1. I wouldn't point to France as a shining beacon of a socialist utopia. A year ago, people were rioting in the streets because the government let businesses fire people.
That's not the reason why they rioted.... The main reason was because the police were on their backs all the time...
Eh, you are mixing two different sets of riots with two different sets of backgrounds. The riots in Paris were immigrants rioting, not because police "were on their backs all the time", in fact, quite the opposite. The police had long since stopped policing these parts of town, and when they finally did, and two dumbazz kids electrocuted themselves hiding from the cops, the immigrants rioted. The reason they rioted however was not the dead kids. The reason they rioted is the same as in so many other cases. They have been permanently disenfranchised from the society. They are the second or third generation in their family that has been more or less permanently unemployed, and in the massively racist France, they have no real hope of employment ever. That is why they riotet.
The second set of riots was college kids rioting because the government wanted to allow businesses to let people who didn't do their job, or people who were just superfluous go. Business needs to do this. If a business can hire and fire people, hiring them becomes a lot easier. The students protested this because they know that when they finish college it will take them 5-10 years to find permanent employment, but when they do, they can not be let go. They can retire on the spot.
In fact, the students rioted so that they could have the same privileged, but hard the first few years, employment system that their parents have. An employment system that permanently blocks immigrants from the work force. An employment system that makes it almost impossible (not exaggerating) for a highly qualified IT professional from Europe (but outside of France) to find a job in France.
And what about the huge exterior debt that your government piled up because of this war? Does that have "nothing to do with your economic system?"
It does. It is the same bad economic system that The Bushman shares with Europe: Borrow your self to death while building a huge public sector economy. It is the economic system that is more or less the diametrically opposite of capitalism. The Bushman is about as far from a capitalist as it is possible to get. Why is it that you think the economic system is so bad in the US when the only thing The Bushman has done is try to copy the failed economic policies of Europe? Is what is good for Europe bad for the US?
When all survey about longevity, living comfort, security, democracy, health etc... show that socialist (or more specifically "social-democratic") countries are at the top...
You are joking right? How has China developed from where they were and to where they are today? China is still pretty bad, but it is moving rapidly towards the same standards of living as one has in Europe. For every piece of Socialism China retires to the pile of junk ideas, they take one step towards a better day for the Chinese. Europe is not rich and well fed due to socialism. Europe is rich and well fed due to a combination of a feudal system that plundered the world and a capitalist system that made it work up until 1945. Since then Europe has been going slowly down-hill, but growing steadily more self-content. In about 50 years Europe will be in serious trouble unless significant changes are made now. The exception is the oil-rich Norway.
Oh, and BTW, how would Europe look in the years after WWII if the US hadn't bank rolled the re-build of Europe? I mean, Europe had bombed it self to shit due to the wonderful politics of Germany, France and Britain, and when the bombing was done, Europe turned to the US, hat in hand, to have good old Uncle Sam pay to clean
Yeah, this is a good example. An economy that is speeding towards doom at the pace of an F1 car. 40% unemployment among young immigrants. Systemic unemployment to the tune of second and third generation of permanently unemployed family members. Again immigrants. If you are an immigrant in Europe you suffer badly. Extreme unemployment. Disenfranchisement. No future. No hope. Take someones hope away and you might as well shoot them in the head. Sure, they eat. They do not starve. But the vast majority of them do not even have the hope of getting out of their situation. Compare that to the US where the immigrant population does better than the non-immigrant population on average. Is the US perfect? No, not even great. It is just a lot better than France.
I am not insecure, I just want to point out that the US is going in the wrong direction. The economy is failing,
The economy in the US is failing? Compared to what? France? Are you joking? Yes, the economy is doing poorly right now. Absolutely. That is because there is a communist dictator wannabe in the White house, not because the US has a capitalist policy. The US is very far from capitalism right now.
they are losing in Iraq, and they have lost many liberties
Yes, the US is losing in Iraq, and Iraq was an insane mistake. Sadly most geeks knew. Have the US lost many liberties? Yes, they have. However, the US still have more liberties than most European countries. In fact, European countries still have laws that would make Stalin and Mao proud. In Europe you can go to jail for expressing unpopular opinions. One British dumbazz went to Jail in Europe (not in Britain) for expressing doubts about the official historical data about WWII. Now, the dude is a dumbazz, but he should have the right to voice his opinion shouldn't he?
In most European countries political parties with an expressed Nazi policy are still banned by law. Democracy my ass. You have democracy only when you allow people with disgusting views to express them. Interestingly when you take the same Nazi views and wrap them in a Muslim context, expressing them is not only allowed in Europe, it is actively encouraged. Color me puzzled.
Nerds are unrealistic when it comes to how human beings actually work.
In reality it is the exact opposite. Nerds realize that humans are imperfect. That humans quite often aren't particularly nice. That humans given power tend, with extremely few exceptions, to abuse that power. So Nerds use their brains logical circuitry and come to the only rational conclusion. Liberty for individuals and curbing the power of the few is the only reasonable form of government. This is libertarianism.
It's pure logic, something the population in general doesn't really use much. Sadly
This is also why the following comedians/talk show hosts typically are popular with nerds: John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Carlos Mencia (the right to speak your opinion with words that Tipper Gore wants to have removed from public television) and Bill Maher. This is also one of the reasons a lot of nerds like people like Eminem.
All of the above are on the front line for liberty in the US today. Well, perhaps Eminem has retired from that role by now.
USA is going towards a capitalistic extreme, witch can become just as bad as the communism they hate so much.
Oh, and this one. Yes. A lot of Norwegians think this is true. I think a lot of Europeans think this is true. Under some governments it is truer, under others it is not. Under the current government it is so far from the truth it makes me sick. The current president is closer to Joseph Stalin than he is to any capitalist thinker ever born.
What Norwegians forgets is something very important. A more capitalist society has made this world a very nice place indeed. The number of people starving to death relative to the world population dropped by more than 50%, closer to 75% from 1980 to 2000. This drop came as the result of a more open, more capitalistic world economy. Day by day the world is moving to a situation where starvation as a systemic problem is non-existing. The UN thinks starvation as a major world problem will be gone some time before 2030. Maybe long before. The main problem is Africa, and Africa is starving because of socialism, not in spite of it.
Amen to all of that. With all the shortcomings of the US, particularly with the lunatic currently in office, I much prefer it to Norway, and I've tried Norway for 30 years and the US for 10.
As I said before, the strange thing is that Americans and Norwegians both think they live in the center of the Universe, but none of them do, for various reasons. Norwegians and Americans are, in this regard, scarily similar.
Socialism does actually work. It is just the Americans who think that all socialism is communism who are wrong. In Norway we have a socialistic government
Hahahahahahaha... that gave me a good laugh. I didn't think there were people in Norway reading Slashdot that actually believes that chit. Oh well, I guess all nerds are not smart.
Now, before we get going on this, I was born in Norway, I lived in Norway for the first 30 years of my life, and I finally ran away. Couldn't take it any more. There is no country in the world where people are more full of them selves for absolutely no reason whatsoever (not talking about the Bergen population only, or at all in fact). I now live in the US, where people are not close to that full of them selves, not even in Texas, but there are other shortcomings. Some of which Americans share with Norwegians. More below.
Now, let's work on a myth. "Norway is the best country in the world to live in". It isn't. Never was. Not even close. The main reason Norway is awarded this title is that it has a very nice social system that encompasses everyone. This social system is financed by virtue of a lottery jackpot Norway hit in the late 1960s, oil in the North Sea. Since Norway won the lottery, more than half of the population has worked for the central or local government. Standards of living are generally high-ish in all of the country. People do not suffer. Other than that, there isn't all that much good about Norway. It is a beautiful place to visit though. If you can afford it, I'd recommend it. My family is there and my soccer team is there, but I am glad I am not. If you measure on more than social welfare, Norway doesn't come close to being "one of the really good places in the world to live" even.
Nobody in Norway excels. The only area where excellence is allowed is in sports. The Norwegian "constitution" is a law called The Jante Law. In the rest of Scandinavia, this is what you call sarcasm, in Norway this law is more important than the real constitution. Anyone who tries to excel outside of sports is shot down immediately and ridiculed in all kinds of ways. Serious business men are made into fools by the media, while a mentally ret@rded "princess" is given all kinds of support.
Norway isn't the best country in the world to live in by any standards other than social welfare. This isn't, and will never be, the only measure of "best" in any way. It is just quantifiable, and it is therefore measured. The sad thing is that when a population that hardly travels beyond the borders of Mallorca (Spain for the uninitiated) are told they live in "the best country in the world", they actually believe it. In the western world, I think the only population that travels less outside of their own heads is the American population. In fact, Americans and Norwegians are limited in their views of the world in a way that is so similar it is scary. Sadly most Norwegians think that they are better than Americans in this regard too, they are not. A Norwegian is "well traveled" if he goes to southern Spain, Greece or Italy once every three years. This is about as "traveled" as a Texan who takes a vacation in Florida or California.
Now, the socialism that is so important to the Norwegian population actually works. Believe it or not. It is probably a good thing for a mediocracy (as opposed to a meritocracy). It also only works because Norway, as I said, won the lottery in the late 1960s. Struck oil as we say, but literally. For years Norway didn't do anything with this oil, British and US companies extracted it, and they were taxed heavily. This taxation made it possible to build a social system that protects the mediocre and cradles it. It has been protected and nourished to the level where it is now the ultimate goal. Meidiocracy (tm). Socialism rewards mediocrity. Norway is a so
Why is the only choice libertarianism? Why not just deal with corrupt politicians?
Well, what is libertarianism other than a way of "dealing with corrupt politicians"? This is why a lot of geeks are libertarians. They are smarter than the average Joe and a lot smarter than the average person who votes a big-government cronyist/socialist like Bush Jr. into office for a second time.
I have an Oppo DV-981. It is a beauty, and it's upscaling capabilities are superb. Now, given the fact that an upscaling DVD player can not add information that is not present in the video file in the first place. An upscaling DVD player can absolutely make my DVD look non-terrible on my 1080p display, it can't make them look like they are HD though. Not even close.
I can easily tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and HD on my 22" computer display. On my 42" TV the difference is night and day.
No it doesn't. I have lived by the Pacific for more than a decade, and I haven't even seen a strong storm. They weren't going to put the space elevator over all of the Pacific. Please read the site before responding. The fact that there are cyclones in some parts of the Pacific doesn't mean that there are in all parts of the Pacific.
OK, so apparently in your mental categories, any spiritual being with power is a "deity".
Well, in my mental categories, Deities, Angels, Demons, Spirits, Ghosts, Santa Clauses and Tooth Fairies are all infantile figments of imaginations at a level I have to admit I do not understand why exists in adults. I stand corrected as to how to characterize angels in a Christian world-view however.
What was said was a direct attack on someone else's belief because they don't want to let them believe anything other then what they do. It is justifying being anti-religious because as they claim it is false.
Nonsense. I am anti-religion. I have never attacked anyone, I am just voicing my opinions about others going around spouting nonsense. This doesn't mean that I want them stopped or want to prevent them from uttering their rubbish, it means that I want to use my freedom of speech to speak out against what they are saying. This is a right I have, it is not a direct "attack" on anyone any more than having religious nut cases showing up on my door trying to speak about their religion is a "direct attack" on me.
Freedom of religion does not include the right to prevent others from pointing out the fact that your beliefs are infantile superstition no different from the belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. If you don't want to hear opinions like that you need to stop moving in fora where they can be uttered, that includes any public places where public discourse is allowed.
If you say it in front of him with her standing there
If I do, I am insensitive. Insensitivity is luckily not illegal in this country, and my buddy doesn't enjoy the right to prevent me from being insensitive. Now, as for religious people, they have exactly the same right to protection from me saying that their religion is infantile superstition as I have the right to protection from hearing them advertise their infantile superstition, none.
can gather from this that your are anti-Christian, you think what they believe is false or fake and weak. Am I wrong? Not from what you said. If this isn't what you meant to say, then you probably shouldn't have said it.
It is my opinion that ny of the major religions, the ones with divine entities in them, are infantile superstition no different from the belief in Santa Claus or The Tooth Fairy, but so what? Does that mean I believe in something? You seemed to claim I believed something, which I do not. What is it that you think I believe?
The absurdity of what you are saying is that they can only believe something if you believe it too. That isn't what freedom is supposed to mean.
Please explain to me how you can derive that from what I am saying? People are free to believe whatever they want, but that freedom doesn't include the freedom from criticism. If they frequent a public forum, they might, and probably will, hear people who voice opinions that are counter to their beliefs. They do not have the right to freedom from these opinions.
Your direct attack. You can discuss anythign you want but whe you directly attack someone else, you have crossed the line...You are attacking their right to have that belief when you search them out and attack them
What nonsense is this? If I say that Christianity is an inane, infantile superstition, is that a "direct attack"? Where do I "attack" anyone? If you don't know what freedom of religion means, you really shouldn't be speaking in a public forum.
The absurdity of it all is that you are using your own beliefs as a religion
Again, a statement that is so far from reality it is strange. Where do you see me utter anything at all about my beliefs?
Did you just not have any better place to put your comment?
Seemingly not. I see it is misplaced, probably just arrived there after I had read a ton of other comments and when I started writing I wanted it off my chest. The Abraham story, and the fact that Christians and Jews thinks it is a nice story is incredibly scary to me.
Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel,
So, what is an angel? A human? It's a deity. A minor one for sure, but definitely a deity. Of course, dependent on how you define a deity, but someone who can, more or less successfully, oppose a deity must be on par with that deity in capabilities, in other words, another deity.
Why it would be important to a Christian I am a little less sure about. Does it matter?
Well, that and in this country we value freedom of speech.
With minor exceptions we don't have that much more of it than any other western country, so I don't think that is a factor.
The rest of us know better and can safely ignore them, unless they intend to force us to see things their way. Then the gloves come off.
You are kidding right? "They" have managed to install one of their lunatic followers in the house with the address of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. These guys have been spending the last 6 years consolidating power into as few hands in the executive branch as humanly possible, ignoring any law ever written in this country. Cheney must rightfully be called a KingMaker, he has been spending 6 years trying to make this into a monarchy with his guy on top, and a band of insane priests running loose in the country trying to shut down teaching of science.
Thankfully these guys are so amazingly incompetent that they were bound to fuck up one way or another. In our case the fuck-ups (GWB, Cheney and friends) decided to spread the word of whatever it is they believe in to Saddam Hussein. That backfired as one would expect when incompetent fuck-ups try to do something serious. Thanks to their extreme incompetence and blind faith in them selves, they are now rightfully marginalized in politics. The only reason they haven't lost all power is that their political opponents, even with a majority where it matters, seems to be completely gutless.
Hopefully we will see some more sanity in government going forward, and maybe some day we will all thank Saddam Hussein for bringing out the idiots from the disguise of what (to the typical American) looked like real leadership and competence.
And yes, religion, blind faith, inability to adjust your map to reality which comes with that, is to blame for the idiocy of these, very dangerous, people.
It is not faith that causes problems, nor is it any particular religion that causes problems. It is usually the destructive and/or self centered actions of a few people associated with those beliefs and acting "in the name of" those beliefs that cause problems.
I disagree, faith in and of it self is a major contributor to the problem. The issue is that having faith prevents you from thinking, not in general, but about the matters in which you have faith. This leads to a mental state where a lot of people are of the opinion that their world view has the same validity as any other world view, it is based on their faith. This means I can not criticize your world view at all, and if I do, you can ignore it.
Science promotes the asking of questions, the dis-belief in absolute truths. This leads to a lot fewer problems.
A strongly religious world tends to be run by people who tend to use Truthiness as a way of making decisions, rather than thought and reason.
The most horrifying example of this is our mis-adventure into the inevitable mess we created in Iraq. For those of us with a background that included some history, the current state of Iraq was not the worst case scenario, it was the inevitable outcome. We all knew that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and we also knew with an high degree of certainty, that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
So, how does that relate to religion? Well, in the thought process. A religious person, like GWB is more likely to try to change the reality to fit his map in a situation like that rather than accepting that his map is horribly wrong and he has to change it. No matter what reality looks like, he will go by his map.
Actually, it's a huge stretch, because the bible doesn't say that at all. It says that Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers.
This is in fact not correct. The bible actually goes out of its way, making up a long list of implausible events, to make it seem like the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The Romans, from the standpoint of the bible were unwillingly coerced by the Jews to execute him. The only reason for this is that the faith took better hold in the Roman world than in the Jewish world, so they had to make this up, and yes, it is made up.
The entire trial and execution of Jesus is riddled with made up rubbish. Romans, for example, reserved crucifixion for pretty serious crimes against the roman empire, which excludes all three of the people that were (allegedly) crucified in the Jesus story.
If there was a man, Jesus, crucified by the Romans, the bible doesn't tell us why they did it. Either it didn't happen, or the bible writers are hiding something. You can see some of what they were hiding in the story. Peter attacks one of the people who come to arrest Jesus with a sword, the word used in the original text uses the name for a sword that was military in nature. Palestine during Roman occupation wasn't Texas, if you were armed with that type of a sword, you were so because you were killing Romans. If you were killing Romans, you got crucified. If you offended a Jewish God the Romans laughed and threw you an apple, they didn't kill you.
Also, Jesus was brought before a Jewish "court" prior to his execution. During passover. Are you kidding me? Did the writers (none of which were jews BTW) not even bother to do a cursory check on whether the Jews would actually summon a court during Passover (they wouldn't). If Jesus was arrested by the jews, he would not have been tried until after Passover.
These are just a small number of problems with this stuff. It is baloney, and the original bible writers knew it. They didn't intend it as an accurate historical record of the guy, it was intended as marketing material. It has the same truth value as does a regular Nike commercial.
People are supposedly free to believe whatever they want when it comes to a religion. When you attack that religion you are attacking that freedom.
That is an absurd statement. People have the right to believe the world is flat, and I have heard some still do, that doesn't mean that what they believe is sane. It also doesn't mean I can't criticize their belief. My criticism also doesn't mean that I am preventing them from believing what they want.
This is a general problem with many Christians, you want the right to believe whatever nonsense you believe, and any direct attack on that belief you claim is an attack on your right to believe. That is absurd. If your faith is so weak that you can't stand anyone talking about it in ways you don't like, there is probably something fundamentally wrong with your faith.
This translational game of telephone that you're proposing is divorced from all history.
I never understood why people who want to talk about the bible are often so stuck on whether it is literally, word for word, true or not. The bible is a horrible book about an insane divine entity whether it is literally true or "young girl" was mistranslated into "virgin" when written in Greek.
Take the story of Abraham. The dude's old. He has a kid. God wants to test him. So he tells him to kill his son. Burn him too. Dude doesn't like it, but eventually he agrees. Goes on to build the bonfire and all. Given his devotion, God eventually says: Dude, I was only joking, you don't have to kill him.
In the Christian faith system this is a beautiful story about loyalty. In the real world it is the story about a psychopathic megalomaniac who finds joy in tormenting other people and a weak idiot of a moron who goes along with the torture.
The correct response if God comes to you and asks you to kill your son is to spit God in the face and tell him to fuck off. If he insists, you get a gang of your best friends together and busts the knees of God. That is the correct response. God was a psychopath for demanding the sacrifice, Abraham was insane for accepting.
Being part of an organization that thinks this is a beautiful story marks you as a nut-case in my book, but that is just me.
According to Christian doctrine I am equipped with free will so that I can chose to go with God or I can chose not to. If I chose God I am saved, if I don't it is my own fault for exercising my own free will. The free will God created me with. But did he? According to Christian doctrine, God is also omniscient and can see all, past, present, future. OK. Let's look at a simple example.
My fridge is filled with... well, all kinds of good stuff. I don't know what I'll have for breakfast tomorrow, maybe I'll make my self an omelet, I like those, do that once in a while, maybe just a couple of slices of that nice La Brea bread my wife bought today. I don't know, I'll decide tomorrow.
God on the other hand, he can find out today what I am going to chose tomorrow, right? He doesn't have to, or probably doesn't even want to check, but he does have the ability. OK. Nice enough. Say he uses that ability to take a peek. He finds that tomorrow morning for breakfast I will have an omelet and some OJ. Cool. Now God knows, probably doesn't give a fart, though, but he knows.
Explain to me how, given Gods ability above, how I can chose to have that new Cereal I bought today? God knows I'm going for the omelet, and I will feel like I am freely choosing it with my free will, but since I have not yet made up my mind, or even thought about the matter, the "free will" I am using to go for the omelet tomorrow morning is only an illusion. It doesn't exist.
In fact, free will and certain knowledge about the future for anyone, God included, are mutually exclusive. Can't exist.
Oh, and please, before you go on and rant about this, Gods ability is enough to nullify my free will, he doesn't actually have to check, and if I have no free will, I don't have the free will to choose God or not, and I will go to Hell because he wanted me to, not because I used my free will to reject him. So if God and the universe is like Christians say he/it is, then God is the biggest shit head ever concocted by man. Pure Evil.
I'm tired of the extremists from both sides telling me I can't accept the morality of Jesus without accepting every insane 4000-year-old metaphor
Well, add me to that list of people. The "morality of Jesus" doesn't exist, his teachings wasn't about morals or how to deal with other people, his teachings was about how you get absolution and go to heaven to dwell with the 4000 year old metaphor. You can't be a Christian without accepting the fact that the old Metaphor is real.
Then again, maybe you're not a Christian, maybe you are a Buddhist. To the degree Jesus said anything concrete about morality, it was a misunderstood and completely botched version of Buddhism.
I don't know of any Christian sect that is Monotheistic. As an absolute minimum there is God and there is The Devil, both are divine entities, and therefore the concept of monotheism in conjunction with Christianity is absurd.
Interestingly the Christian God never claims there are no other gods, quite the opposite in fact, if you read the texts carefully. What he explicitly says is that you are only allowed to worship him, not because the others do not exist (they do, that is implicit in the way he words him self), you just can't worship them.
Actually, the horned guy with the tail and the hoof predates the bible quite substantially. His name is Pan, and for some reason he tends to carry a pitch fork, common with a few other gods. In fact, the devil, Lucifer, whatever you want to call him, is not the only character in Christian mythology with attributes from other deities, even the Jesus story in the New Testament is mainly an amalgamation of older legends. People who believe the New Testament is any kind of chronicle over the life of one Jesus are seriously delusional, or perhaps it is only ignorance.
ome of us are at least willing to accept that the ancient word translated "day" in Genesis has more possible translations than "a 24 hour period"
Did you ever consider that the bible might be a collection of legends from a crowd of mostly uneducated superstitious goat herders, and that the stories, perfectly or imperfectly translated, may all be a combination of legends and stories invented to convey a moral message? Did you ever consider that if there is anything at all in the bible that is relevant for modern man it is the morals, and only the morals? Would you accept that almost everything in the bible, old and new testament, is close to pure fable?
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Eh, you are mixing two different sets of riots with two different sets of backgrounds. The riots in Paris were immigrants rioting, not because police "were on their backs all the time", in fact, quite the opposite. The police had long since stopped policing these parts of town, and when they finally did, and two dumbazz kids electrocuted themselves hiding from the cops, the immigrants rioted. The reason they rioted however was not the dead kids. The reason they rioted is the same as in so many other cases. They have been permanently disenfranchised from the society. They are the second or third generation in their family that has been more or less permanently unemployed, and in the massively racist France, they have no real hope of employment ever. That is why they riotet.
The second set of riots was college kids rioting because the government wanted to allow businesses to let people who didn't do their job, or people who were just superfluous go. Business needs to do this. If a business can hire and fire people, hiring them becomes a lot easier. The students protested this because they know that when they finish college it will take them 5-10 years to find permanent employment, but when they do, they can not be let go. They can retire on the spot.
In fact, the students rioted so that they could have the same privileged, but hard the first few years, employment system that their parents have. An employment system that permanently blocks immigrants from the work force. An employment system that makes it almost impossible (not exaggerating) for a highly qualified IT professional from Europe (but outside of France) to find a job in France.
It does. It is the same bad economic system that The Bushman shares with Europe: Borrow your self to death while building a huge public sector economy. It is the economic system that is more or less the diametrically opposite of capitalism. The Bushman is about as far from a capitalist as it is possible to get. Why is it that you think the economic system is so bad in the US when the only thing The Bushman has done is try to copy the failed economic policies of Europe? Is what is good for Europe bad for the US?
You are joking right? How has China developed from where they were and to where they are today? China is still pretty bad, but it is moving rapidly towards the same standards of living as one has in Europe. For every piece of Socialism China retires to the pile of junk ideas, they take one step towards a better day for the Chinese. Europe is not rich and well fed due to socialism. Europe is rich and well fed due to a combination of a feudal system that plundered the world and a capitalist system that made it work up until 1945. Since then Europe has been going slowly down-hill, but growing steadily more self-content. In about 50 years Europe will be in serious trouble unless significant changes are made now. The exception is the oil-rich Norway.
Oh, and BTW, how would Europe look in the years after WWII if the US hadn't bank rolled the re-build of Europe? I mean, Europe had bombed it self to shit due to the wonderful politics of Germany, France and Britain, and when the bombing was done, Europe turned to the US, hat in hand, to have good old Uncle Sam pay to clean
Yeah, this is a good example. An economy that is speeding towards doom at the pace of an F1 car. 40% unemployment among young immigrants. Systemic unemployment to the tune of second and third generation of permanently unemployed family members. Again immigrants. If you are an immigrant in Europe you suffer badly. Extreme unemployment. Disenfranchisement. No future. No hope. Take someones hope away and you might as well shoot them in the head. Sure, they eat. They do not starve. But the vast majority of them do not even have the hope of getting out of their situation. Compare that to the US where the immigrant population does better than the non-immigrant population on average. Is the US perfect? No, not even great. It is just a lot better than France.
The economy in the US is failing? Compared to what? France? Are you joking? Yes, the economy is doing poorly right now. Absolutely. That is because there is a communist dictator wannabe in the White house, not because the US has a capitalist policy. The US is very far from capitalism right now.
Yes, the US is losing in Iraq, and Iraq was an insane mistake. Sadly most geeks knew. Have the US lost many liberties? Yes, they have. However, the US still have more liberties than most European countries. In fact, European countries still have laws that would make Stalin and Mao proud. In Europe you can go to jail for expressing unpopular opinions. One British dumbazz went to Jail in Europe (not in Britain) for expressing doubts about the official historical data about WWII. Now, the dude is a dumbazz, but he should have the right to voice his opinion shouldn't he?
In most European countries political parties with an expressed Nazi policy are still banned by law. Democracy my ass. You have democracy only when you allow people with disgusting views to express them. Interestingly when you take the same Nazi views and wrap them in a Muslim context, expressing them is not only allowed in Europe, it is actively encouraged. Color me puzzled.
In reality it is the exact opposite. Nerds realize that humans are imperfect. That humans quite often aren't particularly nice. That humans given power tend, with extremely few exceptions, to abuse that power. So Nerds use their brains logical circuitry and come to the only rational conclusion. Liberty for individuals and curbing the power of the few is the only reasonable form of government. This is libertarianism.
It's pure logic, something the population in general doesn't really use much. Sadly
This is also why the following comedians/talk show hosts typically are popular with nerds: John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Carlos Mencia (the right to speak your opinion with words that Tipper Gore wants to have removed from public television) and Bill Maher. This is also one of the reasons a lot of nerds like people like Eminem.
All of the above are on the front line for liberty in the US today. Well, perhaps Eminem has retired from that role by now.
Oh, and this one. Yes. A lot of Norwegians think this is true. I think a lot of Europeans think this is true. Under some governments it is truer, under others it is not. Under the current government it is so far from the truth it makes me sick. The current president is closer to Joseph Stalin than he is to any capitalist thinker ever born.
What Norwegians forgets is something very important. A more capitalist society has made this world a very nice place indeed. The number of people starving to death relative to the world population dropped by more than 50%, closer to 75% from 1980 to 2000. This drop came as the result of a more open, more capitalistic world economy. Day by day the world is moving to a situation where starvation as a systemic problem is non-existing. The UN thinks starvation as a major world problem will be gone some time before 2030. Maybe long before. The main problem is Africa, and Africa is starving because of socialism, not in spite of it.
Amen to all of that. With all the shortcomings of the US, particularly with the lunatic currently in office, I much prefer it to Norway, and I've tried Norway for 30 years and the US for 10.
As I said before, the strange thing is that Americans and Norwegians both think they live in the center of the Universe, but none of them do, for various reasons. Norwegians and Americans are, in this regard, scarily similar.
Hahahahahahaha... that gave me a good laugh. I didn't think there were people in Norway reading Slashdot that actually believes that chit. Oh well, I guess all nerds are not smart.
Now, before we get going on this, I was born in Norway, I lived in Norway for the first 30 years of my life, and I finally ran away. Couldn't take it any more. There is no country in the world where people are more full of them selves for absolutely no reason whatsoever (not talking about the Bergen population only, or at all in fact). I now live in the US, where people are not close to that full of them selves, not even in Texas, but there are other shortcomings. Some of which Americans share with Norwegians. More below.
Now, let's work on a myth. "Norway is the best country in the world to live in". It isn't. Never was. Not even close. The main reason Norway is awarded this title is that it has a very nice social system that encompasses everyone. This social system is financed by virtue of a lottery jackpot Norway hit in the late 1960s, oil in the North Sea. Since Norway won the lottery, more than half of the population has worked for the central or local government. Standards of living are generally high-ish in all of the country. People do not suffer. Other than that, there isn't all that much good about Norway. It is a beautiful place to visit though. If you can afford it, I'd recommend it. My family is there and my soccer team is there, but I am glad I am not. If you measure on more than social welfare, Norway doesn't come close to being "one of the really good places in the world to live" even.
Nobody in Norway excels. The only area where excellence is allowed is in sports. The Norwegian "constitution" is a law called The Jante Law. In the rest of Scandinavia, this is what you call sarcasm, in Norway this law is more important than the real constitution. Anyone who tries to excel outside of sports is shot down immediately and ridiculed in all kinds of ways. Serious business men are made into fools by the media, while a mentally ret@rded "princess" is given all kinds of support.
Norway isn't the best country in the world to live in by any standards other than social welfare. This isn't, and will never be, the only measure of "best" in any way. It is just quantifiable, and it is therefore measured. The sad thing is that when a population that hardly travels beyond the borders of Mallorca (Spain for the uninitiated) are told they live in "the best country in the world", they actually believe it. In the western world, I think the only population that travels less outside of their own heads is the American population. In fact, Americans and Norwegians are limited in their views of the world in a way that is so similar it is scary. Sadly most Norwegians think that they are better than Americans in this regard too, they are not. A Norwegian is "well traveled" if he goes to southern Spain, Greece or Italy once every three years. This is about as "traveled" as a Texan who takes a vacation in Florida or California.
Now, the socialism that is so important to the Norwegian population actually works. Believe it or not. It is probably a good thing for a mediocracy (as opposed to a meritocracy). It also only works because Norway, as I said, won the lottery in the late 1960s. Struck oil as we say, but literally. For years Norway didn't do anything with this oil, British and US companies extracted it, and they were taxed heavily. This taxation made it possible to build a social system that protects the mediocre and cradles it. It has been protected and nourished to the level where it is now the ultimate goal. Meidiocracy (tm). Socialism rewards mediocrity. Norway is a so
I have an Oppo DV-981. It is a beauty, and it's upscaling capabilities are superb. Now, given the fact that an upscaling DVD player can not add information that is not present in the video file in the first place. An upscaling DVD player can absolutely make my DVD look non-terrible on my 1080p display, it can't make them look like they are HD though. Not even close.
I can easily tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and HD on my 22" computer display. On my 42" TV the difference is night and day.
Good luck at the optician.
I am sorry to hear that you are blind, but then again, being blind, why do you have a TV at all?
No it doesn't. I have lived by the Pacific for more than a decade, and I haven't even seen a strong storm. They weren't going to put the space elevator over all of the Pacific. Please read the site before responding. The fact that there are cyclones in some parts of the Pacific doesn't mean that there are in all parts of the Pacific.
Well, in my mental categories, Deities, Angels, Demons, Spirits, Ghosts, Santa Clauses and Tooth Fairies are all infantile figments of imaginations at a level I have to admit I do not understand why exists in adults. I stand corrected as to how to characterize angels in a Christian world-view however.
Nonsense. I am anti-religion. I have never attacked anyone, I am just voicing my opinions about others going around spouting nonsense. This doesn't mean that I want them stopped or want to prevent them from uttering their rubbish, it means that I want to use my freedom of speech to speak out against what they are saying. This is a right I have, it is not a direct "attack" on anyone any more than having religious nut cases showing up on my door trying to speak about their religion is a "direct attack" on me.
Freedom of religion does not include the right to prevent others from pointing out the fact that your beliefs are infantile superstition no different from the belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. If you don't want to hear opinions like that you need to stop moving in fora where they can be uttered, that includes any public places where public discourse is allowed.
If I do, I am insensitive. Insensitivity is luckily not illegal in this country, and my buddy doesn't enjoy the right to prevent me from being insensitive. Now, as for religious people, they have exactly the same right to protection from me saying that their religion is infantile superstition as I have the right to protection from hearing them advertise their infantile superstition, none.
It is my opinion that ny of the major religions, the ones with divine entities in them, are infantile superstition no different from the belief in Santa Claus or The Tooth Fairy, but so what? Does that mean I believe in something? You seemed to claim I believed something, which I do not. What is it that you think I believe?
Please explain to me how you can derive that from what I am saying? People are free to believe whatever they want, but that freedom doesn't include the freedom from criticism. If they frequent a public forum, they might, and probably will, hear people who voice opinions that are counter to their beliefs. They do not have the right to freedom from these opinions.
What nonsense is this? If I say that Christianity is an inane, infantile superstition, is that a "direct attack"? Where do I "attack" anyone? If you don't know what freedom of religion means, you really shouldn't be speaking in a public forum.
Again, a statement that is so far from reality it is strange. Where do you see me utter anything at all about my beliefs?
Seemingly not. I see it is misplaced, probably just arrived there after I had read a ton of other comments and when I started writing I wanted it off my chest. The Abraham story, and the fact that Christians and Jews thinks it is a nice story is incredibly scary to me.
So, what is an angel? A human? It's a deity. A minor one for sure, but definitely a deity. Of course, dependent on how you define a deity, but someone who can, more or less successfully, oppose a deity must be on par with that deity in capabilities, in other words, another deity.
Why it would be important to a Christian I am a little less sure about. Does it matter?
With minor exceptions we don't have that much more of it than any other western country, so I don't think that is a factor.
You are kidding right? "They" have managed to install one of their lunatic followers in the house with the address of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. These guys have been spending the last 6 years consolidating power into as few hands in the executive branch as humanly possible, ignoring any law ever written in this country. Cheney must rightfully be called a KingMaker, he has been spending 6 years trying to make this into a monarchy with his guy on top, and a band of insane priests running loose in the country trying to shut down teaching of science.
Thankfully these guys are so amazingly incompetent that they were bound to fuck up one way or another. In our case the fuck-ups (GWB, Cheney and friends) decided to spread the word of whatever it is they believe in to Saddam Hussein. That backfired as one would expect when incompetent fuck-ups try to do something serious. Thanks to their extreme incompetence and blind faith in them selves, they are now rightfully marginalized in politics. The only reason they haven't lost all power is that their political opponents, even with a majority where it matters, seems to be completely gutless.
Hopefully we will see some more sanity in government going forward, and maybe some day we will all thank Saddam Hussein for bringing out the idiots from the disguise of what (to the typical American) looked like real leadership and competence.
And yes, religion, blind faith, inability to adjust your map to reality which comes with that, is to blame for the idiocy of these, very dangerous, people.
I disagree, faith in and of it self is a major contributor to the problem. The issue is that having faith prevents you from thinking, not in general, but about the matters in which you have faith. This leads to a mental state where a lot of people are of the opinion that their world view has the same validity as any other world view, it is based on their faith. This means I can not criticize your world view at all, and if I do, you can ignore it.
Science promotes the asking of questions, the dis-belief in absolute truths. This leads to a lot fewer problems.
A strongly religious world tends to be run by people who tend to use Truthiness as a way of making decisions, rather than thought and reason.
The most horrifying example of this is our mis-adventure into the inevitable mess we created in Iraq. For those of us with a background that included some history, the current state of Iraq was not the worst case scenario, it was the inevitable outcome. We all knew that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and we also knew with an high degree of certainty, that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
So, how does that relate to religion? Well, in the thought process. A religious person, like GWB is more likely to try to change the reality to fit his map in a situation like that rather than accepting that his map is horribly wrong and he has to change it. No matter what reality looks like, he will go by his map.
This is in fact not correct. The bible actually goes out of its way, making up a long list of implausible events, to make it seem like the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The Romans, from the standpoint of the bible were unwillingly coerced by the Jews to execute him. The only reason for this is that the faith took better hold in the Roman world than in the Jewish world, so they had to make this up, and yes, it is made up.
The entire trial and execution of Jesus is riddled with made up rubbish. Romans, for example, reserved crucifixion for pretty serious crimes against the roman empire, which excludes all three of the people that were (allegedly) crucified in the Jesus story.
If there was a man, Jesus, crucified by the Romans, the bible doesn't tell us why they did it. Either it didn't happen, or the bible writers are hiding something. You can see some of what they were hiding in the story. Peter attacks one of the people who come to arrest Jesus with a sword, the word used in the original text uses the name for a sword that was military in nature. Palestine during Roman occupation wasn't Texas, if you were armed with that type of a sword, you were so because you were killing Romans. If you were killing Romans, you got crucified. If you offended a Jewish God the Romans laughed and threw you an apple, they didn't kill you.
Also, Jesus was brought before a Jewish "court" prior to his execution. During passover. Are you kidding me? Did the writers (none of which were jews BTW) not even bother to do a cursory check on whether the Jews would actually summon a court during Passover (they wouldn't). If Jesus was arrested by the jews, he would not have been tried until after Passover.
These are just a small number of problems with this stuff. It is baloney, and the original bible writers knew it. They didn't intend it as an accurate historical record of the guy, it was intended as marketing material. It has the same truth value as does a regular Nike commercial.
That is an absurd statement. People have the right to believe the world is flat, and I have heard some still do, that doesn't mean that what they believe is sane. It also doesn't mean I can't criticize their belief. My criticism also doesn't mean that I am preventing them from believing what they want.
This is a general problem with many Christians, you want the right to believe whatever nonsense you believe, and any direct attack on that belief you claim is an attack on your right to believe. That is absurd. If your faith is so weak that you can't stand anyone talking about it in ways you don't like, there is probably something fundamentally wrong with your faith.
I never understood why people who want to talk about the bible are often so stuck on whether it is literally, word for word, true or not. The bible is a horrible book about an insane divine entity whether it is literally true or "young girl" was mistranslated into "virgin" when written in Greek.
Take the story of Abraham. The dude's old. He has a kid. God wants to test him. So he tells him to kill his son. Burn him too. Dude doesn't like it, but eventually he agrees. Goes on to build the bonfire and all. Given his devotion, God eventually says: Dude, I was only joking, you don't have to kill him.
In the Christian faith system this is a beautiful story about loyalty. In the real world it is the story about a psychopathic megalomaniac who finds joy in tormenting other people and a weak idiot of a moron who goes along with the torture.
The correct response if God comes to you and asks you to kill your son is to spit God in the face and tell him to fuck off. If he insists, you get a gang of your best friends together and busts the knees of God. That is the correct response. God was a psychopath for demanding the sacrifice, Abraham was insane for accepting.
Being part of an organization that thinks this is a beautiful story marks you as a nut-case in my book, but that is just me.
Let's make it simple and concrete.
According to Christian doctrine I am equipped with free will so that I can chose to go with God or I can chose not to. If I chose God I am saved, if I don't it is my own fault for exercising my own free will. The free will God created me with. But did he? According to Christian doctrine, God is also omniscient and can see all, past, present, future. OK. Let's look at a simple example.
My fridge is filled with ... well, all kinds of good stuff. I don't know what I'll have for breakfast tomorrow, maybe I'll make my self an omelet, I like those, do that once in a while, maybe just a couple of slices of that nice La Brea bread my wife bought today. I don't know, I'll decide tomorrow.
God on the other hand, he can find out today what I am going to chose tomorrow, right? He doesn't have to, or probably doesn't even want to check, but he does have the ability. OK. Nice enough. Say he uses that ability to take a peek. He finds that tomorrow morning for breakfast I will have an omelet and some OJ. Cool. Now God knows, probably doesn't give a fart, though, but he knows.
Explain to me how, given Gods ability above, how I can chose to have that new Cereal I bought today? God knows I'm going for the omelet, and I will feel like I am freely choosing it with my free will, but since I have not yet made up my mind, or even thought about the matter, the "free will" I am using to go for the omelet tomorrow morning is only an illusion. It doesn't exist.
In fact, free will and certain knowledge about the future for anyone, God included, are mutually exclusive. Can't exist.
Oh, and please, before you go on and rant about this, Gods ability is enough to nullify my free will, he doesn't actually have to check, and if I have no free will, I don't have the free will to choose God or not, and I will go to Hell because he wanted me to, not because I used my free will to reject him. So if God and the universe is like Christians say he/it is, then God is the biggest shit head ever concocted by man. Pure Evil.
Well, add me to that list of people. The "morality of Jesus" doesn't exist, his teachings wasn't about morals or how to deal with other people, his teachings was about how you get absolution and go to heaven to dwell with the 4000 year old metaphor. You can't be a Christian without accepting the fact that the old Metaphor is real.
Then again, maybe you're not a Christian, maybe you are a Buddhist. To the degree Jesus said anything concrete about morality, it was a misunderstood and completely botched version of Buddhism.
I don't know of any Christian sect that is Monotheistic. As an absolute minimum there is God and there is The Devil, both are divine entities, and therefore the concept of monotheism in conjunction with Christianity is absurd.
Interestingly the Christian God never claims there are no other gods, quite the opposite in fact, if you read the texts carefully. What he explicitly says is that you are only allowed to worship him, not because the others do not exist (they do, that is implicit in the way he words him self), you just can't worship them.
Actually, the horned guy with the tail and the hoof predates the bible quite substantially. His name is Pan, and for some reason he tends to carry a pitch fork, common with a few other gods. In fact, the devil, Lucifer, whatever you want to call him, is not the only character in Christian mythology with attributes from other deities, even the Jesus story in the New Testament is mainly an amalgamation of older legends. People who believe the New Testament is any kind of chronicle over the life of one Jesus are seriously delusional, or perhaps it is only ignorance.
Did you ever consider that the bible might be a collection of legends from a crowd of mostly uneducated superstitious goat herders, and that the stories, perfectly or imperfectly translated, may all be a combination of legends and stories invented to convey a moral message? Did you ever consider that if there is anything at all in the bible that is relevant for modern man it is the morals, and only the morals? Would you accept that almost everything in the bible, old and new testament, is close to pure fable?
If not, why?