Protest against what? Why would you need to burn Qurans or Bibles to protest?
You normally protest in order to draw attention to a certain situation which you find unacceptable, in order to influence public opinion, or change government policy.
Since Government policy seems pretty level headed about the matter (people aren't being arrested for posting these videos, for example) in this case it's pretty clear we are talking about swaying public opinion.
So, protest against what? Well, how about the cultural climate where our freedom of speech is being thrown under the bus to placate a backwards and murderous culture. Do I imply "all Muslim people" when I say "murderous culture"? Not so much, but more along the lines of "whichever Muslim people grow murderous at my burning a copy of their texts". Or picket with death threats to Obama because some southern preacher said that maybe he'd burn Qurans and then he never got around to it. Or try to extradite Mark Zuckerberg on capitol charges because some subscribers of his website drew cartoons of Mohammed. You get the picture.
Your comments about Muslims are quite a generalization. The trait that you refer to tends to be more characteristic of Muslims originating in the Middle East. Muslims from elsewhere (I'm thinking specifically Indonesia, I have some Muslim friends from that part of the world) don't tend to be as militant.
My comments may sound like a generalization, but my point is more specific than you might perceive. My beef (and I suppose most people agree with me) is not with any arbitrary person, community, mosque or family who say "we are muslim" and sit down to read the Quran. But solely with the ones who stand back up and throw bricks because I've burnt my Quran. Or because someone makes a doodle of a man in a turban and labels it "Mohamed". Or those people who come out of nowhere to blow up a bus or a plane.. but I'm venturing to guess that the idolaters are the first in line to support the jihadists.
So I don't care about whether you live in the middle east, in indonesia, in australia, in the US, I just care how you behave. And if you behave as though the binding of my copy of your book is more valuable than my life or anyone's, then it is worth it for me to behave as a moderate asshole and troll you in order to out you (and your congregation and your community and your leaders, as the case may be) as militant douchbags and a danger to whatever "peaceful international cooperation" we're all trying to achieve.
If there are any moderate Muslims working for peace (maybe in indonesia?) then they're not going to care that some hillbilly burned a stack of Qurans. The hillbilly will have less to shout about, and fewer people listening to him if you don't shout yourself. Unfortunately, a vocal subset of Muslims are intolerant of criticism, and possibly intolerant of absolutely any value set besides their own. Perhaps they claim to support peace and claim to tolerate other people's views when visiting our countries, but when the tables are turned they execute people in many of their own countries just for not sharing their beliefs.
That is precisely why they are uptight about burning the Quran. For those who feel that way, all talk of peace is just a pretense and they view us merely vermin infidel who aren't fit to look upon sacred copies of the holy book, let alone to damage it. These are wolves in sheeps clothing and I support doing none more than to taunt them out of their disguise to be seen for what they are.
Hello, there. Well, the article and the thread are about the Australian not the priest, so I am for one focusing there.
The priest and the lawyer are demonstrating intolerance. If I am intolerant of their narrow-mindedness...well I'm not sure how that's such a terrible thing I should be fired and murdered.
Except that the lawyer was none more than intolerant of the narrow-mindedness of populist Islam. I'm not sure how that's such a terrible thing that he should get fired (as has happend) and murdered (as has been threatened).
On a side note, I used to have a friend who hated when people threw her stuffed animals on the floor.
For me, the word "Her" stuffed animals is a hugely important issue, here. Perhaps she anthropomorphs these dolls and by doing this you are abusing her (admittedly imaginary) friends. If nothing else, you are potentially damaging her property.
Then the issue is, does your friend have the right to issue death threats against the cartoon "Happy Tree Friends"? That show involves black comedy and incredibly twisted things happening to stuffed animals. Do her sensitivities mean that the show has no right to be on the air? That the producers are assholes, should be ashamed, ought to have their lives ruined?
I guess the only material difference between your friend's sentimentality towards plushies and Islam's hangups toward idolotry is that only one of those groups have nuclear weapons and a history of recreational genocide. This is most likely the only reason that Happy Tree Friends remains on the air to this day.
I don't think there's a conflict with the idolatry rules, either. I always interpreted those rules to mean nothing else should come ahead of one's commitment to god.
Hey, I'm on board with that interpretation. However "one's commitment to god(sic)" is not in any way lessened when someone else burns a Quran. You've still got your Quran, and it's really not your right to tell me how to dispose of mine, up to and beyond burning it in protest. The only people who care are those who revere the text as a holy artifact. They see it either as a symbol of holiness, or a symbol of their virtual face being slapped. Same difference.
Think what damage is done to those who are offended? None, aside from the self-feeding outrage. What damage would be done if they turned the other cheek or changed the youtube channel? None. Other people will not run with the protest unless there is an irrational reaction to protest against. In the meantime, Islam countries execute people for holding non Islam beliefs. Why bother with your "two wrongs don't make a right" rhetoric when neither Atheists nor Muslims see a grand total of two wrongs?
OMG, why must you be so intolerant? You just hate all atheists and spread your bigotry over the internet, don't you? I hope your employers figure out who you are and fire you and if some fundamentalist atheists hunt you down and murder you then your family can have my trite condolences.. I mean I would never condone such behavior, nod wink, but you really would do better watching what you say with the crazies out there. Not that I support them of course, I'm just sayin'. Quit with the hate-mongering.
While I agree with you in principle, I think that the act of burning holy books is usually intended in a very religiously intolerant light, if not as an incitement to violence. Here in South Africa, a court interdict was issued recently against a Muslim cleric who was going to burn Bibles in response to the chap in the States a while ago, which I agree with, personally, no-one should make public displays about how much they hate someone else's religion (or race or whatever else for that matter).
Desecrating holy objects has already been thoroughly studied under the auspices of Flag Desecration. Normally citizens of a country who burn their own flag in protest are not expressing hatred for their country, but unrest against the established government and policies of the country and with unquestioning adherence to an ideal that is not being lived up to.
It is a sign that patriotism has lost sight of common sense when allegience to a flag is considered more important than the quality of life of it's citizens. So to, it is clear that adherents to a religion have lost all perspective when burning copies of their book, drawing cartoons of their mascot, etc are seen as greater crimes against them thanmurder.
In short, unless you are spewing bile and using the stunt to draw attention to your bile, the act of desecration or blasphemy itself is not an act of hate, only an act of sensational protest. Anyone who brings up hate crimes are only trying to justify their outrage. The act of desecration is meant to highlight the fact that the offended party's priorities are dangerously skewed. When they react wrathfully, they are helpfully affirming that accusation.
Islam needs to learn what the rest of the internet figured out long ago: Simply don't feed the trolls. Grow a thicker skin and move on with your life. Christians honestly don't care if you burn a bible. And why should they? Athiests don't care if you burn On the Origin of Species, you can buy up or donate to a bonfire as many copies as you'd like, make any sort of dance that you want, as long as you are not absconding our copies to burn or depriving a jurisdiction if it's tax-funded library, then it's just your loss.
You'll also find not many people are doing that. Again, why would they? They will provoke zero irrational reactions from athiests. Christian bibles get burned sometimes, but again, who cares? They don't care, they have plenty. Invented the printing press and all. Lots of people hate Christianity and they know it, but they "turn the other cheek" and that's a good strategy.
Burning the Quran? That evokes irrational reactions. Since no people are harmed, no property is stolen and nothing of real consequence is transpiring, then the reaction itself is uncalled for and more people will try it in order to protest the reaction itself. This is one of the core things people (including myself) do dislike about Islam: putting idolotry ahead of the quality of human life.
That is wrong. I don't care if it's wrong because some people don't think before they react, or if it's wrong because a religious culture trained you to behave that way. Whatever the reason, it is wrong and I value my right to protest against it. To highlight it and to illustrate it.
I am under the assumption (misunderstanding?) that because atheists don't believe in a higher being, they view everything on the same material plane.
Well, not all atheists are materialists or reductionists. Most consider that some things have more value than other things, normally based upon at least utilitarian principles if not sentimentality. For example, most atheists become upset when Christians or Muslims burn valuable objects like, say, members of their family.
The point is that the following pattern is being followed in today's religious politics:
* Person or Small Group A in culture B commits act C that culture D finds sacrilegious.
* Culture B quickly disavows the actions, and tries to distance themselves from person or small group A.
* Culture D slowly froths into an outrage, and doesn't believe easily targeted culture B, instead tarring them all with the same brush.
First, A = Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists, B = the worshipers of Islam, C = 9/11 + anthrax + Kenyan embassy + london railway bombing + spanish train bombing. All told, about 4,000 murdered. D = the Western World. We in the Western World are left to wonder how much Muslims really condemn those actions. So, as a result:
When A = a hillbilly US pastor or Australian lawyer, B = the Western World world, C = burning holy books, or even threatening to do so.. also drawings of Mohammed and Facebook groups and D = Muslims, then we end up in a position where the very people who have been trying to convince us that their religion does not make them psychopathic begin to behave psychopathically.
Yes, this is trolling. In fact, it is a great example of beneficial trolling. Burning a bound collection of personally owned pages with writing on it, or drawing a face and claiming it is a certain possibly fictional character (whether or not you then burn the drawing) are examples of harmless acts that incite hysterical, intolerant response. And not all of it is even from the muslims.
What I find most shocking about the reaction I've read so far in this controversy is that an equal number of non-muslims decry the burning of the Quran. Not the burning of the bible, but the Quran. People burn bibles all the time, so apparently that isn't a big deal. Why should it suddenly be reprehensible when it's the holy book of that particular religion?
Oh yes, because everyone is worried about how members of that particular religion will react.
Like how the president of the Islamic Association of Australia, Sheik Muhammad Wahid had to say "I urge my fellow Muslims to abide by the laws of this country and not take any action which breaks the law". You know, because normally we'd just kill the son of a bitch but, in this country doing so might wind up break a law, which our religion nigglingly requires us to obey. But, you know, if you don't interpret the religion as thoroughly as me then I guess I don't care what you do. I'm just urging.
But this isn't being done in a vacuum. It's being done as a little hate-rally, and the message of hate is, judging from how well this whole stupid thing has been publicized, being propagated to the subjects of that hate.
While I couldn't easily find a definition for the idiom "hate rally", I'm fairly certain that a primary ingredient would be a demonstration of Hate. Am I wrong?
You might make the argument that the southern minister who started this controversy was planning to hold a "hate rally", I won't speak to that. But this article is about Australian Lawyer Alex Stewart posting a video where he personally burns both a Quran and a Bible, with no obvious agenda of hate whatsoever. Merely to demonstrate that these books are physical objects and not sacred icons.
Your equating that action with a "hate crime" is about as shortsighted as equating PETA's videos of beef slaughter houses as a hate crime against the Hindu religion, who believes cattle are sacred.
Or perhaps I should take footage from the IIS and post a video on youtube saying "See? It's round". Would that be hate speech against The Flat Earth Society?
Is this post hate speech because I am disagreeing with you, re-iterating the facts at hand and illustrating via analogy that your sacred opinions are inconsistent with common sense? I won't be upset if you fail to see eye to eye with me, we can agree to disagree as long as we each believe the other has a good view of our case (and continue debating until that has been achieved) but I don't want to participate in a culture that equates dispassionately burning one's own property and posting a video of it, or difference-of-opinion in general as a "reprehensible action" on par with plane hijacking and mass murder.
Also, just because his views are that the Koran or the Bible are just books, it doesn't mean someone with other views is automatically a complete moron and idiot.
Actually, yeah. It kind of does. I mean, you can believe anything you want about the message enshrined in a holy book, but any people who get tied in a knot over the physical disposition of qurans or flags (I don't know anyone who cares about burnt bibles) are guilty of practicing a form of Idolotry even the Quran and the Bible themselves specifically forbid.
These books are simply objects, no more, no less. More importantly, if I burn a holy book, I'm burning my own property. I'm not burning down your house. I'm not murdering your children, stealing your food or hijacking planes to level your office buildings. I am lighting fire to an object I own, that I purchased with my money, and that money even went to fund the printing of more books or flags.
Whoever ascribes holiness to easily duplicable physical objects which they don't even possess either suffers from a potentially very dangerous dementia, or more likely than not they are "a complete moron and idiot" as you put it.
Does that apply to all laws, or just the ones you chose?
Do I get to chose which ones apply in the comfort of my own home?
Really now. Aside from harming your visitors or big media's greed, and I guess controlled substances, how many legal jurisdictions are overlapping your house?
As for me, It's not possible to jay walk here. It's not possible to commit physical theft from here. I can't harm people outside my home without my influence leaving the house (shoot gun out window, for example). I cannot commit fraud, or conspiracy, or any of that fun business without employing a phone or computer and again my influence leaves the house.
But if I copy an optical disk with the blinds shuttered and the internet switched off, I have just performed a criminal act. If I sing happy birthday to my children and some paying guests in my home, and none of them complain of being harmed by it, I have just performed an illegal performance of a copyrighted work the length of a limmerick. Somehow I am harming artists and production companies completely outside of my home and they demand redress.
But as for your point, yeah my interest is now piqued as to what freedoms you crave in your home that you don't already enjoy. (?)
But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion
Hey, here I am! Did I keep you waiting long?
Srsly though, I believe there is a creator that designed and imposed order into the universe. This creator shares a few cognitive features weakly in common with us, such as representative imagination. But this genderless entity scarcely if at all knows we exist and honestly doesn't care, and we've got no influence on it's behavior or agendas. So.. there's.. not really any religion to be built here. Acknowledging or debating the existence of such a being, while interesting has no more practical value than acknowledging the existence of Messier 31. But, it does qualify me as a theist.:P
For example, how many people here say that the Mafia is a criminal organization? Is it because that person has interviewed a representative sample of the multitude of small business owners and community leaders who the Mafia provides support for? Anything less than that is just petty politics.
Yeah, it's exactly like that. The RIAA and the Mafia are each best known for the outrageous projects that they spearhead that make them the most profit. Be it drug trafficking in Queens, or Justin Beiber on tour. These are the cash cows and the reason these organizations are in business, for better or for worse. So this is how they must be measured.
Trying to dilute their primary reason for being by bringing up numbers of small musicians or business owners who are productive, but pinned under their thumbs is completely disingenuous. Perhaps some of the little guys who have worked out a deal that makes them greater profit than relying completely on their merits will have nice things to say about their overlords, but a majority of musicians (or business owners) would profit more from their work if they were not forced to choose between signing their souls to the marketing/protection oligopoly vs. the competitive wrath of said marketing/protection oligopoly.
Actually, based on TFA, I'd say we're more likely to see a multi-core processor with some quantum and some classic cores. Kind of like the old floating point co-processors, or going back still further, the TI-99/4A architecture which was made up of a CPU with dedicated video, audio, and peripheral co-processors.
Yis, because Parsec with Speech Synthesis wasn't enough, now it's going Quantum. 8D
Geez, thanks for ruining a good meme with facts. Next thing you know we'll find out all those cats have been misquoted time and time again.
Or that Lemmings don't commit mass suicide, or that virtually all cartographers knew the world was round throughout the dark ages, or that glass isn't a liquid, yeah I've been noticing lots of this lately xD
I'm beginning to waft back to the old maxim: "It's not true unless it's boring"
Just cull for a scene from two points of view instead of one. Portal has been doing it for years.
Either change and re-optimize your culling algorithm to respect both camera points, or if you're in a development rush run two culls — one from each viewpoint — and only cull polys marked cull from both positions.
You'll need scope with a little LCD screen in it. No no that costs too much. Hmm...
Yeah, why not simply render the zoomed image on Eye 2 with a vignette, and a non-zoomed image on Eye 1 with a scope occluding part of your sight?
Then in options you can pick which eye you prefer to use to look through the scope.
This will be disorienting for some players, but you can also select in the options to blank out the unzoomed eye completely, or to show zoomed sight to both eyes in monoscope.
For those who prefer to play like GP, you get the advantage of either
A> closing your unzoomed eye for an authentic experience. You can even switch eyes like a human marksman, closing zoomed eye for big picture, closing unzoomed eye to retrain fine targets, or
B> Keep both open like a lazy-eyed gangsta
Yes. You will get more headaches than an actual sniper would from how they use their eyes in the field, but welcome to stereoscopy and thanks for all your dough.
There we go. Damned. Slashdot threaded views didn't show this reply when I got the email for the first one.
Bad shows being bad, and continuity issues, I haven't seen a whole lot of Who before the haitus but IIRC what we are seeing is precisely on par for how we started. The whole series has been full of retcon from the start and every other episode has always been made out of spam, but that's the price you pay for the really good ones that stick in your mind.
That's why the nation fears a left turn sign with a plunger stuck in, amirite?:3
Yeah, I don't know much about the BBC besides the following:
* They get lots of good publicity for their news efforts over at least the last few years
* They air Doctor Who, and sev'ral other Britcoms that I enjoy or have enjoyed (Are you being served, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, A Fine Romance, Keeping up appearances, The Catherine Tate Show, yea I don't get BBC I've mostly watched what PBS is willing to import my way 8I)
And that is lit'rally the extent of what I know about them. Trying to scrub a show from existence is pretty damnable, so I'll add that to what I know about them, thanks.
At any rate, my post just wanted to know if you liked the revived series at any rate. I wanted to know if you meant "killed the show" insofar as the events you've just described, and/or "kill the show" insofar as Phantom Menacing it to death.. an opinion I would be sad to hear because I feel as though, whatever happened through the nineties, the torch is being carried proudly again once more. Whether or not we get to thank the BBC itself as a result.:>
PS: Yeah, I actually had never heard the word "genocide" before an episode of Doctor Who not only used it, but was so kind as to define it for me in the same breath. Part of the serial where we lost Perry and the sandy haired doctor and got the ginger-who-somehow-wasn't-a-ginger. xD
No it only implies a condition that does not cease until an optional destination is encountered. Natural numbers are finite "all the way to infinity", but this does not suggest that infinity is either a finite number, or a reachable destination.
In this case, the "destination" is merely the direction "down". Read literally, you have turtles for as long as there is still a "down" to fill them with.
To me the better approach is to question the idea of objective morality. Does such a thing really exist outside of ourselves?
Yeah, I believe there is such a thing as objective morality. I hope I'm matching terms with you, but my understanding is that:
* The universe is a constantly changing medium.
* Motive beings are defined by their agendas; what they want. How they wish to influence the universe around them. Keeping things the same (aka, imposing order upon chaos, slowing the change of the universe around them) counts as an agenda, and helps to define that particular motive being.
* The success of a motive being is defined as their ability to realize their agendas.
* Cooperation and alliance are the most powerful means we know for motive beings to successfully realize their agendas. In short, motive beings are more powerful influences than non-motive forces, and profiting from their activities is easier to do when you cooperate with them than when you antagonize them.
* Thus, whatever strategies can be empirically determined to more successfully foster cooperation can be defined as "moral" and whatever strategies, due to bad planning, selfishness, short sightedness, etc fail to foster cooperation or that lead to communal (and thus ultimately individual) failure can be classified as "immoral". This model sees foolishness and malice as isomorphic. We must instead strive for wisdom and shrewd kindness, which are also born out as isomorphic characteristics.
I agree this approach entails rerooting the definition of many terms including "morality", but I believe we wind up with a pretty consistent working definition to what we use in daily life, but with a working model that helps describe how to behave in a variety of difficult edge and corner cases. We're also left with an explanation and definition of "objective morality" that presupposes no more than certain characteristics of the universe, and the existence of motive actors, which you would kind of need anyway, right? Inanimate objects cannot behave morally as they cannot be said to "behave" at all.
Let me know if this explanation is reasonable at all. Took me all of 30 years to work out, and it's served me well in practice for the 3 years since.:3
Yes, absolutely: no evidence that they can offer you. But they may have evidence that satisfies them.
Hai digi, I'd like to jump in and say that if I were caught in your "my vivid and continuous memories are starkly inconsistent with slowly mounting thorough physical evidence" scenario, I would actually fold quite early lacking any corroborative evidence or alibis of my own.
I think I see what is "reasonable" differently than mainstream, but individuals in our culture are quite fond of tying their identities directly to the bare metal of their personal experiences. I personally find that sentiment harmful to all involved, and choose not to follow that strategy myself.
In any conflict, I do my best to nerf the importance of any of my own unverifiable personal knowledge or anecdotes and avoid taking offense if others question the accuracy of my supposed observations. My observations still count as evidence, of which I have a volume, but it may be incorrect or more often than not misinterpreted, even by myself as the observer. It might be easier for me to do this than an average Joe because my memory has proven quite unreliable in practice throughout my life, so I've retrained my epistemological instincts to prefer immediate, verifiable sources of data over my own longer term recollections.
However, I have found that removing responsibility from my mental vlog helps to improve it's accuracy. When you strongly identify "truth" with "what you've witnessed firsthand", I find that it pressures you to fabricate data you do not have to fill in gaps you might be embarrassed to not recall for whatever reason. You're also pressured to insert your own interpretations of what you saw, confusing your conjecture with what you've witnessed. It's like being pressured to contaminate the mental equivalent of a crime scene. By reducing expectancy from my own memory, I've found that the memories I do retrieve are now much more frequently accurate: although still at times incomplete, badly indexed or difficult to accurately interpret until more empirical data is gathered.
So were I in your situation, I would be quite upset at having a memory that did not match an otherwise consistent trail of hard evidence, but it would not take much hard evidence to abandon my recollection as a frustrating probable falsehood, or at least a fiction lodged into a place it did not belong. Also, I believe that such an attitude would assist any person in properly adapting to the reality around them. Rare is the time (Orwellian governmental conspiracy notwithstanding) when your memories tell you more about the world you're living in now -- the world which will cut you down for not paying attention -- than hard empirical evidence and logic do.
noting comes before it, so random comes out of [after] nothing.
Your suggestion is interesting but it violates what we observe as Newton's second law of thermodynamics. Please allow Maxwell's Demon to see you out the tiny door on your left.
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Protest against what? Why would you need to burn Qurans or Bibles to protest?
You normally protest in order to draw attention to a certain situation which you find unacceptable, in order to influence public opinion, or change government policy.
Since Government policy seems pretty level headed about the matter (people aren't being arrested for posting these videos, for example) in this case it's pretty clear we are talking about swaying public opinion.
So, protest against what? Well, how about the cultural climate where our freedom of speech is being thrown under the bus to placate a backwards and murderous culture. Do I imply "all Muslim people" when I say "murderous culture"? Not so much, but more along the lines of "whichever Muslim people grow murderous at my burning a copy of their texts". Or picket with death threats to Obama because some southern preacher said that maybe he'd burn Qurans and then he never got around to it. Or try to extradite Mark Zuckerberg on capitol charges because some subscribers of his website drew cartoons of Mohammed. You get the picture.
Your comments about Muslims are quite a generalization. The trait that you refer to tends to be more characteristic of Muslims originating in the Middle East. Muslims from elsewhere (I'm thinking specifically Indonesia, I have some Muslim friends from that part of the world) don't tend to be as militant.
My comments may sound like a generalization, but my point is more specific than you might perceive. My beef (and I suppose most people agree with me) is not with any arbitrary person, community, mosque or family who say "we are muslim" and sit down to read the Quran. But solely with the ones who stand back up and throw bricks because I've burnt my Quran. Or because someone makes a doodle of a man in a turban and labels it "Mohamed". Or those people who come out of nowhere to blow up a bus or a plane .. but I'm venturing to guess that the idolaters are the first in line to support the jihadists.
So I don't care about whether you live in the middle east, in indonesia, in australia, in the US, I just care how you behave. And if you behave as though the binding of my copy of your book is more valuable than my life or anyone's, then it is worth it for me to behave as a moderate asshole and troll you in order to out you (and your congregation and your community and your leaders, as the case may be) as militant douchbags and a danger to whatever "peaceful international cooperation" we're all trying to achieve.
If there are any moderate Muslims working for peace (maybe in indonesia?) then they're not going to care that some hillbilly burned a stack of Qurans. The hillbilly will have less to shout about, and fewer people listening to him if you don't shout yourself. Unfortunately, a vocal subset of Muslims are intolerant of criticism, and possibly intolerant of absolutely any value set besides their own. Perhaps they claim to support peace and claim to tolerate other people's views when visiting our countries, but when the tables are turned they execute people in many of their own countries just for not sharing their beliefs.
That is precisely why they are uptight about burning the Quran. For those who feel that way, all talk of peace is just a pretense and they view us merely vermin infidel who aren't fit to look upon sacred copies of the holy book, let alone to damage it. These are wolves in sheeps clothing and I support doing none more than to taunt them out of their disguise to be seen for what they are.
Hello, there. Well, the article and the thread are about the Australian not the priest, so I am for one focusing there.
The priest and the lawyer are demonstrating intolerance. If I am intolerant of their narrow-mindedness...well I'm not sure how that's such a terrible thing I should be fired and murdered.
Except that the lawyer was none more than intolerant of the narrow-mindedness of populist Islam. I'm not sure how that's such a terrible thing that he should get fired (as has happend) and murdered (as has been threatened).
On a side note, I used to have a friend who hated when people threw her stuffed animals on the floor.
For me, the word "Her" stuffed animals is a hugely important issue, here. Perhaps she anthropomorphs these dolls and by doing this you are abusing her (admittedly imaginary) friends. If nothing else, you are potentially damaging her property.
Then the issue is, does your friend have the right to issue death threats against the cartoon "Happy Tree Friends"? That show involves black comedy and incredibly twisted things happening to stuffed animals. Do her sensitivities mean that the show has no right to be on the air? That the producers are assholes, should be ashamed, ought to have their lives ruined?
I guess the only material difference between your friend's sentimentality towards plushies and Islam's hangups toward idolotry is that only one of those groups have nuclear weapons and a history of recreational genocide. This is most likely the only reason that Happy Tree Friends remains on the air to this day.
I don't think there's a conflict with the idolatry rules, either. I always interpreted those rules to mean nothing else should come ahead of one's commitment to god.
Hey, I'm on board with that interpretation. However "one's commitment to god(sic)" is not in any way lessened when someone else burns a Quran. You've still got your Quran, and it's really not your right to tell me how to dispose of mine, up to and beyond burning it in protest. The only people who care are those who revere the text as a holy artifact. They see it either as a symbol of holiness, or a symbol of their virtual face being slapped. Same difference.
Think what damage is done to those who are offended? None, aside from the self-feeding outrage. What damage would be done if they turned the other cheek or changed the youtube channel? None. Other people will not run with the protest unless there is an irrational reaction to protest against. In the meantime, Islam countries execute people for holding non Islam beliefs. Why bother with your "two wrongs don't make a right" rhetoric when neither Atheists nor Muslims see a grand total of two wrongs?
This guy is just a narrow-minded jerk.
OMG, why must you be so intolerant? You just hate all atheists and spread your bigotry over the internet, don't you? I hope your employers figure out who you are and fire you and if some fundamentalist atheists hunt you down and murder you then your family can have my trite condolences.. I mean I would never condone such behavior, nod wink, but you really would do better watching what you say with the crazies out there. Not that I support them of course, I'm just sayin'. Quit with the hate-mongering.
While I agree with you in principle, I think that the act of burning holy books is usually intended in a very religiously intolerant light, if not as an incitement to violence. Here in South Africa, a court interdict was issued recently against a Muslim cleric who was going to burn Bibles in response to the chap in the States a while ago, which I agree with, personally, no-one should make public displays about how much they hate someone else's religion (or race or whatever else for that matter).
Desecrating holy objects has already been thoroughly studied under the auspices of Flag Desecration. Normally citizens of a country who burn their own flag in protest are not expressing hatred for their country, but unrest against the established government and policies of the country and with unquestioning adherence to an ideal that is not being lived up to.
It is a sign that patriotism has lost sight of common sense when allegience to a flag is considered more important than the quality of life of it's citizens. So to, it is clear that adherents to a religion have lost all perspective when burning copies of their book, drawing cartoons of their mascot, etc are seen as greater crimes against them than murder.
In short, unless you are spewing bile and using the stunt to draw attention to your bile, the act of desecration or blasphemy itself is not an act of hate, only an act of sensational protest. Anyone who brings up hate crimes are only trying to justify their outrage. The act of desecration is meant to highlight the fact that the offended party's priorities are dangerously skewed. When they react wrathfully, they are helpfully affirming that accusation.
Islam needs to learn what the rest of the internet figured out long ago: Simply don't feed the trolls. Grow a thicker skin and move on with your life. Christians honestly don't care if you burn a bible. And why should they? Athiests don't care if you burn On the Origin of Species, you can buy up or donate to a bonfire as many copies as you'd like, make any sort of dance that you want, as long as you are not absconding our copies to burn or depriving a jurisdiction if it's tax-funded library, then it's just your loss.
You'll also find not many people are doing that. Again, why would they? They will provoke zero irrational reactions from athiests. Christian bibles get burned sometimes, but again, who cares? They don't care, they have plenty. Invented the printing press and all. Lots of people hate Christianity and they know it, but they "turn the other cheek" and that's a good strategy.
Burning the Quran? That evokes irrational reactions. Since no people are harmed, no property is stolen and nothing of real consequence is transpiring, then the reaction itself is uncalled for and more people will try it in order to protest the reaction itself. This is one of the core things people (including myself) do dislike about Islam: putting idolotry ahead of the quality of human life.
That is wrong. I don't care if it's wrong because some people don't think before they react, or if it's wrong because a religious culture trained you to behave that way. Whatever the reason, it is wrong and I value my right to protest against it. To highlight it and to illustrate it.
I am under the assumption (misunderstanding?) that because atheists don't believe in a higher being, they view everything on the same material plane.
Well, not all atheists are materialists or reductionists. Most consider that some things have more value than other things, normally based upon at least utilitarian principles if not sentimentality. For example, most atheists become upset when Christians or Muslims burn valuable objects like, say, members of their family.
The point is that the following pattern is being followed in today's religious politics:
* Person or Small Group A in culture B commits act C that culture D finds sacrilegious.
* Culture B quickly disavows the actions, and tries to distance themselves from person or small group A.
* Culture D slowly froths into an outrage, and doesn't believe easily targeted culture B, instead tarring them all with the same brush.
First, A = Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists, B = the worshipers of Islam, C = 9/11 + anthrax + Kenyan embassy + london railway bombing + spanish train bombing. All told, about 4,000 murdered. D = the Western World. We in the Western World are left to wonder how much Muslims really condemn those actions. So, as a result:
When A = a hillbilly US pastor or Australian lawyer, B = the Western World world, C = burning holy books, or even threatening to do so.. also drawings of Mohammed and Facebook groups and D = Muslims, then we end up in a position where the very people who have been trying to convince us that their religion does not make them psychopathic begin to behave psychopathically.
Yes, this is trolling. In fact, it is a great example of beneficial trolling. Burning a bound collection of personally owned pages with writing on it, or drawing a face and claiming it is a certain possibly fictional character (whether or not you then burn the drawing) are examples of harmless acts that incite hysterical, intolerant response. And not all of it is even from the muslims.
What I find most shocking about the reaction I've read so far in this controversy is that an equal number of non-muslims decry the burning of the Quran. Not the burning of the bible, but the Quran. People burn bibles all the time, so apparently that isn't a big deal. Why should it suddenly be reprehensible when it's the holy book of that particular religion?
Oh yes, because everyone is worried about how members of that particular religion will react.
Like how the president of the Islamic Association of Australia, Sheik Muhammad Wahid had to say "I urge my fellow Muslims to abide by the laws of this country and not take any action which breaks the law". You know, because normally we'd just kill the son of a bitch but, in this country doing so might wind up break a law, which our religion nigglingly requires us to obey. But, you know, if you don't interpret the religion as thoroughly as me then I guess I don't care what you do. I'm just urging.
But this isn't being done in a vacuum. It's being done as a little hate-rally, and the message of hate is, judging from how well this whole stupid thing has been publicized, being propagated to the subjects of that hate.
While I couldn't easily find a definition for the idiom "hate rally", I'm fairly certain that a primary ingredient would be a demonstration of Hate. Am I wrong?
You might make the argument that the southern minister who started this controversy was planning to hold a "hate rally", I won't speak to that. But this article is about Australian Lawyer Alex Stewart posting a video where he personally burns both a Quran and a Bible, with no obvious agenda of hate whatsoever. Merely to demonstrate that these books are physical objects and not sacred icons.
Your equating that action with a "hate crime" is about as shortsighted as equating PETA's videos of beef slaughter houses as a hate crime against the Hindu religion, who believes cattle are sacred.
Or perhaps I should take footage from the IIS and post a video on youtube saying "See? It's round". Would that be hate speech against The Flat Earth Society?
Is this post hate speech because I am disagreeing with you, re-iterating the facts at hand and illustrating via analogy that your sacred opinions are inconsistent with common sense? I won't be upset if you fail to see eye to eye with me, we can agree to disagree as long as we each believe the other has a good view of our case (and continue debating until that has been achieved) but I don't want to participate in a culture that equates dispassionately burning one's own property and posting a video of it, or difference-of-opinion in general as a "reprehensible action" on par with plane hijacking and mass murder.
Also, just because his views are that the Koran or the Bible are just books, it doesn't mean someone with other views is automatically a complete moron and idiot.
Actually, yeah. It kind of does. I mean, you can believe anything you want about the message enshrined in a holy book, but any people who get tied in a knot over the physical disposition of qurans or flags (I don't know anyone who cares about burnt bibles) are guilty of practicing a form of Idolotry even the Quran and the Bible themselves specifically forbid.
These books are simply objects, no more, no less. More importantly, if I burn a holy book, I'm burning my own property. I'm not burning down your house. I'm not murdering your children, stealing your food or hijacking planes to level your office buildings. I am lighting fire to an object I own, that I purchased with my money, and that money even went to fund the printing of more books or flags.
Whoever ascribes holiness to easily duplicable physical objects which they don't even possess either suffers from a potentially very dangerous dementia, or more likely than not they are "a complete moron and idiot" as you put it.
Does that apply to all laws, or just the ones you chose?
Do I get to chose which ones apply in the comfort of my own home?
Really now. Aside from harming your visitors or big media's greed, and I guess controlled substances, how many legal jurisdictions are overlapping your house?
As for me, It's not possible to jay walk here. It's not possible to commit physical theft from here. I can't harm people outside my home without my influence leaving the house (shoot gun out window, for example). I cannot commit fraud, or conspiracy, or any of that fun business without employing a phone or computer and again my influence leaves the house.
But if I copy an optical disk with the blinds shuttered and the internet switched off, I have just performed a criminal act. If I sing happy birthday to my children and some paying guests in my home, and none of them complain of being harmed by it, I have just performed an illegal performance of a copyrighted work the length of a limmerick. Somehow I am harming artists and production companies completely outside of my home and they demand redress.
But as for your point, yeah my interest is now piqued as to what freedoms you crave in your home that you don't already enjoy. (?)
So, for you, the hatred for the RIAA does indeed trump any concerns for our culture. Like I said, I find that profoundly sad.
I find it absolutely heartbreaking. :3
But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion
Hey, here I am! Did I keep you waiting long?
Srsly though, I believe there is a creator that designed and imposed order into the universe. This creator shares a few cognitive features weakly in common with us, such as representative imagination. But this genderless entity scarcely if at all knows we exist and honestly doesn't care, and we've got no influence on it's behavior or agendas. So .. there's .. not really any religion to be built here. Acknowledging or debating the existence of such a being, while interesting has no more practical value than acknowledging the existence of Messier 31. But, it does qualify me as a theist. :P
For example, how many people here say that the Mafia is a criminal organization? Is it because that person has interviewed a representative sample of the multitude of small business owners and community leaders who the Mafia provides support for? Anything less than that is just petty politics.
Yeah, it's exactly like that. The RIAA and the Mafia are each best known for the outrageous projects that they spearhead that make them the most profit. Be it drug trafficking in Queens, or Justin Beiber on tour. These are the cash cows and the reason these organizations are in business, for better or for worse. So this is how they must be measured.
Trying to dilute their primary reason for being by bringing up numbers of small musicians or business owners who are productive, but pinned under their thumbs is completely disingenuous. Perhaps some of the little guys who have worked out a deal that makes them greater profit than relying completely on their merits will have nice things to say about their overlords, but a majority of musicians (or business owners) would profit more from their work if they were not forced to choose between signing their souls to the marketing/protection oligopoly vs. the competitive wrath of said marketing/protection oligopoly.
Civil disobedience isn't about defying the law in the comfort of your own home
I think part of the basic issue is that this is a law that should have no jurisdiction in "the comfort of your own home".
Actually, based on TFA, I'd say we're more likely to see a multi-core processor with some quantum and some classic cores. Kind of like the old floating point co-processors, or going back still further, the TI-99/4A architecture which was made up of a CPU with dedicated video, audio, and peripheral co-processors.
Yis, because Parsec with Speech Synthesis wasn't enough, now it's going Quantum. 8D
Geez, thanks for ruining a good meme with facts. Next thing you know we'll find out all those cats have been misquoted time and time again.
Or that Lemmings don't commit mass suicide, or that virtually all cartographers knew the world was round throughout the dark ages, or that glass isn't a liquid, yeah I've been noticing lots of this lately xD
I'm beginning to waft back to the old maxim: "It's not true unless it's boring"
Does this accurately compensate for occlusion?
Just cull for a scene from two points of view instead of one. Portal has been doing it for years.
Either change and re-optimize your culling algorithm to respect both camera points, or if you're in a development rush run two culls — one from each viewpoint — and only cull polys marked cull from both positions.
You'll need scope with a little LCD screen in it. No no that costs too much. Hmm...
Yeah, why not simply render the zoomed image on Eye 2 with a vignette, and a non-zoomed image on Eye 1 with a scope occluding part of your sight?
Then in options you can pick which eye you prefer to use to look through the scope.
This will be disorienting for some players, but you can also select in the options to blank out the unzoomed eye completely, or to show zoomed sight to both eyes in monoscope.
For those who prefer to play like GP, you get the advantage of either
A> closing your unzoomed eye for an authentic experience. You can even switch eyes like a human marksman, closing zoomed eye for big picture, closing unzoomed eye to retrain fine targets, or
B> Keep both open like a lazy-eyed gangsta
Yes. You will get more headaches than an actual sniper would from how they use their eyes in the field, but welcome to stereoscopy and thanks for all your dough.
There we go. Damned. Slashdot threaded views didn't show this reply when I got the email for the first one.
Bad shows being bad, and continuity issues, I haven't seen a whole lot of Who before the haitus but IIRC what we are seeing is precisely on par for how we started. The whole series has been full of retcon from the start and every other episode has always been made out of spam, but that's the price you pay for the really good ones that stick in your mind.
That's why the nation fears a left turn sign with a plunger stuck in, amirite? :3
*poke*, let me try this again: "Do you like the new seasons of Doctor Who?" xD
Hi! :D
Yeah, I don't know much about the BBC besides the following:
* They get lots of good publicity for their news efforts over at least the last few years
* They air Doctor Who, and sev'ral other Britcoms that I enjoy or have enjoyed (Are you being served, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, A Fine Romance, Keeping up appearances, The Catherine Tate Show, yea I don't get BBC I've mostly watched what PBS is willing to import my way 8I)
And that is lit'rally the extent of what I know about them. Trying to scrub a show from existence is pretty damnable, so I'll add that to what I know about them, thanks.
At any rate, my post just wanted to know if you liked the revived series at any rate. I wanted to know if you meant "killed the show" insofar as the events you've just described, and/or "kill the show" insofar as Phantom Menacing it to death.. an opinion I would be sad to hear because I feel as though, whatever happened through the nineties, the torch is being carried proudly again once more. Whether or not we get to thank the BBC itself as a result. :>
PS: Yeah, I actually had never heard the word "genocide" before an episode of Doctor Who not only used it, but was so kind as to define it for me in the same breath. Part of the serial where we lost Perry and the sandy haired doctor and got the ginger-who-somehow-wasn't-a-ginger. xD
"All the way" implies a destination.
No it only implies a condition that does not cease until an optional destination is encountered. Natural numbers are finite "all the way to infinity", but this does not suggest that infinity is either a finite number, or a reachable destination.
In this case, the "destination" is merely the direction "down". Read literally, you have turtles for as long as there is still a "down" to fill them with.
To me the better approach is to question the idea of objective morality. Does such a thing really exist outside of ourselves?
Yeah, I believe there is such a thing as objective morality. I hope I'm matching terms with you, but my understanding is that:
* The universe is a constantly changing medium.
* Motive beings are defined by their agendas; what they want. How they wish to influence the universe around them. Keeping things the same (aka, imposing order upon chaos, slowing the change of the universe around them) counts as an agenda, and helps to define that particular motive being.
* The success of a motive being is defined as their ability to realize their agendas.
* Cooperation and alliance are the most powerful means we know for motive beings to successfully realize their agendas. In short, motive beings are more powerful influences than non-motive forces, and profiting from their activities is easier to do when you cooperate with them than when you antagonize them.
* Thus, whatever strategies can be empirically determined to more successfully foster cooperation can be defined as "moral" and whatever strategies, due to bad planning, selfishness, short sightedness, etc fail to foster cooperation or that lead to communal (and thus ultimately individual) failure can be classified as "immoral". This model sees foolishness and malice as isomorphic. We must instead strive for wisdom and shrewd kindness, which are also born out as isomorphic characteristics.
I agree this approach entails rerooting the definition of many terms including "morality", but I believe we wind up with a pretty consistent working definition to what we use in daily life, but with a working model that helps describe how to behave in a variety of difficult edge and corner cases. We're also left with an explanation and definition of "objective morality" that presupposes no more than certain characteristics of the universe, and the existence of motive actors, which you would kind of need anyway, right? Inanimate objects cannot behave morally as they cannot be said to "behave" at all.
Let me know if this explanation is reasonable at all. Took me all of 30 years to work out, and it's served me well in practice for the 3 years since. :3
Also, hells yeah bow ties are cool. :D
Yes, absolutely: no evidence that they can offer you. But they may have evidence that satisfies them.
Hai digi, I'd like to jump in and say that if I were caught in your "my vivid and continuous memories are starkly inconsistent with slowly mounting thorough physical evidence" scenario, I would actually fold quite early lacking any corroborative evidence or alibis of my own.
I think I see what is "reasonable" differently than mainstream, but individuals in our culture are quite fond of tying their identities directly to the bare metal of their personal experiences. I personally find that sentiment harmful to all involved, and choose not to follow that strategy myself.
In any conflict, I do my best to nerf the importance of any of my own unverifiable personal knowledge or anecdotes and avoid taking offense if others question the accuracy of my supposed observations. My observations still count as evidence, of which I have a volume, but it may be incorrect or more often than not misinterpreted, even by myself as the observer. It might be easier for me to do this than an average Joe because my memory has proven quite unreliable in practice throughout my life, so I've retrained my epistemological instincts to prefer immediate, verifiable sources of data over my own longer term recollections.
However, I have found that removing responsibility from my mental vlog helps to improve it's accuracy. When you strongly identify "truth" with "what you've witnessed firsthand", I find that it pressures you to fabricate data you do not have to fill in gaps you might be embarrassed to not recall for whatever reason. You're also pressured to insert your own interpretations of what you saw, confusing your conjecture with what you've witnessed. It's like being pressured to contaminate the mental equivalent of a crime scene. By reducing expectancy from my own memory, I've found that the memories I do retrieve are now much more frequently accurate: although still at times incomplete, badly indexed or difficult to accurately interpret until more empirical data is gathered.
So were I in your situation, I would be quite upset at having a memory that did not match an otherwise consistent trail of hard evidence, but it would not take much hard evidence to abandon my recollection as a frustrating probable falsehood, or at least a fiction lodged into a place it did not belong. Also, I believe that such an attitude would assist any person in properly adapting to the reality around them. Rare is the time (Orwellian governmental conspiracy notwithstanding) when your memories tell you more about the world you're living in now -- the world which will cut you down for not paying attention -- than hard empirical evidence and logic do.
noting comes before it, so random comes out of [after] nothing.
Your suggestion is interesting but it violates what we observe as Newton's second law of thermodynamics. Please allow Maxwell's Demon to see you out the tiny door on your left.
The scientist then asked "All the (way?) down... to what?" The lady threw her knitting at him and went home.
What, so scientist was unfamiliar with infinite regression?
Perhaps he wasn't so clever then, flunked precal and that.