"The gov't could easily have shut down the production of "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers."
Erm, no. Despite the desires of the administration, there are enough people in federal law enforcement with an appreciation for the Constitution to prevent that. The inevitable leak of something of this nature would have made it impossible. The results would certainly qualify as civil disobedience at that point.
"And any scientific body has a more immediate 'stake' in procuring tenure, keeping their research funding, and maintaining things 'the way they are.'"
Indeed, which is why the big money in climate research comes from producing studies purporting to show a lack of causal connection between hydrocarbon consumption and global warming at the behest of oil firm lobbyists and PR firms. This gets harder as time goes by, of course, because the evidence supports a causal connection. Evidence, I notice, which you have made no effort to address, instead launching an ad hominem attack against your perceptions of academia. Climate research is not what produces the screeds you stereotype, but shoddy science journalism that ignorant peple generally confuse with scientific practice.
"It's like the only people who stuck around and remained on campus were the people who actually believed the bullshit on the leaflets passed around on the mall. Everybody else moved on in life."
By "moved on in life," you appear to mean "adopted a strident tone of anti-intellectualism and applied it to science they couldn't be arsed to actually study, conflicting as it did with their personal convictions." If this is the case, I must sadly agree.
"Err.. don't you think these mysterious, nefarious, greedy 'commercial interests' have some stake in protecting the planet? ie. If the planet is engulfed in flames, or C02, or giant termites from space, how are these nasty businesses going to make money?"
Valid question, but inapplicable to actual corporate practice. Any corporation's board has a more immediate "stake" in maximizing share value, assuming they want to keep their six or seven figure salaries. They do, unsurprisingly, and so whatever interest a corporation might have in the consequences of human-induced global climate change is dwarfed by the profit motive. Simple microeconomics.
"WTF is up with "rebuilding iraq"? Why do we want to rebuild it for? We should just smash it up real good and then leave so that the arabs know not to fuck with us."
Donald Rumsfeld? Posting on/.? Who can say now that the Bush administration doesn't try to be open and forthcoming with the American people?
"On some level, if an elected official pursues a course of action that inflames his constituency to a sufficient degree, he will lose power, and possibly his chance of being re-elected."
Whereupon he is replaced by another elected official who, judging from historic experience, will continue the system whereby tax dollars are treated conceptually as though they were corporate revenue rather than collective resources. And, even if we threw all of the bums out of office in the next elections, the system is unlikely to change without a populace who doesn't reflexively view the government as "them" instead of "us."
Any suggestions on how we get there? I'm not being sarcastic, it's something my thoughts often turn towards.
What about Texas, in the area south of San Antonio? It's mostly water to the east (except for Florida, of course) and you can get closer to the equator. The area has problems with tornadoes, but unless I'm mistaken, that can be mitigated by building a reinforced structure along the lines of the current structures in Florida. (We certainly get tornadoes here as well.)
...why, exactly, our country's spaceport is still located in a state known for nothing so much as lightning and storms? I'm silly enough to live in Florida right now too, but I'd be moving even sooner if I had a multimillion dollar vehicle parked in my garage. Everything seems to point to Florida's climate worsening throughout the foreseeable future.
Ha, I'm just kidding. Congress would love to see NASA inoperable so they can go back to spending money on bridges to nowhere (Thanks, Ted Stevens!)
"Why should any part of my brain deal with abstract objects unless they actually exist?"
(I'm assuming here that the poster would personally agree with the stronger statement: 'My brain deals with abstract objects because they actually exist.')
That's begging the question here in the same manner as Plantinga's ontological argument. (The question is, "Does my brain deal with 'abstract objects,' or is this just metaphor for a process that reacts to similarities in experience?")
Not to mention the false dichotomies this implies: "Either my brain does not deal with abstract objects, or they exist" and "Either my brain deals with abstract objects, or they do not exist." There is no logical implication of the truth of either side of the proposition on the basis of the other side; we are not necessitated to accept either.
Of course, one can believe that the brain manipulates abstract objects or that abstract objects have some transcendant form of existence. That's different, however, from asserting the logical necessity of their existence, which is a bit presumptuous with regards to the cause/effect relationship of language and reality.
One needn't posit unnecessary entities, however. And it's great that these scientists are learning more about process that can be shown repeatedly to have a direct causal effect on cognition.
"I welcome all the responses telling me that I'm an idiot or whatever, that's fine. "
How about whining and mildly racist narcissist? "Idiot" would seem inappropriate in light of your obvious cleverness. Portraying your superficial and contemptuous attitude towards learning as some form of superior intelligence is no mean feat, and you might succeed if that attitude wasn't so recognizably common.
An educator's job is to engage their students in the topic they teach, and while they won't always succeed, they never will if not given the opportunity. If a student can't be arsed to make it to class, then why should the teacher pass them? There's no way of knowing how well they understand the material through testing unless the subject is extremely technical in nature. Learning how to read a textbook right before an exam and learning where to find information doesn't mean you deserve to pass most courses. If you show up consistently and are attentive, but the teacher fails to interest you in the subject, then perhaps it is the fault of the teacher (and not the "girl two rows away.") On the other hand, if you can't make an attempt to take anything more from a class than a "rubber stamp" and view attendance as a chore, perhaps the fault is yours.
A non-disclosure agreement has to be signed by the person bound to keep quiet. He couldn't be pressured into signing an NDA if the initial claim was valid - no matter how good and numerous Apple's lawyers might be, he would simply need to reproduce his initial results to escape a finding of liability. For that matter, he'd have the grounds for a massive countersuit brought by lawyers willing to work on contingency - who wouldn't love to get a piece of Apple for a First Amendment violation?
Of course, if his results were invalid, then why would Apple feel compelled to pressure him into signing anything? They might get an injunction filed against him for libel (as opposed to an NDA, which is entirely different in application), but that would be a matter of public record, and nobody would be paying attention to this schmuck and his "cone of silence" if a court had determined that he was a libeller.
The classic defense of the madman or the liar: "What I say is true, but terrible, unspeakable things would happen were I to prove my assertion. You'll just have to take my inability to prove my assertion as evidence of its validity."
"Is there a study out there that proves animal suffering isn't worth worrying about?"
No, and I wouldn't suggest that humans can ethically disregard animal suffering. The issue at hand in the original post is whether that suffering can justify violence towards a human.
Those who believe that animals suffer to the same degree as humans (who, in addition to pain, have a capacity for horror dependent on conscious situational awareness) are making an empirical assertion. Now, in humans, we easily accept that loss or damage to the brain can remove the capacity for self-awareness. Yet looking at animals and conjecturing about their conscious states in human terms (I love a line from elsewhere in the post, "what does the rabbit think while the scientist...") is such common behavior that people rarely question it, despite the fact that in doing so, they are asserting capacities in the animal that cannot be demonstrated to arise from the brain of the animal. Severe damage to the sophisticated frontal cortexes brings the cessation of awareness; the absence of such even DNA encoding for such structures indicates the same in both theory and experiment. This isn't the isolated matter of "a study." It's the lesson of over a century of study into the workings of the brain. Denying it is on no different scientific footing than denying the common ancestry of humans and apes.
The assertion that pain experienced by animals places a duty upon humans to avoid inflicting that pain is philosophically defensible, although rarely are the defenders consistent enough to avoid the infliction of pain on any life-form that can experience it, preferring to focus on the cute and furry animals. And the assertion that animals have human feeling is understandable; much of the enjoyment of a companion animal derives from our ability to represent the animal's comfort and affection towards us as components of a loving relationship in human terms. The error comes in representing our own behaviors and feelings toward an animal as certainty concerning its inner states in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary.
When that mistaken certainty is wheeled out as justification for violence towards a human, the behavior is sociopathic. Animal rights extremists are a leftist variant on the fringes of right-wing Fetus People. Both assert an unknowable (epistemologically) and unlikely (empirically) quality of a particular life form, and then use that assertion to justify violence against humans. Fortunately, as I stated in my earlier post, the majority of such extremists are extreme in text and speech only. And indeed, the majority of those who are concerned with animal suffering are also concerned with human suffering, and understand the stupidity and immorality of violence for the sake of ceasing violence.
It amazes me that such ideas receive the degree of respect they do from an otherwise generally well-educated section of the population.
A term already exists to describe someone able to project their own mental states onto a kitten and call it "empathy," at least to a degree where they could countenance violence against another sentient being in an imagined defense of unrelated kittens. Such a person would be rightly described as sociopathic. Of course, they might claim that the consciousness of an animal grants it a right to the same moral status we typically ascribe to humans (unless we happen to be "animal rights extremists.")
Thinking that an animal's consciousness has the sentient capacity to suffer from death to a degree even approaching that of a human's does not reflect higher ideals, greater awareness, or anything other than a plain ignorance of how the structure of the brain relates to consciousness. A person who makes such claims is on no less unscientific footing than a creationist. Granted, considering the state of the Anglo-American education systems, it is unsurprising that basic scientific truths are not widely known. Still, I would hope that a person would take time to become educated as to the basis of their ideas before engaging in something so frighteningly, permanently stupid as murder.
Of course, a sociopath wouldn't. And in these sorts of cases, they obviously aren't. No wonder the Brits send them packing for long stretches. With all their talk of higher ideals, mentally, the only difference between such a murderer and your garden-variety thrill-killer is the object of narcissistic fixation: an animal in the former, sensual and emotional pleasure in the latter. There are far too many people behind bars in the United States, but with the prognosis for sociopathy generally grim, these are the individuals from whose predations a system of justice is designed to protect society.
Realistically, most of the people one might encounter mouthing animal rights polemic would never murder another person. They thrill vicariously in the stories, and passionately defend violent criminals, but luckily for the rest of us they are harmless and misdirected chasers of moral superiority. Their lack of a disposition to murder doesn't exactly redeem their moral idiocy, but at least it protects others from the tragic ends of sick reasoning.
"You must be on the low end of the democrat spectrum. Let me guess, you dropped out of high school?"
This is funny, since your incomprehension illustrates my point. My point is that Coulter's hyperbole is the most aggressive promoter of a culture where political discussion becomes a contest in outrageousness and misdirection rather than a discussion of facts. It panders to the same grunting instinct that causes a garden-variety moron to spout factual inaccuracies such as "democrat" and "high-school dropout" and refer to a dictionary entry (defining an undisputed issue) as though it were an actual answer.
"Really? Name some stuff. She's more consistant than most conservative politicians. "
Really? Let's compare Coulter's 'Christianity fuels everything I write' (June 2006) with the statements below. Has she really never called for anything more radical and violent than racial profiling? Oh wait...
'I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.' (21 Dec 2005)
'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.' (Predictably enough, 12 Sep 2001)
'Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.' (15 Feb 2006)
Unless your definition of "Christian" has no relation to the teachings of Christ, Javalord, you're just another droning conservative apologist too lazy to even read about the things you defend.
The concept of a "U.S. Military Firewall" is not particularly intimidating. When I was stationed in the Gulf with the Air Force, the Communications squadron was using the same garbage as my 55-year-old mother - McAfee products, and not always with up-to-date patches. A friend in that unit informed me that such was common practice throughout the military in unsecured environments (such as a MWR tent with Internet access.)
Hell, even the censoring of certain websites (rotten.com, ebaumsworld.com, and theonion.com are the only ones I can recall, but it's been a few years) was easy to circumvent for anyone clever enough to uncheck the "Proxy Server" setting in IE. I wonder if anyone ever bothered fixing that?
Given the temperament of the bored kids I remember staffing the Air Force's server rooms, I'd imagine they're probably enabling this kind of activity. Can't say I blame them. I wish we had WoW instead of a copy of Tekken 3.
Oh dear...did you get conned into shelling out cash for an app that scans your Mac for Windows viruses? If not then I'm curious about what, exactly, your antivirus software claims to be doing.
Depends on the law of the community in question. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the legal rights of Stephen Hawking's motorized wheelchair insofar as roads are concerned. Not an issue, of course, as bicycles have a legal right to use the road.
Until the fantasy of extensive and useful designated lanes becomes a reality, it's just silly to rail against the cyclists who often have no choice but to use the roads which, as I've said, they're already paying for.
The only reason that a car is less dangerous and disruptive is because of the widespread inconsideration of motorists. This is one of the few cases where blaming the victims is a widely accepted philosophy, probably because almost everyone in the U.S. drives a car. Nobody likes to accept responsibility, even for such simple things as paying attention to cycists.
Then again, philosophical consistency doesn't seem to be widespread among drivers in general. Take this statement:
"I value the of other people's right to have a smooth commute."
Obviously not. For many folks, a bike ride is their commute. I'm sure you understand this, but apparently haven't internalized it, judging by your earlier assumption that the cyclist to whom you responded was cycling for pleasure. Communities that have continuous bike lanes and/or suitably wide sidewalks leading to every possible commuter destination are certainly rare, and possibly non-existant. That means that, for most bike commuters, at least a portion of their commute will involve use of a road. Shouldn't that portion be a smooth commute, without inattentive drivers who don't understand the road use rights of cyclists causing problems?
You asked earlier if a poster had the money to buy a 1000 dollar car. Perhaps the poster doesn't; this is not an uncommon situation for hourly workers in my country when you factor in costs of gas, insurance, taxes, and maintenance. Or perhaps they do, but would then have to spend a large portion of their minimal resources on unpleasant transportation, which is generally the nature of a thousand-dollar car. I've owned a few. Not everyone accepts the paradigm of "drive the car you can barely afford to a job you hate so you can pay for the car" as a viable lifestyle.
Last year I spent just shy of 2500 dollars on insurance, maintenance, and fuel for my car. Insurance is expensive here if you're an under-thirty male driver; at least my car was already paid off. While I was making payments, that figure was more like 5600 dollars. That is a sizable portion of my after-tax income. After realizing what a sucker that made me, I went shopping. Now I own a $300 bicycle, I do my own maintenance, my physical condition is much better than it was this time last year, and I have more money to spend on wonderful new experiences like health care and fresh food. A brief period of unemployment was considerably less spooky without an insurance or fuel bill. My attitude and energy have improved as a result of eliminating stressful Florida commutes.
Now, I suppose I could give all of that up so that a pack of oblivious motorists can "enjoy" their commute.
Naaah...I have a better idea. I think I'll just keep using these roads, funded as they are by my taxes, and if some folks find it too difficult to drive and pay attention to other commuters simultaneously, then I'll suggest that they shouldn't be driving.
Slashdot Mirror
"The gov't could easily have shut down the production of "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers."
Erm, no. Despite the desires of the administration, there are enough people in federal law enforcement with an appreciation for the Constitution to prevent that. The inevitable leak of something of this nature would have made it impossible. The results would certainly qualify as civil disobedience at that point.
"And any scientific body has a more immediate 'stake' in procuring tenure, keeping their research funding, and maintaining things 'the way they are.'"
Indeed, which is why the big money in climate research comes from producing studies purporting to show a lack of causal connection between hydrocarbon consumption and global warming at the behest of oil firm lobbyists and PR firms. This gets harder as time goes by, of course, because the evidence supports a causal connection. Evidence, I notice, which you have made no effort to address, instead launching an ad hominem attack against your perceptions of academia. Climate research is not what produces the screeds you stereotype, but shoddy science journalism that ignorant peple generally confuse with scientific practice.
"It's like the only people who stuck around and remained on campus were the people who actually believed the bullshit on the leaflets passed around on the mall. Everybody else moved on in life."
By "moved on in life," you appear to mean "adopted a strident tone of anti-intellectualism and applied it to science they couldn't be arsed to actually study, conflicting as it did with their personal convictions." If this is the case, I must sadly agree.
"Err.. don't you think these mysterious, nefarious, greedy 'commercial interests' have some stake in protecting the planet? ie. If the planet is engulfed in flames, or C02, or giant termites from space, how are these nasty businesses going to make money?"
Valid question, but inapplicable to actual corporate practice. Any corporation's board has a more immediate "stake" in maximizing share value, assuming they want to keep their six or seven figure salaries. They do, unsurprisingly, and so whatever interest a corporation might have in the consequences of human-induced global climate change is dwarfed by the profit motive. Simple microeconomics.
...this comes across as "News for Investors" more than "News for Nerds." Get back to me when the guy can demonstrate a prototype rather than a spiel.
"WTF is up with "rebuilding iraq"? Why do we want to rebuild it for? We should just smash it up real good and then leave so that the arabs know not to fuck with us."
/.? Who can say now that the Bush administration doesn't try to be open and forthcoming with the American people?
/snark
Donald Rumsfeld? Posting on
"On some level, if an elected official pursues a course of action that inflames his constituency to a sufficient degree, he will lose power, and possibly his chance of being re-elected."
Whereupon he is replaced by another elected official who, judging from historic experience, will continue the system whereby tax dollars are treated conceptually as though they were corporate revenue rather than collective resources. And, even if we threw all of the bums out of office in the next elections, the system is unlikely to change without a populace who doesn't reflexively view the government as "them" instead of "us."
Any suggestions on how we get there? I'm not being sarcastic, it's something my thoughts often turn towards.
What about Texas, in the area south of San Antonio? It's mostly water to the east (except for Florida, of course) and you can get closer to the equator. The area has problems with tornadoes, but unless I'm mistaken, that can be mitigated by building a reinforced structure along the lines of the current structures in Florida. (We certainly get tornadoes here as well.)
...why, exactly, our country's spaceport is still located in a state known for nothing so much as lightning and storms? I'm silly enough to live in Florida right now too, but I'd be moving even sooner if I had a multimillion dollar vehicle parked in my garage. Everything seems to point to Florida's climate worsening throughout the foreseeable future.
Ha, I'm just kidding. Congress would love to see NASA inoperable so they can go back to spending money on bridges to nowhere (Thanks, Ted Stevens!)
"Why should any part of my brain deal with abstract objects unless they actually exist?"
u ments/
(I'm assuming here that the poster would personally agree with the stronger statement: 'My brain deals with abstract objects because they actually exist.')
That's begging the question here in the same manner as Plantinga's ontological argument. (The question is, "Does my brain deal with 'abstract objects,' or is this just metaphor for a process that reacts to similarities in experience?")
Not to mention the false dichotomies this implies: "Either my brain does not deal with abstract objects, or they exist" and "Either my brain deals with abstract objects, or they do not exist." There is no logical implication of the truth of either side of the proposition on the basis of the other side; we are not necessitated to accept either.
Of course, one can believe that the brain manipulates abstract objects or that abstract objects have some transcendant form of existence. That's different, however, from asserting the logical necessity of their existence, which is a bit presumptuous with regards to the cause/effect relationship of language and reality.
One needn't posit unnecessary entities, however. And it's great that these scientists are learning more about process that can be shown repeatedly to have a direct causal effect on cognition.
Some light reading for anyone interested in the philosophy surrounding these sort of ontological arguments: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arg
"I welcome all the responses telling me that I'm an idiot or whatever, that's fine. "
How about whining and mildly racist narcissist? "Idiot" would seem inappropriate in light of your obvious cleverness. Portraying your superficial and contemptuous attitude towards learning as some form of superior intelligence is no mean feat, and you might succeed if that attitude wasn't so recognizably common.
An educator's job is to engage their students in the topic they teach, and while they won't always succeed, they never will if not given the opportunity. If a student can't be arsed to make it to class, then why should the teacher pass them? There's no way of knowing how well they understand the material through testing unless the subject is extremely technical in nature. Learning how to read a textbook right before an exam and learning where to find information doesn't mean you deserve to pass most courses. If you show up consistently and are attentive, but the teacher fails to interest you in the subject, then perhaps it is the fault of the teacher (and not the "girl two rows away.") On the other hand, if you can't make an attempt to take anything more from a class than a "rubber stamp" and view attendance as a chore, perhaps the fault is yours.
A non-disclosure agreement has to be signed by the person bound to keep quiet. He couldn't be pressured into signing an NDA if the initial claim was valid - no matter how good and numerous Apple's lawyers might be, he would simply need to reproduce his initial results to escape a finding of liability. For that matter, he'd have the grounds for a massive countersuit brought by lawyers willing to work on contingency - who wouldn't love to get a piece of Apple for a First Amendment violation?
Of course, if his results were invalid, then why would Apple feel compelled to pressure him into signing anything? They might get an injunction filed against him for libel (as opposed to an NDA, which is entirely different in application), but that would be a matter of public record, and nobody would be paying attention to this schmuck and his "cone of silence" if a court had determined that he was a libeller.
The classic defense of the madman or the liar: "What I say is true, but terrible, unspeakable things would happen were I to prove my assertion. You'll just have to take my inability to prove my assertion as evidence of its validity."
What a schmuck.
"Is there a study out there that proves animal suffering isn't worth worrying about?"
No, and I wouldn't suggest that humans can ethically disregard animal suffering. The issue at hand in the original post is whether that suffering can justify violence towards a human.
Those who believe that animals suffer to the same degree as humans (who, in addition to pain, have a capacity for horror dependent on conscious situational awareness) are making an empirical assertion. Now, in humans, we easily accept that loss or damage to the brain can remove the capacity for self-awareness. Yet looking at animals and conjecturing about their conscious states in human terms (I love a line from elsewhere in the post, "what does the rabbit think while the scientist...") is such common behavior that people rarely question it, despite the fact that in doing so, they are asserting capacities in the animal that cannot be demonstrated to arise from the brain of the animal. Severe damage to the sophisticated frontal cortexes brings the cessation of awareness; the absence of such even DNA encoding for such structures indicates the same in both theory and experiment. This isn't the isolated matter of "a study." It's the lesson of over a century of study into the workings of the brain. Denying it is on no different scientific footing than denying the common ancestry of humans and apes.
The assertion that pain experienced by animals places a duty upon humans to avoid inflicting that pain is philosophically defensible, although rarely are the defenders consistent enough to avoid the infliction of pain on any life-form that can experience it, preferring to focus on the cute and furry animals. And the assertion that animals have human feeling is understandable; much of the enjoyment of a companion animal derives from our ability to represent the animal's comfort and affection towards us as components of a loving relationship in human terms. The error comes in representing our own behaviors and feelings toward an animal as certainty concerning its inner states in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary.
When that mistaken certainty is wheeled out as justification for violence towards a human, the behavior is sociopathic. Animal rights extremists are a leftist variant on the fringes of right-wing Fetus People. Both assert an unknowable (epistemologically) and unlikely (empirically) quality of a particular life form, and then use that assertion to justify violence against humans. Fortunately, as I stated in my earlier post, the majority of such extremists are extreme in text and speech only. And indeed, the majority of those who are concerned with animal suffering are also concerned with human suffering, and understand the stupidity and immorality of violence for the sake of ceasing violence.
It amazes me that such ideas receive the degree of respect they do from an otherwise generally well-educated section of the population.
A term already exists to describe someone able to project their own mental states onto a kitten and call it "empathy," at least to a degree where they could countenance violence against another sentient being in an imagined defense of unrelated kittens. Such a person would be rightly described as sociopathic. Of course, they might claim that the consciousness of an animal grants it a right to the same moral status we typically ascribe to humans (unless we happen to be "animal rights extremists.")
Thinking that an animal's consciousness has the sentient capacity to suffer from death to a degree even approaching that of a human's does not reflect higher ideals, greater awareness, or anything other than a plain ignorance of how the structure of the brain relates to consciousness. A person who makes such claims is on no less unscientific footing than a creationist. Granted, considering the state of the Anglo-American education systems, it is unsurprising that basic scientific truths are not widely known. Still, I would hope that a person would take time to become educated as to the basis of their ideas before engaging in something so frighteningly, permanently stupid as murder.
Of course, a sociopath wouldn't. And in these sorts of cases, they obviously aren't. No wonder the Brits send them packing for long stretches. With all their talk of higher ideals, mentally, the only difference between such a murderer and your garden-variety thrill-killer is the object of narcissistic fixation: an animal in the former, sensual and emotional pleasure in the latter. There are far too many people behind bars in the United States, but with the prognosis for sociopathy generally grim, these are the individuals from whose predations a system of justice is designed to protect society.
Realistically, most of the people one might encounter mouthing animal rights polemic would never murder another person. They thrill vicariously in the stories, and passionately defend violent criminals, but luckily for the rest of us they are harmless and misdirected chasers of moral superiority. Their lack of a disposition to murder doesn't exactly redeem their moral idiocy, but at least it protects others from the tragic ends of sick reasoning.
"You must be on the low end of the democrat spectrum. Let me guess, you dropped out of high school?"
This is funny, since your incomprehension illustrates my point. My point is that Coulter's hyperbole is the most aggressive promoter of a culture where political discussion becomes a contest in outrageousness and misdirection rather than a discussion of facts. It panders to the same grunting instinct that causes a garden-variety moron to spout factual inaccuracies such as "democrat" and "high-school dropout" and refer to a dictionary entry (defining an undisputed issue) as though it were an actual answer.
"Would we run into this same problem if someone created a "violent" video game that was based on the bible? "
- 4179r.htm
You mean like this?
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060606-113418
"Really? Name some stuff. She's more consistant than most conservative politicians. "
Really? Let's compare Coulter's 'Christianity fuels everything I write' (June 2006) with the statements below. Has she really never called for anything more radical and violent than racial profiling? Oh wait...
'I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.' (21 Dec 2005)
'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.' (Predictably enough, 12 Sep 2001)
'Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.' (15 Feb 2006)
Unless your definition of "Christian" has no relation to the teachings of Christ, Javalord, you're just another droning conservative apologist too lazy to even read about the things you defend.
Yeah...to borrow a phrase from dear old granny, "They can send a probe to Titan, but they can't build a /.-proof server?"
Or something like that.
The concept of a "U.S. Military Firewall" is not particularly intimidating. When I was stationed in the Gulf with the Air Force, the Communications squadron was using the same garbage as my 55-year-old mother - McAfee products, and not always with up-to-date patches. A friend in that unit informed me that such was common practice throughout the military in unsecured environments (such as a MWR tent with Internet access.)
Hell, even the censoring of certain websites (rotten.com, ebaumsworld.com, and theonion.com are the only ones I can recall, but it's been a few years) was easy to circumvent for anyone clever enough to uncheck the "Proxy Server" setting in IE. I wonder if anyone ever bothered fixing that?
Given the temperament of the bored kids I remember staffing the Air Force's server rooms, I'd imagine they're probably enabling this kind of activity. Can't say I blame them. I wish we had WoW instead of a copy of Tekken 3.
Oh dear...did you get conned into shelling out cash for an app that scans your Mac for Windows viruses? If not then I'm curious about what, exactly, your antivirus software claims to be doing.
Depends on the law of the community in question. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the legal rights of Stephen Hawking's motorized wheelchair insofar as roads are concerned. Not an issue, of course, as bicycles have a legal right to use the road.
"As I said: designated lanes."
Until the fantasy of extensive and useful designated lanes becomes a reality, it's just silly to rail against the cyclists who often have no choice but to use the roads which, as I've said, they're already paying for.
The only reason that a car is less dangerous and disruptive is because of the widespread inconsideration of motorists. This is one of the few cases where blaming the victims is a widely accepted philosophy, probably because almost everyone in the U.S. drives a car. Nobody likes to accept responsibility, even for such simple things as paying attention to cycists.
Then again, philosophical consistency doesn't seem to be widespread among drivers in general. Take this statement:
"I value the of other people's right to have a smooth commute."
Obviously not. For many folks, a bike ride is their commute. I'm sure you understand this, but apparently haven't internalized it, judging by your earlier assumption that the cyclist to whom you responded was cycling for pleasure. Communities that have continuous bike lanes and/or suitably wide sidewalks leading to every possible commuter destination are certainly rare, and possibly non-existant. That means that, for most bike commuters, at least a portion of their commute will involve use of a road. Shouldn't that portion be a smooth commute, without inattentive drivers who don't understand the road use rights of cyclists causing problems?
You asked earlier if a poster had the money to buy a 1000 dollar car. Perhaps the poster doesn't; this is not an uncommon situation for hourly workers in my country when you factor in costs of gas, insurance, taxes, and maintenance. Or perhaps they do, but would then have to spend a large portion of their minimal resources on unpleasant transportation, which is generally the nature of a thousand-dollar car. I've owned a few. Not everyone accepts the paradigm of "drive the car you can barely afford to a job you hate so you can pay for the car" as a viable lifestyle.
Last year I spent just shy of 2500 dollars on insurance, maintenance, and fuel for my car. Insurance is expensive here if you're an under-thirty male driver; at least my car was already paid off. While I was making payments, that figure was more like 5600 dollars. That is a sizable portion of my after-tax income. After realizing what a sucker that made me, I went shopping. Now I own a $300 bicycle, I do my own maintenance, my physical condition is much better than it was this time last year, and I have more money to spend on wonderful new experiences like health care and fresh food. A brief period of unemployment was considerably less spooky without an insurance or fuel bill. My attitude and energy have improved as a result of eliminating stressful Florida commutes.
Now, I suppose I could give all of that up so that a pack of oblivious motorists can "enjoy" their commute.
Naaah...I have a better idea. I think I'll just keep using these roads, funded as they are by my taxes, and if some folks find it too difficult to drive and pay attention to other commuters simultaneously, then I'll suggest that they shouldn't be driving.
Since when is an advertisement not propaganda?
Thank you very much, I appreciate that.