It doesnt' matter how intelligent the canon books say they are.
They act as humans, they get upset, they crack jokes.
They are stand-ins for humans where bad things happen to them so that we humans can exercise our racist evil sides in a fantasy way watching non humans get blown apart, torn apart, threatened with being torn apart, etc.
In a non SF film, most of their parts would be portrayed by a human actor and it would come across horribly with humans in those roles in some cases. (for one thing most of the "good guys" would look monstrous).
Animals are quite simply not alive. They are incapable of feeling pain, joy, sadness like humans.
Oh wait... turned out they could.
Well, they are not self aware!
Oh wait... gorillas and parrots definitely are. Probably other animals too- we just haven't found a way to show it yet.
Look- at numerous places in the movies they experience fear, joy, and sorry. If you add the "Clone Wars" then examples of emotions, pointless human banter and expressions of human level intelligence, self conciousness, and self awareness are all over the place between the droids.
I agree that *some* (or even many) droids appear to be robots (no self awareness, interaction is scripted).
There is a subplot in the EU that R2-D2 and C3PO are anomalies for the usual droids.
I agree that lots of droids appear to be expert systems in automatons.
However- throughout the entire series a variety of droids are portrayed as being more intelligent than children, capable of fear, capable of experiencing pain. Especially the battle droids. They banter like humans between themselves when no one is around except other battle droids.
It may be as simple as the fact that a real robot would be boring. Putting human words, emotions, and attitudes into a droids mouth adds humor, pathos, some kind of interesting emotion (which is one of the points of art - to arouse emotion).
The problem is that putting human words, emotions, and attitudesinto the droid's mouth also makes the droid look human.
Characters in science fiction stories allow us to look at things differently than we normally do.
In some cases, it lets us look at prejudice, racism, etc. (But but.. HE'S BLACK and WHITE and I'm WHITE AND BLACK).
To be honest, I never thought about it before, but the treatment of the droids in Star Wars is really just another look into George's racism.
When he was growing up- racism was so prevalent, you could be blind to it. Just watch old 1950's movies and TV shows and it's atrocious.
I don't think George was trying to make a point and get people to see their racism and willingness to be sadistic (or even casually murderous) to weaker beings but wowsers- the author really opens my eyes. I won't see Star Wars the same way again.
Even the GOOD guys are fairly callous and evil to droids- treating intelligent beings as slaves.
He lost because the U.S. government has it's hand so far up Sweden's ass that the U.S. are poking their fingers in Sweden's mouth and controlling what they say.
I'm a U.S. citizen and it's shameful to me. I'm embarrassed for Sweden.
Except if you read the link you will see she wasn't sleeping. She later recanted and said she was half asleep.
A female prosecutor dropped the charges. One of the females involved wanted the charges dropped and the state pursued them anyway.
Let's put it more likely given the spending of millions of dollars over a dubious rape case by a foreign national (it's not like he pulled a stranger off the street and violently violated her while she screamed and pleaded for him to stop and he didn't drug them etc etc.)
Anyway.. what's more likely...
The US government is smearing him, is going to illegally take him away and torture him out of spite (since he really has no secrets they don't already have)...
Or that he SUDDENLY became a rapist RIGHT AFTER dumping a bunch of US government secrets.
The rape charges are a bit tenuous. Firstly, they started with consensual sex. Secondly, some of the females changed their accusations.
In one of the two cases, the "rape" charge based on not using a condom was found to actually be that the condom broke during consensual sex.
To quote the meat:
An extradition hearing took place on 7â"8 and 11 February 2011 before the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court.[260][261] At the hearing, Assange's defence raised a variety of objections, including mismatches between the EAW and the original accuser statements to the Swedish police[262][263] that exaggerated the nature of the complaints.[264][265] In particular they argued the original police reports showed - contrary to the EAW - absence of alleged rape; absence of alleged force or injury; admission in both cases of consensual sex on the same occasions as the allegations; and splitting of a condom used with plaintiff 1 rather than failure to use one.
The defence also highlighted evidence that: plaintiff 2 had later admitted to being "half asleep" after consensual sex, rather than "asleep"; that the plaintiffs had originally been seeking to compel Assange to take an STD test rather than prosecution;[266] and that plaintiff 1 had thrown a Crayfish party for Assange at her home the evening after the alleged incidents, from which she tweeted: "Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world's coolest, smartest people! It's amazing!" and invited Assange to stay in her room afterwards.[267][268]
---
The entire thing is a ridiculous abuse of government power and abuse of the rule of law. They do not spend millions of dollars per rapist. If they DID we would probably catch more of rapists until we went broke.
If New York is hit again within 20 years, we should seriously consider turning the shores into green zones.
At the least the government should not be giving money to the same people repeatedly.
Rare disasters- we share the load.
Every 20 years-- maybe even every 40 years-- is too common and we need to say, "okay if you want to live there it's okay but there won't be any more disaster aid for this area until 2057".
God says "Abraham, Kill Isacc" and Abraham is ready to do it - because it's god.
God says "Moses, tell the people to do this or I'll punish them harshly" so Moses (the representative) says to do it and the people do it.
Even more diffusely, the king or priest class, interpreting the laws, gave orders to the people and the people did it.
If a religion is a bunch of questioning, not particularly obedient people doing what they think is best, then I don't have a lot of beef with it.
But- it's not really a coherent religion then.
Otherwise, you rapidly run into the "No true scotsman" problem. "Oh they did something bad in the name of christ so they really aren't christians" doesn't cut it.
What you are really following is "Fesh's take on christianity". You can't really speak for christianity as a whole any more than the Franciscan monks watching people burn to death and trying to convert them instead of saving them (not much opposition to the death penalty there).
If nothing else, a little over a billion catholics believe the pope has the authority to speak for god. And a couple hundred million Mormons think the same for their high prophets. Protestants (even taken as a group- putting baptists and methodists and etc. togetether) who claim to be the "real" Christianity are a tiny minority compared to those other branches of Christianity.
And most religions do end up with some kind of temporal power which they are affected by (usually corrupted by) and which they use.
Anyway drifting off my point- what makes religion (and nationalism) so dangerous is how good people like yourself can be convinced to do evil things without guilt. Someone else pointed to "group think" as the common thread of danger. And I guess that's true- and it can affect other groups than just religious and nationalistic. But it's very common to get evil group think going with religion and nationalism.
Sounds like you are keeping your own head and your own values while also believing you'll be saved. No problem with that. Religion brought my mother a lot of peace.
Good since a lot of HFT is illegal front running.
on
Have We Hit Peak HFT?
·
· Score: 1
Seeing someone's trade, buying the stock and selling it to them at a markup, has been illegal for decades as front running.
I favor the tiny tax on trades however- lots of trades are no longer done on the market floors (billions of dollars worth of billions of shares).
Not sure if the taxes will hit those markets.
A tiny tax would cut down on the false trades.
I think if you offer a trade, there should be a cancellation fee (instead of this tax). That would kill 99% of the price manipulating uses of posting and immediately cancelling millions of trades.
The peak number has been sliding upwards during my lifetime so I've been dubious.
However, the "hans" guy on TED says we have reached a point where the average child born replaces one human who is dying. He has a nice video that explains it and shows that this will result in an increase from 7 billion to 10 billion.
Only problem is that since it was recorded the peak number has risen to 11 billion. So apparently the birth rate isn't really down to 1baby:1old dying person yet.
Me?
I think that high breeders will come to dominate the population and low breeders will get selected out.
And so the population will continue going up until it breaks.
But I'll give Hans his due and say it will probably be slower than I had previously thought.
I should add at this point that i don't have a problem with small groups of very peaceful religious people (like the amish) whose religions have a strong tradition of non-violence.
"they were tying him to the stake (to burn him to death alive) a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell."
This is my problem with religion. They redefine it so it's okay to burn someone at the stake. You are being a *good* person if you can just force them to convert to your religion before they die.
According to public news reports the book's editor, Prof. Agostino Borromeo, stated that about 125,000 persons were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, of which 1.8% were executed (2,250 people).
During the high point of the Spanish Inquisition from 1478-1530 AD, scholars found that approximately 1,500-2,000 people were found guilty. From that point forward, there are exact records available of all "guilty" sentences which amounted to 775 executions. In the full 200 years of the Spanish Inquisition, less than 1% of the population had any contact with it, people outside of the major cities didn't even know about it. The Inquisition was not applied to Jews or Moslems, unless they were baptised as Christians.
If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 6,000 deaths.
That's the inquisition... now more generally.. you probably want this: http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm --- Now I'm skipping some of what I consider dubious examples where a war between nations is less strongly associated with religion than with a conflict between the people but it's fair to say that religion (the catholic/christian religion) was a factor to a major factor in these conflicts. ---
Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO30] Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW223]
Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). [WW37-40] (In the words of one witness: "there [in front of Solomon's temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes", and after that "happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Saviour's tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude") The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." [TG79]
Battle of Askalon, 8/12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45]
1391 Seville's Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored "badges of shame" that all jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.
1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]
Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians. [DO29] The Albigensians...viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. [NC] Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Bezirs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]
As one of the culprits wrote: "So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous." [SH69] The indian chief Hatuey fled with his people
Has the church been associated with torture and mass murder for over a thousand years?
Yes or no?
Have religions of many kinds been generally associated with genocide, mass suicide, rape, , smashing of suckling babes on rocks, murder, mass murder, child abuse *as* organizations- *ordered by their deities* - not just as isolated human beings- yes or no?
Do many religious people believe that if their deity told them to do something that they would do it because if the deity says to do it, then it's right by definition? yes or no?
For each of these the answer is yes.
If you say, "I'm going to think for myself- I don't care what my deity tells me to do" that's a VERY good first step to not committing atrocities because your religion tells you that your diety told you to.
Agreed- the french electro torture show most recently made that point.
All it takes is an authority figure or existing group to push you in that direction. Most people (like 39:40) can't resist unless they see someone else resisting first.
But racism isn't as powerful as religion and nationalism.
I can grant your point... "Isms" which contain group think are horribly dangerous and scary because they allow normal, nice, people to do terrible things and feel no guilt (even happiness and pride).
The roman catholic church did terrible, horrible, inhumane things to people they considered heretics (torturing them until they confessed and then burning them to death to "save" them before they could recant) *while* thinking they were being good people.
It's the "thinking they were being good people" that's scary to me.
I'm specifically ignoring the cases where the roman catholic church was simply abusing their power because any organization with power leads to that kind of behavior. Even the police lie to protect other police officers who are corrupt, even commit murder but they know they are doing something illegal and wrong- the ends just justify the means and pack loyalty dominates.
I can understand other wise good priests protecting bad priests. It's different than the point I'm advancing.
Just looking at a historical baseline of the spanish inquisition and catholicism.
Your're right- non religious people do bad things too. They usually need to be a sociopath to do evil things.
But religious people can do monstrous things while still being normal people. All you have to do is cross the line to "not being human" according to their religion.
Religion and nationalism allow otherwise normal people to behave like sociopaths. So they are both a bit frightening.
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans....
Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them.... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted â" and it was for blowing the whistle....
Okay- so when you had a film in the 70's and they actually blew up a small city for a scene in the movie- that was impressive in its own right because you *saw* a real city being blown up.
The first aspect is that- as good as they are- special effects are not real. Something is missing. I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point. Or it may be there are just too many things to keep track of.
This was part of what made Inception so effective. Most of the "special effects" were not done with CGI. They built and destroyed a real fortress. They built a real elevator on its side and they built an entire bar on tilted it to tilt the water in the glasses. You looked at it and thought "but this is just CGI" but some part of your brain was saying "but it's real".
The second part is more critical tho. If you can literally portray ANYTHING then the act of portraying it no longer has emotional weight in itself. If you are going to show three cars being thrown around and destroyed because it is stupidly easy with computers- then the three cars should be saying something. Advancing the plot.
Don't ask me to sit there for 5 minutes looking at CGI and think I'll be impressed. I wasn't for star trek the motion picture, I won't be for your film. You need a story. You need plot. You need ideas. You need character development. You need character conflict. CGI only exists to provide the setting. CGI is not impressive. It should be seamless and allow you to get your point across (like the master in TAI CHI ZERO walking up the side of a wall.)
Superman's effects seemed to be a lot of "ooh look isn't this COOL!". Like the spacesuit helmet things. They wasted time showing them peel on and off the actors. What did it say to have the helmets do that?
A useful effect was things flying up and down to communicate the idea that gravity was reversing back and forth (tho how that was terraforming I don't know but I forgive movie makers a lot).
Slashdot Mirror
Different response for a different point.
It doesnt' matter how intelligent the canon books say they are.
They act as humans, they get upset, they crack jokes.
They are stand-ins for humans where bad things happen to them so that we humans can exercise our racist evil sides in a fantasy way watching non humans get blown apart, torn apart, threatened with being torn apart, etc.
In a non SF film, most of their parts would be portrayed by a human actor and it would come across horribly with humans in those roles in some cases. (for one thing most of the "good guys" would look monstrous).
Animals are quite simply not alive. They are incapable of feeling pain, joy, sadness like humans.
Oh wait... turned out they could.
Well, they are not self aware!
Oh wait... gorillas and parrots definitely are. Probably other animals too- we just haven't found a way to show it yet.
Look- at numerous places in the movies they experience fear, joy, and sorry. If you add the "Clone Wars" then examples of emotions, pointless human banter and expressions of human level intelligence, self conciousness, and self awareness are all over the place between the droids.
I agree that *some* (or even many) droids appear to be robots (no self awareness, interaction is scripted).
There is a subplot in the EU that R2-D2 and C3PO are anomalies for the usual droids.
I agree that lots of droids appear to be expert systems in automatons.
However- throughout the entire series a variety of droids are portrayed as being more intelligent than children, capable of fear, capable of experiencing pain. Especially the battle droids. They banter like humans between themselves when no one is around except other battle droids.
It may be as simple as the fact that a real robot would be boring. Putting human words, emotions, and attitudes into a droids mouth adds humor, pathos, some kind of interesting emotion (which is one of the points of art - to arouse emotion).
The problem is that putting human words, emotions, and attitudesinto the droid's mouth also makes the droid look human.
Let me know when Siri severely disapproves of androids, and demands to "have a serious talk with their programmer".
Characters in science fiction stories allow us to look at things differently than we normally do.
In some cases, it lets us look at prejudice, racism, etc. (But but.. HE'S BLACK and WHITE and I'm WHITE AND BLACK).
To be honest, I never thought about it before, but the treatment of the droids in Star Wars is really just another look into George's racism.
When he was growing up- racism was so prevalent, you could be blind to it. Just watch old 1950's movies and TV shows and it's atrocious.
I don't think George was trying to make a point and get people to see their racism and willingness to be sadistic (or even casually murderous) to weaker beings but wowsers- the author really opens my eyes. I won't see Star Wars the same way again.
Even the GOOD guys are fairly callous and evil to droids- treating intelligent beings as slaves.
Very interesting.
He lost because the U.S. government has it's hand so far up Sweden's ass that the U.S. are poking their fingers in Sweden's mouth and controlling what they say.
I'm a U.S. citizen and it's shameful to me. I'm embarrassed for Sweden.
Except if you read the link you will see she wasn't sleeping. She later recanted and said she was half asleep.
A female prosecutor dropped the charges. One of the females involved wanted the charges dropped and the state pursued them anyway.
Let's put it more likely given the spending of millions of dollars over a dubious rape case by a foreign national (it's not like he pulled a stranger off the street and violently violated her while she screamed and pleaded for him to stop and he didn't drug them etc etc.)
Anyway.. what's more likely...
The US government is smearing him, is going to illegally take him away and torture him out of spite (since he really has no secrets they don't already have)...
Or that he SUDDENLY became a rapist RIGHT AFTER dumping a bunch of US government secrets.
I really like this idea. It could push things enough that the effort to keep him under wraps breaks down.
Full details here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
The rape charges are a bit tenuous.
Firstly, they started with consensual sex.
Secondly, some of the females changed their accusations.
In one of the two cases, the "rape" charge based on not using a condom was found to actually be that the condom broke during consensual sex.
To quote the meat:
An extradition hearing took place on 7â"8 and 11 February 2011 before the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court.[260][261] At the hearing, Assange's defence raised a variety of objections, including mismatches between the EAW and the original accuser statements to the Swedish police[262][263] that exaggerated the nature of the complaints.[264][265] In particular they argued the original police reports showed - contrary to the EAW - absence of alleged rape; absence of alleged force or injury; admission in both cases of consensual sex on the same occasions as the allegations; and splitting of a condom used with plaintiff 1 rather than failure to use one.
The defence also highlighted evidence that: plaintiff 2 had later admitted to being "half asleep" after consensual sex, rather than "asleep"; that the plaintiffs had originally been seeking to compel Assange to take an STD test rather than prosecution;[266] and that plaintiff 1 had thrown a Crayfish party for Assange at her home the evening after the alleged incidents, from which she tweeted: "Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world's coolest, smartest people! It's amazing!" and invited Assange to stay in her room afterwards.[267][268]
---
The entire thing is a ridiculous abuse of government power and abuse of the rule of law.
They do not spend millions of dollars per rapist. If they DID we would probably catch more of rapists until we went broke.
If New York is hit again within 20 years, we should seriously consider turning the shores into green zones.
At the least the government should not be giving money to the same people repeatedly.
Rare disasters- we share the load.
Every 20 years-- maybe even every 40 years-- is too common and we need to say, "okay if you want to live there it's okay but there won't be any more disaster aid for this area until 2057".
God says "Abraham, Kill Isacc" and Abraham is ready to do it - because it's god.
God says "Moses, tell the people to do this or I'll punish them harshly" so Moses (the representative) says to do it and the people do it.
Even more diffusely, the king or priest class, interpreting the laws, gave orders to the people and the people did it.
If a religion is a bunch of questioning, not particularly obedient people doing what they think is best, then I don't have a lot of beef with it.
But- it's not really a coherent religion then.
Otherwise, you rapidly run into the "No true scotsman" problem. "Oh they did something bad in the name of christ so they really aren't christians" doesn't cut it.
What you are really following is "Fesh's take on christianity". You can't really speak for christianity as a whole any more than the Franciscan monks watching people burn to death and trying to convert them instead of saving them (not much opposition to the death penalty there).
If nothing else, a little over a billion catholics believe the pope has the authority to speak for god. And a couple hundred million Mormons think the same for their high prophets. Protestants (even taken as a group- putting baptists and methodists and etc. togetether) who claim to be the "real" Christianity are a tiny minority compared to those other branches of Christianity.
And most religions do end up with some kind of temporal power which they are affected by (usually corrupted by) and which they use.
Anyway drifting off my point- what makes religion (and nationalism) so dangerous is how good people like yourself can be convinced to do evil things without guilt. Someone else pointed to "group think" as the common thread of danger. And I guess that's true- and it can affect other groups than just religious and nationalistic. But it's very common to get evil group think going with religion and nationalism.
Sounds like you are keeping your own head and your own values while also believing you'll be saved. No problem with that. Religion brought my mother a lot of peace.
Seeing someone's trade, buying the stock and selling it to them at a markup, has been illegal for decades as front running.
I favor the tiny tax on trades however- lots of trades are no longer done on the market floors (billions of dollars worth of billions of shares).
Not sure if the taxes will hit those markets.
A tiny tax would cut down on the false trades.
I think if you offer a trade, there should be a cancellation fee (instead of this tax).
That would kill 99% of the price manipulating uses of posting and immediately cancelling millions of trades.
The peak number has been sliding upwards during my lifetime so I've been dubious.
However, the "hans" guy on TED says we have reached a point where the average child born replaces one human who is dying. He has a nice video that explains it and shows that this will result in an increase from 7 billion to 10 billion.
Only problem is that since it was recorded the peak number has risen to 11 billion.
So apparently the birth rate isn't really down to 1baby:1old dying person yet.
Me?
I think that high breeders will come to dominate the population and low breeders will get selected out.
And so the population will continue going up until it breaks.
But I'll give Hans his due and say it will probably be slower than I had previously thought.
It certainly can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
Each new child born has multiple mutations.
If we were exposed to highly selective pressure (99% of humans die without this mutation) then we would evolve quickly.
In the case of these particular bacteria run 500 generations per 75 days.
That's like 10,000 years of human time-- almost 50,000 years of human time sacle evolution per human year.
Plastic has been common in the ocean for about four decades.
So that's like 50,000*10*4 = 2,000,000 years worth of human time scale evolution for these bacteria since plastic became common.
I should add at this point that i don't have a problem with small groups of very peaceful religious people (like the amish) whose religions have a strong tradition of non-violence.
And it's this:
"they were tying him to the stake (to burn him to death alive) a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell."
This is my problem with religion. They redefine it so it's okay to burn someone at the stake. You are being a *good* person if you can just force them to convert to your religion before they die.
http://askville.amazon.com/people-killed-Inquisition/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3878676
According to public news reports the book's editor, Prof. Agostino Borromeo, stated that about 125,000 persons were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, of which 1.8% were executed (2,250 people).
During the high point of the Spanish Inquisition from 1478-1530 AD, scholars found that approximately 1,500-2,000 people were found guilty. From that point forward, there are exact records available of all "guilty" sentences which amounted to 775 executions. In the full 200 years of the Spanish Inquisition, less than 1% of the population had any contact with it, people outside of the major cities didn't even know about it. The Inquisition was not applied to Jews or Moslems, unless they were baptised as Christians.
If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 6,000 deaths.
That's the inquisition... now more generally.. you probably want this:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm
---
Now I'm skipping some of what I consider dubious examples where a war between nations is less strongly associated with religion than with a conflict between the people but it's fair to say that religion (the catholic/christian religion) was a factor to a major factor in these conflicts.
---
Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO30]
Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW223]
Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). [WW37-40]
(In the words of one witness: "there [in front of Solomon's temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes", and after that "happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Saviour's tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude")
The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." [TG79]
Battle of Askalon, 8/12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45]
1391 Seville's Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored "badges of shame" that all jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.
1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]
Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians. [DO29]
The Albigensians...viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. [NC]
Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Bezirs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]
As one of the culprits wrote: "So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous." [SH69]
The indian chief Hatuey fled with his people
Has the church been associated with torture and mass murder for over a thousand years?
Yes or no?
Have religions of many kinds been generally associated with genocide, mass suicide, rape, , smashing of suckling babes on rocks, murder, mass murder, child abuse *as* organizations- *ordered by their deities* - not just as isolated human beings- yes or no?
Do many religious people believe that if their deity told them to do something that they would do it because if the deity says to do it, then it's right by definition?
yes or no?
For each of these the answer is yes.
If you say, "I'm going to think for myself- I don't care what my deity tells me to do" that's a VERY good first step to not committing atrocities because your religion tells you that your diety told you to.
Agreed- the french electro torture show most recently made that point.
All it takes is an authority figure or existing group to push you in that direction. Most people (like 39:40) can't resist unless they see someone else resisting first.
Racism is also bad. Again- dehumanizing people.
But racism isn't as powerful as religion and nationalism.
I can grant your point... "Isms" which contain group think are horribly dangerous and scary because they allow normal, nice, people to do terrible things and feel no guilt (even happiness and pride).
The roman catholic church did terrible, horrible, inhumane things to people they considered heretics (torturing them until they confessed and then burning them to death to "save" them before they could recant) *while* thinking they were being good people.
It's the "thinking they were being good people" that's scary to me.
I'm specifically ignoring the cases where the roman catholic church was simply abusing their power because any organization with power leads to that kind of behavior. Even the police lie to protect other police officers who are corrupt, even commit murder but they know they are doing something illegal and wrong- the ends just justify the means and pack loyalty dominates.
I can understand other wise good priests protecting bad priests. It's different than the point I'm advancing.
Just looking at a historical baseline of the spanish inquisition and catholicism.
Your're right- non religious people do bad things too. They usually need to be a sociopath to do evil things.
But religious people can do monstrous things while still being normal people. All you have to do is cross the line to "not being human" according to their religion.
Religion and nationalism allow otherwise normal people to behave like sociopaths. So they are both a bit frightening.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. ...
Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted â" and it was for blowing the whistle. ...
OH by the way... Tai Chi Zero and Tai Chi Hero were quite good.
A very weird comedy drama steam punk kung fu movie series. The third is still to come out.
And IDEAS. Wow- it had so many ideas crammed into the film.
And nice character growth and change (esp on the part of the villain).
Not "perfect" and soulless but damn good.
Okay- so when you had a film in the 70's and they actually blew up a small city for a scene in the movie- that was impressive in its own right because you *saw* a real city being blown up.
The first aspect is that- as good as they are- special effects are not real. Something is missing. I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point. Or it may be there are just too many things to keep track of.
This was part of what made Inception so effective. Most of the "special effects" were not done with CGI. They built and destroyed a real fortress. They built a real elevator on its side and they built an entire bar on tilted it to tilt the water in the glasses. You looked at it and thought "but this is just CGI" but some part of your brain was saying "but it's real".
The second part is more critical tho. If you can literally portray ANYTHING then the act of portraying it no longer has emotional weight in itself. If you are going to show three cars being thrown around and destroyed because it is stupidly easy with computers- then the three cars should be saying something. Advancing the plot.
Don't ask me to sit there for 5 minutes looking at CGI and think I'll be impressed. I wasn't for star trek the motion picture, I won't be for your film. You need a story. You need plot. You need ideas. You need character development. You need character conflict. CGI only exists to provide the setting. CGI is not impressive. It should be seamless and allow you to get your point across (like the master in TAI CHI ZERO walking up the side of a wall.)
Superman's effects seemed to be a lot of "ooh look isn't this COOL!". Like the spacesuit helmet things. They wasted time showing them peel on and off the actors. What did it say to have the helmets do that?
A useful effect was things flying up and down to communicate the idea that gravity was reversing back and forth (tho how that was terraforming I don't know but I forgive movie makers a lot).