We've been hearing that for a LONG time now and it always seems to be "just around the corner."
No, not around the corner. This follows more or less Moore's Law. I don't remember the exact figures, but I remember one or two years ago reading someone had calculated the amount of time needed for we to reach full high-definition real-time photo-realistic 3D CG to be on the order of 14 to 22 years. I don't know about speech synthesis, but that time frame allows for tons of tweaking on emotional responses, not to mention other improvements. Then it'll be a matter of having easier and easier tools being developed to allow reuse of these technologies by creative individuals. Add one or two decades on top of that and we'll have tools allowing one to take a storyboard, some ready-to-use characters, a properly emotionally tagged script, and transform them into a passable skeleton movie ready for extensive tweaking. This is where actual hard work will be required. But everything else that could be automated, will.
They don't even seem to be open for international customers.
It's much worse than that. If they weren't open to them it'd be bad enough, but they're actually actively against them. I've been a customer of eReader and Fictionwise, two early ebook sellers, for almost a decade. At some point Fictionwise purchased eReader, so those two sources became one. Then B&N purchased Fictionwise and let it in Limbo for years, until recently they decided to shut it down for good. The good news, if you happened to be an US customer: you got your library moved to B&N! All the while losing the bajillion file formats Fictionwise offered! The bad news, if you happened to not be an US customer: your library is now gone! Hope you made a backup during the time they offered you to! Yay!
At this point I'm so pissed with B&N that even if they decide in future to start supporting non-US customers I'll refuse doing business with them, period. For me, it'll be Amazon all the way, specially because they've (finally) opened their Kindle store in Brazil so that I can get local support for the ereader (I continue to prefer the US Kindle store for ebooks though: many more titles, and more interesting ones at that).
Look at someone like Ann Coulter. Her target audience wouldn't bother to read the book, so why does it become a best seller? Because that part is engineered. The lets Coulter and her ilk make their money on public appearances. An ingenious scam, and doesn't even require writing ability.
I have to disagree. I've read a few of her books and while I disagree with many, many points she makes, she does indeed write well and she is very funny if only you go into it with the proper mindset. If you don't, it all falls flat.
Don't think I'm trolling. Comedy is based on twists made to something shared between the comedian and the public. Take anything meant to make people laugh that comes outside from your cultural framework, for example a translation of some of the ancient Greek comedies available online, and try to laugh at the jokes. Most of the time you won't even notice what *is* a joke. The context is so alien that the "punch line" simply isn't.
On the other hand, conservatives also have a very hard time noticing the joke in liberal comedy about conservatism, much less laughing at it. For them to be able to do so would require them to stop, concentrate, start thinking as liberals for the duration of the reading, allow themselves to laugh, then go back thinking as conservatives. Most people, on both sides of the political spectrum, simply aren't mentally flexible enough to do that.
You can't make a Hollywood blockbuster in China or India or South Africa, you can't outsource new music to India...
Yet.
CG technology is approaching full photo realism, including for simulated human actors. Voice simulation too is advancing enormously, just look at the most recent generation of the Vocaloid software line in Japan. In a few years all the pieces will be in place for any small CG studio in the world to produce entirely virtual Hollywood-level blockbusters indistinguishable from any "real" production. They won't be able to use the likeness of currently living famous actors, at least not if they plan to release in the US, but add a few more years of well crafted virtual actors reappearing and forging brand awareness and even that will be a moot point.
Unless Hollywood discovers a way to out-innovate technological advances its prominence, a result mostly of the outrageous costs of state-of-the-art film making that so far only it could manage to fund, is a decline in the waiting.
That, right there, is the reason I went back to Windows in 2010 after using Ubuntu exclusively for over 2 years.
Last week I tried the live install CD of Ubuntu 12.10. The CD I just downloaded, from the official server. Guess what? No audio! And this is the exact same box I used back then with Ubuntu 10.10, in which audio worked. So, yeah.
Also: clicking a local drive doesn't open it within the live CD environment doesn't open. There's been a command line (command line!) workaround to fix the issue for months, but no fixed live CD. Go figure... ~double facepalm~
I love my SSH for doing interesting and productive stuff on servers, but for my main home desktop I want to double click and have the shiny stuff happening, no spare thoughts on it. Linux isn't ready for the desktop. At this point I've given up, it just isn't going to happen. So, Windows or OS X it is.
If I ever meet a nice Libertarian that is genuinely concerned for others, full sympathy and overflowing with empathy, I'll eat my hat.
There are some. They usually become libertarian because they are disgusted by conservatism and liberalism, because it proclaims a clear positive goal (freedom) and because the system is logically consistent, much more so than the other two at least. But they don't keep being libertarian after they start (really start) noticing the problems that pure freedom devoid of additional behavioral parameters entails. Then they switch to something that is neither mainstream conservatism, nor liberalism, much less libertarianism. If they're of the philosophical or religious persuasion they end up distributists (my case). Otherwise they tend to go into some smaller branch of conservatism such as paleoconservatism coupled with an atheistic twist or two.
So while compassionate libertarians do exist, that's a unstable state. At some point it breaks and turns into some alternate and more coherent configuration.
As for the babble about 'meaning' and 'the sacred', I'm just going to have to admit complete bafflement about what you are talking about.
I'll try to explain what the OP meant by this or at least what people who use those terms usually mean by using them in this way. The idea is more or less that there are two kinds of freedom, one that's based on your emotions and another that's based on your reasoning, and that the former is easier to the person and detrimental to the latter, and in reality not really freedom (think Star Wars' dark side vs. light side). So, from restrictive religions' perspective, the behavioral restrictions they place on the former is a means for an end: that of increasing the later. It's kind of like metric poetry: by restricting how you express yourself it more or less frees you to become more creative on what you express.
I've studied comparative religions enough to know the above concept has merit given the results on some quite extraordinary individuals out there, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's universally valid. This kind of thing tends to have a statistical nature and to be shaped in a Bell curve. Some religions do recognize this and go to the point of providing spiritual exercises that turn things around by making some of the most emotional stuff, crazy sex included, into the mandatory practice, such as Buddhism with its "Tantra" and Hinduism with its "Raja Yoga".
"in a society of people who are rational enough to foo" / "under bar every tiny gap of power is tightly filled"
Your factual analysis is sound except for these two bits and their surrounding reasoning. These aren't part of a rational analysis of how thing really are and how to deal with reality as it is, rather they're the small dream bits from which one constructs an Utopia: a fiction describing how reality would be if this or that were so and so. Socialists have theirs too you know? "If only people were compassionate enough...", "If only people were willing to work hard enough...", "If only people were concerned enough with...", "If only people could see that..."
Sorry, but the world isn't like that. To develop any good proposal you must start with how things are, now how they "should" be, then plan according starting with the assumption of the worst possible outcome coming to pass, being the most pessimistic possible the squaring or cubing it, and working up and down from there. What if nudging thing in this direction has this all but absurd side effect? What if a charismatic leader arises and convinces all those people who don't WANT to know 'x' that they should do 'y' instead? What if...? What if...? What if...?
Utopists don't like to do that. Thinking all the ways their pet social engineering projects could go wrong and working with the whole set of potential effects isn't fun. It's like work, because it actually is work. Scientific work at that: developing hypotheses, testing them, fixing, going back, restarting. All of which while dealing with the fact they might be unintentionally wreaking havoc with the lives of millions or billions of people.
So, here's the actual scenario:
a) Society will never be composed entirely of people who are rational enough to foo;
b) Under bar only a percentage of the potential gaps of power will ever be filled, and of those percentage, only a subpercentage will be tightly filled;
c) Both conditions will fluctuate randomly around a median, developing always approximately into a bell curve, and from time to time moving even faster in either direction.
Wait, so the guy does not believe in the ressurection or the Holy Trinity, yet he still preaches the "every sperm is sacred" anti-contraception bullshit to his followers in the third world?
Yep. Because there's a distinction of attributions over there. One thing is what the guy in the job thinks or how he personally interprets matters, another is what the church explicitly says and he must do while in an official position. While acting as "Benedict XVI, the Pope", Ratzinger says (said) what he Catholic Church has basically always said with slight to no variation, while as "Ratzinger the theologian, philosopher, PhD etc." he interprets those some sayings in quite non-standard ways. This is somewhat similar to an US President upholding the Constitution while personally thinking: "Gee, that whole 1st amendment thing is annoying. Oh, well, let's go with it anyway, nothing to do about it. *sigh*"
Things have been like this for quite a few centuries, so much so the Church had to officially implement that concept of "infallibility" in the 19th century to clearly distinguish any pope's personal opinions from the very rare instances any one of them would have to stand and say something in the official position of "the Pope", i.e., as the official position of the Church. If I'm not mistaken something has been declared as "infallible" only two or three times since then, most popes going their whole papacies not doing it once.
By the way, although I'm far from Catholic (or Christian) I really fail to see what the anti-Catholic folk find of so objectionably about the whole anti-contraception matter. You know it's valid only for married couples, right? Non-married ones are doing far worse stuff from the Church's perspective for this to be the Church's primary focus. And any actual married Catholic couple willing to obey the Church's instructions on sex are not only not using anti-contraception methods, they also aren't making sex unless they want a new baby. If they are making sex just for fun, well, that's the very first problem right there (again, from the Church's perspective), so the secondary detail of them using contraceptives is at best (worst?) icing on the cake.
It'll take Vatican III to bring about any real progress, and with the current conservative trend I don't think Vatican III would come anytime soon.
You do know that the retiring pope is one of the progressive guys who brought about Vatican II, right? He's also a philosopher with tons of PhDs (as was the previous one) and in that position explicitly said he doesn't believe Jesus either resurrected or actually is God incarnate. These are a few among the many, many reasons actual conservative Catholics don't like him.
I see absolutely no proposals from the pro-life crowd about what to do with an unwanted pregnancy after it does, in fact, become a viable human life outside of the mother's body.
True, but it at least open possibilities, while the alternative closes them. In any case, if an allowed to born person decides she absolutely isn't enjoying existing, she can always pursue suicide herself. That solves her own problem (in a way, at least), while not necessarily subjecting the other "allowed-to-borners" the same. The fact that most unwanted children chose to stay alive rather than suiciding is statistically significant enough, IMHO, for this data point to be taken into consideration. Were a sizeable majority suiciding due to the fact of being unwanted, or due to facts correlated to their unwantedness, and this would certainly weight in favor of abortion as a means of dealing with future unwanted children, since then it'd be little more than preempting an expected behavior pattern. As they don't, the weight shifts in the other direction.
We all know that you claim the right to define what is or is not a lifeform, and THAT is what this debate is about.
Actually, I don't. My own personal position is that I'm against abortion because I don't know whether a fetus is or isn't a person, or at which point he/she/it becomes one. If I don't know, the only rational course of action for me is to not kill the fetus, since by killing he/she/it I might be killing a human person by mistake.
I guess a reasonable threshold of risk would be a 99.999+% chance of a specific fetus not being a person. But calculating that is all but impossible, hence not killing he/she/it is the only reasonable option left.
Well no, that's a lot of bullshit. What he doesn't agree with is that a fetus is not the same as a person.
The argument doesn't rely on that. If we are distinguish a fetus from a person, it's still a matter of an hierarchy of values. IMHO, it'd look roughly like this (subject to lots of refinements):
a) Liberal: person life > women rights over body > killing society threatening life > fetus life
b) Libertarian (typical): women rights over body > person life > killing society threatening life > fetus life
c) Conservative (typical): killing society threatening life > person life > fetus life > women rights over body
d) Conservative (Catholic): fetus life > killing society threatening life > person life > women rights over body
And so on and so forth. Mix and match to find other minor political ideologies.
Human rights and (rightwing politics, elite interests) of all colours generally don't get along.
Sometimes in the effects, but not in the causes.
For example, libertarians are usually all for human rights. What they are against are the "human duties" that come with many of those rights. So, as long as the right is something like "an human has a right to pursue happiness", that's fine. If it says "a man has a right to be happy", and this means someone else having the obligation to make him happy, not so much.
Conservatives, on the other hand, generally aren't agains the rights themselves, but they have serious issues with the hierarchy of said rights. For example, abortion. A conservative (a western one at least) does think a woman should have right over her own body. If he didn't think so he'd be against anti-rape laws, which are entirely based on the right for a women to decide who she lets or doesn't let inside her body. What he doesn't agree with is that said right be placed above a human (fetus or not) right to live. Which in turn they don't think should be placed above the right of society to kill those humans who threaten it the most.
It should be noted too that, from the perspective of many rightwingers, it's the left that doesn't respect many human rights, such as the right to fully express one's own personal beliefs wherever one is just because of one's profession by, for example, forcing one to remove religious symbols from one's work desk or wall.
The government is an irrational belief that exists in the minds of the overwhelming (but slowly shrinking) majority of people. This belief is that some class of priests, through some ritualistic exceptionalism, has a special right to get away with violence.
No, your reasoning is inverted. A better approach to understand this stuff is through motivations.
A sizable chunk of humanity has as its driving goal "having power". They will struggle to obtain power by any means available, that isn't something they chose to be, it's just what they are. And if you don't provide them the mechanisms to do this in a least damaging way, which is what a stable government with concrete prospects of power shifts by non-violent means is, you'll quickly find them doing it on their own in very damaging ways.
People with different driving goals are usually unable to understand how strong this one is, and as is typical for human beings try to reinterpret it in terms of their own different goals, thus reaching confusing and invalid conclusions. Libertarianism is a prime example. It is mostly composed of people with the goals of intellectual achievement and entrepreneurship and who are unable to understand either power thirst or, for that matter, stability seeking, which is what "workers" want above anything else. No surprise then they get to develop a well crafted utopic dream which can work provided those two cases aren't around, the only minor problem with it being that reality gets in the way by continuing to producing those two cases every single generation, no end in sight.
What Libertarianism lacks is balance. They have an excellent theory on how to create material wealth and should be commended for this. What they don't understand, and this is what clouds their mind, is that for the majority out there "material wealth" is of secondary importance, if not something they see as the "necessary evil" they must keep enduring despite their own best interests.
The question: how can the deeply religious be convinced (or reassured) that accepting what science teaches does not require rejecting their faith?
I don't know Dr. Bakker's specific denomination, but given he mentions Augustine the Catholic approach is at least relevant.
Catholicism nowadays is the most science-friendly of the Christian branches. The idea among Catholic theologians is simply that nature, like the Bible, was and continually is made through God's Word ("And said God let there be..."). Thus, both nature and the sacred text are equally important and equally canonical, whatever is revealed in and through nature having to be accepted, period. As for eventual divergences between what nature says and what other pieces of God's words says, those have at most to pass through some harmonization, usually of the kind that prefers to reinterpret the written-with-words text to make it compatible with the written-with-brute-facts one rather than the other way around. Sure, there were some bumps along the road, such as with the treatment of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, but even back then those cases were more exceptions than the rule. The end result is that this kind of stuff is quite easy when it comes to Catholicism and Catholics. As for other branches, not so much.
My guess is this mirrors how persons themselves work. When we're young we believe we have all the answers and certainties and we're righteous etc., but as we become older we stop worrying so much, become more accepting, shrug tons more stuff off, and so on and so forth. Religious institutions pass through the same process, only it's measured in centuries, not decades. "Child" and "adolescent" religious branches are the most idiotic, while the older ones acquire the wisdom of age.
Now enough people do this we loose quality digital media and we get "Fan Fiction" quality stuff where if we are lucky we may get a good product every once in a while, but most of it will be complete garbage, or just rehashing what already exists with little innovation or new ideas.
While this might have been true in the past, in the last few years the amount of high quality fan fiction has increased exponentially. Fan fiction authors aren't accountable to market research or thematically restricted to whatever will attract the most paying customers, and thus can do the craziest stuff in their work. It's come to a point where I find "normal" fiction predictable, repetitive and mostly boring, while fan fiction is consistently creative.
But I have to concede a point to your argument in that, for fan fiction to exist, there must be some original fiction for a fan to derived and improve upon. What the best fan fiction authors have in overabundance is the capacity to take preexisting characters, fictional worlds and scenarios and polish them up to perfection and beyond. What they lack is the capacity to create new good characters, worlds and scenarios, which is where original authors shine. Were we to promote rather than discourage the coupling of the exceptional tool-building of the later with the exceptional tool-usage of the former and we'd get the best of both worlds. Alas we don't. In any case, the point that there's some need for original fiction certainly remains.
Of course there are other things at play than just human action. For example, the physical and chemical and biological processes involved in plant growth will affect a farmer's profits.
Yes, because I've suddenly stopped talking about humans and started talking about externalities. (~rolls eyes~)
Even if you don't allow them, one can, for example, study behavior without understanding the biology behind it just as one can study economics without understanding the psychology behind it.
Not if economics is only a sub-field of psychology and not actually a separate discipline. Since money is indeed a psychological phenomena they aren't independent.
This was well studied by followers of the subjective theory of monetary valuation. When a monetary exchange happens both buyer and seller are exchanging something they value less by something they value more. For a cheese seller your $5 is worth more than his piece of cheese; for you the piece of cheese is worth more than your $5; you exchange and both of you are better off after than you were before. End result: $5 is "worth" simultaneously more and less than that piece of cheese. Worse: it changes depending on how many they both have already exchanged and a plethora of other variables, most of them hidden and of an ordinal (1st, 2nd, 3rd...), not cardinal (1, 2, 3...) nature. Given this isn't quantum mechanics, good luck trying to use that "$" number as a hard unit of measurement then.
to my mind, the post from PPalmgren is completely out of order.
I see your point, but I have reasons for liking reactions such as his, see his answer to my comment and my reply. Besides, without his comment we wouldn't have had this sub-thread and I wouldn't have learned these interesting details on comma usage patterns you provided.:-)
PPalmgren's post also provided me with an interesting challenge: to try writing with fewer commas. I'm already liking this. Having an artificial constraint such as this will help me improve until I can determine what my comma usage pattern should be not because that's what I'm used to do, but because I'll be able to select the best one for any piece of text I'll write. Once it becomes automatic it'll be a win-win all around.
Only problem I see, as I skim the surface, is that I'm quite anti-Catholic. But, the philosophy looks good.
Yep. I like to make a distinction between "Catholicism the religion" and "Catholicism the philosophy". They overlap quite a bit but one can be taken without the other and the later is much more interesting and universally applicable than the former. I myself am not Catholic, but I do absorb quite a bit of their philosophy. After centuries of very serious intellectual development it acquired a "solidity" that most alternatives lack. As such, it's a joy to study for those so inclined, even if they disagree with it in many things (or specially when they disagree -- we in the humanities are weird like that).
Your command of the english language is exceptional so I wouldn't have guessed you weren't a native English speaker.
Hehe, thank you. About taking criticisms with open arms, I usually do that for any subject but even more so when it comes to my use of language. I remember waaay back when I began learning English that the better I became more compliments I received, until at some point I started receiving criticisms for it not being good enough. In other words, I had switched from being perceived as a struggling non-native English speaker to being perceived as a bad native speaker. It was amusing and very encouraging.
I guess I've managed to gain another level since then, as now the perceived problems aren't in my usage of the language itself, but in the style. Yay!:-)
Its very difficult for most to parse language the way a lawyer can so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one who got lost in your comma minefield.
Thanks for the positive criticism. English isn't my native language. Maybe in addition to typos and grammar errors I also use commas in non-standard ways when writing fast in English. I guess I'd remove some of them if I were to revise the text, something I rarely do for forum posts...
Slashdot Mirror
We've been hearing that for a LONG time now and it always seems to be "just around the corner."
No, not around the corner. This follows more or less Moore's Law. I don't remember the exact figures, but I remember one or two years ago reading someone had calculated the amount of time needed for we to reach full high-definition real-time photo-realistic 3D CG to be on the order of 14 to 22 years. I don't know about speech synthesis, but that time frame allows for tons of tweaking on emotional responses, not to mention other improvements. Then it'll be a matter of having easier and easier tools being developed to allow reuse of these technologies by creative individuals. Add one or two decades on top of that and we'll have tools allowing one to take a storyboard, some ready-to-use characters, a properly emotionally tagged script, and transform them into a passable skeleton movie ready for extensive tweaking. This is where actual hard work will be required. But everything else that could be automated, will.
They don't even seem to be open for international customers.
It's much worse than that. If they weren't open to them it'd be bad enough, but they're actually actively against them. I've been a customer of eReader and Fictionwise, two early ebook sellers, for almost a decade. At some point Fictionwise purchased eReader, so those two sources became one. Then B&N purchased Fictionwise and let it in Limbo for years, until recently they decided to shut it down for good. The good news, if you happened to be an US customer: you got your library moved to B&N! All the while losing the bajillion file formats Fictionwise offered! The bad news, if you happened to not be an US customer: your library is now gone! Hope you made a backup during the time they offered you to! Yay!
At this point I'm so pissed with B&N that even if they decide in future to start supporting non-US customers I'll refuse doing business with them, period. For me, it'll be Amazon all the way, specially because they've (finally) opened their Kindle store in Brazil so that I can get local support for the ereader (I continue to prefer the US Kindle store for ebooks though: many more titles, and more interesting ones at that).
Look at someone like Ann Coulter. Her target audience wouldn't bother to read the book, so why does it become a best seller? Because that part is engineered. The lets Coulter and her ilk make their money on public appearances. An ingenious scam, and doesn't even require writing ability.
I have to disagree. I've read a few of her books and while I disagree with many, many points she makes, she does indeed write well and she is very funny if only you go into it with the proper mindset. If you don't, it all falls flat.
Don't think I'm trolling. Comedy is based on twists made to something shared between the comedian and the public. Take anything meant to make people laugh that comes outside from your cultural framework, for example a translation of some of the ancient Greek comedies available online, and try to laugh at the jokes. Most of the time you won't even notice what *is* a joke. The context is so alien that the "punch line" simply isn't.
On the other hand, conservatives also have a very hard time noticing the joke in liberal comedy about conservatism, much less laughing at it. For them to be able to do so would require them to stop, concentrate, start thinking as liberals for the duration of the reading, allow themselves to laugh, then go back thinking as conservatives. Most people, on both sides of the political spectrum, simply aren't mentally flexible enough to do that.
You can't make a Hollywood blockbuster in China or India or South Africa, you can't outsource new music to India...
Yet.
CG technology is approaching full photo realism, including for simulated human actors. Voice simulation too is advancing enormously, just look at the most recent generation of the Vocaloid software line in Japan. In a few years all the pieces will be in place for any small CG studio in the world to produce entirely virtual Hollywood-level blockbusters indistinguishable from any "real" production. They won't be able to use the likeness of currently living famous actors, at least not if they plan to release in the US, but add a few more years of well crafted virtual actors reappearing and forging brand awareness and even that will be a moot point.
Unless Hollywood discovers a way to out-innovate technological advances its prominence, a result mostly of the outrageous costs of state-of-the-art film making that so far only it could manage to fund, is a decline in the waiting.
yes you DO need a stable ABI
That, right there, is the reason I went back to Windows in 2010 after using Ubuntu exclusively for over 2 years.
Last week I tried the live install CD of Ubuntu 12.10. The CD I just downloaded, from the official server. Guess what? No audio! And this is the exact same box I used back then with Ubuntu 10.10, in which audio worked. So, yeah.
Also: clicking a local drive doesn't open it within the live CD environment doesn't open. There's been a command line (command line!) workaround to fix the issue for months, but no fixed live CD. Go figure... ~double facepalm~
I love my SSH for doing interesting and productive stuff on servers, but for my main home desktop I want to double click and have the shiny stuff happening, no spare thoughts on it. Linux isn't ready for the desktop. At this point I've given up, it just isn't going to happen. So, Windows or OS X it is.
If I ever meet a nice Libertarian that is genuinely concerned for others, full sympathy and overflowing with empathy, I'll eat my hat.
There are some. They usually become libertarian because they are disgusted by conservatism and liberalism, because it proclaims a clear positive goal (freedom) and because the system is logically consistent, much more so than the other two at least. But they don't keep being libertarian after they start (really start) noticing the problems that pure freedom devoid of additional behavioral parameters entails. Then they switch to something that is neither mainstream conservatism, nor liberalism, much less libertarianism. If they're of the philosophical or religious persuasion they end up distributists (my case). Otherwise they tend to go into some smaller branch of conservatism such as paleoconservatism coupled with an atheistic twist or two.
So while compassionate libertarians do exist, that's a unstable state. At some point it breaks and turns into some alternate and more coherent configuration.
As for the babble about 'meaning' and 'the sacred', I'm just going to have to admit complete bafflement about what you are talking about.
I'll try to explain what the OP meant by this or at least what people who use those terms usually mean by using them in this way. The idea is more or less that there are two kinds of freedom, one that's based on your emotions and another that's based on your reasoning, and that the former is easier to the person and detrimental to the latter, and in reality not really freedom (think Star Wars' dark side vs. light side). So, from restrictive religions' perspective, the behavioral restrictions they place on the former is a means for an end: that of increasing the later. It's kind of like metric poetry: by restricting how you express yourself it more or less frees you to become more creative on what you express.
I've studied comparative religions enough to know the above concept has merit given the results on some quite extraordinary individuals out there, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's universally valid. This kind of thing tends to have a statistical nature and to be shaped in a Bell curve. Some religions do recognize this and go to the point of providing spiritual exercises that turn things around by making some of the most emotional stuff, crazy sex included, into the mandatory practice, such as Buddhism with its "Tantra" and Hinduism with its "Raja Yoga".
End result: each case is a case, as usual.
"in a society of people who are rational enough to foo" / "under bar every tiny gap of power is tightly filled"
Your factual analysis is sound except for these two bits and their surrounding reasoning. These aren't part of a rational analysis of how thing really are and how to deal with reality as it is, rather they're the small dream bits from which one constructs an Utopia: a fiction describing how reality would be if this or that were so and so. Socialists have theirs too you know? "If only people were compassionate enough...", "If only people were willing to work hard enough...", "If only people were concerned enough with...", "If only people could see that..."
Sorry, but the world isn't like that. To develop any good proposal you must start with how things are, now how they "should" be, then plan according starting with the assumption of the worst possible outcome coming to pass, being the most pessimistic possible the squaring or cubing it, and working up and down from there. What if nudging thing in this direction has this all but absurd side effect? What if a charismatic leader arises and convinces all those people who don't WANT to know 'x' that they should do 'y' instead? What if...? What if...? What if...?
Utopists don't like to do that. Thinking all the ways their pet social engineering projects could go wrong and working with the whole set of potential effects isn't fun. It's like work, because it actually is work. Scientific work at that: developing hypotheses, testing them, fixing, going back, restarting. All of which while dealing with the fact they might be unintentionally wreaking havoc with the lives of millions or billions of people.
So, here's the actual scenario:
a) Society will never be composed entirely of people who are rational enough to foo;
b) Under bar only a percentage of the potential gaps of power will ever be filled, and of those percentage, only a subpercentage will be tightly filled;
c) Both conditions will fluctuate randomly around a median, developing always approximately into a bell curve, and from time to time moving even faster in either direction.
Now, plan.
Ugly, but as real as it will ever get.
HAHAHAHAHHA!!! Don't know if you're serious or trolling
In regards to knowledge, there are several types of people:
a) Those who know, and know they know;
b) Those who know enough to know that they don't know.
c) Those who don't know, but believe they know.
d) Those who don't know, and don't even know there's something there to be know.
Among them, "c" are the most dangerous. To themselves, to others and even to society as a whole.
Wait, so the guy does not believe in the ressurection or the Holy Trinity, yet he still preaches the "every sperm is sacred" anti-contraception bullshit to his followers in the third world?
Yep. Because there's a distinction of attributions over there. One thing is what the guy in the job thinks or how he personally interprets matters, another is what the church explicitly says and he must do while in an official position. While acting as "Benedict XVI, the Pope", Ratzinger says (said) what he Catholic Church has basically always said with slight to no variation, while as "Ratzinger the theologian, philosopher, PhD etc." he interprets those some sayings in quite non-standard ways. This is somewhat similar to an US President upholding the Constitution while personally thinking: "Gee, that whole 1st amendment thing is annoying. Oh, well, let's go with it anyway, nothing to do about it. *sigh*"
Things have been like this for quite a few centuries, so much so the Church had to officially implement that concept of "infallibility" in the 19th century to clearly distinguish any pope's personal opinions from the very rare instances any one of them would have to stand and say something in the official position of "the Pope", i.e., as the official position of the Church. If I'm not mistaken something has been declared as "infallible" only two or three times since then, most popes going their whole papacies not doing it once.
By the way, although I'm far from Catholic (or Christian) I really fail to see what the anti-Catholic folk find of so objectionably about the whole anti-contraception matter. You know it's valid only for married couples, right? Non-married ones are doing far worse stuff from the Church's perspective for this to be the Church's primary focus. And any actual married Catholic couple willing to obey the Church's instructions on sex are not only not using anti-contraception methods, they also aren't making sex unless they want a new baby. If they are making sex just for fun, well, that's the very first problem right there (again, from the Church's perspective), so the secondary detail of them using contraceptives is at best (worst?) icing on the cake.
It'll take Vatican III to bring about any real progress, and with the current conservative trend I don't think Vatican III would come anytime soon.
You do know that the retiring pope is one of the progressive guys who brought about Vatican II, right? He's also a philosopher with tons of PhDs (as was the previous one) and in that position explicitly said he doesn't believe Jesus either resurrected or actually is God incarnate. These are a few among the many, many reasons actual conservative Catholics don't like him.
I see absolutely no proposals from the pro-life crowd about what to do with an unwanted pregnancy after it does, in fact, become a viable human life outside of the mother's body.
True, but it at least open possibilities, while the alternative closes them. In any case, if an allowed to born person decides she absolutely isn't enjoying existing, she can always pursue suicide herself. That solves her own problem (in a way, at least), while not necessarily subjecting the other "allowed-to-borners" the same. The fact that most unwanted children chose to stay alive rather than suiciding is statistically significant enough, IMHO, for this data point to be taken into consideration. Were a sizeable majority suiciding due to the fact of being unwanted, or due to facts correlated to their unwantedness, and this would certainly weight in favor of abortion as a means of dealing with future unwanted children, since then it'd be little more than preempting an expected behavior pattern. As they don't, the weight shifts in the other direction.
We all know that you claim the right to define what is or is not a lifeform, and THAT is what this debate is about.
Actually, I don't. My own personal position is that I'm against abortion because I don't know whether a fetus is or isn't a person, or at which point he/she/it becomes one. If I don't know, the only rational course of action for me is to not kill the fetus, since by killing he/she/it I might be killing a human person by mistake.
I guess a reasonable threshold of risk would be a 99.999+% chance of a specific fetus not being a person. But calculating that is all but impossible, hence not killing he/she/it is the only reasonable option left.
Well no, that's a lot of bullshit. What he doesn't agree with is that a fetus is not the same as a person.
The argument doesn't rely on that. If we are distinguish a fetus from a person, it's still a matter of an hierarchy of values. IMHO, it'd look roughly like this (subject to lots of refinements):
a) Liberal: person life > women rights over body > killing society threatening life > fetus life
b) Libertarian (typical): women rights over body > person life > killing society threatening life > fetus life
c) Conservative (typical): killing society threatening life > person life > fetus life > women rights over body
d) Conservative (Catholic): fetus life > killing society threatening life > person life > women rights over body
And so on and so forth. Mix and match to find other minor political ideologies.
Human rights and (rightwing politics, elite interests) of all colours generally don't get along.
Sometimes in the effects, but not in the causes.
For example, libertarians are usually all for human rights. What they are against are the "human duties" that come with many of those rights. So, as long as the right is something like "an human has a right to pursue happiness", that's fine. If it says "a man has a right to be happy", and this means someone else having the obligation to make him happy, not so much.
Conservatives, on the other hand, generally aren't agains the rights themselves, but they have serious issues with the hierarchy of said rights. For example, abortion. A conservative (a western one at least) does think a woman should have right over her own body. If he didn't think so he'd be against anti-rape laws, which are entirely based on the right for a women to decide who she lets or doesn't let inside her body. What he doesn't agree with is that said right be placed above a human (fetus or not) right to live. Which in turn they don't think should be placed above the right of society to kill those humans who threaten it the most.
It should be noted too that, from the perspective of many rightwingers, it's the left that doesn't respect many human rights, such as the right to fully express one's own personal beliefs wherever one is just because of one's profession by, for example, forcing one to remove religious symbols from one's work desk or wall.
Gray areas. This theme is full of them.
The government is an irrational belief that exists in the minds of the overwhelming (but slowly shrinking) majority of people. This belief is that some class of priests, through some ritualistic exceptionalism, has a special right to get away with violence.
No, your reasoning is inverted. A better approach to understand this stuff is through motivations.
A sizable chunk of humanity has as its driving goal "having power". They will struggle to obtain power by any means available, that isn't something they chose to be, it's just what they are. And if you don't provide them the mechanisms to do this in a least damaging way, which is what a stable government with concrete prospects of power shifts by non-violent means is, you'll quickly find them doing it on their own in very damaging ways.
People with different driving goals are usually unable to understand how strong this one is, and as is typical for human beings try to reinterpret it in terms of their own different goals, thus reaching confusing and invalid conclusions. Libertarianism is a prime example. It is mostly composed of people with the goals of intellectual achievement and entrepreneurship and who are unable to understand either power thirst or, for that matter, stability seeking, which is what "workers" want above anything else. No surprise then they get to develop a well crafted utopic dream which can work provided those two cases aren't around, the only minor problem with it being that reality gets in the way by continuing to producing those two cases every single generation, no end in sight.
What Libertarianism lacks is balance. They have an excellent theory on how to create material wealth and should be commended for this. What they don't understand, and this is what clouds their mind, is that for the majority out there "material wealth" is of secondary importance, if not something they see as the "necessary evil" they must keep enduring despite their own best interests.
The question: how can the deeply religious be convinced (or reassured) that accepting what science teaches does not require rejecting their faith?
I don't know Dr. Bakker's specific denomination, but given he mentions Augustine the Catholic approach is at least relevant.
Catholicism nowadays is the most science-friendly of the Christian branches. The idea among Catholic theologians is simply that nature, like the Bible, was and continually is made through God's Word ("And said God let there be..."). Thus, both nature and the sacred text are equally important and equally canonical, whatever is revealed in and through nature having to be accepted, period. As for eventual divergences between what nature says and what other pieces of God's words says, those have at most to pass through some harmonization, usually of the kind that prefers to reinterpret the written-with-words text to make it compatible with the written-with-brute-facts one rather than the other way around. Sure, there were some bumps along the road, such as with the treatment of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, but even back then those cases were more exceptions than the rule. The end result is that this kind of stuff is quite easy when it comes to Catholicism and Catholics. As for other branches, not so much.
My guess is this mirrors how persons themselves work. When we're young we believe we have all the answers and certainties and we're righteous etc., but as we become older we stop worrying so much, become more accepting, shrug tons more stuff off, and so on and so forth. Religious institutions pass through the same process, only it's measured in centuries, not decades. "Child" and "adolescent" religious branches are the most idiotic, while the older ones acquire the wisdom of age.
Now enough people do this we loose quality digital media and we get "Fan Fiction" quality stuff where if we are lucky we may get a good product every once in a while, but most of it will be complete garbage, or just rehashing what already exists with little innovation or new ideas.
While this might have been true in the past, in the last few years the amount of high quality fan fiction has increased exponentially. Fan fiction authors aren't accountable to market research or thematically restricted to whatever will attract the most paying customers, and thus can do the craziest stuff in their work. It's come to a point where I find "normal" fiction predictable, repetitive and mostly boring, while fan fiction is consistently creative.
But I have to concede a point to your argument in that, for fan fiction to exist, there must be some original fiction for a fan to derived and improve upon. What the best fan fiction authors have in overabundance is the capacity to take preexisting characters, fictional worlds and scenarios and polish them up to perfection and beyond. What they lack is the capacity to create new good characters, worlds and scenarios, which is where original authors shine. Were we to promote rather than discourage the coupling of the exceptional tool-building of the later with the exceptional tool-usage of the former and we'd get the best of both worlds. Alas we don't. In any case, the point that there's some need for original fiction certainly remains.
There is no economy somehow riven from the material universe and "externalities" and where only purposeful human action reigns.
The necessary conclusion being that a purely formal, a priori, deductive science of economics as proposed by the Austrian School isn't enough.
Of course there are other things at play than just human action. For example, the physical and chemical and biological processes involved in plant growth will affect a farmer's profits.
Yes, because I've suddenly stopped talking about humans and started talking about externalities. (~rolls eyes~)
Even if you don't allow them, one can, for example, study behavior without understanding the biology behind it just as one can study economics without understanding the psychology behind it.
Not if economics is only a sub-field of psychology and not actually a separate discipline. Since money is indeed a psychological phenomena they aren't independent.
This was well studied by followers of the subjective theory of monetary valuation. When a monetary exchange happens both buyer and seller are exchanging something they value less by something they value more. For a cheese seller your $5 is worth more than his piece of cheese; for you the piece of cheese is worth more than your $5; you exchange and both of you are better off after than you were before. End result: $5 is "worth" simultaneously more and less than that piece of cheese. Worse: it changes depending on how many they both have already exchanged and a plethora of other variables, most of them hidden and of an ordinal (1st, 2nd, 3rd...), not cardinal (1, 2, 3...) nature. Given this isn't quantum mechanics, good luck trying to use that "$" number as a hard unit of measurement then.
to my mind, the post from PPalmgren is completely out of order.
I see your point, but I have reasons for liking reactions such as his, see his answer to my comment and my reply. Besides, without his comment we wouldn't have had this sub-thread and I wouldn't have learned these interesting details on comma usage patterns you provided. :-)
PPalmgren's post also provided me with an interesting challenge: to try writing with fewer commas. I'm already liking this. Having an artificial constraint such as this will help me improve until I can determine what my comma usage pattern should be not because that's what I'm used to do, but because I'll be able to select the best one for any piece of text I'll write. Once it becomes automatic it'll be a win-win all around.
Only problem I see, as I skim the surface, is that I'm quite anti-Catholic. But, the philosophy looks good.
Yep. I like to make a distinction between "Catholicism the religion" and "Catholicism the philosophy". They overlap quite a bit but one can be taken without the other and the later is much more interesting and universally applicable than the former. I myself am not Catholic, but I do absorb quite a bit of their philosophy. After centuries of very serious intellectual development it acquired a "solidity" that most alternatives lack. As such, it's a joy to study for those so inclined, even if they disagree with it in many things (or specially when they disagree -- we in the humanities are weird like that).
Your command of the english language is exceptional so I wouldn't have guessed you weren't a native English speaker.
Hehe, thank you. About taking criticisms with open arms, I usually do that for any subject but even more so when it comes to my use of language. I remember waaay back when I began learning English that the better I became more compliments I received, until at some point I started receiving criticisms for it not being good enough. In other words, I had switched from being perceived as a struggling non-native English speaker to being perceived as a bad native speaker. It was amusing and very encouraging.
I guess I've managed to gain another level since then, as now the perceived problems aren't in my usage of the language itself, but in the style. Yay! :-)
Its very difficult for most to parse language the way a lawyer can so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one who got lost in your comma minefield.
Thanks for the positive criticism. English isn't my native language. Maybe in addition to typos and grammar errors I also use commas in non-standard ways when writing fast in English. I guess I'd remove some of them if I were to revise the text, something I rarely do for forum posts...