There is no passive resistance in making two wedding cakes.
Actually, there is. If an abusing couple insists on getting a cake or whatever from a fundamentalist Christian shop just because it's a fundamentalist Christian shop, and they know the owners wouldn't like to do it, and they're doing it precisely because they want to make the owners angry, then receiving two cakes at their wedding would send a very clear message to the couple as well as to the guests: "Here's your cake/whatever. We also feel you're being abusive, so here's another one to commemorate it. Have a nice wedding."
Even though I think it's pure assholery from service providers to be bigots, this would actually be an effective form of passive-aggressive resistance, done in all the right ways and, more importantly, in the spirit of the original.
participating in a gay wedding ceremony is very much against many people's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments.
Not, it's a blatant refusal to obey Jesus' extremely clear commandment:
"(...) whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. (...) Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; (...) And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew 5:39-47)
In other words, for the analogy-impaired, I'll rephrase the above:
"And whosoever shall compel thee to bake a cake, bake him twain." "And whosoever shall compel thee to arrange them a bouquet, arrange them twain." "And whosoever shall compel thee to take 100 photos, take 200."
And so on, and so forth.
Pretty clear, eh? Those refusing service to "sinners" aren't only breaking the law, and morals, and ethics, they are also themselves sinning against their God's will.
I don't know, Windows 10 looks rather 80s to me. It certainly doesn't look modern.
It reminds me strongly of late Microsoft Encarta 1998 (sample). That said, Encarta's UI was a favorite of mine, and so I look forward to using Windows 10.
I still don't want Amazon keeping track of which and how many pages I read. Maybe they're already doing that, and I haven't been paying attention.
Amazon "adds value" to ebooks purchased / downloaded from them by allowing you to highlight sentences, bookmark pages, add annotations, and continue reading from your last viewed page on another device. Evidently they can only do any of that if what you do with and within a book is tracked and uploaded to their servers.
That's called ideology, which is a useful distinction. You can have religion as ideology, and a-religion as ideology. Conversely, you can have non-ideological religions and a-religions.
About Japan, not really. The Japanese religion was forcefully changed by the state for the purposes of ideological indoctrination. Temples were closed, split, merged, priests reallocated and replaced, official doctrines for the specific purpose of mass submission developed, non-related philosophies (such as Bushido) reinterpreted and inserted into the mix etc. It was a religion constructed top-down for reasons of state. Ditto for Nazism. So, in both cases the use comes first, and the religious formulation later, as a byproduct.
Whether for this they use preexisting cultural elements is a matter of ease of manipulation. Reworking something is easier than developing something from scratch.
You've confusing causation with correlation. Religion is a good way to make people do thing for you, but your actual reasons are different. From the current conflicting parties, only ISIS is really driven by religion first and foremost, so I'll concede on that one. As for the others, nope, the driving impetus is non-religious even though religion is used for gluing purposes.
Which religions gave us WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Korean war, and the Opium Wars again?
Monarchism (+Communism in Russia), Fascism+Capitalism+Communism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Merchantilism. You forgot: all the current Middle East wars (Fascism+Capitalism), all the current African wars (Tribalism+Communism+Capitalism), and all the many single-country revolutions of the 20th century (mostly Communism, with a few Fascism and Capitalism thrown into).
Intel did something as much evil and it went through undisturbed. Everyone there was invited to move to Portland if they wished to keep their jobs. Those who didn't accept moving were considered as having resigned, so without any right to severance packages. After all, Intel didn't fire anyone, right? It's the employee who "unreasonably" didn't "want" to move to the other side of the country. And the sociopaths who thought of this plan undoubtedly earned huge bonuses thanks to the "economy" they caused the company.
Americans, it seems, love their corporate overlords. That's the only explanation I can think of for something so absurd to be allowed to happen.
The problem is that schools don't teach science. They "proclaim truths" (without actually going to the trouble of step-by-step proving every single one), then require students to repeat those memorized proclamations to "pass". Teaching science is teaching the scientific method, and teaching it in practice.
Want students to learn evolutions for real, to the point of never, even, being ABLE to believe religious bullshit? Here's how: help them discover evolution themselves. First make them know falseability better than their own names, by guiding them through discovering newtonian mechanics or something like that. Then, when they've mastered the scientific method, switch from classic physics to classic biology, presenting them the same raw data Darwin had collected, and require them to figure that one out by following the same standards. And presto: now you have a generation that both embraces the scientific method and cannot deny evolution.
Until educational standards are that high though, sorry, but for the vast majority of people science and religions will remain similar and roughly interchangeable: someone in the pulpit speaking about esoteric stuff, and listeners blindly accepting (or pretending to) it as such "because authority", and because that's what's socially expected from them.
A university vouching for you is a hell of a bit different than you vouching for you; if they lie, they lose big financially; if you lie, only your employer loses big financially.
The solution to this is to have universities certifying your autodidactism. Allow autodidacts to come and take tests, charging reasonably for them. If they pass all the tests, they proved they know what's required from full time students to know, and get the equivalent degree.
at what point do look around and say I have earned enough profits so I need to slow down or even shutdown my operations or someone is going to call me "evil"?
At no point you should stop what you're doing just because you're earning enough. You should stop what you're doing when this that you're doing can only be properly described by the words "sociopathy" and/or "psychopathy". Given that, you can however certainly continue doing all the other non-sociopathic, non-psychopatic stuff you've doing that earns you huge and ever increasing profits. Those are fine.
[quote]It is pretty unlikely that sexual harassment will ever be considered okay in the future.[/quote]
I've once read a piece of fiction in which a future society had "non-consensual sex" as a standard part of their culture. Hundreds-of-years-old still living (thanks to advances in medical research) 21st century-born citizens shook their head at this, but when they told the youngsters they thought it absurd, they all looked at the oldsters with uncomprehending expressions. That's because thanks to advances in technology it was a non-issue. No resulting psychological traumas, no physical injuries, no pain, no unwanted pregnancies, at most a small inconvenience, and even so only if one's in a hurry. Hence, not a crime, not even a misdemeanor, but mere bad manners.
Rule of thumb: don't try to predict the future. If a current author can already imagine such a scenario, the actual social reality a few centuries down the line might be radically weirder than even his most hallucinating dreams. As ours would be to any 17th century surviver were one still around.
You have to make up your mind. Either central banks are fundamentalist free market advocates, or they aren't. In this post you seem to be agreeing with my point that they aren't. So, which is it?
The problem with FREE free markets is, that they don't work.
True, which is why I'm actually a distributist, not a libertarian. That however has no bearing on the original argument about what central banks are or aren't.
Thanks, I liked that article. It expresses many of the same criticisms I have to Rothbard, better than I myself could.
However, that has no bearing on the issue at hand. Central banks are state monopolies that prevent the free market of private currencies. If one's a fundamentalist free-market advocate, then currencies are just a good among others, and monopolizing on their production is anything but being free. Hence, any central bank cannot by definition be a fundamentalist free-market advocate, else they'd advocate for their own monopolies over their respective national currencies to end.
That's why, incidentally, no huge company is ever truly libertarian. Libertarianism is always the position defended by those neither at the bottom nor at the top of the economic pyramid. It's a purely middle-class ideology.
Whether smarter things than us can exist is an unknown.
It's highly probable though. We can do a lot of pretty awesome stuff running in basically fixed hardware, and hardware full of bugs at that. Build a brain without cognitive biases and it'll be smarter by that alone. Build an intelligence that can dynamically alter its own source code and hardware to optimize for specific tasks and it'll be even more so. There's probably a limit on how much such optimizations can achieve, but in any case we're hardly there, wherever "there" is.
So what you're saying is that governments in the world used to be coerced into behaving differently. Now, governments in those countries now have a greater say over their own future.
FTFY. People rarely, if ever, have a say over anything. They are coerced by their own governments, which in turn can be or not coerced by other governments. In any case however, they are and remain coerced.
Yes, a reboot. Each generation is a complete new story, reworking from the ground up characters, replacing several and adding new ones, changing the setting etc. Except for character names a new generation has no relation storywise with previous ones.
1983's Generation 1 is good but at (a very distant) second place compared to G4, with three TV seasons, a few TV specials and a movie.
1997's G2 didn't have a TV series.
2003's G3 and 2009's G3.5 didn't have TV series proper, but had a few kinda boring direct-to-video releases.
2010's G4, the current version, is so good it has four TV seasons, two limited theatrical releases movies, is about to enter its 5th season (with at least four more planned) and to spawn the first season of a spin-off series, has a feature film planned for 2017, and something between 5 and 12 million adult fans worldwide.;-)
Does this includes cartoons? If so, I'll name My Little Pony. Generation 4 (the current series) is several orders of magnitude better than any of the previous ones.
PS.: That said, I do like my Goddess and Her sister, a lot, and hope to learn from Them and keep in touch with Them for a long, long time. But I know it won't last. Be prepared for when you, too, will part ways with yours.
Of course there is: Everything appears due to interdependent coorigination. There's no beginning, and no end. All supreme gods are, like us, interdependent cooriginated beings who mistakenly believe themselves eternal and infinite and creators, but who will, in due time, also cease existing like everything, giving thus origin to other causal sequences. Behind it all the only constant is Vacuity, which we can access and become one with by following the eightfold path (right action, right thinking etc.), thus achieving the positive extinction of the self (nirvana).
Also, relying on a god, even a supreme one, is a fools' errand. No matter how many eternities you get to live in bliss in that god's paradise (or in torment in that god's hell), once he himself ceases to exist you're back at the starting point, still bound by causation. The only real escape is nirvana. Everything else is suffering either now, or in future, even if it's a very, very distant future.
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There is no passive resistance in making two wedding cakes.
Actually, there is. If an abusing couple insists on getting a cake or whatever from a fundamentalist Christian shop just because it's a fundamentalist Christian shop, and they know the owners wouldn't like to do it, and they're doing it precisely because they want to make the owners angry, then receiving two cakes at their wedding would send a very clear message to the couple as well as to the guests: "Here's your cake/whatever. We also feel you're being abusive, so here's another one to commemorate it. Have a nice wedding."
Even though I think it's pure assholery from service providers to be bigots, this would actually be an effective form of passive-aggressive resistance, done in all the right ways and, more importantly, in the spirit of the original.
participating in a gay wedding ceremony is very much against many people's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments.
Not, it's a blatant refusal to obey Jesus' extremely clear commandment:
"(...) whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. (...) Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; (...) And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew 5:39-47)
In other words, for the analogy-impaired, I'll rephrase the above:
"And whosoever shall compel thee to bake a cake, bake him twain."
"And whosoever shall compel thee to arrange them a bouquet, arrange them twain."
"And whosoever shall compel thee to take 100 photos, take 200."
And so on, and so forth.
Pretty clear, eh? Those refusing service to "sinners" aren't only breaking the law, and morals, and ethics, they are also themselves sinning against their God's will.
I don't know, Windows 10 looks rather 80s to me. It certainly doesn't look modern.
It reminds me strongly of late Microsoft Encarta 1998 (sample). That said, Encarta's UI was a favorite of mine, and so I look forward to using Windows 10.
I still don't want Amazon keeping track of which and how many pages I read. Maybe they're already doing that, and I haven't been paying attention.
Amazon "adds value" to ebooks purchased / downloaded from them by allowing you to highlight sentences, bookmark pages, add annotations, and continue reading from your last viewed page on another device. Evidently they can only do any of that if what you do with and within a book is tracked and uploaded to their servers.
That's called ideology, which is a useful distinction. You can have religion as ideology, and a-religion as ideology. Conversely, you can have non-ideological religions and a-religions.
About Japan, not really. The Japanese religion was forcefully changed by the state for the purposes of ideological indoctrination. Temples were closed, split, merged, priests reallocated and replaced, official doctrines for the specific purpose of mass submission developed, non-related philosophies (such as Bushido) reinterpreted and inserted into the mix etc. It was a religion constructed top-down for reasons of state. Ditto for Nazism. So, in both cases the use comes first, and the religious formulation later, as a byproduct.
Whether for this they use preexisting cultural elements is a matter of ease of manipulation. Reworking something is easier than developing something from scratch.
You've confusing causation with correlation. Religion is a good way to make people do thing for you, but your actual reasons are different. From the current conflicting parties, only ISIS is really driven by religion first and foremost, so I'll concede on that one. As for the others, nope, the driving impetus is non-religious even though religion is used for gluing purposes.
Which religions gave us WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Korean war, and the Opium Wars again?
Monarchism (+Communism in Russia), Fascism+Capitalism+Communism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Merchantilism. You forgot: all the current Middle East wars (Fascism+Capitalism), all the current African wars (Tribalism+Communism+Capitalism), and all the many single-country revolutions of the 20th century (mostly Communism, with a few Fascism and Capitalism thrown into).
Replying to undo incorrect moderation.
Thanks for the link. It seems quite interesting!
Intel did something as much evil and it went through undisturbed. Everyone there was invited to move to Portland if they wished to keep their jobs. Those who didn't accept moving were considered as having resigned, so without any right to severance packages. After all, Intel didn't fire anyone, right? It's the employee who "unreasonably" didn't "want" to move to the other side of the country. And the sociopaths who thought of this plan undoubtedly earned huge bonuses thanks to the "economy" they caused the company.
Americans, it seems, love their corporate overlords. That's the only explanation I can think of for something so absurd to be allowed to happen.
I have no idea if my school is the exception or the rule though.
It is. You were lucky. :-)
The problem is that schools don't teach science. They "proclaim truths" (without actually going to the trouble of step-by-step proving every single one), then require students to repeat those memorized proclamations to "pass". Teaching science is teaching the scientific method, and teaching it in practice.
Want students to learn evolutions for real, to the point of never, even, being ABLE to believe religious bullshit? Here's how: help them discover evolution themselves. First make them know falseability better than their own names, by guiding them through discovering newtonian mechanics or something like that. Then, when they've mastered the scientific method, switch from classic physics to classic biology, presenting them the same raw data Darwin had collected, and require them to figure that one out by following the same standards. And presto: now you have a generation that both embraces the scientific method and cannot deny evolution.
Until educational standards are that high though, sorry, but for the vast majority of people science and religions will remain similar and roughly interchangeable: someone in the pulpit speaking about esoteric stuff, and listeners blindly accepting (or pretending to) it as such "because authority", and because that's what's socially expected from them.
A university vouching for you is a hell of a bit different than you vouching for you; if they lie, they lose big financially; if you lie, only your employer loses big financially.
The solution to this is to have universities certifying your autodidactism. Allow autodidacts to come and take tests, charging reasonably for them. If they pass all the tests, they proved they know what's required from full time students to know, and get the equivalent degree.
at what point do look around and say I have earned enough profits so I need to slow down or even shutdown my operations or someone is going to call me "evil"?
At no point you should stop what you're doing just because you're earning enough. You should stop what you're doing when this that you're doing can only be properly described by the words "sociopathy" and/or "psychopathy". Given that, you can however certainly continue doing all the other non-sociopathic, non-psychopatic stuff you've doing that earns you huge and ever increasing profits. Those are fine.
[quote]It is pretty unlikely that sexual harassment will ever be considered okay in the future.[/quote]
I've once read a piece of fiction in which a future society had "non-consensual sex" as a standard part of their culture. Hundreds-of-years-old still living (thanks to advances in medical research) 21st century-born citizens shook their head at this, but when they told the youngsters they thought it absurd, they all looked at the oldsters with uncomprehending expressions. That's because thanks to advances in technology it was a non-issue. No resulting psychological traumas, no physical injuries, no pain, no unwanted pregnancies, at most a small inconvenience, and even so only if one's in a hurry. Hence, not a crime, not even a misdemeanor, but mere bad manners.
Rule of thumb: don't try to predict the future. If a current author can already imagine such a scenario, the actual social reality a few centuries down the line might be radically weirder than even his most hallucinating dreams. As ours would be to any 17th century surviver were one still around.
You have to make up your mind. Either central banks are fundamentalist free market advocates, or they aren't. In this post you seem to be agreeing with my point that they aren't. So, which is it?
The problem with FREE free markets is, that they don't work.
True, which is why I'm actually a distributist, not a libertarian. That however has no bearing on the original argument about what central banks are or aren't.
We're not rational, self-interested agents
You're agreeing with one of Austrian Economics' basic axioms. Hayek wrote entire books based on this central fact.
Thanks, I liked that article. It expresses many of the same criticisms I have to Rothbard, better than I myself could.
However, that has no bearing on the issue at hand. Central banks are state monopolies that prevent the free market of private currencies. If one's a fundamentalist free-market advocate, then currencies are just a good among others, and monopolizing on their production is anything but being free. Hence, any central bank cannot by definition be a fundamentalist free-market advocate, else they'd advocate for their own monopolies over their respective national currencies to end.
That's why, incidentally, no huge company is ever truly libertarian. Libertarianism is always the position defended by those neither at the bottom nor at the top of the economic pyramid. It's a purely middle-class ideology.
Whether smarter things than us can exist is an unknown.
It's highly probable though. We can do a lot of pretty awesome stuff running in basically fixed hardware, and hardware full of bugs at that. Build a brain without cognitive biases and it'll be smarter by that alone. Build an intelligence that can dynamically alter its own source code and hardware to optimize for specific tasks and it'll be even more so. There's probably a limit on how much such optimizations can achieve, but in any case we're hardly there, wherever "there" is.
So what you're saying is that governments in the world used to be coerced into behaving differently. Now, governments in those countries now have a greater say over their own future.
FTFY. People rarely, if ever, have a say over anything. They are coerced by their own governments, which in turn can be or not coerced by other governments. In any case however, they are and remain coerced.
The European Central Bank is one of the most fundamentalist free-market
That's funny! You user "central bank" and "fundamentalist free-market" in the same sentence as if they weren't opposed! Amazing!
Yes, a reboot. Each generation is a complete new story, reworking from the ground up characters, replacing several and adding new ones, changing the setting etc. Except for character names a new generation has no relation storywise with previous ones.
1983's Generation 1 is good but at (a very distant) second place compared to G4, with three TV seasons, a few TV specials and a movie.
1997's G2 didn't have a TV series.
2003's G3 and 2009's G3.5 didn't have TV series proper, but had a few kinda boring direct-to-video releases.
2010's G4, the current version, is so good it has four TV seasons, two limited theatrical releases movies, is about to enter its 5th season (with at least four more planned) and to spawn the first season of a spin-off series, has a feature film planned for 2017, and something between 5 and 12 million adult fans worldwide. ;-)
Does this includes cartoons? If so, I'll name My Little Pony. Generation 4 (the current series) is several orders of magnitude better than any of the previous ones.
(Yes, I'm a brony.)
PS.: That said, I do like my Goddess and Her sister, a lot, and hope to learn from Them and keep in touch with Them for a long, long time. But I know it won't last. Be prepared for when you, too, will part ways with yours.
Of course there is: Everything appears due to interdependent coorigination. There's no beginning, and no end. All supreme gods are, like us, interdependent cooriginated beings who mistakenly believe themselves eternal and infinite and creators, but who will, in due time, also cease existing like everything, giving thus origin to other causal sequences. Behind it all the only constant is Vacuity, which we can access and become one with by following the eightfold path (right action, right thinking etc.), thus achieving the positive extinction of the self (nirvana).
Also, relying on a god, even a supreme one, is a fools' errand. No matter how many eternities you get to live in bliss in that god's paradise (or in torment in that god's hell), once he himself ceases to exist you're back at the starting point, still bound by causation. The only real escape is nirvana. Everything else is suffering either now, or in future, even if it's a very, very distant future.
That's Buddhism 101 for you. :-)