Sure, that sounds great and all, with the moral relativism and the degradation and humiliation and such, but with all those upsides there's gotta be some catch to this "Internet" thing.
I never said "let's just give them more money and hope they decide to be nicer", I said "let's have them ensure they don't completely disregard ethics in an attempt to get an edge with regard to price even though it will cost us more money". Big difference.
The article mainly hinges on the possibility that the iPad isn't using ARM to be wild speculation instead of merely completely insane speculation. The fact that this is already known to be false is a pretty major blow to it. And the fact that this policy affects things that produce code in approved languages and even things that produce Xcode projects to go with it pretty much completely destroys the argument that it's some wise and enlightened choice they have made for the good of developers and not just a complete dick move. It doesn't help either that Jobs himself endorses this particular rationalization of it, which puts forth a completely different argument.
How about, maybe--and I know this is going to sound heretical around here, but hear me out--not having your products built in abusive sweatshops just so you can get your toys a bit cheaper without any regard for the consequences? Making life shit for other people for your own petty benefit in this manner is not an unavoidable "fact of life" by any means, though I suppose that there are people like you horrible enough to think that it's a reasonable and acceptable thing sadly is.
I'm curious as to how exactly you think C# and.NET are a "god-awful hack of a language and framework". I may not be willing to go anywhere near them due to them being controlled by Microsoft, but that aside, they are both quite good from my experience. Said Microsoft-is-evil issue aside, I'd much, much rather use them than Objective-C.
Apple is saying "you can only use C, C++, Objective C, and JavaScript as executed by the iPhone's JavaScript engine". No more, no less. This has fuck all to do with saving your platform from OMG EVIL PORTED GAMES. Poorly ported games are still possible under the new policy. And it applies to many, many things that aren't games. At best, this is an insane and stupid attempt to fuck over Adobe for little reason, and at worst, it's just insane and stupid. Either way, this isn't "good" by any metric that doesn't involve the RDF.
Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple will apply this rule arbitrarily and inconsistently, so you at least won't see the major applications that grossly violate it gone, but it will probably be lots of headaches for everyone else, and be yet another contributing factor to continuing to drive developers away from Apple's little walled garden of madness.
Typing cat with an argument, naturally dumps that file to stdout. Typing cat without an argument does something entirely different.
On a semi-related note, typing "find kitten" lets you find kitten.
rm -rf / doesn't work because, like on any good *nix system, you're not normally running as root.
But you can use sudo with this (and several other things) to do it anyway.
apt-get upgrade (don't forget the sudo) will gladly suggest an upgrade to you if you're using Internet Explorer.
Both vim and emacs are available, in a manner.
man doesn't provide help for most commands, but it does provide some amusing responses for some of them.
Try typing "look".
Various commands don't really do anything, but provide amusing responses. Try ping, ssh, ed, kill, or asl.
There's a command for people who read the source code (along with, you know, the names of all the other commands), but you should find that on your own.
It is a standard, easy part of the OS. You don't have to choose between rpm or dpkg or portage or whatever when you choose a distro. You get the distro-standard package manager and that's that. You, however, seem to have some strange idea that Linux is a single, monolithic OS. It's not. It's a label for a variety of operating systems ("Linux distros") which happen to share significant parts (mainly the Linux kernel and the GNU userland). Complaining about Linux not having only one package management system makes about as much sense as making the same argument against all the BSDs because they're all "BSD". And it makes only marginally more sense than making the same complaint about Linux, BSD, and OS X as a whole because they're "all *nix".
Also, Windows is a rather terrible example of installation being "standard" and "easy". It is the single major platform that is farthest from either of those, by a wide margin.
Note the essential qualification, "that Apple is pushing". Windows is completely unrelated, and Apple's app store is exactly as described. And Apple's model is very much what is shaping the public perception of such things. For the average person, game download services like you mentioned don't seem to fall into the same category as 'app stores' any more than music download services do.
Again, you ignore my points and pass them off as "demagoguery", you act as though I have ignored the focus of your post, which was obviously about the tangentially related little comment at the end and not the paragraphs and paragraphs before it, and you play up how so very mature and rational you are (in between the jabs, of course). Your replies to me have mostly consisted of picking apart the form of my posts, instead of the content, and not once have you responded to an actual point of mine with a valid rebuttal. All I have gotten is logical fallacies, complaints about how you don't feel I'm sufficiently polite and "adult" to converse with you, derailment of the topic, and so on. The best I've gotten is you displaying a very faulty knowledge of various laws, though at least it was an attempt at a reply.
And yet you feel entitled to take a holier-than-thou position, acting as though you have been kindly putting up with the foolishness of a pitiable child who is lashing out in anger at his obvious superiors. My original reply may have been abrasive, but at least it made points and backed them up; your replies since have been eloquent but devoid of anything substantive. You are good at speaking but not so much at the thinking, evidently.
So perhaps we should start again. Are you capable of actually responding to the meat of my posts, instead of the skin? Are you capable of responding to arguments with something more than logical fallacies? Are you capable of not being such a smug prick? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "no", so I shall bow out of this 'debate', and return to my far more fruitful conversation with this lovely brick wall over here.
You cannot win by telling your opponents that they are "obviously wrong." You have not responded to any of my arguments with anything more coherent than, "that is wrong." You say:
I have responded by pointing out that your main argument, that "gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because marriage exists to promote reproduction" hinges on the notion that marriage cannot and has not changed over the many millennia of human society, which is quite demonstrably false, by for example the growing support for it in many countries, and even the legalization of it in some. You can claim that I'm just saying you're "obviously wrong" all you want, but it still doesn't make it true. You, on the other hand, have outright ignored many of my points, passing them off as just "irrational anger".
But at no point do you show your work. Everything you say is conclusory, assumes that you are correct without ever giving reasons why.
Again, claiming that I haven't doesn't change the fact that I have.
Except it's completely on point with the concept of heterosexual marriage, because reproduction is essential to the character of marriage and hence essential to the debate. Your attempt to eliminate it as relevant only shows that you cannot address it head-on.
*sigh* Yes, it is relevant to a central point of the debate. However, the reply was not directed at that, and the point quoted was made clear to be a distinct and different stance. Taking something that replies to some point of an argument and treating it as thought it were in response to a different point of the argument, even if the latter point is the main point, is still taking it out of context, and thus your reply still is a complete non sequitur.
Neither is "you are full of shit," and yet, here we are.
Right, "you're full of shit" isn't a proper rebuttal, which is why it was not used as one. The rest of that paragraph providing counter examples to the claims of the quoted text, however, is a proper rebuttal. The "you're full of shit" is just a non-functional flourish used to convey my contempt for your defense of the restriction of rights of others because of the insane morals of some, and most especially, for how thoroughly shoddy said defense is.
But apparently you think you actually responded to me in an intelligent fashion by declaring my post void by fiat, ignoring my expressed views in favor of attacking those I was presenting not for their truth but as evidence of the existence of a genuine debate.
Your personal views are a couple of sentences sandwiched between the four paragraphs of defending the position of lunatics, and your conclusion about how "gay rights" isn't equivalent to other civil rights movements by stating things false about those other civil rights movements and reducing all of the gay rights movement to gay marriage. Gee, I wonder why I'd think your post is about how "gay rights" is nonsense and the people who oppose it are a bunch of fine, intelligent folks, when it so obviously isn't?
When you realize that intelligent people are capable of disagreement--that not everyone who disagrees with you is automatically "a retard," you might re-apply for admittance into the world of adult conversation.
You are not a retard because you disagree with me, you are a retard because your arguments are full of holes, and when these wholes are pointed out, your respond with logical fallacies, taking things out of context, ignoring my points, and whining about how I used bad words. "Adult conversation" doesn't mean you just use big words, you have to actually have a solid argument underlying those big words.
It's always a little disturbing when anyone who engages in rational discourse is assumed to be the enemy.
It's always a little disturbing when someone defends the pointless large-scale infringement of the rights of others and tries to pass it off as "rational discourse".
You speak as though I opposed gay marriage, when what I plainly stated is that I am opposed to government involvement in any kind of marriage.
Yes, you plainly state it, a bit, in your post which largely consists of defending the stances of people who are quite vehemently opposed to gay marriage.
I was not attempting to argue against gay marriage, but to show that there are valid arguments and that the question is not "simple and obvious."
None of the arguments you raised are valid, and the question is as simple and obvious as the question of miscegenation laws.
Replacing "race" with "sex" makes it completely different. Interracial marriages can still result in children. Homosexual unions cannot. Whether that difference is significant enough to justify the practice is worth discussing. But you can't say it's the "same thing" without sounding... what was the word you used? Oh, yes. Retarded.
You know, there's this concept in reading called "context", with which the meanings of things change in relation to their surroundings. You seem to not be particularly familiar with it. See, what you do is you look at the particular part of the post I am replying to, in this case being this:
Other courts have found that marriage is an individual right--to recognition of your union with someone of the opposite sex, whether you love them or not.
Now, you see how this bit makes no mention of having children? In fact, if you apply more of this "context" magic and go back to the original post and view this quote in its original "context", you find that furthermore, this, in that "context", is provided as a separate, distinct point of view from the "gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because marriage exists to promote couples having children" stance. So, bringing up the subject of capability for having children is what's known as a "non sequitur" (another scary new concept, oh my!), which is Latin for "if your response isn't relevant to what you're responding to you look really, really stupid", and makes you, you guessed it, retarded.
I don't see anything even as substantial as straw in your post. All I see is irrational anger.
"You so sillay!" isn't a proper rebuttal.
I said "the correct approach to the civil rights." I do not consider beneficent racism a correct approach. Most laws "prohibiting discrimination" are either redundant in the face of the Constitution as Amended, or inappropriate forms of beneficent racism.
You are conflating affirmative action with anti-discrimination laws. The latter isn't "beneficent racism", or even "racism" of any kind. Furthermore, constitutions are bodies of laws themselves, so saying "we don't need laws against this, we have a constitution" doesn't make any sense.
What are you, twelve? Come back and join the conversation when you can discourse like an adult.
Your posts have had you claiming that social institutions can't change, that because people arguing against gay marriage have presented poor arguments as post-hoc rationalizations of their stances, they're not really arbitrary and unfounded, gross mischaracterization of the arguments of people arguing for rights for gays as merely being "we like them", gross mischaracterization of the people arguing against them as being a bunch of perfectly rational folks with perfectly rational stances not at all derived from morality, comparing gay rights advocates to racists (seriously?), reduction of the entirety of the gay rights movement to marriage, multiple logical fallacies in your reply here alone, and more. And I am not up to the standards of this fine debate because I said "shit".
Analogizing racial issues to sexual preference issues is significantly problematic. If you see them as "clearly" "exactly the same" then you haven't given it sufficient thought and your expression here is demagoguery.
What I see is that you have given sufficient thought to come up with a justification of why those people were assholes but you, holding very similar views, are actually a rather enlightened fellow. This doesn't change anything of the reality of the situation; they're both the same shit.
Marriage is an abstraction that bridges inescapable biological facts and society's desire to channel those facts to a particular end. Historically recent romanticization of marriage in the West, for various reasons including a drive toward individualism, does not change the fact that marriage is an ancient practice intended to institutionalize reproduction, subverting basic biological drives into the reinforcement of (ostensibly patriarchal, arguably gynocentric, potentially some compromise between the two) cultural norms.
Historically ancient origins of marriage as being related to reproduction do not change the fact that it is currently, for many people, an important part of human interactions, and denying it to those people on the basis of how things used to be is a shitty thing to do (not the mention the various legal issues that can pop up with not being married). A lot of things currently differ in purpose from their original ones, deal with it.
In the state of Arizona, homosexual marriage was rejected on the grounds that marriage is a legitimate state approach to incentivizing childbearing and the nuclear family. And since no one is "entitled" to state incentives, marriage cannot be claimed by "right."
They can call it a kumquat if they so please, but that won't make it one.
Other courts have found that marriage is an individual right--to recognition of your union with someone of the opposite sex, whether you love them or not.
And they used to say the exact same thing about marriage with regard to race (which you somehow assert this is completely different from). The argument is utter bullshit either way. Much of humanity has realized that "you are free to marry anyone--as long as they're of the same race" is a retarded thing to say, and much of it is starting to realize that replacing "race" with "sex" makes it still a retarded thing to say.
There are sound reasons for these decisions. You don't have to like them, you don't have to agree with them, you certainly don't have to accept them, but you cannot say that this kind of discrimination is based on arbitrary hatred.
I damn well can say that, because they are flimsy rationalizations for arbitrary hatred. Ever wonder why these people who claim gay marriage is BAD and WRONG because marriage is supposed to be about reproduction never make the same complaints about marriages where one or both of the partners incapable of reproduction? It's because they're a bunch of moralistic asshats who are just trying to hide their true motives, and failing.
The only reasons I've ever heard for segregation boiled down to, "We don't like those people."
No, they all boil down to the same thing arguments against gay marriage tend to boil down to: "If we let them be treated like us, the fabric of society will unravel!"
The only reasons I've ever heard for same-sex marriage boiled down to, "We like these people."
Really? All the ones I've heard are more along the lines of "These people are people and, as such, deserve the rights of people." Aren't strawmen so much easier to attack, though? You certainly seem to think so.
Whereas, the reasons I hear in opposition of same-sex marriage are simple: traditional marr
Well you can't always get what you want. And roving bands of angry, pitchfork-wielding graphic designer vigilantes make sure that fans of Comic Sans never get what they want. They'll be at your door shortly.
And netcat >/dev/null wins over even that, but for some strange reason people are interested in browsers that have more than the bare minimum of standards support.
Not so much "replaced" as "supplemented". For a very long time, killing people was quite a popular punishment for various crimes, and still is in much of the world, though the more civilized parts have largely abandoned it. And even in those countries, people still sometimes solve their problems (in a less than legal manner) through killing. Not to mention motives like greed. There are many more reasons for killing than 'lol crazy people' or 'evil government evilly forcing people to do it, through evil'.
As a parent you applaud them giving out time in prison for the "production, distribution, sale, hiring and use" of violent video games for everyone, in the name of 'protecting the children', even when there's no evidence of it harming anyone? The whole thing is ridiculous on multiple levels. You shouldn't be applauding factually baseless think-of-the-children moral panic laws imposing harsh punishments and broad restrictions of the rights of others even as a parent.
And it's only censorship if a government does it, right? Excessive pedantry is bad enough, but excessive pedantry with absolutely no basis in reality is particularly annoying.
"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?"
Yes.
"If a webpage is published on the web and no google spider notices it, does it exist?"
Very yes. There are many other channels of communication you can use to give the link to someone else that Google doesn't index. IRC, IM, email, paper (remember that stuff?), and so on. Even if you don't give the link to anyone, it's still not even close to analogous to the original, as a person is still around to see it, namely the site's creator.
"If a thought enters your mind that is not already indexed by google, is it real?"
Now you're just trying way too hard to be clever, to the point of not making the slightest bit of sense.
Killing isn't torture, though the latter can lead to the former, and rape isn't in itself torture, although it can be used as such. Regardless, very few games require or even allow the player to do any sort of torturing, and rape would be illegal in some countries, banned for sale (but not for possession) in others, and theoretically legal to sell in the rest but practically not due to no store being willing to stock such a game, and thus generally not such a great business decision. Have you ever even played a video game?
First of all, completely ignoring my response and going into a pathetic rant against a strawman on an unrelated topic just makes you look like an ass. But I'll respond anyway, because your claims are just so easy to strike down.
"We" are hard working people
As opposed to those damn AGW hippies, who just live on peace and love right? You don't have a monopoly on 'hard working people'.
who are not about to turn over our hard earned cash to a cabal of governments selling a load of snake oil
The thing that makes snake oil snake oil is the wild, unbacked, unverifiable claims. When the thing in question is a theory that has a mountain of solid evidence from decades of hard work and wide support amongst the relevant experts in the field, it is no longer snake oil. The only evidence of any sort you have presented against this is a single, highly flawed article from a highly biased tabloid with a reputation for not caring much for that 'truth' stuff, which I have quite thoroughly demolished. All you have left on this matter is hot hair.
and pushing for wild ass tax schemes to "save the earth".
If you're talking about merely using tax money for developing things to reduce global warming, well, tax money is used to defend against a lot of other threats. It's used for an army to protect your country against others who might wish to do it harm; it's used for a police force, to protect its citizens against others who might wish to do them harm; it's used for fire-fighting, disaster response, and handling disease outbreaks; in many countries, it's used to provide cheap, efficient universal healthcare. Given the projected negative effects of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in current quantities, it's quite reasonable to spend tax money to help protect against that.
If you're talking about more direct taxation, such as on businesses for producing greenhouse gases, then I'm glad to inform you that there is an alternative, and I'm sure you'll love it: heavy-handed government regulation setting strict limits on output and beating any company who breaks these limits into the ground. The taxation-based schemes instead work on the magic of free markets people like you tout so much. They are a mechanism for internalizing the externalities and thus providing an economic incentive to businesses to be more 'green'. One can think of the market, at least in an idealized form, as a sort of optimization algorithm. Then, these laws are modifications to the function it is optimizing. I personally don't have any particular preference either way, as long as it gets good results.
Day be day your arguments fall apart.
My arguments are in the post you replied to. They are fairly solid, and as your post has completely ignored them, they still stand, and are certainly far from falling apart.
The IPPC (or whatever they call this waste of ink and paper) report was "God" at first. Everyone pointed to it. Now we know it's mostly made up garbage.
Nobody has called it "God", except you, people still point to it because it's still fine, and no, "we" don't know it's "mostly made up garbage". You may "know" it, but then, there are people who people who "know" there are aliens who have communicated with humans and regularly abduct us and ram stuff up our asses for no particular reason, people who "know" that they saw Jesus in their food and that it's a sign from the heavens, people who "know" that they are allergic to electromagnetic radiation, and so on. "Knowing" something counts for nothing. Having evidence is what matters.
So you fall back on this and that. "Pay no attention to our first lame ass arguments and evidence...take a look at THIS!"
The one here acting in such a manner is certainly not me. You are the one who has ignored the re
And the debate he spoke of was "over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not".
But the BBC article says:
And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.
Since that's not a direct quote, I'm not sure whether it's something he said that wasn't included in the Q&A, or is a poor summary of parts of his answer to that question. Nevertheless, I'll retract that particular point.
You're complaining about 'spin' while linking to the Daily Mail? Really? How about you get it from the originalsource, then you might have some idea of what he actually said. Daily Fail says:
Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
BBC says:
He insisted that he had not lost any original data, but that the sources of some of the data may have been insufficiently clear.
Daily Fail says:
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now - suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
Phil Jones says:
There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.
We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.
And also (text in bold here and further on is the questions by the BBC):
I - Would it be reasonable looking at the same scientific evidence to take the view that recent warming is not predominantly manmade?
No - see again my answer to D.
Daily Fail says:
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no 'statistically significant' warming.
Phil Jones says:
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
Daily Fail says:
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.
Phil Jones says:
D - Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.
This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influence
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, that sounds great and all, with the moral relativism and the degradation and humiliation and such, but with all those upsides there's gotta be some catch to this "Internet" thing.
I never said "let's just give them more money and hope they decide to be nicer", I said "let's have them ensure they don't completely disregard ethics in an attempt to get an edge with regard to price even though it will cost us more money". Big difference.
The article mainly hinges on the possibility that the iPad isn't using ARM to be wild speculation instead of merely completely insane speculation. The fact that this is already known to be false is a pretty major blow to it. And the fact that this policy affects things that produce code in approved languages and even things that produce Xcode projects to go with it pretty much completely destroys the argument that it's some wise and enlightened choice they have made for the good of developers and not just a complete dick move. It doesn't help either that Jobs himself endorses this particular rationalization of it, which puts forth a completely different argument.
How about, maybe--and I know this is going to sound heretical around here, but hear me out--not having your products built in abusive sweatshops just so you can get your toys a bit cheaper without any regard for the consequences? Making life shit for other people for your own petty benefit in this manner is not an unavoidable "fact of life" by any means, though I suppose that there are people like you horrible enough to think that it's a reasonable and acceptable thing sadly is.
I'm curious as to how exactly you think C# and .NET are a "god-awful hack of a language and framework". I may not be willing to go anywhere near them due to them being controlled by Microsoft, but that aside, they are both quite good from my experience. Said Microsoft-is-evil issue aside, I'd much, much rather use them than Objective-C.
Apple is saying "you can only use C, C++, Objective C, and JavaScript as executed by the iPhone's JavaScript engine". No more, no less. This has fuck all to do with saving your platform from OMG EVIL PORTED GAMES. Poorly ported games are still possible under the new policy. And it applies to many, many things that aren't games. At best, this is an insane and stupid attempt to fuck over Adobe for little reason, and at worst, it's just insane and stupid. Either way, this isn't "good" by any metric that doesn't involve the RDF.
Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple will apply this rule arbitrarily and inconsistently, so you at least won't see the major applications that grossly violate it gone, but it will probably be lots of headaches for everyone else, and be yet another contributing factor to continuing to drive developers away from Apple's little walled garden of madness.
It is a standard, easy part of the OS. You don't have to choose between rpm or dpkg or portage or whatever when you choose a distro. You get the distro-standard package manager and that's that. You, however, seem to have some strange idea that Linux is a single, monolithic OS. It's not. It's a label for a variety of operating systems ("Linux distros") which happen to share significant parts (mainly the Linux kernel and the GNU userland). Complaining about Linux not having only one package management system makes about as much sense as making the same argument against all the BSDs because they're all "BSD". And it makes only marginally more sense than making the same complaint about Linux, BSD, and OS X as a whole because they're "all *nix".
Also, Windows is a rather terrible example of installation being "standard" and "easy". It is the single major platform that is farthest from either of those, by a wide margin.
Note the essential qualification, "that Apple is pushing". Windows is completely unrelated, and Apple's app store is exactly as described. And Apple's model is very much what is shaping the public perception of such things. For the average person, game download services like you mentioned don't seem to fall into the same category as 'app stores' any more than music download services do.
Again, you ignore my points and pass them off as "demagoguery", you act as though I have ignored the focus of your post, which was obviously about the tangentially related little comment at the end and not the paragraphs and paragraphs before it, and you play up how so very mature and rational you are (in between the jabs, of course). Your replies to me have mostly consisted of picking apart the form of my posts, instead of the content, and not once have you responded to an actual point of mine with a valid rebuttal. All I have gotten is logical fallacies, complaints about how you don't feel I'm sufficiently polite and "adult" to converse with you, derailment of the topic, and so on. The best I've gotten is you displaying a very faulty knowledge of various laws, though at least it was an attempt at a reply.
And yet you feel entitled to take a holier-than-thou position, acting as though you have been kindly putting up with the foolishness of a pitiable child who is lashing out in anger at his obvious superiors. My original reply may have been abrasive, but at least it made points and backed them up; your replies since have been eloquent but devoid of anything substantive. You are good at speaking but not so much at the thinking, evidently.
So perhaps we should start again. Are you capable of actually responding to the meat of my posts, instead of the skin? Are you capable of responding to arguments with something more than logical fallacies? Are you capable of not being such a smug prick? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "no", so I shall bow out of this 'debate', and return to my far more fruitful conversation with this lovely brick wall over here.
I have responded by pointing out that your main argument, that "gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because marriage exists to promote reproduction" hinges on the notion that marriage cannot and has not changed over the many millennia of human society, which is quite demonstrably false, by for example the growing support for it in many countries, and even the legalization of it in some. You can claim that I'm just saying you're "obviously wrong" all you want, but it still doesn't make it true. You, on the other hand, have outright ignored many of my points, passing them off as just "irrational anger".
Again, claiming that I haven't doesn't change the fact that I have.
*sigh* Yes, it is relevant to a central point of the debate. However, the reply was not directed at that, and the point quoted was made clear to be a distinct and different stance. Taking something that replies to some point of an argument and treating it as thought it were in response to a different point of the argument, even if the latter point is the main point, is still taking it out of context, and thus your reply still is a complete non sequitur.
Right, "you're full of shit" isn't a proper rebuttal, which is why it was not used as one. The rest of that paragraph providing counter examples to the claims of the quoted text, however, is a proper rebuttal. The "you're full of shit" is just a non-functional flourish used to convey my contempt for your defense of the restriction of rights of others because of the insane morals of some, and most especially, for how thoroughly shoddy said defense is.
Your personal views are a couple of sentences sandwiched between the four paragraphs of defending the position of lunatics, and your conclusion about how "gay rights" isn't equivalent to other civil rights movements by stating things false about those other civil rights movements and reducing all of the gay rights movement to gay marriage. Gee, I wonder why I'd think your post is about how "gay rights" is nonsense and the people who oppose it are a bunch of fine, intelligent folks, when it so obviously isn't?
You are not a retard because you disagree with me, you are a retard because your arguments are full of holes, and when these wholes are pointed out, your respond with logical fallacies, taking things out of context, ignoring my points, and whining about how I used bad words. "Adult conversation" doesn't mean you just use big words, you have to actually have a solid argument underlying those big words.
It's always a little disturbing when someone defends the pointless large-scale infringement of the rights of others and tries to pass it off as "rational discourse".
Yes, you plainly state it, a bit, in your post which largely consists of defending the stances of people who are quite vehemently opposed to gay marriage.
None of the arguments you raised are valid, and the question is as simple and obvious as the question of miscegenation laws.
You know, there's this concept in reading called "context", with which the meanings of things change in relation to their surroundings. You seem to not be particularly familiar with it. See, what you do is you look at the particular part of the post I am replying to, in this case being this:
Now, you see how this bit makes no mention of having children? In fact, if you apply more of this "context" magic and go back to the original post and view this quote in its original "context", you find that furthermore, this, in that "context", is provided as a separate, distinct point of view from the "gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because marriage exists to promote couples having children" stance. So, bringing up the subject of capability for having children is what's known as a "non sequitur" (another scary new concept, oh my!), which is Latin for "if your response isn't relevant to what you're responding to you look really, really stupid", and makes you, you guessed it, retarded.
"You so sillay!" isn't a proper rebuttal.
You are conflating affirmative action with anti-discrimination laws. The latter isn't "beneficent racism", or even "racism" of any kind. Furthermore, constitutions are bodies of laws themselves, so saying "we don't need laws against this, we have a constitution" doesn't make any sense.
Your posts have had you claiming that social institutions can't change, that because people arguing against gay marriage have presented poor arguments as post-hoc rationalizations of their stances, they're not really arbitrary and unfounded, gross mischaracterization of the arguments of people arguing for rights for gays as merely being "we like them", gross mischaracterization of the people arguing against them as being a bunch of perfectly rational folks with perfectly rational stances not at all derived from morality, comparing gay rights advocates to racists (seriously?), reduction of the entirety of the gay rights movement to marriage, multiple logical fallacies in your reply here alone, and more. And I am not up to the standards of this fine debate because I said "shit".
What I see is that you have given sufficient thought to come up with a justification of why those people were assholes but you, holding very similar views, are actually a rather enlightened fellow. This doesn't change anything of the reality of the situation; they're both the same shit.
Historically ancient origins of marriage as being related to reproduction do not change the fact that it is currently, for many people, an important part of human interactions, and denying it to those people on the basis of how things used to be is a shitty thing to do (not the mention the various legal issues that can pop up with not being married). A lot of things currently differ in purpose from their original ones, deal with it.
They can call it a kumquat if they so please, but that won't make it one.
And they used to say the exact same thing about marriage with regard to race (which you somehow assert this is completely different from). The argument is utter bullshit either way. Much of humanity has realized that "you are free to marry anyone--as long as they're of the same race" is a retarded thing to say, and much of it is starting to realize that replacing "race" with "sex" makes it still a retarded thing to say.
I damn well can say that, because they are flimsy rationalizations for arbitrary hatred. Ever wonder why these people who claim gay marriage is BAD and WRONG because marriage is supposed to be about reproduction never make the same complaints about marriages where one or both of the partners incapable of reproduction? It's because they're a bunch of moralistic asshats who are just trying to hide their true motives, and failing.
No, they all boil down to the same thing arguments against gay marriage tend to boil down to: "If we let them be treated like us, the fabric of society will unravel!"
Really? All the ones I've heard are more along the lines of "These people are people and, as such, deserve the rights of people." Aren't strawmen so much easier to attack, though? You certainly seem to think so.
Well you can't always get what you want. And roving bands of angry, pitchfork-wielding graphic designer vigilantes make sure that fans of Comic Sans never get what they want. They'll be at your door shortly.
And netcat > /dev/null wins over even that, but for some strange reason people are interested in browsers that have more than the bare minimum of standards support.
How are programs that provide superior functionality 'clutter' by any definition of the word?
Not so much "replaced" as "supplemented". For a very long time, killing people was quite a popular punishment for various crimes, and still is in much of the world, though the more civilized parts have largely abandoned it. And even in those countries, people still sometimes solve their problems (in a less than legal manner) through killing. Not to mention motives like greed. There are many more reasons for killing than 'lol crazy people' or 'evil government evilly forcing people to do it, through evil'.
As a parent you applaud them giving out time in prison for the "production, distribution, sale, hiring and use" of violent video games for everyone, in the name of 'protecting the children', even when there's no evidence of it harming anyone? The whole thing is ridiculous on multiple levels. You shouldn't be applauding factually baseless think-of-the-children moral panic laws imposing harsh punishments and broad restrictions of the rights of others even as a parent.
I fail to see the merits of doing so, or the relevance to the topic at hand.
And it's only censorship if a government does it, right? Excessive pedantry is bad enough, but excessive pedantry with absolutely no basis in reality is particularly annoying.
Yes.
Very yes. There are many other channels of communication you can use to give the link to someone else that Google doesn't index. IRC, IM, email, paper (remember that stuff?), and so on. Even if you don't give the link to anyone, it's still not even close to analogous to the original, as a person is still around to see it, namely the site's creator.
Now you're just trying way too hard to be clever, to the point of not making the slightest bit of sense.
Killing isn't torture, though the latter can lead to the former, and rape isn't in itself torture, although it can be used as such. Regardless, very few games require or even allow the player to do any sort of torturing, and rape would be illegal in some countries, banned for sale (but not for possession) in others, and theoretically legal to sell in the rest but practically not due to no store being willing to stock such a game, and thus generally not such a great business decision. Have you ever even played a video game?
First of all, completely ignoring my response and going into a pathetic rant against a strawman on an unrelated topic just makes you look like an ass. But I'll respond anyway, because your claims are just so easy to strike down.
As opposed to those damn AGW hippies, who just live on peace and love right? You don't have a monopoly on 'hard working people'.
The thing that makes snake oil snake oil is the wild, unbacked, unverifiable claims. When the thing in question is a theory that has a mountain of solid evidence from decades of hard work and wide support amongst the relevant experts in the field, it is no longer snake oil. The only evidence of any sort you have presented against this is a single, highly flawed article from a highly biased tabloid with a reputation for not caring much for that 'truth' stuff, which I have quite thoroughly demolished. All you have left on this matter is hot hair.
If you're talking about merely using tax money for developing things to reduce global warming, well, tax money is used to defend against a lot of other threats. It's used for an army to protect your country against others who might wish to do it harm; it's used for a police force, to protect its citizens against others who might wish to do them harm; it's used for fire-fighting, disaster response, and handling disease outbreaks; in many countries, it's used to provide cheap, efficient universal healthcare. Given the projected negative effects of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in current quantities, it's quite reasonable to spend tax money to help protect against that.
If you're talking about more direct taxation, such as on businesses for producing greenhouse gases, then I'm glad to inform you that there is an alternative, and I'm sure you'll love it: heavy-handed government regulation setting strict limits on output and beating any company who breaks these limits into the ground. The taxation-based schemes instead work on the magic of free markets people like you tout so much. They are a mechanism for internalizing the externalities and thus providing an economic incentive to businesses to be more 'green'. One can think of the market, at least in an idealized form, as a sort of optimization algorithm. Then, these laws are modifications to the function it is optimizing. I personally don't have any particular preference either way, as long as it gets good results.
My arguments are in the post you replied to. They are fairly solid, and as your post has completely ignored them, they still stand, and are certainly far from falling apart.
Nobody has called it "God", except you, people still point to it because it's still fine, and no, "we" don't know it's "mostly made up garbage". You may "know" it, but then, there are people who people who "know" there are aliens who have communicated with humans and regularly abduct us and ram stuff up our asses for no particular reason, people who "know" that they saw Jesus in their food and that it's a sign from the heavens, people who "know" that they are allergic to electromagnetic radiation, and so on. "Knowing" something counts for nothing. Having evidence is what matters.
The one here acting in such a manner is certainly not me. You are the one who has ignored the re
Slight mistake in my post. I said:
But the BBC article says:
Since that's not a direct quote, I'm not sure whether it's something he said that wasn't included in the Q&A, or is a poor summary of parts of his answer to that question. Nevertheless, I'll retract that particular point.
You're complaining about 'spin' while linking to the Daily Mail? Really? How about you get it from the original source, then you might have some idea of what he actually said.
Daily Fail says:
BBC says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
And also (text in bold here and further on is the questions by the BBC):
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says: