I'm seriously sick of this ignorant crap. There is absolutely no known possible mechanism for GM foods to cause cancer because they're GM.
That's kind of like all the anti-drug people who say that there is no scientific proof that marijuana has any medicinal value. It was absolutely true. But the reason it is true is because you needed the DEA to give you a permit to work with banned drugs and they only like to give out permits projects researching adverse effects, not beneficial effects.
Same thing with GMO's -- the testing coverage of GMOs is very weak. There is this get out jail free card they use to legally avoid testing called substantial equivalence - the theory is that if you are just mixing genes from two different kinds of food, then its all good. They do very limited testing to make sure there is nothing obviously wrong (like the potatoes genes haven't turned the new GMO crop into belladonna) but the basic testing is all that's ever done if they can claim equivalence. Of course they do this because comprehensive testing would be really, really, really expensive. So, you know, let the customers beta test it.
So yeah, there is no known mechanism because no one is looking for one.
Pastors often have their congregation "turn off" all their electronics in order to better hear God. It's a common theme in churches. So the constant filling of our time with noise does contribute to our "spiritual malaise", at least according to many in spiritual jobs.
That's a silly leap of logic. Theaters and symphonies tell people to turn off their phones too, schools forbid them from the classroom and its illegal to text and drive. It isn't about "hearing god" its about paying attention to whatever happen in real life in front of you rather than on the net. There is nothing spiritual about it.
Religion of ALL kinds harms humanity far more than helps it.
That's an unfalsifiable claim, but I can try.
The religious impulse seems to be an evolutionary adaption. Lots of "atheists" still exhibit other forms of faith like an implicit trust in ideologies like libertarianism, democracy, science, etc.
I'm not saying those things are automatically religious, far from it. I'm saying that a lot of people are less than skeptical of them in the same way that 'religious' people are less than skeptical of their belief systems. At some point you have to put your trust in something because there just aren't enough hours in the day to verify everything from first principles. But even so, a lot of people go beyond trust as a matter of expediency and are unwilling to consider the possibility for error in the same way that religious people are often unwilling to question doctrine.
So, if this religious impulse is such a wide-spread evolutionary adaption then it stands to reason that it has a net positive value to the human species.
Hundreds of guns, several agents shot and possibly dead. Agreed the ATF was heavy handed, but it was quite understandable in that situation.
No, it is not understandable. It would be understandable if they were just regular people. But they weren't - they have been given an enormous amount of power with that comes an enormously higher standard of behavior. Giving them a pass because the situation was emotionally difficult is like giving someone a pass for vehicular homicide because they were drunk.
Unless you were at Waco, you don't know what happened at Waco.
Bullshit. Even the US government doesn't deny that children were burned to death. They do deny their culpability, but it isn't terribly hard to see that as misdirection.
Even if the footage (which I watched on live TV at the time) of the tank pushing in the walls and the fire starting not to long afterwards was misleading, the government were the ones with all the resources and time necessary to handle the situation in a safer way. They decided that their time was worth more than the risk to the children and that's the best possible light you can put on the government's actions, all other interpretations are much less favorable.
I don't see what the point of misdirect the discussion on this topic would be, unless a rationale examination of IT project failure is something some group would prefer to be avoided. Accenture maybe?
Besides, both parties have embraced the name Obamacare - the republicans started it thinking it was pejorative and then the democrats must have run a few test groups on the name and decided to try and "take it back" before the last election. At this point, I don't think the name is controversial at all. It certainly rolls off the tongue much better than any of the official names.
Basic Cruise Control from the 60s and 70's could handle that situation. The problem is there are too many people who won't use cruise control
So true.
I have basic, stupid cruise control on my car and it rarely varies more than 5mph (+/- 2.5mph) on a grade when set at 65. But it seems like any time I drive for more than 30 minutes on an uncongested freeway it is inevitable that I'll run into at least one numbnut who isn't using cruise control and lets their speed vary by 10-15mph. They'll catch up to me, sit in my blind-spot until I put on the brakes and force them to pass. Once they are well ahead, I turn the cruise-control back on at my original speed and then I catch up to them, at which point they speed-match me again. If I gun it and get past them, as soon as I settle back at the set speed they start to catch up again. I can not figure out what the fuck is going through their heads, but it is super aggravating and it happens all the fucking time. Vast open stretches of freeway and these guys must be lonely because they won't leave me the fuck alone.
The same can be said of any thing humans do. Being a nanny can be an exploitative relationship.
The difference, as I've pointed out repeatedly, is that unlike nearly all other forms of socialization, there are practically no other sources of examples for children to learn about sexuality from. A gallon of porn can massively dilute a few drops of compassion.
The lesson we should teach our children is "don't do ANYTHING to another person without thinking about how it impacts them".
Far more easily said than done. Such a simplistic attitude completely fails to capture the difficulty of the task. If it were so easy, then a couple of episodes of sesame street would have raised a generations of pacifists around the world.
And I can assure you that at no point in my life did I ever believe that Grand Theft Auto was ever representative of reality.
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
You can confusing sex with stable, loving relationships. Sex is a physical act we do for fun and to make babies.
No. Sex is a form of social interaction that is far more than just "fun." People use sex for all kinds of things. It is a necessary component of any normal romantic relationship, it can be transactional, it can be recreational, it can be an escape from problems in life, it can be a tool of manipulation and control, it can be a a way to hurt people - the list of what sex is as varied as the human imagination. And that is the problem you black-and-white thinkers are having - you vastly underestimate the complexity of sex and the potential difficulties of navigating all of it.
And yes, a 5 second conversation really can root that difference firmly in a kids mind. If I can tell my kids that Grand Theft Auto doesn't actually represent how real people are supposed to behave and expect them to believe me
Lol. I don't think you actually have any children if you think telling them something is bad and that they shouldn't do it is enough to convince them. "Don't hit your brother!" Never mind that sex is orders of magnitude more complex than simply getting a kid to play nice.
The argument is that if kids are taught about sex and told that some people like to shove pineapples up their butts, they will become sexual deviants
That may be your strawman argument. but it isn't even close to what I've been saying.
What I've been saying is that given the typical sexual role models of modern youth (basically none) porn will fill the gap and teach them porn-sex is normal-sex. Furthermore, that a "5 second" conversation, or even even a few substantial conversations, isn't enough to fully overcome those learned attitudes about sex.
Citing your 3-year old's statement that she isn't a dinosaur as proof of a child's ability to understand something for which they have practically no other context is ridiculous. If children really were so rational then it would be fine to let minors enter into legally binding contracts and age of consent laws would be completely without merit.
That's a definition of fundamentalism, it certainly isn't the definition of fundamentalism that is common short-hand for extremist asshole. The FSF does not qualify for the extremist asshole definition, not by a long shot.
I don't think it's an over-simplification at all. As I said, I do not find porn to be harmful in the least.
At this point your argument has become circular - assuming the proposition without proof. It doesn't help that you keep resorting to the strawman of black and white reasoning either ("completely without brains" and "magical brainwashing rays").
And now you too can go forth and use it correctly knowing that you will catch at least one fish in the same net. Give a man dessert and he eats for a night, catch him in a fish net and he can go trolling for the rest of this life.
That's like saying that if you say that people can get good ideas from television shows, you must also believe that violent content makes people more aggressive.
I think your over-simplification is harmful. I would say that violent content does not necessarily make kids violent (note the difference between violent and aggressive) because there are tons of other role models for kids to learn from who do not interact violently. But for sex, porn dominates the landscape of role models.
My understanding is that the IRA was very scrupulous about making bomb threats. They didn't make hoax threats and they had a system for authenticating themselves when making the threats so that officials could determine reliability of the threat such that hoaxers were more likely to be ignored.
I just don't believe in magical brainwashing waves, or anything such as that.
Then it would logically follow that all those tv shows like sesame street have no impact on how kids learn to interact with other people despite showing by doing being 90% of their content.
I'm not convinced that anything has changed ... although the US does seem particularly scared of terrorism whereas in England we just keep calm and carry on.
I don't know any other way to read that but as self-contradictory.
More likely that suppression of the kids' sex drive will lead to perversity and dysfunction.
That's a false dichotomy. You are assuming that the only alternative to porn is sexual repression. As if there weren't all kinds of more realistic material out there - isn't that what the article is complaining about? That important non-porn sexual information is being blocked by the filters?
Someone who uses the word "intimacy," for example, almost certainly has a troubled mind
Wow. I think that sentence is one of those where the author unintentionally reveals himself to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seriously sick of this ignorant crap. There is absolutely no known possible mechanism for GM foods to cause cancer because they're GM.
That's kind of like all the anti-drug people who say that there is no scientific proof that marijuana has any medicinal value. It was absolutely true. But the reason it is true is because you needed the DEA to give you a permit to work with banned drugs and they only like to give out permits projects researching adverse effects, not beneficial effects.
Same thing with GMO's -- the testing coverage of GMOs is very weak. There is this get out jail free card they use to legally avoid testing called substantial equivalence - the theory is that if you are just mixing genes from two different kinds of food, then its all good. They do very limited testing to make sure there is nothing obviously wrong (like the potatoes genes haven't turned the new GMO crop into belladonna) but the basic testing is all that's ever done if they can claim equivalence. Of course they do this because comprehensive testing would be really, really, really expensive. So, you know, let the customers beta test it.
So yeah, there is no known mechanism because no one is looking for one.
Pastors often have their congregation "turn off" all their electronics in order to better hear God. It's a common theme in churches. So the constant filling of our time with noise does contribute to our "spiritual malaise", at least according to many in spiritual jobs.
That's a silly leap of logic. Theaters and symphonies tell people to turn off their phones too, schools forbid them from the classroom and its illegal to text and drive. It isn't about "hearing god" its about paying attention to whatever happen in real life in front of you rather than on the net. There is nothing spiritual about it.
Every person brought up believing sky god bullshit is a person (usually) not solving actual problems and advancing the human condition.
I think that if you left out any reference to religion, that statement would be just as true.
Religion of ALL kinds harms humanity far more than helps it.
That's an unfalsifiable claim, but I can try.
The religious impulse seems to be an evolutionary adaption. Lots of "atheists" still exhibit other forms of faith like an implicit trust in ideologies like libertarianism, democracy, science, etc.
I'm not saying those things are automatically religious, far from it. I'm saying that a lot of people are less than skeptical of them in the same way that 'religious' people are less than skeptical of their belief systems. At some point you have to put your trust in something because there just aren't enough hours in the day to verify everything from first principles. But even so, a lot of people go beyond trust as a matter of expediency and are unwilling to consider the possibility for error in the same way that religious people are often unwilling to question doctrine.
So, if this religious impulse is such a wide-spread evolutionary adaption then it stands to reason that it has a net positive value to the human species.
Hundreds of guns, several agents shot and possibly dead. Agreed the ATF was heavy handed, but it was quite understandable in that situation.
No, it is not understandable. It would be understandable if they were just regular people. But they weren't - they have been given an enormous amount of power with that comes an enormously higher standard of behavior. Giving them a pass because the situation was emotionally difficult is like giving someone a pass for vehicular homicide because they were drunk.
Unless you were at Waco, you don't know what happened at Waco.
Bullshit. Even the US government doesn't deny that children were burned to death. They do deny their culpability, but it isn't terribly hard to see that as misdirection.
Even if the footage (which I watched on live TV at the time) of the tank pushing in the walls and the fire starting not to long afterwards was misleading, the government were the ones with all the resources and time necessary to handle the situation in a safer way. They decided that their time was worth more than the risk to the children and that's the best possible light you can put on the government's actions, all other interpretations are much less favorable.
I don't see what the point of misdirect the discussion on this topic would be, unless a rationale examination of IT project failure is something some group would prefer to be avoided. Accenture maybe?
Besides, both parties have embraced the name Obamacare - the republicans started it thinking it was pejorative and then the democrats must have run a few test groups on the name and decided to try and "take it back" before the last election. At this point, I don't think the name is controversial at all. It certainly rolls off the tongue much better than any of the official names.
Basic Cruise Control from the 60s and 70's could handle that situation. The problem is there are too many people who won't use cruise control
So true.
I have basic, stupid cruise control on my car and it rarely varies more than 5mph (+/- 2.5mph) on a grade when set at 65. But it seems like any time I drive for more than 30 minutes on an uncongested freeway it is inevitable that I'll run into at least one numbnut who isn't using cruise control and lets their speed vary by 10-15mph. They'll catch up to me, sit in my blind-spot until I put on the brakes and force them to pass. Once they are well ahead, I turn the cruise-control back on at my original speed and then I catch up to them, at which point they speed-match me again. If I gun it and get past them, as soon as I settle back at the set speed they start to catch up again. I can not figure out what the fuck is going through their heads, but it is super aggravating and it happens all the fucking time. Vast open stretches of freeway and these guys must be lonely because they won't leave me the fuck alone.
any opinion I state winds up pissing off some fanboy.
And the best thing about your posts is that they are never wrong!
Narcissism FTW!
The same can be said of any thing humans do. Being a nanny can be an exploitative relationship.
The difference, as I've pointed out repeatedly, is that unlike nearly all other forms of socialization, there are practically no other sources of examples for children to learn about sexuality from. A gallon of porn can massively dilute a few drops of compassion.
The lesson we should teach our children is "don't do ANYTHING to another person without thinking about how it impacts them".
Far more easily said than done. Such a simplistic attitude completely fails to capture the difficulty of the task. If it were so easy, then a couple of episodes of sesame street would have raised a generations of pacifists around the world.
And I can assure you that at no point in my life did I ever believe that Grand Theft Auto was ever representative of reality.
So now you are your kids. Guess I was right.
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
You can confusing sex with stable, loving relationships. Sex is a physical act we do for fun and to make babies.
No. Sex is a form of social interaction that is far more than just "fun." People use sex for all kinds of things. It is a necessary component of any normal romantic relationship, it can be transactional, it can be recreational, it can be an escape from problems in life, it can be a tool of manipulation and control, it can be a a way to hurt people - the list of what sex is as varied as the human imagination. And that is the problem you black-and-white thinkers are having - you vastly underestimate the complexity of sex and the potential difficulties of navigating all of it.
And yes, a 5 second conversation really can root that difference firmly in a kids mind. If I can tell my kids that Grand Theft Auto doesn't actually represent how real people are supposed to behave and expect them to believe me
Lol. I don't think you actually have any children if you think telling them something is bad and that they shouldn't do it is enough to convince them. "Don't hit your brother!" Never mind that sex is orders of magnitude more complex than simply getting a kid to play nice.
Well you are vehemently objecting in a thread saying one should be polite to the President.
And just where did anyone say to treat the president rudely?
The argument is that if kids are taught about sex and told that some people like to shove pineapples up their butts, they will become sexual deviants
That may be your strawman argument. but it isn't even close to what I've been saying.
What I've been saying is that given the typical sexual role models of modern youth (basically none) porn will fill the gap and teach them porn-sex is normal-sex. Furthermore, that a "5 second" conversation, or even even a few substantial conversations, isn't enough to fully overcome those learned attitudes about sex.
Citing your 3-year old's statement that she isn't a dinosaur as proof of a child's ability to understand something for which they have practically no other context is ridiculous. If children really were so rational then it would be fine to let minors enter into legally binding contracts and age of consent laws would be completely without merit.
That's a definition of fundamentalism, it certainly isn't the definition of fundamentalism that is common short-hand for extremist asshole. The FSF does not qualify for the extremist asshole definition, not by a long shot.
What the fuck is it with all this black and white thinking?
So your kid knows that magic pens don't work, but does she also know that sharing and being considerate to her friends also doesn't work?
I don't think it's an over-simplification at all. As I said, I do not find porn to be harmful in the least.
At this point your argument has become circular - assuming the proposition without proof. It doesn't help that you keep resorting to the strawman of black and white reasoning either ("completely without brains" and "magical brainwashing rays").
So there is not really any point in continuing.
And now you too can go forth and use it correctly knowing that you will catch at least one fish in the same net. Give a man dessert and he eats for a night, catch him in a fish net and he can go trolling for the rest of this life.
That's like saying that if you say that people can get good ideas from television shows, you must also believe that violent content makes people more aggressive.
I think your over-simplification is harmful. I would say that violent content does not necessarily make kids violent (note the difference between violent and aggressive) because there are tons of other role models for kids to learn from who do not interact violently. But for sex, porn dominates the landscape of role models.
My understanding is that the IRA was very scrupulous about making bomb threats. They didn't make hoax threats and they had a system for authenticating themselves when making the threats so that officials could determine reliability of the threat such that hoaxers were more likely to be ignored.
I just don't believe in magical brainwashing waves, or anything such as that.
Then it would logically follow that all those tv shows like sesame street have no impact on how kids learn to interact with other people despite showing by doing being 90% of their content.
I'm not convinced that anything has changed
...
although the US does seem particularly scared of terrorism whereas in England we just keep calm and carry on.
I don't know any other way to read that but as self-contradictory.
You know one does not exclude the other. Obama can be dishonest and the tea party can have a big streak of racism at the same time.
Sorry, but it's desserts. Think of it this way... you would actually want two desserts, but who wants two deserts?
Haha, sucker! I knew that proper usage would hook someone too supercilious to google it before edumacting me. It always does.
It isn't about dessert - really what kind of dumbass expression would that be? Just dessert? If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding?
No, it is about what someone deserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_deserts
More likely that suppression of the kids' sex drive will lead to perversity and dysfunction.
That's a false dichotomy. You are assuming that the only alternative to porn is sexual repression. As if there weren't all kinds of more realistic material out there - isn't that what the article is complaining about? That important non-porn sexual information is being blocked by the filters?
Someone who uses the word "intimacy," for example, almost certainly has a troubled mind
Wow. I think that sentence is one of those where the author unintentionally reveals himself to the world.