun filter, or for cheap, get sunglasses, two sticks and a watch with a second hand, and perform the experiment yourself.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Thanks for the link.
It looks like a big round head with two eyes, a little too close set, with furry eyebrows, those pointed up at the ends and down at the middle (which indicates a squinting or frowning or cynical cast of face). You also see the diagonal wrinkles on the forehead. Immediately below the eyes is the tip of the nose. Because the sun is frowning so, the lips are pale and tightly compressed together, and somewhat askew; the right side is up and the left side is down, as if to ask sarcastically "What the Hell are you going to do about it?!" And on the right cheek is the scar he got back when he was a junior in high school, in that fight in the parking lot of the pizza parlor.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Don't know if he ever got a degree, but Philip Dick was a clerk in a classical record store, and (allegedly) he liked drugs a lot, and he got divorced several times, which background variously informed his extensive and inimitable body of work.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The guy who wrote the article is talking out of his ass. Like Colonel Klink from Hogan's Hero, he "knowz abzolutely nuttzing."
It is unforgivable that you are not aware it is Sergeant Schultz, not Colonel Klink, who knows "abzolutely nuttzing."
To keep in tone with a few of the other more rabid comments I've read under this article, I shall now assert, (don't take it personally, I don't really mean any of it, it just seems to be de rigueur here)(what's with you Mac guys anyway? you don't see Linux people getting all fanatical like that over little technical details) that this lapse proves you have no right to post anymore anywhere, to speak publicly, to procreate with those idiot's genes of yours, even to breathe the valuable air any more, etc., etc.
Have a nice day!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah right, grammar, "OK," but Apple's ad guys, to Hell with them anyway! I saw this, they had the gall to illustrate an store ad for their merchandise, with a picture of Mohandas Gandhi, and that is not OK, not OK at all. Did Apple's advertising agency think, "Gandhi's safe in his grave and unable to sue and we're running out of celebrities, so let him spin there," do these people have no sense of decency at all?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Just wondering, why would you change a perfectly good, nice-sounding, intrinsically meaningful and well-known name like "metalab" to "iBiblio," which you can't confidently pronounce nor spell, which doesn't scan either, and on top of everything else has one of those annoying embedded caps?
See, a lot of people already know about the justly famous "metalab," they know its history and reputation. But if you go up to those same people and say, "Hey, what about that iBiblio?" they're apt to think it's yet another new e-business scam, or another on-line bookstore, or one of those loathsome schemes to sell crippled electronic documents with some kind of cryptographic built-in expiration or copyright protection. After having spent a decade making "metalab" into one of the most respected site names on the web, why would they toss away their good name for a new one?
I hope none of the metalab, er I mean "iBiblio" staff, will be offended by this only mildly critical observation. I've downloaded plenty of stuff from their site and I really appreciate their efforts, and wish them the best of luck in the future, embedded cap and all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
CmdrTaco has a slashdot uid of 1
That ruins it. The Prisoner was so great because you kept on asking Who is Number One!? and they kept on saying You are number Six! so you kept on hanging on hoping to find out but now you've told and the secret's out and there's no need to wonder anymore.
Disappointed, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's not only theoretically possible for the artist to owe the studio money after a profitable album, it happens all the time. Records go platinum, and the artist goes bankrupt. So, yeah, Universal ought to owe all their artists a proportional chunk of that money...
Actually when Universal loses this suit their various slave-artists will get a computer printed letter in the mail informing them of the good news that that they owe the record company somewhat less than they did the previous day. Sort of a "win-win" situation.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Any other issues with this solution that I missed?
Would you want to have been treated that way by your local public library when you were seventeen, or fourteen, or whenever?
Would you have deserved it?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
i bought a wooden whistle
but it wooden whistle
so i bought a steel whistle
and it steel wooden whistle.
thank you.
OK, so how is this relevant to "library internet filtering"? I'm not saying that it is irrelevant, far be it from me to be so judgmental especially of a poet, I actually just want to hear your specific explanation, or someone's, of how it is. Come on, you can do it! Entertain me, I insist!
There is, when ya consider it, that definite link there in the frustrated struggle for self expression your sad song so plaintively sung, and "steel" suggests the substance of that cage (defective, leaky! impotent! yet which deforms like the Sung woman's foot-bindings...) in which the spirit of information, which wants so to be free, instead flutters away its sad imprisonment...
no wait the other way it's the controlled lockstep of the air, the desired, managed, mechanical industrial cyclical throb of the sequential compression and rarefaction of air, that's the thing the overmastering would-be whistleblower from above, maybe that's what he wants, but the law of chaos, the force of independence, ensures that that is the one thing he God damn well won't get! No, first cage us in your tedious rules and passwords, we hax0r em you betcha! then next you pushy lusers fortify your rules with iron laws, still no way you sorryass "leaders" that you'll impell us to sing your tune for you, basta!
let my phonemes go, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
new testimate references
...pure art. Here's that wonderful New Testament reference to stoning re adultery.
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
There is no perfect filtering system, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to develop one that is workable.
Maybe not, neither does it mean we should bother to use internet filtering at all, any more than I should attach anti-aircraft missiles to my car, "just in case."
Anyway, Chrissake, if you yourself can put up with slashdot enough to actually post here, with that fucking goatse.cx picture popping up all the time, then how can you expect us to take you seriously when you whine over a mere porno repeating web page? Next you'll be insisting on installing some kind of expensive and stupid atomic-powered somethingware (emits ghostly blue light, occasionally buzzes and snaps like a Georgia skeeter zapper) down at the city park because this one time once you happened to step in some dog shit.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Must be nice to have had a parent who would talk to you about stuff like that or anything for that matter. I first learned about the Second and First World Wars, and incidentally a few other real important facts my Dad-n-Mom couldn't be bothered to tell me about, off the shelves of the Clearwater, Florida and Dunedin, Florida public libraries.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No Christian will ever tell you that the human body, God's creation, is inheritly sinful. We're not talking about tasteful portrayals of the human body, we're talking about hardcore porn. Big difference.
You are wrong. Go find you some pictures by an art photgrapher named Jock Sturges. Books of his work are available in book stores, sometimes, in some locales. He does nudes. His photos are very good, very beautiful, far from indecent or prurient; by comparison, Milo's Venus and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are, relatively speaking, practically lewd. If you find Sturges's photos pornographic then clearly you are insane.
Next sniff around the net in a search engine and check out how the so-called "christian" right has relentlessly hounded this guy over those books of photos for the last decade or so.
If you want to defend Christianity, by telling me that the "christian" right of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon's American Family Association does not in any comprehensible way represent anything which any sensible reader of the New Testament can label "Christianity," then I suppose I can, with certain reservations, accept that argument.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
He was a famously bad speller.
A famously creative speller, you mean. An inspiration to us all; in that sense like Shakespeare, who even occasionally mis-spelled (? but wouldn't he be the authority?) his own name as "Shaxpere." You owe it to yourself to violate at least one law a day. I mean, whose language is it, theirs or yours?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, a snake-ball of ten million laws and another million new ones expected by the end of the year, and yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Obviously the plan is, a fearful proletariat, each individual subject to arbitrary arrest from any direction at any given moment, will be a docile and productive one. Somehow I doubt this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Sweet Skepticism of the Heart --
That knows -- and does not know --
And tosses like a Fleet of Balm --
Affronted by the snow --
Invites and then retards the Truth
Lest Certainty be sere
Compared with the delicious throe
Of transport thrilled with Fear --
-------------
Anonymous Emily Dickinson LIVES!
Jesus Christ, how in the world did this woman manage to anticipate all these slashdot articles so many decades before they were published? +1, Interesting, +1, Ontopic!
Another poetry lover remains,
Gratefully yours, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So whatever X is, Xes are just wonderful and they never do wrong, because as soon as they do wrong, they're instantly no longer Xes. That's cheating.
Besides, ask them. Axe in hand, blood up to their elbows and knees, they'll proudly tell you, "ad majorem gloriam Dei."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Me too, I agree entirely, you betcha. "IXTHUS," Greek for "fish," is an acronym and an excellent multi-level pun (cf. Mark 1:17, Matthew 4:19) nearly two millenia old, which, expanded, spells out "Iesus Christos Theu Uios Soter," or in English "Jesus Christ Son of God Savior".
Now whenever I see someone with one of them cute lil' "IXTHUS" fishies glued to the rear end of their car, I immediately think, "Whoo-ee! What a vicious atheist, gratuitously insulting the world's billion-plus Christians with that ugly one-letter abbreviation for 'Christ'".
Yeah buddy, yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps: animated fish .GIF courtesy of this web page...
Nice rant! Thanks for writing. Say, how do you feel about VP candidate Lieberman, that Social Security bandito^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprivatizer, and his claim that we atheists (and for that matter, followers of non-theistic religions like Buddhism) can't possibly be good Merkins on account of us failing to believe in "God"? And, ha ha, the very next day after I read that crap in the newspaper, I get a solicitation in my mailbox from the Democratic National Committee asking me to dig into my wallet and give till it hurts! Bite me, DNC, and rack up another vote for Righteous Ralph instead!
cf. our crabby old friend Mencken on this very issue.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
How can you possibly know there are no gods / is no God?
The problem you have is that you expect a person's beliefs to be watertight and absolutely unsinkable. I can't imagine being so egotistical to claim that my arguments are irresistible against those of any and all debaters from now till eternity. I would also like to point out that you yourself surely do not use the words "belief" of "believe" in this rigid sense elsewhere when you talk.
For example, you or I might honestly, sincerely, and reasonably say, "I believe it's not going to rain tomorrow, so I will pack a picnic lunch and prepare to go fishing." If you say this to me, I'm not about to jump down your throat with "But how can you be sure?" Now we know that we can't be absolutely sure what the weather is going to be tomorrow. But we can still formulate a belief and act upon it. A couple of other common beliefs are these:
a.) The Sun is going to rise tomorrow, and
b.) The Sun is going to rise the day after I die.
Everyone believes the first, right? yet no one can prove it ahead of time; we'd have to wait until tomorrow to absolutely know it is true. The second is even weirder; clearly, by deinition, I can't ever possibly prove that one. But who reading this fails to put 100% full reliance on either conjecture?
If you like, for us to firmly hold mundane beliefs such as these is nothing less than a leap of faith; "faith" is a word which alarms atheists and theists alike, but the alternative to this ordinary sort of faith is that we don't make any plans whatsoever any more.
The difference, then, between an atheist and an agnostic is that an atheist believes that there definitely is no such thing as "God" and he orders his actions and plans accordingly, whereas an agnostic believes that the "God" question is either currently unsolved in practice, or else is unsolvable per axiom, and he conducts his affairs with that somewhat different belief in mind.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So now for a brief commercial: isn't the Biblical account of creation uniquely rational and uniquely similar to present-day scientific theory on how and when things came to be?
The Biblical account of creation appears to claim, among other things:
a.) There was a self-conscious, intelligent entity - which means, at least, that you or I could in theory have a conversation with it - and this entity existed before the creation of all the matter in the universe.
b.) There was exactly one of these things: not two, not zero.
c.) This entity, the very same one, whom English-speaking believers refer to as "God," exists essentially unchanged and with a continuity of identity, from prior to the beginning of the universe to this very day.
d.) And finally, this entity is actively concerned, even as I type, with every detail of my unimportant and pointless life, as well as yours.
Pitch overboard any of the above elements and I say you have abandoned the Biblical creation hypothesis altogether. But if these four axioms are central to the Biblical creation theory, I fail to see what is so "uniquely" convincing about it. First of all, why only one "God"? In nature, as we see around us, so many things that generate new forms reproduce by twos; why is "God" single and lonely? Second, if the properties of the universe are the outcome of consciousness, why are they so boringly mechanical? One would expect water to flow up hill every now and again, just by Divine whim, if consciousness rather than mechanics created and ruled the cosmos.
Finally, why is today's "God" identical with the creator "God"? Other living things age and die and are replaced by new ones, and besides if I were "God," sentenced as He is to loneliness forever, and beholding this unsatisfactory world in such close detail as He does, I do believe I'd jump off the bridge. I did once read some philosopher somewhere who claimed that "God," though He is omnipotent by definition, nonetheless is logically incapable of killing Himself, from which follows the pride-inflating lemma that you and I possess a super-divine power to do what even "God" himself can not.
Finally, where you say
Atheistic materialism ultimately can't explain anything, because it can't account for its own existence
I can buy that notion, less because of Godel's theorem (why should the number of rules of the universe be countable, anyway?) than the old "first cause" argument (if X caused everything what caused X? if the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, upon what does the turtle rest?) but the "first cause" paradox weighs equally heavily against any scheme, theistic or atheistic, which claims to globally explain the universe.
Skeptically yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net