Wasn't that the line tobacco companies were trying to sell the Czech Republic a few years ago? Allow smoking because people die younger & your universal healthcare system will cost less?
it's true. Lamentable and certainly not a cost-saving measure I'm happy with, but it's true. Being lamentable doesn't alter the truth. Living to an old age is damn expensive these days.
So, foreverdisillusioned, which tobacco lobbyist group do you work for anyway?
I advised the poster to get an ego-c, which (since it seems to be only available online) is not to my knowledge produced by any tobacco company, unlike those pieces of crap you see at gas stations and walmart. There is very little data concerning the long term risks of nicotine alone, but what data we do have implies the risks are significantly lower than smoking. Even if they weren't, it's hella cheaper and you can usually do it in restaurants, etc. because the droplets do not persist in the air and there is no smell at all, so it's still something I recommend. While I'm at it I strongly recommend people refill their own cartridges using fluid from many of the fine, independently owned online shops out there. If I were I shill I'd be recommending those massively overpriced prefilled cartridges.
It's worth mentioning unsolicited because most people I've met have either not heard of e-cigs, don't realize they (optionally) have nicotine in them, believe that nicotine is just as harmful and addictive as tobacco alone, and/or they've actually tried those pieces of crap they sell at gas stations and concluded they suck.
You missed the point. They die sooner, before they have a chance to fully develop the typical old age illnesses. If their healthcare costs are subsidized by you (as may be the case depending on your country of residence and/or details of your health insurance), then they are subsidized to a lesser extent than non-smokers.
If your parents ultimately die of old age without ever having any diagnosable medical problems, good for them (not for dying, for the being healthy part.) The large majority of the population, however, will be treated for one thing or another for years and years. And before dying, they generally have at least one major hospital stay. Many will end up bouncing in and out of the the hospital emergency room as they 'circle the drain.' Lung cancer is expensive, yes, but not as expensive as decades of Medicare.
I am all for keeping an open and unbiased mind. However, the continued assertion that "we don't know if them being Muslims has anything to do with it!" is wearing a little thin. It may be that they didn't have explicit religious/political motives, but seeing and reading about their fellow Muslims and fellow Chechens engaging in this sort of activity surely had SOME sort of influence. As I said elsewhere, it would be fairly unthinkable for this sort of "out of the blue" transformation to happen in someone raised in, say, the Jain religion.
Not a Muslim basher here (I despise all Abrahamic religions roughly equally), but religion massively influences culture and culture massively influences how children are brought up.
It wasn't exactly a wild guess. With the increased law enforcement focus on Muslim and Arab-looking people (much of it unofficial, but that doesn't make it less real), the lack of anyone claiming responsibility for the attack, and the HUGE amount of rhetoric and radicalization surrounding both federal income tax (remember the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS building a couple years back?), gun control (McVeigh) and Waco (McVeigh again), it really wasn't an unreasonable initial theory. I don't think it was fair to accuse the Tea party directly, since the Tea Party is little more than vapid, aimless populism of the conservative sort, but it wasn't unreasonable to look at the kind of rhetoric was feeding into that movement.
Except magazine capacity has nothing to do with assault rifles. Semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines have never, to my knowledge, been singled out. Only big scary black guns.
Mag restrictions are also fairly stupid, but it's something you can at least have an intelligent debate about, and they have nothing to do with the definition of 'assault rifles'
Not only do you pay higher premiums but over your shortened lifetimes you end up needing LESS healthcare, not more. But don't expect the rabid anti-smoking lobby to stop spreading lies.
P.S. If you are a smoker, try vaping instead. Get yourself a good ego-c, not the crap they sell at walmart, some high strength liquid and be sure to exhale through your nose (you don't absorb it as much in your lungs.) If you still have cravings consider adding an antidepressant, since one of the reasons why tobacco is so addictive (whereas straight nicotine is only mildly addictive) are the MAOIs and other neurotrasmitter-affecting chemicals present.
Um, at the very least the religion plays a part to the degree that it influences their culture and their attitudes towards violence. If they grew up Jain, for instance, I rather doubt they would have bombed anything regardless of their politics.
Chechen independeance isn't religious in nature? Argh. You might as well argue that the Palestinian cause is entirely political, with no religious element. Actually I'm sure there are people who do that, just like some people stick their heads in the sand and insist that the Northern Ireland conflicts are strictly political.
The fact that such conflicts have ostensibly non-religious dimensions only serves to illustrate how influential, insidious and all-encompassing the Abrahamic religions tend to be. The religious aspect becomes a given, something one doesn't need to trumpet at every occasion, because everyone in the group already knows all about those evil, insular, freakish Catholics/Protestants/Sunni/Shia/Druze/etc.
A fine sentiment, and I hope the investigators will not allow themselves to be unduly biased in their assessment but let's be realistic for a moment here: the bombers were Muslims not born (though were raised) in the United States. It would be astonishing if religion and/or politics had nothing to do with it.
If the suspect is carrying explosives and potentially willing to use them in a suicide attack, the distinction between those two basically shrinks to zero. If he is not unconscious or paralyzed, he is either dead or still capable of blowing himself up. You can't shoot to render unconscious without shooting to kill. In theory you could aim for the spinal cord but realistically it's going to boil down to a head shot. Which is unfortunate, because we may never know the full story (including potential accomplices.)
How about this as a compromise: tell us concealed permit holders how much training we need to get and we'll do it. I, for one, would not mind at all being required to get more training. However, I think you may find that your average cop (not SWAT) isn't really all that much better trained that your average gun nut. In case you missed the memo, these guys ambushed and killed an MIT cop last night. All the training in the world will not save you from an ambush.
The fact of the matter is, for every Zimmerman out there there are hundreds if not thousands of American cops that have similarly overreacted in the same way this past year. I'm all for gun control and increased training and increased safety measures and background checks and mental health screening and so on, but throwing up your hands and saying everyone who is a cop is a cool headed professional and the rest are dangerous gun nuts is deluded, bordering on fascist (cue the flames.)
At the risk of being insensitive to the fact that the guy is still on the loose, people are scared and there's a very good chance there will be more bloodshed before the day is through:
What are the long term consequences of this? I mean so far "only" four people are dead, but the citizens major city have been told to stay indoors because a Muslim maniac with guns and bombs and possibly a suicide vest is on the loose. I think this is an experience that's going to stick in the popular consciousness for quite a long time.
Chechen, interesting. Methinks we might get more friendly with Russia after this. Also, especially in light of the 4chan debacle (did the Post really run with the photo on the front page? it boggles the mind. When I first saw the 4chan thing last night the first thing I said was I was surprised they hadn't proven Justin Bieber the culprit), Americans may finally come to realize that not all Muslims have brown skin. They may even realize that Iranians are for the most part are not Arab, but I'm not holding my breath.
If they used or later today uses an "assault rifle" (everyone who thinks this is anything other than a laughable political construct please, go educate yourself), the Republicans may finally begin to compromise on the gun thing.
Annnnd, um, I'm not sure what else may come of this.They sounded desperate and without long term plans so hopefully he isn't prepared to go hide out in the woods or something... I cannot begin to fathom the circus we'll experience if this goes on for longer than a day or two.
Regardless, this surely isn't something that will be glossed over in a year or two. I hope they get him alive (interrogation if nothing else), today, without any more bloodshed.
There is nothing that can exceed the speed of light. The speed of light may be 299,792,458 meters per second but that is a profoundly, profoundly misleading soundbite, because if you could travel at the speed of light you could go anywhere in the universe without aging even a microsecond. Light speed is actually instantaneous travel... from the traveler's point of view. The *problem* is the rest of the universe, including your point of departure and your destination, will have aged quite a bit. So when people talk about FTL what they really mean is "traveling really fast without that pesky time dilation getting in the way." Which is a fancy way of saying "time travel". If you can travel that fast without the time dilation then you can also travel backwards in time. There's nothing wrong with asking about time travel, it may yet be entirely feasible, but the very persistence of the term "FTL" betrays very profound ignorance of special relativity that persists even 108 years later.
I've heard different explanations of the Alcubierre drive but if wikipedia's current description is to be believed, it is essentially a form of time travel. If you possess exotic matter then you are able to go back to yesterday just as easy as you are able to travel Alpha Centari in fifteen minutes (not just fifteen minutes for you but fifteen minutes for us here on earth and the aliens waiting for you there.) Exotic matter is fascinating but has never been experimentally verified beyond the still controversial and misunderstood Casimir Effect.
There's also no such thing as a FTL cosmic rays to my knowledge. What you are describing are tachyons, which have never been experimentally detected and the vast majority of physicists dismiss as a mathematical artifact. Some references to "faster than light" particles in the popular press are either misrepresentations of what is actually occurring (the leading edge of the waveform isn't traveling faster than light) or experiments that have been later disproven (such as the six sigma FTL neutrino.)
We already have "near light speed" technology; you just get a huge tank of fuel and keep firing that (possibly nuclear) rocket until you're going fast enough.
Anyway, to reiterate: going fast has never been the issue (except for the expense involved and political unpopularity in transporting nuclear materials to space.) Near-lightspeed has never been impossible and has always been more than fast enough for the traveler. What is problematic and possibly unsolvable is going fast without everyone and everything back on Earth aging--from the traveler's point of view--at an accelerated rate.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows 8 and I may never do so. I don't doubt Metro is very badly executed and needlessly foists bad cell phone based ideas on desktop users.
However, I find it just slightly amusing that everyone is screaming for the return of one of the most infuriatingly annoying UIs ever conceived of, the Start Menu. I didn't know anyone who liked this piece of shit when it appeared 18 years ago, but apparently MS trained people very well. Ok yes, it got a little more usable with Windows 7 (maybe it was Vista, I forget), but you have to remember how horrible it was for those first 12 years or so. The only good part about it was it didn't take up much space when not in use and it was accessible without minimizing all your application windows. Great. Except, in order to actually do anything, you have to click a dozen fucking times, opening a chain of windows that covers over half the screen, and if you happen to misclick you have to start over. (Vista/7 fixed some of this, but it still feels pretty sadistic the way they force you to go hopping through submenus using less than 1/10th of your screen. For me, the only real saving grace was the ability to type in the name of a program instead.)
And god fucking forbid you want to be able to launch a program in less than 3 clicks by putting a shortcut on your desktop. Oh no no no, the desktop is meant for nothing except staring at your pretty wallpaper! If you put too many useful shortcuts or folders on your desktop, Windows would bitch at you every single day to clean it up for you, with no way of making it shut up without some third party hacks. And then there's the whole stupidity of compositing window managers making it incredibly tedious to set up non-overlapping windows, so 95% of the time you wind up maximizing everything anyway. (Again, not saying Metro does it right, just saying that reflexively hitting the maximize button on every app you start is retarded.)
And now after almost two decades of training users to utilize, expect and apparently love such a sadistic paradigm, people are up in arms now that they've come out with a UI that, however horribly executed, actually decides to use the whole screen. Me, I've been waiting for the death of the start menu paradigm, utilization of all four window corners (provided they take multimonitors into account), and intuitive fullscreen / tiling window managers for a long time now.
I guess my point is, if you hate Windows 8 / Metro, good for you! I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to. However, "Windows 7 was UI perfection" is not one of those reasons. Just because Windows and its imitators (including OS X and most Linux desktops) have spent decades trained you to use something doesn't mean that something was any good to begin with.
Err, that's nothing to do with the evolution of sexual desire, that's only because we've become so incredibly good at making cheap food. Haven't you ever seen those stone fertility idols? Or heard of societies where obesity is/was a sign of the aristocracy? People have gotten extra sex because they were fat for far longer than they've been denied reproductive opportunities for the same.
No no, they don't inevitably require it. They inevitably imply it. Important distinction. I won't embark on any lengthy explanation as to why, but I will say that there is a an infinite set of spectulative ideas not inspired by relality, most of which are contradictory, so right away you know the odds of any one of these ideas being correct is extremely low. You can argue that theistic belief (either one specific religion or a nebulous definition that tries to tie together a bunch of disparate religions) has special qualities that make it stand well above these other speculative ideas, but I have never seen such an argument that wasn't ridiculously contrived. (Note I said theistic belief, not deistic belief. Theists trying to ally themselves with deists is even more absurd than Christians trying to ally themselves with Buddhists. I'm not an a-deist, but the concept is so empty as to be irrelevant.)
So yes, it's entirely possible for a freethinker to make an unreasonable exception when it comes to religion, making them a theistic (or at least theism-tolerant) freethinker. It's also possible for someone to literally believe the entire word is the completely literal word of God except for a few key 'obviously allegorical' phrases. Both are inconsistencies, the severity of which depends on how socially and politically contentious the phrases / religions in question are.
I don't really object to "militant"; I just find it an important indicator of how the lines have remained skewed. I do view "atheist" as fairly derogatory (when used as the sole descriptor of one's worldview/arguments) for a variety of reasons, but I recognize that this is still a minority view.
Instead of modding me all the way to negative one, could someone who believes this is flamebait explain to me why? I didn't bring up the idea of being offended by this name; I simply responded to the naked mockery of the idea. I explained how such offense is rather reasonable, especially in light of the constant stream of offended Christians still doing the political circuit, still shouting at the top of their lungs about how worried and offended they are. I don't advocate that level of games or rhetoric, but it is a simple conscious-raising step to say "you do know Lazarus is a fairy tale thought by hundreds of millions of Americans to be a literal, historical truth, right?"
Expecting us to ignore it is like choosing the username "vaccines==autism" and complaining it's just a joke when someone condemns it. And I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.
Except we really doesn't have to be active about it at all. The disagreement is dropped on our doorstep (often literally) all the damn time. I don't think I've ever brought the subject up myself, either in real life or on the net. I didn't bring up the subject now; I merely responded to the joking and scoffing at the idea that someone might take offense (however fleeting and trivial, like a feminist offended by "fireman") at yet another allusion-without-condemnation to a dangerous fable that is still the single most important political force in this country.
If you did read my other posts, I hope you saw the one about freethought vs. atheism. Freethought influences me a great deal. It is an identity I have trouble imagining myself without, whereas atheism is a mere consequence, a conclusion able to be effortlessly changed at a moment's notice (not that it seems at all likely any new evidence or new reasoning is forthcoming.) Freethought--the valuing of critical thought and rejection of popularity-based arguments--guides the vast majority of my nontrivial thoughts and behavior. It affected my choice of career (a field the average person hasn't even heard of), my choice of a partner, my attitude towards alternative and conventional medicine (I frequently condemn both, but the worst offenses obviously lie with the former), my ethics and morals, etc. Atheism is an important consequence of freethought only to the extent that social and political theism is prevalent.
You put in zero time educating anyone around you about the perils of atheism or other non-Christianity? You are ok with your children being exposed to antiChristian beliefs; or if you are OK with it, do you make no attempt at to tell them that those beliefs are wrong? If an atheist starts gushing over about a book of Hitchens' or Dawkins', are you obliged to keep absolute silence lest you become a militant afreethinker (or a-atheist)? What about being pro-vaccine... is that a consciousness-defining trait if someone does not ignore idle chatter about vaccines causing autism to go unchallenged? Challenging stupid and dangerous ideas is simply an indicator that someone things those ideas are, wait for it, stupid and/or dangerous.
I don't find God-debunking books to be terribly interesting. I got around to reading The God Delusion like six years later only because I wanted to see precisely what could cause such offense. It was underwhelming and fairly tedious. I doubt I'll ever bother reading it through again. Nevertheless, I am a fan of Dawkins precisely because he does not shy away from condemning bad ideas. The belief (nonbelief) itself is completely immaterial to me; the politics of it, however, are not. Nonbelief matters because mainstream society, most promenently Fox News, keeps screaming its goddamned head off that it matters. Trying to counter Christian politics by simply saying "maybe you should keep that private; keep it to yourself" is silly and patronizing and unrealistic. I definitely do not and should not ever expect anyone to believe one thing and act a completely different way in public and in the voting booth. No, the proper response is "you are wrong, this is why, and this is why and how your wrongness is negatively affecting my life." No different from explaining statistics and herd immunity to an anti-vaxer, really.
I said if the topic of the name came up, I would likely chime in with my thoughts. Of course in the grand scheme of things it isn't important enough to go out of the way to bring it up. It came up here and was scoffed at by people who (perhaps subconsciously) believe only politically powerful people have the right to be offended, or those who simply believe that there is no point in quibbling over issues that aren't of earthshaking importance. They do matter. Annoying feminists making a big deal about using gender-neutral language matters, not because it's some insideous thing poisoning our subconscious with sexism (though some would argue that), but precisely because it is so simple, easy and quick. It makes people aware of the fact there is, in fact, another group of people who view things quite a bit differently. It's called "consciousness raising", and it's a battle very different from the big issues like evolution and gay rights and separation of church and state. Low key, but important for the sake of simply being visible (and we are, sadly, still quite invisible. Largely due to our own apathy and defeatism, I'm afraid.) Anyway, since it came up here, it was worth a response from me. That's all. Possibly the length of my responses make it seem like I'm making a bigger deal out of it than I am; I just like to be thorough.
Yes, most vocal atheists seem to be embracing the label as an effective self-descriptor even as most of them decry the concept as stupid, a-buddhist, a-fairy-ist, etc. It's a damn shame, continuing to identify oneself with one is not. There are a great many stupid and/or evil atheists in the world, it just so happens that the "New Atheist" crowd tends to be of the good, freethinking sort. The problem with treating them as synonyms is best exemplified by this damn "What about Stalin" thing that keeps popping up. (Actually, "What about Hitler" pops up more often, which is a pathetic attempt to frame us for an obviously Christian-borne and Christian-executed genocide.) I don't know why Hitchens and Dawkins and the rest mince words. The answer is simple: Stalin was not a freethinker. He was anti-science (see: Lysenkoism) and anti-dissent. Those are probably the two most important building blocks of freethought, which is what good atheists like Dawkins use and advocate. Not believing in something simply doesn't matter; it's what we believe *instead of* the thing you believe in.
No, I'm all for that. I think it's fantastic when Christians bitch about the Christ being taken out of Christmas (although it's a tad silly to blame us, since it was Christians who decided to give it a snazzier hero and to absorb all of that pagan winter solstice stuff.) I hope they manage to reestablish firm lines between religious and secular, I really do.
How exactly am I militant? This kind of characterization really drives home my point. Non-militant atheists means what... never saying "you are wrong" ?
My words and attitudes are infinitely more reasonable than the fire and brimstone you can hear over the public airwaves, during the daytime when impressionable children could be watching/listening. And unlike many politically powerful Christians, I never advocate for institutionalized supression of the opposition.
For that matter I also object to being characterized as an atheist (I did use the phrase 'apathetic atheists', mostly because I knew I was already veering into offtopic territory and didn't need another digression.) I am a Freethinker, which makes atheism a rather unavoidable consequence, but my atheism influences my actions to the same degree your lack of belief in Santa Claus influences yours.
I can see how you would view secularization as weakening Christianity, but I think the more proper way to characterize it is a watering down, making it more palitable (like the Catholic Church did with Christmas and Easter.) By injecting lots of frivolities you deaden the power of the more blatant fundamentalists, yes, but you also muddy the waters so much that people can't see where actual Christianity begins or ends, it turns into this nebulous thing with contradictory tendrils touching different parts of our lives, and that makes it harder to fight.
I used to be fairly passive and head nodding, my only rule was I was not going to lie if I was asked a direct question about what I think/feel/believe/do. Apparently, this level of hyperpolite tolerance does not sufficiently coddle their insecurities. The awkward moments will ALWAYS be there unless you are willing to not just passively conceal your beliefs, but lie about them as well. So why bother concealing them at all? I'm not saying abandon all tact. I make sure not to be rude or accusatory or especially emotional in any way, I just calmly state my view on the matter, often with a shrug. That this is still considered to be terribly offensive by many Christians (seriously, how the hell do they get worked up about someone as calm and reasonable and tolerant as Dawkins?) is all the more reason not to self-censor. To put it in a more Orwellian manner: saying aloud the words "Two plus two equals four" is usually prosaic and pointless... but not if there are a lot of people running around saying it equals three, and we need to be up in arms against those heretics who say it's five.
The lack of Google branding hurt UClue for sure, but it was also held back by their self-interest: only former Google Answers researchers were allowed to become paid UClue researchers. The rest of the answers sites are generally crappy free wiki-type things, with little oversight and relatively small communities of contributors. The demand for a high quality research-oriented community with bounties is there, still unsatisfied, when Google had the product in the palm of their hand over ten years ago. Apparently, it was discontinued for no reason other than it was niche. Well, why the hell didn't you expand it?! For starters, you could have embraced the wiki revolution and recruited lots more paid researchers, offered resources for amateurs wanting to go pro. And it's not like it was an expensive thing to maintain. The people running it were commission-based contractors, not employees... and google got some of that commission too, on top of whatever they were making with ads.
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Wasn't that the line tobacco companies were trying to sell the Czech Republic a few years ago? Allow smoking because people die younger & your universal healthcare system will cost less?
it's true. Lamentable and certainly not a cost-saving measure I'm happy with, but it's true. Being lamentable doesn't alter the truth. Living to an old age is damn expensive these days.
So, foreverdisillusioned, which tobacco lobbyist group do you work for anyway? I advised the poster to get an ego-c, which (since it seems to be only available online) is not to my knowledge produced by any tobacco company, unlike those pieces of crap you see at gas stations and walmart. There is very little data concerning the long term risks of nicotine alone, but what data we do have implies the risks are significantly lower than smoking. Even if they weren't, it's hella cheaper and you can usually do it in restaurants, etc. because the droplets do not persist in the air and there is no smell at all, so it's still something I recommend. While I'm at it I strongly recommend people refill their own cartridges using fluid from many of the fine, independently owned online shops out there. If I were I shill I'd be recommending those massively overpriced prefilled cartridges.
It's worth mentioning unsolicited because most people I've met have either not heard of e-cigs, don't realize they (optionally) have nicotine in them, believe that nicotine is just as harmful and addictive as tobacco alone, and/or they've actually tried those pieces of crap they sell at gas stations and concluded they suck.
You missed the point. They die sooner, before they have a chance to fully develop the typical old age illnesses. If their healthcare costs are subsidized by you (as may be the case depending on your country of residence and/or details of your health insurance), then they are subsidized to a lesser extent than non-smokers.
If your parents ultimately die of old age without ever having any diagnosable medical problems, good for them (not for dying, for the being healthy part.) The large majority of the population, however, will be treated for one thing or another for years and years. And before dying, they generally have at least one major hospital stay. Many will end up bouncing in and out of the the hospital emergency room as they 'circle the drain.' Lung cancer is expensive, yes, but not as expensive as decades of Medicare.
I am all for keeping an open and unbiased mind. However, the continued assertion that "we don't know if them being Muslims has anything to do with it!" is wearing a little thin. It may be that they didn't have explicit religious/political motives, but seeing and reading about their fellow Muslims and fellow Chechens engaging in this sort of activity surely had SOME sort of influence. As I said elsewhere, it would be fairly unthinkable for this sort of "out of the blue" transformation to happen in someone raised in, say, the Jain religion.
Not a Muslim basher here (I despise all Abrahamic religions roughly equally), but religion massively influences culture and culture massively influences how children are brought up.
It wasn't exactly a wild guess. With the increased law enforcement focus on Muslim and Arab-looking people (much of it unofficial, but that doesn't make it less real), the lack of anyone claiming responsibility for the attack, and the HUGE amount of rhetoric and radicalization surrounding both federal income tax (remember the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS building a couple years back?), gun control (McVeigh) and Waco (McVeigh again), it really wasn't an unreasonable initial theory. I don't think it was fair to accuse the Tea party directly, since the Tea Party is little more than vapid, aimless populism of the conservative sort, but it wasn't unreasonable to look at the kind of rhetoric was feeding into that movement.
Except magazine capacity has nothing to do with assault rifles. Semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines have never, to my knowledge, been singled out. Only big scary black guns.
Mag restrictions are also fairly stupid, but it's something you can at least have an intelligent debate about, and they have nothing to do with the definition of 'assault rifles'
Not only do you pay higher premiums but over your shortened lifetimes you end up needing LESS healthcare, not more. But don't expect the rabid anti-smoking lobby to stop spreading lies.
P.S. If you are a smoker, try vaping instead. Get yourself a good ego-c, not the crap they sell at walmart, some high strength liquid and be sure to exhale through your nose (you don't absorb it as much in your lungs.) If you still have cravings consider adding an antidepressant, since one of the reasons why tobacco is so addictive (whereas straight nicotine is only mildly addictive) are the MAOIs and other neurotrasmitter-affecting chemicals present.
When will this myth die? Smokers cost taxpayers less than nonsmokers because they DIE SOONER (and everyone needs lots of healthcare in their old age.)
Um, at the very least the religion plays a part to the degree that it influences their culture and their attitudes towards violence. If they grew up Jain, for instance, I rather doubt they would have bombed anything regardless of their politics.
Chechen independeance isn't religious in nature? Argh. You might as well argue that the Palestinian cause is entirely political, with no religious element. Actually I'm sure there are people who do that, just like some people stick their heads in the sand and insist that the Northern Ireland conflicts are strictly political.
The fact that such conflicts have ostensibly non-religious dimensions only serves to illustrate how influential, insidious and all-encompassing the Abrahamic religions tend to be. The religious aspect becomes a given, something one doesn't need to trumpet at every occasion, because everyone in the group already knows all about those evil, insular, freakish Catholics/Protestants/Sunni/Shia/Druze/etc.
A fine sentiment, and I hope the investigators will not allow themselves to be unduly biased in their assessment but let's be realistic for a moment here: the bombers were Muslims not born (though were raised) in the United States. It would be astonishing if religion and/or politics had nothing to do with it.
If the suspect is carrying explosives and potentially willing to use them in a suicide attack, the distinction between those two basically shrinks to zero. If he is not unconscious or paralyzed, he is either dead or still capable of blowing himself up. You can't shoot to render unconscious without shooting to kill. In theory you could aim for the spinal cord but realistically it's going to boil down to a head shot. Which is unfortunate, because we may never know the full story (including potential accomplices.)
How about this as a compromise: tell us concealed permit holders how much training we need to get and we'll do it. I, for one, would not mind at all being required to get more training. However, I think you may find that your average cop (not SWAT) isn't really all that much better trained that your average gun nut. In case you missed the memo, these guys ambushed and killed an MIT cop last night. All the training in the world will not save you from an ambush.
The fact of the matter is, for every Zimmerman out there there are hundreds if not thousands of American cops that have similarly overreacted in the same way this past year. I'm all for gun control and increased training and increased safety measures and background checks and mental health screening and so on, but throwing up your hands and saying everyone who is a cop is a cool headed professional and the rest are dangerous gun nuts is deluded, bordering on fascist (cue the flames.)
At the risk of being insensitive to the fact that the guy is still on the loose, people are scared and there's a very good chance there will be more bloodshed before the day is through:
What are the long term consequences of this? I mean so far "only" four people are dead, but the citizens major city have been told to stay indoors because a Muslim maniac with guns and bombs and possibly a suicide vest is on the loose. I think this is an experience that's going to stick in the popular consciousness for quite a long time.
Chechen, interesting. Methinks we might get more friendly with Russia after this. Also, especially in light of the 4chan debacle (did the Post really run with the photo on the front page? it boggles the mind. When I first saw the 4chan thing last night the first thing I said was I was surprised they hadn't proven Justin Bieber the culprit), Americans may finally come to realize that not all Muslims have brown skin. They may even realize that Iranians are for the most part are not Arab, but I'm not holding my breath.
If they used or later today uses an "assault rifle" (everyone who thinks this is anything other than a laughable political construct please, go educate yourself), the Republicans may finally begin to compromise on the gun thing.
Annnnd, um, I'm not sure what else may come of this.They sounded desperate and without long term plans so hopefully he isn't prepared to go hide out in the woods or something... I cannot begin to fathom the circus we'll experience if this goes on for longer than a day or two.
Regardless, this surely isn't something that will be glossed over in a year or two. I hope they get him alive (interrogation if nothing else), today, without any more bloodshed.
There is nothing that can exceed the speed of light. The speed of light may be 299,792,458 meters per second but that is a profoundly, profoundly misleading soundbite, because if you could travel at the speed of light you could go anywhere in the universe without aging even a microsecond. Light speed is actually instantaneous travel... from the traveler's point of view. The *problem* is the rest of the universe, including your point of departure and your destination, will have aged quite a bit. So when people talk about FTL what they really mean is "traveling really fast without that pesky time dilation getting in the way." Which is a fancy way of saying "time travel". If you can travel that fast without the time dilation then you can also travel backwards in time. There's nothing wrong with asking about time travel, it may yet be entirely feasible, but the very persistence of the term "FTL" betrays very profound ignorance of special relativity that persists even 108 years later.
I've heard different explanations of the Alcubierre drive but if wikipedia's current description is to be believed, it is essentially a form of time travel. If you possess exotic matter then you are able to go back to yesterday just as easy as you are able to travel Alpha Centari in fifteen minutes (not just fifteen minutes for you but fifteen minutes for us here on earth and the aliens waiting for you there.) Exotic matter is fascinating but has never been experimentally verified beyond the still controversial and misunderstood Casimir Effect.
There's also no such thing as a FTL cosmic rays to my knowledge. What you are describing are tachyons, which have never been experimentally detected and the vast majority of physicists dismiss as a mathematical artifact. Some references to "faster than light" particles in the popular press are either misrepresentations of what is actually occurring (the leading edge of the waveform isn't traveling faster than light) or experiments that have been later disproven (such as the six sigma FTL neutrino.)
We already have "near light speed" technology; you just get a huge tank of fuel and keep firing that (possibly nuclear) rocket until you're going fast enough.
Anyway, to reiterate: going fast has never been the issue (except for the expense involved and political unpopularity in transporting nuclear materials to space.) Near-lightspeed has never been impossible and has always been more than fast enough for the traveler. What is problematic and possibly unsolvable is going fast without everyone and everything back on Earth aging--from the traveler's point of view--at an accelerated rate.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows 8 and I may never do so. I don't doubt Metro is very badly executed and needlessly foists bad cell phone based ideas on desktop users.
However, I find it just slightly amusing that everyone is screaming for the return of one of the most infuriatingly annoying UIs ever conceived of, the Start Menu. I didn't know anyone who liked this piece of shit when it appeared 18 years ago, but apparently MS trained people very well. Ok yes, it got a little more usable with Windows 7 (maybe it was Vista, I forget), but you have to remember how horrible it was for those first 12 years or so. The only good part about it was it didn't take up much space when not in use and it was accessible without minimizing all your application windows. Great. Except, in order to actually do anything, you have to click a dozen fucking times, opening a chain of windows that covers over half the screen, and if you happen to misclick you have to start over. (Vista/7 fixed some of this, but it still feels pretty sadistic the way they force you to go hopping through submenus using less than 1/10th of your screen. For me, the only real saving grace was the ability to type in the name of a program instead.)
And god fucking forbid you want to be able to launch a program in less than 3 clicks by putting a shortcut on your desktop. Oh no no no, the desktop is meant for nothing except staring at your pretty wallpaper! If you put too many useful shortcuts or folders on your desktop, Windows would bitch at you every single day to clean it up for you, with no way of making it shut up without some third party hacks. And then there's the whole stupidity of compositing window managers making it incredibly tedious to set up non-overlapping windows, so 95% of the time you wind up maximizing everything anyway. (Again, not saying Metro does it right, just saying that reflexively hitting the maximize button on every app you start is retarded.)
And now after almost two decades of training users to utilize, expect and apparently love such a sadistic paradigm, people are up in arms now that they've come out with a UI that, however horribly executed, actually decides to use the whole screen. Me, I've been waiting for the death of the start menu paradigm, utilization of all four window corners (provided they take multimonitors into account), and intuitive fullscreen / tiling window managers for a long time now.
I guess my point is, if you hate Windows 8 / Metro, good for you! I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to. However, "Windows 7 was UI perfection" is not one of those reasons. Just because Windows and its imitators (including OS X and most Linux desktops) have spent decades trained you to use something doesn't mean that something was any good to begin with.
Err, that's nothing to do with the evolution of sexual desire, that's only because we've become so incredibly good at making cheap food. Haven't you ever seen those stone fertility idols? Or heard of societies where obesity is/was a sign of the aristocracy? People have gotten extra sex because they were fat for far longer than they've been denied reproductive opportunities for the same.
No no, they don't inevitably require it. They inevitably imply it. Important distinction. I won't embark on any lengthy explanation as to why, but I will say that there is a an infinite set of spectulative ideas not inspired by relality, most of which are contradictory, so right away you know the odds of any one of these ideas being correct is extremely low. You can argue that theistic belief (either one specific religion or a nebulous definition that tries to tie together a bunch of disparate religions) has special qualities that make it stand well above these other speculative ideas, but I have never seen such an argument that wasn't ridiculously contrived. (Note I said theistic belief, not deistic belief. Theists trying to ally themselves with deists is even more absurd than Christians trying to ally themselves with Buddhists. I'm not an a-deist, but the concept is so empty as to be irrelevant.)
So yes, it's entirely possible for a freethinker to make an unreasonable exception when it comes to religion, making them a theistic (or at least theism-tolerant) freethinker. It's also possible for someone to literally believe the entire word is the completely literal word of God except for a few key 'obviously allegorical' phrases. Both are inconsistencies, the severity of which depends on how socially and politically contentious the phrases / religions in question are.
I don't really object to "militant"; I just find it an important indicator of how the lines have remained skewed. I do view "atheist" as fairly derogatory (when used as the sole descriptor of one's worldview/arguments) for a variety of reasons, but I recognize that this is still a minority view.
The hell are you talking about?
Instead of modding me all the way to negative one, could someone who believes this is flamebait explain to me why? I didn't bring up the idea of being offended by this name; I simply responded to the naked mockery of the idea. I explained how such offense is rather reasonable, especially in light of the constant stream of offended Christians still doing the political circuit, still shouting at the top of their lungs about how worried and offended they are. I don't advocate that level of games or rhetoric, but it is a simple conscious-raising step to say "you do know Lazarus is a fairy tale thought by hundreds of millions of Americans to be a literal, historical truth, right?"
Expecting us to ignore it is like choosing the username "vaccines==autism" and complaining it's just a joke when someone condemns it. And I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.
Except we really doesn't have to be active about it at all. The disagreement is dropped on our doorstep (often literally) all the damn time. I don't think I've ever brought the subject up myself, either in real life or on the net. I didn't bring up the subject now; I merely responded to the joking and scoffing at the idea that someone might take offense (however fleeting and trivial, like a feminist offended by "fireman") at yet another allusion-without-condemnation to a dangerous fable that is still the single most important political force in this country.
If you did read my other posts, I hope you saw the one about freethought vs. atheism. Freethought influences me a great deal. It is an identity I have trouble imagining myself without, whereas atheism is a mere consequence, a conclusion able to be effortlessly changed at a moment's notice (not that it seems at all likely any new evidence or new reasoning is forthcoming.) Freethought--the valuing of critical thought and rejection of popularity-based arguments--guides the vast majority of my nontrivial thoughts and behavior. It affected my choice of career (a field the average person hasn't even heard of), my choice of a partner, my attitude towards alternative and conventional medicine (I frequently condemn both, but the worst offenses obviously lie with the former), my ethics and morals, etc. Atheism is an important consequence of freethought only to the extent that social and political theism is prevalent.
You put in zero time educating anyone around you about the perils of atheism or other non-Christianity? You are ok with your children being exposed to antiChristian beliefs; or if you are OK with it, do you make no attempt at to tell them that those beliefs are wrong? If an atheist starts gushing over about a book of Hitchens' or Dawkins', are you obliged to keep absolute silence lest you become a militant afreethinker (or a-atheist)? What about being pro-vaccine... is that a consciousness-defining trait if someone does not ignore idle chatter about vaccines causing autism to go unchallenged? Challenging stupid and dangerous ideas is simply an indicator that someone things those ideas are, wait for it, stupid and/or dangerous.
I don't find God-debunking books to be terribly interesting. I got around to reading The God Delusion like six years later only because I wanted to see precisely what could cause such offense. It was underwhelming and fairly tedious. I doubt I'll ever bother reading it through again. Nevertheless, I am a fan of Dawkins precisely because he does not shy away from condemning bad ideas. The belief (nonbelief) itself is completely immaterial to me; the politics of it, however, are not. Nonbelief matters because mainstream society, most promenently Fox News, keeps screaming its goddamned head off that it matters. Trying to counter Christian politics by simply saying "maybe you should keep that private; keep it to yourself" is silly and patronizing and unrealistic. I definitely do not and should not ever expect anyone to believe one thing and act a completely different way in public and in the voting booth. No, the proper response is "you are wrong, this is why, and this is why and how your wrongness is negatively affecting my life." No different from explaining statistics and herd immunity to an anti-vaxer, really.
I said if the topic of the name came up, I would likely chime in with my thoughts. Of course in the grand scheme of things it isn't important enough to go out of the way to bring it up. It came up here and was scoffed at by people who (perhaps subconsciously) believe only politically powerful people have the right to be offended, or those who simply believe that there is no point in quibbling over issues that aren't of earthshaking importance. They do matter. Annoying feminists making a big deal about using gender-neutral language matters, not because it's some insideous thing poisoning our subconscious with sexism (though some would argue that), but precisely because it is so simple, easy and quick. It makes people aware of the fact there is, in fact, another group of people who view things quite a bit differently. It's called "consciousness raising", and it's a battle very different from the big issues like evolution and gay rights and separation of church and state. Low key, but important for the sake of simply being visible (and we are, sadly, still quite invisible. Largely due to our own apathy and defeatism, I'm afraid.) Anyway, since it came up here, it was worth a response from me. That's all. Possibly the length of my responses make it seem like I'm making a bigger deal out of it than I am; I just like to be thorough.
Yes, most vocal atheists seem to be embracing the label as an effective self-descriptor even as most of them decry the concept as stupid, a-buddhist, a-fairy-ist, etc. It's a damn shame, continuing to identify oneself with one is not. There are a great many stupid and/or evil atheists in the world, it just so happens that the "New Atheist" crowd tends to be of the good, freethinking sort. The problem with treating them as synonyms is best exemplified by this damn "What about Stalin" thing that keeps popping up. (Actually, "What about Hitler" pops up more often, which is a pathetic attempt to frame us for an obviously Christian-borne and Christian-executed genocide.) I don't know why Hitchens and Dawkins and the rest mince words. The answer is simple: Stalin was not a freethinker. He was anti-science (see: Lysenkoism) and anti-dissent. Those are probably the two most important building blocks of freethought, which is what good atheists like Dawkins use and advocate. Not believing in something simply doesn't matter; it's what we believe *instead of* the thing you believe in.
No, I'm all for that. I think it's fantastic when Christians bitch about the Christ being taken out of Christmas (although it's a tad silly to blame us, since it was Christians who decided to give it a snazzier hero and to absorb all of that pagan winter solstice stuff.) I hope they manage to reestablish firm lines between religious and secular, I really do.
How exactly am I militant? This kind of characterization really drives home my point. Non-militant atheists means what... never saying "you are wrong" ? My words and attitudes are infinitely more reasonable than the fire and brimstone you can hear over the public airwaves, during the daytime when impressionable children could be watching/listening. And unlike many politically powerful Christians, I never advocate for institutionalized supression of the opposition.
For that matter I also object to being characterized as an atheist (I did use the phrase 'apathetic atheists', mostly because I knew I was already veering into offtopic territory and didn't need another digression.) I am a Freethinker, which makes atheism a rather unavoidable consequence, but my atheism influences my actions to the same degree your lack of belief in Santa Claus influences yours.
I can see how you would view secularization as weakening Christianity, but I think the more proper way to characterize it is a watering down, making it more palitable (like the Catholic Church did with Christmas and Easter.) By injecting lots of frivolities you deaden the power of the more blatant fundamentalists, yes, but you also muddy the waters so much that people can't see where actual Christianity begins or ends, it turns into this nebulous thing with contradictory tendrils touching different parts of our lives, and that makes it harder to fight.
I used to be fairly passive and head nodding, my only rule was I was not going to lie if I was asked a direct question about what I think/feel/believe/do. Apparently, this level of hyperpolite tolerance does not sufficiently coddle their insecurities. The awkward moments will ALWAYS be there unless you are willing to not just passively conceal your beliefs, but lie about them as well. So why bother concealing them at all? I'm not saying abandon all tact. I make sure not to be rude or accusatory or especially emotional in any way, I just calmly state my view on the matter, often with a shrug. That this is still considered to be terribly offensive by many Christians (seriously, how the hell do they get worked up about someone as calm and reasonable and tolerant as Dawkins?) is all the more reason not to self-censor. To put it in a more Orwellian manner: saying aloud the words "Two plus two equals four" is usually prosaic and pointless... but not if there are a lot of people running around saying it equals three, and we need to be up in arms against those heretics who say it's five.
The lack of Google branding hurt UClue for sure, but it was also held back by their self-interest: only former Google Answers researchers were allowed to become paid UClue researchers. The rest of the answers sites are generally crappy free wiki-type things, with little oversight and relatively small communities of contributors. The demand for a high quality research-oriented community with bounties is there, still unsatisfied, when Google had the product in the palm of their hand over ten years ago. Apparently, it was discontinued for no reason other than it was niche. Well, why the hell didn't you expand it?! For starters, you could have embraced the wiki revolution and recruited lots more paid researchers, offered resources for amateurs wanting to go pro. And it's not like it was an expensive thing to maintain. The people running it were commission-based contractors, not employees... and google got some of that commission too, on top of whatever they were making with ads.
Spawned a million clones, all of which suck.