The real key to this whole religion vs. science is that they are NOT disparate - they are competing for the overlapping space.
In the old days it was religion that gave people hope and acted as a barrier against the fear of the unknown, labelling and quantifying what common people could not, or would not do. That was it's societal function. This is coming from someone who's religious, but who sees that most religions have been abused in the past (and now).
Along comes science. You get cancer, you're possibly going to die. Who do you turn to? God? Or your doctor? BOTH. And both are institutions that want to survive and go on. The churchs want you to come to church, pay your money, and keep them rolling, but the scientists want you to support their funding too. Neither is necessarily nefarious, but both want the prestige and the glory and money that comes with it.
Similary what do we use to explain the inexplicable now? More often then not we approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism made all the more authentic by the science it seems to embody.
In general the two are seperate, but there are many areas of overlap and thus competition. That's the drama being played out between the fundamentalists and the scientists right now. Which will reign as king?
Personally I think that you should use neither religion or science, but I think perhaps they are BOTH the opiate of the masses. Go to Mass and absolve yourself of guilt before returning to your life of mediocrity or stand in line for 12 hours to pick up the new xbos 360 so that you can have one more way to distract yourself from the fact that you're not living up to any of your youthful dreams and ideals.
They both get abused for the same purpose. Are they really so different after all?
Why do we need to come up with a reason to explain why corporations aren't funding any exhibit at all? Is it mysterious that corporations don't always give away their money?
They're not against a very specific technique, but against the whole of science
Do you have any basis for this AT ALL? Do religious people refuse to fly planes? Watch TV? That would make televangelism rather difficult, now wouldn't it?
The fact of the matter is that they are opposed to what they see as an encroachment of science upon their turf - origins of life. And in all fairness this HAS been a religious issue until relatively recently (last couple of hundred years). From their perspective science has come over and tweaked their nose, and they're going to fight back. The notion that they are actively seeking out science to oppose is both contrary to verifiable fact (they use the web, TV, and every other popular invention of science just like everyone else) and utterly prejudicial.
I happen to think they're wrong for what they're doing but let's just stick to the facts and not engage in the kind of irrational behavior we expect from religious zealots.
Grandparent has a point. Unless you can point to numerous non-evolution-related exhibits having no trouble getting corporate funding then why should we assume that this particular exhibit is suffering from anything other than a general financial shortfall?
In fact, if they were really shrewd they might just be able to convince a couple of reporters that business were staying away BECAUSE they delt with religion.
Then there'd be a few articles about how the religious right (which for all we know doesn't even know this exhibit exists) are frightening corporations from giving money to the exhibit and suddenly the private donations are there for the exhibit to go on.
Those societies that have embraced education and science historically are those societies that survive
I don't think that's a very scientific position to take. What's the control for the study? I'm not trying to be flippant, but the fact is that "science" as we understand it has a very limited history - only a few hundred years. It's really rather meaningless to make statements like this.
I happen to be a very religious person, and I think I'm (almost) as disturbed as you are by this report. I personally am not quite sure that all of evolution makes sense to me, but I've never felt threatened by it in any way, and it strikes me as unnerving that we have so many religious zealots out there who think that creationism needs to be taught in our schoools. Don't forget - some religions are just as intolerant of each other as they are of science, and if certain hard-core Christian groups ever got in control of this country I'd be in just as much danger for being Mormon as you would be for being a bioscientist (even though as far as I'm concerned Mormons are Christians). Probably more so in fact - I don't remember the last time Americans killed and raped people for having PhDs but some of my own ancestors survived a massacre of Mormons (at Haun's Mill).
By the same token, as long as you are going to be a proponent of science you should do it scientifically. I'm not as disturbed this as I am by the religious nuts, but I am still somewhat disturbed that so few scientists seem to have a historic appreciation for the position of "science" in modern society, and are also unaware of meta-thought (like Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolution") that point out potential fallacies and shortcomings even in modern science. It's not as though "science" has never been harnessed for questionable practices (eg eugenics). You can't say "oh, but that's not real science" unless you allow people to point at the religious nuts and say "oh, but that's not real religion" as well.
So what I'm saying, is don't stoop to the level of the idealogues.
if there was no co-defendant, noone would be culpable, and the whole execution would have been fair and square.
In fact if there's no co-defendant than the blame would rest squarely on the eye-witness who lied under oath. If there had also been no eye-witness there would have been no case, no guilty verdict, and no execution at all. So your analysis simply falls apart.
My argument is simple: there was no evidence that the Texas judicial system willfully killed an innocent person. Therefore they did not murder him.
The rest of the argument is simply that there were people who, through their willfull silence, DID kill (or allow to be killed) someone they knew was innocent. That is closer to murder than what the Texas judicial system did - even though it was the Texas judicial system that did the actual killing.
By extension this also means that there's really no case here against the death penalty, and there isn't even much of a case against the Texas judicial system. If two complete strangers are going to tell corroborating lies about a violent crime there just isn't much of a way for a judicial system to handle that without raising the bar to prove guilt so high that actual murders are found "not guilty" in droves. Perhaps the defense made serious errors in this case, but again that's simply not an indictment of the Texas judicial system unless you can prove that something about the system led to those errors and that the alternative would not have been worse.
So despite your allegations about my pet system I haven't said anything for or against the death penalty. I'm just pointing out that the article itself is hopelessly biased against it - and therefore exactly a masterpiece of journalistic integrity.
I'm not saying that everything is just fine, but I'm not going to engage in overly simplistic "the sky is falling" rhetoric either.
First of all, there are systematic mistakes, and then there are isolated mistakes. It's not even really coherent to hold a system responsible for isolated mistakes. For all we know the Texas judicial system works as well or better than the national average in correctly finding people guilty or innocent. But in this case there was an eyewitness who lied, and a co-defendent who waited until after the execution to speak up. This could happen in any criminal justice system in any state.
The article makes it seem as though there was a lot of doubt in the case, and certainly given the fact that the eyewitness recanted and the co-defendent came forward, in hindsight it looks as though the guilty verdict was wrong. But the article also starts with the premise that the kid had no criminal record, and then later on mentions that oh yeah, he did happen to shoot a cop in a bar fight but the charges were dropped. Just because you have no convictions does not mean you have no criminal record. That pretty much toasts the credibility of this whole article.
Finally, and most importantly, there's a huge distinction between killing and murdering. There's no doubt that Texas killed this kid. But murder? That implies not only unjustified but willfully unjustified killing. I did a quick google search:
First degree murder is a "deliberate and pre-meditated" unlawful killing second degree murder is an unlawful killing done "deliberately" but "without pre-meditation." Manslaughter is the negligent killing of another human being, without "pre-meditation," or expressed or implied "intent."
In order for it to be murder, you have to intentionally unlawfully kill someone. The Texas criminal justice system clearly thought that he was guilty, and therefore it CAN NOT be murder. If the criminal justice system was negligent then it was manslaughter - that's the worst you're gonna get.
It's radicals that really make progress impossible in so many different political arguments. If you're against the death penalty (personally, I'm undecided on it) then you're only going to hurt your own side by getting all hysterical and saying "Damn right Texas murdered him" when the evidence incontrovertibly demonstrates that they did not. You're kind of like PETA with their comparison of factory farming to the Holocaust. I'm morally opposed to factory farming, but utterly embarassed to find myself on the same side of any argument as that bunch of loony nut cases.
Do yourself a favor and no matter how passionately you feel about this issue, try to keep a level tone when you advocate your position. It may be less viscerally satisfying, but you may actually sway some open-minded people out there to your side.
-stormin
And if it's true, it's true. Doesn't matter who points it out, or what sympathy one may or may not have for them. Satan himself may point out that the sun is up, it doesn't mean it goes dark.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. All I'm saying is that if there's any moral culpability for the death of the kid, it's with the co-defendent who didn't speak up until after the execution. Whether or not Texas made any mistakes is arguable - and for all we know they thought they were executing a murderer. This kid who stayed silent knew an innocent man was being executed - that makes him the only potential murderer in the story.
"Part of me died when he died," Garza said in an interview with the Chronicle. "You've got a 17-year-old who went to his grave for something he did not do. Texas murdered an innocent person."
So the kid who refused to come forward until AFTER the execution says Texas murdered this kid?
I'm not a big pro-death penatly guy. On my list of conservative causes I care about it's, no wait, it's not on the list. Innocent people have been killed, I don't think that's a fair trade for killing any number of serial killers who'd already been caught. But still, this kind of soppy blame-the-state, all-individuals-are-victims reporting is just obnoxious.
There has been a lot of backlash from the Sony blunder, and I think the backlash will continue because there's a relatively low speed of propogation from the techies to the non-techies, but it's there. I tell people all the time about the Sony rootkit who have no idea what a rootkit is - let alone that Sony had put one out. Without fail they are interested in learning the basics of a rootkit (allows programs to hide on your computer by corrupting the OS) and without fail they are angered by what Sony did.
So now to have the RIAA come out and say "me too!". Nothing could be better. There's a lot of anger coming Sony's way, and I'm glad to have the RIAA volunteer for their fair share. First community-minded thing they've ever done.
Yeah, the most recent Intel commercials are focussing on things other than speed. That's because it's finally become obvious that you can't just keep spinning the core faster. While the avg user may not undersand the importance of cache and other design features, they do understand "my laptop battery lasts 15 minutes and ignites my pants" as well as "wow - dual core sounds neat!".
Here's the story as I rememnber it, and I'm sure there are others with more inside information and better memories out there who can complete the story:
Intel equated processing power with core speed. This began a kind of arms race between AMD and Intel in clock speed - but the AMD message was diluted because they focussed on better chips, not just better scores. Several years ago, however, they decided to play at Intel's own game for a time and there was this huge rush to get to the 1 GHZ mark. It was in this frenzy of clock speed that Intel switched from the efficient and well-designed p3 (which they later returned to for their excellent Pentium M chip) to their wimpy but fast p4. They were able to push the p4 speeds higher than the p3 speeds and thus continue to win the "clock speed = power" battle with the public.
It was on the foundation of this general misconception that Intel's brand was built (of course the actual marketing - as in commercials on TV - had practically no technical content whatsoever, so I'm talking about marketting in terms of their development strategy to win over the computer users who were looking for some simple number they could relate to value).
Now, of course, with the rising supremacy of mobile computing (where the PM shines), the advent of 64-bit processors (AMD was the leader) and dual core processors (again, kudos to AMD) they have FINALLY instituted a marketting shift. This was apparent months ago when they unveiled their new road map and everything was about cycles/watt. They've got a new, slighty more complex and slightly better marketting gimmick - but it's the same old idea. The public doesn't want to read dozens of Anandtech articles detailing each new core for each new processor - they just want a guideline that makes sense. For a while it was clock speed, now it's clock speed per watt.
You have to give them credit for clever marketting. It was because of ploys like this that their brand name became the defacto standard in CPUs, but it doesn't alter the fact that it's just a marketing ploy and that Intel has used their ability to misrepresent their chips to the detriment of actual chip design. It it weren't for AMD - where would we be now?
Although in the final analysis - the real savior isn't AMD, it's competition.
If the lawsuit has managed to crack open Dell to using AMD processors because Intel has to mind its manners with a lawsuit on the horizon then even if the lawsuit doesn't procede it's done what it needed to do: level the playing field.
It's true that AMD marketting hasn't been the best, but it's also true that Intel marketting has convinced the majority of casual users that more GHZ = more performance always. And all questions of marketing aside, I think AMD has a real case.
Well at this point, I guess we've got nothing left to disagree on. How often does that happen on Slashdot? An entire discussion runs its course - and there weren't even any direct Hitler references. I said all along I wasn't sure you were a cultural relativist, you just sounded like one, but clearly you're not so I'll stop trying to peg you as one.
I agree that we needed a better plan for post-war Iraq. And I've heard similar things - that the military leaders said this would be a cakewalk. I just have a hard time believing that people really just ignored military leaders of uniform opinion - why do that? Clark or what's his face, the general running for the democratic presidential nominaion - is at least one example of a high-ranking military leader who certainly thought that we would meet much tougher resistance.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that a minority opinion that there would be stiff resistance was considered a larger risk than the by-comparison tame prospect of museum looting. In hindsight a mistake, but an understandable one.
The decision to disband the Iraqi army seems stupid in hindsight, but on the other hand the reverse position also seems somewhat absurd. To leave the army - the tool and representation of Saddam's authoritarian power - almost entirely intact (just change the leadership): I'm sure that many American's fealt that this would send an entirely different message to the Iraqi's then what we wanted them to see. I mean, it's like "Hey, that army that occaisionally slaughtered you guys, gassed entire villages, and in general wreaked havoc when told to, turns out they weren't all bad. So don't mind us while we transition to a democracy protected by the same entity that protected the dictatorship".
Again - in hindsight the damage from unemploying so many young, healthy males outweighs the symbolic ramifications, but without the benefit of hindsight I can see a strong case being made for doing exactly what was done.
So I guess the only difference between us is that while you think that all these mistakes wer obvious mistakes, I think they were understandable. So even though I think they were mistakes just as much as you do, I just have as much angery and vitriol about it.
First of all just because someone makes an accusation about cultural or racial bias doesn't mean they are doing nothing more than "playing the race card". Sometimes the card is called for. I continue to think that in your case it is called for. For example:
But you've got to be pragmatic Iraqis have lived under authoritarian rule for a very long time.
And what exactly would you call Imperial Japan before and during WWII? A commune? Anarchy? No, it was just as authortarian, if not as actively repressive, as Saddam's regime.
And calling you a cultural relativist right after calling you on racial/cultural bias is NOT irrational. My whole point is that "multiculturalism" is a misnomer - and that it is those who profess the loudest about respecting all traditions/races/nations equally that are frequently the worst hand-holders and coddlers. And that in the real world that constitutes damaging bias by creating and enabling dependencies.
I'm not trying to launch an attack and blame everything on the left. Africa, for example, is not where it is today because of the left. But I was attacking a specific leftist tendency to be hyper-idealistic and more concerned with things that SOUND good rather than actually good policies. The leftist attitude of "what about the children" is what leads to foreign aid and debt relief to Africa that hurts more than it helps.
But to be fair you're absolutely right that another major obstacle to African development are protectionist agricultural subsidies that Europe especially (and America too) refuse to give up. And that's arguably a nationalist (right-wing) policy, not a left-wing policy (althoguh subsidies in general tend to be leftist).
I agree that the US could have and should have done better planning for the invasion of Iraq, but the facts are simple: America genuinely believed Saddam did have and would use weapons of mass destruction. We were't planning to prevent museum looting within days of the start of hostilities, we were planning on being able to react to chemical and biologic weapons attacks on our troops. If we'd known that the entire Iraqi army would fall apart again, I think we would have done a better job. But Democrats especially believed that there'd be thousands of American casualties, that the streets would run with rivers of blood, etc, and now THEY are the ones saying "you should have known the whole place would cave-in faster than you could drive your tanks!".
We can't change the past. The best we can do is work for freedom from here on out. That means less prisoner-abuse scandals, but you've ignored all my points about torture being necessary or at least defensible in somem situations. We DON'T need MORE irrational hyper-idealism! We need fortitude to stay in Iraq, take the punches, and slog it out until the nation stands upright. We've done it before, and I think we can do it again.
1. I think the NYT is reliably pretty far left-of center, and when they fall in line with DC it's either an exception to the rule, or because EVERYONE is. Leading up to the Iraq war no one, not even France, questioned the US intelligence. That's not falling into lock-step with the whitehouse - that was just the universal belief. I don't think even Ted Kennedy voted against the resolution to send troops in, but I doubt you'd call him a stooge of the white house.
2. I don't think Japan and Germany were "under control" immediately following the war. War's chaotic. So's the aftermath. There was looting, sporadic paramilitary resistance and so on. Sure, Iraq is worse after 2 years than either Germnany or Japan in terms of violence, but how much of that is due to foreign influence? A lot, I'd say.
3. Sure, totalitarianism is no fun, but at least there are a predictable set of (admittedly oppressive) rules you can follow to avoid death or torture.
This is a shocking statement coming from a progresive such as yourself. I may be assuming too much, but aren't you in the category of those who get extremely angry that Bush uses his fear-mongering to consolidate gov't control over public life ala the Patriot Act, etc.? And yet you apply a horrible double-standard to the Iraqi's. I think there's a bit of implicit cultural bias being exposed here.
In America it's worth the risk and danger to keep our freedoms. We oppose the Patriot Act because it's being used against criminals of the non-terrorist variety. So although it benefits in greater civil order, we oppose it in the name of liberty. So Americans can trade safety for liberty.
But the Iraqi's, as backwards, culturally undeveloped, and politically naive people, for them a patriarchal, domineering, totalitarian regime where you get tortured and rape for dissident but the power stays on and they leave you alone as long as you (and everyone from your family and village) refrain from protesting in the name of freedom or liberty, for them that's OK? That's a good trade of?
I'm not trying to force these concepts into your conclusions, I just don't understand what other basis you could have for treating Americans as mature and capable of trading security for freedom while claiming that the Iraqi's were better off in a totalitarian state because hey - they had running water and the lights were on. If you don't like my explanation (that you're unconsciously culturally or racially biased) then come up with a differnt one. I'm listening.
As far as the rest of it goes, I wasn't trying to imply that all the allegations are wrong. Just that it's foolish to believe people with nothing to lose by lying and every motivation to lie as the default position. In the American criminal justice system even convicted felons are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But you seem to be perfectly content to turn this tradition on its head entirely and write off as guilty men and women with no criminal background based on the words of those who may or may not be actively engaged in terrorism.
Does that seem right to you? I guess you are willing to sell off some of our precious American heritage after all.
Look, I'm not trying to say you are not patriotic, or that you're evil, or anything. You strike me as a reasonable, intelligent, and patriotic American. I have no desire to demonize you. I'm not tryign to be sensationalist.
But I do believe that you, and many of those who practice "cultural relativity", "multiculturalism" etc (whether in name or not) are guilty of a new kind of imperialism, a cultural imperialism (as opposed to political or economic) that endangers America and those we try to subsume in our cultural net. While professing to treat people everywhere as equals, it actually perpetuates a heinous double standard that has us ramming foreign aid down the throats of African nations to the destrucion of native economies, the engorgement of despotic wallets, and the enabling of national dependency. T
I guess if I thought that Iraq was worse off now then before the invasion, I would agree, but I don't. A couple of points:
1. Nazi Germnay and 1945 Japan were much worse off then either had been 6 years previous. Despite this fact, the ruin wrought upon both countries made possible the thriving democratic nations you see today. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get beter.
2. I don't believe that the US is treating the Iraqi's worse than Saddam did, or that conditions of life generally have detoriated as much as you believe.
2a. You give no indication of the improvements that have been made. Women are voting and on the path to full and equal rights (although I realize that Saddam was never a sectarian leader to begin with). Schools are being built. The Kurds no longer live solely under the safety of American air-power.
2b. I know several soldiers that have served in Iraq including one who was an interrogation specialist. After his tour of duty he went back as a civilian contractor. Now he trains interoggators for the Army. Of course he wouldn't talk about top-secret stuff, but he has always been extremely open about the kinds of interrogation he did - and it never involved torture of any kind. All of the vets that I've talked to say that we have an extremely pessimistic view of Iraq, and that in most of the country life is better than it ever was with Saddam.
I admit I haven't read your articles yet. I will read them today. But even before I read them I have a final point. Terrorists are being taught now that if they are captured by the U.S. they should do whatever they can to claim that they are being tortured. The pictures from Abu G. show that some torture is undeniably going on. In addition there have been deaths in custody. These instances are doubly unfortunate because on top of being wrong and evil they make it easier for fake stories of brutatlity (like the Koran down the toilet) to be spread by terrorists.
Are you willing to believe every report of torture the media can dig up? If I was a terrorist in prison, or even just had a grudge against being in there, I'd be happy to have a friend rough me a up a bit, than grab an American journalist and regal him or her with tales of sodomy, torture, and watching my cell-mate be torn to shreds by vicious man-eating jail-dogs. See my point? It's in the best interests of the terrorists to spread as many rumors as possible about torture - they're all highly motivated to claim it - are you going to believe all the claims just because they end up in the NYT or Rolling Stone?
Again I must protest, and again the same refrain: "fine distcintions".
When we start systematicly torturing, raping and executing THEN you can reasonably say we began "treating prisoners exactly the way he treated them".
Sporadic episodes of "soft" torture (face it, no one's getting hung from the wall by metal hooks through there gonads or something) are not the same.
I'm not saying its OK. I'm not saying as long as we're not as bad as Saddam we're angels. But I am saying that you do your own nation and national heritagae a great disservice by contributing to the systematic hyperbole that equates the morality of the American and Baathist Iraqi systems of government. I also will never take seriously someone who acts like torture is something that we should never, under any circumstances engage in - and that this is a foregone conclusion. Those are exactly the type of out-of-touch idealists we DON'T need to have any more power. We should lock them in a room with the people who actually enjoy torture and let them eat each other so that the rest of us normal people can get some real work done.
The fact is that people in America are spoiled rotten. We all rant and rave about the gestapo in the patriot act becase we've never seen a real gestapo here in our lives. We live such incredibly sheltered and free existences that go crazy over the slightest infraction of our rights. I lived in Hungary for 2 year, I toured 60 andrassy ut (the house of terror) where the communist secret police were located up until the 1956 revolution, I talked to people who had lived through real oppression, and what we have in America is NOT the same. We don't have to secretly hide photographs of unarmed students being slaughtered in a public square. Rodeny King and OJ Simpson or that National Guard incident during Vietnam (when they fired on a hostile crowd and killed/wounded a few students) are engrained on our national conscience. These are bad things, but people please; get some perspective! It's not the Khmer Rouger here.
And believe it or not, over reacting will NOT prevent us from going there. You simply divide the public into two radical and utterly ineffective extremes. Those nut-cases who call Guantanamo a gulag and those who call it a vacation get away.
We need more people who can not be swayed by all this ridiculous rhetoric, who can maintain a sense of perspective. Those are the ones that can actually make a difference. The rest of you are just self-marginalizing, hysterical, and unhelpful.
I believe the GP was not addressing people like you. I'm sure you have come across people which falls under what the GP's ranted against, and I don't think there are just a few of those people hanging out there.
I appreciate the sentiment. And there definately are people that fit the profile of the rant. But I didn't feel that the GP was making that distinction. That's really all I was trying to do. I don't think all religions are great. I maen, that's just a retarded statement. Even the most cursorary look at history shows that's not true. But I just wanted to stand up for those religions, and those religious people, that don't fit the profile.
When you consider other religions, you dont just consider their best, you consider how they've been really doing, and also their potential to do bad.
This may be an academic distinction, but I think what you're describing is sociology, not theology. When you study a religion, you really should study it in terms of the religion, not the followers. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever look at what the followers are doing, but when you do that you're not studying the religion anymore, you're studying the followers.
I'm glad that you agree with one of my points, but I can't stand by and just watch as people continuoully attempt to equivicate America's War in Iraq and terrorism.
During WWII Germany had concentration camps, and America had internment cacmps for the Japanese. Would you have said that that made "us scum too"? That "we do the same things they do"?
It's like we have two sides here, those that are like "America is the best, ra ra! Kill the camel-jockies!" and the sid that says "America is the terrorist state!" Its hard to be the moderate in the room, but somebody's got to do it. Someone's got to be rational enough to point out the fine distinctions.
1. Terrorists believe killing innocent people is worth achieving political aims. In America when our fundamentalists do that (like when they bomb abortion clinics) we arrest them and send them to prison - even a large population of Americans share the belief that abortion is wrong. We don't kill people to stop it.
2. Americans believe in human rights for everyone. We're not perfect. We have abridged the rights of peoples in other countries, and we've abridged the rights of people in this country. But we've grown from slavery to jim crowe to affirmative action. Do you see the Taliban making similar strides in their treatment of women? We have tortured. I think this is similar to total war. If you had a child molester in custody who knew information tha would save somebody, and you only had a few hours to save them - how far would you go? Would you follow a rule that didn't allow you to yell? Lie? Threaten? Punch? Would be perfectly content to let some kid die because you didn't want to rough up a molester?
I don't think it's right to torture, but most of the people involved in the debate are just siezing the opportunity to grab the moral high ground for political gain.
3. The American military genuinely tries to avoid civilian casualties. When we do kill civilians it is by accident. That doesn't make it OK, but it also makes it morally different from killing people on purpose.
4. America believes in civil liberty. Osama's not so big on that.
Eh, whatever. Just had to be one person to stand up for America. I'm not proud of all the country has done, but I'm still proud for what it stands for.
-stormin
I'm so tired of people who can't deal with fine distinctions. People who want to ge on their hight horse
Dude, breathe. Seriously. You need to calm down if you don't want to be mistaken for a raving lunatic. I mean, are you actually responding to my post here?
so lets just nock it the fuck off. to say that these people are just inherently evil and jealous is stupid. im done talking about this. grow up guys.
Is that related to anything that I've written? Or anyone else in this thread?
we lied about the WMDs we lied about the terrorist connection
Who's we, dude?
You seem to have a serious hating-America thing. People like you always make me sad. You go from "Columbus cut off the hands of natives" to "we lied". Two problems here.
1. I'm not guilty for what Columbus did. I know that I live on land that, in general, was taken from Native Americans. I'm not really happy about that. But I didn't take it, and I'd like to think that I wouldn't take it now, and there really isn't a way for me to give it back. If you want to channnel guilt onto yourself for what people you're probably not even related to did hundreds of years ago, that's your issue, but I think you need to relax.
2. Your America-hating is not rational. Sure, America did horrible things. Guess what, the Native Americans were not a bunch of peace-loving, ultra-civilized pacifists. And Americans were not just a bunch of greedy, evil, murdering thieves. Some Native Americans were the greedy, evil, murdering thieves, and some Americans were peace loving and ultra civilized pacifists.
You seem to need to have a child-like black and white view of the world. But all you're doing is playing cowboys and Indians (albeit backwards) or cops and robbers with history.
The fact is that history is extremely complex. You can keep living in your own simplified world you take a few simplistic over generalizations about a culture (the concept of 0 was invented in the middle east - therefore all middle easterners are mathematicians and doctors, Columbs killed Native Americans, therefore all Americans are bloodthirsty murderers) but please keep your guilt-ridden anxiety attacks to yourself in the future while the rest of us try to deal with the real world.
So... my only other question is: do you think it's bad that America's arsenal is designed to kill people precisely and specifically while our troops are out of harm? I mean, is there a better way to design an arsenal, or you just opposed to arsenals on principle?
Not that I think arsenals are nice things to have, but it seems like having an arsenal is better than not having an arsenal. We called a lot of people in WWII. We killed a lot of civilians: German and Japanese especially. Sometimes I wonder why we don't talk about that more. We get all upset that we've killed thousands of Iraqi's unintentionally, while during WWII we flat-out bombed entire cities. We killed more people when we fire-bombed Dresden than Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. And we'd have to be in Iraq for another 100 years to kill that many.
My objective is not so much to convince you that you're wrong as to show you what you're not thinking about.
That's just condescending.
I really don't think that that's condescending (and it certainly wasn't written in that spirit). I don't expect everybody to think about religion all the time, but I've spent a lot of time doing it. I mean, I was a missionary for 2 years, I was a philosophy major for a while, and I enjoy arguing religion with my best friend (Muslim) and pretty much anyone else that I can (it's only fun when it's friendly, of course). So I'm not trying to imply that I know more than you do, just that I may have vantage points you don't. Don't take it any other way. If we were talking open source and that was a passion of yours than even though I know a little bit about it I would certainly expect you to be able to provide stuff that I hadn't thought about.
So if someone told you God had given him a personal tour of heaven and hell, what would your initial impression be? 1. Wow, if I doubt what he's saying, I'm flirting with the fundamental issues of ontology itself! All assertions are equally as likely! or 2. This person is probably either lying or suffering from psychosis
There's a big difference between a hypothetical "what if I got a tour of heaven - how would I know I wasn't tripping" and a hypothetical "what if some dude walked up to me on the street and said he'd had a trip to heaven and hell". Trivial examples are indispensible to any involved philosophical discussion, it's disingenuous to then act as though the trivial examples are something more.
That's because religion is just a superstitious wrapper for politics.
That's the kind of oversimplifcation that results in a loss of really important distinctions. Politics is concerned with issues like "how should we distribute wealth", "should we distribute wealth", "how should determine the rules we live by". Some of the concerns, like the last one especially, overlap with religion.
But religion also has somme of its own questions that don't really concern politics. Questions like "why are we here on earth", "is there a point to life", that kind of thing. A lot of overlap with philosophy, perhaps, but certainly not with politics.
Also, I don't think that religions are nearly as wanton and artificial in their rules as you seem to think. Most religions have deep and implicit convictions about our obligations to one another and to God that come out in their rules. As an example, the rules about animal sacrifice in the Old Testament foreshadowed the atonement of Christ and reflected priciples about man's relationship to God and worth to him.
Of course if you hop to the end (of the logic, not of the book) and read a bit about cutting an animal in half and walking down the middle it sounds crazy and random. But that's a result of you skipping the beginning, not a reflection of any inherent arbitrariness in the code.
That may be true for most western countries.. but even in the west (and particularly in the U.S.) it's a constant struggle to keep government and religion separate.
I don't even wanto open the whole seperation of church and state can of worms here, but you really can't compare a president who mentions God in his speeches, to, oh, I don't know the Holy Roman Empire. When the Pope (or the Mormon prophet) gets instated as commander in chief of the armed forces and the clergy takes over zoning laws and public utilities we're in the same ball park as religion's place in human life. Not saying we're in the perfect position now, but it's not even close to how things were historically.
Let me get this straight: an American fight pilot dropping a bomb is morally equivalent to a suicide bomber.
Is that really what you are saying?
Cause, stop me if I'm wrong here, if an suicide bomber had access to an F-16 I imagine he would do his best to kill as many people as possible, wherease the entire point of most of America's modern arsenal is to pinpoint the damage only where we want it to go. It doesn't turn dropping a 30,000 lb bomb into dropping a couple of lollipops, but it's not exactly the same as blowing yourself up at a wedding party on purpose either.
You conveniently ignored the main question of my post: Why is the literal reading of that phrase not proper, besides the reason that you don't agree with it?
Well, yes, I suppose I did. I will now address it directly.
1. I don't think the literal meaning is "not proper".
1a. I'm not sure that "give up your life" is literarily equivalent to die without exception. The only literal word for "die" is "die". I think ONE meaning of the phrase is that whoever gives up their life, in the sense of dying, for Christ will be saved.
1b. There are other, equally literal, understandings. What is a "life" if not what we do, think and say every day? If someone gives up their life, the things that they have done and said every day, in order to become a disciple of Christ this would be just as accurate a literal reading. I feel both meanings are intended.
2. In general, complex thoughts and arguments require either a lot of wordage, or very, very clever wordage. I feel that the New Testament especially takes the latter approach. The idea is that the teaching should be immediately obvious in a rough, primitive sense, but that the ideals behind the obvious meaning are more important. Take the 10 commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the lord in vain (give or take). Do you think that that statement is literally all the rule implies?
Of course not. The point is, among other things, to engender a sense of reverence and respect for the name of God, an thus for God himself.
The Bible tell the story of a fairly crude and primitive moral system, starting a binary decision: eat the fruit or don't (adam and eve). From there we move up to sacrifice (do it the right way, not the wrong way - Cain and Abel). Then comes the Law of Moses, an intricate system of washings, annointings, sacrifices, etc. that all point towards higher meaning. Then along comes Christ to literally enact what the law of moses had been teaching - atonement (at-one-ment) and coming to be with God.
So there's this giant context the Bible presents us with, and you need to read every verse within the greater context. Not because the BIble is a uniform text, but because chronolgically it outlines a progression from primite to complex.
That's another major reason why I feel it is a mistake to take one verse out of context, say what it literally means, and then be all belliegerant about "what, what more could it possibly mean?"
Take one of the most enigmatic and meaningful verses of the entire New Testament - and also the shortest in the Bible:
"Jesus wept".
God cried. End of literal meaning. At this point, judging by what you've siad so far, we could just move away. But the context is essential and even though I don't claim to know all the meaning behind it, I know there IS meaning behind it. Just as there is meaning waiting in almost everything we do or experience in life.
Do you feel that I've satisfactorily responded to your main question?
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The real key to this whole religion vs. science is that they are NOT disparate - they are competing for the overlapping space.
In the old days it was religion that gave people hope and acted as a barrier against the fear of the unknown, labelling and quantifying what common people could not, or would not do. That was it's societal function. This is coming from someone who's religious, but who sees that most religions have been abused in the past (and now).
Along comes science. You get cancer, you're possibly going to die. Who do you turn to? God? Or your doctor? BOTH. And both are institutions that want to survive and go on. The churchs want you to come to church, pay your money, and keep them rolling, but the scientists want you to support their funding too. Neither is necessarily nefarious, but both want the prestige and the glory and money that comes with it.
Similary what do we use to explain the inexplicable now? More often then not we approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism made all the more authentic by the science it seems to embody.
In general the two are seperate, but there are many areas of overlap and thus competition. That's the drama being played out between the fundamentalists and the scientists right now. Which will reign as king?
Personally I think that you should use neither religion or science, but I think perhaps they are BOTH the opiate of the masses. Go to Mass and absolve yourself of guilt before returning to your life of mediocrity or stand in line for 12 hours to pick up the new xbos 360 so that you can have one more way to distract yourself from the fact that you're not living up to any of your youthful dreams and ideals.
They both get abused for the same purpose. Are they really so different after all?
-stormin
Why do we need to come up with a reason to explain why corporations aren't funding any exhibit at all? Is it mysterious that corporations don't always give away their money?
-stormin
This is stereo typing of the very worst kind.
They're not against a very specific technique, but against the whole of science
Do you have any basis for this AT ALL? Do religious people refuse to fly planes? Watch TV? That would make televangelism rather difficult, now wouldn't it?
The fact of the matter is that they are opposed to what they see as an encroachment of science upon their turf - origins of life. And in all fairness this HAS been a religious issue until relatively recently (last couple of hundred years). From their perspective science has come over and tweaked their nose, and they're going to fight back. The notion that they are actively seeking out science to oppose is both contrary to verifiable fact (they use the web, TV, and every other popular invention of science just like everyone else) and utterly prejudicial.
I happen to think they're wrong for what they're doing but let's just stick to the facts and not engage in the kind of irrational behavior we expect from religious zealots.
You're becoming what you're fighting.
-stormin
Grandparent has a point. Unless you can point to numerous non-evolution-related exhibits having no trouble getting corporate funding then why should we assume that this particular exhibit is suffering from anything other than a general financial shortfall?
In fact, if they were really shrewd they might just be able to convince a couple of reporters that business were staying away BECAUSE they delt with religion.
Then there'd be a few articles about how the religious right (which for all we know doesn't even know this exhibit exists) are frightening corporations from giving money to the exhibit and suddenly the private donations are there for the exhibit to go on.
Slick move.
-stormin
You are correct about the most long-lived civilizations placing an emphasis on education.
I think it's worth pointing out that for much of human history those teaching and preserving literacy have been the religious.
-stormin
Those societies that have embraced education and science historically are those societies that survive
I don't think that's a very scientific position to take. What's the control for the study? I'm not trying to be flippant, but the fact is that "science" as we understand it has a very limited history - only a few hundred years. It's really rather meaningless to make statements like this.
I happen to be a very religious person, and I think I'm (almost) as disturbed as you are by this report. I personally am not quite sure that all of evolution makes sense to me, but I've never felt threatened by it in any way, and it strikes me as unnerving that we have so many religious zealots out there who think that creationism needs to be taught in our schoools. Don't forget - some religions are just as intolerant of each other as they are of science, and if certain hard-core Christian groups ever got in control of this country I'd be in just as much danger for being Mormon as you would be for being a bioscientist (even though as far as I'm concerned Mormons are Christians). Probably more so in fact - I don't remember the last time Americans killed and raped people for having PhDs but some of my own ancestors survived a massacre of Mormons (at Haun's Mill).
By the same token, as long as you are going to be a proponent of science you should do it scientifically. I'm not as disturbed this as I am by the religious nuts, but I am still somewhat disturbed that so few scientists seem to have a historic appreciation for the position of "science" in modern society, and are also unaware of meta-thought (like Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolution") that point out potential fallacies and shortcomings even in modern science. It's not as though "science" has never been harnessed for questionable practices (eg eugenics). You can't say "oh, but that's not real science" unless you allow people to point at the religious nuts and say "oh, but that's not real religion" as well.
So what I'm saying, is don't stoop to the level of the idealogues.
-stormin
You anlysis of my argument doesn't work.
if there was no co-defendant, noone would be culpable, and the whole execution would have been fair and square.
In fact if there's no co-defendant than the blame would rest squarely on the eye-witness who lied under oath. If there had also been no eye-witness there would have been no case, no guilty verdict, and no execution at all. So your analysis simply falls apart.
My argument is simple: there was no evidence that the Texas judicial system willfully killed an innocent person. Therefore they did not murder him.
The rest of the argument is simply that there were people who, through their willfull silence, DID kill (or allow to be killed) someone they knew was innocent. That is closer to murder than what the Texas judicial system did - even though it was the Texas judicial system that did the actual killing.
By extension this also means that there's really no case here against the death penalty, and there isn't even much of a case against the Texas judicial system. If two complete strangers are going to tell corroborating lies about a violent crime there just isn't much of a way for a judicial system to handle that without raising the bar to prove guilt so high that actual murders are found "not guilty" in droves. Perhaps the defense made serious errors in this case, but again that's simply not an indictment of the Texas judicial system unless you can prove that something about the system led to those errors and that the alternative would not have been worse.
So despite your allegations about my pet system I haven't said anything for or against the death penalty. I'm just pointing out that the article itself is hopelessly biased against it - and therefore exactly a masterpiece of journalistic integrity.
I'm not saying that everything is just fine, but I'm not going to engage in overly simplistic "the sky is falling" rhetoric either.
-stormin
I'm quite serious.
First of all, there are systematic mistakes, and then there are isolated mistakes. It's not even really coherent to hold a system responsible for isolated mistakes. For all we know the Texas judicial system works as well or better than the national average in correctly finding people guilty or innocent. But in this case there was an eyewitness who lied, and a co-defendent who waited until after the execution to speak up. This could happen in any criminal justice system in any state.
The article makes it seem as though there was a lot of doubt in the case, and certainly given the fact that the eyewitness recanted and the co-defendent came forward, in hindsight it looks as though the guilty verdict was wrong. But the article also starts with the premise that the kid had no criminal record, and then later on mentions that oh yeah, he did happen to shoot a cop in a bar fight but the charges were dropped. Just because you have no convictions does not mean you have no criminal record. That pretty much toasts the credibility of this whole article.
Finally, and most importantly, there's a huge distinction between killing and murdering. There's no doubt that Texas killed this kid. But murder? That implies not only unjustified but willfully unjustified killing. I did a quick google search:
First degree murder is a "deliberate and pre-meditated" unlawful killing
second degree murder is an unlawful killing done "deliberately" but "without pre-meditation."
Manslaughter is the negligent killing of another human being, without "pre-meditation," or expressed or implied "intent."
In order for it to be murder, you have to intentionally unlawfully kill someone. The Texas criminal justice system clearly thought that he was guilty, and therefore it CAN NOT be murder. If the criminal justice system was negligent then it was manslaughter - that's the worst you're gonna get.
It's radicals that really make progress impossible in so many different political arguments. If you're against the death penalty (personally, I'm undecided on it) then you're only going to hurt your own side by getting all hysterical and saying "Damn right Texas murdered him" when the evidence incontrovertibly demonstrates that they did not. You're kind of like PETA with their comparison of factory farming to the Holocaust. I'm morally opposed to factory farming, but utterly embarassed to find myself on the same side of any argument as that bunch of loony nut cases.
Do yourself a favor and no matter how passionately you feel about this issue, try to keep a level tone when you advocate your position. It may be less viscerally satisfying, but you may actually sway some open-minded people out there to your side.
-stormin
And if it's true, it's true. Doesn't matter who points it out, or what sympathy one may or may not have for them. Satan himself may point out that the sun is up, it doesn't mean it goes dark.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. All I'm saying is that if there's any moral culpability for the death of the kid, it's with the co-defendent who didn't speak up until after the execution. Whether or not Texas made any mistakes is arguable - and for all we know they thought they were executing a murderer. This kid who stayed silent knew an innocent man was being executed - that makes him the only potential murderer in the story.
"Part of me died when he died," Garza said in an interview with the Chronicle. "You've got a 17-year-old who went to his grave for something he did not do. Texas murdered an innocent person."
So the kid who refused to come forward until AFTER the execution says Texas murdered this kid?
I'm not a big pro-death penatly guy. On my list of conservative causes I care about it's, no wait, it's not on the list. Innocent people have been killed, I don't think that's a fair trade for killing any number of serial killers who'd already been caught. But still, this kind of soppy blame-the-state, all-individuals-are-victims reporting is just obnoxious.
-stormin
Write simple macros for Excel/Word/Access interopability?
There has been a lot of backlash from the Sony blunder, and I think the backlash will continue because there's a relatively low speed of propogation from the techies to the non-techies, but it's there. I tell people all the time about the Sony rootkit who have no idea what a rootkit is - let alone that Sony had put one out. Without fail they are interested in learning the basics of a rootkit (allows programs to hide on your computer by corrupting the OS) and without fail they are angered by what Sony did.
So now to have the RIAA come out and say "me too!". Nothing could be better. There's a lot of anger coming Sony's way, and I'm glad to have the RIAA volunteer for their fair share. First community-minded thing they've ever done.
-stormin
Yeah, the most recent Intel commercials are focussing on things other than speed. That's because it's finally become obvious that you can't just keep spinning the core faster. While the avg user may not undersand the importance of cache and other design features, they do understand "my laptop battery lasts 15 minutes and ignites my pants" as well as "wow - dual core sounds neat!".
Here's the story as I rememnber it, and I'm sure there are others with more inside information and better memories out there who can complete the story:
Intel equated processing power with core speed. This began a kind of arms race between AMD and Intel in clock speed - but the AMD message was diluted because they focussed on better chips, not just better scores. Several years ago, however, they decided to play at Intel's own game for a time and there was this huge rush to get to the 1 GHZ mark. It was in this frenzy of clock speed that Intel switched from the efficient and well-designed p3 (which they later returned to for their excellent Pentium M chip) to their wimpy but fast p4. They were able to push the p4 speeds higher than the p3 speeds and thus continue to win the "clock speed = power" battle with the public.
It was on the foundation of this general misconception that Intel's brand was built (of course the actual marketing - as in commercials on TV - had practically no technical content whatsoever, so I'm talking about marketting in terms of their development strategy to win over the computer users who were looking for some simple number they could relate to value).
Now, of course, with the rising supremacy of mobile computing (where the PM shines), the advent of 64-bit processors (AMD was the leader) and dual core processors (again, kudos to AMD) they have FINALLY instituted a marketting shift. This was apparent months ago when they unveiled their new road map and everything was about cycles/watt. They've got a new, slighty more complex and slightly better marketting gimmick - but it's the same old idea. The public doesn't want to read dozens of Anandtech articles detailing each new core for each new processor - they just want a guideline that makes sense. For a while it was clock speed, now it's clock speed per watt.
You have to give them credit for clever marketting. It was because of ploys like this that their brand name became the defacto standard in CPUs, but it doesn't alter the fact that it's just a marketing ploy and that Intel has used their ability to misrepresent their chips to the detriment of actual chip design. It it weren't for AMD - where would we be now?
Although in the final analysis - the real savior isn't AMD, it's competition.
-stormin
Ditto that.
If the lawsuit has managed to crack open Dell to using AMD processors because Intel has to mind its manners with a lawsuit on the horizon then even if the lawsuit doesn't procede it's done what it needed to do: level the playing field.
It's true that AMD marketting hasn't been the best, but it's also true that Intel marketting has convinced the majority of casual users that more GHZ = more performance always. And all questions of marketing aside, I think AMD has a real case.
-stormin
Well at this point, I guess we've got nothing left to disagree on. How often does that happen on Slashdot? An entire discussion runs its course - and there weren't even any direct Hitler references. I said all along I wasn't sure you were a cultural relativist, you just sounded like one, but clearly you're not so I'll stop trying to peg you as one.
I agree that we needed a better plan for post-war Iraq. And I've heard similar things - that the military leaders said this would be a cakewalk. I just have a hard time believing that people really just ignored military leaders of uniform opinion - why do that? Clark or what's his face, the general running for the democratic presidential nominaion - is at least one example of a high-ranking military leader who certainly thought that we would meet much tougher resistance.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that a minority opinion that there would be stiff resistance was considered a larger risk than the by-comparison tame prospect of museum looting. In hindsight a mistake, but an understandable one.
The decision to disband the Iraqi army seems stupid in hindsight, but on the other hand the reverse position also seems somewhat absurd. To leave the army - the tool and representation of Saddam's authoritarian power - almost entirely intact (just change the leadership): I'm sure that many American's fealt that this would send an entirely different message to the Iraqi's then what we wanted them to see. I mean, it's like "Hey, that army that occaisionally slaughtered you guys, gassed entire villages, and in general wreaked havoc when told to, turns out they weren't all bad. So don't mind us while we transition to a democracy protected by the same entity that protected the dictatorship".
Again - in hindsight the damage from unemploying so many young, healthy males outweighs the symbolic ramifications, but without the benefit of hindsight I can see a strong case being made for doing exactly what was done.
So I guess the only difference between us is that while you think that all these mistakes wer obvious mistakes, I think they were understandable. So even though I think they were mistakes just as much as you do, I just have as much angery and vitriol about it.
-stormin
First of all just because someone makes an accusation about cultural or racial bias doesn't mean they are doing nothing more than "playing the race card". Sometimes the card is called for. I continue to think that in your case it is called for. For example:
e gel/0,1518,363663,00.html
But you've got to be pragmatic Iraqis have lived under authoritarian rule for a very long time.
And what exactly would you call Imperial Japan before and during WWII? A commune? Anarchy? No, it was just as authortarian, if not as actively repressive, as Saddam's regime.
And calling you a cultural relativist right after calling you on racial/cultural bias is NOT irrational. My whole point is that "multiculturalism" is a misnomer - and that it is those who profess the loudest about respecting all traditions/races/nations equally that are frequently the worst hand-holders and coddlers. And that in the real world that constitutes damaging bias by creating and enabling dependencies.
I'm not trying to launch an attack and blame everything on the left. Africa, for example, is not where it is today because of the left. But I was attacking a specific leftist tendency to be hyper-idealistic and more concerned with things that SOUND good rather than actually good policies. The leftist attitude of "what about the children" is what leads to foreign aid and debt relief to Africa that hurts more than it helps.
See "For Gods Sake, Please Stop the Aid!" http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spi
But to be fair you're absolutely right that another major obstacle to African development are protectionist agricultural subsidies that Europe especially (and America too) refuse to give up. And that's arguably a nationalist (right-wing) policy, not a left-wing policy (althoguh subsidies in general tend to be leftist).
I agree that the US could have and should have done better planning for the invasion of Iraq, but the facts are simple: America genuinely believed Saddam did have and would use weapons of mass destruction. We were't planning to prevent museum looting within days of the start of hostilities, we were planning on being able to react to chemical and biologic weapons attacks on our troops. If we'd known that the entire Iraqi army would fall apart again, I think we would have done a better job. But Democrats especially believed that there'd be thousands of American casualties, that the streets would run with rivers of blood, etc, and now THEY are the ones saying "you should have known the whole place would cave-in faster than you could drive your tanks!".
We can't change the past. The best we can do is work for freedom from here on out. That means less prisoner-abuse scandals, but you've ignored all my points about torture being necessary or at least defensible in somem situations. We DON'T need MORE irrational hyper-idealism! We need fortitude to stay in Iraq, take the punches, and slog it out until the nation stands upright. We've done it before, and I think we can do it again.
-stormin
1. I think the NYT is reliably pretty far left-of center, and when they fall in line with DC it's either an exception to the rule, or because EVERYONE is. Leading up to the Iraq war no one, not even France, questioned the US intelligence. That's not falling into lock-step with the whitehouse - that was just the universal belief. I don't think even Ted Kennedy voted against the resolution to send troops in, but I doubt you'd call him a stooge of the white house.
2. I don't think Japan and Germany were "under control" immediately following the war. War's chaotic. So's the aftermath. There was looting, sporadic paramilitary resistance and so on. Sure, Iraq is worse after 2 years than either Germnany or Japan in terms of violence, but how much of that is due to foreign influence? A lot, I'd say.
3. Sure, totalitarianism is no fun, but at least there are a predictable set of (admittedly oppressive) rules you can follow to avoid death or torture.
This is a shocking statement coming from a progresive such as yourself. I may be assuming too much, but aren't you in the category of those who get extremely angry that Bush uses his fear-mongering to consolidate gov't control over public life ala the Patriot Act, etc.? And yet you apply a horrible double-standard to the Iraqi's. I think there's a bit of implicit cultural bias being exposed here.
In America it's worth the risk and danger to keep our freedoms. We oppose the Patriot Act because it's being used against criminals of the non-terrorist variety. So although it benefits in greater civil order, we oppose it in the name of liberty. So Americans can trade safety for liberty.
But the Iraqi's, as backwards, culturally undeveloped, and politically naive people, for them a patriarchal, domineering, totalitarian regime where you get tortured and rape for dissident but the power stays on and they leave you alone as long as you (and everyone from your family and village) refrain from protesting in the name of freedom or liberty, for them that's OK? That's a good trade of?
I'm not trying to force these concepts into your conclusions, I just don't understand what other basis you could have for treating Americans as mature and capable of trading security for freedom while claiming that the Iraqi's were better off in a totalitarian state because hey - they had running water and the lights were on. If you don't like my explanation (that you're unconsciously culturally or racially biased) then come up with a differnt one. I'm listening.
As far as the rest of it goes, I wasn't trying to imply that all the allegations are wrong. Just that it's foolish to believe people with nothing to lose by lying and every motivation to lie as the default position. In the American criminal justice system even convicted felons are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But you seem to be perfectly content to turn this tradition on its head entirely and write off as guilty men and women with no criminal background based on the words of those who may or may not be actively engaged in terrorism.
Does that seem right to you? I guess you are willing to sell off some of our precious American heritage after all.
Look, I'm not trying to say you are not patriotic, or that you're evil, or anything. You strike me as a reasonable, intelligent, and patriotic American. I have no desire to demonize you. I'm not tryign to be sensationalist.
But I do believe that you, and many of those who practice "cultural relativity", "multiculturalism" etc (whether in name or not) are guilty of a new kind of imperialism, a cultural imperialism (as opposed to political or economic) that endangers America and those we try to subsume in our cultural net. While professing to treat people everywhere as equals, it actually perpetuates a heinous double standard that has us ramming foreign aid down the throats of African nations to the destrucion of native economies, the engorgement of despotic wallets, and the enabling of national dependency. T
I guess if I thought that Iraq was worse off now then before the invasion, I would agree, but I don't. A couple of points:
1. Nazi Germnay and 1945 Japan were much worse off then either had been 6 years previous. Despite this fact, the ruin wrought upon both countries made possible the thriving democratic nations you see today. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get beter.
2. I don't believe that the US is treating the Iraqi's worse than Saddam did, or that conditions of life generally have detoriated as much as you believe.
2a. You give no indication of the improvements that have been made. Women are voting and on the path to full and equal rights (although I realize that Saddam was never a sectarian leader to begin with). Schools are being built. The Kurds no longer live solely under the safety of American air-power.
2b. I know several soldiers that have served in Iraq including one who was an interrogation specialist. After his tour of duty he went back as a civilian contractor. Now he trains interoggators for the Army. Of course he wouldn't talk about top-secret stuff, but he has always been extremely open about the kinds of interrogation he did - and it never involved torture of any kind. All of the vets that I've talked to say that we have an extremely pessimistic view of Iraq, and that in most of the country life is better than it ever was with Saddam.
I admit I haven't read your articles yet. I will read them today. But even before I read them I have a final point. Terrorists are being taught now that if they are captured by the U.S. they should do whatever they can to claim that they are being tortured. The pictures from Abu G. show that some torture is undeniably going on. In addition there have been deaths in custody. These instances are doubly unfortunate because on top of being wrong and evil they make it easier for fake stories of brutatlity (like the Koran down the toilet) to be spread by terrorists.
Are you willing to believe every report of torture the media can dig up? If I was a terrorist in prison, or even just had a grudge against being in there, I'd be happy to have a friend rough me a up a bit, than grab an American journalist and regal him or her with tales of sodomy, torture, and watching my cell-mate be torn to shreds by vicious man-eating jail-dogs. See my point? It's in the best interests of the terrorists to spread as many rumors as possible about torture - they're all highly motivated to claim it - are you going to believe all the claims just because they end up in the NYT or Rolling Stone?
-stormin
Again I must protest, and again the same refrain: "fine distcintions".
When we start systematicly torturing, raping and executing THEN you can reasonably say we began "treating prisoners exactly the way he treated them".
Sporadic episodes of "soft" torture (face it, no one's getting hung from the wall by metal hooks through there gonads or something) are not the same.
I'm not saying its OK. I'm not saying as long as we're not as bad as Saddam we're angels. But I am saying that you do your own nation and national heritagae a great disservice by contributing to the systematic hyperbole that equates the morality of the American and Baathist Iraqi systems of government. I also will never take seriously someone who acts like torture is something that we should never, under any circumstances engage in - and that this is a foregone conclusion. Those are exactly the type of out-of-touch idealists we DON'T need to have any more power. We should lock them in a room with the people who actually enjoy torture and let them eat each other so that the rest of us normal people can get some real work done.
The fact is that people in America are spoiled rotten. We all rant and rave about the gestapo in the patriot act becase we've never seen a real gestapo here in our lives. We live such incredibly sheltered and free existences that go crazy over the slightest infraction of our rights. I lived in Hungary for 2 year, I toured 60 andrassy ut (the house of terror) where the communist secret police were located up until the 1956 revolution, I talked to people who had lived through real oppression, and what we have in America is NOT the same. We don't have to secretly hide photographs of unarmed students being slaughtered in a public square. Rodeny King and OJ Simpson or that National Guard incident during Vietnam (when they fired on a hostile crowd and killed/wounded a few students) are engrained on our national conscience. These are bad things, but people please; get some perspective! It's not the Khmer Rouger here.
And believe it or not, over reacting will NOT prevent us from going there. You simply divide the public into two radical and utterly ineffective extremes. Those nut-cases who call Guantanamo a gulag and those who call it a vacation get away.
We need more people who can not be swayed by all this ridiculous rhetoric, who can maintain a sense of perspective. Those are the ones that can actually make a difference. The rest of you are just self-marginalizing, hysterical, and unhelpful.
-stormin
Hmm... this?
Hahahaha, nice one.
I believe the GP was not addressing people like you. I'm sure you have come across people which falls under what the GP's ranted against, and I don't think there are just a few of those people hanging out there.
I appreciate the sentiment. And there definately are people that fit the profile of the rant. But I didn't feel that the GP was making that distinction. That's really all I was trying to do. I don't think all religions are great. I maen, that's just a retarded statement. Even the most cursorary look at history shows that's not true. But I just wanted to stand up for those religions, and those religious people, that don't fit the profile.
When you consider other religions, you dont just consider their best, you consider how they've been really doing, and also their potential to do bad.
This may be an academic distinction, but I think what you're describing is sociology, not theology. When you study a religion, you really should study it in terms of the religion, not the followers. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever look at what the followers are doing, but when you do that you're not studying the religion anymore, you're studying the followers.
Heh - maybe that's just nitpicking.
-stormin
I'm glad that you agree with one of my points, but I can't stand by and just watch as people continuoully attempt to equivicate America's War in Iraq and terrorism.
During WWII Germany had concentration camps, and America had internment cacmps for the Japanese. Would you have said that that made "us scum too"? That "we do the same things they do"?
It's like we have two sides here, those that are like "America is the best, ra ra! Kill the camel-jockies!" and the sid that says "America is the terrorist state!" Its hard to be the moderate in the room, but somebody's got to do it. Someone's got to be rational enough to point out the fine distinctions.
1. Terrorists believe killing innocent people is worth achieving political aims. In America when our fundamentalists do that (like when they bomb abortion clinics) we arrest them and send them to prison - even a large population of Americans share the belief that abortion is wrong. We don't kill people to stop it.
2. Americans believe in human rights for everyone. We're not perfect. We have abridged the rights of peoples in other countries, and we've abridged the rights of people in this country. But we've grown from slavery to jim crowe to affirmative action. Do you see the Taliban making similar strides in their treatment of women? We have tortured. I think this is similar to total war. If you had a child molester in custody who knew information tha would save somebody, and you only had a few hours to save them - how far would you go? Would you follow a rule that didn't allow you to yell? Lie? Threaten? Punch? Would be perfectly content to let some kid die because you didn't want to rough up a molester?
I don't think it's right to torture, but most of the people involved in the debate are just siezing the opportunity to grab the moral high ground for political gain.
3. The American military genuinely tries to avoid civilian casualties. When we do kill civilians it is by accident. That doesn't make it OK, but it also makes it morally different from killing people on purpose.
4. America believes in civil liberty. Osama's not so big on that.
Eh, whatever. Just had to be one person to stand up for America. I'm not proud of all the country has done, but I'm still proud for what it stands for.
-stormin
I'm so tired of people who can't deal with fine distinctions. People who want to ge on their hight horse
Dude, breathe. Seriously. You need to calm down if you don't want to be mistaken for a raving lunatic. I mean, are you actually responding to my post here?
so lets just nock it the fuck off. to say that these people are just inherently evil and jealous is stupid. im done talking about this. grow up guys.
Is that related to anything that I've written? Or anyone else in this thread?
we lied about the WMDs we lied about the terrorist connection
Who's we, dude?
You seem to have a serious hating-America thing. People like you always make me sad. You go from "Columbus cut off the hands of natives" to "we lied". Two problems here.
1. I'm not guilty for what Columbus did. I know that I live on land that, in general, was taken from Native Americans. I'm not really happy about that. But I didn't take it, and I'd like to think that I wouldn't take it now, and there really isn't a way for me to give it back. If you want to channnel guilt onto yourself for what people you're probably not even related to did hundreds of years ago, that's your issue, but I think you need to relax.
2. Your America-hating is not rational. Sure, America did horrible things. Guess what, the Native Americans were not a bunch of peace-loving, ultra-civilized pacifists. And Americans were not just a bunch of greedy, evil, murdering thieves. Some Native Americans were the greedy, evil, murdering thieves, and some Americans were peace loving and ultra civilized pacifists.
You seem to need to have a child-like black and white view of the world. But all you're doing is playing cowboys and Indians (albeit backwards) or cops and robbers with history.
The fact is that history is extremely complex. You can keep living in your own simplified world you take a few simplistic over generalizations about a culture (the concept of 0 was invented in the middle east - therefore all middle easterners are mathematicians and doctors, Columbs killed Native Americans, therefore all Americans are bloodthirsty murderers) but please keep your guilt-ridden anxiety attacks to yourself in the future while the rest of us try to deal with the real world.
-stormin
Alright, I guess we agree...
So... my only other question is: do you think it's bad that America's arsenal is designed to kill people precisely and specifically while our troops are out of harm? I mean, is there a better way to design an arsenal, or you just opposed to arsenals on principle?
Not that I think arsenals are nice things to have, but it seems like having an arsenal is better than not having an arsenal. We called a lot of people in WWII. We killed a lot of civilians: German and Japanese especially. Sometimes I wonder why we don't talk about that more. We get all upset that we've killed thousands of Iraqi's unintentionally, while during WWII we flat-out bombed entire cities. We killed more people when we fire-bombed Dresden than Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. And we'd have to be in Iraq for another 100 years to kill that many.
So yeah - arsenal good or bad?
-stormin
My objective is not so much to convince you that you're wrong as to show you what you're not thinking about.
That's just condescending.
I really don't think that that's condescending (and it certainly wasn't written in that spirit). I don't expect everybody to think about religion all the time, but I've spent a lot of time doing it. I mean, I was a missionary for 2 years, I was a philosophy major for a while, and I enjoy arguing religion with my best friend (Muslim) and pretty much anyone else that I can (it's only fun when it's friendly, of course). So I'm not trying to imply that I know more than you do, just that I may have vantage points you don't. Don't take it any other way. If we were talking open source and that was a passion of yours than even though I know a little bit about it I would certainly expect you to be able to provide stuff that I hadn't thought about.
So if someone told you God had given him a personal tour of heaven and hell, what would your initial impression be? 1. Wow, if I doubt what he's saying, I'm flirting with the fundamental issues of ontology itself! All assertions are equally as likely! or 2. This person is probably either lying or suffering from psychosis
There's a big difference between a hypothetical "what if I got a tour of heaven - how would I know I wasn't tripping" and a hypothetical "what if some dude walked up to me on the street and said he'd had a trip to heaven and hell". Trivial examples are indispensible to any involved philosophical discussion, it's disingenuous to then act as though the trivial examples are something more.
That's because religion is just a superstitious wrapper for politics.
That's the kind of oversimplifcation that results in a loss of really important distinctions. Politics is concerned with issues like "how should we distribute wealth", "should we distribute wealth", "how should determine the rules we live by". Some of the concerns, like the last one especially, overlap with religion.
But religion also has somme of its own questions that don't really concern politics. Questions like "why are we here on earth", "is there a point to life", that kind of thing. A lot of overlap with philosophy, perhaps, but certainly not with politics.
Also, I don't think that religions are nearly as wanton and artificial in their rules as you seem to think. Most religions have deep and implicit convictions about our obligations to one another and to God that come out in their rules. As an example, the rules about animal sacrifice in the Old Testament foreshadowed the atonement of Christ and reflected priciples about man's relationship to God and worth to him.
Of course if you hop to the end (of the logic, not of the book) and read a bit about cutting an animal in half and walking down the middle it sounds crazy and random. But that's a result of you skipping the beginning, not a reflection of any inherent arbitrariness in the code.
That may be true for most western countries.. but even in the west (and particularly in the U.S.) it's a constant struggle to keep government and religion separate.
I don't even wanto open the whole seperation of church and state can of worms here, but you really can't compare a president who mentions God in his speeches, to, oh, I don't know the Holy Roman Empire. When the Pope (or the Mormon prophet) gets instated as commander in chief of the armed forces and the clergy takes over zoning laws and public utilities we're in the same ball park as religion's place in human life. Not saying we're in the perfect position now, but it's not even close to how things were historically.
-stormin
Let me get this straight: an American fight pilot dropping a bomb is morally equivalent to a suicide bomber.
Is that really what you are saying?
Cause, stop me if I'm wrong here, if an suicide bomber had access to an F-16 I imagine he would do his best to kill as many people as possible, wherease the entire point of most of America's modern arsenal is to pinpoint the damage only where we want it to go. It doesn't turn dropping a 30,000 lb bomb into dropping a couple of lollipops, but it's not exactly the same as blowing yourself up at a wedding party on purpose either.
-stormin
You conveniently ignored the main question of my post: Why is the literal reading of that phrase not proper, besides the reason that you don't agree with it?
Well, yes, I suppose I did. I will now address it directly.
1. I don't think the literal meaning is "not proper".
1a. I'm not sure that "give up your life" is literarily equivalent to die without exception. The only literal word for "die" is "die". I think ONE meaning of the phrase is that whoever gives up their life, in the sense of dying, for Christ will be saved.
1b. There are other, equally literal, understandings. What is a "life" if not what we do, think and say every day? If someone gives up their life, the things that they have done and said every day, in order to become a disciple of Christ this would be just as accurate a literal reading. I feel both meanings are intended.
2. In general, complex thoughts and arguments require either a lot of wordage, or very, very clever wordage. I feel that the New Testament especially takes the latter approach. The idea is that the teaching should be immediately obvious in a rough, primitive sense, but that the ideals behind the obvious meaning are more important. Take the 10 commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the lord in vain (give or take). Do you think that that statement is literally all the rule implies?
Of course not. The point is, among other things, to engender a sense of reverence and respect for the name of God, an thus for God himself.
The Bible tell the story of a fairly crude and primitive moral system, starting a binary decision: eat the fruit or don't (adam and eve). From there we move up to sacrifice (do it the right way, not the wrong way - Cain and Abel). Then comes the Law of Moses, an intricate system of washings, annointings, sacrifices, etc. that all point towards higher meaning. Then along comes Christ to literally enact what the law of moses had been teaching - atonement (at-one-ment) and coming to be with God.
So there's this giant context the Bible presents us with, and you need to read every verse within the greater context. Not because the BIble is a uniform text, but because chronolgically it outlines a progression from primite to complex.
That's another major reason why I feel it is a mistake to take one verse out of context, say what it literally means, and then be all belliegerant about "what, what more could it possibly mean?"
Take one of the most enigmatic and meaningful verses of the entire New Testament - and also the shortest in the Bible:
"Jesus wept".
God cried. End of literal meaning. At this point, judging by what you've siad so far, we could just move away. But the context is essential and even though I don't claim to know all the meaning behind it, I know there IS meaning behind it. Just as there is meaning waiting in almost everything we do or experience in life.
Do you feel that I've satisfactorily responded to your main question?
-stormin