It wasn't the "sexual liberation", it was Johnson's well-intentioned but woefully wrong "war on poverty" and the radical changes to AFDC that did it. If there was a man in the house, he was expected to work, while a single dad (or more usually, mom) was expected to raise kids. Johnson's changes made it incredibly difficult to escape AFDC and poverty. Generational welfare skyrocketed then, as did the rise of one-parent welfare households. It became the norm in many if not most poor neighborhoods. A girl was encouraged to get pregnant so she could get that welfare money.
It got worse with Reagan's reboot of Nixon's "war on drugs" which put many, many poor men in prison and fueled gang wars. It didn't help that black neighborhoods were targeted for drug stings.
Thankfully, AFDC was repealed in 1996 under Clinton and replaced with TANF.
Maybe centuries old traditions of religion and family life are not based on stupid superstitions as many people educated beyond the level of their intelligence seem to think these days
As a Christian, I certainly don't consider it superstition (it isn't superstition when you've experienced God personally). But the stable, two parent family wasn't the norm for most of the last thousand years -- marriage was expected and out of wedlock births were rare, but lots and lots of women died in childbirth, many men died in industrial accidents, war, and other violence. In the 1800s there were probably more single parent households than marriages, since so many parents died from war, childbirth, accident, and disease.
Most kids are indeed better off in a two parent household, but many kids would be far better off if their abusive, violent, alcoholic fathers (or mothers) were to disappear.
All that said, I have no right to insist that anyone else follows my values. I certainly wouldn't want to be forced to follow Islamic values, would you?
I don't suppose you would ever accept the answer being something along the lines of "because they are committing the majority of the crimes in the US"?
Nah..it couldn't possibly be that simple.
Only superficially. A larger percentage of blacks than percentage of whites are poor, and poverty and crime go hand in hand. Have a kid grow up in a poor family with no hope of ever getting a decent education, a future, a life, where everyone he knows is a criminal destined for the grave pr prison, and guess what happens? No matter what color he is?
Yes, the problem is indeed simple. The solution doesn't seem to be.
Not to mention that most people in prison don't have father figures in their lives, which means that marriage has a strong positive effect on society.
Having a father isn't going to help if Dad's a criminal. Criminality, like everything else, tends to run in families. And I think I'd need to see some stats before I could give that credence, as I know a few folks (all white) who have been in prison. Two of them I know had dads. One is my best friend's brother, a former diesel mechanic (before he was arrested) who spent time in Fed for loaning a former high school classmate money (the classmate was a drug dealer, half his graduating class went to prison) and the other, an avowed atheist, was brought up in a strict Southern Baptist family and spent ten years in a Kentucky prison for murder. Another fellow that haunts that bar, a really burned out drug abuser, went to Joliet for cooking meth, but I Don't know if he had a father figure growing up.
Bill Clinton's dad died when his mother was pregnant with him.
Another fellow there, a business owner, has two sons. One is a security guard, the other is a criminal. So what I've seen in my six decades doesn't jibe at all with your assertion.
Bullshit, for the last two years my church has given two weeks' groceries to every family with a chile at Harvard Park Elementary over Christmas break, because it's the poorest neighborhood in town and school breakfast and lunch is all some of those kids get. No sermons involved, volunteers simply drop off the groceries.
I don't believe St John's breadline, run by the Catholics here, makes you say grace or anything. They're just feeding poor people. No sermon attached.
He was referring to liberals as the hissy-fit throwers, and actually casting Christians in a beneficent light.
Yes, which tagged him as a church-going conservative hypocrite.
As an atheist with qualms about organised religion I do object to them taking over the role of the state
As a Christian, I agree. It isn't up to me to judge anyone, and IMO only those things that harm or endanger others should be illegal. I think the worst kind of government would be a theocracy.
As long as there is no interference on the subject matter (evolutionary biology for example)
Anyone who thinks science and Christianity are at odds either misunderstands the science or Christianity. IINM the same can be said of Bhuddism and Hinduism.
I hate to tell you this, Mr. Conservative, but Jesus was a liberal. Taxes? "Render unto Ceasar..." You conservatives seem to hate the poor that Jesus said "Blessed are" of. Tax money for food stamps? Conservatives are against it. "They should get jobs" you say, Jesus said "look at the lilies of the field, they neither sew nor spin yet Solomon in all his glory was never so clothed." Conservatives love money, but the bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.
Jesus was a liberal, a radical, Caiphas was a staunch conservative. Why do you think he was crucified? Conservatives hated him.
Oh, and if you're a lawyer you don't want to know what Jesus said about you.
Too bad the corporations own the government, needed laws restricting companies from screwing over customers no longer get passed here. More corporate rights, fewer human rights.
I think he's serious, and I agree with him. And I'm not an Apple user, of my 3 computers one runs XP, one W7 and one kubuntu 10.04. I do agree that W7 is the best MS OS I've used, but it's not as good as kubuntu (not the current clusterfuck, Shuttleworth is insane).
My notebook runs W7. An older one I had several years ago also ran W7 and had the gestures spoken of by the OP. I hated that "feature" and it took me two months to figure out how to shut it off ("Tap to click" drove me crazy, every time I touched the pad it clicked). It wasn't under "mouse controls" in Control Panel where you would expect it to be, it was in a hidden icon in the bar at the bottom.
I installed kubuntu dual-boot and it, too, had the gestures. Less than five munutes later I had them shut off; the controls were in kubuntu's version of Control Panel under mouse controls, right where you would expect them to be. This is my biggest gripe with MS, the way they make changes for no discernible reason annoys me.
Although I think W7 is their best, they went downhill in a few ways. XP's file manager was useable, W7's has all sorts of illogical behavior.
I like that W7 requires fewer reboots to keep it running than previous OSes, but the only time I boot the Linux computer is when I want to shut it off. I don't have to reboot for anything except upgrading the kernel.
When I boot the Linux PC, it comes up as if it had never been shut down, with all the files and documents that were open when I shut it down. I wouldn't mind Windows reboot naggings so much if it didn't lack this feature. The feature's not mandatory, you can easily have it boot like a Windows computer if you prefer it that way.
When I boot the Linux PC, it enters the password automatically. This is easily changeable, too. You have to hack the registry to make Windows do this.
I haven't found any features in Windows that KDE lacks. If there are any I'd like to know.
Windows is prettier, I'll agree to that. It's a capable OS. But Linux is better, period. So why do 2/3 of my computers run Windows? Because you choose an OS to run the programs you already have or will need. The XP computer needs to run EAC (Aramok's not good enough) and W7 hasn't annoyed me enough lately to bother upgrading to Linux.
I don't know about Apple, the only Apple in the house is an old G3 in a closet somewhere, unplugged. But I'd be willing to bet that it's a better OS than Windows.
And I think it just shows a complete lack of knowledge on behalf of the writer
Indeed it does, as well as a complete lack of thought. I'm sixty and can list things I have now that nobody had when I was ten. Car air bags, antilock brakes, the Crystalens in my left eye, the microwave oven, the VCR, LED, LCD, and plasma display screens, viagra, naproxin sodium, artificial hearts, self-driving cars, laptop and tablet computers, cell phones... I could go on all day.
My guess is the writer is younger than my youngest daughter and is fresh out of journalism school, thinking "I've never seen anything truly innovative in my (very short) life.
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every single atom in a human brain in real-time. All the chemical reactions in the brain are modeled down to quark at the Plank scale. Why can that simulation not be intelligent, but the pile of real chemicals can?
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every quark and gluon in all the materials and machinery that constitute a hydrogen bomb in real-time. Is there any radiation released? It's the same thing, only a model.
What's special about chemistry that electricity cannot reproduce?
Try baking a cake using only electricity. No wheat or water or sugar or salt or yeast, just electricity.
Once the computer is "faking" feeling pain to the point where it is impossible to distinguish, is it really faking any more?
If I fake paranormal activity well enough that the Amazing Randi can't figure out how I did it, am I still faking it?
Who is to say that humans aren't "faking" sentience?
How do you know that everyone but you isn't faking sentience? You know you're sentient, but there's no way to prove sentience. We don't even have a clue how sentience comes about.
Actually, we did. Without empathy we probably would have become extinct before agriculture came about. They say that Neanderthals were more intelligent than early Homo Sapiens, and I suspect that Neanderthals became extinct because we had more empathy than them. A succinct line from "Pale Rider": "A man alone is easy prey." Try killing a saber toothed tiger by yourself with nothing more than a spear -- a spear invented by someone else.
They've changed it. Funny used to be karma-neutral, but no longer. It surprised me when I saw the change to the faq. Like metamoderation, the old way was much better.
That was exactly my point -- the intelligence comes from the designer, whether a slide rule, an abacus, or Watson. It's real intelligence, but it isn't the machine's intelligence. Watson is no more intelligent than the Britanica hooked to a giant abacus with trillions of wires and beads -- which is exactly what Watson is.
FFS, intelligence != sentience (the sci-fi book I'm writing notwithstanding; "fi" is fiction). My slide rule back in 1965 was intelligent, but it wasn't sentient. The Britannica I read at age 12 was more intelligent than I was (or not; info != intelligence), but your dog knows he's alive, he knows pain and pleasure. No computer can, or will, understand pain or pleasure (although they can fake them) until we invent chemistry-based replicants.
There is no such thing as artificial intelligence; Watson's intelligence is real, but it isn't Watson's. It's Watson's engineers' and programmers' intelligence.
The appearance of a thing does not equal that thing. Just ask the amazing Randi. Magicians do all sorts of cool tricks, as do programmers and engineers (most magic involves some engineering).
It's a troll (or an incredibly stupid attempt at humor) and whoever modded it "funny" is a dork (and yes, I said that on purpose, waste your points modding me down, idiot, so you don't have the points to mod idiocy up).
BTW, the troll wasn't funny but I got a chuckle out of your unmodded comment. I wonder why moderation is so abysmal today, I've seen a "make shitloads of money on the internet" spam twice today, neither one modded down. And they mod that garbage UP!
Wow, a username like "futhermocker" and a shortened URL? The mods are sure brave today! Is that goatse they found so funny? Spam site? Someone wanting to drop a virus? No way I'm clicking.that link, what's the REAL url? This isn't twitter, please stop shortening URLs. To link a site, do this: <a href="goatsemalwareuglysister.xxx">really cool pictures of a supermodel </a> so everyone will know it's safe.
Twit. With a six digit URL you should know better.
Agreed completely. Of the three of my computers I actually use, one runs XP, one runs kubuntu, and the newest one, a two year old notebook, runs W7. I think the last piece of software I bought outright was XP, back when XCP destroyed a 98 install and I couldn't find drivers after wiping and reinstalling. Most of my software is FOSS, freeware, or it came with hardware. I seldom spend money on computing, except of course my ISP bill. And there are so many free hotspots here I could get away without that (but then I wouldn't get to listen to KSHE at home... Van Halen's on right now).
What is it with all you free market anti-nerds?? Your solution isn't "use your brain to hack out a solution," It's "SPEND MONEY! WE LOVE MONEY! WE WORSHIP MONEY!"
I'm annoyed at this stupid attitude. Did you get here by mistake, thinking it was Forbes or Business Week? We're nerds. We don't buy solutions, we create them. My hat is off to the guy you're putting down, a creative solution to a problem. If your answer to problems is always "pull out the credit card" you are at the wrong site.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't the "sexual liberation", it was Johnson's well-intentioned but woefully wrong "war on poverty" and the radical changes to AFDC that did it. If there was a man in the house, he was expected to work, while a single dad (or more usually, mom) was expected to raise kids. Johnson's changes made it incredibly difficult to escape AFDC and poverty. Generational welfare skyrocketed then, as did the rise of one-parent welfare households. It became the norm in many if not most poor neighborhoods. A girl was encouraged to get pregnant so she could get that welfare money.
It got worse with Reagan's reboot of Nixon's "war on drugs" which put many, many poor men in prison and fueled gang wars. It didn't help that black neighborhoods were targeted for drug stings.
Thankfully, AFDC was repealed in 1996 under Clinton and replaced with TANF.
Maybe centuries old traditions of religion and family life are not based on stupid superstitions as many people educated beyond the level of their intelligence seem to think these days
As a Christian, I certainly don't consider it superstition (it isn't superstition when you've experienced God personally). But the stable, two parent family wasn't the norm for most of the last thousand years -- marriage was expected and out of wedlock births were rare, but lots and lots of women died in childbirth, many men died in industrial accidents, war, and other violence. In the 1800s there were probably more single parent households than marriages, since so many parents died from war, childbirth, accident, and disease.
Most kids are indeed better off in a two parent household, but many kids would be far better off if their abusive, violent, alcoholic fathers (or mothers) were to disappear.
All that said, I have no right to insist that anyone else follows my values. I certainly wouldn't want to be forced to follow Islamic values, would you?
I don't suppose you would ever accept the answer being something along the lines of "because they are committing the majority of the crimes in the US"?
Nah..it couldn't possibly be that simple.
Only superficially. A larger percentage of blacks than percentage of whites are poor, and poverty and crime go hand in hand. Have a kid grow up in a poor family with no hope of ever getting a decent education, a future, a life, where everyone he knows is a criminal destined for the grave pr prison, and guess what happens? No matter what color he is?
Yes, the problem is indeed simple. The solution doesn't seem to be.
Not to mention that most people in prison don't have father figures in their lives, which means that marriage has a strong positive effect on society.
Having a father isn't going to help if Dad's a criminal. Criminality, like everything else, tends to run in families. And I think I'd need to see some stats before I could give that credence, as I know a few folks (all white) who have been in prison. Two of them I know had dads. One is my best friend's brother, a former diesel mechanic (before he was arrested) who spent time in Fed for loaning a former high school classmate money (the classmate was a drug dealer, half his graduating class went to prison) and the other, an avowed atheist, was brought up in a strict Southern Baptist family and spent ten years in a Kentucky prison for murder. Another fellow that haunts that bar, a really burned out drug abuser, went to Joliet for cooking meth, but I Don't know if he had a father figure growing up.
Bill Clinton's dad died when his mother was pregnant with him.
Another fellow there, a business owner, has two sons. One is a security guard, the other is a criminal. So what I've seen in my six decades doesn't jibe at all with your assertion.
Bullshit, for the last two years my church has given two weeks' groceries to every family with a chile at Harvard Park Elementary over Christmas break, because it's the poorest neighborhood in town and school breakfast and lunch is all some of those kids get. No sermons involved, volunteers simply drop off the groceries.
I don't believe St John's breadline, run by the Catholics here, makes you say grace or anything. They're just feeding poor people. No sermon attached.
He was referring to liberals as the hissy-fit throwers, and actually casting Christians in a beneficent light.
Yes, which tagged him as a church-going conservative hypocrite.
As an atheist with qualms about organised religion I do object to them taking over the role of the state
As a Christian, I agree. It isn't up to me to judge anyone, and IMO only those things that harm or endanger others should be illegal. I think the worst kind of government would be a theocracy.
As long as there is no interference on the subject matter (evolutionary biology for example)
Anyone who thinks science and Christianity are at odds either misunderstands the science or Christianity. IINM the same can be said of Bhuddism and Hinduism.
I hate to tell you this, Mr. Conservative, but Jesus was a liberal. Taxes? "Render unto Ceasar..." You conservatives seem to hate the poor that Jesus said "Blessed are" of. Tax money for food stamps? Conservatives are against it. "They should get jobs" you say, Jesus said "look at the lilies of the field, they neither sew nor spin yet Solomon in all his glory was never so clothed." Conservatives love money, but the bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.
Jesus was a liberal, a radical, Caiphas was a staunch conservative. Why do you think he was crucified? Conservatives hated him.
Oh, and if you're a lawyer you don't want to know what Jesus said about you.
Too bad the corporations own the government, needed laws restricting companies from screwing over customers no longer get passed here. More corporate rights, fewer human rights.
Well, not without a little hacking. Just pipe oxygen into the intake. But with that little atmosphere you have more problems, like how to get lift.
Only to open Schrödinger's fridge for a beer.
Oh, for mod points...
I think he's serious, and I agree with him. And I'm not an Apple user, of my 3 computers one runs XP, one W7 and one kubuntu 10.04. I do agree that W7 is the best MS OS I've used, but it's not as good as kubuntu (not the current clusterfuck, Shuttleworth is insane).
My notebook runs W7. An older one I had several years ago also ran W7 and had the gestures spoken of by the OP. I hated that "feature" and it took me two months to figure out how to shut it off ("Tap to click" drove me crazy, every time I touched the pad it clicked). It wasn't under "mouse controls" in Control Panel where you would expect it to be, it was in a hidden icon in the bar at the bottom.
I installed kubuntu dual-boot and it, too, had the gestures. Less than five munutes later I had them shut off; the controls were in kubuntu's version of Control Panel under mouse controls, right where you would expect them to be. This is my biggest gripe with MS, the way they make changes for no discernible reason annoys me.
Although I think W7 is their best, they went downhill in a few ways. XP's file manager was useable, W7's has all sorts of illogical behavior.
I like that W7 requires fewer reboots to keep it running than previous OSes, but the only time I boot the Linux computer is when I want to shut it off. I don't have to reboot for anything except upgrading the kernel.
When I boot the Linux PC, it comes up as if it had never been shut down, with all the files and documents that were open when I shut it down. I wouldn't mind Windows reboot naggings so much if it didn't lack this feature. The feature's not mandatory, you can easily have it boot like a Windows computer if you prefer it that way.
When I boot the Linux PC, it enters the password automatically. This is easily changeable, too. You have to hack the registry to make Windows do this.
I haven't found any features in Windows that KDE lacks. If there are any I'd like to know.
Windows is prettier, I'll agree to that. It's a capable OS. But Linux is better, period. So why do 2/3 of my computers run Windows? Because you choose an OS to run the programs you already have or will need. The XP computer needs to run EAC (Aramok's not good enough) and W7 hasn't annoyed me enough lately to bother upgrading to Linux.
I don't know about Apple, the only Apple in the house is an old G3 in a closet somewhere, unplugged. But I'd be willing to bet that it's a better OS than Windows.
And I think it just shows a complete lack of knowledge on behalf of the writer
Indeed it does, as well as a complete lack of thought. I'm sixty and can list things I have now that nobody had when I was ten. Car air bags, antilock brakes, the Crystalens in my left eye, the microwave oven, the VCR, LED, LCD, and plasma display screens, viagra, naproxin sodium, artificial hearts, self-driving cars, laptop and tablet computers, cell phones... I could go on all day.
My guess is the writer is younger than my youngest daughter and is fresh out of journalism school, thinking "I've never seen anything truly innovative in my (very short) life.
You might want to look up that fallacy again, it doesn't fit this situation.
Indeed, and there's no physical evidence that you're sentient, even though you know full well that you are.
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every single atom in a human brain in real-time. All the chemical reactions in the brain are modeled down to quark at the Plank scale. Why can that simulation not be intelligent, but the pile of real chemicals can?
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every quark and gluon in all the materials and machinery that constitute a hydrogen bomb in real-time. Is there any radiation released? It's the same thing, only a model.
What's special about chemistry that electricity cannot reproduce?
Try baking a cake using only electricity. No wheat or water or sugar or salt or yeast, just electricity.
Once the computer is "faking" feeling pain to the point where it is impossible to distinguish, is it really faking any more?
If I fake paranormal activity well enough that the Amazing Randi can't figure out how I did it, am I still faking it?
Who is to say that humans aren't "faking" sentience?
How do you know that everyone but you isn't faking sentience? You know you're sentient, but there's no way to prove sentience. We don't even have a clue how sentience comes about.
Actually, we did. Without empathy we probably would have become extinct before agriculture came about. They say that Neanderthals were more intelligent than early Homo Sapiens, and I suspect that Neanderthals became extinct because we had more empathy than them. A succinct line from "Pale Rider": "A man alone is easy prey." Try killing a saber toothed tiger by yourself with nothing more than a spear -- a spear invented by someone else.
They've changed it. Funny used to be karma-neutral, but no longer. It surprised me when I saw the change to the faq. Like metamoderation, the old way was much better.
That was exactly my point -- the intelligence comes from the designer, whether a slide rule, an abacus, or Watson. It's real intelligence, but it isn't the machine's intelligence. Watson is no more intelligent than the Britanica hooked to a giant abacus with trillions of wires and beads -- which is exactly what Watson is.
FFS, intelligence != sentience (the sci-fi book I'm writing notwithstanding; "fi" is fiction). My slide rule back in 1965 was intelligent, but it wasn't sentient. The Britannica I read at age 12 was more intelligent than I was (or not; info != intelligence), but your dog knows he's alive, he knows pain and pleasure. No computer can, or will, understand pain or pleasure (although they can fake them) until we invent chemistry-based replicants.
There is no such thing as artificial intelligence; Watson's intelligence is real, but it isn't Watson's. It's Watson's engineers' and programmers' intelligence.
The appearance of a thing does not equal that thing. Just ask the amazing Randi. Magicians do all sorts of cool tricks, as do programmers and engineers (most magic involves some engineering).
You are more than just a machine.
Humans are not compassionate creatures, by nature, except the immediate few we care about.HUMANS are.
It's a troll (or an incredibly stupid attempt at humor) and whoever modded it "funny" is a dork (and yes, I said that on purpose, waste your points modding me down, idiot, so you don't have the points to mod idiocy up).
BTW, the troll wasn't funny but I got a chuckle out of your unmodded comment. I wonder why moderation is so abysmal today, I've seen a "make shitloads of money on the internet" spam twice today, neither one modded down. And they mod that garbage UP!
Did I get on 4chan or reddit by mistake?
Wow, a username like "futhermocker" and a shortened URL? The mods are sure brave today! Is that goatse they found so funny? Spam site? Someone wanting to drop a virus? No way I'm clicking.that link, what's the REAL url? This isn't twitter, please stop shortening URLs. To link a site, do this: <a href="goatsemalwareuglysister.xxx">really cool pictures of a supermodel </a> so everyone will know it's safe.
Twit. With a six digit URL you should know better.
Agreed completely. Of the three of my computers I actually use, one runs XP, one runs kubuntu, and the newest one, a two year old notebook, runs W7. I think the last piece of software I bought outright was XP, back when XCP destroyed a 98 install and I couldn't find drivers after wiping and reinstalling. Most of my software is FOSS, freeware, or it came with hardware. I seldom spend money on computing, except of course my ISP bill. And there are so many free hotspots here I could get away without that (but then I wouldn't get to listen to KSHE at home... Van Halen's on right now).
What is it with all you free market anti-nerds?? Your solution isn't "use your brain to hack out a solution," It's "SPEND MONEY! WE LOVE MONEY! WE WORSHIP MONEY!"
I'm annoyed at this stupid attitude. Did you get here by mistake, thinking it was Forbes or Business Week? We're nerds. We don't buy solutions, we create them. My hat is off to the guy you're putting down, a creative solution to a problem. If your answer to problems is always "pull out the credit card" you are at the wrong site.
The book is available for $0 at the library. If I like it, I may buy a copy.